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Cat Fight

Sunday 22 May 2022

Greg Locke has gone after fellow Evangelical Christian Kenneth Copeland, daring Copeland to sue him and suggesting he’s actually a “ninth-degree Mason.” As an outsider, I find this insider friction fascinating. Locke’s insult is that as a member of a Masonic lodge (and I don’t even know if that’s true), Copeland is actually not a Christian and is instead worshiping Satan.

When you don’t believe in either of the characters, it’s like watching people get into a fight over which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek.

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Thoughts on Hell

Thursday 5 May 2022

I’ve been in a Twitter conversation with a Christian fundamentalist about hell. What has come to light once again is the Christian double standard regarding hell and God’s omnipotence. This Christian and many like him suggested God doesn’t send anyone to hell. People choose to go to hell. They choose with their sins, they choose with their blasphemy, and they choose with their rejection of God. And most disturbingly, some will even admit that according to Christian doctrine and the idea of original sin, even newborn babies are deserving of this punishment because of the stain of original sin.

Yeah who determine the parameters that resulted in such consequences? Who determined that transgressions against gods will result in separation from God? God of course. God said all the rules and all the consequences, so why are you might want to try to suggest to ease your conscience that God doesn’t send anyone to hell, he set up all the framers to make that a certainty in some situations.

This Christian continued his argument by explaining that God didn’t Mikaël for humans but rather for the devil. Here once again we run into a problem when we accept the idea of God’s supposed omnipotence and omniscience. He exists outside time, Christians explain, so he knows all things at all times. That means that when he created hell for the devil, he knew man would eventually end up there as well. But the Christian view creates a surprised God who thinks, “Crap — that went off the rails quickly! I’d better do something!” My interlocutor explained it thusly:

Can you decide anything yourself? Free will. Man had free will & chose evil. He didnt have to, was warned not to but did anyway. Free will. Then God Himself made the way back. Man sends himself to hell. Your choice.

My response was along the lines above:

God made the consequences of disobedience hell. He could have made the consequences anything. He chose infinite punishment for a finite transgression—or, thanks to original sin, the transgression of a distant relative of eating a piece of fruit. Perverse.

But he’ll likely continue to insist that I just don’t understand God’s grace, that I don’t understand the finer points of the theological argument, that I just don’t understand.

And that’s another problem: why would a benevolent god make things so difficult to understand, so easy to misunderstand, when eternal punishment is on the line?!

Four Blood Moons

Wednesday 4 May 2022

I don’t know why I read things like this. I knew when I reserved it at the library that I was just getting this nearly-decade-old book by fundamentalist nutjob pastor John Hagee to see just how ridiculous it is — to mock it, in other words. Yet since I’m reading a book of primary documents (letters, reports, etc.) from the perpetrators of the Holocaust, I felt I needed some light reading.

The back cover blurb itself was enough to entice me:

It is rare that Scripture, science, and history align with each other, yet the last three series of Four Blood Moons have done exactly that. Are these the “signs” that God refers to in His Word? If they are, what do they mean? What is their prophetic significance?

In this riveting book, New York Times best-selling author, Pastor John Hagee, explores the supernatural connection of certain celestial events to biblical prophecy—and to the future of God’s chosen people and to the nations of the world.

Just as in biblical times, God is controlling the sun, the moon, and the stars to send our generation a signal that something big is about to happen. The question is: Are we watching and listening to His message?

It’s rare that Scripture and science align? It’s never happened. Ever. Scripture and history? A handful of times. All three together? Never. Double-never.

But I was intrigued: it sounded from the blurb that Hagee was going to try to get some prophetic meaning out of the positioning of the sun, moon, and stars. That sounds like astrology — one must say that in a rumbling, threatening voice for the full effect. Fundamentalist Christians avoid astrology or anything that looks like it at all costs. So how can a good, Rapture-believing, tee-totaling, fundamentalist, Scripture-literalist have anything to do with astrology?

First, we might want to define astrology. Sure, we all know what it is, but let’s get a good definition on the table. Let’s Google it and take the first definition: “the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial bodies interpreted as having an influence on human affairs and the natural world.”

Just for kicks, let’s see what astronomy’s definition is, using the same method: “the branch of science which deals with celestial objects, space, and the physical universe as a whole.”

How does Hagee define these?

  • “Astronomy is the science of studying the movements and positions of planets and stars.”
  • “Astrology is the worship of stars, which is occultic and pagan.”

He literally gives the definition of “astrology” for “astronomy.” Don’t believe me (because I’d be skeptical of such idiocy myself)? Here are the shots from the book:

This means one of two things:

  1. He’s completely ignorant about what astronomy actually is, and no one around him corrected him either from deference to his position as “God’s anointed” of their own ignorance.
  2. He knows what astronomy is and is counting on his readers not knowing how duplicitous he’s being.

Neither option is good.

Holy Saturday 2022

Saturday 16 April 2022

Today is the day in the Catholic liturgical year when Jesus is supposed to be in the tomb. Crucified yesterday afternoon, he was laid to rest according to the gospels in a tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea. It is this tomb that various people will find empty tomorrow morning according to tradition in the gospels.

Who exactly find the tomb empty depends on which gospel you read. Critics point this out as one of many discrepancies which undermines the supposed factual accuracy of the gospels. Believers have various apologetics to explain away these differences. That’s a different issue for a different post. Besides that’s not until tomorrow. Today is Holy Saturday: I’m more interested in what’s going on today according to the gospels.

One piece of “evidence” that apologists like to put forth is the empty tomb, but first, we have to get Jesus in the tomb. What is the evidence we have that he was even buried? Only the Bible biblical narrative.

We do know from other contemporary sources, however, that most victims of crucifixion were not given a proper burial. This was part of the punishment. Your rotting corpse served as a deterrent for others. Furthermore, once burial took place, it was most often accomplish by tossing the remains not eaten by the birds into mass common graves. So we have two major problems with the account in the gospels: first, criminals’ bodies are traditionally left on the crucifixion steak to serve as a deterrent; second, once the remains were buried, they were placed in a common grave. The only evidence that we have Jesus was buried, comes from gospels written 50 to 70 years after he died. That’s not terribly convincing evidence, and I would bet that most Christians if this claim were made by another religion where is similar objections.

However, most Christians accept this as a simple fact it is beyond dispute, and from this narrative, Catholic secondary traditions have sprung up. Polish Catholics traditionally build a grave in their church and some sort of Jesus figure is placed in it, symbolizing Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea‘s grave tomb. Local Poles brought that tradition to our area, and the parish pastor has fallen in love with the tradition. So every year, the Polish community creates a tomb for Jesus just like they would do in Poland, and the faithful come and keep vigil with him throughout Friday night and Saturday. Of course, everyone knows that this is simply symbolic representation of Jesus in the tomb, but the fervor with which some people sit and pray in front of this tomb suggests that somehow that symbol has become for them very real. It is as if they are sitting by the actual tomb, which of course likely didn’t even exist. How is this possible?

I think there’s a certain predisposition among Catholics to turn the symbolic into the real, to suggest with a line between the symbol and the thing somehow blurs, somehow disappears completely. They do this every week with the bread and the wine. Catholic teaching is that this bread and this wine, after some words uttered by the priest, are no longer bread and no longer wine. It looks like bread and wine; it taste like bread and wine; scientific analysis would show that on a molecular level, it’s still bread and wine. None of these things matter. What matters is that the church has taught for ages that somehow despite all appearances to the contrary, this is now the physical body and blood of Jesus. When someone can make that kind of Leap, all other boundaries between symbol and symbolized unnecessarily begin to slip.

All of this is undergirded by the nearly universal notion that our world is it duality. There is a physical; there is a spiritual. Things can exist that don’t seem to exist, that leave no physical trace, they have no physical characteristics, they have nothing. Humans, according to Catholic teaching, are not just physical beings: at our core, we are a soul. This duality then spills into other things, so that we can suggest it bread and wine have a physical existence, but they have some other kind of existence. This is what changes Catholic say.

Of course, this other “existence,” which they call substance, cannot be shown to exist in any scientific manner. It is a philosophical construct. Once a group of people starts to imbue philosophical constructs with actual existence, then literally things that exist only in the head can be said to exist in reality, and in a certain sense, they do exist in reality, for our conscious experience of the world is the only experience of it we have. But they don’t have an external reality, they don’t have a reality that is not dependent on our contemplation of said philosophical construct.

Freedom doesn’t exist outside our notion of what freedom is. Justice does not exist outside of our notion of what justice is. And our notions of freedom and justice and every other philosophical construct vary widely from cultural culture, from time to time, from person to person. And so their existence is completely relative and completely dependent on human thought.

Once someone is comfortable with a squishy boundary between these two things, though, all sorts of ideas that they might otherwise think are silly can become the most profound, the holiest ideas that they hold. And so we end up with over one billion people in the world kneeling before a piece of bread and a bit of wine with the same reverence as if they were kneeling actually before the most powerful being in the universe. We have people shedding tears in front of a tomb that they themselves made that the houses a carving of a crucified man whose existence or might not be questionable but his characteristics, actions, words, and deeds have scant if any real likelihood of being accurately recorded in the one historical record we have of them. Which is to say, because we don’t actually have Jesus here physically with us it’s all in our heads.

Passover

Tuesday 12 April 2022

The story of Passover always confused me. The Israelite god is going to destroy all the firstborn of Egypt in order to convince Pharaoh to let the slaves go (after, according to the passage, this same god “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” against the idea of releasing his slaves). He commands the Israelites to smear blood above their door in order to receive protection and save their own firstborn. Why in the world did an all-powerful, all-knowing god need the Israelites to smear blood on their door lintel in order to indicate to this god that the occupants were, in fact, Israelites? This so anthropomorphizes this god as to make it laughable. It leaves readers imagining this god moving physically from house to house, door to door, checking to see if there’s blood, then acting accordingly. Now, granted, I believe the text refers to an angel doing the actual killing, but spirit is spirit, right (in whatever sense “disembodied mind that has the ability to affect the physical world” might mean)?

Yet there’s a more brutal way of expressing this confusion:

 

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Hard Sayings: First Impressions

Tuesday 8 March 2022

I’m currently reading Trent Horn’s Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties and at about halfway through, I’ve definitely formed some definite opinions about the book. Most strikingly, I’ve come to realize it’s mistitled. Instead of Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties, it should be titled The Passage Makes Sense if We Assume… : A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. That phrase — “The passage makes sense if we assume…” — is a quote from the book, and it’s indicative of the whole argument. In fact, Horn doesn’t just suggest that we have to assume to Bible is correct to really understand how it’s correct, he says it outright:

[I]t is the critic’s burden to prove that there is a contradiction in the Bible because he is the one accusing the text of being contradictory. All the believer has to do is offer one or more reasonable explanations of how the passages could be reconciled, thereby showing that the critic’s evidence is not conclusive (152).

This is ridiculous: there is nothing to prove with the contradictions. They’re sitting on the page, obvious as the sun in the sky. This passage says X; that passage says not X. There — it contradicts itself. It’s the believer’s burden to explain how it only appears to be a contradiction.

But Horn’s approach makes it possible for him to weave his conditional explanations of problems with the Bible and feel that they suffice. And does this book ever have a ton of conditionals. Within X pages, we read that “Mark may have referred to him…”, that the “name Jethro appears to be a title on par with ‘your excellency,'” that it “could be that the Midianites…”, that “[o]ne way to resolve this contradiction … is to propose,” that “both are probably referring…”, and that “It could be the case.” Let’s make a list of those statements:

  • may have
  • appears to be
  • could be
  • to propose
  • probably referring
  • could be the case

This is an argument of possibilities, all of which are extra-Biblical and simply endeavor to save the Bible for people who want it saved. These explanations are just ways of explaining away obvious problems, and these types of “arguments” will only appeal to those who have already accepted the conclusion. In other words, another possible subtitle could be “Begging the Question.”

Revealing

Monday 7 March 2022

On one of the Bible-in-a-Year groups that I still follow appeared the following comment:

I’ve been behind…well I actually started on day 5. So I’ve been at least 4 days behind. Today, I got caught up to day 44 and haven’t stop thinking of day 42. I have a lot of friends who are in a same sex marriage, and I just couldn’t accept the thought that my friends who love eachother so much, are sinful. I found this group to see what others thought on the subject; or really what the church’s view really was. I just can’t help but think that God truly loves us no matter who we love. No one chooses to be in a same sex marriage to go against the grain, but with the intention of love! I was really bothered by others not thinking otherwise. I mean, who are we tell other people what God will punish or not?

It’s so unusual to find members of these groups expressing their doubts and disagreements like this. Most of the groups are simply fawning over how great Jesus is, how great the Bible is, how great God is (I know — God and Jesus are supposed to be the same person, but no Christian really thinks of them as the same being in any practical way). To see someone else (someone other than me, that is) saying, “Hold on a tick — this just doesn’t seem to make sense” is fabulous. I had to show some solidarity:

Never will understand this — why is the Abrahamic God so concerned about what consenting adults do to the point that in both the OT and the Koran, believers are commanded to kill homosexuals? One of the biggest things that has pushed me toward exiting the church.

It got a couple of responses, but nothing major. One lady explained it thusly:

You know how in the OT, the objects in the Temple are holy, simply because they were consecrated to God for a specific use? So are a man and a woman holy and their relationship is holy.

When we take something SO Incredibly Holy and use it for our own selfish purposes, it causes SO MUCH Pain to God. We don’t feel our own pain, because it is in our souls, and it is hidden underneath the sweetness of our sinfulness. BTW – it isn’t just a homosexual relationship that is unholy – a heterosexual one can be just as unholy. But a homosexual relationship is sinful inside and out. It is such a deep, deep, deep devaluing of the person of the opposite sex, who has been rejected in favor of a person of the same sex.

First of all, in what sense does could an omnipotent, omniscient, eternal being feel pain? One only has to think about it for half a second to realize the absurdity of it. But this idea of causing the Christian god pain is one of the fundamental ways Christianity encourages feelings of guilt. “Jesus did so much for you, and you’re just rejecting him?!” First of all, what exactly did Jesus do? He died for a weekend. Second, why did he have to die, according to Christian theology? To pay for our sins. But who defined those sins and defined the consequences for violating those laws? He did. It reminds me of a favorite meme:

Second, the idea of it being “such a deep, deep, deep devaluing of the person of the opposite sex, who has been rejected in favor of a person of the same sex” illustrates how deep this person’s misunderstanding of human sexuality.

Circles and Spirals

Thursday 10 February 2022

I’m reading Trent Horn’s Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. He speaks of Karl Keating’s argument for scriptural inspiration, saying “when taken as just a reliable human document, the Bible shows that Christ not only rose from the dead, but that he established a Church built on the apostles.” These apostles “were then able to authoritatively declare the Bible to be the word of God.” So the Bible proves the church and the church proves the veracity of the Bible. That’s called circular reasoning, isn’t it? Horn doesn’t think so.

This is not a circular argument, in which an inspired Bible is used to prove the Church’s authority and the Church’s authority is used to prove that the Bible is inspired. Instead, as Keating says, it is a “spiral argument,” in which the Bible is assumed to be a merely human document that records the creation of a divinely instituted Church. This Church then had the authority to pronounce which human writings also had God as their author.

The level of cognitive dissonance in this statement is absolutely astounding. He can assert that calling it a “spiral argument” somehow removes the circularity of the argument, but in essence, he is still using the Bible to prove the Church to prove the Bible. No Christian ever regards the Bible as “a merely human document.” People regard the Bible as authoritative because they see it as divinely authored. I get that this is a distinctly Catholic explanation of things, but no Catholic ever sees the Bible this way, either. It is, defacto, divinely inspired in their eyes. The so-called divine nature of the Catholic church is in no way illustrated in the pages of the Bible, and we still have the basic problem of Biblical error: how are we to know that that particular portion of the Bible detailing the founding of the church is accurate? In short, we don’t. We have to take that on faith. And who is the one explaining all of this? The Church. So the Church says the Bible is just a humanly written document that proves the Church is divinely inspired, which then proves the Bible is not just a humanly-written document.

It’s almost as convoluted as God impregnating Mary to give birth to God to die to appease God’s anger, which is the story of Christianity in its most simplistic form.

Fundamentalism and Democracy

Monday 7 February 2022

This is from about a year ago, but it is very much worth the time it takes to watch it. And anyone who watches this and is not terrified on some level…

At the heart of this, Jeremiah Jennings (who goes by the name Prophet of Zod on social media) points out that functioning society involves discussing disagreements with people while holding a few assumptions in mind:

He then goes on to point out, very convincingly, how fundamentalist Christianity doubts or even outright disputes each of these claims. The implications this civic breakdown has for democracy are frightening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lqaqp5TwnU

Barron’s Response

Monday 31 January 2022

On Bishop Robert Barron’s minstry’s YouTube channel — Word on Fire — he had a conversation with staff member Brandon Vogt after Barron’s interview with Alex O’Connor in which they promised to go a little deeper in the responses.

Vogt points out that Barron and O’Connor went back and forth for a long time on faith, and invited Barron to elucidate a little. Instead, he just gave the same analogy, changing it from getting to know his interlocutors to getting to one one’s spouse:

The analogy which I think is very illuminating there I often use is come to know a person. So you’re coming to know another human being. Of course, reason is involved all the time. I mean, reason understands all sorts of things, but there is a moment when that person, if you’re coming to real intimacy with that person, reveals something about herself that you could not in principle know no matter how many google searches and how much analysis and how much how clever you. There’s no way you’d get what’s in that person’s heart unless she chooses to reveal it, at which point you have to make a decision: do I believe it or not. Now is it credible what she’s saying, and you might say, “Yeah it is because it’s congruent with everything else I know about her.” At the same time, is it reducible to what I know about her? No, otherwise it wouldn’t be a revelation. So that’s why it’s a false dichotomy to say reason or faith. No, it’s reason that has reached a kind of limit, but reason has opened a door. Reason has poised you for the self-manifestation of another.

Well, that’s not just with God; that happens all the time. When two people are married and deeply in love, I’m sure you could point to those moments when [your wife] revealed something to you that you would never ever have known otherwise. You revealed something about yourself to her and then the two of you, because you’re in love with each other, I imagine said, “Yeah, I believe that.”

Now, can I reduce that to an argument? No, you never can. In a way it remains always mysterious to you yet your will, in that case, has commanded your intellect. That’s exactly what Thomas Aquinas says about faith. It’s a rare instance when the will commands the intellect. Normally, it moves the other way right? The intellect kind of leads the will. The intellect understands the good and then it leads the will, but in the case of faith, the will leads the intellect. It says, “No this is worthy of belief. This person who’s speaking to me is worthy of belief, and what the person is telling me is congruent with reason yet beyond it, and so I choose to believe.” That’s the relationship between faith and reason it seems to me so.

In the debate with O’Connor, Barron defined faith as “the response to a revealing God.” That makes very little sense in terms of how most people use faith. “You just have to have faith that God’s plan, which involves this horrendous suffering, will result in good,” someone might say. Let’s switch those out: “You just have to have [the response to a revealing God] that God’s plan, which involves this horrendous suffering, will result in good.” Clearly, this definition of “faith” is not the same as the original sentence’s sense of “faith.” This might work for “the Christian faith” — “the Christian response to a revealing God.” That works. That’s fine. You’d also have “the Muslim response to a revealing God,” and so on — but this “faith” just means “belief system” or even “religion.”

Furthermore, the faith that Barron gives in this example is not faith — it’s trust. It’s a trust that is based on experiential evidence. I believe my wife because she’s shown herself to be trustworthy. I wouldn’t make this same move (to use a favorite Barron term) with a stranger. The only time such a move (there it is again) is conceivable is if the revelation the stranger gives you is utterly trivial: “I have a dog.”

This faith/trust often moves into faith/trust in Jesus, that we’re to get to know Jesus and then we’ll have faith in him. Or trust in him. But that is utterly different from the situation with my wife. My wife is physically present with me. She’s not some hypothetical spiritual being out there but a real person that I can observe and talk to.

“You can get to know Jesus,” comes the rejoinder. But how? Directly? No.

I can get to know him through the Bible, but that’s problematic for obvious reasons that I’ve discussed numerous times here. It’s filled with contradictions. The image of God presented in the Old Testament is positively barbaric. It’s packed with immorality commanded from God — it’s just not a good example of a good supposedly written by an omnipotent being.

I can get to know him through what the church teaches about him, and here the Catholic church has a leg up on Protestants because they don’t restrain themselves to the Bible. The magisterium has equal footing — or nearly-equal footing. So if the Pope says it ex-cathedra, it’s an article of faith. Still, that’s just the same as relying on the Bible — it’s a product of humans.

Finally, I can get to know him in that way that Evangelicals and Mormons are especially fond of: that sense we have in our heart (it’s telling that religions insist on using that metaphor when we’ve known for ages that the seat of our intellect is not our hearts but our brains — it’s an attempt, I suspect, to move the whole experience away from the intellect) that God is involved in our lives. That warm feeling in their hearts that Christians attribute to the Holy Spirit. I don’t doubt the experience of that warm feeling, but to attribute it to anything outside one’s own mind is itself an act of faith, an act not based on evidence. “It’s the Holy Spirit!” the Bible proclaims and our pastors echo, and so Christians accept that explanation. Muslims have the same experiences but attribute that not to the Holy Spirit (that would be blaspheme, for God is one!) but to Allah. Hindus would make the same move. (It’s rubbing off on me.)

So all three ways we get to know God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit are questionable: they’re all open to interpretation; none are firmly grounded on rational reasoning based on evidence. That is what we skeptics mean when we say that faith is not reason, that it does not work in a similar way, and that it is separate from (sometimes anathema to) evidence.

Bishop Barron on Faith

Sunday 30 January 2022

I was listening to a debate between Alex O’Connor and Bishop Robert Barron on YouTube during my run this evening, and they got to talking about the nature of faith. I wanted to respond to it, but I didn’t want to take the time to transcribe large portions of the video, so I tried my first-ever response video…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmkvZTjsnGU

The original debate is here:

Snow Days 2022 — Day 4: Instructions about the Rapture

Wednesday 19 January 2022

An acquaintance posted a video on social media about the rapture — one of the most bizarre ideas in all of Evangalicism.

He begins thusly:

The rapture of the church is when Jesus comes for his church the second coming is when Jesus comes with his church. The rapture of the church happens when he appears in the clouds of heaven he does not come to earth we go up to meet him. The dead in Christ rise first we which are alive and reign shall be instantly caught up to be with the lord in the air and we go to heaven.

The first thing that happens is the judgment seat of Christ. Paul said we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account of the deeds that have been done in our body whether they are good or whether they are bad. Our works are going to be tried by fire so that our lives in its essence will be given purity as we enter our eternal life. Every person is going to stand here people say well uh you’re already in heaven it’s not a matter of if you’re going to be in heaven and on it’s a matter that you are going to give an account to God for what you have done and what you fail to do. The gap that exists between what you could have been and not were not because you did not use the opportunities god blessed you. You are still going to be in heaven but you are going to receive a reward in heaven based on what you did on this earth where there are going to be five different crowns that you can receive. You’ll receive a white robe and we are going to receive the mansions. We are going to be there for a period of seven years and there will be the marriage supper of the lamb.

While we’re in heaven seven years there will appear on this earth the antichrist and he’s going to set up a government of ten — ten men who will lead groups of nations — that will be complete dictators on the face of the earth. Every commercial exchange shall be recorded. You cannot do anything without his permission. He will start out making a treaty with the state of Israel that’s for seven years. He will break that treaty in three and a half years.

In this seven-year period there will be six seals, seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven vials: 21 supernatural acts of judgment that are coming on this earth. Just one of those acts will be whenever angels are released to destroy a third of the earth’s population in a day what’s going to happen on this earth will be hell on
earth and we the bride of christ are going to be in heaven.

People teaching that we are going to go through that just simply biblically misinformed.

This claim that dissenters of this view are “simply biblically misinformed” would carry a lot more weight if there was anything in the Bible that actually explained things like he does in the video. If we could turn to Hypothetical Book of the Bible chapter x beginning in verse y and find what is quoted above, perhaps in more flowery language, perhaps a little more poetic, I might think the guy has a point here. However, the Bible says nothing about this. Instead, we find passages describing hallucinations of multi-headed beasts rising from the sea and then these people interpret it to mean this silliness. They explain it as if they are simply describing something they see in front of them or the process by which uranium-238 gets processed into uranium-235 (i.e., observable, confirmable, testable facts in our reality), but in fact, it’s just wild conjecture.

And then there are all the competing interpretations. The Catholics, for example, have their own interpretation, strangely (for such a superstitious belief system) less based in wild conjecture:

The aim of the Apocalypse, the most difficult book of the Bible to interpret, is eminently practical. It contains a series of warnings addressed to people of all epochs, for it views from an eternal perspective the dangers, internal and external, which affect the Church in all epochs.

It’s sort of a handbook for spiritual growth, I guess. It’s not for the future, in other words; it’s for all time. That’s less crazy than suggesting that beasts coming out of the sea somehow represent contemporary events.

And there’s a meme that perfectly illustrates a central problem with this interpretation:

Speaking in Tongues, Slain in the Spirit

Monday 10 January 2022

“Language-like activity in the absence of meaning” — a good definition of glossolalia, the act of speaking in tongues. The Bible promotes it, and I’d always understood it to be the miraculous act of speaking a language one doesn’t have any foreknowledge of. For example, breaking into Farsi having never studied it.

“Surely,” I thought, “No one really believes that happens?! It’s so easy to debunk: record it and have a computer try to recognize and translate the language.” But it turns out, real speaking in tongues is not the miraculous speaking of an otherwise-unknown language: it’s speaking in the language of angels. It is, in simple terms, gibberish.

If you listen to these segments of people speaking in tongues, you’ll notice a few things:

  • A lot of them repeat the same vowel sound over and over.
  • They like to trill their r’s.
  • At times it seems as if they’re mimicking — consciously or otherwise — actual languages.
  • Some consonant sounds seem more common than others: b, k, r, and s seem very popular.
  • They seem to be so clearly putting on a show that it’s almost hard to watch.

I’m on the fence about the video, though, because they’re clearly mocking these people, and while it does seem silly, I find myself thinking that they must get something out of it. It likely gives a natural high of endorphins.

I once attended a church where there was a lot of calling down of the Holy Spirit, a lot of prayers for God to send the Holy Spirit to enter the building and enter them, with repetitive music playing, the congregants with their hands raised and their eyes closed, swaying to the music. It struck me how similar they appeared to people I’d see just a week or so earlier at a party who’d passed around a gigantic bong and gotten stoned out of their gourd. They all had the lost-in-the-moment look about them, and even in some churches that speak in tongues, one way they see the manifestation of the Holy Spirit is through uncontrolled laugher, the tell-tale sign that someone has smoked marijuana.

There’s also the element of crowd pressure — some of those people are clearly forcing their laughter. And perhaps some of them are closeted non-believers and they’re finally able to let out the laughter that they keep pent up every Sunday.

The king of all this nonsense is huckster Benny Hinn.

I just can’t understand how people can fall for this stuff. I’d love to get up on stage with someone like this and let him wave his arms at me, fling his coat at me, and just stand there looking at him. Wonder what would happen — I’d likely be hustled off the stage in a hurry…

Hermes Far Eastern Shining

Tuesday 4 January 2022

On the way to work today, I listened to an episode of the Cults podcast, which was about the Australian group Hermes Far Eastern Shining, a group that teaches an Eastern-tinged variety of religious silliness. Their original leader, who claimed to have the same type of spiritual energy and ability as Jesus, died over a decade ago, but they’re still peddling their quackery. Their primary product seems to be magic wands. That’s not a joke: they sell magic wands, which are basically plastic tubes with a liquid that an Australian regulatory agency determined was nothing more than dyed distilled water.

One of their more inexpensive wands is the “Don’t Fence Me In Wand,” which sells for only $55.00. What can we expect of this marvel of medieval superstition?

“… Give me room, lots of room underneath the starry skies…” Like inhabitants of “Flatland”, the usual person is hemmed in, unable and unwilling to step over the ‘line’. We are constrained within one-dimensional and two- dimensional levels of existence, by self and other possession. The one-dimensional is the atheistic scientific model of the universe, in which it is insanely suggested that an individual’s behaviour could be predicted by simply knowing where all their molecules are at one time and somehow knowing where they will be at some future time. This abysmal view is utterly and deplorably fallacious, “Thank God”. The two- dimensional aspect of this is other possession particularly and ‘self-possession’.

This consideration of ‘don’t fence me in’ is focused in other possession. This other possession has many forms; some of these are concept possession, lower astral possessions, entity possessions, parental and sibling possessions, friends, possessions, place possessions, time possessions, black witchcraft possessions, programming possessions, dimensional possessions and so on. This is all the stuff of Television drama; struggling with father, mother, brother, sister, lover or some idea that torments us. Penetrating the illusion of these possessions can be very freeing, leaving us at last with our own self-possession, which is our own moral responsibility, under the banner of energy and feeling.

(Being ‘psychic’ is simply what we are to understand as feeling. (Energy we are to understand as ‘action.’) Exit stage right, Alice1 disappears down the rabbit hole…

I’m not sure I understand what this product description is exactly claiming because, like all religious poppycock, it’s long on poetic, esoteric nonsense and short of practical specifics. But at least they include instructions on how to use the wand:

The Wands can be carried with you throughout the day in your hand, pocket, handbag, briefcase etc. You can engage them at work, during exercise, recreational activities, meditation or at home. You can imbue a glass of water with the Energy of your Wand by tapping it to the side of the glass. Sip the water while holding the Wand and receive its energy.

Each Wand holds a specific intention of purification and transformation. The Wands are not influenced by other energies and so do not require ‘cleansing’, ‘clearing’ or ‘re-charging. They can be used personally, shared with others and used in your immediate environment.

You can also apparently hold it over someone’s head for some kind of special effect.

Another option, in the $1,500 price range, is to buy an “Energy House,” which holds several of these magic wands and makes you a particularly good reader.

“Energy Houses” — quotes very much intentional

If you’re already sold on the whole magic wand supersition, you can forego the tedium of adding them one at a time to your shopping cart and get a pack of 20 for a mere $2,250.

There’s also the “Food And Beverage Spiritualiser“

As our forms are lifted and transformed over time, so to is it necessary for the energy of the food and beverage that we receive. The Food and Beverage Spiritualiser brings a clearing and blessing energy to optimise the intensity of all that we ingest. In tern, this helps the energy of our food to combine with our forms more easefully and support us to be more like Light than flesh.

One of the original intentions of the Food and Beverage Spiritualiser was to help us awaken to the recognition that as we evolve, we must support our forms to incorporate and conduct the Eternal Current of Divine Light and Radiance.

In addition to the four golden, glass spheres holding a vast array of special Alchymeic Energies, the Food and Beverage Spiritualiser holds a clear Soul Fire Octahedron in the centre, with four diamond bezels in the four corners, sitting upon a spinning base.

Finally, there’s the ultimate magic-water machine, the Bubbler.

This beautiful piece of quackery will set you back $6,000 — I’m sure it’s worth it for all the amazing benefits.

At one point, the Australian government shut down the whole operation for obvious reasons, but they opened again, adding a lengthy disclaimer to the website. Among the choice weasle-word passages about making no health claims is this stunning admission:

What we offer has no scientific backing, evidence or support. It is a wholly ‘esoteric’ matter, completely outside of conventional scientific understanding. There are no scientific verifications for our work. Hermes Far Eastern Shining does not claim and will not claim that conventional worldviews provide any support for our work.

In short, they are admitting that there is no way to determine whether or not their products actually do anything. The further explain,

When you choose to work with our products, any results that you may experience cannot be anticipated and they may not be readily observable. Any results are up to the Divine and how well you understand and apply what is presented.

Some people do report many things to us – some of them truly inspiring things – but we want you to be clear that this is a matter between you and the Divine and that we are not interested in persuading anyone or suggesting that this will be your experience.

In other words, it might not seem to work at all, and if it doesn’t work, it’s likely your fault because you don’t have enough faith.

It’s bad enough that this group bilks gullible people out of thousands of dollars. It also does real harm to those in the cult:

One former devotee Jackie Gate, said she joined the group with her boyfriend when she was 31-years-old.

She said the ‘friendly’ group took her in and made her feel secure.

But not long after she joined, she said she started to notice its dark underbelly.

When she fell pregnant, Ms Gate said the group tried to turn her against her boyfriend and take control of her and her unborn child.

She said a member told her ‘you know this baby is yours and not the dad’s, no matter how much you say you will be together. You don’t need him, we will help raise your baby as one of us … don’t rely on a man for help’.

Ms Gate said this was a turning point for her and her boyfriend.

She told the group she needed to fly to the UK for a funeral, and immediately booked flights home to Sydney.

‘I stumbled across something that I thought looked wonderful, but felt dark,’ she said.

Another former devotee Anna Fitzgerald said she was ‘love bombed’ by recruiters and spent eight years with the group after she was initially showered with kindness.

At 50-years-old, Ms Fitzgerald left her life in the UK and moved to Australia where she was given the name Perplexity Swings This and That.

But after eight years of working for up to 16 hours a day, Ms Fitzgerald said she realised she was just a victim.

‘I realised I was being conned,’ she said.

Ms Fitzgerald said she hatched up a plan in 2011, and asked some shopkeepers to help her escape.

She was driven to a hotel in Coolangatta where she hid until her family sent money to get back home. (Source)

That people fall for this stuff is a testament to the susceptibility even in these times to fall prey to silly superstitions. Other groups have magical objects and special water, but at least you don’t (as far as I know) have to buy those: you get them after you’ve paid your dues in the organization!

Hearing God’s Voice

Monday 3 January 2022

In a post on social media in the group I’ve been following — people who have been participating in the “Bible in a Year” podcast, though I haven’t listened to any of it in weeks — someone posted the following:

I wish I am like Elijah who can hear God’s words.

This seems like a reasonable request. After all, if the Christian god is to be seen as a father, as he’s portrayed in the Bible, one would expect clear interactions with him. As a father myself, I try not to rely on the practice of maintaining physical distance from my children, being essentially invisible and leaving little evidence of my actual existence, while hoping we develop a good relationship through generic letters not necessarily written to them personally but to children in general. I find it’s much better to communicate to them directly, in their physical presence. This person clearly wishes her god engaged in parenting practices more like my own preferred methods and less like, well, most gods tend to prefer.

But it raises lots of questions if this god is going to maintain physical distance yet communicate audibly with his believers. I queried this believer about these concerns:

Even if it were an audible voice, how would we know it’s the voice of God and not something else, say schizophrenia? I think we pretty much discount people who say they hear God talking to them. How would we know the difference?

Her response was simple: she maintained that “somehow I think you’d know.” I naturally couldn’t let that stand: “How exactly? Especially if it were audible only to you.” She replied with the worst possible example I could imagine:

You just know! Unexplainable, but I will try. 🙂

When God spoke to Abraham. Only Abraham could hear him. Yet Abraham knew it was God.
The voices of schizophrenia is evil. Insane. The voice of God is good. Sane. The outcome of the two are complete opposites. (“How would we know the difference?—>)The results.

God does not boom to us vocally from the heavens today, like we surmise Him doing back in the Bible days. Its within. *God The Holy Spirit*, whether its for God, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, a Saint, or an Angel. We instinctively know which one it is. A miracle. A mystery that can not be explained. Then faith and trust follows, because its all you have left to explain the unexplainable.

There are few stories in the Bible that I find more disturbing than the story of Abraham and Issac. I couldn’t let it stand without comment:

The voice of God told Abraham to kill his son. That sounds pretty insane. If you heard what you thought was the voice of God, would you be willing to do the same? I know I wouldn’t.

The response:

God speaks in different ways…sometimes audibly..sometimes through others…sometimes in a way only your soul recognises.
So beautiful.

It’s like being in love. You just know.

“It’s like being in love.” Yes, I guess sometimes you just know — but most of the time I’ve “known,” I was wrong. I was right only once.

[G] I always know.. it comes in threes…usually through the media or through a priest during a homily.

What method did this person use to determine this? How do we know whether or not to count some event as part of those “threes”?

[G] You know. A voice you’ve never heard before, yet is some how the most familiar voice ever. The sound of pure, unconditional love. A peace and calmness, total serenity comes over you. 99% of the time God leads in ways other than a voice, and it can be difficult to decipher His will as He will not impose upon our freedom of will. However, if God wants to say something to you, there is no question, He will make Himself be known.

If you’re looking for a god, that’s exactly what you’ll find.

I don’t know why I do this…

Epiphany 2022

Sunday 2 January 2022

Today’s reading in Mass had to do with the coming of the wise men — the magi:

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star at its rising and have come to do him homage.” (Matthew 2.1, 2)

It doesn’t take much to see that they are using the star rising — which is a clear reference to astrology — and by this, learn of Jesus’s birth. Astrology is condemned in the Old Testament: “Do not practice divination or seek omens” (Leviticus 19.26) makes this clear, as does “Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them. I am the LORD your God” (Leviticus 19.31) and “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer” (Deuteronomy 18.10). But here it seems to be fine. In fact, God is using astrology to guide the wise men to the infant Jesus.

Bishop Robert Barron spoke of this in his homily today. The magi are astronomers, he suggests, and because of their “scientific investigation[, they] are now journeying to find this newborn king of the Jews.” Only in one’s wildest fantasies could one call these three astronomers. They were clearly astrologers. Astronomers do not see stars as being guiding forces in any way; that’s exactly what astrologers do.

The priest in Mass today brought up science as well, though in a different way. He talked about how atheists deny God’s existence by saying there’s no scientific proof for him. “But science changes all the time!” the priest protested, adding with a pause, “Just ask the CDC.” Laugher in the congregation prompted him to admit, “I thought you’d like that one.” It was an underhanded way of belittling science’s advances: “It really doesn’t say anything completely trustworthy because it’s always changing. It’s useful, but not for grounding ultimate concerns,” was the insinuation. It’s a way of having the benefits of the scientific advances of the last 200 years (“We’re not Luddites, after all!”) without having to deal with the direct challenges science makes to religion.

On the non-religious side of things, my new bike arrived today:

A new mountain bike for me actually means a very happy Boy. “Think of all the places we can ride now!”

The Trinity

Tuesday 12 October 2021

If God is the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost was the one responsible for impregnating Mary, and Jesus is the child, then God is both the lover and son of Mary.

It’s an idea ripe for memes.

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Filters

Wednesday 22 September 2021

We see what we want to see. Social media offers the best example of that in the contemporary world, but sometimes, it’s not just evident in a macro-view but in individual postings.

One of the religion groups I follow posted a story about a meteor “demolishing an ancient Middle Eastern city” and speculated that it could have inspired the story of Sodom and Gemorrah. The individual sharing the article added the comment, “Always interesting when science catches up to The Bible.”

“Science catches up to the Bible?!” I laughed. The Bible that includes a talking snake, an apple curse, a talking donkey, and a man surviving in a whale’s stomach for days? The Bible that includes the story of a flood that inundated the whole world despite the fact that there’s nowhere near enough water in existence on the Earth to do that? The Bible that says the heavens are a bowl-shaped divider that keeps the water of the upper firmament out (that is where all the water comes from, I guess)? The Bible that has epileptics misdiagnosed as victims of demonic possession? The Bible that says a sky wizard created the world in six days, including creating light before there was no light source? The Bible that purports many men lived literally centuries, with several living close to a millennium? In short, the Bible that is so scientifically backward that apologists have to contort themselves into knots or declare troubling passages as merely metaphorical is in any sense ahead of modern science?

I, of course, couldn’t leave well enough alone, responding “Science caught [sic] to the Bible and left it behind long ago.” Given the context of what I just wrote, it’s clear what I meant: the Bible is backward and dated, especially when compared to modern science.

That’s not what they read, though. One young man replied,

tell it to scientist [sic] 50 years ago, they also thought they know everything, in terms that we’re developed at their time… eyes opened yet? 🙂
Cell phones? Radio waves? What, we know only as much as we know, and every decade some people think we know it all, ‘its called science!’ 😄😄 God Bless

It is, naturally, to be expected that someone posting on a pro-Christian board would have pro-Christian views, and my comment was somewhat vague — intentionally so. Still, I didn’t expect everyone to see it that way. It’s a perfect example of confirmation bias.

The Sacrifice

Friday 17 September 2021

Another post on social media about Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, this time as a comedy:

I would think that such an event would cause near-trauma in the mother: any other reaction seems unhealthy. I would hope that if I came home with one of our children and told K that I’d almost killed the child because I was sure God had told me to sacrifice the child but thankfully an angel stepped in and stopped the whole thing that she’d gather the children and get away from me as fast as possible until I got substantial counseling.

As for the child, I would think it would be more than just a mere reluctance to go into the woods with the father.