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Sunday 18 September 2022

But God is NOT a commanding officer, now is He??

Of course, he is.

Who made him commanding office? One of higher authority had to do so. So who was it?

Don’t be silly with semantics. You know what I meant.

As you do mine. God IS and IS in command. So why do you rebel against your commander? And don’t pull this crap that He’s not YOUR commander.

But he’s not. Sorry — had to pull it.

What any rebel should say. Any treasonous rebel. Any delusional, treasonous rebel.

I’ll bet you just can’t wait to be in heaven watching me writhe in hell, right?

But what about YOU??? Evidently you wrote and then deleted. Afraid of your own lie? Yeah it’s hard work figuring new ways to ignore truth. Why are you avoiding the issue?

I originally said that there’s no hate like Christian love. You’re a great example of that. Then I thought you’d probably say something like, “I look forward to watching you roast,” or some such nonsense. I’m not afraid of anything; I’m not ignoring the truth; I’m not avoiding any issues. I just don’t believe. But I’m not dripping with only slightly concealed hatred like you are.

Why is it “hatred” to say you are a rebel against God? Or why is EVERYTHING that is a contrary view labeled “hatred” by you people?? It’s like the only verb you know.

So many Christians can’t see themselves as others see them. It’s a form of hatred because it’s a judgment made on a personal standard that insinuates that joy I suggested you feel when you contemplate me in hell. It suggests that you will stand in judgment alongside your god and say with mock sadness, “Lord, you know best, but of course, I can’t say anything about this miserable wretch other than to say he’s rebelled against you — which of course you already know, Lord,” all the while anticipating getting watch me get my dues. “I told you so!” you can say. So on second thought, perhaps it’s not hatred as much as childishness.

And how others see is always right and correct, huh? So we must cater to what YOU think? How bout non-Christians can’t see themselves the way God sees them? And once again, the unbeliever makes a shambles of Christian doctrine while congratulating himself in his mockery. Dude…we were ALL rebels. We say nothing about you that we couldn’t say of ourselves.

“How bout non Christians can’t see themselves the way God sees them?” — See? You’re speaking for your god, standing by his side and passing judgment, eager to see your so-called enemy cast into the flames. As for “And once again, the unbeliever makes a shambles of Christian doctrine while congratulating himself in his mockery.” — I don’t even see where that came from. I watched a couple of your videoes, so I know you have a real persecution complex like so many Christians, and you’ll read into things persecution that’s not even there, but I wasn’t even talking about any Christian doctrine. I was talking about your attitude. This whole thing started with me making an off-hand comment about the Christian god being a sort of commander-in-chief (You know, like “Onward Christian Soldiers”?), and you’ve blown this up into — I don’t even know what. I’m just shaking my head in disbelief: I don’t get you or your attitude. I never said anything derogatory about Christians or Christian beliefs. I just made a silly comment. Calm down, man. This has gotten way out of hand: you’re frothing at the mouth.

No I’m nailing you to the wall for bring so flippant. You make it sound like you’re not even referring to Christianity. Liar. Persecution complex? Not here, bud. You don’t know what that is anymore more than you understand rebellion.

I read that imagining John Wayne was saying it. Very effective.

Please identify this “hate”. You make reference to it but do not state what you consider hateful.

I did. A few comments ago. (That comment didn’t sound so great in a John Wayne voice. I was hoping for more “nail you to the wall” kind of bravado.)

Genocide

Thursday 15 September 2022

The commands to genocide in the Old Testament are particularly troubling for most people except for the most basic, literal-thinking fundamentalist (Protestant or Catholic). For them is simple: God said it, so it’s morally right. Most other Christians take a little more nuanced approach — at least the ones who know about the passages and want to deal with them honestly.

Capturing Christianity — a YouTube apologetics channel — invited Dr. Randal Rauser, who describes himself as “progressively evangelical, generously orthodox, rigorously analytic, [and] revolutionary Christian thinking,” to discuss the troubling passages. He wrote Jesus Loves Canaanites, a book that deals with the various Christian attempts to explain these passages. I listened to the interview on my run this evening, and two things stood out.

How do we make sense of the fact that God is supposed to be love and yet he commands all these awful things? Surely this creates some cognitive dissonance that Christians want to deal with. How do we deal with it?

Rauser explains that, in dealing with these passages, Christians need to “develop different reading strategies to minimize the cognitive dissonance that is created when we read these passages.” Earlier he mentions a new convert who discovered these passages and found them troubling, and Rauser suggests that new converts who haven’t been “inculcated” with these reading habits might find these passages to be stumbling blocks to their faith. It’s interesting that he uses the word “inculcated” because the definition Oxford is “instill (an attitude, idea, or habit) by persistent instruction.” Persistent instruction — drilling this into one’s head. So in order to deal with these issues, one has to have drilled into one’s head certain reading habits. What are these habits?

One of them is to ask if a given interpretation develops a love of God and man. If it doesn’t, it’s not the intended interpretation. But this puts the cart before the horse: one should not have to read the Bible with an ideal interpretive framework in place that automatically defaults to erring on the side of the Bible. That’s not critical study; that’s mindless acceptance.

Another reading technique is to apply what we know about God and ask if a certain interpretation reflects that.

He uses the extreme example of Dena Schlosser, who in 2004 used a knife to amputate the arms of her eleven-month-old baby because it was a sacrifice God had asked her to make. Rauser insists that

the vast majority of people today, we don’t even give it a moment’s consideration that God possibly willed such a thing to happen because we believe it is fundamentally inconsistent with who God is. And we would say, maybe she was influenced by a demonic entity or she is mentally ill, schizophrenic or something else, but what we don’t think seriously is that God maybe or possibly commanded that.

Yet I don’t see why we can’t imagine God commanding that: he did command Abraham to do just the same thing. If we’re going to accept that Abraham was justified in what he did, we have to at least consider that Schlosser was justified in what she did. After all, who are we to say that God wasn’t talking to her?

But of course, we will say that because it’s the only thing we can say. To suggest that God might be getting back into the business of having people slaughter each other at his bidding opens up such potential chaos and terror that it’s unimaginable.

A favorite question of skeptics when the story of Abraham and Isaac comes up is to ask the Christian, “What would you do if God commanded you to kill your child?” Most Christians will hem and haw and suggest that they’d have themselves checked into a hospital to check for mental illness and yet at the same time deny that possibility for Abraham.

I commend Rauser for dealing with the issue, but like Trent Horn, he seems just to be offering possible ways out that allow a Christian some breathing room from the crowding cognitive dissonance that rattles thinking Christians’ faith.

Strawman

Wednesday 14 September 2022

This whole discussion starts with a sort of ad hominem attack on Harris, suggesting his view is “naive” and (later) silly. That’s amusing since all Harris was doing was paraphrasing the basic core of the Biblical account of the ascension and second coming. There’s a literal up motion and a down motion: Up toward the sky for the ascension, down toward earth for the second coming. All this “vast” and “rich” and “nuanced” theory that Davis presents is simply modern apologists’ attempts at recasting these events in a way that doesn’t so clearly contradict science. The fact is simple: for most of Christian history, a literal upward motion to heaven above us and vice versa was the only understanding. If you’re criticizing Harris’s view, you are in fact criticizing the Biblical account. All the theories Davis presents are simply speculative apology that has absolutely no support in the Biblical text.

Sapiens Thoughts

Monday 12 September 2022

I’ve been reading Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and two early passages have led me to see religion in a whole new way. Unfortunately, neither epiphany is ultimately flattering for religion, but at least one thought from the book got me thinking that religion was a useful tool in our development.

The first realization comes from the argument religionists make about the existence of morality being ultimately due to the existence of a law-giver that created a conscience in us all that is somewhat similar. Murder, theft, and lying seem to be universally bad — how could this be unless some god “wrote that on our heart” to use a Christian apologist metaphor. Harari points out, however, that because we Homo sapiens walk upright, our hips have to be narrower, which led to an evolutionary preference to earlier birth. But human babies need much more care and development time than babies of other species, and this necessitated help from others. This need, in turn, led to evolutionary selection for people more likely to cooperate and live together peacefully. And this would eventually result in a moral system that prized compassion and cooperation — without the need for a god.

The second realization came from Harari’s contention that Homo sapiens development into a species that can coexist in large groups, much larger than our closest evolutionary relative, the chimp, has to do with our ability to use language to describe things that aren’t actually there. To create fiction, in other words. He writes, “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.” He continues,

Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag.

This common myth enables large-scale cooperation that doesn’t appear in the societies of other apes.

The problem, though, is that we are at a point in our development in which the competing myths can go to war with each other with catastrophic effects for the entire plant…

Friday Night Football

Friday 2 September 2022

When I was in high school, Friday night football was, during the beginning of the year, the highlight of the week. Everyone would arrive early to stake out their seats and make sure all the lowly freshmen got the worst seats. Friends saved seats for each other, and had cell phones existed then, they likely would have been texting each other, asking where they were, demanding that they hurry.

All the students went to cheer on the team, to hang out, to escape parents, to escape the everyday. The cheerleaders led everyone with raucous, taunting chants, and the marching band took the spotlight during halftime. The football players looked, and probably felt, a bit like stars.

My next-door neighbor played on the football team, and though we were not close, I’d wish him luck with the game if I saw him that day. The neighbor across the street also played, but even though I was closer to him than my next-door neighbor during our childhood, by the time we reached high school, we rarely talked.

Win or lose, spirits were always high. While everyone wanted the home team to win, it wasn’t just about the game’s outcome. It was about the friendship and closeness that everyone experienced.

At least I’m assuming it was, for I never went to a Friday night high school football game as a kid. Not once. It was in part because of a lack of desire, I suppose: football was never really something I loved except for a short couple of years when I was in second and third grade. (Or was it first and second grade? Or third and fourth grade? Hard to remember.) The main reason I never went was because it was off limits: growing up in a sabbatarian sect, we observed Friday night sundown to Saturday night sundown as the Sabbath, and all worldly cares and events went by the wayside. A Friday night football game was most certainly out of the question.

I never really wanted to go, but I wouldn’t have been able to even if I did want it.

Or I tell myself that. Could my inability to go, my knowledge long before I could develop a desire to go that I would never be allowed to go, my certainty that there was something deeply and spiritually wrong with going to watch a football game on Friday night — could that have tempered my desire before it ever developed?

I tell myself that I would not have felt comfortable there even if I did go because most of that crowd — the in-crowd, the popular crowd — felt uncomfortable. But why? If I’m honest it’s because I was always distancing myself to begin with: I knew I could never really do any of the things they did on the weekend even if I was invited, even if they begged me because they thought I was the most amazing person to be around, even if I were king of homecoming (which I could have never been because, well, it’s probably obvious). I’d never been terribly close to any of them outside of school (and perhaps playing in the neighborhood after school) during elementary school, and that moved with me into junior high where it settled into a sort of permanent quasi-outsider sense that I carried with me into college.

So at tonight’s high football game — the first I, at nearly fifty years old, had ever been to in my life — I found myself wondering how different my light might have been if I had not grown up in what can only charitably be called a sect. I’m not bitter about my childhood; I don’t regret that life; I appreciate what I got in return for Friday night and Saturday events.

But I still can’t help but wonder…

A Short Response

Wednesday 31 August 2022

I’ve been listening to a discussion between Alex O’Connor, an atheist, and Trent Horn, a Catholic. At one point, an audience member asks Horn a simple question: what level of evil would have to exist in the world for you to think that perhaps it’s an unjustifiable level of evil that thus counts as evidence against the existence of a god. His answer was revealing, so I made a one-minute response video.

Here’s the whole discussion:

Belief Revisited

Friday 19 August 2022

It’s a quote I’ve used twice here:

[Belief] may be the battle of your life, but emotionally and intellectually, it could also be the most exhilarating one you’ve ever engaged in. Whether you experience God’s reality or are just intellectually intrigued by the idea, God can be a very real force in peoples’ lives – spiritual, emotional, supportive – that almost no other system can offer. But you must gird yourself for a fight and know that you’re going to have to try to reconcile very difficult things. Or at least hold them in suspension and bounce them back and forth and get tired. There’s no quick fix, but we have the benefit of drawing on thousands of years of religious thinking. You can’t learn it over a weekend. It’s an engagement for the rest of your life.

Burton Visotzky

I originally included it while discussing Winifred Galligher’s Working on God, in which it’s originally quoted.

Belief

I also reposted the quote on its own a few years later, undoubtedly just to have an easy way out of keeping up some artificial posting streak:

Burton Visotzky

In some ways, I think I admired that quote, but now, I view it so very differently.

Visotzky writes that believers are “going to have to try to reconcile very difficult things. Or at least hold them in suspension and bounce them back and forth and get tired.” I originally read this very ambiguously, not really thinking about what exactly one must reconcile. As I’ve returned to my skeptical positions of the past after a sojourn in faith, I see it simply: you’re going to have to reconcile contradictions or ignore them. Contradictions between faith claims and scientific claims. Contradictions between various faiths’ claims. Contradictions between claims of omnipotence and omnibenevolence and the evil we see around us. Contradictions within traditions’ holy books. You might “get tired,” he suggests. I think that’s what happened to me: I got tired of the continual cognitive disonance.

Far from being a wise quote, I see this now as the dysfunctional heart of faith itself: it’s seeing one thing that has an abundance of evidence and believing another that has little to no real evidence.

Connected to Christ

Saturday 13 August 2022

There’s an infographic I’ve seen several times on several social media platforms. It’s meant to encourage Christian parents to take concrete steps to make sure that their children stay Christian.

The fact that such an infographic exists let alone that it has gone somewhat viral speaks to the crisis in which contemporary Christianity finds itself. The “Nones” are the fastest-growing demographic in the States. This has a lot to do with the explosion of social media in the last decade. Skeptics have made good use of these media and present opposing viewpoints that churches were otherwise historically able to keep somewhat hidden from young people. No more — now skeptics are explaining why Christian theology makes little to no sense and young people are listening. Additionally, Christianity’s historic position on gay rights and its relative opposition to science (the Catholic Church’s weak protests notwithstanding) leave young believers out of step with church teachings.

If they’re connected with Christ, why are there so many people involved in this? If Jesus is real and the connection is real, why does it need to be so supported socially? Each one of these is a social connection. Each one is an example of what sociologists call plausibility structures. The more people someone has around them supporting their beliefs, the more likely they are to hold those beliefs.

If we look at the wording of each one, we see that it’s obvious how this is using social psychology and sociology to enforce belief systems.

  1. Ate dinner with family
    This is critical for the initial creation of plausibility structures. Doing it five to seven times a week gives it the repetition necessary for it to remain relevant. This will be key for young children.
  2. Served with family in ministry
    Again, doing the same thing together with the same underlying motivation will increase the likelihood that an individual accepts as valid that motivation.
  3. Had one spiritual experience per week in the home
    This one is a little vague: what is that one experience? How do we determine that it is spiritual? Most likely this will occur through the instruction of the parents. This will enforce what children learn in church: that warm feeling you get sometimes when listening to “praise and worship” music or reading the Bible is the Holy Spirit at work. The experience itself cannot be questioned; the cause of it can. This makes sure that that cause always leads back to a deity.
  4. Entrusted with ministry responsibility at an early age
    This begins the transfer from trusting others’ interpretation of your inner experiences (i.e., labeling them as coming from a god) to making it your own. In treating you like an adult, you become an adult, and when this is tied to “ministry,” that ministry becomes part of your adult identity.
  5. Had one non-familial faith-based adult in life
    Again, this is adding plausibility to the belief structure. Step one (dinner as a family) will work with children; this step will be key for teens, who don’t necessarily want to listen exclusively to the family because it’s part of growing up. A close relationship with a non-familial adult will help the transfer process from “their worldview” to “my worldview.”

I, of course, rose to the bait when this appeared on a friend’s feed:

If Jesus is real and the connection is real, why does it need so much social support? These are all examples of what sociologists of religion call plausibility structures: the more people you have around you believing the same thing and suggesting, directly and indirectly, that such belief is plausible and logical, the more likely an individual is to accept that belief as such.

The individual who posted this meme responded:

[H]ow long can one coal burn (even with regular blowing) apart from the rest of the fire? We aren’t closed systems…the World, the Flesh, & the Devil are actively pulling us away from God. Driftwood doesn’t move upstream…it must be acted upon.

It’s interesting that this response doesn’t deny the fact that these are, in essence, plausibility structures. Instead, the response only highlights it. Sociologist Peter Berger suggests that the only way to maintain a given belief in the face of competing beliefs is to surround yourself with like-minded people. He calls this a “cognitive ghetto.” The response posits that just such mental sequestration is necessary to keep out the three enemies:

  1. The World
  2. The Flesh
  3. The Devil

Of course, in such a Christian’s worldview, these three can all be subsumed under the last one: the devil. But attributing one’s loss of faith when confronted with conflicting viewpoints to the devil does little: it’s an untested and unfalsifiable hypothesis without evidence, and as such, it can be dismissed without evidence.

Another person asked,

[D]on’t all relationships require some sort of support to survive? The very word relationship indicates two or more things, factors or people.

I replied:

I just don’t understand why a relationship with a supposedly omnipotent being needs support. It seems to me that the omnipotent being could make it so obvious to the believer that it would be folly to reject it. As it is, in my experience with a believer, I only had my own inner experiences and other people’s assurances that those experiences were of God.

My interlocutor did not respond.

Who Commanded What

Wednesday 10 August 2022

I really don’t know why I do it. I follow some of these Catholic groups online for no good reason, I think. Am I there just to pick a fight? I guess.

Today, this one popped up as a joke.

Everyone was laughing about it, so I guess humor is the new way of dealing with the awful things God commands in Leviticus. Of course, I replied: “But both come from God. Both are commands from God. That’s the problem.”

A user named Joseph responded, “no there is no problem. None of the levitical laws are valid anymore. Thus any command from Chirst is superior.”

People just don’t get it, though. Jesus might have done away with these laws, but because of the trinity doctrine, it was Jesus who created the commands in the first place. I responded to Joseph:

But the fact that they were commanded in the first place — that’s the problem I’m referring to. That God commanded his people to stone to death incorrigible children, stone homosexuals, stone people for breaking the sabbath — THAT is the problem. Whether or not he did away with those laws is not as troubling as the fact that he made them in the first place.

At this point, Jesse jumped in to help:

[I]f you listened to the first couple of episodes, Fr. Mike clarified it. Some laws were “allowed”, just as what Jesus said about the law on divorce. Also that some must be understood that they were given to a savage, nomadic, tent-living, and with frequent streaks of going astray kind of people who lived thousands of years ago.

I’ve heard this so many times I’m sick of it. No one sees the problem that the same god who gave us the kinder, gentler Jesus also gave us these commands in Leviticus! In fact, because of the trinity, it’s the same being! I tried to explain this:

No, that doesn’t fly. God didn’t allow those laws. He didn’t see them stoning people and say, “Well, I’ll let you do that for a while.” It was God who COMMANDED the stoning. Why does no one get that distinction?

There were a few more responses — I replied to them all. And then everyone just stopped responding to me. Questions are unwelcome, I guess, and even more so follow-up questions.

Two Problems

Tuesday 24 May 2022

I’ve been working on my own “Why I Am Not a Christian” a la Bertrand Russell’s piece of the same name. There seem to be two logical problems Christianity encounters from the very beginning before taking anything else into account.

The two main issues I have with the Christian worldview are the problem of suffering and the nature of Christian salvation. The best way to highlight these problems is to reframe them in strictly human terms to see how much sense it would make for humans to do what the Christian god supposedly does.

The problem of suffering is simple: if there is a loving god who is omnipotent, it would want its creatures to live free of meaningless suffering. There is meaningless suffering in the world. Therefore, this god is either not loving, not omnipotent, or doesn’t exist. Christians will likely quibble over the definition of “meaningless suffering,” pointing out that that it is a value judgment and that we are in no way to determine if a given example of suffering is meaningless or not (that’s their god’s decision). Here it becomes useful to put it in concrete human terms: put simply, if I had the power to stop a child from being raped, I would. No questions, no hesitation: I would just stop it from happening if I could. If I had the power to stop a child from starving to death, I would. If I had the power to stop a child from being beaten, I would. The god of Christianity doesn’t stop these things from happening. In fact, the supposed representatives of this god are all too often the ones inflicting this suffering on children.

The common apologetic response here is to suggest that the Chrisitan god’s ways are not our ways, that we cannot know what good can come from this suffering. That might be so, but that supposed good that can somehow justify the evil and make it in fact a good — that is merely speculation. What is not speculation is the suffering itself.

In response to this, apologists in turn bring up free will. Their god gave us free will, and we can use it, or we can abuse it. Their god lets us do whichever we wish because to do otherwise would be to limit our free will.

Another example shows the absurdity of this thinking. Imagine you walk in on your twelve-year-old son beating your three-year-old daughter to death with a length of two-by-four. Would you stop it? Of course, you would. But imagine you decide that to do so would be to violate your twelve-year-old’s free will, so you let it happen. The authorities find out and charge you. At your trial, you make the defense that, because we all have free will, you are not ultimately responsible and that you were merely allowing your son to exercise his free will. Would the jury accept that defense? If the roles were reversed, and you were on that jury, would you accept that defense?

Thus, reframing the problem of suffering in strictly human terms leads to a strange outcome: we realize that we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than we hold our idea of a god. We allow a god to get by with things we would find abhorrent in our own behavior by suggesting that we’re just not smart enough to see the good that raping a three-year-old can bring.

At this point, the Christian apologist will likely suggest that this is all a moot point anyway because all this is due to the Fall, and then suggest Jesus’s sacrifice solves this problem (i.e., the Fall). We might point out that the evil still exists but at least Christians have a way to explain where it comes from: we’re flawed in our very nature due to the Fall. Jesus solves all this, the apologists assure us.

What happens when we examine that solution in human terms? Imagine my wife and I have a rule in my home: no one is to spill food while at the dinner table. The penalty for spilling food is three cuts on the forearm with a sharp knife. One night, predictably, my young son spills food. I take his arm and tell him that because of the rules, I have to make three cuts on his arm. However, because I love him so much, I’m going to take that punishment for him. I hand the knife to my wife, and she makes three deep cuts in my forearm. I look at my son lovingly and say, with tears in my eyes, “Do you see, son, how much I love you? I took this punishment for you. This should fill you with an incredible love for me!”

You, as an outside observer, would think all of this is quite absurd. You might question why I had such a strict punishment for such a relatively insignificant “crime.” You would likely suggest that it was inevitable that my child would spill some food and ask why I had that rule in the first place. And finally, you would probably think the whole blood-letting for forgiveness was ridiculous: “Why not just forgive the kid if that rule has to be in place?” you’d ask before pointing out yet again that I was the one who created the law in the first place and that it was completely unnecessary to begin with. As for my suggesting that my son should love me all the more because I took his punishment, you’d likely think that it was a highly traumatizing event for my son.

Yet this is just what Christians think Jesus does for them: he takes a punishment that they deserve and in doing so, earns our undying love. However, Jesus is, according to the doctrine of the trinity, God, so this god set the rules himself as well as the punishment. He could have just forgiven us, but for some reason, he’s insistent on a blood sacrifice to make up for sins that we didn’t even necessarily commit, so Jesus steps in to fulfill that obligation.

At this point, Christians explain that their god would like to forgive us but because of his perfectly righteous nature, he can’t. This is some bizarre argument: the nature of this god apparently restricts this god.

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.