Aw, go ahead and comment. People will like you!
Link to previous Open Forum.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Thursday, March 29, 2007
James White's "Dare" to Post His Links / My Reciprocal Challenge: Why Not Return the Favor and Also Reply to Eight of My Critiques?
Illustration by Maria Korusiewicz
In the continuing comic saga of Baptist anti-Catholic luminary James White and his love-hate relationship with Catholic apologists, he is now calling for us to have the guts to post some of his old papers, in his latest post: For the Serious Minded.
I would like to invite Jonathan Prejean, Patrick Madrid, Dave Armstrong, and the rest of that group of RC apologists, to post links to the paper as well.
Who??!!! Why is he mentioning me? After all, I thought he was through with me once and for all, after his recent insult-barrage in turning down my debate challenge. Some highlights:
Your credibility rating is 0.0. You are all verbiage, zero substance. . . . I consider you a stalker, nothing more. . . . Your arrogance knows no limitations and your hubris is likewise without bounds. . . . your very integrity and honesty [are] highly suspect. I would invite you get some help with your obsessive/compulsive problem. . . . I have not said a word about you in ages, because I have no interest in your re-tread Catholic apologetics, and I am focused upon important things.Yes, okay; back to the topic at hand after that humorous aside . . . White "invites" us Catholic apologists (obsessive stalkers with zero substance and unbounded hubris though we possess) to post a link to his article, What Really Happened at Nicea? (Christian Research Journal, Spring 1997). I have linked to it in the title of the article, above. White complained about the small print in the Internet Archive version he found. I have done him the service of finding an earlier archived version with larger print. I'm sure he will be most grateful, since he holds me in such high regard.
[it took exactly 23 days for White to decide to mention me again. I guess for him, that is an "age"]
I do not have time for your childish games, Mr. Armstrong. You just ignored numerous reasons why even investing the time to try to get you to act in an adult manner in the issue would be next to impossible, . . . I debate adults, sir, who can be expected to keep their word long enough to make the investment of time and money worthwhile.
. . . you play games focused solely upon your monumental ego, Mr. Armstrong, . . . I cannot imagine what it is like to do what you do, to live like you live, to view yourself as you view yourself. I can only be thankful I will not be in your shoes when God judges the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Why [should we post the link]? Well, they are all claiming the paper is a glowing example of how unscholarly I am, how ignorant I am, and why no Roman Catholic should ever listen to anything I have to say.
I haven't said one word about it. I don't even participate on the Envoy Discussion Board. So I don't know why White thinks I have. Maybe it's because I am (so sez he) a "stalker", so he just assumes I am in on the evil Jesuit conspiracy to prove that he is so ignorant?
So, how about posting this link
Your wish is granted, good bishop!
along with the Envoy article, and my brief response (which was limited, by the way, by publication word limits)?
I'm happy to be of service (I've been known to provide more than a few links on my blog and former website):
"Ancient Baptists" and Other Myths, Fr. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. (July / August 1998 -- Envoy)
Ancient Baptists and Other Myths (White's reply of 8-25-06)
That way, you can let your audience find out if Hugh Barbour was actually dealing with what I wrote, or was doing as I have said, writing nothing but a shameless hit piece that mocks the very nature of sound scholarship?
Being a lover of two-sided dialogue myself, I am ecstatic to present one such example and let readers decide.
And would it not be a great benefit for Madrid and Prejean and Armstrong to post my article as an example of just how dull I am?
I don't know if "dull" is the best word to describe Bishop White. I would prefer "sophist" or "obtuse" or "intellectual coward" in light of how he has interacted with me these past twelve years.
I mean, each of them should be able to provide a far superior summary of the main issues at Nicea, Constantine's role, the primary personalities involved, and make it all understandable to the interested layman, and do it all in 4500 words, right? I mean, since I failed so miserably at it, they should be able to pull it off, right?
I might just take up this challenge, but will Mr. White, for his part, promise to respond if I do so, rather than high tail it for the hills, like he has done virtually every other time I have critiqued his writing? One tires of cowardice, poorly masked by bombast and relentless arrogant, self-congratulatory trumpeting of one's supposedly singular debating abilities.
So I look forward to their demonstrating their integrity and honesty by posting the link along with their far superior articles.
Oh goodie! I have regained my integrity! It took just 23 days too!
But I must confess that I didn't fulfill White's wish and request merely out of the goodness of my heart and in order to help him along in his increasingly desperate plight to attain some semblance -- any remote shred -- of intellectual respectability in my eyes and that of my colleagues. I actually have a small favor to ask of Mr. White, too.
Would the good bishop be willing to give some sort of answer -- at long last -- to any or all of these eight critiques of mine that he has run from and ignored (the first going back nearly twelve years now?):
Is Catholicism Christian?: My Debate With James White (+ Part Two) (May 1995)
Dialogue on the Alleged "Perspicuous Apostolic Message" as a Proof of the Quasi-Protestantism of the Early Church (June 1996)
Pope Silvester and the Council of Nicaea (July 1996)
"Man-Centered" Sacramentalism: The Remarkable Incoherence of James White: How Can Martin Luther and St. Augustine Be Christians According to His Definition? (November 2003)
"Whitewashing History": Critique of James White's Book, Mary -- Another Redeemer? (with William Possidento) (March 2004)
The Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:6-30) vs. Sola Scriptura and James White (September 2004)
Refutation of James White: Moses' Seat, the Bible, and Tradition (Introduction) (+ Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Parts VII & VIII) (May 2005)
Refutation of James White on 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 and Purgatory (March 2007)
One rare exception to the rule of White's fleeing in terror from any critique of mine is his multi-part critique of my book, The Catholic Verses (January 2005). He actually stayed on topic for about a post and a half before predictably descending into the slime pit of personal insult. After a few posts of that, I tired of it and simply ceased discussing it with him.
Ever since, this has been the lone instance that White can cite, where I stopped discussing things with him (after having begun an exchange). Since he knew that I had stopped discussing the topic, suddenly he became emboldened and manly enough to write several posts (knowing that I would not be responding). How brave; how impressive . . . I dare say most people would have reacted the same I did, if they had been subjected to asinine vitriol such as the following:
White claimed I was ignorant as a Protestant, and had not done sufficient reading to know much of anything. I promptly provided a detailed list of what I had read as a Protestant. Without missing a beat, White replied:
In essence, this means that instead of blaming ignorance for his very shallow misrepresentations of non-Catholic theology and exegesis, we must now assert knowing deception.
(12-31-04)
Armstrong simply doesn't understand the process of scholarly examination of a text . . .
(1-1-05)
This kind of utterly amazing mishandling of Scripture is sad to observe, . . .
(1-2-05)
. . . in reality, Dave Armstrong does not understand the basics of how to respond to sound, simple scholarly observations regarding the subject.
(1-3-05)
I never dreamed that a total and complete melt-down would take place, resulting in Mr. Armstrong pulling the material off his blog and going into hiding! . . . let's face it: DA isn't up to defending his published works. . . . DA can't do meaningful exegesis, . . .
(1-3-05)
. . . it is hard to take what Mr. Armstrong says seriously . . .
(1-4-05)
At the moment a fairly small group of folks are filling up the blogosphere with the constant assertion that I have engaged in ad hominem argumentation in my reviews of Armstrong's book, mainly because I have concluded sections by noting Armstrong's inability to seriously engage the topic at hand (i.e., provide meaningful exegesis). . . . Evidently, it is not allowable in our society to point out when someone provides shallow, errant, and generally worthless argumentation in a written form . . . when he is forced to attempt to deal with specifically exegetical material, he is out of his depth. . . . To call this a "melt-down" is to engage in understatement to an absurd degree.
(1-4-05)
The man does not know how to do exegesis. It's a fact. . . . the reason that Dave Armstrong is doing this [ceasing discussion with anti-Catholics] is pretty much the same reason that Dave Hunt won't debate me. He can't. He can't . . . the facts are not on Dave Armstrong's side. He can't respond! . . . Dave Armstrong has gone into hiding . . . because he can't respond anymore . . . . . . the argumentation is so basic and so clearly fallacious . . . clear, obvious, logical errors. . . Armstrong could throw his hands up in the air and say, "look, I'm not a scholar; I have no scholarly training. I can't read the original languages." But he won't do that. [No? That's news to me. I did just that on 1-4-05, on my blog, and many times before. Bizarre claim . . .]
(Dividing Line webcast, 1-4-05)
. . . what we find in The Catholic Verses. No exegesis is offered. No argument from context appears . . . But nowhere does Armstrong do the one thing he must do to be taken seriously: he never exegetes the passage. He never makes the connections that would be absolutely necessary to prove his point. He just assumes his position, nothing more. . . . the "Catholic Verses" are, in fact, "Badly Chosen Catholic Prooftexts Devoid of Exegetical Meaning." But we must be ready to explain why and hope and pray the Spirit will open hearts and minds that have been blinded by a false gospel and a false hope.
(1-5-05)
This was only the climax of a long history of slander by Bishop White. For example, there was his eight-minute rant about me on Dividing Line (4-2-04):
Those of you who have been following the blog, uh [laughter], just, I don't know, what do you do with someone like Dave Armstrong, you know? . . . you know, in your heart of hearts, that this fella, uh, bless his soul, has no idea what he's talking about. He's read some books, but the important foundational stuff that allows you to actually make sense out of all that stuff, he's clueless; he has no idea what he is talking about, but he writes constantly!
[Why, then, has Dr. White, challenged me to debate him live some 5-6 times now, through the years (from as far back as 1995 -- and he was insulting me back then already, just as he does now), if my thought is so utterly worthless? Does he seek out the very worst opponents he can find? What does that make him, then?]
. . . So what do you do? Cuz, it's sorta, sort of; it's really disturbing to me, uh, that I hear from people, and they go, "well, well, whaddya think about what he said about this?" And I sorta, I sorta; I, it's really hard for me to go, "well, have you really thought about, you know, the foundation of this argument, and the background of this argument?" People need to learn how to examine argumentation! And see through fluff! Uh, see through stuff that shouldn't even be called an argument; it's complimenting it way too much to call it an argument! And [sigh] it's just, how do you deal with folks like that?
. . . the whole point was to illustrate the difference in exegetical methodology. I have one. He doesn't. And he doesn't because he doesn't know the field. He's just; he doesn't know what he's doing! I mean, that would be like my trying to, to, write to a CPA and criticize uh, an audit that he's done on a major corporation. I'm not trained in that. I don't know the terminology. I don't know the basics, the foundational rules that you're supposed to do and why you put this in this ledger and why you put that -- I don't know that stuff. It's not my area, I; you can go to school and learn those things. Uh, but he hasn't done so.
. . . This guy [sigh], sadly, there are people who write recommendations of his stuff! I mean, you got Scott Hahn, all these folks, which amazes me. Uh, because you [laughter] look at some of his books, and it's just like "wow! there's just no substance here." It's just rattle rattle rattle rattle, and quote John Henry Cardinal Newman and that's the end of the subject. And there's no meaningful argumentation going on at all.
Then we must never forget White's classic ad hominem post (also from April 2004: a real banner month for Jimbo): Dave Armstrong: Socrates without Substance ("Dave Armstrong has never once cracked the binding of a book on exegesis, let alone taken the subject seriously enough to equip himself to honestly approach the subject with integrity," etc.).
* * * * *
In passing, I'm wondering if someone can help me find the in-depth, full refutation of the Talpiot Tomb claims by these Roman Catholic apologists? I mean, I would think the fact that they are so far beyond me in scholarship (especially Mr. Prejean), that they would have been providing information on the Acts of Philip and mitochondrial DNA and the like far faster than I have. So could someone direct me to their rebuttals?
Why would we need to? The Body of Christ is composed of many parts, with each playing his role, including apologetics. I've stated time and again that Mr. White does good work in many areas, such as the Muslims, Mormons, liberals, homosexual activists, KJV-Only, and this sort of skeptical nonsense. I've defended white against slander more than once. I link to many of his non-Catholic-related papers. That being the case, this is what I wrote to him recently:
Yes, I complimented you on that in my last letter. God bless you. I don't need to spend time on that particular nonsense because you are doing a thorough job. Kudos! I can simply refer people to your refutation if they want something on that.So how about it, James? I fulfilled your request. Now will you make links to all of my papers that you have run from in abject terror for twelve years? And will you summon up all your courage and intellectual acumen to answer maybe one of the eight that I listed? Even two or three?
I do have extensive critiques on my blog, of course, of atheists and theological liberals (a page devoted to each), along with other work, such as against homosexual activists, pro-aborts, Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, scientific materialism, etc. So you're not the only one out there fighting the forces of evil and falsehood. There are plenty more in the apologetic trenches.
Oh, and I would invite all of them to help us test out our new phone system this afternoon/evening on The Dividing Line? The toll free number is 877-753-3341. I'd love to give you the opportunity of continuing the demonstration of "ethics in defense of Rome," i.e., "As long as you are slandering critics of Mother Church, it's all fair game."
Why would I want to go on a show where James controls everything? He hung up on Jonathan Prejean. I'm gonna be dumb enough to participate in such a situation stacked entirely in his favor? I offered to go on this show for an entire hour (see #4 below), and White refused. It was part of his long pathetic history of refusals and running from challenges, where I am concerned:
1) Bishop White volunteered to substitute for Tim Enloe in a prearranged live chat debate (12-29-00) after Tim gave up and failed to fulfill what he had agreed to. We went back and forth for 5-10 minutes and then he had computer problems and disappeared. I hung around for a good two more hours hoping he would return but alas, it wasn't to be.
2) White declined an offer in early 2001 to ask me questions all night in his chat room (on any topic!) if I could have 90 minutes questioning him. The entire thing was to be recorded on my website, no matter what happened.
3) White virtually begged and pleaded with me to leave him alone after I turned down yet another request by him to do a live oral debate (for principled reasons I have consistently given). He wrote on 11 and 12 January 2001:
I have done everything I could to avoid further contact with you. I cannot stand people who attempt to impress by bluster, obfuscation, and rhetoric. It's a personal problem I have, maybe a character defect, but that's the way it is. I know you cannot back up your "tightly reasoned arguments" . . . and so to hear you so smugly rely upon your ability to write and write and write without end is tremendously annoying to me. I'm one of those folks who truly dislikes long, wordy people who say nothing.
. . . I'll be right up front with you, Dave: you would never survive a one-on-one debate with me, because you can't defend your position without using obfuscation and rhetoric. You can't survive direct cross-examination, and what really bugs you is you know it.
. . . I detest inconsistency and deception. I detest surface-level assertions and the misuse of facts. That is why you and I don't get along. I'm not impressed by rhetoric and bluster and verbosity. There are many who are, I'm not one of them. I have a deep-seated dislike of those who make a show of knowledge for the sake of something other than the truth itself. . . . If you think written exchanges have the ability to allow for the kind of interaction that live ones do, well, what can I say? It obviously does not.
. . . I have done all I could since then [May 1995] in light of certain aspects of your behavior to avoid interaction like the plague. My website contains nothing about you for that very reason. You are a writer who seemingly has endless vistas of time in which to write endlessly irrelevant diatribes that, if they are not dissected point by point, you claim are, in fact, "tightly reasoned" classics of Socratic logic and insightful patristic and biblical scholarship. And if someone does point out obvious errors, well, poof! Mean-spirited angry Protestants!
. . . Mr. Armstrong, I have no interest, whatsoever, in continuing this with you. I don't like you, and I don't believe you like me. Until a few weeks ago I had followed the path of wisdom and avoided every entanglement with you.
. . . I'm going to ask you to join me in promising to stay as far away from each other as possible. I'm not asking you to not respond on your own website to what I write or doing whatever you want to do when speaking, etc. I am talking about personal interaction. Stay out of #prosapologian. Don't write to me. Don't ask to do dialogues, debates, or anything else. You just do your thing, and I'll do mine. OK?
4) He declined my suggestion in October 2004 that I come onto his webcast so we could just chat like human beings for an hour.
5) He kicked me out of his chat room recently when I had done nothing wrong (and had been harangued by the notorious anti-Catholic Pastor David T. King. I wasn't even allowed to go to the second "debate" chat room. I'm far too threatening, I guess, to enter a place with 25 anti-Catholics. The odds are too stacked in my favor, I reckon.
6) He declined my challenge to do a live chat debate (on the topic of "What is a Christian? / Is Catholicism Christian?"), where I would give him 90 minutes to cross-examine me whereas I get 60 to question him. This was specifically designed to give him plenty of opportunity for cross-examination, since he frequently extolls the glories and supreme importance of same on his blog. His sidekick John Q. Doe then refused the same exact challenge.
7) And he ruled any possibility of even his beloved live oral debate on the same topic.
All this, and yet White thinks "you would never survive a one-on-one debate with me, because you can't defend your position without using obfuscation and rhetoric. You can't survive direct cross-examination, and what really bugs you is you know it."
Lastly, there is the issue of reconciliation and apology. I have sought the former many times and done the latter many times. All to no avail with James White, because, as he said himself, he doesn't "like" me and according to him I am a mean-spirited simpleton, pretender, liar, with no integrity or substance, nothing whatsoever good to offer by way of apologetics (even general Christian apologetics), etc., etc. Recently, I was asked a question by Doe on his anti-Catholic blog:
I'll mention to James next time I talk to him how sorry you are for the innane [sic] things you've said about him over the years, and how you're trying to change. Maybe we can work something out and move you off the stalker list.I replied:
Yes, case in point. I have made now maybe ten different apologies to James through the years (virtually all of them open and public). He has made exactly none back. What do you think God would think of that? You are actually silly enough to believe that James has never said anything about me in eleven years that deserves an apology? If so, you are truly out of reality and live in a fantasy land.
One time I apologized to him right in his chat room, with everyone witnessing it. He would not apologize back, though, for all the lies he's told about me through the years.
Recently I simply removed 75 papers of personal nonsense back and forth, including many legitimate defenses of myself against slander. But all of White's garbage written about me remains on his site.
And now I'm a "stalker." This guy just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. It's amazing! Now he's reduced to showing five-minute radically-divorced from the overall context clips where he supposedly embarrassed his debate opponents?
But that's not foolish and arrogant . . . James White can levy insults and defend himself and his great unvanquishable (ha ha!!!) wisdom till Kingdom Come and he has the utmost integrity, etc. The blatant, ongoing double standards of ethics are never acknowledged.
That's one reason (of many) why I have ignored anti-Catholics for two years. One only has so much patience for this sort of inane childishness.
And, by the way (as if it were not obvious), I didn't leave the chat room when asked to by James because I had done nothing wrong, as I stated. To do so would be to, in effect, accept the lie that was being implied: that I had violated some rule or had some nefarious purpose. I had not. It was a matter of principle and basic ethics.
So I wasn't about to leave. He had to ban me, so his hypocrisy and arrogance would be manifest, just like you now think Pat Madrid is a coward and a hypocrite because you were banned on his forum. If it applies to Pat then it does in the exact same way to James White (who doesn't even allow comments on his blog).
I don't know what you wrote at that forum and so I can't have an opinion on whether it was right that you were banned. But I know Pat personally and I know he would certainly be able to offer a good reason for what happened. And I do have most of the transcript of what occurred when I was in White's room. . . . Facts can be brought to bear on these things. It's not just a "he said she said" scenario.
Listen to James White Become Unhinged & Yell at & Patronizingly Preach to Jonathan Prejean on "Dividing Line"
This is one for the ages (15 minute exchange on Dividing Line: 8-22-06). Of course Bishop White (clueless as usual regarding Matters Catholic) is actually proud of it, and so presents it on his blog for all to hear. I'm so happy he did. This provides a welcome balance to his endless array of video debate vignettes presented on his blog (invariably when he is the cross-examiner; we never see the other guy doing his cross-ex), where he supposedly makes mincemeat of his Catholic opponents, cowering under the weight of his immense wisdom and biblical acumen. Who else would be so brazen, lacking in dignity and propriety, and transparently self-important, to do such a thing? It's like "the king of arm wrestling" in a junior high locker room or something . . .
This audio clip reveals the James White I have known for 12 years: a prime audio example of condescending, arrogant, utter disdain of Catholics as human beings and thinkers, stupefying noncomprehension of opposing viewpoints, and the always-ready obtuse counter-"argument." This, from the man who recently turned me down (with severe insults designed to justify his intellectual cowardice) when I offered him a 90 minute cross-examination of me in his chat room, where he could annihilate me once and for all (as he fully believes he can do -- so he says himself --, yet never does it because he refuses every opportunity to do so). He even ruled out any possibility of his beloved oral debate on the same topic ("What is a Christian, and are Catholics Christian?").
See also his accompanying commentary on my good friend Jonathan Prejean on his blog. Can you imagine me talking to the good bishop on his webcast? It is almost unable to be conceived how utterly condescending the man would become with me on the other end of the phone. I have 12 years of his relentless, unending insults (almost all of which I recently removed from my blog because people -- including, very much, myself -- are tired of the ad hominem horse crap between Christians) that give me a very good idea of what it would be like. But he also turned me down when I suggested that we do a friendly chat for an entire webcast, so I guess we'd never know. In the meantime, we can all lament this performance of his. Thanks again to James for posting it! White in all his patronizing anti-Catholic glory! . . .
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
John Lennon's Short-Lived Intense Interest in Evangelical Christianity
I thought I knew just about everything there is to know about the Beatles, but I had never heard this before. According to well-known Christian writer / author Steve Turner ("John Lennon's Born-Again Phase"), this occurred in April-May 1977. Lennon had shown considerable interest in several of the TV evangelists and even started announcing to friends that he was "born again." Apparently, Yoko Ono played a key role in making sure this was simply a (typically) passing interest, by strenuously arguing against the belief that Jesus was God incarnate, etc., and continuing her interest in various false religious practices and beliefs.
This is fascinating and a bit eerie on a personal level, because it happened at exactly the time I seriously devoted myself to Jesus as His disciple, in my evangelical conversion (what I described as being "born again" at the time). A big influence on John Lennon in this regard was Franco Zeffirelli's magnificent film, Jesus of Nazareth, that also made a huge impact on me in early April of 1977 (I mentioned that in my conversion story in Surprised by Truth). How sad that John didn't choose to continue this newfound path. I knew he had been raised as some sort of Anglican.
I also recall reading an article about John Lennon in the newspaper within a few weeks of his murder, where Lennon said he was reading the Gospels and really understanding what Jesus was saying for the first time. I've always hoped that this indicated some spiritual commitment or at least avid interest, such that he might have been saved in the end. If this article is correct, and Lennon turned away from Christianity and became fairly hostile (an instance of the gospel "seed" falling on "rocky soil"), then it is a good sign that he was still willing to read and ponder the words of Jesus, shortly before his death. God has mercy on every soul. God knew John didn't have long to live. We can only hope and pray.
We all have to decide Whom we will serve, and no one knows when their time on this earth will come to an end. Today is the day to commit yourself to Jesus Christ if you have not yet done so. I believe that the Catholic Church preserves the fullness of Christian truth and moral teaching. But even if you are not in a place where you can accept the teaching of the Catholic faith, I urge you to commence or renew your commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. Now is the time. God gives all the grace for repentance and ultimate salvation. Jesus died on the cross so that we could obtain eternal life.
But you (like John Lennon) can decide to act upon this cross-enabled grace or not. God gives you that freedom because He is not interested in forcing people to follow Him and enter into the Kingdom and joy. Don't wait! And whatever you do, don't turn away from what you know is the truth, for then your soul is in exceedingly great danger of hellfire. Not popular or fashionable words these days, but true nonetheless, and if I didn't proclaim this message in its fullness I would be lax in my duty as a Catholic Christian evangelist.
If you're on the fence, or in a miserable place in your life; if you are in despair; now is the time for you to decide to follow Jesus and be His disciple. He's calling you. Will you answer the call and act upon it?
Monday, March 26, 2007
On the Curious Scarcity (Online) of Distinctively Lutheran Apologetics
John Warwick Montgomery is a superb, distinguished Christian apologist (one of the greatest in our time) who is a Lutheran, but not particularly an apologist for Lutheranism.
I had this exchange with several Lutherans on the Three Hierarchies blog, starting here. Color codes:
Josh S. = blue
Eric Phillips = green
Joel = purple
Pirate = orange
BWL = red
Eric Phillips = green
Joel = purple
Pirate = orange
BWL = red
I'm still searching for a Lutheran blog that does apologetics and actually likes to interact with Catholics (and preferably not anti-Catholic). Does anyone know of any?
Dave, I'm pretty sure that by your standards, any genuine Lutheran is going to be anti-Catholic, just like anyone who actually subscribes to Trent will of necessity be anti-Lutheran. Our churches exist in mutual anathema.
OK, I don't want to turn this into another protracted Dave vs Josh war, so that's enough of that.
A "genuine Lutheran" is, of course, one who consistently accepts traditional Lutheran beliefs (basically, LCMS and WELS these days, and perhaps some traditionalist European species), whether anti-Catholic or not. Luther and Melanchthon were both anti-Catholics but also had significant pro-Catholic elements in their beliefs.
A Lutheran apologist would be one who defends Lutheran distinctives (just as I defend Catholic distinctives), and who attempts to provide rational reasons for Lutheran distinctiveness and preeminence among Christian belief-systems, and to incorporate the mind and intellect into the Christian witness in Lutheran form.
I am having the greatest difficulty finding this. Are things that bad in Lutheranism that y'all don't have a single active Lutheran apologist on the Internet, whereas Catholics can name many dozens who are defending Catholicism in such a way?
*** CLICK ON "Tolle, lege!" immediately below to finish this article ***
I was referred to one blog, but that person said he doesn't want to do any debates at all, but simply provide Lutheran stuff for Lutherans. I asked him if he knew of any sites along the lines of what I seek. He said he didn't. So I have asked here, because CPA and I have had excellent dialogues in the past (but he said he is doing relatively less apologetic-type discussion now).
I find that astounding, but also a striking fact of the preeminence of Catholicism and the uniqueness of the distinctively Catholic outlook on Christianity.
. . . anyone who actually subscribes to Trent will of necessity be anti-Lutheran. Our churches exist in mutual anathema.
That may be true of Lutherans (and the Confessions describe us as the Antichrist, as I recall), but it is not true of us. See my paper: The Catholic Understanding of the Anathemas of Trent and Excommunication.
As everyone knows, the Catholic Church has rapidly developed a more ecumenical approach, especially since World War II. That is not, unfortunately, true of LCMS. So the Catholic is faced with the fact that the more traditional Lutherans tend to be anti-Catholic, whereas relatively more ecumenical Lutherans tend to be less consistently traditional (or "orthodox") Lutherans.
If I had a blog, I would do that sort of thing when it came up. If I do get one some day, I'm sure you'll find it.
If you're looking for a professional Lutheran apologist, though--meaning someone who does it full-time and makes his living that way--I don't know of any. Come to think of it, you're the only professional Roman Catholic apologist I know of, and there are way more RCs than Lutherans in this country.
I'm not sure Lutherans need any full-time professional apologists to convince inquirers of the truth of their doctrines the same way that Catholics seem to need them. It's enough for Lutherans to quote chapter and verse, since, as St Athanasius says, "The holy and divinely inspired writings are sufficient of themselves alone to make known the truth."
I am having the greatest difficulty finding this. Are things that bad in Lutheranism that y'all don't have a single active Lutheran apologist on the InternetIt's not that things are bad. First, since we regard other Christian churches as actual churches where Christ is truly present, stealing their sheep is not a priority. Second, the theologians in our churches are pastors. Running apologetics websites for arguing with Roman Christians isn't a high priority for them. Third, as Joel said, when your doctrines are simply based on Scripture rather than medieval mythology, complex scholastic re-imaginings of Aristotle, and a mid-20th C rewriting of history in the vision of Newman, they do not look as patently absurd to most Christians and thus do not require a full-time professional to defend and discuss them.
Dave, the question is not whether Roman Catholics think Lutherans are going to hell. These days, it seems like even atheists have a hard time getting into the Catholic hell. It's whether or not Lutheran doctrines are rejected by the papacy, and they still are. You can't be a faithful Roman and affirm the doctrines in the Book of Concord. Period. That's what the anathema's about.
You call me an "anti-Catholic" because I think the official doctrines of the papacy are contrary to Scripture and the Gospel, as though I could think anything else and call myself "Lutheran." Yet, you cannot be a Catholic without likewise affirming that Lutheran doctrine is contrary to God's Word and the Gospel, but you are "ecumenical?" Give me a break.
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Nope; I call you "quasi-anti-Catholic" primarily because of your manifest prejudice and secondarily because you can't describe Catholic theology accurately to save your life, which is equally obviously a function of your prejudice, that brings on the inaccuracies.
Mere honest theological disagreement has nothing to do with the label "anti" -- at least as I use it (in line with many many Protestant sociologists and historians).
Come to think of it, you're the only professional Roman Catholic apologist I know of
You've never heard of, for example:
Karl Keating
Jimmy Akin
Scott Hahn
Mark Shea
Pat Madrid
John Martignoni
Tim Staples
Steve Ray
Al Kresta
Marcus Grodi
Peter Kreeft
Thomas Howard ??
I'm flattered if you know of me and not any of these, but I'm quite surprised if so.
As for apologetics in general, all Christians, it seems to me, are commanded to defend the faith (1 Peter 3:15 being the classic "proof text"). Paul did it constantly, and he tells us to imitate him. Christians have often played the games of pietism and/or fideism throughout history, but it's not a biblical approach if by this all apologetics is intended to be excluded altogether, because the latter is so prevalent in Scripture, particularly in Paul.
That doesn't mean everyone specializes in it, but it does mean that the biblical command cannot be simply dismissed as of no import in the Christian life, and it means that all Christian groups ought to have those who specialize in such things, just as every other occupation has its experts and practitioners.
John Warwick Montgomery is an exceptionally distinguished Lutheran apologist but he is not active on the Internet that I know of, and he doesn't appear to write much concerning defense of Lutheran distinctives. I see one such book in his bibliography: In Defense of Martin Luther (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing, 1970). See also his website.
Gretchen Passantino is a Lutheran I have known about for over 20 years, who has done a lot of general apologetics; not sure if she (formerly with her late husband Bob) defends Lutheran distinctives much, either. That's specifically what I am looking for.
Paul L. Maier is another who does mostly general Christian apologetics.
I defend general Christianity, too, and do a great deal of that sort of apologetics (especially against atheists and cultists), and I also defend Catholic distinctives.
Yet, you cannot be a Catholic without likewise affirming that Lutheran doctrine is contrary to God's Word and the Gospel, but you are "ecumenical?" Give me a break.
Sheer nonsense. Lutherans are fellow Christians who are in error on various points. of course I am ecumenical, just as my Church is, and as Pope Benedict XVI is.
After all, Lutheran pastor William Weedon cited his words from 1993:
I think the pope is pretty well-acquainted with what the Catholic Church holds, or, more specifically, what individual Catholics are allowed to believe about other Christians. Are you saying that you know more about that than he does? Pastor Weedon commented: "From everything I've know about Benedict, I do not believe he's the sort to prevaricate."Even a theology along the lines of the concept of apostolic succession, as is in force in the Catholic and the Orthodox Church, should in no way deny the saving presence of the Lord in the Evangelical [i.e., Lutheran] Lord's Supper.Who said this? Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in a letter to the Lutheran Bishop of Bavaria, Johannes Hanselmann in 1993.
It can be found in print in the volume Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: the Church as Communion by (then) Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. It is on page 248.
Note that the words of the pope do not necessarily imply that he believes Lutherans have the Real Presence. But they are undoubtedly ecumenical and respectful, in sharp contrast to, say, the quasi-anti-Catholic ravings of Josh, or, for that matter, The Book of Concord:
"The Mass in the papacy must be regarded as the greatest and most horrible abomination . . . it has been the supreme and most precious of the papal idolatries . . .
If there were reasonable papists, one would speak to them in the following friendly fashion:
Why do you cling so tenaciously to your Masses?
1. After all, they are a purely human invention. They are not commanded by God . . . Christ says, 'In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men' (Matt. 15:9).
. . . 3. . . . one can be saved in a better way without the Mass. Will the Mass not then collapse of itself -- not only for the rude rabble, but also for all godly, Christian, sensible, God-fearing people -- especially if they hear that it is a dangerous thing which was fabricated and invented without God's Word and will?
. . . 5. The Mass is and can be nothing else that a human work, even a work of evil scoundrels . . .
Accordingly we are and remain eternally divided and opposed the one to the other. The papists are well aware that if the Mass falls, the papacy will fall with it. Before they would permit this to happen, they would put us all to death.
Besides, this dragon's tail -- that is, the Mass -- has brought forth a brood of vermin and the poison of manifest idolatries.
(Smalcald Articles [1537], Part II, Article II: The Mass, from The Book of Concord, translated and edited by Theodore Tappert, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House / Muhlenberg Press, 1959, pp. 293-294)
So in the papal realm the worship of Baal clings -- namely, the abuse of the Mass . . . And it seems that this worship of Baal will endure together with the papal realm until Christ comes to judge and by the glory of his coming destroys the kingdom of Antichrist. Meanwhile all those who truly believe the Gospel should reject those wicked services invented against God's command to obscure the glory of Christ and the righteousness of faith.This is the basis upon which the early Lutherans forbade masses in their territories, and on which they justified stealing thousands of Catholic Church properties. Gotta chase that old devil and the idolatries of Baal-worship out of Christian lands, after all, even if it means stealing, theft, and plunder! Anything goes, fighting papist evil and utter corruption of Christianity!
(Apology of the Augsburg Confession [1531], Article XXIV: The Mass, Book of Concord, ibid., 268 )
This is clearly where Josh's quasi-anti-Catholicism derives (not to mention Luther's own frequent anti-Catholic inanities and propagandistic lies about his former Church. It's Lutheran heritage.
But Catholics don't speak in such ridiculous terms. Even Trent didn't condemn Protestant denominations or "Reformers" by name; it simply condemned errors. Individual Protestants and denominations may or may not hold those today. But in any event, you are regarded as our brethren in Christ, and we do not mock your religious services the way you (officially) mock and deride and despise ours.
Individual Lutherans can and do, of course, act in an ecumenical, charitable fashion, but they do so in the teeth of passages such as these in the Confessions they profess to follow in their entirety.
Isn't that what Lutherans are supposed to do? I hope I am wrong. Maybe Lutherans can -- are allowed to, within an "orthodox Lutheran" framework -- interpret such texts as non-binding and capable of more favorable explanation, after nearly 500 years of reflection.
There's something distasteful about going around looking for a fight. No Lutheran should engage you unless he thought he was specially called to do that sort of thing, otherwise he would be casting his pearls before swine, so to speak. (Sorry, no offense!) As you know, these issues have been gone over at length before, e.g.: The Augsburg Confession. Response: The Roman Confutation. Response to that: The Apology of the Augsburg Confession. Etc. To paraphrase the man whose sight Jesus restored, "I have told you already, and ye did not hear: wherefore would you hear it again? will ye also be [Luther's] disciples?
It's the quintuple posting RC apologetics in threads that have nothing to do with RC that makes you so endearing, Dave.
Right.
You might find the two Lutheran apologetic sites below of interest:
Thanks, BWL. My faith in humanity and intellectual confidence within Lutheranism is restored! For a second there, I thought y'all had gone pietist and fideist . . .
Those do look excellent indeed. Thanks for directing me to them. Now if we can get over the significant hurdle of the ones who run these sites being cordial even when they are critiqued . . .
If they can both defend their Lutheran distinctives under scrutiny with some decent arguments and remain amiable and friendly, they will have my eternal respect and admiration.
I have found that those things (among any denomination) are about as rare online as hen's teeth. So anyone who can buck the trend and the fashion truly has my sincere respect.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Should a Christian Ever Contribute to a Mosque Building Fund? / Early Christians & Jewish Synagogue & Temple Worship
The early Christians, following Jesus' example, continued to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, even during times of animal sacrifice (Acts 3:1), and also at synagogues.
This exchange was with "Grubb", a Protestant regular on my blog. His words will be in blue.
My cited words will be in green. His cited words will be in purple.
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A friend of mine sent me an article [link], and I was wondering what y'all thought. If you don't feel like reading it, in a nutshell it says there's a RC Church in Germany that is planning to give money to Muslims to help build a Mosque in the same town. A collection is being taken (or was taken) with the money going to the Muslims to help build their place of worship.
It seems to me that we're called to love the lost in a way that draws them to Jesus not in a way that facilitates them turning away from Jesus.
In the end I think it was only 400 or 500 Euros, but does this really seem wise? Is this a rogue priest, or does the RCC approve of this? What do y'all think?
I have no problem with it, viewed as a gesture to facilitate inter-religious and ethnic harmony. As stated in the article:
"All that matters to me about them is keeping peace in the area," Meurer remarked. "We don't pray together there. We get to know each other, which is possible only at get-togethers like that."I don't see it as any different than, say, if a Buddhist neighbor of mine had their house burned down, that the neighborhood chipped in to help.
. . . "It's simply a nice gesture by Mr Meurer," said Rafet Ozturk, DITIB's coordinator for interreligious dialogue. "We're pleased, of course. Even very pleased."
Doing this doesn't necessarily imply religious agreement or compromise; I think that may be the fallacy you are laboring under, in objecting to this act.
*** CLICK ON "Tolle, lege!" immediately below to finish this article ***
"All that matters to me about them is keeping peace in the area," Meurer remarked.
How about the fact that they're headed for a Christless eternity? That should matter infinitely more than keeping peace in the neighborhood.
[I]f the Vatican spoke out publicly about this now it might cause a huge issue; but it seems as though they should establish a policy not to help facilitate false religions in any way in the future.
I believe we're sending mixed signals if we say, "Jesus said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me' and 'No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him'" but then turn around and help build a place to worship a false god. What did they do in the Old Testament? They tore down places to worship false gods. Now I'm not saying we should go OT, but at the very least we shouldn't help expand the kingdom of darkness.
Make no mistake, some people will be converted to Islam in the Mosque Meurer helped build. How will he defend that when he stands before the judgment throne? The words, "All that matter(ed) to me about them (was) keeping peace in the area" will ring very hollow.
Will we next help build abortion clinics to keep the pro-abortion crowd peaceful? If you say, "Murder occurs in an abortion clinic, we'd never support that", I'll ask, "What occurs in a Mosque?" Surely spiritual murder occurs there. Their goal is to get one to believe in something that will lead to everlasting death. Isn't that worse than killing the body?
Building a place of worship is different than rebuilding a home. Helping someone rebuild a home doesn't in any way, shape, or form put forth the notion that you support their false religion. Helping them build a place of worship could.
I see. So if you are a plumber and a Muslim calls you to fix their toilet at the mosque, you refuse because that would mean you are supporting the religion of Islam?
If you put in windows or do roofing, you refuse to work on any mosque or synagogue or Buddhist temple, on grounds that you are thereby helping people go to hell?
How about if you are a fireman, and the local mosque is burning down. You say, "let it burn; that way people won't go to hell"?
Let's make it even simpler. The local mosque sponsors a night where Christians and Muslims can get to know each other and each other's religion better. You won't go because setting foot in the mosque means you support Islam, even though you are going there to explain and share your Christian faith?
The apostle Paul went into the synagogues and argued (apologetics) and proclaimed the Gospel. Why should you not go into a mosque and do so? I did this myself one night, in a Christian-Muslim group discussion. I defended Christianity with a Protestant friend of mine. I was also very friendly with the Muslims. They're not my enemies. They are fellow human beings in need of salvation like everyone else.
So you think the ecumenical outlook has difficulties; yours clearly involves far more absurdities, once scrutinized closely. And it is all based on the false premise I already mentioned.
Jim Scott IV added:
Historically in the really really old days the Church did try as much as possible to limit the proliferation of non-Catholic/Christian houses of worship but even then they allowed some of them to be built and this was way before Vatican II, my friends.You're jumping to a lot of false conclusions when I've barely even espoused my ecumenical views. Slow down turbo.
In fact in once case a local bishop seized a Jewish Shul from the local Jews and transformed it into a Church and the pope himself forced the bishop to fork over the money to build the Jews a new Shul.
So this is not new or unreasonable or unbiblical.
Christians must hang out with unbelievers; we're not called to practice the "holy huddle". Jesus hung out with unbelievers. Jesus went where unbelievers were. Paul went where unbelievers were . . . possibly even their places of worship. Going to a Mosque on a Friday night to preach the Gospel or to establish inroads for later preaching is fine. I'm not suggesting we build Christianville and never hang out with the lost. All of what I've said in this paragraph is Biblical and defensible. So you and I don't disagree on the fourth and fifth paragraphs you wrote, and your sixth paragraph is erroneous based on our agreement.Your first three paragraphs are interesting food for thought. In the '80s JPII called RCs to quit their job if they worked in the nuclear arms field, because they were building weapons of mass destruction. Would he discourage building nuclear weapons but allow building mosques? Discourage what destroys the body but allow what destroys the soul? What's the difference between a nuclear bomb and a mosque? A nuclear bomb can do serious damage but may never be used; a mosque can do serious damage, but we KNOW it will be used. It seems as though JPII would have been against building a mosque since he was against building WMDs; and if he was against building one, I'm sure he'd be against funding one. I didn't agree with JPII, but it certainly will be interesting to see how you'll justify not building WMDs but allow building mosques.
Should a Christian donate to an abortion clinic in order to promote peace with pro-abortionists?
Hey Ben [Jim],
Long time no talk to. I hope you're well.
If I understood the first part of your comment, the RCC did try to hinder non-Christian "churches" from being built. Allowing some to be built is far different than helping pay for them. If anyone doesn't believe that, give money to the next topless bar being built in your area. Allowing it to be built would be hurtful; paying for part of it (even if done to help promote peace and inroads for witnessing) would be excruciating.
The last example you cited doesn't really apply here, does it? The Bishop stole their Shul and was forced to pay it back by building a new one. Meurer's parish didn't steal anything from the Muslims to whom they gave money.
it certainly will be interesting to see how you'll justify not building WMDs but allow building mosques.
That's simple. Things can be used for both good and evil. Use of nuclear arms is almost always evil, I would argue; however, deterrence as a concept is not completely ruled out by the Church. A nuclear weapon sitting there in a warehouse or a bunker is not intrinsically evil.
Say a monster from outer space attacked earth and we had such a weapon to use against it. This would not be evil; therefore the weapon itself (just like a gun or a knife) can be used for good or evil and is therefore not intrinsically evil. Killing noncombatant civilians wantonly, however, is evil, as part of traditional just war doctrine.
I'd have to see what JPII said exactly about workers in the nuclear field. It could be that he simply urged non-cooperation in a general sense, while not going the further step and saying that it would be intrinsically evil to participate in any way whatsoever. I don't know unless I see the exact quote you refer to. Anyone who pays taxes to the federal government contributes to nuclear arms, since it is part of military defense.
Helping to build a place of worship is not directly participating in any evil, either, and there is truth and falsehood in virtually any religion. It's not pure evil by any stretch of the imagination, like, for example, an abortion clinic or a Nazi death camp (which amounts to the same thing as the abortuary). That would be an absolute situation of the type you describe, in my opinion.
But one does not participate in false religious teaching in so doing. That's your fallacy and false premise. Muslims are going to build a mosque in any event, and worship there. If Christians want to help them as a gesture of good will, then that is constructive for purposes of inter-religious and ethnic harmony. It doesn't imply that we agree with the teachings. But we show that we respect their right to worship as they please, and acknowledge that their faith is just as important to them as ours is to us. That is part of charity. As long as we don't deny anything we believe, nothing wrong is done.
My reductio was, of course, that if you claim no one can help build a mosque in any way, shape, or form, without cooperating in false and pernicious religious doctrine, then how could anyone even help maintain or repair such a structure in any fashion?
Either you have to agree, by virtue of the reductio, that your position is too extreme, and must be discarded or greatly modified, or if you disagree, you must explain the essential difference between the two scenarios, and at what hypothetical point involvement in a non-Christian religious building becomes material participation in sin and false doctrine, etc.
Good luck . . .
You made a much better case than I thought you would; you frequently surprise me . I believe there's a fundamental difference between who's money we take (i.e. who we do jobs for) and to whom we give our money (i.e. what we support). When Paul was making tents, did he only make them for Christians? Not likely since he was working in an unbelieving land. Did Daniel work for a "believing" king? Not initially (he may have believed later on). So there's Biblical precedence in working for people who are unbelievers and possibly making things that we know will be used for evil. Paul may have made a tent for someone he knew was going to worship Baal in it; and Daniel may have been required to oversee the building of a non-Jewish temple early in his career.
Giving money is usually done for one of three reasons (there may be more, but I didn't want to actually try to come up with every reason we give money ) :
1) Stuff we need (house, car, electricity,... )
2) Stuff we want (soccer ball, tv, RAZR, soda, movies,... ) and
3) Stuff we support (charities, service organizations, churches, ... )
I know there are reasons that may not fit neatly into one of these, but generally this is how I classify my money spending.
With groups 1 and 2, we don't generally have the luxury of specifying things we support. I NEED electricity, but there's only one provider in my town, so I buy it from him. I want a soccer ball, but publicly held corporations don't specify their stand on Christianity.
But when I choose to give my money to someone or something, it's usually to help that person/thing in a time of need or to show direct support. I don't generally give money to people who ask on the street but do offer to buy them a meal because that's what they need. That way the money doesn't go to something I disapprove of (like crack). I give money to my church, because I support it. I give money to the Pregnancy Support Services Center (helps pregnant women avoid abortions). My brother gives money to Christian Children's Fund, because he loves what they're doing (so do I, but there's only so much money to give).
Is there anything you willfully give your money to that you don't support?
I have no problem with any of this so far. Presumably you are getting to my questions . . . I want to see what you say to those.
I do NOT give money to the Democrat Party, abortion clinics, N.O.W. (the feminist group), or Islamic building funds. Not even in the interest of peace, because it's too easy to construe building a relationship with support. The "They were going to do it anyway" defense is a very weak one. When my daughter moves out, I'll help her buy her first vehicle...unless it's a motorcycle. I will NOT contribute to a vehicle I think is very dangerous. She may buy it anyway, but I won't support it by giving money to help. Democrats are going to do what Democrats are going to do with or without my $500 just as Muslims were going to build their mosque with or without Meurer's money. But I don't give Democrats money to improve my relationship with the liberals in my office. I do other things to promote relationships and good will with those guys. And THAT is what I think Meurer should have done; come up with something else.
There is clearly Biblical precedence for working for unbelievers and possibly even working on unbelievers' places of worship as a job. But I don't believe there's Biblical precedence for voluntarily giving money to build an unbeliever's place of worship. I'm not saying because it's not in the Bible we can't do it (that's a whole 'nother conversation ); but rather that they didn't appear to do it in Moses' or Jesus' day, so we may want to follow their lead.
Here was the weakest part of your argument: ...there is truth and falsehood in virtually any religion. It's not pure evil by any stretch of the imagination... Actually that's the biggest danger in any false religion. If they taught one has to always lie, beat people up, and cheat on his spouse, that would be an easy religion to convert people away from. But when Satan blends his lies with God's truth, it makes it infinitely more dangerous. Not too many would fall for "Grubb's religion of lying, cheating, stealing, and spouse abuse", but billions have fallen for Islam. If misleading billions to hell by blending truth and lies isn't pure evil, I don't know what is.
Again, wasn't there something else Meurer could have done with the 500 Euros that would have showed good will? Sponsoring the first "get together" would have been an excellent idea.
If you show me an instance where Jesus or Paul clearly gave money to the building of an unbeliever's place of worship, I'll concede Meurer was right.
They did even more than that: they worshiped at the Temple and at synagogues. The Jews didn't even accept the Trinity (so they were like Muslims in that regard). Jesus continued to worship at the Temple and synagogues; so did Paul.
I believe there was a mandatory tithe or something of that sort, that supported the priests. Jesus in all likelihood continued to pay that, so He supported non-Christian worship practices and buildings.
Jesus even commanded His disciples to obey what the Pharisees taught (Matt 23:2-3), and Paul acknowledged the high priest's authority even when he was being persecuted by the Jews (Acts 23:2-5), and called himself a Pharisee (Acts 23:6).
Jesus highly commended the faith of the Roman centurion, who wasn't even a practicing Jew, let alone a Christian.
Is that enough for you to make you concede, even if you refuse again to answer my rhetorical questions?
Let readers judge who has the better argument: I continue to answer your questions; you ignore mine, and now I offer explicit biblical support for my position.
Likewise, when I wrote, "I believe there's a fundamental difference between who's money we take ... and to whom we give our money... When Paul was making tents, did he only make them for Christians? Not likely since he was working in an unbelieving land. Did Daniel work for a 'believing' king? Not initially (he may have believed later on). So there's Biblical precedence in working for people who are unbelievers and possibly making things that we know will be used for evil. Paul may have made a tent for someone he knew was going to worship Baal in it; and Daniel may have been required to oversee the building of a non-Jewish temple early in his career.", I presumed you would deduce that I don't have a problem with helping build or maintain a non-Christian place of worship.
But if you want it point blank: I would not refuse to work on their toilet, their windows, their roofing, and I would put out a fire.
Why would I answer rhetorical questions? Those are questions that not only don't require an answer, but the asker usually doesn't WANT an answer.
That's not how my own socratic method works at all. The whole point is that questions are asked so that the other guy's premises are challenged and he is made to reflect further on their implications and how they can be either defended or discarded as inadequate.
I looked up every instance of worship, worshipped, and worshiping in the NIV NT and didn't see any instance where Christians worshipped with Jews or unbelievers. Obviously it's true that Jesus, Paul, John, Peter, and the others taught in the synagogues, and before the resurrection worshipped with Jews, but did they necessarily worship with them in the old Jewish way after the resurrection? See below for a little more on this.
I believe there was a mandatory tithe or something of that sort, that supported the priests. Jesus in all likelihood continued to pay that, so He supported non-Christian worship practices and buildings.
I'm not going to concede based on "I believe there was a mandatory tithe or something of that sort, that supported the priests". Why wouldn't Jesus continue to go to synagogues and pay the temple tax? The old covenant hadn't been replaced yet. That wasn't done until the Resurrection, right? If worshipping in synagogues and paying money to support Jewish priests is such a good idea, why did the early church stop doing it? They stopped doing it, because to worship along side of unbelievers can be very distracting at the least and soul damaging at the worst. Apparently hanging out with Jews didn't help Peter much, since he went back to some of the old ways which is why Paul confronted him.
Jesus even commanded His disciples to obey what the Pharisees taught (Matt 23:2-3), and Paul acknowledged the high priest's authority even when he was being persecuted by the Jews (Acts 23:2-5), and called himself a Pharisee (Acts 23:6).
Are you trying to build a case for us to continue to be under Jewish teaching? So a Rabbi walks into a RC church and says, "According to our law, you should give me all the money in the offering plate" and the priest says, "According to Matt 23:2-3 we're to obey the Rabbi; hand over the money." Is that how it works in the RCC today? Cause if it is, I'm thinking about getting a Rabbi costume and going to the nearest RC church this Sunday
. Just so y'all know, that was intended to be humorous, and I did make myself laugh out loud. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. In Acts 4:18-20, "Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John replied, "Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard."Obeying authorities instituted over us and Pharisees when they teach accurate Godliness has no bearing what so ever on whether we should voluntarily give money to support false religions.
Jesus highly commended the faith of the Roman centurion, who wasn't even a practicing Jew, let alone a Christian
Not really sure you want to be making that argument Dave. That Roman centurion may not have been a Christian when he road out to meet Jesus, but he may have become a follower that day. This would actually support the PT (Protestant) position, salvation by faith alone. He hadn't done the sacraments, been baptized, or done any other act, but Jesus may have considered him a believer. By the very definition, he was a believer. Jesus told him his son would recover, and he believed and had faith in Jesus.
Again, this has nothing to do with whether one should give money to support a false religion. If the Centurion didn't become a Christian that day, do you think Jesus said, "Here's 10 denari, go build an alter to worship Baal. I hope we can be at peace and will try to preach the Word to you later."? Do you think Jesus ever saw people worshipping Baal and said, "We should give them some money to improve our relations, so that we may have peace with them and tell them the truth, because peace with them is all that matters to me"? That conversation isn't in the English Standard Version of the Bible I read.
It's not in yours either, because when Jesus saw the lost, he went to them and said, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water" (John 4:10b) and "Go now and leave your life of sin." (John 8:11b) And Paul said, "I preached that they should repent and turn to God" (Acts 26:20b) and "what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you." (Acts 17:23) And Jesus said, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matt 10:34) and "Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division" (Luke 12:51). Peace is enjoyable, desirable, and should be sought; but it is NOT as Meurer said "all that matters".
None of the passages you cited even remotely indicate that it's a good idea to willfully give money to a false religion. In fact if you read some of the questions I pretended Jesus or Paul asked, you would see how absurd it is to believe anything they did would encourage us to freely donate money to a false religion. Again, isn't there something else Meurer could have done to build good will between his church and the Muslims? Dave, you and I could probably think of ten things within 30 minutes if we tried that would build good relations without giving the money to the mosque building fund.
You may think I danced all around your iron-clad defense, but I did say, "If you show me an instance where Jesus or Paul clearly gave money to the building of an unbeliever's place of worship, I'll concede Meurer was right." My statement may not be accurate enough, since I was really addressing the 3rd way we spend money (willfully to support something). None of the passages you mentioned did that. In fact, in my opinion, none of them even remotely hinted at that.
Here's my last point, Kant's Moral Imperative basically asks: Would it be good if everyone did this? Some might say, yes, because we might have much better relations with Muslims world wide. Some might say, no, because we might have a lot more Muslim churches world wide. I fully believe we can improve relations with Muslims without donating to their building funds. This website is an example of how RCs and PTs have improved relations, and to the best of my knowledge Dave hasn't sent a check to my church's building fund. Or is that check in the mail Dave?
I would not refuse to work on their toilet, their windows, their roofing, and I would put out a fire.
Good. So now the question is, as I stated earlier:
. . . you must explain what the essential difference is between the two scenarios, and at what hypothetical point involvement in a non-Christian religious building becomes material participation in sin and false doctrine, etc.
I contend that there is no essential difference between maintaining a building and helping to pay for it. In both cases you are contributing to the continuance of a building that teaches what you regard as a false religion. I don't see any difference. In one instance you are contributing labor (which is exchanged for money) and in the other, money. What's the difference?
Your position is that you somehow are agreeing with or sanctioning the false religion in so doing. I don't think that follows. Your task is to either show how there is a difference between the two scenarios (fixing stuff and giving money), or to grasp that one is not embracing a false religion in doing either act, in which case you have conceded your entire original point of view.
Obviously it's true that Jesus, Paul, John, Peter, and the others taught in the synagogues, and before the resurrection worshipped with Jews, but did they necessarily worship with them in the old Jewish way after the resurrection?
Yes; I showed you already how Paul described himself as a Pharisee and recognized the authority of the high priest. That was after the resurrection. Christians continued to worship in the old ways until (at the very least) the council of Jerusalem and (more definitively) the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. For example, Paul "and his company" are described as worshiping at a synagogue:
13: Now Paul and his company set sail from Paphos, and came to Perga in Pamphyl'ia. And John left them and returned to Jerusalem;The sabbath day was, of course, Saturday. Paul and his friends were not only worshiping at the synagogue, but were actually invited by the "rulers" to preside over the service. The text records what Paul said, and then we learn:
14: but they passed on from Perga and came to Antioch of Pisid'ia. And on the sabbath day they went into the synagogue and sat down.
15: After the reading of the law and the prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent to them, saying, "Brethren, if you have any word of exhortation for the people, say it."
(Acts 13:13-15)
42: As they went out, the people begged that these things might be told them the next sabbath.Acts 18:4 tells us that Paul "argued in the synagogue every Sabbath", seemingly implying that he was worshiping there, too.
43: And when the meeting of the synagogue broke up, many Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who spoke to them and urged them to continue in the grace of God.
44: The next sabbath almost the whole city gathered together to hear the word of God.
(Acts 13:42-44)
Acts 18:8:
Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with all his household . . .According to Acts 3:1 (right after the Day of Pentecost):
Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour.The notes in my RSV explain that the ninth hour was 3 PM "when sacrifice was offered with prayer (Ex 29.39; Lev. 6.20; Josephus, Ant. xiv.4.3)."
Acts 2:46 described the early Christians:
And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts,
Obeying authorities instituted over us and Pharisees when they teach accurate Godliness has no bearing what so ever on whether we should voluntarily give money to support false religions.
But I deny that one is doing that by simply helping to build a mosque. That was the whole point of the reductio argument of fixing the toilet in a mosque, etc. You said you would do that, but you haven't shown how that is any less "participating in false religion" than contributing money.
I deny that either scenario is supporting a false religion! First of all, not all in Islam is false. Muslims, still, e.g., have children and frown upon contraception and cohabitation and fornication. In all these ways they do far better than most Protestants and Catholics, so they preserve those truths that Christians have largely forsaken.
Secondly, such gestures can be classified as diplomatic acts of charity. The Muslim knows it doesn't mean that the Christian believes in Islam, but the act creates good will and harmony: a most desirable end indeed.
"If you show me an instance where Jesus or Paul clearly gave money to the building of an unbeliever's place of worship, I'll concede Meurer was right." My statement may not be accurate enough, since I was really addressing the third way we spend money (willfully to support something). None of the passages you mentioned did that. In fact, in my opinion, none of them even remotely hinted at that.
I've now shown with several examples, Christians after Pentecost (including Paul, Peter, and John) worshiping in the regular Temple services or at synagogues. Now, almost certainly both the Temple and the synagogues had some sort of money collection (rabbis and priests had to eat and have some sort of shelter and clothing, after all).
So all they had to do was contribute to that and therefore they would be contributing to the religion of Judaism, which denies the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection of Jesus, and other aspects of Christianity, though it also agrees with much of what we believe (and I would argue that Christianity is a consistent development of the OT and OT Judaism, and that Jesus did not even overturn the Law; only modified it and taught a different application -- Matt 5:17-20).
One could easily argue that post-Christian Judaism takes a far lower view of Jesus than Islam does. After all, Islam regards Jesus as a prophet, whereas the early Jews after the resurrection thought he was a false prophet, false Messiah, and possessed by a demon. Therefore, the early Christians supported a (partially) false religion (Judaism) by not only money but also direct participation in its worship services.
Ergo: it is completely biblical to partially support the building of a mosque with a financial contribution, since this is a lesser participation than what the early Christians like Paul, Peter, and John did when they worshiped with Jews, and to a religion that takes a higher view of Jesus than Judaism itself does.
Case closed. Your objection has now collapsed in ruins, and on the basis of the Bible alone. Isn't "Bible only" religion fun???
This website is an example of how RCs and PTs have improved relations, and to the best of my knowledge Dave hasn't sent a check to my church's building fund. Or is that check in the mail Dave?
In fact, my last charitable contribution was to a local inner-city Protestant ministry in Detroit called Joy of Jesus. I donated our old van (not worth much at all, and on its last legs, I hasten to add) to a place that re-sells it and gives the money to a charity of one's choice.
That is a good example, because I am contributing to a Protestant group that is doing important work that I agree with (inner-city evangelism and restoration). Part of that is, no doubt, proclaiming the Protestant gospel of "faith alone" and sola Scriptura, etc., but that doesn't mean I shouldn't contribute because I don't agree with every jot and tittle. That is rarely the case.
There are largely good and true things (e.g., Protestantism), partially good and true things (Judaism and Islam), mostly bad things (political liberalism, secularism), and wholly evil things (abortion and the abortion establishment).
I would say that one could donate in good conscience to the largely good and true things and partially good and true things.
It is rare to be able to have complete consistency in such matters. For example, I think abortion is absolutely evil in all cases. But George W. Bush (and his father) think it is permissible (or should be legal) in cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. I disagree with that, but between Bush and Kerry, the choice was clear who to pick (and the Catholic Church allows one to make those choices).
By your strict, illogical mentality, I was, therefore, supporting the evil murder by abortion of a child conceived in rape, in voting for President Bush. But in my opinion, that is a classic case of voting for the "lesser of two evils." Politics is like that. So is life in general, oftentimes (probably more than most of us would care to admit).
So I would help a Muslim in a material sense, without compromising my religious beliefs in the least.
We know the Jews worship the same God as Christians do; so to attend a church where they were preaching genuine Godliness isn't a problem. We agree that Jesus didn't come to replace the law but to fulfill it (Matt 5:17-19), so sitting with Jews who were learning about the LORD was acceptable. But I'm pretty confident Paul didn't partake of any sacrifices after his conversion. I presume none of the Apostles did since Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice. There would have been a definite distinction between the way the Jews worshipped and the way the Christians worshipped even if they did sit in the same "service".
You still haven't shown that they unnecessarily donated money. You presume they did, but you haven't shown it. You can't declare victory based on circumstantial, unsubstantiated, unprovable evidence. I guess you CAN since you seemed to do so, but one shouldn't.
You claim my argument is inconsistent, but I'll restate it one more time. If it doesn't make sense, we may just have to agree Grubb doesn't make sense. The job one works on doesn't require consent or support. My company (a retail company) analyzes sales by department. I think they should analyze sales by items. But I write programs that show them sales data by dept. Am I supporting their decision by writing the program? No, I'm trading my programming skills for their money. In this situation, I'm not supporting their business decision.
When I GIVE money to someone without expecting to get anything back, I'm showing support. You gave a van (a very nice gesture indeed) to the inner city organization and support what they're doing. If you didn't support their mission, you'd have given your van to another organization. I don't give my "charitable" money to organizations I disagree with. Without expecting to get anything back to what do you give money that you DON'T support? Even if you don't like PTism in its entirety, you do support what that inner city group is doing. Right?
Try this experiment: sell a charitable organization a $10,000 van; and give a different charitable organization a $10,000 check. Would the two charities say the same thing about you? No!! The 1st would say, "Dave's ok. He sold us this van for $10k. Nice guy." The 2nd would say, "Dave is amazing!! He gave us $10k. That's 10 THOUSAND dollars!! He must REALLY love the work we're doing!!" And even if you didn't support what they were doing, you must see that some (maybe even most) could construe that you do. Don't you agree there's a difference in the two scenarios?
I've asked this three times or more now. Couldn't Meurer have come up with a better way to spend 500 Euros (like sponsoring the first "social" or helping needy Muslims pay their electricity bill) without donating the money to the mosque building fund?
I understand that laying bricks to build a mosque and giving 500 Euros to help build a mosque are both materially participating in building the mosque. I didn't want to pause the conversation without that being known.
The huge hang-up I have (and the place where I think the two are different) is that one is simply trading money for services without showing any intellectual ascent to their ideology and the other is (or at the very least can appear to be) supporting the organization's cause or showing that one believes in the cause of the organization. To RCs who don't attend church regularly, they might say, "I suppose the church is ok with Islam now. It's come to this, has it?" and be discouraged. But if the money had been used to pay a needy Muslim's power bill, he a) would never hear about it, or b) would realize the church is helping the lost.
We know the Jews worship the same God as Christians do
They do? Then why do they object to us? Where's the beef? The beef is, of course, precisely over the nature of God, because we say Jesus is God and they think that is blasphemous. Our God has three Persons. Theirs has one. Their God is essentially the same as the Father in the Trinity, but that is not the same God, because there is no God the Son or God the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, if you think the Jewish God is the same -- enough to allow for common worship -- then you would have to think the same about Jehovah's Witnesses and the Christadelphians (Arian groups). Would you worship with them? Would you help build a Kingdom Hall?
But I'm pretty confident Paul didn't partake of any sacrifices after his conversion. I presume none of the Apostles did since Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice.
That's exactly what Peter and John did in Acts 3:1, as I already showed you. They went to the Temple service that was specifically for sacrifice.
You still haven't shown that they unnecessarily donated money. You presume they did, but you haven't shown it.
I don't have to have it in black and white. Jewish services like any other would have collections. Since I've shown that early Christians participated in such services it is not unreasonable at all to assume that they most likely contributed financially. And there were tithes and taxes, too.
But it doesn't matter anyway because to actually participate in a non-Christian service is to give it far more sanction than to simply give money for building a building where such a service is conducted. The person is right there worshiping with the others!
And Islam has a higher view of Jesus than Judaism does, as I explained already too. Judaism has falsehood just as Islam does. And both contain truth.
When I GIVE money to someone without expecting to get anything back, I'm showing support.
When I worship with someone in a religion that has just rejected the Messiah and the Son of God (as the early Christians did), I am showing more "support" even than giving them money.
Try this experiment: sell a charitable organization a $10,000 van; and give a different charitable organization a $10,000 check. Would the two charities say the same thing about you? No!! The 1st would say, "Dave's ok. He sold us this van for $10k. Nice guy." The 2nd would say, "Dave is amazing!! He gave us $10k. That's 10 THOUSAND dollars!! He must REALLY love the work we're doing!!" And even if you didn't support what they were doing, you must see that some (maybe even most) could construe that you do. Don't you agree there's a difference in the two scenarios?
Yes, of course. But we're not just talking about different forms and levels of giving; also in this discussion is the question of whether acts of charity imply sanction or agreement with the religion of the one that is helped.
I say it (rather obviously) does not necessarily. You seem to think that it does. It's the falsehoods in the religion that you object to, so you don't want to give any money at all. I am saying that you can give money for reasons other than supporting the religion. It doesn't necessarily imply religious agreement at all.
Couldn't Meurer have come up with a better way to spend 500 Euros (like sponsoring the first "social" or helping needy Muslims pay their electricity bill) without donating the money to the mosque building fund?
See, now this is exactly what I am talking about. You use the value judgment "better." I don't see much difference. The Muslim knows that the Christian doesn't accept Islam anyway, and doesn't think otherwise just because he chipped into a building fund. The Christian (unless he is a liberal, indifferentist, wishy-washy type) knows this. Everyone pretty much knows.
I have no problem whatsoever with someone (like you) deciding as an individual, in good conscience, that he shouldn't contribute to such a fund. But it is a matter of conscience and not a moral absolute; this is where we differ. When you try to apply your own feelings on the matter to others and say they are wrong, you go astray, because you do so on insufficient grounds (and as it turns out, contrary to the relevant biblical examples).
The huge hang-up I have (and the place where I think the two are different) is that one is simply trading money for services without showing any intellectual ascent to their ideology and the other is (or at the very least can appear to be) supporting the organization's cause or showing that one believes in the cause of the organization.
This is your fallacy. It doesn't follow that one supports the religious view in so doing: not in its entirety. I used my own example of donating to a Protestant inner-city charity. As a Catholic I wouldn't agree with everything they do. In my mind I was donating to the inner-city work. That is the good cause I feel that I am furthering.
Same thing with Islam: one could give to a building fund on the grounds that this keeps Muslim kids on a morally straighter path; it promotes at least monotheism (and that is what Judaism is too); good family values, basic moral teachings ("do not steal," etc.) and so forth. One is supporting those things and showing charity towards a non-Christian neighbor.
Very few things in concrete, day-to-day life are absolutely clear-cut, morally and metaphysically perfect without any error or sin in them at all. We've discussed before on this blog how we all buy goods made in China. Well, China (a Communist country) has slave labor and forced abortions and atrocious persecution of Christians and other religions. We definitely help to keep that system going by massive purchases of their goods. It very well might collapse but for our huge financial support (while Taiwan, a civilized country, isn't even allowed into the United Nations, if I recall correctly).
You do that, I do it. I would venture to guess that 99.9% of people in America have items in their house that are made in China. Do you plan on getting rid of all that and not buying any more? Why do you keep supporting an evil, anti-religious governmental system by buying their products? You'll do that but you wouldn't give a dime to a mosque fund for pious Muslims to worship in?
This is a good example, I think, because it shows the complexity of cause and effect, and how we are all involved in such situations and how it would be quite difficult to be perfectly consistent.
Then there are the host of companies that fund the abortion industry. If we all stopped buying any products or using services that did that, or stopped watching TV shows that use these advertisers, etc., we'd have to make massive lifestyle changes. Abortion is absolutely evil. Yet virtually all of us are helping it to continue by unwitting purchases of products from companies that promote it. And every person who votes for pro-abortion politicians keeps the killing legal and societally- and legally-sanctioned.
It goes on and on. How about hospitals that perform abortions? Do you make sure that you go to one that doesn't? Etc., etc.
To RCs who don't attend church regularly, they might say, "I suppose the church is ok with Islam now. It's come to this, has it?" and be discouraged.
Ignorance will be with us till the end of time. The thing to do is to educate the ignorant and explain things; not cave in to the ignorance by not doing something that is perfectly acceptable just because they don't understand it.
"Jeb Protestant" asked:
Would you give money to the local Masonic lodge? Would you give money to the JWs [Jehovah's Witnesses] to help build a "kingdom hall"?I wouldn't, personally. My reasoning would be that they are both corruptions of Christianity. But Islam is a different religion altogether and doesn't entail that sort of "false advertising." I have argued, remember, that this is a matter of conscience. I wouldn't say it is absolutely wrong to contribute to these either, but I wouldn't do it myself. Grubb, on the other hand, seems to be arguing that it is a matter of absolute right and wrong, and that one sanctions the religious beliefs of the group one contributes to, in so doing. I deny this, and my "fixing the toilet and the roof" examples were designed to show the difficulty of maintaining that point of view.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Did Martin Luther Deny the Canonicity of Esther?
The Elbe River in Germany
Martin Luther's words will be in green.
* * * * *
* * * * *
There is a famous citation from Luther: "The book of Esther I toss into the Elbe [river]". Or are these really the words of Luther? Apparently this is indeed a misquote. The John Aurifaber version of Table-Talk, translated by William Hazlitt, available online, reads in its section XXIV: "The third book of Esdras I throw into the Elbe."
Mea culpa on behalf of all those (including yours truly) who have wrongly used this false citation in the past or present. Falsehood of any sort (whether inadvertent or not) does no one any good. Mine was an honest mistake. And as we shall see, scholars have done the same. it is one of those errors that got passed down through history.
This one erroneous citation doesn't mean, however, that Luther didn't denigrate and even deny the canonicity of the book of Esther (only this particular "proof" was -- by all appearances -- a botched citation at some point in the textual history; the question of who made the error will be further discussed below). For the very same section of Table-Talk also includes the following words from Luther:
I am so great an enemy to the second book of the Maccabees, and to Esther, that I wish they had not come to us at all, for they have too many heathen unnaturalities. The Jews much more esteemed the book of Esther than any of the prophets; though they were forbidden to read it before they had attained the age of thirty, by reason of the mystic matters it contains.
Even this quotation, however, gives support to the accuracy of the second mention of Esther above, as genuine ("Oh, how fond they are of the book of Esther, . . ." -- from LW, 47:156 -- cf. above: "The Jews much more esteemed the book of Esther than any of the prophets"). It gives a correlation to a statement of Luther that does quite arguably question the canonicity of Esther. Luther also wrote in Bondage of the Will:
[T]hough I could rightly reject this book [Ecclesiasticus], for the time being I accept it so as not to waste time by getting involved in a dispute about the books received in the Hebrew canon. For you poke more than a little sarcastic fun at this when you compare Proverbs and The Song of Solomon (which with a sneering innuendo you call the “Love Song”) with the two books of Esdras, Judith, the story of Susanna and the Dragon, and Esther (which despite their inclusion of it in the canon deserves more than all the rest in my judgment to be regarded as noncanonical).
(LW 33:110)
Here is a second rendering:
Though I might with justice repudiate this book [Ecclesiasticus], yet for the present I receive it, so as not to lose time by entangling myself in a dispute about books received into the Jewish canon. You are somewhat biting and derisive yourself about that canon, when you compare the Proverbs of Solomon and the Love-song (as with a sneering innuendo you term it) to the two books of Esdras and Judith, and the History of Susanna and of the Dragon, and the book of Esther (though they have this last in their canon; in my opinion, however, it is less worthy to be held canonical than any of these).So now we have the evidence of Luther saying he is an "enemy" of Esther; wishing that it "had not come to us at all" and that it is "less worthy to be held canonical" than "Esdras and Judith, and the History of Susanna and of the Dragon": books universally regarded by Protestants as non-canonical.
(The Bondage of the Will, J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston translation, Grand Rapids: MI: Revell, 1957, Reprint October 1999, 143)
Many Protestant interpreters, like F.F. Bruce, the great Bible scholar, have no problem recognizing that Luther regarded Esther on the same plane as the "apocryphal" 2 Maccabees, based on the Table-Talk citation seen above:
. . . Luther manifested a special animus against 2 Maccabees . . . It is noteworthy that he shows his exercise of private judgment here by including Esther under the same condemnation as 2 Maccabees.Indeed, even The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, no shill for nefarious Catholic apologetics ("Esther, Book of", Vol. II, 1007), states:
(The Canon of Scripture, Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1988, 101)
The Attacks upon the Book:Remarkably, another 1823 translation of Bondage of the Will literally reverses the judgment at the end (thus directly contradicting the versions in Luther's Works and the recent J.I. Packer translation):
The opponents of the Book of Esther may undoubtedly boast that Martin Luther headed the attack. In his Table-Talk he declared that he was so hostile "to the Book of Esther that I would it did not exist; for it Judaizes too much, and has in it a great deal of heathenish naughtiness." His remark in his reply to Erasmus shows that this was his deliberate judgment. Referring to Esther, he says that, though the Jews have it in their Canon, "it is more worthy than all" the apocryphal books "of being excluded from the Canon."
Perhaps the clearest way to come to a conclusion is to read the old Henry Beveridge translation of the this [sic] Tabletalk [sic] utterance:This version was translated by Henry Cole in 1823. Here also is the additional translation of The Bondage of the Will (also from 1823) of Edward Thomas Vaughan:". . . and the Book of Esther, though they have this last in their canon, and according to my judgment, it is much more worthy of being there, than any one of those that are considered not to be in the canon."
[my emphasis added]
. . . and Esther. This last, however, they have received into their canon; although, in my judgment, deserving, more than all the rest, to be excluded.Vaughan comes down on the side of Luther's Works and Packer / Johnston, though in a footnote he tries to apply this mention of "Esther" to only additional chapters of it not accepted by the Jews. In any event, that is three translations that read one way, and one that reads another, completely opposite way (what we might call "pro-Esther").
Two Protestant co-authors wrote about the mistaken "Esther" in the quote at the top of this paper:
Soon after the publication of this article, I became aware , that Esther was here a mistake for Esdras; and this by the verse quoted. The error stands in all Aurifaber's editions of the Tabletalk; his text is taken by Walch, and from Walch I translated.
(Source: Thomas Carlyle, Sir William Hamilton, Life of Martin Luther [link] Michigan: American Book Exchange, 242)
So the error is a result, not of sinister "anti-Luther" Catholics, but of Joannes Aurifaber and Johann Georg Walch: respectively the Protestant writer and later compiler of Table-Talk.
Carlyle and Hamilton's book was published in 1879. So it was possible for one of them (Hamilton) to make this mistake 333 years after Luther's death, because it was still that prevalent, due to a mistake somewhere along the line in the transmission of Table-Talk. This Protestant author also made the innocent mistake. The author, Sir William Hamilton, explains and justifies (to some extent) his mistake:
As to my error; I may say in excuse, if excuse be needed, that at the time of writing the article, not only was I compelled to make the extracts without any leisure for deliberation; but I recollected, though the book was not at hand, that Luther, in his work on the Bondage of the Will, had declared that Esther ought to be extruded from the canon, -- a judgment familiar to every tyro even in biblical criticism . . . Esther, I thus knew, was repudiated by Luther, and among his formulae of dismissal, the preceding recommended itself as at once the most characteristic and the shortest.The same writer (in context) definitely opines that Luther "repudiated" Esther and thought (on the basis of the passage we considered above) that it "ought to be extruded from the canon."
(Ibid., 242-243)
In one fell swoop, then, we see that the notion of Esther's non-canonicity as Luther's own, is again supported, and the charge of mis-citation is shown to be ultimately the fault of Protestant biographers of Luther and compilers of his primary works, and those later biographers following them, rather than of Catholics. Hamilton writes on page 248:
In various of his works, and from an early to the latest period, Luther denied the canonicity of St. James' Epistle.He proceeds to give several proofs of his assertion.
The example of Esther is thus seen as merely one example of many, of biblical books that Luther felt free to judge wholly based on his subjective opinion. This folly flows from his prior erroneous presupposition, as described by the respected Lutheran scholar and Luther expert Paul Althaus:
Such an attitude is perfectly capable of being intelligently, rationally critiqued, and not just by Catholics. As I showed in my previous article on Luther and the canon, even very prominent Lutherans like Martin Chemnitz and C.F.W. Walther, the first president of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, and current-day Lutheran apologist John Warwick Montgomery. Catholics have plenty of good Protestant company in this regard of Luther's view of the biblical canon.He thereby established the principle that the early church's formation and limitation of the canon is not exempt from re-examination . . . the canon is only a relative unity, just as it is only relatively closed. Therewith Luther has in principle abandoned every formal approach to the authority of the Bible. It is certainly understandable that Luther's prefaces were no longer printed in German Bibles.
One may characterize his attitude in this way: The canon itself was, as far as Luther was concerned, a piece of ecclesiastical tradition and therefore subject to criticism on the basis of God's word.
(The Theology of Martin Luther, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966, 85, 336)
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Reply to Two Lutheran Pastors on Fundamental Misconceptions Regarding the Catholic Position on the Death Penalty
Lutheran pastor Paul T. McCain wrote in his post Papal Bull-oney:
The Vatican needs to spend more time dealing with homosexuals and child abusers in it clergy ranks, and the lousy theology that infests most of its institutions of higher learning in this country, than pontificating on how to deal with mass-murderers and tyrants.And in comments below it (responding to a fellow Lutheran who thought he was being a bit too harsh:
The Vatican has long experience appeasing kings, emperors, dictators and what-not. Perhaps you are falling into the trap of naievete?And:
The Vatican's position is contrary to Sacred Scripture which makes it abundantly clear that the state has been given the power from God to wield the sword and execute criminals. That's the issue here. There is a long history of the Vatican doing things that directly contradict Holy Scripture.He cites fellow Lutheran pastor William Weedon in agreement. The latter stated:
I just read a piece where the Vatican has denounced the execution of Saddam Hussein. The argument was simply that it was punishing one crime by committing another.In comments below his post, he adds:
. . . To the government God has given the sword, and its task with that sword is to punish evil doers. That is not by any stretch of the imagination to suggest that the government has never abused the sword entrusted to it. It has indeed, time and again. And when it does, the Church is perfectly right to call the government to repentance. But what the Church can never do is insist that the government govern by the sword of the Spirit entrusted to HER.
I'm quite sure of the government's right to exercise capital punishment; the Sacred Scriptures are utterly clear on the point. Nevertheless, I am not sure of how wisely the government always exercises that right.But of course the Catholic Church has not denied that the state has such a right and jurisdiction. It simply holds that the exercise of the death penalty is required in only very few extraordinary circumstances. In other words, the emphasis is greatly on Pastor Weedon's point in his second sentence immediately above. The Church has not taught that capital punishment is intrinsically evil.
Pastor McCain continues in his combox thread:
Neither Pr. Weedon or I are insisting that every government must exercise its right to execute criminals. What we are both saying is that it is the teaching of God's Word that governments have the authority to wield the sword to execute justice. To declare otherwise is to violate Holy Scripture and as Lutherans, it is also a violation of our Confessions to which we are bound because we confess them to teach what Scripture teaches.Since the Catholic Church has not denied such authority, it is a moot and irrelevant point.
. . . for Lutherans what is "out of bounds" according to the Biblical doctrine we confess in the Book of Concord is any suggestion that the state is not given the authority to wield the sword to execute criminals.Yes, and for Catholics. The only difference is a quantitative one and a disagreement as to how necessary it is to use the death penalty, or how often. To imply that the Catholic Church has denied any such right by states at all is beyond silly. We haven't condemned all war altogether or use of a police force, etc. The Catholic Church has not asserted pacifism.
The death penalty is not sinful and a person can in good conscience enforce it and use it.Exactly.
I personally believe that justice requires it in certain circumstances.So do I, and I am as orthodox and as loyal-to-the-pope a Catholic as one could find. I think Saddam Hussein's execution was one such well-deserved and just instance. I am allowed to believe this as a Catholic.
That's why we were both less than impressed with the Vatican's comments, since they directly conflict with the teaching of Holy Scripture.Let's see if this is the case. What Rev. McCain links to, and what he is responding to is the following:
"An execution is always tragic news, reason for sadness, even in the case of a person who is guilty of grave crimes," the Holy See's spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, said in a statement released by the Vatican press office.Now, is this statement saying that no state has the power of the sword, or that capital punishment is intrinsically evil, or that it can never be done in any circumstance (all of which would indeed be quite contrary to Holy Scripture)? No.
Earlier in the morning, Lombardi made similar comments on Vatican Radio.
"The position of the Catholic Church — against the death penalty — has been reiterated many times," the spokesman said in the statement, referring to the Vatican's overall opposition to capital punishment.
"Killing the guilty one is not the way to rebuild justice and reconcile society," the spokesman said. "On the contrary, there is the risk that the spirit of revenge is fueled and that the seeds of new violence are sown."
(Vatican Denounces Saddam's Execution as 'Tragic', 12-30-06)
What was stated was that it was "tragic" and a "reason for sadness" which should be true of any execution. It is not an occasion for joy. We should pray for such a person's soul. Capital punishment is viewed from the larger perspective of an overall culture of life, and from the possible reactions to such instances: "the risk that the spirit of revenge is fueled and that the seeds of new violence are sown." I don't see how this is at all contrary to Scripture (unless one cynically reads into it what is not there in black and white). The article goes on:
The Vatican's top official for dialogue between religions, Cardinal Paul Poupard, said: "We pray to the Lord and for the dead and the living so that this will not become an occasion for new violence."The same analysis applies to this. How are any of these thoughts inherently "anti-biblical"? More objectionable, however, is the next citation:
"We are always sad when men take lives which belong to the Lord," Poupard told the Italian news agency ANSA.
In an interview published in an Italian daily earlier in the week, the Vatican's top prelate for justice issues, Cardinal Renato Martino, said executing Saddam would mean punishing "a crime with another crime."I think this goes too far myself, and uses inappropriate, objectionable language. But what this Cardinal stated is not official Church teaching: that somehow this (let alone every) instance of capital punishment is a "crime"; i.e., evil in and of itself (though arguably the term doesn't necessarily mean that).
In any event, a man's thoughts deserve to be accorded the respect of being interpreted within his overall thought. Cardinal Martino's is easily sought out in an Internet search. For example, the article: Death Penalty is Cruel and Unnecessary. What can we find here as to Cardinal Martino's position on the question of the "intrinsic evil" of the death penalty or the inherent right of states to use it? Quite a bit:
Actually, capital punishment falls within the boundaries of legitimate defence.
. . . Church teaching on capital punishmentThere are many misconceptions regarding the position of the Catholic Church on the issue of capital punishment. Many state — and accurately — that the Church has never absolutely banned the death penalty.
. . . Developments in Church teaching
Evangelium vitae affirms the Catechism's teaching, but takes it even further by enumerating conditions under which it would be morally acceptable. Given the development of most penal systems in our day, the Holy Father states that the nature and extent of punishment "ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society" (n. 58). Then, he adds: "Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are rare, if not practically non-existent" (ibid).
While affirming the principle set forth in the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the use of bloodless means, Evangelium vitae, released only three years after the Catechism, would necessitate an adjustment of the Catechism's language on this subject. Thus, on 9 September 1997, among the adjustments announced, one of the most significant concerned new language regarding the death penalty, specifying that Catholic tradition has allowed for use of the death penalty only when the identity and responsibility of the condemned is certain and capital punishment is the only way to protect the lives of others.
In keeping with Evangelium vitae, the new edition, while not excluding capital punishment absolutely, limits its application to the following conditions: only in cases where the ultimate penalty of death is justified in order to secure the common good (but such cases today are very rare, if not practically non-existent); there must be a full determination of the guilty party's responsibility and identity; the death penalty must be the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor; if non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means. There is an important change in this latter condition: the original text which read "public authority should limit itself (to bloodless means)" was changed to "will limit itself to such means".
Nowhere in these comments is it asserted that the death penalty is intrinsically evil or that the state can never exercise it. Quite the contrary. Therefore, Pastors McCain and Weedon have misrepresented Catholic teaching in their polemical thrust of trying to show the great superiority of the Lutheran "two kingdoms" concept: which itself has huge difficulties (problems never more clearly seen than in the political philosophy of the Nazis and the passive, docile reaction of the German populace to it, precisely because -- it could plausibly be argued -- they were told that religion and state were entirely separate entities altogether).
The Lutheran two kingdoms notion is itself hopelessly confused and inadequate. Pastor Weedon writes:
The papacy across the years has had a fatal tendency to confuse the two - and there was certainly a time when the Bishop of Rome claimed that both swords and kingdoms were his by virtue of being Christ's vicar upon earth. The Lutheran Church's clarity on this perennial and vexing question needs to be heeded more.Why, then, did Martin Luther and his right-hand man and successor Philip Melanchthon adopt a "State Church" model of ecclesiology right from the beginning: appealing to the Lutheran princes to preside over their churches rather than the Catholic bishops? This led to all sorts of silly and foolish political-religious situations such as any "region's" religious affinities (hence the people within the region) being determined by what the ruler believed:
In 1556 the Pfalsgraf, Otto Heinrich, declared the doctrine of Luther to be the exclusive religion of the land. But his successor, Frederick III, only three years later, established Calvinism as the State religion. His son, Ludwig, however, in 1576 brought Lutheranism in again, and banished from the country all Calvinist ministers, teachers and officials. In 1583 the pendulum swung back once more, and Ludwig's brother Johann re-established Calvinism. Thus the unhappy people, in the space of less than forty years, were compelled to change their religious faith four times, to say nothing of the original change from Catholicism to Protestantism!(John Stoddard, Rebuilding a Lost Faith, New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1922, 98)
"Were it not for the princes and lords," says Luther, "we could not stand much longer. Let us then pray for our Elector, that he may be able to preserve the Church."(Martin Luther, cited in Johannes Janssen, History of the German People From the Close of the Middle Ages, 16 volumes, translated by A.M. Christie, St. Louis: B. Herder, 1910 [orig. 1891], Vol. V, 286; citing Werke, Halle edition, 1753, J.G. Walch, editor, Vol. I, 2444)
In Lutheran Europe civil courts became the only courts, secular power the only legal power. Secular rulers appointed Church personnel, appropriated Church property . . . The Church became subject to the state. The Lutheran movement, which thought to submit all life to theology, unwittingly, unwillingly, advanced that pervasive secularization which is a basic theme of modern life.
(Will Durant, The Reformation, [volume 6 of 10-volume The Story of Civilization, 1967], New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957, 377)
Luther . . . despised the common people . . . Luther had to transfer to the state most of the authority that had been held by the Church; therefore he defended the divine right of kings.
- The hand that wields the secular sword is not a human hand but the hand of God. It is God, not man, who hangs, and breaks on the wheel, and decapitates, and flogs; it is God who wages war.
In this exaltation of the state . . . lay the seeds of the absolutist philosophies of Hobbes and Hegel, and a premonition of Imperial Germany.
(Durant, ibid., 448; citing Weimar Ausgabe edition of Luther's Works [Werke] in German, 1883, Vol. XIX, 626)
Here, as elsewhere, Lutherans have no grounds to be condescending of serious Catholic attempts to harmonize the realms of the civil government and the Christian kingdom of God, and to promote a larger culture of life. And they have a responsibility to better understand it before setting out to blast it on their blogs with pictures of baloney, etc. They might be better served by concentrating their vigorous condemnations on things like the ELCA's official pro-abortion position, rather than distorting crucial, fundamental details with regard to the Catholic Church's attempt to promote a culture of life by making the death penalty as rare an event as possible.Melanchthon had afterwards abundant reason to regret his appeal to secular power . . . Hence his exclamation: "If only I could revive the jurisdiction of the bishops! For I see what sort of Church we shall have if the ecclesiastical constitution is destroyed."
(Hartmann Grisar, Luther, translated by E.M. Lamond, edited by Luigi Cappadelta, 6 volumes, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1917, Vol.VI, 270; citing Bretschneider, editor, Corpus Reformation, Halle, 1846, Vol. II, 234; letter to Camerarius)
END
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Calvinist Iconoclasm Against Lutherans and Lutheran Liturgical and Material Suppression (By Outright Theft) of Catholics
Lutheran pastor and blogger Paul T. McCain has written a post decrying historic Calvinist iconoclasm and intolerance against Lutherans (citing in turn a reader's translation of a German website about Lutheran history):
The truth of the matter is, of course, far more complex. It is true that Lutherans (because of their significantly more "catholic" theology) were not prone to iconoclasm, but they were just as intolerant of non-Lutherans in many other ways. They expected to be allowed to conduct their services in peace, but did not extend this same consideration to Catholics or Anabaptists. Luther and Melanchthon sanctioned the death penalty for Anabaptists. Lutherans plundered or confiscated wholesale many thousands of Catholic churches and monasteries. In Sweden, for example, the proportion of land owned by the Catholic Church went from 21% to zero.
And, of course, they usually (if not virtually always) forbade and suppressed the Catholic Mass in their territories. They hypocritically objected to Calvinist denial of (hence, suppression of) the eucharistic real presence in their own services, while acting precisely the same towards Catholics for the crime of believing in a different version of the real presence. Examples are legion. At Augsburg, on 18 January 1537:
Catholic historian Warren Carroll described the proceedings and the lack of tolerance in the Lutheran party, at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530:
Lutherans have no grounds for acting as if they had a better record of tolerance than the Calvinists in those dreadful times. For what is worse?: destroying art and statuary in a church or stealing the entire church property and forbidding the Catholic Mass and banishing all Catholics in one's territory? Calvinists certainly stole Catholic properties too, but it is foolish to insinuate (by deliberate omission and selective presentation) that Lutherans did not also do so.
END
All those Lutherans out there pining about what's so "wrong" about orthodox Lutheranism's supposed stubborn and unloving attitude toward non-Lutheran churches need to keep in mind that finally there is no possibility of agreement between those who deny the chief parts of the Small Catechism and those who confess them. . . . Will we ignore the lessons that history teach us? Thanks to Michael Zamzow for these comments and his translation.Having written three papers about Calvinist iconoclasm in the past (one / two / three), I have no doubt that this is a substantially accurate account. But it is (as so often) only half of the story. The implication is that the Calvinists were the intolerant folks, while the Lutherans were simply carrying on ancient Christian tradition. I will be happy to provide readers with the service of balancing out this account a bit, and also highlighting some of the "warts" in the history of early Lutheran religious "toleration.". . . The Calvinists at that time behaved toward Lutherans with the same arrogance with which the representatives of "modern", so-called historical-critical Biblical interpretation behave toward those Christians who "still" consider the Bible to be God's Word. Calvin had asserted for himself the claim that he actually understood Luther better than Luther understood himself. In the catechism of the Calvinists (Heidleberg Catechism the question (78) is posed: "Do bread and wine become the real Body and theBlood of Christ?" The answer is a clear "no" with the additional comment: "so the holy bread in the supper does not become the Body of Christ itself, even if the sacrament is traditionally called the body of Christ." And the Holy Mass is shortly thereafter termed "blasted idolatry." With these statements the Calvinists targeted not just the Roman, but equally the Lutheran Mass.
For decades Calvinist minded preachers tried to gain influence in Berlin. In 1613 Elector John Sigismund fell away from the Lutheran confession and converted to the Reformed faith. There was an uproar in Berlin in 1615. The trigger was iconoclasm which took place in the Berlin cathedral. The year
before the church had been confiscated from the Lutherans and turned over to the Calvinists even though there was only a handful of them in Berlin. They consisted for the most part of courtiers and the court preacher who were of Reformed background.
The Calvinists removed all the precious art from the ancient cathedral. They tore the crucifixes out and shattered the pictures whose rubble they threw in the river. They smashed the baptismal font and eliminated the altars. The left the house of God barren and empty except for a simple table in the chancel. After that the majority of Berliners, who were of a Lutheran persuasion,--the Berliners were still pious back then!--defended themselves with public uproar.
Over the years the Calvinists tried again and again to assert themselves and were supported in their efforts by the Elector. Thus the conflicts escalated --exacerbated by the Great Elector abolishing the subscription of pastors to the Formula of Concord. With the renewal of an edict from 1614 he forbade clergy to speak about the matter from the pulpit. He forbade his subjects to study theology and philosophy in Wittenberg."
The truth of the matter is, of course, far more complex. It is true that Lutherans (because of their significantly more "catholic" theology) were not prone to iconoclasm, but they were just as intolerant of non-Lutherans in many other ways. They expected to be allowed to conduct their services in peace, but did not extend this same consideration to Catholics or Anabaptists. Luther and Melanchthon sanctioned the death penalty for Anabaptists. Lutherans plundered or confiscated wholesale many thousands of Catholic churches and monasteries. In Sweden, for example, the proportion of land owned by the Catholic Church went from 21% to zero.
And, of course, they usually (if not virtually always) forbade and suppressed the Catholic Mass in their territories. They hypocritically objected to Calvinist denial of (hence, suppression of) the eucharistic real presence in their own services, while acting precisely the same towards Catholics for the crime of believing in a different version of the real presence. Examples are legion. At Augsburg, on 18 January 1537:
. . . the town council issued a decree forbidding the Catholic worship, and banishing, after eight days, all who would not accept the new faith. At the expiration of the period of grace the council sent soldiers to take possession of all churches and monasteries; altars and statues were removed, and priests, monks, and nuns were banished. Frankfurt-am-Main [in 1533] promulgated a similar ordinance; and the seizure of Catholic church properties, and the suppression of Catholic services, spread through the states controlled by the Protestants.At a religious convention at Hamburg in April, 1535 the Lutheran towns of Lubeck, Bremen, Hamburg, Luneburg, Stralsund, Rostock and Wismar all voted to hang Anabaptists and flog Catholics and Zwinglians before banishing them. Luther's home territory of Saxony had instituted banishment for Catholics in 1527. For further documentation and much more related information, see my paper, The Protestant Inquisition. I made up a pun about these scandalous procedures: "The Catholic Masses were forced out, while the Catholic masses were forced in" (to Protestant services) . . .
(Will Durant, The Reformation, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957, 424)
Catholic historian Warren Carroll described the proceedings and the lack of tolerance in the Lutheran party, at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530:
Early in July the bishops presented their complaints to the Diet of the plundering and destruction of churches, seizure of monasteries and hospitals, prohibition of Masses, and attacks on religious processions by the Protestants. When Charles called upon the Protestants to restore the property they had seized, they said that to do so would be against their consciences. Charles responded crushingly: 'The Word of God, the Gospel, and every law civil and canonical, forbid a man to appropriate to himself the property of another.' He said that as Emperor he had the duty of guarding the rights of all, especially those Catholics unwilling to accept Protestantism or go into exile, who should at least be allowed to remain in their homes and practice their ancestral faith, specifically the Mass; the Protestants replied that they would not tolerate the Mass . . .Nor was "tolerance" very prevalent in Augsburg itself, in matters religious, following the Diet. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:
(The Cleaving of Christendom; from the series, A History of Christendom, Volume 4, Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2000, 103-104)
At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, at which the so-called Augsburg Confession was delivered to Emperor V in the chapel of the episcopal palace, the emperor issued an edict according to which all innovations were to be abolished, and Catholics reinstated in their rights and property. The city council, however, set itself up in opposition, recalled (1531) the Protestant preachers who had been expatriated, suppressed Catholic services in all churches except the cathedral (1534), and in 1537 joined the League of Smalkald. At the beginning of this year a decree of the council was made, forbidding everywhere the celebration of Mass, preaching, and all ecclesiastical ceremonies, and giving to the Catholic clergy the alternative of enrolling themselves anew as citizens or leaving the city. An overwhelming majority of both secular and regular clergy chose banishment; the bishop withdrew with the cathedral chapter to Dillingen, whence he addressed to the pope and the emperor an appeal for the redress of his grievances. In the city of Augsburg the Catholic churches were seized by Lutheran and Zwinglian preachers; at the command of the council pictures were removed, and at the instigation of Bucer and others a disgraceful storm of popular iconoclasm followed, resulting in the destruction of many splendid monuments of art and antiquity. The greatest intolerance was exercised towards the Catholics who had remained in the city; their schools were dissolved; parents were compelled to send their children to Lutheran institutions; it was even forbidden to hear Mass outside the city under severe penalties. . . . Altogether during these years of religious warfare the Diocese of Augsburg lost to the Reformation about 250 parishes, 24 monasteries, and over 500 benefices.For more, see my paper: The Real Diet of Augsburg (Protestant Intolerance in 1530). Lutheran and Zwinglian absolute intolerance of Catholicism were displayed in 1540 in an even more striking way:
In January 1540 Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli's successor Bugenhagen signed a statement declaring that religious peace could be established simply by the Emperor and the German bishops renouncing "their idolatry and error," and that "even if the Pope were to concede to us our doctrines and ceremonies, we should still be obliged to treat him as a persecutor and an outcast, since in other kingdoms he would not renounce his errors." It was the first explicit public announcement that the ultimate goal of the Protestants was the total destruction of the Catholic Church throughout the world. The German religious conference finally opened June 12 in the little town of Hagenau . . .See my paper, The Early Protestants Were Ecumenical? NOT! (+ Part II) (Dave Armstrong vs. Dr. Paul Owen).
(Warren Carroll, The Cleaving of Christendom [A History of Christendom, vol. 4], Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2000, 176)
Lutherans have no grounds for acting as if they had a better record of tolerance than the Calvinists in those dreadful times. For what is worse?: destroying art and statuary in a church or stealing the entire church property and forbidding the Catholic Mass and banishing all Catholics in one's territory? Calvinists certainly stole Catholic properties too, but it is foolish to insinuate (by deliberate omission and selective presentation) that Lutherans did not also do so.
END
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Two Newly-Discovered Photographs of C.S. Lewis (one in color!!)
[Photo by Charles A. Huttar, 1962; used by permission at the C.S. Lewis, Literature, and Life website]
On the Title "Lutheran" / My Respect For Lutherans
German-born C.F.W. Walther (1811-1887): first President of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, and arguably its most influential theologian.
Lutheran pastor Paul T. McCain asked on a Lutheran blog:
So, let's open another reflection discussion: concerning the name Lutheran. Why do we use it? What does it mean? Would we be better served to use names such as "Catholic" or "Evangelical" or "Orthodox" or use those terms in lower-case? The name Lutheran nowhere appears in our Book of Concord, but other terms or phrases, such as, "The churches of the Augsburg Confession." Here is what one pastor recently said to me:The Lutheran Church is the Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Church and that these realities - all three - only meet in her. That that is why the name Lutheran is worth fighting for - because it is the conjunction of these other aspects.
Lutheran pastor William M. Cwirla commented:
I would say that Lutheran churches, as they confess, teach, and practice according to the Book of Concord are rightly "evangelical," "catholic," and "orthodox" churches, whether lower or upper case, I care not. They are also "apostolic," in the right sense of that word too.And Mike Baker, in the same discussion thread, cited noted Lutheran figure C.F.W. Walther:
1 - it was Luther and no other through whom God in these last times has brought the pure clear doctrine of the Word of God together with the right use of the Sacraments again into the day and onto the plain and,This is how I would reply, as a Catholic:
2 - the communion of those who have confessed this pure doctrine of the Word of God with heart and mouth is therefore named and known by every Lutheran by this name; we can only confess the faith which is in our hearts purely and completely with the name Lutheran.
If we would get rid of the name Lutheran the highest suspicion would be aroused that either we are ashamed of the old Lutheran doctrine, or that we no longer consider it to be the only true doctrine agreeing with God's clear Word and that a new false doctrine is in our hearts. As dear, therefore, as the truth is to us, as dear as God's honor and the salvation of our souls is to us, so little can we, especially in this time of widespread error, give up the name Lutheran. By this name we separate ourselves from all the unorthodox of all times and publicly confess the right faith of all time.
I basically agree with Mike Baker (and Walther); i.e., looking at it from what I perceive as a consistently Lutheran perspective.
It is true that Lutheranism derives historically from Luther ("it was Luther and no other through whom God . . ."), and also through the Confessions. It's always pointed out to me (quite needlessly) that Lutherans in their present dogmatic teaching follow the Confessions and not Luther, but nevertheless, in terms of historical descent, no one can deny that the movement now known as Lutheranism began as a result of Martin Luther.
Therefore, I think Lutheran is an apt and accurate description. And this is true regardless of the extent to which some of Luther's views were modified or rejected in the Lutheran Confessions.
Also (here's the controversial part), I would deny that many (if not all) Lutheran distinctives (over against traditional Catholic doctrines) can be properly traced back to the apostolic or even patristic era (I've had many debates with Lutherans about this), just as Lutherans would deny that many Catholic beliefs can be so traced. This is one of our fundamental disagreements.
I also deny (as one would expect) that there is a consistent and comprehensive Lutheran historical continuity with the Church previous to Luther, and would contend that this casts into doubt the accuracy of the terms apostolic, orthodox, or catholic applied to Lutheranism. There is, of course, in those considerable areas where Lutherans agreed with previous Tradition, but not in other areas where (I contend) radical innovations were introduced.
Therefore (with all due respect: and I have a great deal for traditionalist Lutherans), to apply the terms orthodox or catholic or apostolic as historically understood, to Lutheranism (especially if meant in a sense that is consciously opposed to historic Catholicism) would be literally a misnomer.
Thus again, Lutheran is the most accurate term, just as Calvinist (more so than the question-begging Reformed) is for those whose views clearly derive from Calvin. I don't have a problem with "evangelical" because I think that all Christians believe in the Gospel, and that is not at issue (in that sense, I am quite enthusiastically evangelical myself, though I recognize how the term is usually used in reference to Protestants). The difficulty there would be that this term has become so fluid today that it is on the way -- sadly -- to becoming almost meaningless.
"Evangelical" as applied to Lutherans would make more sense in, e.g., Germany, where the term has been historically understood as a synonym of what we call "Lutheran".
* * * * *
Lutherans, are, in my estimation, the most respectable and intellectually cogent Protestant denomination. I say that after years of interaction with all sorts of Protestants (and being an evangelical Protestant myself, from 1977-1990).
I've enjoyed my dialogues with Lutherans through the years. I disagree with many things, of course, but it is with a lot of respect and thankfulness for all that Lutherans and Lutheranism
have brought to Christianity, historically and in the present era.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
The Best and Worst of Worlds: Internet Apologetics
[This was an article written in 2004 and intended to be published in a widely-known Catholic magazine. I was already paid for it (quite well, too), so I don't know what happened. In the meantime, I offer it here for your perusal. Don't tell any magazine editors that I put it up!]
The explosion of the Internet has offered an exciting opportunity for Catholic apologetics and evangelism. One might describe theologically-oriented venues on the Internet such as discussion boards, lists, blogs, and chat rooms, as the 21st-century equivalent of London’s Hyde Park: a place where Catholics (for example, the well-known lay apologist Frank Sheed and his Catholic Evidence Guild) disputed and dialogued with atheists, Protestants, and other opponents of Catholicism, and where free discussion occurred.
The Second Vatican Council expressly encouraged the use of such activities in its Decree on the Means of Social Communication (Inter Mirifica: 4 December 1963), referring to “those means of communication which of their nature can reach and influence . . . the whole of human society. These are the press, the cinema, radio, television, and others of a like nature” (1). The Council urged that all Catholics “should make a concerted effort to ensure that the means of communication are put at the service of the multiple forms of the apostolate without delay and as energetically as possible” (13).
I have been very active in “online apologetics” for more than eight years now (since March 1996). The Internet has played a key role in enabling me to engage in my own full-time apologetics and evangelism apostolate, and allowing me to create my own website (Biblical Evidence for Catholicism and recently, a blog (short for “weblog”: Cor ad cor loquitur). Having largely failed in a previous attempt at full-time campus ministry, as a Protestant in the late 1980s, before I ever had a computer and when the Internet was scarcely known in mass culture, I greatly appreciate and thank God for what it has made possible, in my own life’s work.
Yet the Internet (like much of life itself and other forms of modern technology) is (most people would agree, I think) a radically-mixed bag, and I shall now briefly discuss some negative aspects of Internet apologetics and then the positive factors or potentialities that I have observed through the years:
Anti-Catholicism
Any Catholic venturing out into Internet-land to share their faith cannot fail to be struck by the prevalence of this strain of thought on the worldwide web. For whatever reason, it seems that most of the discussion boards and other venues where people discuss Catholic-Protestant issues, or Orthodox-Catholic differences, are overwhelmingly dominated by anti-Catholic sentiment (that is, the notion that the Catholic Church is not a doctrinally Christian institution, and cannot be classified as part of Christianity).
Catholics need to interact with anti-Catholics, because they are in most need of good information about Catholicism. This is a worthy goal, but I have found through the years that pursuing such (often extremely exasperating) people inevitably becomes a futile exercise of spinning one’s wheels. St. Paul often warned his flock to avoid “vain conversation” or “stupid controversies,” but on the other hand we never know what seeds we plant, and how the person might be affected in the long run.
My worst experience in this regard was a visit to a Protestant Reformed discussion board about three years ago. It was literally a feeding frenzy when I showed up. My crime was simply being a Catholic. I tried to explain that I didn’t have any nefarious agenda, and truly just wanted to talk to my Protestant brethren, but it got worse and worse until one person proclaimed me as “damned” and urged board participants to not even pray for me. This is not legitimate Reformed teaching (John Calvin states that we cannot know for sure who is of the elect), and is a disgrace, yet only two people protested at all.
One has to approach these encounters with great discernment and make a determination whether some worthy goal is being achieved. Many anti-Catholics have managed to convert to Catholicism by God’s grace. It is possible.
Limitations of the Medium
Many have observed how differently people behave on the Internet, compared to what is often half-comically called “real life.” The absence of facial expression, tone of voice, humor, smiles, body language, pauses and vigor of argumentation; the lack of personal contact and getting to know people before launching into discussions of great importance, and so forth, breed many misunderstandings which would otherwise be avoided.
The strong tendency of Internet discussion boards is to operate according to an exaggerated and distorted “male-oriented” approach to human relationships. Women understand this very well and do far better, I think. Men can get together and completely skip over the personal: "how are you doing?," "what's going on in your life,?" "what has bothered or hurt you lately?," "how is it going with x, y, or z problem?" They tend to go right to the intellectual and the problem-solving theological, apologetic types of discussions (especially on the Internet).
The problem with such a "disembodied" ideas-only approach is that, oftentimes, once disagreements set in, there was no necessary prior build-up of trust and good will. So when the disagreements come, usually on these boards, personal insults immediately commence. The worst is assumed and the accusations fly, because the other person isn’t known well enough to understand that they are not closed-minded, or obstinate, or some other negative characteristic that is often charged in these discussions. Little effort was made to get to know the “whole person”; it was only their ideas that were engaged.
The “Big Fish in a Little Pond” Syndrome
This phenomenon is also very well-known to anyone who has surfed the Internet in search of a good, substantive discussion on theology. It seems that almost every discussion board, chat room, or other venue has the resident “big shot” or “dominant figure.” Occasionally, this person might be a likable, jovial sort, but too often, arrogance comes into play and the person is stroking their ego to some degree.
I maintain that good dialogue has to take place in an atmosphere of good will and mutual trust and respect. So when those things are absent, in my opinion, the discussion is sabotaged and ruined from the outset. Often, the Internet is characterized by a macho, competitive, "get the heretic," "show how ignorant and stupid so-and-so is" mentality. This is not good-natured dialogue or charitable, gentlemanly discussion. It is a mud-wrestling match.
On the Internet, people often play to the crowd or seek to belittle others or make them feel dumb or inferior. Frequently, a herd mentality and the usual cliques and petty jealousies of human life occur. But Catholic evangelism and apologetics is not about "winning" and "putting people in their place." It is about sharing the Good News of Jesus and the fullness of spirituality and Christian truth in the Catholic Church.
“You Are Not Your Ideas”: Personal Attacks and Needless Offense
Human insecurities and oversensitivity are very common factors on the Internet, as indeed, in life in general. Our culture seems to foster the idea that serious discussion about issues (where people have strong, heartfelt disagreements) is somehow the equivalent of a domestic quarrel, or a fistfight in a schoolyard. Be that as it may, many people receive any criticism of their ideas as a fundamental attack on their person or character. This is extremely prevalent on the Internet. Granted, many people do cross this line, but often, they are simply making an argument and the person “hearing” takes it personally.
We can expect this, given human nature, and the fact that religious matters are some of the most deeply felt of all opinions and beliefs, and very closely (and rightly) identified with our self-perception. But we need to be on guard that we do not become overly sensitive in discussion.
The “flip side” of the above is that many, many folks on the Internet quickly descend into purely personal attack and insult. They seem to have precious little sense of ethics in conversation, and grant scarcely any benefit of the doubt as to the good intentions and character of the person they are opposing. As soon as a strong disagreement occurs, such people tend to immediately conclude that the other person is obstinate or an enemy of truth, etc. St. James strongly warns against the uncontrollable human tongue. The old culprits of pride and lack of charity are the root causes that bring this about.
“Moderation” Often a Joke
Discussion boards are ostensibly supposed to be guided by rules of behavior. This is what they claim, and the rules are always there, to be observed by all and sundry, but I would say that in my eight-year experience, at least 80% of the time the rules are barely enforced at all, or with much unfairness. Moderation is no enviable task (I was a moderator on my ecumenical discussion list for about a year, and I often found it quite unpleasant work, though I never booted anyone out). Whatever the reasons, and whoever is at fault, this is a significant factor that Internet visitors can expect to encounter, and an obstacle to overcome in Catholic outreach.
101 Rabbit Trails, or the “Scattershot Approach”
Human nature being what it is, however, one often finds that when a dialogue opponent cannot give a rational reply, they will (consciously or not) switch the subject, in order to avoid the consequences of appearing to not have an answer, or in effect, admitting a difficulty in their position. Of course, this occurs a lot away from the Internet, too, but somehow the tendency seems to become accentuated online. I deal with it by addressing it very directly: asking the person to please stick to the subject at hand, and reiterating that I will be more than happy and willing to address the off-topic questions they bring up, in due course. “First things first.”
Astounding Numbers
Now let us examine some very positive aspects of the Internet: The most obvious advantage and exciting prospect for evangelism and apologetics is the sheer numbers of people who might potentially see one’s words or website. This will vary according to how long one has been at it, and how many links one manages to persuade others to provide, use of search engines, and various other forms of advertising, etc., but it is a tremendously exciting factor, any way one looks at it.
I’ve been at it eight years and have posted papers I actually wrote long before I went online, and have a great number of papers online (now over 1500). But in a relatively short time, and with wise use of the tools of the medium, anyone can achieve a large exposure of their writing on the Internet, and thus reach more people, if their goal is to spread the Word, and the Faith.
Specific Target Audiences
Not only can a person reach great numbers of people on the Internet, but also the exact audiences towards whom their material is directed. Throughout the entire decade of the 1980s, as a Protestant evangelical, I used to often go out on the street (as well as lots of other places) “witnessing” with my friend Dan Grajek. The idea was to pass out some sort of tract (usually fairly brief), and see if a person would respond at all and actually enter into a conversation.
Though any such effort is a good thing, and worthwhile, at length we found that this method was so inefficient and lacking in tangible results, that we started to jokingly call it “garbage can evangelism” (named in honor of those lovable souls who would immediately toss the tract on the ground, as a worthless interruption in their life). We would pass out hundreds and thousands of tracts, but probably less than one person in two hundred would show any interest at all. We got into many wonderful discussions, to be sure, but they were relatively few and far between (we were happy to get into one in a day’s work).
With the Internet, on the other hand, it is possible to reach the people who will be most interested in theology in the first place: the seekers, or the lost, or those otherwise curious for one reason or another. They discover Internet papers, through means of a search or a link or browsing around theological websites or papers and stumbling upon them (or even sometimes by means of a personal recommendation by word of mouth or a mention on some board).
This is one thing I absolutely love about the Internet. I can go about doing my work as an apologist, and leave the rest to God (He is always the primary cause of moving men’s hearts, anyway). The material is “out there,” and able to be accessed in many different ways. People can read it in the privacy of their own homes. This is great, because there is no pressure (either social or intellectual), no arm-twisting, no offensive “proselytizing.”
Whoever wants to read something, can do so. It is all public material. In the old days, I was largely confined to passing out photocopied tracts to an audience -- 99% of whom cared not at all about it, or were not interested at the time because they were doing something else. Or I might affect one or two people at some meeting I went to, with the secondary purpose of seeking out someone who might want to discuss theology. All of that is overcome by Internet technology.
Linking and Cut-and-Paste Technology
The advantages here are obvious: in the process of explaining a Catholic position to an inquirer, there is almost unlimited potential of directing them towards another website with just the click of a mouse, or pasting material from somewhere else into a discussion on a board or a list or chat room. This is spectacularly more efficient and speedy than the old procedures (which now seem quite ancient) of recommending a book or an article in a library, or mailing a photocopy, etc.
As we live in a “fast food” world, this is a great practical and tactical blessing. Generally speaking, the Internet offers ease of access to all sorts of information (including theological and religious and spiritual), with relatively minimal expense. And one can also easily enter into conversations with types of belief-systems they might not likely come across in their particular circles (for example, a Muslim or an atheist).
Dialogues and Pedagogy
Lastly, I would like to discuss a great love of mine: Socratic dialogue. As an apologist, my goal is not only to directly reach people with the Catholic and general Christian message, but to also help others to be able to communicate the message in a constructive fashion. Pedagogy means, roughly, “walking someone through in order to teach them.”
So when, for example, I deal with a leading anti-Catholic and engage his ideas and arguments, even though I have little chance of persuading him of anything, the exciting thing about the Internet is that the posting of such a dialogue helps others to see both the fallacies and wrongheaded disinformation in the anti-Catholic argument, and also how a Catholic can respond to such things. Thus, in one fell swoop the dialogue accomplishes two things: refutation and the providing of an example for others to possibly follow, in dealing with similar arguments and people.
This was, of course, fully possible before the Internet (a number of books in the Christian world presented dialogues of “Four Views on Subject X”), but what the Internet does is make the encounters themselves far easier to engage in, and then it allows the posting of them for many others to read (without having to spend a red cent).
To give an example: I have been a pro-life activist since 1982. I’ve talked to many pro-abortion persons during that time, but never, to my knowledge, do I recall ever persuading one of the pro-life position. Recently, I had the remarkable experience of actually convincing such a person (a non-Catholic Christian) of the pro-life position. This was no private affair, but a public one. The entire exchange occurred on my blog. Hundreds of people were observing it. I had no idea that I would actually persuade my friend, but it happened, and it was all recorded (with his full consent).
So now anyone who happens to come across the resulting paper on the Internet can observe a real, live (not contrived) interaction between two Christians on a supremely important ethical issue of our time. They can work through the reasoning, and be challenged from either side. Pro-lifers can see one particular way that succeeded in persuading an intelligent, articulate person of the errors and ethical impermissibility of the so-called “pro-choice” position.
Like politics, the world of theological ideas has its staunch advocates and its “mushy middle.” One can potentially reach and convince these “undecideds” by showing how the strong advocate on the opposite side can be refuted. One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that it makes such endeavors more possible, and easily, widely accessible to those who may find them spiritually beneficial.
Catholics have been doing a marvelous job on the Internet, and people are converting or having their faith strengthened as a result of such outreach. May we all – with the aid of God’s grace -- make good use of the new technology and opportunities available to us today, for evangelistic, apologetic, and spiritual purposes.
Emergency prayer request from Steve Wood (Serious head injury)
From the letter I received:
Please join Steve and Karen in praying for Mary's recovery and healing and that God would sustain her family through this time.
Please pray for Mary Jaquith, 13-year-old daughter of Mike Jaquith, longtime friend and Board Member of the Family Life Center.
Mary sustained head injuries this afternoon in a horse-related accident and is fighting for her life in a Florida hospital.
Please join Steve and Karen in praying for Mary's recovery and healing and that God would sustain her family through this time.
All My Papers Now On My Blog (1545 In All!)
I was very happy to finally finish (late last night) this long term, very tedious and laborious process of transferring papers onto my blog from the old website (e.g., . . . ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ160.HTM).
Now things can get back to normal on my blog. I won't have to keep uploading old, long papers on here. I can post either short articles or ones that are shortened for the front page of the blog (where you hit Tolle lege! at the bottom to read the whole thing). It won't be "crazy": you'll be able to quickly see what is on the front page.
Thanks for your patience. All the papers are now in the blog format, making for a uniformity of appearance that I haven't had in years, due to the sheer numbers of papers. The sidebar on the right has all the index pages, so you can easily switch from one to another to locate anything you are looking for. The search function on top will work better, since everything is on the blog. The next thing is to get the old papers off the Internet or to at least direct people here, so that folks will come to this blog to read my papers, and hopefully make more comments.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Happy St. Patrick's Day (Photographs of Ireland / Old British Isles Web Pages / Ford Surname Information)
Celtic Crosses on Inch Kenneth island [photo credit]
Pathway to Aughnanure Castle outside Oughteread, Co. Galway [photo credit]
Remains of a Dominican Friary, dating from around 1470 [photo credit]
Owenscaul River, Dingle Peninsula [photo credit]
Minard Castle, Dingle Peninsula [photo credit]
Ireland: History, Culture, & Christian Heritage Links
(my old web page, that was on my site from February 1997 to April 2003. This is the most recent version from Internet Archive: dated 17 April 2003. Many of the links still work fine)
See also, related pages:
Scotland: History, Culture, & Christian Heritage Links(my web page that was online from February 1997 to August 2001. This archived page dates from 15 August 2001)
England: History, Culture, & Christian Heritage Links
(online from February 1997 to April 2003; this version from 7 April 2003)Medieval and Renaissance Culture
(online from February 1997 to April 2003; this page is dated from 1 April 2003. Check out my "medieval prince and princess" photo at the top!)
Book of Kells (dating from around 800; from County Meath near Dublin; it contained the four Gospels in Latin) [photo credit]
My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Ford. In searching for information on the Irish roots of this name, I found the following:
Forde, Ford A surname of English origin from the Old English ford meaning ‘dweller by the ford’. May be the anglicised form of a number of Gaelic surnames. ó Fuarráin meaning descendant of Fuarrán or Fuarthán (diminutive of fuar, cold). A sept of Munster. Mac Giolla na Naomh, meaning son of the servant of the saints a sept of west Connacht. Corrupted to Mac Giollanáth and erroneously translated from the resemblance of the final syllable to áth, a ford. Mac Conshnámha meaning son of Cú-shnámha (swimming hound). A sept of Leitrim who were chiefs of Muinter Kenny in the present barony of Dromahaire. It was popularly supposed to be Mac an átha, son of the ford and translated accordingly. In 1890 Forde was numerous in Galway, it was also to be found in Cork, Mayo and Dublin. The estimated number of bearers for Forde was 5,107, and for Ford was 1,747.
[also found in Counties Limerick, Waterford, and Kerry]
From another web page:
The name Ford in Ireland is usually of immigrant origin having been brought to the country by settlers from England, especially during the seven The name Ford in Ireland is usually of immigrant origin having been brought to the country by settlers from England, especially during the seventeenth century. A number of Gaelic Septs adopted Ford as the anglicized form of their name including the O'Fuarain Sept of County Limerick who also changed their name to Foran.
In form, this is a common English name for someone who lived near a ford. In Ireland, where it is more often ‘Forde’, it may indicate English ancestry, since many English of the name settled in Ireland. However, in the majority of cases it is a native Irish name, an anglicisation of at least three Irish distinct originals: Mac Giolla na Naomh, meaning ‘son of the devotee of the saints’, also anglicised as ‘Gildernew’; Mac Conshnamha, from conshnamh, meaning ‘swimming dog’, also anglicised ‘Kinneavy’; and O Fuarain, from fuar, meaning ‘cold’, and also anglicised as ‘Foran’. Clearly, the English clerks transcribing Irish names had scant knowledge of the language they were hearing. Mac Conshnamha originated in north Connacht, where the sept were chiefs in the area now part of Co Leitrim from the thirteenth century. Mac Giolla na Naomh was principally a south Connacht name, while O Fuarain originated in Co Cork. The name is still most common in Cork, though large numbers are also to be found in the Connacht counties of Galway and Mayo, as well as in Dublin.
See more information on the surname Ford from Go Ireland.com.
| FORD FAMILY CREST |
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Friday, March 16, 2007
Hasidic Rapper? Jewish Reggae and Reincarnation?
(Getty Images)
Some words just don't seem to go together, like "Amish crime syndicate" or "consistent liberal tolerance" or "Christian Science" (which is neither). "Hasidic rapper" would seem to be another. But there is a young man named Matisyahu, (formerly Matthew Paul Miller) from the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidic Judaism in Brooklyn, whose curious musical hybrid style combines elements of hip hop and (mostly) reggae, along with some rock influences.
He's quite good at it, too (I've heard several of his songs): so good that he was named the Top Reggae artist of 2006 by Billboard. His albums Live at Stubb's (2005) and Youth (2006) are both certified platinum, and charted at #30 and #4.
I ran across this exciting musician by accident: looking for a picture of Hasidic Jews for one of my old papers that I was adding to my blog (!). What a delightful surprise. I enjoyed reggae in its heyday in the late 70s and was listening to Bob Marley in those days, and, of course, The Police, who were highly influenced by it (e.g., Message in a Bottle, a song that Matisyahu covers). I even bought vinyl LP's by the ska revivalist groups Madness and The Specials back then, that I still have. This may spark my interest in it again.
I also discovered something else I didn't know: listening to one of Matisyahu's songs, I noticed that he mentioned reincarnation. It turns out that Hasidic Jews, in particular, hold to this notion: which is more characteristic of eastern religion. Not only that: the belief is also accepted by some (not sure how many) mainstream Orthodox Jews. I find that quite odd, but it's true. That would be a case where the Conservative Jews were more doctrinally correct than their Orthodox brethren.
Bob Hypes' Reply to My Critique of His Article: "Religion and How I Lost It " and My Counter-Reply
Bob Hypes recently started corresponding with me, after he found out about my critique (I was unsuccessful in contacting him at the time) -- and, I might add, in a commendably friendly and cordial manner. He has graciously granted permission to publish all his words on my website, so that this dialogue can continue. If someone wants to contact Bob, his e-mail address is hypes.bob@gmail.com. His words will be in blue.
I was recently directed by a friend to a rebuttal to an article I wrote several years ago at the urging of Farrell Till for Skeptical Review. This was nothing new, though most of the previous contact about my article had been sent to me personally, and most of it favorable, not that that is important. Your rebuttal had me scratching my head. You were responding to an article that I didn't write. Oh yeah, I wrote that article, but it was not written in the way in which you read it. What you took to be generalizations and attacks were mostly first person happenings or things that I have observed, or both. It was not intended to be a scholarly treatise, but a personal, accessible, article. If it had been the sort of thing that should be picked apart as you saw fit to do, I would have written it as a scholarly piece. I do not deal with generalities in scholarly works. I do not engage in slap dash prose in scholarly writings. I do not attack those I don't know, and do not guess at their motives, reasons, intellect, or other
things of the sort. Oh that we all should write in such a civilized manner.
What I would like to do is to send you a point by point answer to your rebuttal to try to help you through this simplistic little article
that you totally misunderstood. You have made a few valid points and I'll say so when I believe it to be true. But you have missed the mark
on the vast majority of what I wrote. You're trying to parse it out like a graduate school study of Ulysses and in comparison all my
little article is, is a first person "what I did on my summer vacation" story.
I know we're only in the "preliminaries", but as I compile this latest exchange I feel compelled to respond here to this notion of a merely "personal" or entirely subjective or private article, as it has already become a recurring motif in your latest round of replies. I don't find this to be a coherent idea at all. It doesn't make any sense to me, and here are my reasons why:
First of all, your article was written for a magazine, ostensibly for the purpose of persuading others or dissuading Christians from their position (just as you were in ways which the article describes). Otherwise, why write it? This being the case, and assuming (as is generally understood) that pieces written in a magazine are fair game for criticisms and both expressed agreement and disagreement, this idea that it is merely private, and befuddlement as to why I have critiqued it in some detail is very curious and even, I think, a bit odd. If your experience and intellectual odyssey has no relevance at all to anyone else, then by all means, don't write it for public consumptin (I would even urge you to remove the piece from the Internet as irrelevant and one huge non sequitur, if you insist on taking this point of view).
Secondly, if indeed this was only "personal" (so much so that responding to it is somehow improper or "overkill"), then it is a contradiction in terms for it to be published for public consumption, for the goals of a private and a publ;ic piece are diametric opposites. If this is your experience and yours alone, and has no relevance whatsoever to anyone else: whether Christian or atheist or three-toed, green-eyed Rastafarian moth catcher, then again, why does it exist "out there" on the Internet to be read at all? Your own personal taste is of no relevance to anyone else. Either these things have an objective basis, in which case others can enter into the discussion and dispute your factual and philosophical / experiential / religious claims, or they do not. If the latter, the article is an oxymoron. If the former, then your complaint makes no sense.
Either way, you are caught in a logical conundrum. It would be like writing an article about how one loves chocolate ice cream rather than vanilla. Who else cares about that? It is not "newsworthy" material. It's not something to discuss or ponder. Or you could write a purely "personal" account of how you like to wear purple pajamas, stand on your head, and munch cinnamon raisin bagels while watching Jeopardy every night. That's fine and dandy, but no material for any public magazine, let alone one on so important an issue as whether God exists, and how we order our own existence and behavior in relation to others who differ from us. In fact, your article was not just personal or applicable to you, in its very grammatical structure, for you often write in a plural sense, referring to (many) more people than just you (emphases added presently):
They may formulate the base experience for many others as well. [the third sentence]Thirdly, if the article is "simplistic", as you describe it (and you as the writer would be in a position to make such a judgment), and the intellectual or persuasive equivalent of "what I did on my summer vacation" stories (which sounds to me like children's stuff, which is ironic since you made a big deal about how childish religion often is for folks), then again, why does it exist? It seems to me that this would disqualify it as worthy of a magazine of this type, which routinely deals with the question of the truth or falsity of Christianity and other religions. If it is so "simplistic" that it can't withstand any critique, then what purpose does it have, for heaven's sake (no pun intended)?We next learn that God is the creator of all that we behold and all that we will never understand. He is the grandfather many of us never knew . . . [who is the "us" if this is only a "personal" piece, with no relevance to anyone else?]
Then we are introduced to the Holy Spirit and the unfathomable tale of the Trinity. That three can equal one is totally outside of our ability to understand. In fact, few, if any, adults can comprehend this one. [many further examples could easily be produced]
Fourthly, you claim that your article contains hardly any "generalizations" or "attacks". You wrote that "I do not attack those I don't know, and do not guess at their motives, reasons, intellect, or other things of the sort. Oh that we all should write in such a civilized manner." Indeed; what a great dream that would be if only it were true. But you did not in fact (consciously or not) abide by this characterization and lofty goal of your own writing. Here are some of the things from your piece which undeniably partake of the characterizations above, which you have denied committing (emphases again added):
Theists base their belief on faith, belief based on emotion and culturalization. [note the extreme generalization, and claim that theists -- no qualification at all is given -- don't even attempt to incorporate reason into their thinking; this is certainly "guessing" at both the "reasons" and "intellects" of theists; not just one isolated example (which might be perfectly acceptable if rational demonstration occurred, but en masse. This is not rational or factual analysis. It partakes of the very emotionalism which it is purporting to critique]I could go on and on with similar examples. Your article is filled with them. So I must beg to differ as to your description of the nature of your paper. If you can't see these huge biases and the objectionable nature of much of your rhetoric, I as a Christian certainly can. It's always very different to be a recipient of a criticism (especially a false or grossly exaggerated one) than to be the perpetrator of same. The non-Christian audience (which makes up probably at least 80% of the readership of Skeptical Review, if not far more) will eat this stuff up, and love it. But is it accurate, is the proper question?When reason and rationale challenge that faith, then the reason can have no value and the rationale must be incorrect. Faith is irrefutable and errorless because it must be in order to validate all in which they believe. [this is the very next sentence, which serves to reinforce my critique. Reason is placed in absolute antithesis to faith, as if most or all Christians approach the matter in such a fashion. You may have dome so in your defective Church of Christ atmosphere, but I can assure you that I and many other Christians have never done so. So the generalization is false, and it is incorrect to claim that you made no such generalizations.]
They then raise their children into the habit of accepting absurdities, mysteries, convoluted thinking, and supplication. They do this while the children's minds are supple and moldable. They know that the habits of thought thus formed stand a good chance of lasting a lifetime. [this is not questioning the "motives" of Christian parents? One can disagree with a worldview without attributing gross irresponsibility and near-deliberate dishonesty to parents raising their children. Again, there is no qualification at all, so that the reader gets no sense that any Christians out there in the real world function any differently than this. I suspect that it is simply a projection of your own Christian past onto others. This will not do (to put it mildly).]
They either live in judgment of anyone who does not believe as they do, or they begin to question their own values. [again, this is far from being merely a personal account. It is a vast generalization. I don't function like this at all as a Christian. I haven't judged you personally at all, but I find much to object to in your reasoning.]
A major purpose of fundamentalist religions is to supply a safe harbor for those who are insecure, fearful, lost or lonely, by justifying a way of life with narrow, defining principles and prejudices. [more of the same, which is hardly consistent with the way you have described your article above]
No reasonable person can believe that the guesses of preliterate man, upon which the myths of gods and the supernatural are based, were true. The beliefs of these primitives, however, were more reasonable in terms of their limited and insignificant knowledge, than the beliefs of today's religionists who have masses of information available to them. [this is not massively jaded, prejudicial language against Christians? This doesn't attack "reasons, intellect, or other things of the sort."? Imagine if I applied this kind of prejudiced language to your belief-system. See what you would think of it:
No reasonable person can believe that the guesses of modernist and postmodernist man, upon which the myths of atheism and agnosticism are based, were true. The beliefs of these primitives, however, were more reasonable in terms of their limited and insignificant knowledge, than the beliefs of today's atheists and agnostics who have masses of information available to them.]
- - - I responded initially to Bob's first letter, saying I would be happy to have further dialogue - - -
Thank you for responding to my inquiry. I think to begin with, before I would enter into an actual point by point defense of my Skeptical Review article or a generalized dialogue on the subjects raised therein, I should let you know where I'm coming from in general regarding my view of religion.
As you certainly could tell from the article in question, I came from a background of fairly fundamental religion, though not nearly as severe in interpretation and insinuation into people's lives and psyches as many of the more fundamentalist cults indulge in today. From a normal childhood beginning and basis in things religious, I progressed toward religious maturity through my teens and into my young adulthood. I majored in theology in college, searching for answers to many questions by which I was troubled about this religion. Under the tutelage of men who had spent their lives devoted to these studies and the issues they raise, I found that opinions and beliefs among these "experts" were varied and often turned on the slightest of evidence or premise.
Well sure, you will find a lot of contradiction. That gets into the issues of legitimate religious authority and epistemology.
For twenty or so years after college I continued my search as time and energy allowed. I examined in depth many source materials from the first and second centuries, both secular and religious. I read the works and studied the opinions of theologians from the earliest of the so called 'church fathers' down to those with whom I was contemporary.
Okay.
There was no sudden epiphany. No opening up of the sky or shaking of the earth to signal my realization that for me there could be no god, no devil, no heaven, no hell. Just a slow, gradual, point by point realization that I could not believe in my heart what my head found to be false. For me god shrunk away and disappeared over this twenty years or so of profound research and reflection. Maybe that journey started much earlier than my active search for answers began. Maybe I had my first doubts when I realized a biblical contradiction for the first time at the age of twelve or so. Maybe even before that time for some reason I no longer remember.
Maybe you could be convinced of the Christian view in some of these areas by an apologist like me. :-) I appreciate your honest report of your "journey." A lot of times, I think that people get only one kind of information, rather than seeing both sides. We all make decisions as to what we are gonna read and study. And they can shape our intellectual and spiritual destinies. That may or may not have been true in your case. But your willingness to dialogue is a sign to me that you remain open-minded on the overall issue. And that makes for good dialogue.
With my realization that to me there could be no god and that I could no longer pretend to believe, I found peace and ease and comfort in my life that I had never had before. No longer burdened by doubts, no longer having to sublimate my thoughts so as to fit into a mold that others expected, I became a better husband, father, neighbor, brother, son, and friend to those around me. I found liberation in my new worldview that I had never found anywhere else.
This is one big reason I am an apologist. I recognize that (as you say) one cannot follow what their mind rejects as false. I certainly couldn't do that, nor would I ever wish to. I'm here to try to demonstrate that Christianity need not involve such a conflict, and that unbelief, on the other hand, ultimately does become burdened by such intellectual difficulties.
Still, I am not an evangelical atheist, nor a militant in the cause. Atheism to me is a distinctly personal decision based on my own personal journey of seeking truth and finding answers.
Understood. Yet by dialoguing at all, you will be making your personal opinions "public" to some extent. It goes to an objective ground that is something more than mere subjectivity and personal preference (like a favorite color or flavor of ice cream). Propositions will be debated as to their truth or falsity.
I believe that each of us is personally responsible for whatever we believe. I believe that we should each be able to delineate what and why we believe, and not by resorting to tautological arguments such as "I believe the bible because the bible is true."
Yes; I agree.
I will not even discuss my views with anyone who resorts to such argumentation.
I'm trying to learn to avoid people like that too. :-)
If one does not possess arguable, debatable, logical argumentation for one's point of view, whatever that may be, then one does not know whereof he speaks in such matters. It would be like discussing opera with someone who has heard a few arias in his life and has decided that he is an aficionado of all things operatic.
Yes; good point!
To wrap up this initial clarification of where I am coming from on these issues, I will tell you that I do not belong to any atheist or humanist organization, nor do I agree with much of the way they conduct the dissemination of information supporting their viewpoints.
Okay. You seem like a rational and amiable enough fellow to me.
Again, I feel that each of our journeys to whatever we find to be the truth for us has to be personal. When we follow the dictates of a church, or a religion, or a secular group, or another person, we are not then truly knowledgeable in our belief.
All belief systems have tenets and structures of thought that are accepted by authority or faith. That includes science, which presupposes certain fundamental axioms, and (on a theoretical level) the truth (at least provisionally) of various widely-held theories or hypotheses. Every philosophy starts with unproven axioms, etc. So I have to disagree that any acceptance of deeply-entrenched beliefs, opinions, or dogmas, whether in science, religion, or philosophy, constitutes a lack of knowledge. People often act as if religious matters are merely subjective whims, with no objective rational basis.
So having said all of this, convoluted and rambling as it has been,
Not at all. I think it was good . . .
I want to assure you that will not put myself on the soapbox to prove my case or disprove yours. I will discuss the issues contained in my original article and in your rebuttal to it for purposes of clarification. If you want to discuss pertinent issues which relate to the overall issue I will attempt to expand beyond the above parameters as time and energy permit.
Okay. I just follow my thoughts in reply wherever they lead, while trying hard to stay on the immediate subject (it's a delicate balance). If you raise issues that I think require a solid Christian response, then I must do that, because this is what apologists do, after all, and I'm trying to function as a teacher for my readers, and to offer pedagogical materials.
Hope this gives us a bit more of a base from which to work.
Yes.
I will begin to work on a defense of my article if this scenario seems to be a worthy one to pursue in your opinion. Am waiting to hear from you at your leisure.
Great. I will await your next installment. In the meantime, I'll go re-read the existing paper, because it has been a while. Then we can go from there. Is it okay for this initial exchange (perhaps including some earlier stuff) to also be part of the posted dialogue? I think that would be helpful for readers, unless you think something here was overly personal. We can have an arrangement where you would okay the final draft of our dialogue before I post it, if you want. The main think I try to achieve is a dialogical, Socratic, back-and forth format, because I believe that is an excellent way for observers to work through the issues, by seeing both sides interact and actually dealing with opposing arguments, rather than ignoring them (as is so often -- sadly -- the case).
As you suggest, I have no problem with you putting our dialogue on your website. As I have said, I am not an evangelical atheist, and so do not write with that in mind, only to clarify that which I feel you didn't understand or which became distorted in your critique of my article.
In your latest response to me you wrote, "A lot of times, I think that people get only one kind of information, rather than seeing both sides. We all make decisions as to what we are gonna read and study. And they can shape our intellectual and spiritual destinies. That may or may not have been true in your case. But your willingness to dialogue is a sign to me that you remain open-minded on the overall issue. And that makes for good dialogue."
I hope to provide one half of a good, reasoned dialogue. Don't take that as a sign, however, that I am 'open-minded' to the degree of having my viewpoint softened on these issues.
I didn't. But I take it as axiomatic that every seeker of truth must be open to having his viewpoint overthrown, if the evidence requires and warrants this. I include myself in that equation. I don't think it very likely at all; I have virtually no expectation of that happening in actuality, yet I believe that all thinkers must have this approach to truth, and a willingness to go wherever it leads, otherwise we can easily become mere propagandists, immune to criticism, and possessed of an irrational, unfalsifiable belief-system, which does no one any good.
I will respond to those things in our dialogue about which I know or which I feel are worth a response, and will hopefully raise issues to which you will respond.
You further stated in your reply: "I'm here to try to demonstrate that Christianity need not involve such a conflict, and that unbelief, on the other hand, ultimately does become burdened by such intellectual difficulties."
We each have a viewpoint on this issue, and they are in conflict. I don't believe that the argumentation of this issue is a good place to start, however, but just mention this conflict, parenthetically. In fact, by way of a reasoned and honest dialogue, we can possibly further illuminate this dichotomy in such a way as to better define our individual positions. Maybe this better definition will, by default, be the final summation.
I think that is a worthy goal in and of itself (particularly where both parties are exceedingly unlikely to change their positions). I am most concerned about your excessive generalizations about, and portrayals of, what Christianity is supposedly about. I think they are greatly in need of qualification and tempering. In many cases, I would readily agree, if your criticisms were only directed towards smaller (often sectarian, in the worst sense of that term) Christian groups (such as your own former Church of Christ) and/or those individuals who distort the actual nature of our religion in one way or another, and take it in an unhelpful, problem-laden direction. But you insisted on generalizing almost everything (while recently denying this) and doing a sort of "cynical psychoanalysis" or "psychology of religion." I am here to present a more balanced picture of what Christianity is about.
. . . Of course you may use whatever I write. That is the point of my trying to set the record straight as what I wrote in my earlier article and to clarify some of what you attacked about the article. If any of this helps to clarify those positions, then the readers can see for themselves what you have already defined. All I seek here is clarification, and if that can be achieved by expanding the dialogue, then feel free to print that which I write.
Having said all of that, I will now start in the point-by-point discussion of your critique of my article that was printed in the Skeptical Review. I am largely a 'stream of consciousness' sort of writer, so will respond as naturally and conversationally as I can.
That you felt compelled to write a point-by-point critique of this article in the first place gives the simple message of my deconversion a sense of much more importance than it deserves.
It acquired that importance by being published (or else do you wish that I regard all published materials in Skeptical Review as "unimportant"?), and by other internal factors. I wrote at length about this at the top of this paper, so I won't belabor the point.
I only ask to use this forum to clarify a few things in your critique, which as the author of the piece in question I feel I have the right to do.
Absolutely. I'm delighted that you have an interest to do so.
I am just sorry that it took these many months for your piece to be brought to my attention.
I tried at the time . . .
I will try to follow the order of the original article in much the manner that you did in your rebuttal. In this way I will also be answering the issues you raise in the same order as you presented them.
First though, I must clarify that this article was originally written at the urging of Farrell Till, and I tried to honor his request to keep it in the vein of my own personal experience rather than present it as a theological treatise. I feel that your critique of my article missed this fact and that in many places you tried to hold me to account for things that were not said nor intended.
If you didn't intend to make many many generalizations about Christians (per my several excerpts from the piece, above), and go far beyond merely your own experience, then I must say that your view of the nature and function of language must be explained to me, because I don't get it. I really don't . . .
I will not belabor this point, however, but will from time to time raise it as it applies at certain junctures of your rebuttal.
And I will keep appealing back to my initial remarks above, as needs be, which I think require a solid answer.
You seem to have thought more about my opening paragraph than I did when I wrote it. It was a simple beginning, and one that did indeed represent my early childhood concept of the religion into which I was born. The childishness and unsophisticated nature of the lyrics, "Jesus loves me" cannot be overstated, and yet it is consistent with the inculcation that many, including me, have undergone before any erudition has been developed as to a religious worldview.
You say about that paragraph, "So what? When children grow up, one would expect them to be a bit more sophisticated. St. Paul talks about moving from milk to solid meat." I couldn't agree with you more. But I see as the operative thought in your statement, the concept of "one would expect them to be a bit more sophisticated." In all too many instances this greater sophistication never develops, and often, even when it does, never achieves full intellectual maturity. Far too many religionists of every faith keep one foot in the playground of their childhood religious views and all too often default to the tautology of childish reasoning instead of ever gaining that maturity or sophistication of which you speak. This statement should be understood as a generalization and as a personal opinion based on a significant number of theists I know, and have known, and is not an attack upon them, nor upon the general population of Christians.
I agree that it is a big problem for a significant number of Christians, who have not been taught to integrate their rational thinking with theology and spirituality, and to synthesize faith with culture (both goals being a major purpose and function of my own apologetic endeavors). What I objected to was your overly-generalized language, and the predictable attempt to proceed onto a "psycho-babble" analysis of religious faith (note that this went far beyond your own personal experience in a sort of fundamentalism that I have never been a part of -- nor have many millions of other Christians), that can only be seen by Christians as insulting, just as it historically has been, when attempted by people such as Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud. And the tables can be turned on that sort of "psychology of religion" (I have done so, myself, in my apologetics). I don't find this line of thinking very helpful or productive or insightful at all. I only deal with it insofar as atheists and agnostics insist on doing it. But if I had my way, we would all get beyond that and discuss the objective issues that divide us, not subjective states of mind, emotions, wishes, motives, judgmentalism, projection, supposedly widespread, epidemic infantile or anti-intellectual mentalities, etc.
It only offends and creates more unnecessary division (where there already is far too much in the first place). If you and others insist on presenting Christianity in the worst possible light, based on the worst possible examples of its practitioners, then this attempt can only backfire on you when someone like me comes around and calls you on it. You wouldn't put up with such cynical characterizations of your worldview group. We only ask that you extend the same courtesy to us. I've often chided Christians for approaching atheists and agnostics as if they were purely "evil, wicked" or intrinsically dishonest people (I've written papers about that, too). Again, we could use a few in your camp who object to such unfair treatment of my group (usually as ignoramuses or intellectual troglodytes). This is stereotypical and prejudicial language, and neither helps advance the discussion along at all.
Bottom line: if infantile acceptance (the song "Jesus loves me," and so forth) of theological tenets formed the basis of your own religious thinking, then let it be your own report of your own foibles, and kindly refrain from projecting it onto those of us (Christians) who have never gone through such a phase, and have never approached God or theology in such a fashion. You wanted your paper to be a personal one, so make it so; not an exercise in projecting your own past behavioral and intellectual deficiencies onto millions upon millions of Christians of all stripes. The Church of Christ is assuredly not an adequate representation of Christianity as a whole (and as an apologist for 24 years, and former Protestant, I am in a good position to know about such things). Your experience was in that distinct sub-group. The Church of Christ doesn't even believe, in, for example, original sin, which virtually all trinitarian, Nicene Christian groups accept. They are distinctly out of the mainstream of Christianity.
You go on to say that, "Christianity is not intrinsically childish or juvenile or unsophisticated." I would beg to differ, and do so from the perspective of one who has seen this issue from both sides.
Well, this is a case in point, of precisely what I have been objecting to in your analysis, isn't it? You quickly go from writing (hopefully): "This statement should be understood as a generalization and as a personal opinion based on a significant number of theists I know, and have known, and is not an attack upon them, nor upon the general population of Christians", to the absurd assertion that Christianity is "intrinsically childish or juvenile or unsophisticated" (since you denied my denial that it was such). I find this quite astonishing, and wonder how decent dialogue is possible with one who takes such a jaded view of my belief-system. Perhaps you can explain that to me in our next installment. I believe in an "intrinsically childish or juvenile or unsophisticated" set of beliefs, yet I can be sensibly talked to as a thinking adult? Why would you want to bother? Yet another inconsistency in your position . . .
In this I am not unique, and do not claim accuracy based on the duality of my viewpoint. I think that Christianity can, indeed, be a childish, unsophisticated diversion from reality. At least Christianity as practiced by some of those within the circle of my personal knowledge.
This is already a contradiction of your statement above. Either you are not thinking logically here, or writing sloppily (thus causing further confusion). I specifically used the word "intrinsically." That means that Christianity (or anything else), in and of itself; by its very nature," is a certain thing (whatever that may be deemed to be). I denied that it was childish or juvenile or unsophisticated in this fashion. You, in turn, denied that, meaning that you are asserting that it is intrinsically, by nature, childish, etc. Yet you turn around immediately and soften that by saying it "can" be this stuff (is able to be, might be, could be, is capable of being, etc.). Well, of course it "can" be (and often is, sadly, due to ignorance, sin, cultural influence, and many other factors), in the sense of sectarian diversions and corrupt practices, but this is a different proposition from asserting that it is intrinsically so, as a belief-system. Christianity is a set of beliefs, after all. That's why we have creeds and systematic theologies. Then you use further qualifiers: "At least Christianity as practiced . . . " Well, if you believe the qualifications, then it seems to me that logic and fairness demand that you retract the claim about the supposed intrinsically juvenile nature of Christianity. You can't have it both ways (not if you wish to be non-contradictory and coherent).
In my article, I next offer that the concept of the song, if not the song itself, is symbolic with the primary religious training of many preschool children. This training is based on unqualified love of the brotherly Jesus figure, giving the child a feeling of protection and comfort, contrasting with the child's own fragility.
You rightfully state, "And what is wrong with that, as far as it goes? The child clings to its parents for the same reason." But you are right only in the fact that it happens, and that nothing intrinsically bad is immediately the result of this simple source of comfort. The problem lies in the fact that the parents are real, in a tangible way. Jesus is not.
But this is your presupposition that is, of course, quite arguable and controversial. You can't start a critique of Christianity with a bald axiom of "Jesus isn't real," without first defending that assertion. That's why I object to the nature of your article as overly-general and subjective analysis. It never gets to the real, important issues that have to be worked through. It is simply psychological analysis. You might spend your time far more profitably explaining to us Christians why you believe that Jesus isn't "real."
The parents are experienced in a corporeal way, while Jesus is experienced differently.
So what? This presupposes that the only reality is physical, which is itself a huge discussion within philosophy, to this day, with able proponents taking both sides. That's not even acceptable within physics. They still don't know, for example, whether light is a particle or not. It may not be "physical." But no one denies that it is real.
Your attempt at psychoanalysis of atheists in general, and me by inference within your rebuttal of my words, is interesting.
But this is done only for the rhetorical, philosophical purposes explained above: to turn the tables. I think the whole attempt to psychoanalyze those who believe differently than ourselves is ultimately a futile (and usually uncharitable) exercise.
You mention that psychologist Paul Vitz has shown a close correlation and connection between a great many famous atheists' bad relationships with their fathers and their atheism itself.
I can speak for no one else, nor would I pretend to do so.
I think I have by now demonstrated over and over that -- to the contrary -- you often judge and treat quite harshly the great mass of us Christians, and make sweeping judgments, all the while strangely denying that you are doing so.
As for me, I had a wonderful, close, warm relationship with my father. I looked to him for wisdom and guidance until his death several years ago, and still honor his example to the best of my ability. While I will grant you that some atheists may have had bad relationships with their fathers, I will also wager that many Christians have had just as bad of luck in this regard. Maybe these Christians are searching for a father figure who won't let them down, or ignore them, or abuse them, or abandon them. They're willing to give up the comfort of a real father who fails them in some way, or ways, for the imagined acceptance and comfort of a fictional father who loves them, and all they have to do to win this love and keep it is to believe with their hearts that which their lucid mind may not be able to honestly grasp.
This illustrates the bankruptcy of this sort of "pop-psychoanalysis" (and I am being charitable in my terminology) on both sides. Your experience was a different one. Of course there are exceptions to almost anything, and anecdotal evidence doesn't accomplish much. Vitz showed from much gathered historical fact that there were many such instances among well-known, influential atheists of a terrible father-son relationship. His whole purpose (as is mine) was to turn the tables on the garden-variety atheist / agnostic polemic of "Christianity as a psychological crutch." It's self-evident that those on both sides can -- and often do --, create projections either for or against a God, based on their earthly parents. So it's a wash; it doesn't advance the discussion; it doesn't rationally resolve anything. What we object to is the hypocritical double standard of applying this analysis to Christians while ignoring it where atheists are concerned, as if Christians are uniquely prone to fall into psychologically unhealthy or infantile patterns of behavior. So Vitz turned the tables, and I do the same, when it is required, to defeat this rather silly, substanceless, worthless line of argumentation against Christianity.
I then posit in my original article, that this childish image of Christianity will always be a part of our being, and may be the hardest thing we have to shake off when we grow to question and doubt this religion.
Yes, it may have been for you, because you were raised in a certain fundamentalist environment that didn't foster a rational approach to theology and culture and matters of the mind.
You answer, "Precisely." Then, having said that, you attempt to argue against my point without apparently understanding the point.
My "precisely" must be understood in a qualified sense only. You concentrate on one word taken out of context (where you haven't even grasped the sense in which I used it). But here are some of the other words I wrote:
I was almost sure the author would argue that the childlike sentiments in "Jesus loves me" would set the tone for a lifetime of Christianity. Again, it may for some fundamentalists or misinformed and underinformed Christians of any stripe (Catholic, Orthodox, etc.) but this does not disprove Christianity . . . The criticism of the sub-group would serve fine if the subject matter were "fundamentalism," but ostensibly the topic is the much larger "religion," and the explanation for why it is untenable and unworthy of belief by rational men.You say that being a misinformed or underinformed Christian does not disprove Christianity, and I concur with those words. Christianity was quite capable of disproving itself to me with little help from misinformed Christians.
That may be (that is, you may think that it does), but you have given me exactly no reason to accept such a perspective, by this "psychological" reasoning you have adopted. If you have reasons for believing that Christianity is disproven, then by all means produce them. But this kind of analysis is wholly insufficient for that task. All you have proven was that you yourself adopted an infantile understanding of God and theology in your own past. Again, I say (I hate being so repetitious) "so what"? What bearing does this have on anyone else? And if it has no relevance, why was it published in such a magazine?
I also agree with your further elucidation on this point: "one does not refute Christianity or religion generally-speaking by recourse to a warped, simplistic, minority expression of it. The sub-group does not represent the entire group, or the worldview." But then truth likewise cannot be ascertained by majority opinion.
Of course it can't; I agree. I am only asserting the principle that in order to refute a large belief-system like Christianity, it is absolutely necessary to have a good grasp of what it is in the first place, and to critique the thing itself, not objectionable practices of it.
A thing can be wrong and be believed by a vast majority, or can be right and only be grasped by a small number of people. Truth is not democratic nor is error the sole dominion of subgroups or minority opinion.
Absolutely. As we have no disagreement there; we have no need to discuss that point. I am objecting to your particular arguments against Christianity as invalid or irrelevant or equally applicable to atheists, or all of the above.
Your final portion of the above reply has left me somewhat bewildered, but not chagrined. Clearly, as I stated earlier, you did not understand the nature of the piece that Farrell Till asked me to write.
That may be, but by the same token, I don't think you have adequately thought through the implications of your language and various claims, and how a Christian would rationally perceive what you assert, nor how it becomes a larger issue than your own odyssey, by its very nature and the language that you have used; also the various contradictions involved that I believe I have spotlighted.
It was to be a personal account, not an exercise in theological academia.
You say that (and I am not accusing you of insincerity), but I haven't found this to be the case, as I read it.
While you're trying to read it as a thesis,
I'm reading it according to the usual rules of English grammar and meaning, and logic. Since this is a public piece, it is susceptible to critique.
it is but the honest, personal ramblings of a simple man who has lived life on both sides of the border between religion and reality.
Note how religion is set in opposition to "reality." Very nice turn of phrase there. How would you feel if I said that "I was an atheist, and then I discovered reality and became a Christian," as if atheism were merely fantasy with no rational basis whatsoever? I assume that you know that one of the most basic definitions of mental illness is a denial of reality. So are you proposing that all Christians are mentally ill, having lived in an "unreal" world?
I was not trying to elucidate the reasons why religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are unworthy of belief by rational human beings.
That doesn't follow from your excessive language.
I will leave that up to each who makes the journey of discovery for himself.
If you were really doing that, then you would leave out all the sweeping condemnations, and implications that many or most Christians are ignoramuses and simpletons, wouldn't you?
That you find this simple paragraph referenced above to be "wholly insufficient for its purpose" does not concern me in the least. I didn't claim, and never intended, that this paragraph, nor the work as a whole, achieve what you have tried to make it do.
Then I say that your language is improperly suited to the task you set out to achieve, and the whole piece ought to be re-written, or removed, as contrary in its language to your stated purposes.
Then you write, "Either the author doesn't comprehend these points of logic, or he wishes to merely explain his own gross intellectual deficiencies and ignorance in matters of religion, in which case the article is wrongly titled (being much more about himself than about religion per se). I don't claim that he is being merely a clever propagandist, utilizing illogical axioms for his purposes (but this would be a possibility, too)."
While I wasn't a 4.0 student in Logic at the university,
I think you could have been a 2.0 student in logic (I believe I was a 3.0 student in that course), and avoided the many logical errors I have discovered in your argument.
neither was I a failure in the class. I understand the points of logic that you infer, but they were not integral to my article, and so were not included in that account.
I agree; logic was often left out of the picture in your account.
As to my gross intellectual deficiencies and ignorance in religious matters, I had hoped that I had put those aside when I stopped believing in old men in the sky
Technically, God has no age, as He had no beginning and will have no end. He is outside of time, in orthodox Christian understanding. Therefore, it is illogical to refer to Him as "old" since that is a strictly temporal understanding of a being who progresses from youth to old age. This isn't the case with God at all. Without time, there is no relative progression of a living being. God doesn't change. He simply is. So chalk this up to another misunderstanding on your part as to what Christian belief involves. Maybe you thought God the Father had a long beard and sat in a rocking chair, too, or that He looked like Michelangelo's representations of Him?
and angels and saviors and all other fairy tales.
That's a nice touch. All Christian belief is "fairy tales." More infantilism . . .
I am not saying in inference that those who still believe in such things are intellectually deficient or ignorant,
Oh, of course not. Who would ever get that impression?
only that I would personally have to be disingenuous and intellectually dishonest to go on professing belief in something which my own personal path of rationalism has convinced me is untrue.
Of course, but that doesn't give you a license to mock the beliefs of others as infantile, mere wish projections, "fairy tales," "old men in the sky," and so forth.
I have been called many things, but "clever propagandist" is not one of them until now.
I'm afraid you still haven't been called one, because I didn't do so, either. What I wrote was the following:
I don't claim that he is being merely a clever propagandist, utilizing illogical axioms for his purposes (but this would be a possibility, too).I specifically denied that I was calling you this ("I don't claim . . ."). I only suggested that it was a "possibility." And that was because -- frankly -- I found the arguments such commonly-used ones, not out of any desire to question your motivations at all.
I blush at the quasi compliment. Clever would be a nice thing to be, and can only hope that someday I may achieve that status. But I am not, and won't be, a propagandist. I really don't care if everyone, or no one, believes as I do. It doesn't make me safer or less secure either way.
Then why write the article? For what purpose? To show that you are rational, but a billion and a half Christians aren't?
It neither puts money into, nor takes money out of, my pocket. It doesn't make me happy nor sad, proud nor chagrined, right nor wrong either way.
So why write it? For what purpose does another human being read this article of yours? You claim that you aren't trying to convince anyone of your belief, because you "really don't care." Okay, I believe you, but I don't know, then, what you were trying to achieve with the article. If you really think Christians are so gullible, infantile, and irrational, then it stands to reason that you have a desire to persuade them to reject that position. Yet you claim that you're not trying to do that. I confess that I am out to sea trying to understand how this all fits together in your mind.
When one has a truly personal belief, arrived at through his own unique yearning, searching, studying, and has endured tears and laughter, doubt and certainty, acceptance and rejection in the journey of acquisition, he doesn't need, nor want, converts to his way of thinking.
But you seem to have a great need to go on and on about how rational your belief is, and how silly and irrational Christian belief is. You go after psychological tendencies (real or imagined) rather than discuss the actual philosophical issues at stake.
My main argument is that we are each responsible for our own beliefs. I will not allow my beliefs to be a carbon copy of someone else's, and for that reason I reject all affiliations with atheist or humanist groups or individuals. Their journey is their own and mine is mine.
Yet you argue precisely as many many atheists have through the centuries. You may claim that you are relatively or exceptionally unique in your thought-processes, but virtually no one is. There's nothing new under the sun. You and I are both recycling ideas that have been held by many before our time, and will be held by many after we die. We're no more unique than one grain of sand on an ocean shore.
I can no more understand why they are atheists than I can understand why you are not one. I only know, and am only responsible, for my own philosophy and do not flinch from that responsibility.
Then why are we doing this, if there is no possibility of you even understanding any other position? Now we are beyond the realization we both have of the virtual impossibility of convincing the other, to this notion that even better understanding is a futile effort.
On the other hand, I am not a militant, nor am I evangelical in my atheism. I will gladly discuss it with anyone who wants to listen, but I will not waste my time trying to bring others to my point of view.
So again, I ask, if the article explained why you are an atheist, does that not immediately imply that it might offer reasons for others to also become atheists? If not, then again, I ask, why does the article exist at all? Is it the intellectual equivalent of an explanation of why one person likes the color blue the best, and another likes green? Or why one prefers Beethoven to Mozart? If so, then your sweeping judgments and uncharitable characterizations of Christians are most out of place, for we don't condemn others who like vanilla ice cream better than chocolate. That's their choice, and no one denies the validity of those choices. You can't have it both ways. If everything is radically individualized and subjective, then you have no grounds to go after Christians as ignorant, infantile, simpletons, as you do (and which has been fashionable for over 200 years). You should simply live and let live. But as is so often the case (for Christian and non-Christian alike) we rarely live up to our stated ideals, either morally or intellectually, do we? As so often, the actual words of your paper do not synthesize very well with how you now characterize it. You claim to not care about what others believe. Yet you write, near the end:
When one defends, propounds, and propagates such error as fact and refuses to examine other information objectively, it is intellectually reprehensible, and I will challenge that type of belief every time.So hey; if you want to challenge these beliefs "every time," then I am more than within my rights (and duties as a Christian apologist) to critique your reasoning. This is clearly more than just your personal odyssey. That's fashionable to say in the current zeitgeist, but virtually no one of any belief ever truly lives up to it. They can't help trying to convince others of what they think is true, in some fashion.
Lastly, even the editor's note at the end of your paper reveals the intentions here, which go far beyond only your own report. Note the usual jaded generalizations. Your story was immediately seized upon as typical of many (emphasis added):
He is a former Church-of-Christ preacher, and he tells a familiar story. He grew up believing what he had been taught in his childhood, but when he engaged in serious Bible studies as an adult, he found things in it that made it impossible to continue believing what he had been taught as a child. Many former fundamentalists will say that the Bible is its own worst enemy. If we could just get more Christians to study this book that they claim to believe in so much, the inevitable result would be fewer Christians. The Christian religion thrives on ignorance of the very book that is its foundation.Now we are ignorant of our own sacred book, too. Atheists know more about it than we do. This is an old tired theme (I've encountered it and refuted it myself, many times, showing how atheist biblical exegesis comes to the most ludicrous, irrational conclusions). All we have to do is honestly study the Bible and we would leave Christianity in droves. If you can't see how this is both severely insulting and ridiculous, then explaining it would certainly be a futile effort.
I think this is a good place to stop at this time. If you wish to respond, which I assume that you would, I will further discuss those issues you raise about this reply. I will also continue my response to your critique within the next day or two, as time permits.
Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Nothing personal at all is intended in the above criticisms; I am only interested in flaws in your argument.
Thanks for the reply to what I have written in rebuttal so far. I am sorry not to be able to supply you with a worthy intellectual foil for your apologist position, but I'll do the best I can whether you find what I write to be comprehensible or not.
First I will reply to your latest response, posted on you website, to what I have written thus far, as referenced above. I am not going to belabor it too much but will continue to write from my stream of consciousness method, for better or worse. I will then continue to respond to your original critique to my article.
You say in your latest response that you don't find my idea of a 'personal' article, as I contend my original to have been, to be coherent. Without trying to sound totally flippant I can only say that I don't really care about your ability to cohere my claim with the way you choose to read the article. You make an assumption as to my motives by putting your own personal methodology and prejudices onto my article, and as a reader, that is your right to do. It is also you right to critique the article. But you exercising those rights does not mean that you are right and that I am wrong. Hopefully I have not, nor will I, impute motives onto you and your apologist viewpoint which you don't intend, and only ask the same courtesy. Whether you grant such a courtesy or not really doesn't matter, but it would help to elevate our discussion to a more civilized tone.
You seem to have taken extreme umbrage at many of my word and phrase choices, and claim that they undermine my rationale and logic. I can only say that I wrote this at a time and frame of mind that was unique and that if I were to write the same article today it would be written differently. I would not disavow my philosophy. On the contrary. I would be comfortable with it and would delineate it in a more fleshed out way. Likewise, I would not disavow my inner feelings that run contrary to any belief in theism, but I would write it in a less impassioned manner. Chalk up my original to an overzealousness that was not properly in check in some areas of word usage.
Then again, and I hate to keep bringing this up, for clearly I have not adequately gotten the point across to you, but this article was written as Farrell Till suggested and approved. It was not a polemic, it was not a thesis, it was not scholarly, as evidenced by the lack of any scholarly footnotes or citations. It was simply my first person account of having put aside one way of thinking and one worldview for another. I was asked to not make it an academic study as the Skeptical Review was filled with such articles in every issue.
I can see from your confusion that you do not recognize the literary license which I used in many places in the article, writing in second and third person while thinking in the first person. Again, you are trying to read it as a condemnation of others while it was an explanation of what I had seen, felt, believed, and from the shadows of which I had escaped. The other error which seems to have you confused since you mention it so frequently, is that the article was written for a specific audience, and not intended for a broad audience, much less a Christian one. That is why it was in the Skeptical Review, which you yourself observe, "The non-Christian audience (which makes up probably at least 80% of the readership of Skeptical Review, if not far more) will eat this stuff up, and love it." Like almost any writer, I wrote to the audience, not to convince, not to unduly ruminate, but to share with those who could relate, just as others had shared their stories with me.
I believe that the above facts, whether you believe them or not, understand them or not, or whatever your response, pretty much invalidates a lot of your further points, but I will address a few in a gesture of fairness to try to understand the ground upon which you are building your criticism. However, just to reiterate, since I don't seem to have had any luck at explaining this in a way that you can believe or understand, I wrote what I was asked to write by the editor of the magazine. I wrote for an audience who I took to be nearly unanimous in their having escaped the bonds of theism, and as you have said, constitutes 80% or more of that readership. Finally, I engaged in a literary technique that would not be valid in a thesis or other scholarly work, but which is used a great deal in general literature; I wrote a first person account largely in the second and third person. Grammatically incorrect, perhaps, but a style that is widely used.
You ask why this article exists if it is not intended to change people's minds or to attack theism or Christianity in general. Hopefully this further elucidation of the facts I have tried to explain before will help to answer that question. If not, then please seek clarification from the magazine and its editor for it was they who saw fit to publish it, and in fact, to ask for the article in the first place.
I will thus plead guilty of using a poor prose style. Likewise, I will plead guilty to writing a piece at the direction of the editor who had asked for an article of this exact type. And I will finally plead guilty of writing to a narrow audience in a magazine which largely serves that particular segment to which it was addressed. I will defend myself against your broad and specific charges that are contrary to those constraints.
You ask how I would feel if you applied some of my terminology and viewpoints to my beliefs. First of all, you are certainly free to do so and it wouldn't bother me in the least. You can attack my non-god in any way you like and it does me no harm. Since I don't technically have a 'belief', but rather the lack of one, it would mean nothing. You can even attack my philosophy, which I feel is largely objectivist, with a smattering of other viewpoints thrown in on select issues. I do not feel attacked because someone disagrees with me. Neither do I feel compelled to do battle under such circumstances. It is interesting to engage in an intellectual discussion with those who have different viewpoints, if for not other reason than to solidify my own resolve that my way is the right way for me. And I reiterate, for me.
A final comment about this response you recently posted. After I had said that I really don't care if anyone or no one believes as I do, you asked, "So why write it? For what purpose does another human being read this article of yours?"
I really have no idea why anyone would read it. I really don't care why they would or wouldn't. I wrote it because I had been asked to write it and I suppose was somewhat flattered by that fact. I wrote it because I felt like doing it. I wrote it because I like to write. There are probably a lot of reasons, but converting anyone to my viewpoint was not among them.
If I had written this article about how I decided not to be a fan of the Chicago Cubs any longer, it wouldn't have been with an idea to convert other Cub fans away from this brand of quasi religion. I might have pointed out the futility of having been a Cubs fan and of coming to the conclusion that I could no longer support their ineptitude nor those who reveled in the fandom of that futility. I am sure that those who read it and were never Cub fans would have agreed with the end premise but could not have related to the journey that led to that decision. I am likewise sure that those who had fallen away as Cub loyalists after their own personal journeys of discovery would have seen common ground between my article and their experiences, and undoubtedly would have noted many differences as well. Those who would have screamed the loudest would have been those who still worshipped at the altar of Wrigley Field. How dare I attack their intellect, their maturity, etc.
Hoping that I have not overdone or oversimplified the sports analogy, this is largely parallel to the article which I did write, and with the strength of your own personal convictions, you attack what I have written just as a good Cubs fan would have attacked the hypothetical article. It's part of our human nature to pick those things in our lives about which we feel passionately and then to defend those passions against any attack or perception of an attack, no matter how slight the actuality of that attack might be.
I will send this along to answer these issues you raised, and will send a further point by point analysis of your original critique within the next day or two.
You are picking and choosing very carefully what you wish to respond to, and making broad statements that don't help to advance the discussion along, precisely because they are not specific and interactive enough. There are massive logical problems and worldview clashes here that cannot be gotten over without much further discussion. In the meantime, we're virtually two ships passing in the night, as the proverb goes. You claim I don't understand your reasoning; I say the same about you, vis-a-vis mine. Good dialogue requires that both parties truly understand the other.
In my original article, I next laid out a little more sophisticated view of god. As one matures in age, he should likewise mature in intellect and understanding. Within that paragraph I am merely delineating the fact that this god often takes on the role of a grandfather-like presence in the lives of those who are raised in the faith. This was certainly true in my case and the cases of many others with whom I grew up.
I don't deny that. I maintain that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and to the extent that it is in some cases, the same sort of deficiency is equally applicable to atheists. I don't see much use for this "pop psychoanalysis." You obviously do, so you keep using it.
You reply to this comment with, "I see nothing intrinsically implausible or unreasonable in that, per the above. Atheists are the ones who are more irrational, by dismissing the possibility or existence of God simply because their earthly fathers were scoundrels. One bad father has nothing whatsoever to do with the classic philosophical question of God's existence."
Again, you play the role of psychoanalyst, pretending that you know the root cause of atheism, that being hatred or loathing of one's father.
Not really. As I explained above, I am simply turning the tables on you. I am only criticizing atheists who have reasoned in this sort of utterly fallacious way. I think the "root causes" of atheism are many: probably dozens, not one simple explanation. I would never show the intellectual contempt and condescension towards your worldview, that many of your brethren exhibit towards mine. I know too much about both people and ideas to do that.
And again you are wrong to generalize, as is normally the case in generalities.
But I wasn't doing that. I was turning the tables on one common atheist argument (which is exactly what Paul Vitz did, too).
If my lack of belief in a god had anything to do with having a scoundrel for a father, then I would never have come to atheism. My journey to atheism was an exercise in intellect, not an escape from a tormented childhood.
I wasn't discussing your own specific case, but the garden variety atheist "psychological crutch" so-called "argument" against theism.
I next wrote, "We also become aware of God's propensity for wrath, and we are told not to tempt him or displease him." Here again I am laying out an incremental growth of belief and understanding that was part of my own early nurturing and rearing. Your response is somewhat convoluted and tautological in its presentation. It is also so full of holes that I don't know where to begin.
I know the feeling, believe me . . .
In an attempt to keep it brief, I will say your analogy of your god and a father whose son wreaks havoc with his property is an interesting one. I suppose it depends on one's point of view as to whether chaos was visited upon the property by the wayward son, personally, or by a set of circumstances beyond his control, such as "acts of nature" or "acts of god". It would also be interesting to know if you believe that one who acts as an agent for your god, such as a pope or minister, or powerful world leader who professes belief in your god, always, sometimes, seldom, or never, acts in good faith with this god's property.
People fall short and play the hypocrite all the time. It's called sin, and original sin. It's called the flesh, the world, and the devil. It's called the fall. Does this surprise you? It's been said that original sin is the most manifestly demonstrable and proven of all Christian doctrines. :-)
For instance, G.W. Bush, a professed born again Christian invades Iraq who has never attacked the U.S., was not involved in any way in 9/11 terrorism that we can ascertain, and who were already powerless to act against us due to our sanctions and embargoes. Is that not defiling the property of this god?
The ethical justification of any particular war is always debated by conscientious folks. Hence, Christians and Catholics are debating the present one. Pacifism is not taught in the Bible or in mainstream Christianity. I've debated Catholic friends of mine on this war. I thought it was quite justified. My friend did not. But he's not a pacifist. He objected to this particular war as inconsistent with traditional Catholic just war theory.
Is Iraq not part of his creation?
Sure; so were Hitler and Stalin and Mao and all the other tyrants who killed millions of innocent people (also part of God's creation, last time I checked) before they were stopped (or not stopped, as in the last two cases). Stalin starved ten million Ukrainians in the 30s while the liberal newspaper men winked at his crimes and denied that they were happening, and affectionately referred to him as "Uncle Joe." Later he was our ally against another bloodthirsty murderer. Preborn children are part of His creation, too, but it seems that only traditional Christians are speaking out against their wholesale slaughter. Why is that? Occasionally you will get an ethically consistent atheist like Nat Hentoff, who will join us in our opposition to the butchery and genocide of the most helpless among us. They manage to be for the "littlest of guys" along with the "little guy," according to the (now almost nonexistent) traditional liberal emphasis on standing up for the innocent and the oppressed.
How about all of the Christian businessmen who rape, pillage and plunder the earth as if it were their own little sand box on the playground?
We are to be good stewards of what God has given us. I agree. That's why I think that when God grants a couple a child, that they ought to love it, not slaughter it on the altar of sexual freedom, personal convenience, and selfishness. After all, a human being is infinitely more valuable than a strip mine, right? Maybe they're even worth more than a whale!
Are they not defiling the creation of the god they profess to believe in?
Sometimes, yes, of course. But that pales in comparison to the massive genocide of child-killing that secularism, the sexual revolution, atheism, and situation ethics have brought us. The reasoning seems to be: "there are a lot of children around, so the value of new ones being conceived is less, and they can be disposed of." This is the "scarcity theory of value." Christians believe each person is infinitely valuable because they are made in the image of God and have an eternal soul. But if God is taken out of the equation, what gives a child inherent value? Obviously (however you would argue the ethics or claim inconsistency in practice), secularism has led to the culture of death, where mass murder is casually justified and people think little of it. Even full-term babies are now slaughtered (it's called "partial-birth abortion"). The child is delivered up to the neck and then scissors are inserted into the back of its neck and hos or her brains are removed. This is our liberal, secularized, compassionate society. We wouldn't even treat a baby pig or skunk in such a cruel, savage, heartless fashion. I prefer Christian morality, thank you.
I also find it odd that you would pretend to know the wellspring of my disbelief with your last sentence in this section: "I say that many of these common skeptical notions flow from simple prejudice and lack of solid thinking, rather than from detached reason and proper, fair analysis." Since you are critiquing my article, I can only suppose that you are referencing my personal journey of discovery, even if only parenthetically.
I'd have to look at the context again. I can only go by what you are saying, and yes, I see in you (rightly or wrongly) a great deal of prejudice against Christians and Christianity. You make many charges against my view, so I see this as a relatively small charge and matter.
If you wish to think that my philosophy is the result of prejudice or faulty thinking, that is your prerogative. When, however, you announce that premise to the world, I take exception with your doing so under the guise of an intellectual dissertation. I, and I alone, know how deep, how broad, how lengthy, and how exhaustive my search for truth has been.
When you start speaking about my beliefs and my worldview (beyond just yours), then you have the ethical and intellectual responsibility to do so accurately. Your journey is your own. I haven't judged your character or motivations, only your ideas. I can only criticize your stated viewpoint insofar as it is based on demonstrable falsehoods, such as (especially) how you have mischaracterized Christian beliefs in various ways. There are factual matters which can be debated, after all. As for "faulty thinking," I've shown over and over how your thought is incoherent and illogical (i.e., at those points where I criticize it). Readers can draw their own conclusions. If something is persistently incoherent and illogical, it ought to be rejected, as far as I am concerned. At the very least, some warning flags ought to come out. It's your side which is making flat-out stupid, entirely prejudicial statements like:
If we could just get more Christians to study this book that they claim to believe in so much, the inevitable result would be fewer Christians. The Christian religion thrives on ignorance of the very book that is its foundation.You either agree with this or not. If you do, I say you are being quite patronizing and condescending insofar as concerns Christianity. If not, then you can say so here, and render an objection to your editor, for having such a remark associated with your piece, as if you agree with it. You, too, have made similar remarks not much less prejudiced.(the editor's remark at the end of your article; emphasis added)
And that search brought me answers completely at odds with my subjective wishes at the start of this journey. I began my study to find the truth, and I thought the truth existed in the religion with which I was raised. I fought against the contrary evidences and put off the conclusions as long as I could. I finally had to give in to intellectual honesty and admit that god does not, never did, and probably never will, exist.
So you say. Others disagree. Nothing you have written leads me to accept this on a purely rational basis. In my opinion, you've provided no reason whatsoever for someone to believe that God doesn't exist. Granted, you have other reasons you haven't written about, but in what you have written, I don't find the slightest reason to overturn my belief in God. I don't deny that you sought truth, according to your own motivation and internal perception. I don't get into that. I assume people are operating in sincerity and good faith unless and until massive evidence to the contrary forces me to think otherwise. So that's not at issue.
That all which I held dear in those regards from my earliest youth was a fairy tale just like those written by the Brothers Grimm, or the Norse folklorists, or the African shamans.
Again, I've seen nothing in what you have provided us that would compel one to adopt such a conclusion.
You can think I entered this search with prejudices, and I did. Prejudices to prove that which I have come to know is not the truth.
Exactly. You eventually became prejudiced against your former beliefs (some true, some false), and this contributed to your drive to change your mind. Thank you.
You can think that it is the result of unclear thinking,
That's why I am doing this; showing that your thinking does not withstand proper rational and factual scrutiny.
but you did not pour over the thousands of books, articles, manuscripts, etc. that I read until my head hurt and my eyes burned from lack of sleep and reading in light unfit for the task.
You can read all the atheist and liberal Christian books in the world, but unless you can rationally defend that which you believe, it means little or nothing to anyone else.
Smugly think what you will, but I rest easy in the knowledge that you are wrong in your assumptions, and am even more comforted by the fact that I don't really care what you or anyone else thinks, or why.
For not "caring," you are sure putting a lot of effort into this; far more than I wish to myself, and I am a Christian and Catholic apologist, who certainly wants to persuade others of my viewpoint.
I next mentioned the concept of the trinity as it is understood by a young person, and unfortunately, all too many adults who likewise cannot grasp the concept. You go off trying to make it all seem so simple and my mention of it so trite and so non-understanding.
I didn't say the concept was simple (of course it isn't, neither is nuclear physics, calculus, or any number of true things), but that your breezy dismissal of it (showing very little comprehension of the doctrine) was.
Well that was the point. Again, this article was written and delineated at a different rate and with a different focus than that which you are
attempting to argue against. That's fine. I knew some people wouldn't understand it, and clearly you don't.
That's obviously becoming your standard response in cases where I call you on some logical or factual deficiency (I don't "understand" you). That's alright; readers are sharp enough to notice that. This is all part of the reasoning and critical process: one observes how people react when they have inadequate answers to give.
It is written, I will say it again, as a series of details of my own personal journey, and it is not written as an academic treatise or dissertation.
And it is untrue, however you characterize it. If you can't appeal to my ignorance or that of Christians (like your editor does), then you can appeal to your own, I suppose. You've done it several times now. It seems to me that if you've read "thousands of books, articles, manuscripts, etc.," (that's quite a few!), then at some point you should stop appealing to ignorance, and offer up some solid arguments that you can defend and not run from (by appealing to ignorance) when challenged. Or is that again irrelevant because your story applies only to you and no one else? Massive supposed Christian ignorance is objectionable but your own is fine and dandy because (as you tell us over and over) it remains yours alone, and so is no one else's business? That might apply to your own atheism, but again, when you start coming after my views, and those of Christians (the Holy Trinity, etc.), then it is a different ballgame, and we have every right to respond. As a Christian apologist, I also have a duty to do so, to protect Christians from false ideas that run contrary to our beliefs.
The baby steps of understanding that led me from a child with a "Jesus loves me" warm and fuzzy, to a teenager struggling to understand that which aged and learned theologians have debated for two millennia. You are not even addressing the issues in the manner in which they are written, but I'm the one who is non-logical, non-intellectual, with a scoundrel for a father,
When did I ever state that, pray tell? So now your miscomprehension of what I was even arguing obviously has you responding emotionally and non-rationally. Hopefully, we can get back to the real issues soon.
and with such an all consuming hatred for him that I am rebelling against the father figure of your god. Even if he does have a multi personality disorder.
More nonsense about my supposed arguments or beliefs . . . Clearly you can't handle having the tables turned on you, with regard to this "psychological crutch" issue. If so, I would suggest not using it next time. And maybe now you have an inkling of how it feels for Christians to be routinely subjected to this kind of asinine, second-guessing, condescending psychological "analysis." How does it feel, Bob? I don't even believe these things about you and your father. I was making strictly a general rhetorical reply to the atheist polemic. But we're literally regarded as infantile ignoramuses by so many oh-so-smart, smarter-than-thou atheists. I've demonstrated how that reasoning utterly fails; not that your father was a scoundrel or any of the nonsense above that you somehow wrongly think I was asserting.
Then I wrote in my original article, "Belief becomes a habit driven by fear of the unknown or the fear of rejection if we doubt or question, so our questions are internalized, and we begin to feel guilt."
To which you reply with more long distance psychoanalysis, "More pop-psychological pablum; unworthy of serious attention, as it is again merely assumed as some grand explanation for religious belief."
Not assumed, but lived.
Sure, you lived this, but it doesn't follow that all other Christians did, or that, furthermore, this is one reason of many to reject Christianity, or "religion," as your article describes it. Your past or present problems in emotion or belief are strictly your own. They have no bearing on the truth of falsity of anything, let alone Christianity, except as matters of fact about your own experience and past belief-system.
This is another personal part of my own youth, grasping for sense out of faith, understanding out of belief. I wouldn't know pop psychology pablum from oatmeal, though I do believe that many Christians make use of a lot of this sort of thing. Groups like Focus on the Family, Promise Keepers, and others are real big into the mass hysteria, mass psychology thing. Or is it mass psychosis?
Case in point. If submit that you should follow your own advice, whereby you lecture me for doing such quack analysis.
Next I wrote, "We now learn a more rigid set of moral values. We learn that thinking a wrong thing is the same as committing the act."
I don't want to sound like a broken record, but once again you respond to my particular, unique, personal growth of understanding as a young man, as though it were a generalized charge leveled at everyone.
Okay, so then you agree that it applies only to you and no one else, per my second comment back. Good! Great! Too bad, though, that you don't apply that consistently, because you can't help making wild general accusations, such as we just saw in the last reply (Focus on the Family, etc.)
You defend the concept of thinking a wrong thing as being equivalent with a wrong act by saying, "I think this is quite sophisticated ethics and psychology, and it is thoroughly Christian. But Mr. Hypes seems to think it is silly and unwarranted. I don't think he has adequately thought-through these issues. Or at least so it appears, going by this article alone."
That's the point. It is thoroughly Christian and it has held the social order back in Christian countries for centuries.
Oh, has it? That's a grand claim indeed.
A lot of people, most people in fact, think a thing from time to time that if committed would be a crime, or immoral, or hurtful, but if they don't do the thing and the thought passes on, no harm is done. Some Christians would have us believe that this thought is equivalent with the actual act. It isn't and no amount of nattering on your part will change that fact.
I see. Why, then, does the legal system require a greater penalty for a premeditated crime, than for one that wasn't planned beforehand? Why is manslaughter punished even less? For what reason? Have such laws also "held the social order back for centuries"? Obviously, an evil act committed is a greater sin that thinking about such an act only and not acting upon the thought or desire; yet the essence of the evil act is in the will to commit it, which precedes the act. That was Jesus' reasoning when He stated that to lust after a woman in your heart was to already commit adultery. And this is precisely because human beings are far more than mere animals. We think about things and have a will. We're not just robots who have no choice but to do what we do.
As to this whole subject, again, it is from my personal experience and my recall of how things came to fall into place for me as a young man searching for answers to my questions about faith and belief. If I have not adequately thought them through, it may be because I didn't have to do so. I did not write a thesis which made assumptions and offered proofs. I did not write a scholarly study of these topics too quickly discussed and passed over, nor was that the intent.
Okay; so you admit that your article does not offer solid reasons to be an atheist, or "proofs." That's a major concession; thanks. I could hardly ask for more, for my purposes! You didn't "have to" think things "through" in any "adequate" sense. Glad you said it, not me . . . Suddenly now, at least your own path to atheism doesn't strike one as all that reasoned or rational. Not that this surprises me . . . but for the many folks brainwashed by our school system and higher academia into thinking that secularists and atheists are always so sharp and smart and reasonable and that Christians are not (and indeed, supposedly opposed to reason, by nature), perhaps this comes as a great awakening (no pun intended).
When I next wrote, "The feelings of inadequacy wash over us, challenging the depth and the coldness of the baptismal immersion", you felt moved to mock that deeply personal moment in my teenage life. I did not feel that I was good enough to be given the grace that I was told this god would bestow upon me, and those feelings are the ones I address in this "poetic flourish" as you lamely call it.
Perhaps I misread that. If what you meant was that you didn't deserve God's grace at all, that is good, solid, orthodox Christianity. The trouble with the Church of Christ sect is that it doesn't believe in original sin, so the significance of baptism is greatly lessened.
You go on to make some sort of sociological point about inadequacy being tied to a social construction of one or more sorts. And then you say that to tie this "simplistically" to Christianity is ridiculous.
Read the paragraph immediately before the one above and you might see that it is your answer here which is simplistic in that you did not understand the tone, tenor, purpose, or much else about my article. It makes me wonder why you picked this article out of cyber space and felt so compelled to rebut it.
I will let the reader decide who understands whom better. We've been treated to spectacles like, for example, my alleged claim that you hated your father, and that this made you become an atheist . . .
My quote from Thoreau: "They think they love God! It is only his old clothes, of which they make scarecrows for the children. Where will they come nearer to God than in those very children?" is a deep, meaningful, and true statement. And it is in keeping with the purpose for my article. In that we are inculcated at a young age to fear this god or someone else's concept of this god, and yet it is the innocence of those children that is really god-like. I don't find it to be a particularly anti-religious viewpoint from Thoreau, nor did I offer it as any proof of such a viewpoint. It is merely what I feel is a truism and worthy of inclusion in this article. I'm sorry if you don't get it, or don't agree with it, or whatever. From my perspective it's worth more than all the words that will be uttered or propounded in the average church next Sunday, or the one after.
Thanks for your further clarification.
My statement, "Theists base their belief on faith, belief based on emotion and culturalization," is, again, based on my own life experiences and observations.
Exactly. Then please refrain from repeatedly projecting your own unique experience onto Christians en masse.
You don't get it and say as much in your convoluted reply to this simple sentence. You say that I assume that reason and intellect play little or no part in religious belief. Could you cite where I said that?
I've cited enough of your own words back to you, so why should I bother digging more quotes up (except that readers can see that you are again inconsistent)?
Oh, I might have hinted at it I suppose, or someone might interpret that I had such intentions in what I wrote. But no, you misunderstood what I was saying and then went off tilting at windmills thinking they were dragons, only they weren't even wind mills. This whole line of argument was erroneously elicited out of a simple experiential observation which I made.
Then you go on to castigate me for not using reason and intellect and boldly claim those areas as your own domain. Well, you certainly have used reason of a sort and what might pass for intellect,
So I have no intellect (only what "passes" for it)? Thanks for that compliment. Readers can decide if my argumentation been a mere masquerade of intellect, but not really so.
but by using them to respond to my simple little piece about a personal journey in search of the truth, it seems as though you've used all of those powers of logic and rationalism for naught. I would liken my article to a primer, a Bobbsey Twins story, or a piece of child prose, while you have attacked it with the full power and wrath of Christian intellect, and I am not using that phrase as an oxymoron.
You may not have intended this, but I thought those last two words were usually considered by atheists to be an oxymoron, and that Christians are quite ignorant people, unacquainted with the powers and joys of reason and intellect??!! After all (according to your illustrious editor), we don't even understand our own sacred book, and if we could only be brought to the light of the profound atheist understanding of the Bible, that we would leave in droves for the sunny, lofty fields of atheism?! Faith is, we are told (by you, among many others), outright antithetical to reason. Yet here I am using it???!!! Thanks for the left-handed compliment, by the way . . . If I must be criticized, I am quite proud to receive a complaint about using too much intellect.
But thank you for clarifying things by pointing out that you have been using reason and intellect. I shudder to think that this salient fact should go unnoticed in our exchange.
No problem . . . I should also think that your logical fallacies and factual inaccuracies ought not to go unnoticed, either, both for your sake, and that of our readers.
My paragraph, "When reason and rationale challenge that faith, then the reason can have no value and the rationale must be incorrect. Faith is irrefutable and errorless because it must be in order to validate all in which they believe" has also been misunderstood by you and you compound this error of understanding with your unnecessary attack on these simple words.
You say, "This is quite unfair as well. Everyone believes in some things without fully understanding them: no exceptions." First of all, it isn't unfair. It was my article and I said what applied to me.
Not in this instance (as in many others). The statement "faith is irrefutable, because . . . " is a general one, not applicable to you alone. At least that is how English grammar (and logic) works. For it to be understood by the reader as applying to you alone, it should have read (it seems to me) something like: "my [own, personal] faith was irrefutable, because . . . " No one would take that as applying to faithful people in general, whereas your statement is quite easily interpreted in that way. Whether you intended that or not is your problem, because we are accustomed to interpreting words and sentences according to commonly accepted meanings of words, and English grammar and syntax.
What I had lived, and what I'd seen, and what I'd known others to live through.
See, now there you go. You want to have your cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, you keep appealing to this as your own experience, and so you object (several times now) when I interpret your arguments as applying to others. Yet you can't even object to my supposed irrational, mistaken interpretation without stumbling into the fact that you also had others in mind. And so it turns out that I wasn't that far off, after all. You are generalizing and trying to speak to more Christians than just yourself. But why should I care about one circle of Christian friends, anyway? If they were mostly Church if Christ (Christians usually hang around those in the same denomination), they will all tend to approach this matter in the same general way (itself not a conventional Christian one, as Church of Christ is highly sectarian and exclusivistic, and far out of the mainstream of Christianity, and grossly heretical in some areas, such as in its denial of original sin). So the experience of 10 or 100 or 1000 of your fundamentalist friends still does not prove a general reality about Christians (though I readily agree that many Christians are quite scandalously ignorant and unsophisticated in their faith; I simply deny that the nature of Christianity is such that such things are intrinsic to it -- as argued earlier).
It's only unfair if it is directed at someone else whose circumstances I don't know. Kind of like your unfair assumptions about my father hatred, lack of logic, intellectual vacuity, etc., which pepper your critique.
For the last time, I never said you hated your father (what I do say is that it is ridiculous and foolish for you to come to this silly conclusion, based on anything I ever wrote); critiques of lack of logic apply only to individual arguments, not your entire brain and thought processes, and the characterization of "intellectual vacuity" is also a great overreaction to strong critiques of your argument (not your brain or mental or intellectual capacities). If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Though I do agree with your statement that everyone believes in some things they don't understand, my agreement is so full of caveats and exceptions that I won't go into them unless you want further elucidation on these matters. Suffice it to say, as an example, I don't know how or when the universe came into being, but I do believe that it did so without any outside intervention from some pre-existent cosmic magician.
Oh, I see. So you have made atoms your god(s). They can do everything that the Christian believes God can do. But somehow that is more "rational" and "believable" than theism. I wrote an entire paper about this, partially tongue-in-cheek, called The Atheist's Boundless Faith in Deo-Atomism ("The Atom-as-God"). Instead of believing in one God, you (much like primitives in many cultures and their idols) believe in trillions of them: each capable of the extraordinary things that the Christian God can do.
But see, instead of inventing a story to explain it, or grabbing hold of some millennia old folklore to explain it,
Or (to return your polemical favor) some Johnny-come-lately atheist mythology and fanciful thinking . . .
I'm perfectly o.k. saying, "I don't know, and I really don't care."
Back to that, again. If you cared so little, then you wouldn't "care" enough to make garden-variety swipes at Christianity ("cosmic magician," "folklore," etc.), as if we have no rational basis other than adoption of ancient old wives' tales and children's fairy tales for what we believe. This gets old. It's more of the smug, "smarter-than-thou" atheist mentality that is so prevalent. You don't "care" about this and that, so you say, yet you insist on making fun of Christians and our supposed sublime ignorance at every opportunity. Then it stands to reason that you "care" enough about your belief that Christianity is false to mock and deride it at every opportunity. It's almost as if you have certain mantras that you repeat; which are fashionable in the atheist community (not to mention, in postmodernist thought). You're taught to mouth these platitudes, so as to appear above the fray of all these silly debates and concerns that many of the rest of us have entered into. You "don't care" about any of this stuff, yet here you are, spending many hours carefully responding to my critique. So I don't buy it. I don't see that your rhetoric matches your behavior or your expressed beliefs. Now it's altogether likely that no one has ever confronted you with this anomaly before, so you (like all of us at some point or other) simply haven't thought about it. That's why dialogue is good. But unfortunately, you don't seem to appreciate very much the opportunity to have your beliefs challenged, so that you can strengthen your own opinions and make them more solid than they were before, by being forced to defend them at every turn.
The explanation, if there is one, cannot be verified by experimentation or absolute evidences, therefore, your viewpoint on this would be an opinion, while probably opposite of my own, no more provable to an unbiased observer.
That's right. I completely agree that neither view can be proven. But I also believe that both are equally reasonable and require roughly the same amount of faith to accept. That's where the atheist will usually differ: they will insist that the Christian view is gullible and credulous (and unscientific), whereas the atheist cosmology is eminently reasonable (and of course, harmonious with science). They always have to attack the theistic and Christian ability to reason and think. It's simply part of the ethos. And so you must speak of "cosmic magicians" and "folklore" when describing theistic or non-materialist cosmology. You can't help but be condescending. You have to use loaded terms. It's too much a part of atheist culture and thinking to avoid patronizing theists and especially Christian theists (with fundamentalists being the very incarnation and quintessential examples of Christian folly).
You say, "The author must know that his statements are far too broad if he has met any theists at all (folks like philosophers, scientists, etc.). if he knows this, then he is obligated to not absurdly generalize, as he is doing."
No, my statements are not broad. They are narrow.
Narrow-minded? Just teasing . . .
They are down to a first person narrative. And when you claim that I am absurdly generalizing, you only further compound what has been obvious throughout my reading of your rebuttal. You have not grasped what I was saying or how I was saying it. But then it is not incumbent on me to write so that you or anyone else understands it. I only have to write so that one person might understand it, and from other responses I have gotten from this article, I can honestly say that you are the only one to come to my attention who hasn't grasped it.
I see.
I'm sorry that I forced you to go into a screed about the public school system with my mention of how children's minds are molded at young ages to accept those things that defy critical evaluation. Again, this is something I was on the receiving end of for a long time as a child and beyond. And it is true. The vast majority of supplicants in any religion, cult, creed, or whatever, were raised in families and/or communities that believed the same things.
Which is also true of atheists, of course . . .
Like it, don't like, argue against it, I don't care, it happens all too often and is a primary reason why religion is such a self perpetuating affliction of mankind. And I use the term affliction without prejudice against those so afflicted. I no more hold them to blame for that than I do someone who has a chronic disease. They are to be pitied, not vilified.
Yes, especially the atheists raised in those environments . . .
My next sentence, "They either live in judgment of anyone who does not believe as they do, or they begin to question their own values," is more of my personal observation, not a general indictment, per se, of Christians or Christianity, which you correctly point out.
I particularly agree with your statement here: "These are simply attitudinal and cultural problems that need to be avoided by all and sundry." I couldn't agree more, even though I know many people who fit my indictment, and did so myself to at least some extent for a long period of time.
I then wrote, "What I thought of as an honest and critical look at the religion I had embraced all of my life had gone on for years as a halfhearted effort." You replied, "I can see that. Would that the author would give us some rational argumentation, since he claims to have attained such an exalted state of enlightened reason, due to his having cast off the shackles of antiquated and groundless religion."
In answer to your criticism, I apologize that I wrote the article in the manner it was requested and that this fact was not made clear within the article, apparently. At some point after my defense of this article is completed, I would be happy to offer some of the rationale for my deconversion. Not in an attempt to bring others to my point of view, but to answer the charges that I have not based my reasons for atheism in rationalism. Just because I did not reveal them within the context of an article which did not require such revelations does not mean that they don't exist.
That's right. But I can hardly reply to an argument I haven't seen, can I?
Then I continued in the article: "I wanted to find the truth, yet I wanted that truth to support that in which I had always believed. In other words, I was frontloading my search by trying to find corroborating evidences, not by searching for the real truth."
You correctly point out that, "We all tend to do that because we all have our existing beliefs, and they inevitably influence our further searches. This is why we must compare and contrast: looking at the most able proponents of any given position (not the worst ones) and make up our own minds as to truth."
I get the feeling from this that you believe that I must have misled myself by listening to the worst proponents of the theological positions which I studied.
It's usually predominantly theological liberals in these cases (i.e., those who no longer believe in the positions they are supposedly still advocating). I would bet quite a bit of money that this was true in your case. This will obviously provide one with a jaded view of Christianity: if the best orthodox apologists and theologians are not also sought out, to provide a balance.
I suppose it depends if you see particular theologians or historians as good or bad in this context if the above statement would be true.
That's right. And that always comes down to one's prior opinion or disposition. No one can avoid this.
I have a hunch that we would disagree diametrically on who was propounding good theology and who was teaching bad theology.
So do I. I only suggest to people who are working through the issues, that they read the best proponents of each position they are considering, not just one side. If they read one side, then they will obviously come out on that side, if they are prepared to change their mind in the first place. If they read both sides, then at least they have eliminated the problem of inherent bias that each advocate has for their position, and can make a decision with much fuller and adequate knowledge on which to do so.
And there's nothing wrong with that. It is merely more of this personal viewpoint issue which I have raised repeatedly.
If you believe there is no one truth "out there" to be discovered, then you would believe that, yes. But you are sure certain about what isn't true, aren't you?
Actually much of my rejection of religion in general, and Christianity as my particular brand of religion, came from the bible itself and required little or no outside proponents at all. That the bible is the basis for our knowledge of what Christianity is makes it central to the argumentations as to its content. More about this if you want to pursue this as a separate and seminally important issue.
No thank you. I've seen all I need to see about the merits of atheist biblical exegesis. It's some of the worst I have ever seen: and that includes goofy fundamentalist interpretations.
I then quote the Maxim of Freethought and write of how it helped free me to look more objectively for the truths I sought: "He who cannot reason is defenseless; he who fears to reason has a cowardly mind; he who will not reason is willing to be deceived and will deceive all who listen to him." This struck home to me personally, even though I am sure it does not move you in any appreciable manner.
It doesn't? You're "sure" it doesn't? That's strange you would think that, since I agree entirely, wholeheartedly with this sentiment. You are the one who has discovered it and changed your mind. I've always believed similarly, as long as I thought about anything at all. The thinking Christian has no objection to reason. It's what is considered reasonable and what isn't, and why, where the disagreement with atheists (and other non-Christians) comes in. In other words, the argument isn't over the validity and goodness of reasoning itself, but over the truth and falsity of particular premises.
I realized my cowardice to recognize and admit the truth as I was discovering it to be, and resolved to overcome that weakness. I threw myself anew into research, but with a new approach. Your reply to this is not at all unexpected given the tone of some of your other writings which I have perused.
Nor have you surprised me much at all, as I continue to reply . . .
You said, "All this shows is that Mr. Hypes' own Churches of Christ version of Christianity was devoid of reason; not at all that Christianity, period, or theism, are devoid of reason. So I have been given nothing whatsoever here to cause me to cease believing in God or Christianity. All this piece can accomplish, as far as I am concerned, is to give comfort and solace to other atheists who are former Christians, so that they can rationalize their loss of faith and feel good about themselves (much as testimonies of conversion serve in many Christian communities). Ironically, then, the author falls back on the same sort of non-rational mere emotionalism and sentimentality that he purports to be criticizing. Touting reason, he continues to communicate nonrationally when 'explaining' his rejection of Christianity."
This reply to my earlier point is long and multifaceted so I will try to respond concisely and to stick to a couple of major points I would like to defend. I can only say to the issue of reasoning as it pertains to my former denomination, that it is probably more reasonable than some and certainly no less so than many others.
That's how it perceives itself, since it spends much of its time denying the validity of all other Christian denominations.
Your issues with denominationalism of any sort other than your own which I have read outside of this particular piece seem to make your writings more of an apologetic for Catholicism than an honest critique of Christianity itself.
Bingo! (no pun intended). I'm a Catholic apologist. But I'm also a Christian apologist when Protestant-Catholic issues are not in play (as presently). I have many dozens of articles which don't discuss Catholic distinctives. In fact, I've written two books as a general Christian apologist, as opposed to a Catholic one.
And that's alright. It's your blog and you're entitled to your opinion. I, however, find any religion to be basically lacking in reason
Like I said: atheists always have to judge basically all Christians and their religions as unreasoning, irrational ignoramuses. I've always marveled at this, because of how uncharitable and condescending it is. But apparently it is part and parcel of atheist self-understanding. Atheists seem to have a great need to put down the reasoning capabilities of those who differ from them. I submit that this might perhaps suggest a bit of intellectual insecurity and lack of confidence in one's own position.
so would concur in your assessment that the denomination in which I found myself lacked reason, but then I go a few steps further and say that, in my opinion, your denomination also lacks reason, as do all others.
Of course . . .
If my article, as you suggest, gives comfort and solace to other atheists or those who are seeking a path similar to that which I took, then I might have accomplished something worthwhile. The world is full of Christian viewpoint. Everywhere from newspaper editorial pages, to broadcasting, to book publishing, to the man on the street pontificating about issues that relate to religion. If an atheist or an agnostic or one who simply doesn't know where to turn on these issues is touched by something I have written, then I'm o.k. with that. Not that I want them to stop their own search for truth with something I have written, nor for them to believe me without their own examination of these issues.
This shows once again, that any article of this type is far more than merely a personal account. That's what I've been maintaining from the beginning, yet oddly, you have been objecting to that.
Finally as to the above complex reply you offered, you say that I fall back to non-rational emotionalism which I have previously criticized. You say that while I tout reason, I am being nonrational in my explanation. I agree with your assessment to a degree after rereading what I wrote at that time. When I wrote this article I wasn't all that far removed from having still been a theist. Old habits are hard to break and I fell back somewhat on one of theism's major defenses of itself, emotionalism. I apologize for backsliding by using this form of argumentation.
Thank you. No offense, but frankly, I don't see how you have progressed all that much in the interim . . .
I will say though, that the intent of the paragraph in question wasn't to be either reasonable nor unreasonable, just to present the truth as it happened to me. That quote did energize my search for truth into a new avenue of investigation. An avenue that held truths I was previously hesitant to admit knowledge of or to increase my knowledge from this venue. If that is nonrational then I plead guilty to the charge without any embarrassment, for it led to this place of rationalism where I dwell today.
I only regret that you thought rational thinking and Christianity were at odds. If you could have been disabused of that false notion, perhaps you would still be a Christian today. And (if you followed your denomination's thinking), you would be saying I wasn't one, because I am a Catholic. :-)
Because we might have chosen a questionable path at different junctures of our journey, once the destination is reached it is of little significance. Moving on. I next wrote a longer paragraph than usual delineating how biblical literalism and the inerrancy doctrine has led to cultism, denominationalism, sectarian hypocrisies and prejudices, and other negatives in our society as a whole.
Not really. Historically speaking, it was Protestantism's change of the principle of authority: from Church, Tradition, and Bible, to Bible Alone as the only infallible authority, that immediately led to sectarianism, which has been continuing ever since. That hadn't happened prior to the 16th century. There was one major split (the Orthodox) and a few lesser ones. Now we are blessed with many thousands of contradictory groups and hundreds of theologies, thanks to the new Protestant principle.
[the preceding is the only instance in this "dialogue," I believe, where I have specifically written as a Catholic, rather than as a generic Christian apologist, because -- from a Catholic perspective -- the subject matter demanded it, and it was required to refute your false claim]
You responded by saying this is a jaded argumentation and pointing out that the extremes of historical Christianity are not reasons to reject the religion in today's world. You are right to some degree. Inquisitions, crusades, and other prejudicial and sectarian excesses of the past may not be part of Christianity today, though those excesses cannot be whitewashed nor forgotten, and they still dwell within the worldview of many Christians who feel a need to judge the rest of the world by their narrow standards. On the other hand, I was not speaking only of historical anomalies. I mentioned the eccentricities of the Amish, the snake handlers, and those who refuse medical treatment as conditions of faith within their particular sects. And what I said about these sects, or cults if you will, is that they are based in literal interpretations of what their adherents believe to be an inerrant bible. That statement is true.
I think there is a great deal of truth in it. I only object (as always) to a broad judgment of the Bible or of Christianity-at-large, because of sectarian excesses of relatively small groups. It's simply fallacious reasoning. And there are much larger issues of exegesis, hermeneutics, etc. that need to be dealt with. Snake handlers and those who refuse medical treatment comprise only a tiny, tiny amount of the whole of Christians (and Jehovah's Witnesses, who refuse blood transfusions, are not even correctly classed as Christians, as they deny the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and other orthodox Christian doctrines). No generalization based on such dinky groups carries much weight or force at all. Nor can the Bible itsef be blamed for stupid interpretations of it.
If I erred in any way in that paragraph it was by not inserting a caveat that I was speaking of those anomalous actions and beliefs that set these Christians apart from others of different sects. Again, I have personal history with people with these and other beliefs, all of which come under the banner of Christianity, and their eccentricities and sometimes foolish behavior and beliefs made clear to me that religion can twist those who are vulnerable by extolling the empowerment that one can gain by believing in some particular versions of biblical literalism.
Sure, some false tenets in the religious arena can twist some people gullible and foolish enough to believe them; of course. I've made it my life's work to oppose these kinds of false ideas. I wrote an article against the silly notions of "God always heals" in 1982; it's on my website. I've attacked biblical literalism in interpretation, and defended the traditional fourfold method of biblical exegesis (hyper-literalism is largely a Protestant fundamentalist error). I haven't written about snake-handling, but certainly utterly condemn that as an excess and sad misapplication of one biblical passage. None of this, though, has the remotest relevance to the larger questions of whether the Bible and Christianity are true.
You went on to say, "But, you see, his background is not every Christians' experience or rationale for their belief. And he is foolish to think that it is. This is the most fundamental flaw of his article. He hasn't uttered a word about Catholicism or Orthodoxy or High Church Anglicanism. Those things don't even enter his radar screen. Instead, he is on a crusade to excoriate his own past fundamentalism."
Bingo! That is exactly what I was doing.
But -- contrary to your repeated claims -- you do not stick strictly to that plan. You can't help but venture out into general criticisms of Christianity as a whole.
As I said before, Farrell Till contacted me to write an article of just such a nature. One which would resonate with the readers of the Skeptical Review who had escaped, were trying to escape, or might not yet know there was an escape, from this very insidious beast of fundamentalism.
And to use that unfortunate past to engage in a sort of irrational prejudice and pretense that this warped version of Christianity is somehow a reason to reject all of Christianity . . . you encouraged them in that; I would guarantee it, even if it wasn't your intention at all. That's the power that language -- interpreted within the cultural and intellectual context of one particular milieu [in this case, atheism or agnosticism] -- has.
I could not write an attack on Roman Catholicism, nor Anglicanism, for I did not live inside their cloister and had little knowledge about their methods of mind control over their supplicants.
"Mind control"? Interesting choice of words . . . So do you maintain that all Christians are victims of brainwashing?
I also have always thought it to be a bad practice to attack those who believe differently than I do, for that only confounds the real arguments without really accomplishing any positive result.
Funny that you have repeatedly done so throughout this "dialogue," then (particularly the rational capacities of Christians). For heaven's sake, in your sentence immediately previous to this last one, you have made yet another of your ridiculous, condescending claims which attacks Christians en masse as mind-controlled (i.e., literally brainwashed) dupes. If you want to pretend that you make no such "attacks," go ahead. But if anti-Christian prejudice is inside of you, it will always come out. It can't help but come out, whether you deny that it is present or not.
I'm not sure if I was trying to excoriate my past fundamentalism as you write, but reading this now with some time having passed, I think you might be right. Now I would write a more reasoned, less impassioned article.
If you believe in something false, you'll always have to adopt bad reasoning at some point. I think we can agree on that, from our different perspectives.
As I said above, I was not that far removed in time from having broken those ties and there were still, no doubt, some things with which I was struggling.
You then finished your rebuttal to this section by giving some of your own background. I was intrigued by your journey. From where you started to where you now find yourself. If this completes your search for truth and where you will remain then I am glad that you have found the solace you sought.
Thank you (though I was quite happy as a Protestant; I simply found something even better: from "very good" to "better" or "best," rather than from bad to good).
My journey was somewhat the opposite and has led me to a place of solace and comfort and I would only want that end result for anyone who wades through the miasma of religious study, whatever their end may be. I am not anti religious,
I beg to differ, having observed many of your extreme statements. I see no necessary reason why you feel compelled to paint virtually all Christians and Christian systems as irrational and almost fundamentally dishonest and ignorant: not even understanding the Bible, as any intelligent atheist easily could.
nor pro atheist, merely a seeker after truth who wishes that all could, and would, make the journey to seek out truth rather than to accept it on someone else's terms. You claim to have done that, and that's commendable. You at least thought for yourself and that's the center of what I believe about religion. Each of us must do our own search and come to our own conclusions. I have and you have, and we differ in our conclusions.
This is good, but I think a lot of your rhetoric is inconsistent with this high ideal.
Next, I wrote of the insular world of fundamentalism within Christianity and the use of the bible as the final arbiter on any question within this community. Again, I was writing from an insider's view. An insider who had stepped out and looked back in and saw it all so much more clearly from that perspective.
You replied that since fundamentalism is a distortion of Christianity that my viewpoint was a fair one if applied only to those sects who are identified as fundamentalist. You believe that I didn't make this distinction prominent enough, however. I am not sure how much more prominent I could have made it, since this entire article was based on having freed myself from fundamentalist Christianity and now having the ability to stand outside and see it more clearly. I don't believe that I once mentioned any sect or denomination other than my own and others like it. Denominations who use biblical literalism and inerrancy as chains with which to shackle their supplicants. And my intention, as Mr. Till's suggestion, was to do just that.
As I've already shown (and could easily demonstrate with much more evidence), you did far more than that. The very title would be misleading, if this were the case (and titles -- as any English teacher or newspaper editor will tell you -- are supposed to give an accurate indication of writing purposes and goals and content). Your piece didn't bear the title: "How I Freed Myself From Fundamentalist Church of Christ Christianity." No; it was infinitely broader and very misleading (given your stated goals): "Religion and How I Lost It." Man! That goes far beyond one fringe Protestant, quasi-cultic sect to beyond even the Protestant-Catholic divide; indeed, beyond even Christianity to religion in general. This is how language works. How many times do I have to repeat this? You say it was strictly about your own brand of isolated, culturally-backward fundamentalism, yet you (or the editor, for all I know) give it this title?!
But nevertheless, you insist on faulting me again and again for reacting to it in a general sense, as applicable to much more than just your own sect. One gets a flavor of the tenor and content of an article by reading the title in the first place. If someone reads that title, I contend that they would immediately think (using reason and understanding simple definitions): "this is a critique of religion." They wouldn't think: "this is specifically a critique of one fringe Protestant group: one which doesn't even accept some mainstream Christian doctrines held in common by virtually all historic Christians, and which attacks all other groups as grossly inadequate or non-Christian or apostate." See the difference? In the latter case, I could even agree with much of what you write, as long as it remained denomination-specific, and didn't make wild claims and charges based on Church of Christ and other fundamentalist group deficiencies. And your own language constantly branches out into general statements such as:
Theists base their belief on faith, belief based on emotion and culturalization.Hope there is at least a little more clarity now about what I wrote and why. If not, at least I tried my best to illuminate that which was obviously murky from your point of view.Faith is irrefutable and errorless because it must be in order to validate all in which they believe.
No reasonable person can believe that the guesses of preliterate man, upon which the myths of gods and the supernatural are based, were true. The beliefs of these primitives, however, were more reasonable in terms of their limited and insignificant knowledge, than the beliefs of today's religionists who have masses of information available to them.
Whoever is to blame, we are not communicating in a constructive fashion. But I do think those on both sides can learn a lot about how atheists and Christians talk past each other, and how one or both sides misunderstand. If I have misunderstood you so massively, as you claim, then at least I am fair-minded enough to publish this thing in its entirety on my website, for readers to make up their own minds about what has gone down here. And if that helps someone to think through the issues in a better way (i.e., even if I am wrong about some stuff), then great, because that's my goal, too; not to always be right, no matter what.
I then wrote in the original article. "To be human means we are doomed to explaining our world, not simply and directly, but only indirectly, through these interpretations. We dwell in our interpretations. In explicating a phenomenon, we always put it in terms limited by our ability to understand, always based in our own prejudices and preconceptions. This means that we will understand things partially and inadequately, through language rather than a godlike omniscience."
Your response was: "I agree. This is true for atheists and theists alike. Theists; however, claim to be in possession of revelation: which is God explaining the world and spiritual truth to us. It is an additional source of knowledge. If it exists, it is supremely important; if it does not, then it is a big joke and a farce."
I am glad that you agree, for this paragraph, to me, is the most important one that people understand, and upon which there is some shared agreement. I believe, as you say, that it is true for theists and atheists alike. We are not all that much different after all. As you point out, the theist has the added baggage of revelation that rounds out their world view beyond that of human reasoning. You say that it is an additional source of knowledge, but I would say that, in my viewpoint, it is a delusion of knowledge.
But as the reasons I have seen atheists produce for that negation are at worst (and I say, usually) ludicrous, and at best questionable (certainly not compelling), your claim does not carry much force with me.
Which then causes me to agree with your final words in that paragraph, "then it is a big joke and a farce."
Why am I not surprised?
The difference between atheists and theists is that at least some atheists get the joke whether they find it funny or not.
I think they "get" far less than they make out. That has been my consistent discovery in 24 years of talking to them.
I continued in my original article: "Therefore, we internalize our belief structure, i.e., that which causes and enhances our beliefs. At the same time, we externalize its effects on our lives and that of those about us. This duality of nature does not lead us to understanding or knowledge but to faith. Faith in an improperly arrived at conclusion based on ill-conceived thought processes becomes so entrenched that it is often thought to be the truth even when it flies in the face of reality."
To which you reply: "Here again is the dichotomizing of faith and reason. It need not be so at all. But this is never pointed out."
And again, this is spoken from the first person as the article was intended. I agree that this disconnect between faith and reason need not be true, but in my case, and the case of many others, the putting away of reason is the only way in which this type of faith can exist.
Then you need to make that clear in the article itself. You did not, so the reader is left with a general sense. The problem started in the very title of the piece. And of course atheists will be predisposed to generalize the comments to all religion (which might explain -- I suspect -- why the article has the title it has in the first place).
Anecdotally, I would add, I have received several dozen communiqués from others who have put away their faith, or were struggling with the conflict between faith and reason, who wanted to share with me their fellowship on this point.
Of course. We all want to be with kindred spirits, with similar experiences. Hence, Catholic converts and other apologists often contact me.
I next go out on a limb of sorts, and do abandon my primary caveat in writing this article, though I stand by it nonetheless. I wrote: "No reasonable person can believe that the guesses of preliterate man, upon which the myths of gods and the supernatural are based, were true. The beliefs of these primitives, however, were more reasonable in terms of their limited and insignificant knowledge, than the beliefs of today's religionists who have masses of information available to them."
You replied: "Biblical revelation (in the Old Testament) is not "preliterate." Moses could write. The question is whether God revealed Himself or not, to the Jews, the chosen people. If He did, when it happened is irrelevant. The knowledge revealed would have relevance for all time."
First of all, whether Moses could write or not, or whether Moses even existed or not, is a moot point within the context of what I said above. Writing is not the only sign of literacy, there is also comprehension and understanding of what is said or written. My point here was not about Moses nor the writing of scripture, per se. It was about how religion came to be in the first place, even before the time of Moses.
The definition of "literate" in my dictionary is: "able to read and write." So we again clash on the simple meaning of words. My interpretation -- beyond coinciding with the dictionary -- was not out of place, seeing that not long ago, many liberal "Bible scholars" contended that in the time of Moses, the Israelites were illiterate (in the dictionary sense). Subsequent archaeological discoveries blew that out of the water (not that we Christians -- or observant Jews, for that matter -- were at all surprised). It remains arguably prejudiced and condescending to describe the Bible-era ancient Israelites as "preliterate" or "primitive." But this is standard atheist fare. Any condescension is permissible as long as it is directed towards Christians or the ancient cultures which form the backdrop to Christianity and the Bible. Quite "tolerant" and open-minded, isn't it?
Secondly, the statement that a god revealed himself to a people four or five thousand years ago must be taken by faith
Not entirely. There exists legal-type eyewitness evidence of various miracles. There is an enduring culture to be accounted for (whereas most other ancient cultures are either extinct or vastly different from what they used to be). We have prophecies in the Bible that this culture produced, which can be verified as accurate or false. Even messianic prophecies provide great evidence that some super-intelligent being was behind the Bible, as there were so many true predictions about Jesus alone, written hundreds of years prior to His birth. The first two evidences are not particularly compelling to a skeptical sort; I agree, but the last is worthy of a serious consideration that it is rarely given.
and has no relevance at all as to the knowledge endemic in, or the knowledge bestowed as a result of, such a revelation. Within a world of reason there is not room to supplant that reason with revelation unless the revelation is real and can be demonstrated in much the same way that reason can be called to testify on its own behalf.
Fulfilled prophecies and extraordinary factual verification from archaeology and historiography testify to the inspired nature of the Bible. Obviously, you reject all that, but it remains untrue that the Christian can stand on simply blind faith, in order to accept the Bible as inspired revelation.
If preliterate man, before Moses, invented gods out of their miscomprehension, simplistic view of the world and its natural order, or other externalized stimuli, we cannot today call that a revelation from those gods.
But you presuppose that Abraham (who was no more "preliterate" than Moses was) "invented" monotheism, which, of course, is the very matter in dispute. You can't simply assume something is false without argument and act as if that is a rational argument.
We can contend that it could have been, or that such might have happened, but we cannot rationally make that claim in such a way as to make believers out of those who doubt. That is more or less what I was trying to say in that paragraph.
You usually can't convince an atheist with reason, because that is often not the basis upon which his atheism is based (when it is closely examined). Your own case is illustrative. You yourself admit that your basis was largely emotional and a reaction against fundamentalism. You claim to have reasoned through things, too, and I don't deny that, but we know from your own report that emotion (which is non-rational, technically-speaking) also played a key role, since you converted before having gotten such emotionalism out of your system, as you say.
Our world and how we know it is a complex thing with many sides to some issues of defining truth. There is absolute truth, such as 'the sun rises in the eastern sky in the morning', with the caveat that at some points on earth, at or near the poles, there are exceptions to this truth. There is perceived truth which can be fraught with errors of human emotion, observed evidences, etc. It is within this area of 'truth' that the vast majority of what we call 'truth' actually exists. And there may even be revealed truth, though I think it is but a subset of perceived truth. Revealed truth has no burden of proof upon one claiming to have received it, and no way in which that proof would be universally accepted anyway.
To the contrary, it is both falsifiable and verifiable, in ways that I (and others) have detailed: prophecy and factual verification as to accuracy in reporting various details. Accuracy doesn't prove inspiration, of course (not at all); yet if something is inspired, it will be accurate, so this removes one objection to the possibility that the Bible is indeed inspired. It's a "minimum requirement," in other words. If biblical prophecies were shown to be habitually false, and none could hold any water, then I would agree that this would cast serious doubt on the divine inspiration of the Bible (or else on the manuscript that we have, as corresponding to the actual historic Bible).
If a trusted friend of mine who I knew to be reasonable and logical, one day came to me in an agitated state claiming that he had seen the sun rise that morning in the west, I would know he was wrong. I would likewise be fairly sure that he wasn't lying, since he was an honest and honorable man. I would know he was wrong, for his claim would deny the absolute truth that the sun rises in the east at our point on the planet. So I would assume that he had experienced some sensory failure that had disoriented him from distinguishing direction on that morning, or that he had dreamed it so vividly as to believe it. He would not be lying, for he truly believed his claim, but yet what he
said was not the truth as it is known to exist. Now if he claimed that some supernatural revelation had led him to make this claim I would worry more about him and his clarity of mind.
Yeah, me too.
The perception of truth, even when it is in error, can be explained logically and will lead few thinking people astray. Revealed truth, on the other hand, in the minds of many who believe in it, supercedes any and all other forms of truth if that revelation falls within the parameters of being an article of faith. That can be delusional, and can lead others astray who are pliable enough, or well enough conditioned, to believe by faith rather than reason.
That may be your experience. It has not been mine, among those Christians who think to any significant degree at all about their faith. You'll always have non-thinking Christians, just as with any other massive group. So what? I continue to urge you to go back to the thing itself rather than the worst examples of it. All the major groups in historic Christianity would vehemently deny that there is an inherent dichotomy between faith and reason. They all believe that the two exist harmoniously, as ordained by God, and are not in conflict. You can always find fideists and so forth, but they are not the mainstream, and that's my point. So I again reiterate for our readers that what you are talking about does not -- repeat, NOT -- represent mainstream historic, orthodox Christianity. To the extent that you make out that this is so at all, you are deceiving your readers, and being most unfair to the viewpoint that you seek to critique. You had several chances to clarify this in your article, but never did, to my knowledge. You continue even now to make unqualified, extremely sweeping statements about the intellectual and rational deficiencies of Christians en masse. This is not right, from any fair-minded ethical perspective, because it misrepresents, which is a form of lying or bearing false witness (one of the Ten Commandments, as it were).
My next statement is a simple one. "It is apparent that such faith is based upon emotion, rather than reason."
Your answer is nearly as simple. "This is not apparent at all. It is only apparent that some folks pit reason and faith against each other, as if they were fundamentally hostile."
Well, to me it is apparent, and to many others with whom I have corresponded or spoken with on this point, it is apparent.
Whether it is "apparent" to you or not is irrelevant. There are facts here to be ascertained. The fact remains that you moved in fundamentalist, quasi-cultic circles as a Christian, and now you are in atheist circles. As far as I know (you can correct me if I'm wrong), you have not spent significant time with (committed, informed, educated, orthodox) Catholics or Orthodox, or even Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, Reformed, or other forms of mainstream Christianity. Thus, your former circle of acquaintances does not represent a firsthand knowledge of that which you purport to critique. In fact, you were a preacher in a sect which habitually blasts all those other groups, so you were hardly in a place to consider them fair-mindedly or dispassionately at all. Thus it appears to me that you have pretty much simply projected Church of Christ errors upon all Christians. I've been a Protestant and am now a Catholic. I moved in the circles of many of the Protestant traditions when I was there (Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Reformed, non-denominational "Jesus Freak," messianic Jews, etc.).
I have many friends, from virtually all the major categories of Christianity. So I (as a published, professional Christian and Catholic apologist) know what I am talking about. I (despite my Bible-reading) know my subject, and I am claiming that you don't know what you are talking about, because you insist on bringing up, over and over, your own former small, fringe group and extrapolating that onto other Christians. You say you don't do this, and don't intend to, but by your language you do nonetheless, as I have shown again and again. At best, all you can say is that "many [or, too many] Christians dichotomize faith and reason." As I would readily agree with that, it is not at issue between us. It's a big reason why I am an apologist: I try to show Christians how to synthesize what ought to be synthesized, and what all major Christian groups believe ought to be in harmony, not at war. It's only when you use that as a launching point to a wider critique of Christianity and the larger category of theism or non-materialism that I must vehemently object.
I am not responsible for your comprehension of the points I have made.
Here we go again. Think what you will of my "comprehension." Yours is not all that great concerning my argumentation, either, if we must go there. However ignorant I am of your reasoning process, you're still making unwarranted attacks on my belief-system (which I believe to be objectively true), and I won't stand for that. Your reasoning will be subjected to intense scrutiny as long as I have anything to do with it, and as long as you insist on attacking Christianity on unreasonable and unfair grounds.
On the other hand, I do think that faith and reason, if not actually anathematic of one another, are certainly polar opposites to many who have escaped the bonds of religious faith.
For them, they are, because they obviously never learned to properly practice their Christianity, nor (most relevantly to our discussion) "how to think Christianly." That's why they're no longer Christian! If they had thought it was reasonable, they would have presumably stayed. I contend that they had a woefully insufficient understanding of their faith and the issue of reason, faith, and revelation in the first place. They (and you) left for the wrong reasons, in other words.
Coming near to the end of my article, I next wrote: "Emotion needs no proof and rejects all questioning. Reason demands answers, questions conflicts, and objectively studies the issues from every available source and viewpoint. Reason is fearless thought, undeterred by legal, spiritual, or social penalties. Dissenting viewpoints do not alarm those who seek truth. The knowledge seeker who has a passion for truth fears nothing except error."
You responded thusly: "Amen! I am very much in agreement with this sentiment. My reason has led me to theism, the Christian God, and to Catholicism. And it has shown me how atheism is untrue. One may disagree with my conclusions, but they can't claim that reason did not play the crucial role in my belief-system."
I think we are lot more alike than either of us may understand.
Good. But I don't think atheists as a whole are nearly as stupid and gullible as you seem to think most Christians are. That's a major difference. I think they have flawed thinking, based on false premises. That's far different from the charge of stupidity, irrationality, infantilism, "fairy tales" and all the rest of the usual contra-Christian charges. I think atheists have not properly thought through the issues; therefore have arrived at wrong conclusions. And various other factors extraneous to pure reason enter in also, just as with all human beings.
Your agreement with my above statement shows a kindredness of spirit and intellect, at least to some degree. I certainly would not claim that reason has not led you to your viewpoints, nor would I want it said that reason did not lead me to mine. Even though we are diametrically opposed in our view of religion and theism, we have arrived at these opposites through our own journey of examination. We can only suppose that differences beyond intellect then have played a large part in our assimilation of what we have as divergent views of truth.
Or that one or both of us have accepted false premises along the way, and built a flimsy castle on a foundation of sand.
I went on to say: "I have found the average skeptic to have a much broader knowledge of the Bible and theological issues than the average Christian."
Your response was: "I don't know what sort of Christians Mr. Hypes has been talking to. I have found just the opposite. In fact, atheists are abysmally ignorant of even rudimentary biblical exegesis and hermeneutics. I have demonstrated this on several occasions in the course of my apologetics."
Well, I only wrote what I personally knew in this regard, and the intervening years has done nothing to make me alter this observation. I guess I must know more Christians who do not question, examine, and study the breadths and depths of their religion than you do. As to your claim that atheists are abysmally ignorant in even the rudiments of biblical dissertation, I can only guess that the atheists to whom you refer are those who never journeyed through the world of religion. They are most likely those who were raised atheist and never examined the other side.
One, as I recall, was a philosophy professor, Dr. Ted Drange, who claimed to be an expert on the Bible. I made mincemeat of his "exegesis," and it wasn't hard to do. Any reasonably-informed Christian could have done it. He would up looking rather silly and foolish because he was dogmatically claiming to be so biblically knowledgeable, whereas he was, in fact, quite abysmally ignorant. Most atheists I have dialogued with were, like yourself, raised as some sort of Christians, and accepted it themselves to more or less degrees as adults. The last one I dealt with, Ed Babinski, was at first a Catholic, then a fundamentalist Protestant. Steve Conifer, a very sharp graduate student with whom I had several meaty dialogues, was, as I recall, a Catholic, and lost his faith in college (like so many, because they are inadequately prepared for the secularist onslaught that they receive there). So you're simply wrong -- at least regarding my own dialogical experience. It's the very fact of having formerly believed something that gives many people their great zeal to now go out and refute it. I think they're warring with their own past to a large extent, and have a need to justify their new belief and to justify rejecting their old.
Much like Christians who are born into their religion often take no interest in really knowing what and why they believe. The atheists and agnostics with whom I converse and communicate are mostly of the sort who came to atheism or agnosticism through thorough examination of religion, theology, and philosophy, and nearly to a person they are well informed and knowledgeable in these and other fields of study.
They think they are so informed about Christianity, but they are not; I'll guarantee that. I've yet to meet one who didn't suffer from several basic miscomprehensions concerning Christianity. I realize that both sides will always tend to say that those who left never really understood what they left. It can only be demonstrated on a case-by-case basis.
Then I wrote: "Whether led to skepticism by knowledge or led to the knowledge by their skepticism, the truth of the skeptic is that he is ultimately led by a search for truth."
Your response was: "They have no corner on that search; nor is it immediately evident that the search for truth characterizes the motivations and goals of all skeptics and atheists. Aldous Huxley, for example, admitted that his rejection of Christianity was due to basically a desire for sexual freedom. He was honest. And I dare say this sort of "reason" is quite widespread."
I never said that atheists have a corner on the search for truth, but it is my own journey to atheism about which I was writing and so in that context it applies, not just to me, but to others of my acquaintance. As to Huxley's reason for embracing atheism, I would say that it was extremely shallow and self serving if you cited him correctly, and is not at all characteristic of the atheists I know. Atheism is not a license to do whatever one wants.
Okay; let's take a survey of the sexual beliefs of atheists. How many are against premarital sex? How many think abortion is wrong? Or do they take the view that every individual is on his own sex-wise, and can do whatever he or she wants (up to and including murdering their own children that they don't "want"), as long as no one else is "exploited" (genetically human babies exempted from the human race, of course)? We see this in Christian circles all the time, too. Someone doesn't like the Catholic teaching on divorce, and they want to get divorced, so they leave the Church in order to do that. We have a saying in Catholic circles: "all heresy begins below the belt." I'm not saying that this explains atheism -- not at all -- but I would insist that these sorts of self-serving, sexual, non-rational considerations factor into many behaviors of many people, either consciously or unconsciously. It applies to Christians as much as to atheists or any other belief-system. If we deny this, I think we are fooling ourselves. The Christian believes that this kind of thing can be overcome only by God's grace. If it weren't for that, human sin would take over and totally dominate.
It is not a negation of scruples or morals, only another vantage point from which to view morality. Morality did not spring from the mind of a god, but is a collection of societal constructions which work in a civilized framework. It is not only wrong to murder from a religious viewpoint, but is wrong from nearly all societal standards that apply under any social construction. The same is true of all other moral laws and guides of social propriety, and it is these upon which civil law is based and upon which personal morality should be judged.
I agree, by and large, and I understand the perspective. I've known many atheists whom I consider fine, upstanding, moral people of integrity (including one who used to attend monthly discussions in my home). That doesn't negate the observation that atheists are rather more free than Christians to do and believe as they wish. After all, what ultimately constrains them? You may have many internal "checks" and guidelines of various sorts, but they are nothing like the belief in a God Who oversees and judges and is all-powerful (and all-Good). But that's a huge discussion (one I have had with atheists before). There are the actual ethical beliefs of atheists and also what I would argue are the logical consequences of atheism as pertains to ethics. Sometimes I am referring to the latter, and I get accused of charging atheists in practice with what I think is a logical conclusion or reductio ad absurdum of their views.
Next I wrote: "Few Christians can delineate the reasons and evidences for their faith. Almost any attempt to elucidate qualitative responses on the subject elicit catch phrases and incoherent babbling."
You wrote in response: "I am an apologist, whose field is defending the Christian faith and giving reasons for why we believe what we do. I have had no problem offering sound answers to atheists. They are a challenge, but by no means an insurmountable one."
Reading that paragraph of mine now makes me wince just a little. The spirit of what I said is correct, in my experience, but I think that equating the speaking of theists about their religion to babbling was a bit too strident, and certainly too generalized.
Thank you.
I then stated: "If one believes, based on naivety or innocence, it may appear charming or quaint, such as a child believing in Santa Claus. If one believes culturally, because he was raised to believe certain things, it can be understood, even if there is no other basis. If one believes as a result of erroneous information or faulty study, it is lamentable. When one defends, propounds, and propagates such error as fact and refuses to examine other information objectively, it is intellectually reprehensible, and I will challenge that type of belief every time."
You responded: "I agree. Well-stated. I'm all for challenges and dialogue. Bring them on! But not many people are truly interested in
that."
Not much to say here except if you are reading these words, then my view is being presented in contrast to yours. I am not a topflight intellect as you seem to be. Just a simple country boy who grew up and studied theology, formally and informally, searching for answers to questions I could not ignore. What little I learned along the way, and what I am able to recall after all these years that is usable in this dialogue, may be unworthy of inclusion in this discussion. All I can say is that I have served up the truth as I know it, and will offer up such evidences as are applicable if you ask.
I finally wound up the article with this paragraph: "Biblical literalism presents more questions than answers. It offers a god we cannot respect or understand, a god who changes vastly from passage to passage and event to event, a lack of consistency in what should be consistent if our faith is not to be shaken. What is impossible for our minds to believe our hearts cannot worship."
Briefly: biblical literalism (as it is usually practiced by the types of Christians you describe) is an erroneous approach which has been rejected by the great majority of Christians through history. The notions about God being inconsistent have been dealt with time and again and are based on both an inadequate biblical understanding and incoherent thought as to what is entailed in a Divine Being, Creator, Judge, etc. People object to hell; they think God "changed" between the Testaments from a wrathful, rather petulant and arbitrary avenger to a loving, merciful God. This is the mythology; not the accounts which are called mythology by those who don't believe them. All these things can be solidly answered with plausible reasoning.
At long last we have arrived at your final response, as well. You wrote: "First of all, "biblical literalism" is not the whole of biblical interpretation. Hyper-literalism characterizes fundamentalist Protestantism, but not historic Christianity. Secondly, biblical so-called "contradictions" are often not that at all, once scrutinized. Often, statements such as the above (about God changing, and this being a biblical teaching) flow from ignorance of Christian theology and the Bible, and of Hebraisms and Ancient Near Eastern expressions, idiom, and culture."This could easily require an entirely new article, just responding to your above statement.
Yes; these are all huge topics.
I will try to be brief, though brevity is not my strong suit, as you can tell.
:-)
I agree with you that 'biblical literalism' is not the whole of biblical interpretation within Christianity as a whole. I do suggest, however, that it is central to the belief system of a large number of Christians.
It's large, but it is still a small minority. It's a minority of a minority: of Protestantism. There are about a billion Catholics and 300-400,000 Orthodox. Neither system accepts this kind of biblical interpretation. Protestantism contains maybe 500,000 people, if that much. Fundamentalism is a relatively small sub-group (probably no more than 15-20% of Protestants, if that much). You do the math. By any estimate, it's a very small minority among all Christians. This is even more so if you approach it from an historical perspective.
And it is from that wellspring of theological reasoning
What reasoning? That was the problem . . . Church of Christ and fundamentalism in general not only glory in anti-intellectualism; they are also almost completely a-historical. They care little or nothing about Church history, which I would argue is directly contrary to the historic self-understanding of Christians and the biblical worldview, which is overwhelmingly of this mindset (and opposed to Bible Alone, or sola Scriptura). Christianity is in essence an historical religion. Yet these kinds of Protestants (not all Protestants, by any means) act as if history has nothing to do with it at all.
that I began my journey to finding truth in such matters. I do believe, however, that literalism of interpretation of the bible is endemic of nearly all denominations, cults, and sects.
Here I thought we were making progress, and then you say this. It's not true, my friend. The Bible is to be interpreted as any other literature is: in some places it is poetic; in others, it utilizes legal-type language; in others it is a narrative; in others it is philosophical, or nearly so (Paul's epistles; especially Romans and the two letters to the Corinthians, Ecclesiastes); then there is apocalyptic and prophetic literature. There is allegory, parable, metaphor, sarcasm, hyperbole, and other sorts of language and literary forms. When it is intended to be taken literally, of course it should be, just as any article in the daily paper should be, if it is a literal account.
And I'm not going after your term, hyper-literalism here, but just plain, "the bible says it, so it must be correct," literal interpretation.
The inspiration and divinely-revealed nature of the Bible is a different proposition from "literalism" -- let alone the stupid, anti-intellectual, culture-rejecting fundamentalist variety.
Was the universe created in six days? The bible says so. If it is not so, then the bible is in error or it has been misread and misinterpreted by all of those who believe in a six day creation.
But then the question immediately becomes, what does the Hebrew "day" (yom) mean, or I should say, what can it mean; what range of meanings can it have? And of course, it is not restricted to a literal meaning of 24 hours. This is also true in English. We say, for example, "in this day and age," or "in my day, things were different," or "it's a new day" (in a wider, metaphorical sense). The same was true in ancient Hebrew. So the hyper-literalist is ignorant right off the bat. St. Augustine in the 4th century understood what I wrote above. This is nothing new.
How many who believe in that biblical passage literally would believe it if the bible were silent on the subject? If that idea had sprung from the sacred writings of another religion or was the theory of a modern day scientist, but the bible said nothing about it. How many who believe it now would believe it under one or more of the alternate scenarios above?
I agree that the idea obviously comes from the Bible. But it is a matter of interpretation.
Of course this is a hypothetical question and serves only to illustrate one example of biblical literalism that is widely believed simply because it says so in Genesis. I could as easily have used examples such as the resurrection of Jesus or the theology of Paul.
This is entirely different ground. All orthodox Christians must believe in the Resurrection, because it is an article of faith, and why we are Christians in the first place (Jesus rising from the dead was the proof that He was Who He claimed to be: God). We must believe that God created the universe. But we aren't at all required to believe that it was in six literal days.
Christians who believe in the resurrection do so as a result of literally interpreting the bible and making this point an article of faith upon which they base their beliefs in a messianic being who they choose to follow.
Yes, because that miraculous event was reported as a literal historical event, and it was and is verified through various evidences of history and legal-type evidences. If Jesus wasn't God, and didn't rise from the dead, Christianity would utterly collapse, as Paul himself said. In this case, the Bible was supposed to be interpreted literally, because it was historical narrative. In the case of the creation, that is not required by the language or type of literature. The divine creation itself is literal, but the times involved have a leeway.
They do not get this story anywhere else, and if they did, would they believe it if the bible was silent on the issue?
Sure, just like we believe in, e.g., the theory of relativity or chemistry or algebra or classical logic or any number of things that the Bible does not address.
So yes, I think that biblical literalism is at least one of the central issues within Christian belief to a vast majority of Christians, and to some degree, all Christians.
You are simply mistaken, in the sense in which you are trying to argue.
On to part two of your response. When I wrote of god changing, I had in mind things like the multiple covenants which god is said to have issued over the millennia, for instance. His covenants with Adam and Eve, Abraham, Noah, and Moses were all superceded, according to Christian theology, with his covenant of blood with the sacrifice of his son. I'm not saying that it is wrong that god refined his covenant in increasingly more all encompassing ways, but a changeable god can also be the sign of a god created by man to be self-serving for the empowerment of one nation or people or belief system over another or all others.
But this is no more proof that God "changed" than a tree which grew from an acorn "proves" that acorn and tree are fundamentally different things. God simply chose to reveal Himself more progressively to man, over time. These covenants don't contradict each other; they develop from each other, just like the New Testament did from the Old (mainly in the sense of being more and more inclusive; branching out from individual Jews to the Jews as a whole, and then to all mankind who would accept Jesus as Messiah).
God goes from living among man to spending time with certain select men, to being removed from man's presence but still in vocal communication, to falling silent and having angels carry his messages, to total silence, unless one believes that people we think have mental abnormalities really are picking up god's voice yet today. This incremental and lasting disappearance of god from the temporal world is not proof that he does not exist, or never existed, but it does demonstrate, possibly, the way in which man's need for the god he created has diminished in importance. This is a change of god and his presence that is evident in the bible.
I don't see it as evident at all. God acted differently at different times, for several reasons. How is that contradictory, let alone some tremendous disproof of biblical theology proper (i.e., the theology of God Himself and His attributes)?
There are many other examples which I won't belabor the point with at this time.
If they are this insubstantial, I appreciate the courteous gesture. :-)
Other contradictions and flaws . . .
"Other"??!! Let's first start with you demonstrating one! You haven't, thus far.
exist in great numbers within the bible, and that is not from an ignorance of the bible, but from a detailed study.
Yes, a "study" whose goal is to find "contradictions" (even where they don't exist at all) and to make the Bible and Christians look ridiculous . . . That is hardly a compelling, dispassionate methodology.
Not just a study which I undertook, but one which thousands of theologians and learned scholars have known of for centuries. These contradictions have nothing to do with Hebraic idioms, though there are, undoubtedly, examples that do.
A vast understatement . . . check out my extended dialogue with Ed Babinski (cited above). His dogmatically-stated exegesis was an absolutely classic example of atheist ignorance and tunnel vision concerning the Bible.
They are not rooted in cultural differences, but are simple contradictions within a book which is believed by faith, and part of that faith is to believe in the truth of that book and everything that it says. When it says two things, and one contradicts the other, then a reasonable mind will make note of that discrepancy. A reasonable mind does not throw out the whole book on the basis of one such contradiction. And a reasonable person will want to try to rectify the conflict, to find a common ground upon which both scenarios can be inclusive rather than exclusive.
But then a reasonable mind will begin to add up those contradictions which stand the test of further evaluation and which demonstrate aninability to reconcile.
As many more recent philosophers have shown, the larger frameworks of belief-systems often predispose one to see a "contradiction" where there may not be one at all. No one (not even know-nothing fundamentalists) exists in an intellectual vacuum. The atheist or "biblical skeptic" approaches the Bible the way a butcher approaches a hog, or a lumberjack approaches a tree. That is hardly conducive to an objective, fair analysis. If one is to err in interpretation, it stands to reason that we can likely better trust one who respects and loves his subject matter, as opposed or compared to one whose motive is strictly a negative enterprise: to show how rotten and culturally and intellectually destructive something is. So, for example, would anyone think that a racist would be able to do as accurate and worthwhile study of black culture and history, as one who loves that culture (whether black or white) would be able to do? Of course not. Yet we Christians are irrationally, arrogantly asked by atheists to accept the "fact" that they understand the Bible far better than we do: we, who have studied and revered it our entire lives, and devoted (in a case like my own, as an apologist) countless thousands of hours reading, studying, and defending it. It's just not plausible. Use a little common sense . . . And this severe bias and negative approach produces some truly ludicrous opinions, as I have shown in my dialogues on the subject with atheists. That's the bottom line.
At some point, if enough of these contradictions come to light, and if they are egregiously enough in error, individually or collectively, then a reasoned mind must begin to wonder what sort of foundation for the faith the bible really is.
At some point, if enough of these alleged atheist-produced "contradictions" are refuted and revealed to be the non-examples that they are, and if they are egregiously enough in error, individually or collectively, then a reasoned mind must begin to wonder what sort of foundation the atheist zeal for chasing after imaginary biblical "contradictions" really rests on, and what causes otherwise intelligent people to adopt such obviously-deficient and desperate "reasoning."
If you wish to converse further, feel free to do so.
We'll see. There is nothing much new here, from my past dialogues. I would probably want to do a much more specific discussion, if we were to continue. We have milked this "general discussion" as much as we can. I would give any reader who is not sound asleep by now a medal for heroic perseverance.
I will respond as time and energy allows, and no topic will be off limits as it pertains to the issues at hand. I will not have all the answers, and many of those I do have will not seem satisfactory to you. Just be aware that I will feel the same about some of what you offer up. I only ask for a reciprocation of respect even in adversity of opinion.
Thanks for your participation and willingness to share your viewpoint in an overall cordial, courteous manner. I can't say that I think much of your characterizations of Christianity, and I think you have been too often quite illogical and incoherent (you often return the favor), but you have been a gentleman, and that is rare enough in Christian-atheist dialogue, and a great thing in and of itself. That has allowed us to present an exchange where both sides have been fully presented without rancor and acrimony, which is wonderful for our readers' sake. So I appreciate your participation in that worthy enterprise. I sincerely hope I have been a civil gentleman also, and apologize beforehand for any offense I may have caused. It was not my intention at all.
Thanks for your speedy and detailed response to my rebuttal of your earlier critique of my article in the Skeptical Review. I hope that line of definition is not too convoluted so as to not make perfect sense . . .
You clarified the intent of your citation of Paul Vitz in the critique in question, for which I would like to thank you. I always like to have things I don't understand, or misapprehensions at which I grasp, clarified so that I can learn more about the thought processes of those with whom I exchange ideas. Vitz, by trying to draw a parallel of sorts, and your citation of his reasoning in your critique, left it up to the reader to determine whether or not terrible father/son relationships could lead to an easier embracing of atheism. Had I understood that this citation was offered, not as a pathological reason for one embracing atheism, but as a 'turning of the tables' as you characterize it now, I would not have paid it any attention whatsoever. I am sorry for any mental deficiency which led me to read your words, and the citation of Vitz, as a serious rejoinder.
Sometimes it is the reason for atheism (just as similar things sometimes cause a belief in Christianity). Vitz's primary reason and mine were as I have described. That doesn't mean such things never happen. I happen to think the argument from psychology is ultimately futile, as it is secondary to the real issues, and usually offends those on both sides. In any event, I made no specific charge regarding you and your father.
But then again, I am allowing you to explain that which I took as a misstatement or generalized attack on atheists in general and by inference, on me personally, and am accepting that you meant it only as a sort of parlor trick meant to elicit an emotional reaction.
It's not a "parlor trick," it is classical logic and argumentation. Atheists like yourself insist on psychoanalyzing people of faith, so we are simply turning the tables, in order to show the shallowness and inconclusiveness of such an approach. The only "trick" here is the double standard whereby Christians can be trashed and pilloried, but we are not allowed to make any return criticisms of atheism and atheists. This won't do.
If only you would allow me that same literary license rather than holding all of my words up to a scrutiny which you define as necessary to defend your own beliefs from the assumption that I launched hurtful attacks by some words and phrases within my article.
I can only deal with what you write. Words mean things. Folks can always clarify later. That's what we're doing.
I am also heartened by your words, if they are true, that, "I would never show the intellectual contempt and condescension towards your worldview, that many of your brethren exhibit towards mine. I know too much about both people and ideas to do that." This is a very good attitude and a lofty, and attainable, goal. Contempt or condescension of another, or the views of another, adds nothing to the body of intellectual or reasonable exchange of ideas.
Thank you. But then I can only wonder at why you keep insisting on demeaning Christians as "ignorant" and in that state precisely because of the Bible, not despite it.
Yes, people of all philosophies, religions, cultures, ethnicities, levels of understanding and intellect do fall short of some goal that is called 'the norm' or some such designation. Some more often and more egregiously than others, and some with mitigating circumstances and others out of sheer manipulation or other willful desires. To a Christian theist, particularly those who are guilt-based in their personal or societal viewpoint, this can be called sin and can be attributed to what is called, "the Fall". We can agree on that generalized premise, but when you actually speak of what I feel is an aberration and a man-made convenience to explain human nature within a theistic framework, as 'sin' as if it is a real state of humanness, then the rest of your litany of guilt associated definitions fail to resonate with me. While as a Christian sin, the devil, etc. are manifest and real, such may not be universally recognized and believed by others. It's more a case of preaching to the choir than making logical, rational, real-world connections to those you would like to sway with your argument.
That's correct. At that point, I was not making an argument, but merely stating Christian theology. All of these topics are huge and require an in-depth discussion. As they are tangential to our topic, I couldn't do that here.
And certainly, I am guilty of this same use of understood definition and narrowed viewpoint coming from the other end of the spectrum. It's the bane of human communication that we are often times cursed to selecting language and thoughts that lie most easily and readily within or subjective grasp rather than accessing the whole of language and thought.
I couldn't agree more. That's why I have critiqued your words and logic, according to "the whole of language and thought," not some thing in your head that I have no access to, other than what you reveal by your words.
Another statement that made me pause just slightly was when you wrote, "Pacifism is not taught in the Bible or in mainstream Christianity."
Whether or not it's taught as from the viewpoint of pacifism or not, I would mention that the biblical phrase 'to turn the other cheek' has certainly been used by many Christians and others who are pacifists. Even if this initial thought was expressed by the Buddha long prior to the onset of the common era as defined by the birth and life of Jesus.
See my paper, Dialogue on Christian Pacifism and "Just War": Biblical and Social Factors.
I would also like to point out that your mention of the "traditional Catholic just war theory" is not universally held by the world in general, nor by many others within the body of Christianity itself.
Did I say it was? At that point I was discussing internal Catholic affairs and ethical viewpoints. You need not point out the utterly obvious to me, as if I think the whole world is Catholic. How silly is that?
To define the world and the use of deadly force by the justifications of one sect, or even by many, cannot be logically defended as right or reasonable, nor would such a viewpoint be worthy of universal support. Is Iraq not part of his creation?
Already answered . . .
You next make some points about Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and then go off on an anti-abortion tangent to which I feel no need to respond within this forum.
Of course not. That would make it quite difficult to pretend that you are so concerned about the rhetorical "God's creation" that you would actually include preborn children in the mix. Best to ignore it and rant and rave about Iraq and how hypocritical "born again" President Bush supposedly is . . . .
Since this is a matter that transcends the bonds of one sect or one world view compared with others, and ends up usually being largely personal and nearly always contentious, I see no gain to be made by responding within the framework of the reason for this exchange between us.
Whenever I have any opportunity, I must speak up for the most defenseless and innocent among us, who are being led to slaughter every day, at the rate of 4000 in the US. You spoke up for what you feel is an unjust war; I responded with my concerns for innocent slaughter. One concern is no better or worse than the other. Therefore, it is the furthest thing from a "tangent" that I can imagine. You brought up Iraq and the war, not I. I'm merely responding by including all human beings who are being killed into consideration. If that makes you uncomfortable, fine. It should.