Jesus (At Times) Was an Embarrassment to the Gospel

(Note: In addressing this issue, I’ll assume the reader has a basic working knowledge of the Synoptic Tradition).

In the earlier Gospel of Mark, we find a pericope which tells us that after leaving Bethany with his disciples, a hungry Jesus sees a live fig tree in the distance. Given the change to stuff-his-gut, Jesus makes a bee line to it and finds nothing but leaves, since, as the writer of Mark even knows; hey, it’s not the season for figs.

So what does the Son of God do? He throws a temper fit just like a kid who didn’t get want he wanted. He uses his healing powers now to attack a defenseless fruit tree and kill it (Mark 11:14, 20; = Matthew 21:9).

Now, how is this embarrassing situation handled by the Synoptic Gospel of Luke (13:6-9)? Luke completely rewrites it. The pericope is now placed on the lips of Jesus in the form of a parable so you know it can’t go wrong! Plus, it will make Jesus look good.

The irrational action of an immature Jesus is now transformed and then transferred to a level headed and patient, wisdom-aged farmer who goes three times to the fig tree wanting fruit and finding none, he tells his vinedresser “Cut it down and reuse the ground.” But even the vinedresser pleads with the farmer not to be so impatient and to just give it one more chance by waiting another year. He’s sure, with just a little care and work, the tree will produce fruit. If not (and after the fourth year), the vinedresser agrees with the farmer that it would not be irrational to cut it down (kill it).

The author of Luke /Acts has taken an irrational story where an out-of-control Jesus is removed and it is totally reworked into a wise and intelligent parable of wisdom. By putting it on the lips of Jesus, Luke has now credited Jesus with a parable which will further the spread of the Gospel and not be an embarrassing hindrance to it.

Was Jesus a Jewish Religious Bigot?

The most harden and reveling position Jesus takes in this context is over his love and protection of the exclusive truth of the faith of Israel and its God. As hinted at else where in the Gospels, we see a dark side of Jesus in his cruel and venomous attack on a mother simply requesting his mercy for her possessed daughter (Matt. 15: 21-28)... The Gospel of Mark simply calls her “…a Gentile, of Syrophoenician race.” (Mark 7:26). However, when this verse is redacted in Matt. 15:22, she is call “…a Canaanite woman…” a term used in the time of Jesus equivalent today to an African American being called a “Nigger”. Here Jesus is referenced to the “New Moses” (a theme used by the writer of Matthew) in confronting a non-Jew (Israelite) or a pagan Canaanite woman. His disciples know Jesus’ position on Gentiles; his basic hate for them, but are unable to get rid of her and are forced to file their complaint with Jesus himself who has, up until now ignored her. Now the Jewish Jesus must confront someone his faith and history requires him to hate. Matthew’s Jesus has some cruel fun with her and her sick daughter: “It is not proper to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Dogs (κυναριοις) is Jesus’ Jewish hate term for Gentiles ( Matt. 7:6 “κυσιν “). Finally Jesus heals her daughter, but only after he extracts from her a verbal confirmation before his disciples and the people watching that only the Jews have God’s blessing and she and her daughter are indeed dogs (notice the play on words here θυγατηρ (young girl) with κυναριοις (small dog)).

Although Jesus warns against adults harming any Jewish child’s faith (Matt. 18:1-6), he has (as expressed in the above pericope) no concern about Gentile children since any faith they may have is non-Jewish and pagan. In short, for Jesus, Gentile dogs have no true faith.

The Cost of Atheism

It's hard to be agnostic, even more a "becoming atheist." Christians often self-congratulate their experiences of "persecution" and "the cost of discipleship," but the cost of agnostic/atheism high, perhaps higher, than any Christian ever imagined.

I have been on both sides of the table. There is no question that discrimination and rejection are experienced by many Christians. Unfortunately, most of it - at least in Western culture - is earned. Rather than demonstrating the love, unity, acceptance and forgiveness that the New Testament proposes as the model of Jesus' life and the expectation of those who are his followers, most contemporary Christians are mean-spirited, self-righteous and hypocritical. Most Christians I encountered during my sojourn through the Land of Oz (ie, Christianity) deserved just about every bit of distrust and disrespect they received.

But a fact often overlooked is that agnostics and atheists are similarly despised and rejected, especially in this psuedo-born again culture of America, that makes some bastardization of Christianity and patriotism synonymous. Listen to the blowhards on any radio talk show or the FOX News network, and you will quickly understand that in the "culture war" of these days, atheists are the "evil empire."

But - actually - I am not thinking of that kind of thing when I talk about the cost of agnosticism/atheism. I am talking about something else, possibly a spiritual dynamic (and certainly psycho-social) that resists the notion of denying or questioning the reality of God. It's really a question of the head versus the heart. My head has always doubted the reality of God - my heart yearns for his reality. Rationally, reasonably, I can question (at least) and deny (at most) the existence of a Divine Being. But my heart wants magic, mystery, and the sense of wonder that can be part of the journey of faith and belief.

I don't have much respect for those on either side of the God debate who deny the role of the aching heart in the agnositic/atheist community. Of course, I admit that not all have the emotional resonance with Christianity that I have as a former Christian. But anyone who denies the role of emotion in the formation of faith and belief is a liar and a fool. We are not just thinking animals...we feel, and our feelings are often a far more powerful reality than our reason.

I miss God. I often want to fall back on easy believism. A recent commenter on this site reminded me of the rules of "easy believism" - God says it, I believe it, that settles it. No questions asked. I wish! My heart wants - indeed, aches - for a trust in a Heavenly Daddy who loves me, desires the best for me, has a plan for me, and will help me accomplish that plan if I put my trust in him (and give his church my money)!

A few days ago, I saw a guy wearing a religious tee-shirt. It showed a knight in armor, kneeling, with his sword in front of him. Over the picture were these words" "The difficulty of what you face is not as great as the Power behind you." It nearly brought me to tears. How I yearn to believe - simply, as a child - that there is God who stood behind me, held me up, helped me through. Alas...and forsooth.

Remember the movie "Pitch Black" - the sci-fi movie that introduced us to Vin Diesel as Riddick, the space cowboy? In that movie, a mullah challenges Riddick, saying "you don't believe in God." Riddick responds - "No, I absolutely do believe in God. And I absolutely hate the M---F---er!"

It's hard to believe. It's harder to choose not to, especially when your heart - your emotional life - yearns to believe.

But there is a reason I choose not to believe...and the cost of atheism is high.

Girl from Qatif Rape Victim

A girl from Qatif was gang raped and the Saudi's blamed her by initially sentencing her to 90 lashes. Is this not barbaric? At least they aren't going to kill her, and they're reviewing her case because of the moral outrage of Westerners. This is exactly what Ayaan Hirsi Ali said in her book Infidel. The girl is blamed if she is raped because men cannot help themselves. Ahhh, poor, poor men. They can't help themselves. Bullshit! Absolute bullshit. At least the men were sent to prison also. According to many Muslims, women should guard their pussies and it's their fault if raped. I am so outraged by this I am beside myself, and this moral outrage is applicable to the Christian faith. Here is the story...

Known only as the "Girl from Qatif," the victim said she was a newlywed who was meeting a high school friend in his car to retrieve a picture of herself from him when the attack occurred in the eastern city of Qatif in 2006.

While she was in the car, two men got into the vehicle and drove them to a secluded area where others waited, and then she was raped.

The ministry's account Saturday alleged that the woman and her lover met in his car for a tryst "in a dark place where they stayed for a while."

The girl was initially sentenced to prison and 90 lashes for being alone with a man not related to her. An appeals court then doubled the lashes to 200.

Again, I have nothing but disgust for the religion of Islam for this.

But there are similar texts in the Old Testament that sanction rape and "honor" killings. A female captive in war was forced to be an Israelite man’s wife (Deuteronomy 21:10-14). That's rape! If a virgin who was pledged to be married was raped, she was to be stoned along with her rapist (Deuteronomy 22:23-24), while if a virgin who was not pledged to be married was raped, she was supposed to marry her rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28-29).

This is all barbaric. At least there are signs that Islam is changing, since they are not going to kill her. How long before they become more civilized like Christians have become in free democracies, I cannot say. But they have similar sacred texts, and Islam is at least more consistent in applying them.

I know. I know. The easy way out is for Christians to deny they are living under the Old Covenant. But big fucking deal (I told you I was outraged)! Why would any good intelligent God ever santion something like this in the first place? I could never worship such a God, and I could never gerrymander around the Biblical texts that have caused such pain. I would at least have to be HONEST with those texts. God sanctioned rape and honor killings against women who did nothing wrong! That God cannot all of a sudden change his moral stripes and say he's perfectly good and loving in Jesus. He's barbaric to the core.

Bill Gnade's Argument in Support of Faith

Since Bill Gnade has visited and commented here at DC so often, I thought I would return the favor and comment on a Blog post of his….

In 2006 Bill made a particular religious argument on his Blog. Recently he said this about it: “I have asked dozens, perhaps hundreds of atheists to reply to my ‘Letter to Christopher Hitchens.’ Not one has done so.”

Okay, I will. Here is Bill’s argument.

Now there is a great deal I could say about it, but the whole point of his argument is what he said in the comments section where he wrote:

I would first point out that I have not argued for or against the existence of God. You see, I am not interested in showing whether God exists; what interests me here is showing that religious belief and non-religious belief are both based in faith: therefore, one is not more or less reasonable than another. My argument, really, is that faith is the only viable epistemological foundation. Mr. Hitchens is in the same boat as any atheist or any theist: he cannot begin to know anything without beginning with a first axiom, premise or step reached by faith. I believe that since faith infuses both the believer's and the sceptic's position, then I can safely conclude that the question is something of a wash.

I believe I have shown that the rational bases for religious and secular beliefs are identical, born in uncertainty. Epistemologically speaking, I…hold to the idea that religion and secularism are "religious" in essence, i.e., based in faith.

I really don’t need to engage the specific examples in his argument to show why it is a wrongheaded non-sequitur, although I could do so. The bottom line is that he’s correct to say we all begin with some sort of faith, since nothing can be proven with apodictic certainty, irrespective of his examples. I must trust my five senses in order to act in this world. I believe I exist as a human being and that the arm in front of me is mine, for the same reason. But I cannot apodictically prove these things. I believe these things. I believe I’m really typing these words in the year 2007, too. Conversely, I do not believe I’m merely dreaming in 2010 about typing these words in the year 2007.

Okay so far? Faith is an essential aspect to knowledge claims. I agree. Without some faith we cannot claim to know anything…anything. Even the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum can only lead us to believe that “doubts exist,” not that there is an “I” who is doing the doubting. And even that meager claim gets us nothing much at all, nor does it lead to any other truth claim, contrary to Descartes’ argument.

One way to phrase Bill’s argument (using some of his very words) goes something like this:

1) Knowledge claims that are based upon faith have no empirical evidence for them.
2) All knowledge claims that are based upon faith with no empirical evidence for them are in the same epistemological boat, in that one of them is not more or less reasonable than another.
3) All religious and non-religious knowledge claims are based on faith without empirical evidence for them.
.: Therefore, religious and non-religious knowledge claims are in the same epistemological boat, in that one of them is not more or less reasonable than another.

After I learn from Bill that I’ve construed his argument properly, I will proceed. If I've misconstrued it, then it would be a waste of time to deal with something that isn't his argument, and I humbly request he specify exactly what his argument is that I've missed.

"An Embarrassment to Atheists?" ;-)

I routinely visit the blogs of people who comment here to see if they represent themselves the same way on their own blogs. William Hawthorne has been commenting here and has been a bit annoying, so I thought I'd take a look.

He comes across as really well-read and really intelligent here, but this is far from the impression I get from his blog, and the issues he comments on. I initially saw a problem when he claimed to list books in support of Christian theism and inadvertently listed one book that was critical of it here. [Does anyone know which one?...Does he?]

Anyway, in one post on his blog he says the RRS is "an embarrassment to atheists." I am always extremely amused whenever a self-proclaimed Christian apologist is concerned for our good name. It is so disingenuous that I just bust out laughing. Imagine, a Christian actually wanting atheists to better represent themselves so they can be more effective!? It's so funny I'm still laughing, and it has nothing to do with the RRS either, since I didn't watch those videos and don't even know what he thinks the RRS has done, except that he's concerned the RRS might give us atheists a bad name. In any case, the only person who represents my beliefs is me, and as such no other atheist is an embarrassment to me. It's a non-sequitur.

Biblical Studies v Philosophical Studies

This post is a continuation of the DC Challenge. This will be brief...

Christians do NOT claim to affirm the grammatical-historical interpretation of the historic Christian creeds based upon reason. That is, they do not reason to their specific beliefs. Deists claim to reason to their beliefs, but Christians who affirm these historic creeds do not. The Christian affirms these creeds based upon accepting revelation from the Christian God, whether they find it in the Bible, or in church tradition. Christians will simply argue that it’s reasonable for them to accept God’s revelation, regardless of where they claim to find it.

However, if what I argue here at DC is true that the Bible is a collection of unwarranted superstitious beliefs, then it's likewise not reasonable for them to accept church tradition as authoritative. For if the Bible is shown to be a false revelation, then the historic church was wrong to proclaim it, and if that’s the case we have no assurance the church isn’t wrong in whatever it proclaims today. If church tradition isn't authoritative, then neither can we trust their selection of the books that go into the canon, since the church created the canonical Bible in the first place. [Protestants, especially evangelicals, claim the Bible created the church, but I cannot make any sense of this claim of theirs].

My point here is simple. In the area of the Philosophy of Religion religious beliefs are scrutinized according to reason to see if said beliefs are consistent and reasonable to believe. It is not a branch of Apologetics where the sum total case for Christianity is examined, nor is it a branch of Theology, where a believer isn't defending his faith so much as explicating it.

For the Christian, all of these areas are important and can be considered on some kind of continuum for defending and understanding their beliefs. But the source of their beliefs comes from the Bible, in one fashion or another. That's why I focus on Biblical studies and Biblical scholarship, because I think with Hector Avalos that Biblical studies should end. The Bible is irrelevant to the needs of modern people. The focus of Biblical studies should henceforth be on debunking them, according to Avalos. I agree.

Those Christians who focus on the Philosophy of Religion must first do the dirty work of investigating the results of Biblical scholarship, since that forms the basis of what they believe, and here is where their arguments cannot get off the ground. What these philosophers have succeeded in doing is to take certain beliefs, as if those beliefs can be defended in the Bible itself, and they try to work out why it's reasonable to believe them. But that gets the cart before the horse. Many smart people can defend stupid and ignorant beliefs that have little or no evidence to them. There are some pretty intelligent Holocaust deniers, Mormon scholars, and militant Muslim scholars, so we all know that people can defend beliefs which have little or no actual evidence for them.

What is the source of your beliefs and what's the evidence for them? That's where these philosophical scholars must start. But since they are in a highly specialized field of learning, they just assume (outside of their specialization) the results of Conservative Biblical scholars to begin with. But they themselves have not done the prerequisite Biblical study.

So my debate challenge is to get down and dirty inside the area of Biblical studies. I think the Bible itself debunks Christianity more than effectively.

Cheers.

Introducing Cognitive Dissonance

This article is meant to introduce the concept of Cognitive Dissonance and how it relates to Christianity.
Cognitive Dissonance is a term in psychology that describes the feeling of tension experienced by a person when they hold two conflicting beliefs. When this happens to a person they feel uncomfortable and they start trying to figure out a way to reconcile the beliefs so they don't seem to conflict anymore and / or the discomfort is relieved. Dissonance is more likely to happen if the major idea is about who we are. To better explain this concept some examples of situations that introduce cognitive dissonance follow.

- People who think they are smart, moral or competent and they make a mistake that would indicate otherwise.
- People with addictions that know the behavior is harmful but want to continue to do it anyway, such as smokers, overeaters, compulsive gamblers, alcoholics
- People that are genetically disposed to Mental Illness have difficulty in reconciling their actions with their conscience
- People that cheat on or find ways to reduce their taxes either unintentionally or intentionally.
- People that make excuses for the 'embarrassing' or trouble-making member of the family.
- People that automatically start 'playing the blame game' and pointing fingers.
- Politicians, in fact there is a book out on this right now that is referenced at the end of this article.
- Subordinates that have to justify enforcing policies they don't support, in business, government, military, etc
- Salespeople that have to sell a product they don't particularly care about, but have a need to exaggerate its value to the customer
- Professional people that have made a mistake that impacts their self image, such as a prosecuting attorney that wrongly convicts someone who is subsequently shown through something such as DNA evidence to be innocent. The attorney doesn't want to believe they have made this kind of mistake.
- People that want to believe in things that are not supported by strong evidence such as Superstitions, UFO's, Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster, Ghosts, Psychic phenomena, faith healing, etc
- People that have to reconcile why they hold a certain Religious belief rather than another
- People that have to reconcile events in their religion that they do not like, such as the many anecdotes in the Old Testament.
- People that have to reconcile why an all powerful and loving god would create the need to permit so much apparently needless suffering in the world.
- People that have to reconcile why Jesus mother and family thought he was crazy as described in Mark.
- People that have to reconcile why an all powerful loving God uses principles that are shown in day to day life to be flawed.

Once you understand the concept of Cognitive Dissonance and Self-Justification, you can see examples of it literally hour to hour, and especially in Movies and in TV where authors have to introduce conflict as quickly as possible to set the premise and give the characters something to do. It seems to be a mechanism, or drive related to self-preservation. The brain is wired for self-justification. It has been identified in every major culture. It shows up in fmri brain scans. Drew Weston showed that when a person is experiencing dissonance, the thought processes shut down and when the subject starts reducing dissonance the brain centers that show pleasure become activated. The problem is that it is a means of utilizing bias and ignoring evidence that prevents finding the truth or resolution of a problem. Once a person is experiencing Cognitive Dissonance it is very difficult for another person to interrupt the process. Attempts by another person to interrupt the process will result in the intensifying of the process and the resolve of the person experiencing dissonance to continue attempting to reconcile it.

An episode in a series of Psychology videos explains bias and cognitive dissonance very well. Follow this link Learner.org Part 11: Judgement and decision making. Registration is free to watch but you will have to create an account and I recommend it as 'safe' because i haven't received any spam since i did.

Of the many things the video talks about is a seminal experiment by Leon Festinger and Carl Smith.
Leon Festinger conducted one of the first experiments to introduce conditions that reliably induce dissonance. In the experiment the subjects were told to perform boring tasks. Afterwards they were given the opportunity to receive payment if they could influence others to participate in the experiment. Some subjects were given a twenty dollar payment, others only a one dollar payment and some were not given the offer. When asked to rate the tasks, the group that was paid one dollar rated them more highly than the group that was paid twenty. The group that was paid twenty dollars had an obvious external justification fortheir behavior, but those that were paid less had to internalize it. The researches theorized that the one dollar group did not believe they had sufficient justification to lie about the tasks so they were forced to changetheir attitude to relieve the stress. The process allowed the subjects to genuinely believe the tasks were enjoyable. Here is a link to the original paper.

Another similar experiment was done by Elliot Aronson where two groups were picked to join an organization with a initiation tasks. The organization turned out to be boring and uninteresting, but those that had the harder initiation felt more loyalty to it than those that had the easy initiation.

Leon Festinger summed it up in the video as "we come to love what we suffer for".

Carol Tarvis and Elliot Arronson (the researcher noted above) wrote a book on this subject called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs
In an interview with Carol Tarvis on Point of Inquiry, the Podcast of the Center for Skeptical Inquiry she was asked if Cognitive Dissonance is manifested in religious belief and the following summarizes her response.

Q: There are religious people that don't demand proof for their beliefs, is this a way of relieving their cognitive dissonance?
A: The more important a particular belief is to us the more strongly we will ignore or reject evidence suggesting we are wrong. Religion is central to what gives many people meaning and purpose in life. This type of belief will be defended at all costs. Examples of dis-confirming evidence creating Cognitive Dissonance are Evolution, the Holocaust and disasters.
Most religious people are not threatened by evolution. They find a way to fit it into their beliefs, but some cannot fit it into their beliefs and they will go to great lengths to try to refute the dis-confirming evidence.
How do Jews deal with the Holocaust? The Jews believe they are the chosen people, and god is looking after them. How could a good loving god have permitted genocide? Students of Cognitive Dissonance Theory would predict that people would become more religious and their faith would be strengthened. What most people do is not lose their faith in God but reduce the dissonance by saying God is responsible for the Good in the world, human beings are responsible for the Evil or God is testing faith. The Christian response to the question of how Jesus could permit enormous suffering to happen is to believe that it is to test faith. Anything that is not consonant with a belief in God is reinterpreted to make it consonant. For example after a terrible disaster the survivors will say something like "god was looking after me" but discounting the fact that God was not looking out for other people that died.

Another interesting interview related to cognitive dissonance is from the radio show "All in the Mind". They interviewed Phillip Zambardo, the lead researcher involved with the Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment had to be cancelled because it got out of control. The participants started self-justifying doing terrible things to each other and it had to be stopped. He was the expert witness for the defendants in the Abu Ghraib trial, explaining how situational factors can make good people do bad things using cognitive dissonance to self-justify their actions. It is described in his book
The Lucifer Effect. It made me think about slavery, the crusades, Old Testament atrocities and William Lane Craigs defense of killing pregnant mothers with a sword. (thanks Steven Carr!)

I suffered severely from dissonance and when I decided to subject my religious beliefs to the same type of criteria and scrutiny that I used for my day to day life, I discovered that I could no longer hold a belief in God. I Know that it is likely that I am not going to convince any christian that there is no God, but what I can do is, through the use of rational discussion, point out the weakness in their arguments and principles that their arguments depend on to introduce cognitive dissonance in their mind.

People use different criteria for reasoning based on the context of the situation. They are called Spheres when the the concept is applied to a group and "compartmentalizing" when applied to an individual. This concept is discussed in Stephen Toulmins "Introduction to Reasoning" and Richard D. Reinke and Malcom O. Sillars "Argumentation and Critical Decision Making". The difference in the spheres and compartments can be seen very well when comparing Scientific reasoning, Legal Reasoning, Religious Reasoning, Artistic Reasoning, and Business Reasoning. I am sure these are not all the spheres that can be identified but they are useful for this discussion. The difference between them is the weight that each places on types of evidence and principle. And often one type of reasoning taken out of context and applied in another sphere or compartment breaks down. For example, the type of anecdotal evidence used in Legal reasoning would break down when applied to science, just as Religious witness testimony breaks down when applied to Legal Reasoning. These facts insulate poor reasoning and can be used to Justify poor conclusions. However, when comparing the principles that conclusions depend on, it is not so easy to justify poor conclusions. For example, the concept of evidence is fundamental to all the types of reasoning but the type of evidence is not. However, if we say the type of evidence needed to justify a Christian belief is not sufficient to justify a Muslim, Hindu, Jewish (etc) then the principle breaks down and we can say the conclusion is flawed.

If you watch this blog long enough you can see people wrestling with this concept as illustrated here in this recent exchange between me and a commenter. We were talking 'embarrassing moments' in the bible and whether or not they are useful to build a case for authenticity. The argument goes that by including the 'embarrassing moments' in the bible it adds authenticity to it.

Lee:
I wouldn't even add it [argument for authenticity from embarrassing moments] to my portfolio to make a cumulative case. The reason why is someone like me would turn it around and point out, like I did in my first post, that in the beginning, Jesus as god was not the consensus. These things put in there were not threatening to that idea. Over time they became threatening. I would turn this argument around and say that it better supports Jesus lack of divinity because the anecdotes are not consistent with what should be the case if a god walked the earth, and if anyone should know it would be his mother. It better supports as ed points out that the further away from the event the larger his divinity grew which is more consistent with the creation of a legend than historical authenticity.

Commenter:
I would ad it [argument for authenticity from embarrassing moments] considering that it contributes in a positive way, even if it is neither necessary nor necessarily sufficient to make a case. Historical inquiry demands that I take it into consideration. The alternatives, while plausible, are not very strong in my opinion since they argue from silence and are based on hypotheticals.

What I want to point out is that while he asserts that the principle i am using to build my case is flawed he is happy to use it for his argument. Namely that the alternatives that I am using are not very strong and based on hypotheticals. His argument was too. And I claim his are based on them to a much larger degree since I have precedent on my side. In any case, I didn't use this example to declare that I am right, I simply used it as the most recent example of cognitive dissonance that I have experienced. If you watch this blog day to day, you see it almost every day.

The truth will stand up to scrutiny and the truth will set you free. People just have to decide to break down the walls between those compartments and identify and eliminate sources of bias because they will not be convinced by anyone otherwise.

REFERENCES not all inclusive, refer to the body of the article for more.

* Point of Inquiry podcast with Carol Tavris interview.
* Science Friday podcast interview with Elliot Aronson
* Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs
* Wikipedia on Cognitive Dissonance
* Stanford Prison Experiment
* The Lucifer Effect

Solomon Asch conformity experiments
* Solomon Asche
* Conformity Experiments
* YouTube video

Drew Weston
* Discussion of his experiment
* His book "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation"

Fire From Heaven and Broken Promises

Imagine two people making promises to you. The promises are basically the same: "Do this for me, and I will..." One promises to give you one million dollars. The other promises to give you a new house.

You do the deed, and go to the first person for the promised reward. Their response is something like this: "sorry, I don't have that money to give you right now," or "you have to wait until you die (wink, wink) to get that reward," or "sorry, that was a metaphor...the million dollars actually represents treasures of joy, happiness and fulfillment for doing what I want you to do," or "yeh, that promise was for someone else, not you. You just misinterpreted my words on that one."

You go to the second person for the promised reward. They give you keys to a new house; not a mansion, just a basic 3-bed, 2-bath ranch. But, at least, they kept the promise. No tricks, no excuses, no blaming you for misunderstanding.

I have seen so many Christians try to excuse their God from failing to make the promises He makes in the Bible. They even go so far as to say that the Bible really is not their sacred book, their Source for their belief. Of course, if you ask them to explain where their thinking and doctrine about God come from, their response is to accuse you of being unintelligent, belligerent, or simplistic.

But, the simple and plain truth is, that in the Bible, which is the Source of Christian doctrine and belief - whether certain Christians like it or not - are a truckload of promises that have not been kept, are not kept, and will never be kept (if God remains consistent with himself up to this point).

Which, fundamentally, makes God either (1) a liar, or (2) the Bible is really an evil, deceptive and destructive Source for doctrine, or (3) there is no God at all, and the Bible is - again - a powerfully destructive book because it appeals to people's hopes, dreams, aspirations, and faith...and it does not deliver because their is no Divine Being to back it up.

Now, what of this other person who made the promise and kept it? Who might that other person be? The Devil? Secularism? Science? Atheism? Hmmm...

Apart from the Devil (who probably does not exist, since there is no God), the others present a very attractive alternative to the Christian God. Why? Because at least they deliver. No, they do not deliver a mansion. Nor do they deliver the neat, perfect doctrinaire answer that ninety-nine percent of Christians like to believe their God offers (and can be summed up so easily in the "Statement of Doctrine" found in most, if not all, churches). But (and excuse my metaphor) it is the key to a new house. It is something.

In 1 Kings 18, there is a great story of the prophet Elijah confronting Ahab, the King of Israel who has turned to Baal worship. Elijah challenges Baal to prove himself in competition with God. Elijah dares for two bulls to be place on altars...the Baal prophets will pray to their God, Elijah will pray to his God (who he and the Bible claim is the one, true God). The Baal prophets pray and pray and pray. Nothing happens. Elijah mocks them. Nothing happens.

Then Elijah prays, and of course God answers by fire from heaven, consuming Elijah's bull, the altar, and the bull and altar used by the Baal prophets.

Elijah makes this great challenge to set up the whole deal: "let the god who answers by fire, let him be God!"

Remember Promise Keepers, that huge evangelical men's ministry stadium show that was hugely popular several years ago?

Promise Keeper? God? Not hardly! The so-called God of the Bible has been silent for a long, long, long time. Many hundreds of thousands of millions of faithful have prayed and prayed and prayed...and fasted...and prayed. No fire from heaven. No whisper in the wind. No million dollars. No key to a new house.

Nothing. If the god who answers by fire is truly God...then I think the atheists have made their point.

Welcome to the World of Christianity

As a Christian, you are now following a supreme God who created the universe. The following are some of the main superlative facts you need to know about God (Yahweh):

He is omnipotent (Having unlimited power and authority).
He is omnipresent (He is present everywhere).
He is omniscient (Having total knowledge).
He commands billions of angels of which just one could destroy the world.

As a Christian, you are part of large and diverse group totaling over 2.1 billion members that has a worldwide yearly budget approaching one half of a trillion dollars.

HOWEVER

You now know Satan (a fallen angel) is your only and main adversary who leads a small rag-tag army of other fallen angles (demons).

Satan has very limited power (Just what little power and control God gives him).
Satan has no earthly members. (Just a few “Dabblers”).
Satan has no budget.

AND YET

According to God’s own word the Bible (especially the Book of Revelation) God, with all the above supreme attributes, is losing a battle He created and even sacrificed His only begotten son to win.
You, as a Christian, will one day stand before your God at the Great White Throne Judgment and be asked to “give an account” of why you, as a mortally limited and sinful human, screwed up. From there, most of your members will be given total blame for the lost of creation and along with unforgiven sinners you will be casted into The Lake of Fire to be burned and tormented forever.

HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND THIS?

It is a divine Mystery

(The theological term used by the Catholic Church for our mortal lack of understanding.)

The Strange Case of Evangelist Oliver Green and Rudolf Bultmann with a Note on C.S. Lewis

The president and founder of the radio broadcast, The Gospel Hour (still on many Christian stations today), Evangelist Dr. Oliver B. Green (Feb. 14, 1915 – July 26, 1976) loved the fundamentalist theology and good sound King James’ Version of Biblical truth backed by a strong evangelistic preaching of salvation. I used to listen to him in the early ‘70s and hear him complaint about the circulation in his legs “it’s like my legs are on fire”. His website states:

"Early in life it was immediately evident Oliver B. Greene was an independent Baptist. Through all of his ministry he carried the honor of being one who "could not be bought." In 1939, the 24-year-old bought a tent, and for 35 years he conducted revivals all across America, until failing health forced him to stop.

Carefully kept records reveal that over 200,000 found Christ under his ministry. Perhaps his single greatest campaign was in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where 7,000 professions of faith were registered. He held his last tent revival in Bel Air, Maryland (this tent was 100 feet by 300 feet). "

He died at the rather early age of 61 from cardio-vascular failure. Green also had two sons who suffered form birth defects. One I know from personal experience was born with only one arm (I helped change the avionics in his plane for a one armed control).

On the other hand, Rudolf Bultmann (Aug. 20, 1884 – July 30, 1976) demythologized the Kerygma of the New Testament, wrote Kerygma and Myth and latter Jesus Christ and Mythology in 1958. Bultmann stood for almost everything opposite of Fundamentalist Christianity and yet he died a peaceful death at age 92 (just less than a month short of his 93 birthday and in the same month and year as Green (a providence of God?)). The fact is, this nonbeliever out lived Oliver Green by almost 32 years.

If God blesses those who bless Him and curses those who cruse Him; where is the so called Providential Justice? Also, if as Greek philosophy claims God does not make mistakes; than why were both Green’s sons born birth defects?

Note: In the same vein, apologist C.S. Lewis (1898 – 1963 whose “Mere Christianity” is often pointed to as a defense of the evangelical faith) died also at an early age (when compared to Bultmann) at 64. After his wife Joy died of cancer, he wrote under a pseudonym “A Grief Observed” in which he wrestled with the reality of his faith in Christianity and his struggle to hold on to this faith.

So just how is this Theodicy explained? Unlike the early Christian disciples who died often at an early age for their faith; most meeting their end by martyrdom, these defenders of the faith seem to have been destroyed or cursed by the very God they apologetically defended!

Christians Converting Christians to Christianity

Jesus is equal to a chemical catalyst (a chemical catalyst changes other elements in a chemical reaction, but does not change itself). The failed apocalyptic view of a first century Jewish reformer seems to have been forever lost forever in time and space (Albert Schweitzer / Rudolf Bultmann). As a theological catalyst, he now has created chemical reactions in the minds of over 20,000 sects within Christendom with most claiming the exclusive rights to the word "Truth" or, according to each sect; Truth" should be a registered Trade Mark in the US Patten Office. As an example here just last week, are the two Jehovah Witnesses left an "Awake" magazine with my wife. It stated emphatically that while there are religions calling themselves Christian, there is only ONE TRUE CHRISTIANITY - those believers called by Jehovah to witness His "Truth"...door to door. Also here we find Mormons, Church of Christ, Seventh Day Adventist, Christian Science, and Catholics all having THE exclusive TOTAL TRUTH given to them by God. As viewed from within, each of these sects, see other Christianities are "Deceptions of man" or at worst, "lies of Satan".

Just tune in the “Catholic Global Radio New Work” (either on satellite radio or an AM station) and hear form evangelical Protestants “coming home” to the true and only orthodox Church Jesus Christ accepts. On their website: http://www.catholic.com/ hundreds of books and pamphlets are offered debunking the belief of evangelicals and their “born again” theology. Apologist Karl Keating invites the “heretics” of evangelical / Protestant theology to debate him on the air. More over, some of the major Catholic defenders of the faith are former evangelicals who now defending the truth of the Roman Catholic Church against evangelicals without compromise.

On the other hand, I worked with a Baptist on furlong from Guam (an island whose population is 90% Catholic) which he stated has a lost population which desperately needs to break that hold Satan has on it by hearing and accepting the Gospel of Christ. I’ve seen this man breakdown and cry over his “burden for lost Catholics”.

Since ignorance breeds superstition, the human mind feeds on the fear of a supreme figure theology labels as absolute "Truth". Stories of a vengeful God killing anyone viewed as sinful in many parts of the "Old Testament" or a disappointed loving God of the New Testament who "fries people like bacon in Hell" creates the same fear in an adult as the ghost that hides under the bed or the noise in the attic does for a child's mind... just as the stories of the brothers Grimm. Is it any wonder after viewing the movie The Exorcist (according to Billy Graham) many Christians had to seek psychological counseling.

So how is truth is so subjectively maintained? As a Baptist preacher told me 38 years ago..."The Bible said it! I believe it! That settles it!...No wait. The Bible said it! That settles it! I don't have to believe it!" Thus, we have absolute "TRUTH" in its purest from!

It’s little wonder that when I asked an evangelical Christian which is worst: an Atheist or a Heretic? He answered definitely “A Heretic!”

Stephen Law on Faith, Reason and the Existence of God

Author and philosopher Stephen Law wrote an excellent essay about faith, reason and the existence of God. Check it out!

Christianity is More Dangerous Than Atheism Because of the Same Reasons I Reject it!

I'm beginning to think that when it comes to the question, "which belief system killed more people, Christianity or atheism,” that the answers given are a wash. There has been evil done on both sides, such that by merely looking at the evil itself we cannot conclude which set of beliefs is more dangerous. The numbers themselves don't tell us the whole story, so continually adding and subtracting which set of beliefs killed the most people doesn't tell us much about which set of beliefs is more dangerous.

Since it's obvious people use religion for their own selfish and evil purposes, and since self-destructive and egomaniacal people who reject religion can kill people in the name of atheism, this debate doesn't show much to us about the truth or falsity of our respective claims, except in one important respect, which is the same one we argue about between us anyway!

Christians have a revelational claim. They do not reason to their specific beliefs (the trinity? Virgin Birth? Incarnation?). They learn about such beliefs from God’s revelation and then they argue these beliefs are reasonable. Even the arguments for God's existence cannot get a person to the Trinity. Non-believers claim to follow reason and science. We have separate starting points.

That difference between us is also the same difference when it comes to which set of beliefs are more dangerous, I think, and it's clear to me which ones are indeed more dangerous. It's the Christian set of beliefs. Why? Because there’s this entity called the Holy Spirit. The Christian claim is that he speaks to them both individually through illumination, or collectively through the Bible. Non-believers have no such belief. What atheists believe is based on reason and science (in various degrees, since there are intelligent and educated ones as well as ignorant ones).

Individually a Christian can claim to have heard the Holy Spirit or God speaking directly to them, and this voice can say “kill people,” or a host of other messages, many benign. Those who claim God told them to “kill people” are the insane people, of course, but an atheist insane person has no such justification if he chooses to kill.

Whenever God’s message is believed based upon this inner voice of God’s, without evidence, Christians are absolutely sure of it and they can do a great amount of evil in God’s name precisely because a belief held without reason is one that cannot be debunked by reason. They can claim practically anything. From “God wants so-and-so elected,” to “I should marry this person,” to “we should have another baby,” to “I should bash gay people and infidels,” to “our church should step out on faith and build a bigger church,” to “so-and-so is an evil person.” These beliefs can do harm, and they are adopted based upon a voice in their own heads.

An Christian individual who hears this voice can influence a church or a nation on a collective level, if that person is a leader. Collectively a church can do great harm in such things as the Inquisition, the Crusades, or by endorsing slavery. A “Christian” nation can endorse such things as “manifest destiny,” or that we should invade Iraq, or support the Jews no matter what, because they are supposedly in Biblical “end-time prophecies.”

So I think these beliefs of Christians are dangerous and do produce greater evil for the very same reasons I reject it. Their beliefs are not based upon reason and science! Any belief not so based can and does lead to great harm.

The question I have posed continually is why God never said such things as “Thou shalt not trade, sell, buy, own, or beat slaves,” and said it as often as needed for the collective church to get the point (this could be done for witch, honor, and heretic killings as well). And if a proper exegesis of the relevant Biblical texts should’ve been so clear in the Bible that Southern Christianity was not getting it right about slavery, then where was the Holy Spirit’s influence? If Christians can repeatedly and grossly reject the influence of the Holy Spirit, then what influence does he really have in the lives of believers?

The fact is that the very claim that Christians make of the Holy Spirit and of revelation makes the Christian belief system more dangerous that atheism, regardless of which belief system killed more people. It's the basis for the Christian claim that makes it ipso facto more dangerous...by far.

Eddie Tabash Responds

Earlier we had a discussion about Eddie Tabash's argument on the separation of church and state to be found here. There were some unanswered questions so I emailed Eddie and here is his response...

Bill Gnade is concerned that there is too much of a focus on the role played by right wing Christians in eroding church/state separation. There is no need to discuss liberal Christians, because they are not the problem. My speech is entitled the “Threat of the Religious Right to Our Modern Freedoms.” In this presentation, I speak of the need for nonbelievers to work with liberal believers to secure freedom of conscience for everyone. However, the threat to turn the United States into a theocracy is a real danger that emanates from the religious right. Focusing my criticism on the religious right does not entail any automatic condemnation of liberal Christians or religionists, in general, who agree on keeping God and government separate.

Bill Gnade is also concerned about absurdities that can flow from church/state separation. If properly applied, there would be no legal disabilities imposed on believers. Believers would only enjoy no greater rights than non believers, as it should be.

The writer, Jon, apparently does not comprehend the dangers of pure democracy, as opposed to a constitutional democracy. He also does not appreciate the role of the 9th Amendment in preserving for the people rights otherwise not given to the states. The states are defined as their collective law making authority. If they are not specifically empowered to encroach on a liberty interest, that interest must lie with individuals.

Jon is also not persuaded that the framers intended strict separation between church and state, that is, government neutrality in matters of religion. In my talk, I think I showed that this is what the Framers clearly intended. However, for a more developed historical analysis of why the Establishment Clause was designed to require government neutrality in matters of religion, please see my in depth article on the True Meaning of the Establishment Clause.

Jon seems to miss the importance of empowering individual liberty to stave off state oppression. The incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states, by way of the 14th Amendment, accomplishes this. If our most basic liberties can be crushed by government, if there is no right of privacy, then it does not matter that the oppressive arm of government emanates from the state house rather than Congress.

The Establishment Clause clearly prohibits government bodies from imposing religious-based laws on individuals. So, if a state can burst into the marital bedroom and stop the use of contraceptives, we have a form of state totalitarianism that is in violation of the liberty interests of the very limited government that conservatives keep harping about. Also the 4th Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, along with the Establishment Clause, and the 9th Amendment, incorporated to local governments by the 14th Amendment, clearly justifies preventing a dictatorial majority from using the police power of the state to trample on minority rights.

So, yes, I do not favor, and I do not believe the Bill of Rights favors, unbridled democracy. I believe that the Constitution places limits on the degree to which majority sentiment can encroach upon minority rights.

If I wish to express my views in public as to why I believe there is no God, it wouldn’t matter if 100% of those hearing those views wanted the state to forcibly stop me from expressing those views. Such expression is protected. The state of Alabama, for instance, should not be permitted to prosecute me, even if 100% of those living in that state insisted that atheists should not have the same rights to speak in public as do religionists, and I publicly expressed my reasons for not believing in God at a public debate at the University of Alabama.

In his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, Scalia mentioned masturbation as among the “deviant” sexual activities that a state should be able to ban. America would become a tyranny if the cops could burst into someone’s bedroom and arrest that person for privately jerking off, regardless of what the majority of residents of the given state thought.

Eddie Tabash

Subject: Is it a Fact that the Biblical Background is Original?

Below is how I now understand salvation and Christianity and why I'm not worried about a future life in a Heaven or Hell. You will not find this taught in church supported schools (Bible colleges or conservative seminaries) nor mentioned in Sunday School classes as these facts would totally be counter productive in any development of faith.

As a non-Christian (one who was never saved (John Calvin) or one who lost his salvation (Jacobus Arminius)…I’ll leave that up to the theologians to debate) I feel very fulfilled with my life and find the concepts of eternal reward or punishment meaningless now in light of the environment. But just to clarify my view, below is the central reason why I left Christianity.

Some Major Biblical Facts

A. Every major Greek theological term and concept the New Testament and Early Church used to create his or her religious doctrine was taken directly from the Classical “pagan” world. Here are a few: God (Greek: Theos) Church, Faith, Prayer, Salvation, Gospel, Heaven, Hell, Sin, Soul, Spirit, Demon, Forgiveness, Sacrifice, Blood Atonement, the concept of “god” as father, divine punishments and rewards and so on. These terms and concepts were loaded words pregnant with meaning from the so-called “pagan” religious traditions and applied by the early followers of Jesus to their up start religion(s) (Christianity is a “catch all” term for all early Jesus movements whether latter accepted as orthodox or not). As proof, look up any of the above words in Oxford’s Classical Greek Lexicon (A Greek-English Lexicon, Liddell, Scott, Jones) and watch how the word is reapplied latter by the authors of the New Testament in A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature, Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, Funk and finally the exclusive use in the Christian tradition in Oxford’s A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Lamp. These “pagan” religions used these same terms and concepts for hundreds to thousands of years before Jesus which enabled people like St. Paul proselytize based on the foundations of Classical religious traditions (Paul needs this foundation to preach at Athenians: Acts 17). It is little wonder Christianity was given its name and had great success in Classical pagan Asia Minor while the teachings of Jesus (as found in the Synoptic Gospels and taught by such Jewish-Christian sects as the Ebionites whose terms and concepts where base the Semitic Aramaic language) had mostly died out in Roman Palestine by 400 CE.

Even the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, minted coins with a cross on one side and Apollo, the Sun god, on the other. The New Testament’s concept of judgment where God is seated on a throne with Jesus either standing or seated at His right hand is drawn directly from the court of the Roman Emperor with his son or favorite general seated or standing to his right and set the stage for the imperial cult worship of the Emperor.

Symbolic numbers such as 3, 6, 7, 12, 40, 72 are also given divine meanings and are used repeatedly by Jesus and the writers of the New Testament (especially in the book of Revelation) to reveal divine mysteries. These same six numbers can be found as symbolic and magical numbers in much older stories and religious texts from ancient Semitic language families such as Akkadian, Phoenician, and Ugaritic. In light of this fact (as argued by Christian apologist) to claim that “God” uses known symbols and terms of the ancient pagan world only begs the question as to the exclusive truthfulness of both Judaism and Christianity.

The West Semitic language of Hebrew (of the Israelites) is a direct dialect of the hated Canaanites reed stylus script: Ugaritic (Note: The late Hebrew alphabet script compared to the ancient reed logographic script proves which came first). The symbol used in the Book of Revelation of the seven- headed beast (Rev. 13) was a concept already about 1000 years old when the writer of this Christian book chose to plagiarize it (see: Ancient Near Eastern Text in Pictures Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton University Press). Thus the New Testament writers often depended on, and needed popular pagan symbols to create accepted and factual bases for their new faith so the Christian tradition would fit right in to a competing “pagan” religious context.

In a world in which most people were poor and illiterate, with few living past the age of thirty (where a simple abscessed tooth could cause death), the austere teaching of the Synoptic Jesus on wealth (Matt. 13:22, Mark 10:25, Luke 6:24, 16:19-31) is replaced with promises of “health, wealth and prosperity” in latter works such as the Gospel of John where the faithful will be given many rooms (Greek: mona) in Heaven (John 14:2) or, in the books of Revelation, where the righteous walk on streets of gold in an emerald city (Rev. 21: 9-21).

Even recent major archaeological discovery now shows, more than ever, that the Hebrews are themselves part of their hated neighbors: the Canaanites. The lack of any archaeological sites that are linked to the Israelites in the Sinai over their forty year journey under a man called Moses are proving there was never an exodus form Egypt as stated in the Bible (for a review of the facts see: America’s leading archeologist William Dever in his book: Who Were the Israelites and Where Did They Come From? Eerdmans, 2003). In fact, the old lunar calendar of the Canaanites and their religious festivals to their gods is the same basic calendar of dates for many of Israel’s major festivals: Rosh ha-shanah, Sukkot, Pesach and Shavu’ot. Shav’uot.

It’s very interesting that while so called Bible Believers (as such, Bob Jones University) claim to accept the Bible at face value and follow Jewish tradition (and that of Jesus himself) that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, they never explain why an earlier text such as Deuteronomy 18:10 is not followed or accepted by Yahweh Himself in a much latter time/text such as the burning of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11:29-40 (and notice that the English word used here: Lord is the direct rendering of Hebrew Yahweh in the Masoretic Hebrew text ). Even if the text of Deuteronomy 18 is dated into the Josianic reforms, Yahweh Himself has both prohibited and accepted human sacrifice as a burnt offering! It’s now just a small step from accepting a human burnt offering (that of Jephthah’s daughter) to the human crucified offering: Jesus. One thing being equal, Israel’s god Yahweh and the Canaanite gods (Baal / El) both accepted human flesh and blood as a sacrifice!

What Best Explains the "Embarrassing Elements" in the Gospels?

I'll comment later, but what do you think about this argument?

The Ache of Christmas

I am an agnostic on my best days, and an atheist on my better days. But when Christmas comes around, I ache inside.

I miss the meaning of the music, which in my opinion is the best and most moving choral and common music ever written. I miss the mystery of the moment, when God incarnated Himself in humanity. I miss the power of the myth...incarnation in a poor, forsaken Jew, living in occupied territory, born with a murder threat over his head and the head of his family.

I have been to Israel. I have stood in the cave under the Church of the Nativity. I have stood in the Shepherd's Cave. I have looked out over the fields where the shepherds watched their flocks at night. I looked up in the expanse of sky above my head, where those shepherds saw angels singing "Hosanna, peace on earth (not hardly), good will to mankind (yeh, well...)." I visited the little excavated home in Nazareth, swallowed up by a modern cathedral, where Mary raised the little Messiah to be. (OK - I am pulling a Paul here, trying to cite my credentials for the benefit of my attackers).

I even learned on that visit - and received it with a skeptical mind and heart because I was anointed of the Holy Spirit, and walking in faith - that those sites had absolutely no historic merit, but were consigned that identity by Catherine and the ambassadors from Constantine that marked off the Holy Land for Christianity in the fourth century.

Hell, I even miss Santa Claus, in my mind - now - a myth equal to the myth of Jesus and possibly more rooted in fantastical realism. The gifts under the tree, the Christmas Eve dinner, the singing of carols, the celebration with wassail...all of those things seem somewhat empty to me now that I have given up the Ghost.

It is not easy being agnostic at Christmas. HP Lovecraft - admittedly not the philosopher or intellect that is often quoted here, but a man of keen insight and a philosopher's vision - looked up at the stars and saw a cold, heartless, meaningless universe. John Loftus compared our plight on planet earth to a Monte Carlo card game...Bill Gnade took him up on it and an interesting argument ensued. Bottom line...when one embraces agnosticism, or atheism, one embraces a cold, heartless, meaningless universe that has no regard for humanity or the plight of humans or the destiny of individuals. Chuthulu may as well be out to destroy us for no reason other than that we, as a species and a race, are in his way. Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter that I am agnostic, or that at one time I stood on the cliff overlooking Shepherd's Field and wept with wonder at the immensity of that alleged night.

The hardest truth of all...it does not matter. There are probably atheists and agnostics out there who will deny that they ever feel the emptiness of that truth. Or perhaps they don't ever feel that...and I envy them. I feel the ache, and Christmas just makes the ache of that reality more poignant. But as one who once worshipped the Babe in the Manger, and now does not...I am convinced that it is better to find a way to embrace the ache and get on with it, than to live in a delusion that - like the truth about Santa - may cause more damage than good.

So, it's midnight...and things are clear.

The Pagan Development of Christianity

A. The ministry of Jesus the Jewish Reformer and his traditional 11(12) apostles were failures. From the death of Jesus (between 30 -32 CE), it took 30 to 40 years for the first Gospel of Mark to write a life of Jesus. The very limited function of (Saint) Peter the Jew is totally eclipsed by the Hellenistic / Greek Paul (or a school of Pauline thought) wrote half of the New Testament. By Acts chapter 14, the last apostle (Peter who was to have been taught by the master Jesus himself) is totally drop in favor of the Greek Jew, Paul who redefines a limited Jewish Jesus into a universal and gentile "Christ". The rest of Jesus’ Jewish apostles appear only in non-canonical pseudepigraphic and apocryphal literature...

B. Only Christianity as it survived in Greek Asia Minor (the home of Paul or the philosophical east) and Rome (the seat of power) was accepted as orthodox as defined at the Nicaea Council in 325 CE. From 325 CE onwards, Christology is defined by the later church councils directly from the rhetoric and philosophy drawn from Neo-Platonism. This mode of thinking becomes the language to the orthodox Church Fathers and of salvation. This is particularly true in light of the Hebrew Bible’s concept of Sheol or the Land of the Shades where all decent in the after life. Platonic philosophy as found in the Phaedo has the soul returning to above spiritual world of absolute true: The Forms. Thus, eternal life for the righteous soul based on a philosophical understanding of Christ is moved from underground Sheol / the Pit to accent in the heavens / Heaven. Sheol is now Hell (since down is bad, thus the place for the fall of the soul in Plato and the land of the Forms is now Heaven (since up is good and the source of divine light in Plotinus of which we all seek to return to). Paul’s accent into the “third Heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2) is attested from a structure of the Plotinian Universe. Further, Paul’s exclusive concept of a Jewish midrash reading of the Genesis’ story of Eden and the talking snake (Genesis 3) provided the foundation for what the Church Fathers defined as Original Sin (as derived from Plato’s Phaedrus).

C. The limited anthropomorphic god of Israel is given expanded attributes such as "all knowing", "all loving", "all present", "all powerful", and any and all other positive absolutes are drawn directly from the Classical Greek philosophical traditions of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus as a ultimate philosophical universality (again note St. Paul’s theology). Little wonder there is no known Greek or Latin manuscript used in the translation of the New Testament where the name of Israel's god Yahweh is recorded. The Hebrew Yahweh as a historical actor is now dead and the Greek philosophical and Classical term theos or “God” is now front and center.

D. In the late Gospel of John, Jesus is the "logos" (Greek for word) pulled by the writer of this gospel directly from Greek philosophy. This logos or word has no birth, but always was from the beginning (John chapter 1). The old Greco-Roman myth where a god impregnates a woman (as record in Mathew and Luke) to make a half man and half god (such as in the case with Heracles and many other Greco-Roman demigods) was rejected as crude myth in the Platonic view. Thus, the Classical myths with their flawed gods and demigods are given the boot in favor of the pure term logos. This logos is now totally identified as God or the Classical Greek generic term for the highest level of pure universal of concept of light and mind (John 1:9). In this Fourth Gospel, Jesus (unlike in Matthew, Mark and Luke) has no parables to tell, but is made to speak as a Greek philosopher. In fact, the word faith used so often in the Synoptic Gospels never occurs in John. The famous statement use by Evangelicals and most likely formed by the writer of John as recorded in John 3:16 (For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that who so ever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life." is a statement where the limited Hebrew god Yahweh and his chosen people (the Israelites) are now cast out being replaced by the universal absolutes of Platonic philosophy. This God of Philo of Alexandria and the Gospel of John have been totally transformed from the God of Noah (Genesis 6 -9) who hated his own creation to universal logos of love.

For those Christians who argue that God never changes need only to study the ancient world of Judaism and Christianity more openly and objectively in dialogue with the text of the ancient Near East and the Classical worlds. (Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever. Hebrews 13:8) Really?

Harry McCall

Bill Gnade and the Origins of Existence

In a discussion that started here, Bill Gnade has asked some very good questions which bear repeating and answering...

Bill said…

If we are here by pure chance, then we are not here as a result of some Monte Carlo game. For a Monte Carlo game is a system that is itself neither random nor is it created ex nihilo; any Monte Carlo game is the result of a creating intelligence. There is nothing ultimately random either about the existence of the game or the results of the game as played. Your analogy assumes intelligence, even intelligent design. Moreover, you intend to use this analogy rationally; you don't intend to use it irrationally. Hence, you do believe that there are rational metaphysics, namely yours. You DO explain existence: we are a number that came up in a drawing, and this is a "brute fact" that prevents us from explaining existence.

Agreed. All analogies break down somewhere, and I was using words to describe something that probably cannot be described, only that we just don’t know how we got here. When it comes to why anything exists, all we have are brute facts, and I find that extremely interesting and maddening at the same time. The brute fact that will be more reasonable to accept will depend upon the one that has the fewest ad hoc hypotheses, agreed?

We either start with an unexplainable “quantum wave fluctuation” or we start (from the Christian perspective) with a triune God, even though the no sense of the trinity can be made that is both orthodox and reasonable; who as a spiritual being created matter, even though no known point of contact between spirit and matter can be articulated; who never began to exist, even though everything we experience has a beginning and an end to it; who never learned any new truths and cannot think, since thinking demands weighing temporal alternatives; is everywhere, yet could not know what time it is since time is a function of placement and acceleration in the universe; and if timeless this God cannot act in time.

Plus, depending upon what you believe in the Bible this God commanded genocide, witch, honor, heretic killings, and demanded a perfect moral life when such a life is not possible given that we are fleshly creatures with an “epistemic distance” from knowing God’s true love and power; became incarnate in Jesus, even though no reasonable sense can be made of a being who is both 100% God and 100% man; found it necessary to die on the cross for our sins, even though no sense can be made of so-called atonement; will return to earth where every eye will see him, which assumes an ancient pre-scientific cosmology; and will judge humanity by rewarding the “saints” in heaven by taking away their free will to do wrong, and punishing sincere doubters to hell with their free will intact so they can continue to rebel.

I prefer the simplest brute fact, period.

Bill again...

Moreover, since you call this existence "absurd," I am led to believe that you don't believe your own assertion, for to know what is absurd one must first know what makes sense; and since what makes sense is the rational, you must stand in the rational, or else you could not discern the absurd from what is not. Hence, you have not really shown what is your ultimate view of reality, couched as it must be in sensibility and reason (and even sanity); you have not shown us how you KNOW this existence is absurd.

What I believe, after moving off of the default position, which is agnosticism, is based upon a measure of faith.

Bill said…

Somehow, for some reason, I have not given in to my ultimate doubts.

I make no predictions about this, nor do I personally care if you do. All I’m saying is that I did, and I have offered reasons for why I did.

Bill said…

You are probably right about the Ontological Argument, though I hope you recognize that the argument is at least logically valid.

Yes it is. But what do you do when two valid arguments lead to mutually contradictory conclusions? John Hick used the same formulation of the Ontological Argument that Plantinga uses, except that he concludes that an evil Supreme Being exists.

Bill said…

But Will Hawthorne's question opens up a very important idea, namely, that the existence of the universe is not "known;" hence, at best, our acceptance of the universe as known is based on faith (forgive me Mr. Hawthorne if I've said too much). And if faith is the first principle of knowledge, then I believe any argument against Christianity as "faith" is silly.

Agreed. Reason can lead us to the default position, but reason cannot move us off it. It’s faith that moves us off of it. So the only question is which movement off of the default position entails the least amount of faith, and the least amount of ad hoc hypotheses? I think I know.

Cheers.

Eddie Tabash on the Separation of Church and State

Even Christians can support the separation of church and state, okay?

Christians Gain Little From Antony Flew’s Change of Mind

Antony Flew changed his mind on the God-hypothesis, which was announced in an interview published in December of 2004. To answer his critics he wrote an article for the Journal of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, called The Open Society (Summer 2005, Volume 78, Number 4), titled What I Mean by Atheism, pp 8-9. In it we see why Christians gain little from his change of mind...

In this article Flew rambles, and what he wrote seems contradictory. In the first place, why is the article titled, “What I mean by atheism,” if he now believes? He also states that “I am myself delighted to be assured by biological-scientist friends that protobiologists are now well able to produce theories of the evolution of the first living matter and that several of these theories are consistent with all the so-far confirmed scientific evidence.” Why would he say that if he has accepted the Intelligent Design hypothesis? And why would he answer the question of whether we need a God to explain the origin of life by writing, “the work in this area which I have now read and on which I am presently relying for my conclusion on this matter is Victor J. Stenger's Has Science Found God?: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe? Stenger’s answer to that question," Flew writes, "is, of course, an emphatic ‘No’."

But Flew does say this: “Probably I should always have called myself an agnostic.”

In an earlier article Raymond Bradley asked, “You say that you have abandoned atheism for belief in God. But the God of which religion? Pantheism? Deism? Or of some non-Mosaic version of theism?” Flew’s answers by writing “My answer is clear and confident. It is the non-interfering Aristotelean God of Deism and, most emphatically not the God of any revealed religion.” How much clearer can Flew be?

To emphasize this point, Flew wrote: “Albert Einstein was once asked – ‘to settle an argument’ – whether he believed in God. He replied that he believed in Spinoza’s God…No doubt many orthodox Christian and Jewish readers were reassured to think the great physicist was at one with them on this most fundamental matter.’ But of course, in Spinoza’s usage ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ were synonyms. Of course there is…a quite fundamental difference between an Aristotelian God who is the First Cause and Einstein’s Spinozistic ‘God or Nature’. But I don’t see why anyone else should be much interested in that question just so long as any God who is believed to exist is not Himself interested in human behaviour.”

Here’s my problem. In this essay we see Flew rambling and even making what seems to be contradictory claims in 2005. That should surely be an indicator that two years later he probably has other lapses in thinking and writing. It is not the clear and well written stuff he used to do. Nonetheless, in it he distances himself from any revealed religion. Why are Christians getting so much reassurance out of this? I don’t see it.

I think soft-agnoticism ("I don't know") is the default religious position. In this article Flew even says as much by saying he should've always affirmed agnosticism. Anyone leaving the default position must offer arguments in doing so. That's why I argue that moving from that initial position to a full-blown fundamentalist Christianity is as hard to do as flying a plane to the moon. That's why Christians of the fundamentalist type, gain little from his "conversion."

Flew’s viepoint is a very small step off that initial position. He affirms very little. Since the smaller the claim is, the easier it is to defend, his view is a much more reasonable position than fundamentalism, and harder to debunk. I too make a small move off the default position, but in the opposite direction, to atheism. However, his Deistic view offers him nothing...no hope...no morality...no helping God. A distant God like that is no different than none at all. Once I grasped this I became an atheist, for even if there is a God, it makes no difference to believe he exists.

I think all attempts to figure this existence out end in practical absurdities. Some people embrace those absurdities and punt to mysticism and mystery as pointers to the ultimate. Existentialists do so. Pantheists simply claim all is maya, an illusion.

But when I reflect on what best explains this absurd existence, then I offer a meta-explanation. Since no explanation is rational, I offer a meta-explanation for why this is so. It's because chance events, by their very nature, cannot be figured out. Our number came up in a Monte Carlo game. The universe is a brute fact, and this best explains why we cannot figure out why we exist.

Videos From the AAI 07 Conference

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The Bible and the Christian Tradition are Irrelevant

Let's just face it. The Bible and the people who produced it were barbaric and superstitious. The only redeeming qualities about the Bible or the Christian tradition are those things that civilized people agree with them about, and hence they are irrelevant to modern scientifically literate people. To see this argued for you must read this book!

Why Faith?

A few weeks ago, John Loftus (the esteemed founder and moderator of this blogsite) and I had a disagreement about my use of the concept of “belief.” John challenged my understanding of belief, and after some study and reflection, I came to agree that he was right....

We all experience “belief” – it certainly is not unique to Christianity. Indeed, even after careful, reasonable consideration, “belief” is about the best most of us can muster when it comes to just about anything, including scientific theory or postulate.

What I came to understand is that my problem was – and is – with “faith.” Faith is what is unique to Christianity - even more so than in other religious systems, for Christianity boldly declares “without faith it is impossible to please God,” and “we are saved by grace, through faith…and that not of ourselves, lest any one should boast”. Faith is the willing suspension of disbelief, or the willing choice to believe in the face of either a lack of supporting evidence or contrary evidence.

After spending a few months at this and other sites that challenge Christian faith, I have concluded (or at least arrived at a “soft” conclusion) that faith is not the end result of reason, or philosophical consideration, or logical process. I am amused and somewhat mystified by some of the cold, analytical arguments made here – by both atheists and Christians – about issues like chemical origins of species, cosmological and quantum theory applications to origins, yada yada. As intellectually stimulating and informative as these debates are, they don’t seem to go very far in dislodging or debunking Christians, or disguising the passion that most atheists/agnostics feel about challenging the faithful and the faith.

Why is that? Because (and admittedly it has been dealt with by other posters on this site) faith is not about reason. Reason may inform faith, or challenge it. But faith is something other. Christians claim that faith itself is a “gift of God”, which, for those Christians who tend towards the theory of election, puts the lie to the concept of free will. In other words, you can only be saved by faith, and faith is a gift of God given to the elect or chosen…therefore, you are screwed if you are not elect and free will is not a concept that applies to you. You may have chosen to sin but you cannot choose to be saved. The Wesleyan Christians believe in “prevenient grace”, which basically claims that when Jesus died, a gift of grace was given to the human race, so that all would be able to have a faith that could lead to salvation and enabling all to choose it if they want.

But ultimately, why faith? (Calvinists probably don’t have much to say to this, but…) Why choose to willingly suspend disbelief, or choose to believe in the face of lack of supporting evidence or contrary evidence? I do not accept that most Christians choose faith because they have studied all the philosophical, historical, and scientific data and dispassionately conclude that this is the best reality offered. In fact, reading the vehemence and passion of their response on this site, I can conclude that they choose faith for some other reason, one much closer to the heart, to the sense of self and significance.

In 25 years of Christian faith and service (which was in the evangelical tradition), I saw that most people got “saved” because of an emotional need that drove them to choose faith. I experienced that in my own life. Once that experience occurred, reason was subject to faith and served faith. Faith was my defining border. I see that in today’s so-called Christian scholars…they use science, history, philosophy, etc., to support definitions and beliefs and postulations that are either formed by or controlled by faith. But faith represents a border beyond which most of them dare not go.

Again, why? Because – I postulate – they have experienced “salvation.” In other words, “I once was lost and now am found.” They have experienced a subjective phenomenon that cannot be measured except by their own loyalty to the experience and the claimed results. How do you define “lost”? Unhappy? Confused? Suicidal? Addicted? Faith is chosen as a way out of lostness, and then one is “found” – happy, clarity of thought, glad to be alive, free from addiction, whatever. Of course, those results aren’t exclusive to salvation…they can occur as the result of psychotherapy, or your favorite team winning the World Series. But Christians claim it is “faith”, and the promise of God given as a reward for faith. They have pleased God, and now they experience the promise of God to those who believe in Him and that He rewards those who seek Him.

Again, why faith? Why make that choice? What are the reasons? I don’t accept that faith is the result of a deliberate reasoning process. In fact, for most who begin a deliberate reasoning process, the end result is loss of faith…i.e., a lack of willingness to suspend disbelief, and choosing not to believe in the face of lack of or contrary evidence.

There may be Christians out there who are Christian without choice (??? – can such a thing really exist?). But I will say that all who are Christian (certainly in the evangelical tradition, which is the target of our debunking activity) made a choice to be. They chose faith, even in the face of overwhelming arguments and evidence against it. Why did you do it?

Liberal Christianity: A Dangerous Pretend Game.

We’ve been discussing Liberal Christianity here lately, something rare at DC. Some interesting and provocative thoughts have emerged from it. I have to agree with Wounded Ego who said this about Liberal Christianity: "It is, to my mind, like a giant role playing game - only for keeps…I think an excellent illustration of the kind of illusion you are describing can be seen in the excellent flick 'The Village.'" But let me say more...

James McGrath wrote: But when I ask myself "Why not be an atheist?", I come back to a number of things. The power of an experience that really did change my life. The teaching attributed to Jesus that we do to others what we want them to do to us. The inspiring paradigm (which may owe as much to the author of Matthew's Gospel as to the historical figure of Jesus) that there is a third way of resisting injustice that avoids either passivity or taking up arms.

McGrath knows well enough that religious experiences like he’s had are experienced by people with differing faiths, so he also knows that such experiences provide little or no evidence for his particular faith. HE KNOWS THIS! He’s playing pretend, and like the paranoid schizophrenic who thinks the CIA is out to get him, McGrath actually believes these experiences to be real without any evidence for them.

Richard M wrote: Joseph Campbell said somewhere that fundamentalists say religious stories are the truth, atheists say they are a lie, and liberals say they are metaphor.

Actually atheists say these religious stories are delusionary, or false. I do not question the sincerity of the claims of believers, just like I don’t question the sincerity of paranoid schizophrenics. They aren’t lies intended to deceive, they are simply false. And liberal Christians are simply playing pretend with these falsehoods.

Think of it this way. Christmas is coming and parents will tell their children that Santa Claus will bring presents to them. They tell their kids Santa sees if they “are naughty or nice.” When my kids were growing up I told them about Santa, but I also told them we were playing a pretend game. They might not have initial understood me when I told them “we’re playing pretend,” but as they grew older and asked me if he really existed, I would always say “No.” Children love to pretend. It’s their nature, I think. So do adults, especially if they role play while having sex. Is there value in playing pretend? Yes. It provides spice to our lives. People pretend when they think positively, too, especially sports fans who sit in the same seats, order the same food, and wear the same jerseys to the ball games, as if that’ll help their team win.

This discussion has made me think about playing pretend. I liked the movie “Toy Story,” produced by Disney. The character Buzz Lightyear actually thought he had supernatural powers and could fly. When he learned the truth he was depressed to the point where he didn’t try to help others out for a while. As the movie progresses he learned to do what he could without any of his special powers. I was going through my period of doubt when I first took my kids to that movie, and I asked myself, is Buzz Lightyear better off knowing the truth? I think so, and the reason is clear. Buzz Lightyear could’ve gotten himself killed by bouncing around on spoons and acting like he could fly through the air when he really couldn’t fly. He could’ve hurt himself…badly. The truth is always better, come what may.

Some pretend games are foolish, period. Some provide the needed spice to life. But when pretending crosses over to the point where a person actually thinks the pretend games are real, then I see dangers…many of them, depending on the game being played.

So the question I put forward is whether or not pretending the game of Christianity is playing a dangerous game. I think it is. Sure, it may provide a certain spice to life, since having a heavenly father figure can provide comfort, but it also sacrifices the intellect, encourages others to do likewise, and buttresses the claims of other religious people to maintain their faith who do evil in the name of religion.

Richard M says, “this is my main objection with the views if folks like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Much as I respect them otherwise, I think they err grievously when they lump liberal religionists with conservative ones. Atheists and secular humanists will find no better friends in the world than reform jews, unitarians, and the like -- they will be the ones who join atheists to vote for atheist candidates, push to keep ID out of schools, promote critical thinking and science education, support liberal social causes, welcome Hindu prayers in congress, support physician-assisted suicide, support same-sex marriage, ban coercive prayer from public schools, and jump at the chance to send Pat Robertson a one-way ticket to Sheol.”

Agreed! However, religious thinking adds several new areas of conflict to life. We already fight over money, our kids, our spouses, our jobs, our races, our genders, and our nationalities. But religions also provide additional areas of conflict over sacred spaces, books, traditions, leaders, and gods. Granted, the liberal is probably not going to fight over these things, so she has a benign type of faith, for which I can be thankful for. But when the liberal participates in surveys where it’s claimed, say, that 60-80% of the people believe in God, this bolsters those fundamentalists who do fight over sacred spaces and gods. There has been a great deal of harm done in the name of Christianity. So it’s like claiming to be a member of the KKK while openly disavowing the beliefs of the KKK. Why do that?

Dr. James McGrath on "Why I Am a Christian."

He writes about it here....

He says:

I am a Christian in much the same way that I am an American. It is not because I condone the actions of everyone who has officially represented America, or that I espouse the viewpoints of its current leaders. It is because I was born into it, and value the positive elements of this heritage enough that I think it is worth fighting over the definition of what it means to be American, rather than giving up on it and moving somewhere else. In the same way, the tradition that gave birth to my faith and nurtured it is one that has great riches (as well as much else beside), and I want to struggle for an understanding of Christianity that emphasizes those things. And just as my having learned much from other cultures is not incompatible with my being an American, my having learned much from other religious traditions doesn't mean I am not a Christian. Christians have always done so. Luke attributes to Paul (in Acts 17:28) a positive quotation from a poem about Zeus (from the Phainomena by Aratos [sometimes spelled Aratus].

Why am I a Christian? Because I prefer to keep the tradition I have, rather than discarding it with the bathwater and then trying to make something new from scratch.

My question is whether this is a reasonable conclusion to make. I think not. A liberal Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, could say the same things. She could say, I don't agree with the historical underpinnings of my faith, nor the intellectual reasons for my faith, but since I was born into it, I'll stick with it. Sorry to insult Dr. McGrath, but this is nonsense (again, sorry). If one no longer accepts the historical or intellectual underpinnings of her faith she should look for a different one, or none at all.

I have been dealing with Liberal theology beginning here.

To continue reading the next post in this series see here.

Part 1, The Problem With Liberal Theology

My focus is on Debunking Evangelical Christianity for several reasons outlined here. Let me stress at this point that one of the reasons I do is to dislodge the evangelical Christian off of center. I say this is the hard part because it is. Liberals will say that I’ve chosen an easy target. It’s easy only so far as the arguments are against it. But it is also extremely tough to do. Once dislodged from this center, former evangelicals can go in several theological directions. But no matter what direction they travel, they are less of a threat to people with differing opinions because they know what it’s like to realize they were wrong. They will also cease quoting a Bible verse to answer every problem, and learn to think through the issues at hand.

The evangelical already rejects many cults, liberalism, pantheism, Islam. So by leading them to reject their faith some will jump ship entirely and embrace either agnosticism or atheism. That’s not what they all do. I didn’t initially. I embraced liberal theology in varying degrees for several years first. I even described myself as an existential deist. Later on I described myself as a soft-agnostic, and later still as an atheist.

For me, once I abandoned evangelical Christianity I started on a slippery slope which ended in atheism. It’s hard to remember how long it took me because as I was struggling with my faith, I still sought to maintain it. And I kept my struggles to myself, remaining in the church. But it was several years.

Now granted, Christians on this slippery slope do not slide down to agnosticism or atheism like I did. But many do. Let me mention a few of them: Robert M. Price, Gerd Luedmann, Hector Avalos, Bart Ehrman, William Dever, Michael Shermer, Farrell Till, Dan Barker, Ed Babinski, and me. There are other Christians who deeply struggle to maintain their faith in the onslaught of philosophical and scientific knowledge, like Ruth Tucker, James F. Sennett, and Terence Penulhum, seen here. I have also heard that Howard Van Till has rejected Calvinism and adopted “a more ambiguous position on religion.”

In a future post or two I’ll try to respond to liberal versions of Christianity and show why they should be rejected as well as the evangelical views. I won’t spend a great deal of time on this subject since to adequately do justice to it I should take on one theologian at a time. I intend instead to lump them all together for the most part, and in so doing it will appear superficial to the liberals out there, but that’s the most time I want to spend on it for reasons I’ve specified earlier. The bottom line will be that if evangelicals don’t have much by way of evidence for their faith, liberals have even less evidence to believe.

Part 2 can be found here.