Is Baptism Necessary for Salvation?
Why Doesn’t Bible Chaos Bother Christians?
…enough for them to just say, “NO”
In The Adventure of the Final Problem, published in 1893 in The Strand magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes. Twenty thousand enraged fans canceled their subscriptions to the magazine. When Doyle published The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901 (he set the story before Holmes’ death), there were 30,000 new subscribers instantly. It is just a fact that humans make huge emotional investments in stories; more modern examples include, of course, Downton Abby, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones.Good fun, right? But religion has demonstrated a particular talent for exploiting our attachment to stories; even I appreciated Father Andrew Greeley’s charming description of the role of stories in Catholic piety. Obviously, however, many different, competing religions have claimed that their stories hold the key to achieving favor with the gods, and above all, for escaping death. Christianity has specialized in the eternal life promise: “You’ll get there if you just do this.”
A Pop-Quiz for Christians, Number 8
Dealbreakers in the Bible
Based on my own experience—I was pastor of churches for nine years, and have authored two books critical of Christianity—I’m pretty sure of this: devout folks don’t want to think too much about issues that can undermine their faith. Which means that reading the Bible is almost a No-No. Because there is so much in scripture that should prompt educated people to say, “Well, that can’t be right.” There are so many deal-breaker texts, just in the gospels. So in this Pop-Quiz for Christians I want to focus on some of these really embarrassing texts. How can the faithful read, study, reflect seriously on these patches of scripture—and not head for the exit?
The Bible, Gross Income Inequity and the Christian Right
Bible quote: Jesus said, "if you wish to inherit my kingdom, go and sell all your possessions and give the profits to the poor, then come and follow me." (Matthew 19:21)
Actual Christian response:
I'm not sure where you're going with this thought as the quote is simply addressing the dangers of people relying on Government help without working and trying to provide for themselves and contribute to society. I believe the Bible passage you quoted to be more about letting go of items such as wealth that inhibit us from following Jesus with our whole heart rather than dictating how the poor are to be taken care of.John Loftus:
The Bible is quite clear in both. The New Testament and the Old Testament that we are to work to provide for ourselves and our families. Here are just a couple quotes:
2 Thessalonians 3 10-12: For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.
Proverbs 14:23: In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty.
First off, notice the radical individualism inherent with the misuse of these texts. This may be the over-all problem in America, an antiquated Westward-Ho individualism, and it's still here today.
My Response To An Encouraging Email With Questions and Suggestions
Dear Mr. Loftus,
My name is Jeff Kuhn, and for the past several months I have been reading a number of your books, or books which you have edited, with great enthusiasm, and wanted to reach out to you directly with some thoughts concerning these works. So, hopefully you will indulge me for just this brief inquiry.
First, I want to say that I found all the works I read (The Christian Delusion, The Outsider Test of Faith, Christianity in the Light of Science, and Why I Became an Atheist) not only compelling but ultimately convincing, and that I am in agreement with the conclusions you and the other esteemed contributors present.
Secondly, and just for the record, I have no credentials in either Christian Apologetics or science. I am just a lay person (67 years old) who has been a Christian most of my life but has struggled mightily over the past 20+ years with the obvious conflicts between Christianity and science, the problems of suffering and evil in the world, the problems and conflicts in the world created by religious demagoguery and ideologies, and the lack of critical thinking of people who I know to be of more than average intelligence when it comes to accepting events which cannot obviously be true as stated in the Bible. (This one is especially troubling).
Ultimately it was single event which occurred several months ago in which a man in Florida, holding four young children hostage in a police standoff, killed all four (and himself) that was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. The children were 6 months, 6, 10, and 11. I cried for days after this event thinking what they must have been going through before they were killed and wondered how a merciful and loving God could find "Glory" in this event , and be either unwilling or incapable of preventing it. Certainly there have been larger and more tragic events in history that could have been averted by the God of Christianity, but this one event sealed the deal. So now I have rejected the entire concept.
But to my point. The books I read were very convincing and lay out the facts in such a way that it would be very difficult for any reasonable person who took the time to consider the information to not arrive at these conclusions. But, though it is stated the material is written for college level, the reading is difficult at times and the logic of the philosophical arguments sometimes is very circular and difficult to follow. I am a reasonably intelligent person, and well educated, but I have to admit there were sections I had to read several times, and do additional outside research, to understand the discussion.
Natural Theology for Chimps
Altruism, though, is a kind of shibboleth for humans, and particularly for Christians. Our "better angels" have always been a key distinction for humans, an unbridgeable ontological chasm between the rest of creation, and man, endowed by God with the imago dei. Christian writers from Paul in the first century to C.S. Lewis in the 20th century have made much of this unique sense of man, of which altruism was a distinguishing sign. Man not only knew God was his creator intuitively just by surveying the world around him, man had an innate moral conscience, a built in sense of ought that was utterly intractable as a matter of biology. Christians commonly wonder, bemused at the thought, how evolution could account for something so... self-defeating as selfless charity and self sacrifice. Humans, for instance, send money, food and medicine to the other side of the world, to aid people they've never met, never will meet, and couldn't be more perfect strangers, genetically or otherwise. What's the selective imperative for that, they demand.
This is an important point for Christians, as Christ is understood to be a kind of apotheosis of this idea. God is supposed to have became flesh and sacrificed himself through no fault of his own, perfect in his being, in need of nothing, just giving of himself as a reprieve to (believing) man because that is his nature. Jesus instructed those who listened to love their enemies, another rendering of altruism, becoming less, being vulnerable in services of a higher good on the Christian view. Modern apologists rely heavily on the "moral argument", the idea that man cannot account for his moral sense, or moral convictions without positing God as creator, divinely provisioning them. It's just unthinkable, in contrast, that man would evolve in an impersonal universe with this innate moral sense, in their view.
What do we make, then, of research like this study done last year which investigated and compared the altruistic capabilities and tendencies of chimpanzees and human children? Here's the author's summary of the research:
Debates about altruism are often based on the assumption that it is either unique to humans or else the human version differs from that of other animals in important ways. Thus, only humans are supposed to act on behalf of others, even toward genetically unrelated individuals, without personal gain, at a cost to themselves. Studies investigating such behaviors in nonhuman primates, especially our close relative the chimpanzee, form an important contribution to this debate. Here we present experimental evidence that chimpanzees act altruistically toward genetically unrelated conspecifics. In addition, in two comparative experiments, we found that both chimpanzees and human infants helped altruistically, regardless of any expectation of reward, even when some effort was required, and even when the recipient was an unfamiliar individual—all features previously thought to be unique to humans. The evolutionary roots of human altruism may thus go deeper than previously thought, reaching as far back as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.(emphasis mine)
There are (at least) two important implications of this kind of finding. First, it assaults the ancient shibboleth, the distinction of man as uniquely equipped and aware in the enterprise of altruism. To be sure, the experiment does not find chimpanzees organizing global relief efforts for men or monkeys if far off lands, and by no means would we mistake these findings for some kind of altruism in chimps that places them in parity with humans, by quality or quantity of their altruism. But here you have a structured set of tests that show that our closest relatives manifest behaviors of the kind that has always put man alone on one side of the "moral chasm", with every other living thing on the other. Now, it seems, in light of recent investigations, that maybe we need to make some room on our side of the moral divide for our chimpanzee cousins (and who knows who else might get added to the list).
Second, its hard to read the article and not be struck by the similarities demonstrated between chimps and small (human) children. In both cases, when the researcher doesn't demonstrate distress, chimps and kids aren't distressed either, and don't help out, as ostensibly no help is needed. When the researcher sends clear signals that they need help, help that the chimp or kid might render, they do, much more often then when no "need-state" is in view. We humans, being humans, intuitively understand this; if someone is having trouble, you ought to consider helping, even if there's no reward in view, immediately or ever. As the study affirms, this isn't something we must be taught in class to develop, but something that is innate at some low level.
That's not strange to most humans. But it is strange to see the same kind of response from chimpanzees when your worldview says that that "ought" can only come from God, and can only come to man. For the chimp who has perfectly nothing to gain (on the caricatured view of evolution as seen by most Christians) in helping someone reach something just beyond their grasp, whence the "ought" that prods them to help? Does God spare a little moral sense, sense unto altruism, even if in rudimentary form, for the chimp?
If so, it's a spotty application. Chimpanzees are notorious for their inclination for infanticide, the brutal killing of infants in the group, sometimes resulting in cannibalism of the young as a follow up to the frenzy (see here, for example). If there is some kind of natural theology for chimps, it seems much more compartmentalized that it is even for (allegedly) fallen, depraved humans. I won't even bother to recount the illustrious sex life of the average chimp, Google that up some time if you are not aware and inclined to think just maybe God dished out a helping of the same sense of "objective moral values" he designed for man, to use a favorite (if problematic) term from William Lane Craig.
Infanticide and sexual promiscuity the likes which might make Larry Flynt blanch aren't a problem from a naturalistic standpoint. There are both plausible (and to increasingly evidentially supported) explanations for such features of chimp behavior, and no "moral chasm" to bridge. Man is a moral being and capable of ethical reasoning in ways that no other animal is, as best we can tell. But while we stand apart, we stand apart by degree and by circumstance on the naturalistic view. For the Christian, man stands apart in kind, in essence. If we are to find, as this study suggests, that that degree isn't nearly so different from our closest genetic relatives, it's interesting and informative, but it fits the model. Chimps and man shared a common ancestor some time long ago, and the discovery of chimp altruism just points us back to our common heritage, a developmental history where we shared the "proto-ethics" that later developed into the concrete forms we see in chimps and humans today.
On the Christian view, though, it's hard to know what to make of such findings. There's always the trusty "common design" hobby horse to trot out whenever parallels and isomorphisms are identified in biology between disparate species. But common design, weak as it is, just utterly fails in this case, as mankind is sui generis in terms of his moral conscience, per Christianity, a "bespoke design" as a British friend recently called it. The sensus divinitatus is what makes man different from all other creatures for the Christian, and it is this that man draws upon, even and especially the unregenerate man in acting on moral impulses.
This is why morality as a matter of biological evolution is flatly, unequivocally rejected by Christianity. If morality emerges as the output of evolution, then it's as available to the chimp or the dolphin as it is to man. It's different for the same reasons the species themselves are different: they occupy different ecological niches, and have unique paths that brought them where they are as social animals. The more we learn though, the more the evidence accumulates that works right against the "moral chasm", against the sensus divinitatus, and toward the idea that morality fits right into the unifying principles and dynamics of evolution. If morality is supported as an integral part of the impersonal biological processes of man's development, one of the load-bearing beams of Christian apologetics, and the appeal of Christianity itself, falls apart.
The Warneken et al study is not the final word, of course, but just a piece of the puzzle. Chimps being helpful, even at some cost, without a basis for reciprocity or any kind of compensation, doesn't quite rise to the commitments of say, a Mother Teresa (Hitchens' objections to her notwithstanding). It's representative of the "pebbles" that are ever accumulating into what has grown now to be a significant pile of data that supports the idea that the "moral instinct", or the "moral grammar" as Marc Hauser would call it (with a hat tip to Chomsky), is a natural byproduct of evolution. No imago dei, no sensus divinitatus provisioned by a supernatural deity needed. A very good amount of the moral finger-wagging by Christian apologists depends on this message: you can't be moral without God. Or, more recently, a slightly more sophisticated revision: you can be moral, but you can't justify your morality without God. The more we learn, the more clearly plausible and evident becomes the picture of man as a moral being by virtue of his evolutionary biology.
So long as man is the only "altruist" -- the only one on the "moral" side of the moral chasm -- that's not a big problem for Christianity. A theistic evolutionist can nod at all the evidence for man developing a moral sense in the context of evolution. In her view, God is working, invisibly, behind the scenes, pulling invisible strings to steer man's nature toward its proper, intended moral constitution. But the identification of that kind of moral development, the emergence of even such sublime features as moral, conscious altruism in other animals, is problematic. That kind of evidence is a disconfirmation of the idea that man is unique, alone in his moral endowments. If we find emergent morality and ethics in other species of the very same kind we find more fully developed in man, the chasm is bridged, and this works strongly against the idea that man is ontologically distinct from the rest of life on earth.
Natural theology for chimps is a problem for the Christian worldview.
How Much Faith Must the Faithful Have?
“God requires that we have faith,”
I’d have accrued a sizable little nest egg by now. It’s the deal breaker reply for me and the believer. Stop the train! Let me get off right now. There’s nothing else that I can say. The ardent believer really BELIEVES that they won the argument with a non-argument. God’s tricky like that, apparently. If I insist on proof that she’s there, she gets offended.
Why can’t I just believe?
What’s wrong with ME, not what’s wrong with the expectation that I’m required to just have faith that some kind of god is out there, minding my personal business no less.
David Marshall and Guillermo Gonzalez: How Untruth Becomes Gospel Truth
Labels: "Avalos"
Why Faith? Reviewing Mittelberg's Book "Confident Faith" Part 3
The third important matter that comes to mind is to wonder what Mittelberg was thinking when he defined faith? He defines faith as "beliefs and actions that are based on something considered to be trustworthy--even in the absence of proof" (p. 2). According to Mittelberg then, if your conclusions (i.e., beliefs) and actions are located above the threshold of what is trustworthy, you have a reasonable faith. If they are located below that threshold, you have an unreasonable faith. His main polemical point is that everyone has faith. For if we base our conclusions on anything less than absolute proof we do so on faith.
Mittelberg brashly tells readers Richard Dawkins has faith because on his 1-7 spectrum of atheist probability Dawkins is only a 6.9! Dawkins's conclusion, he says, "is a belief that he holds in the absence of real proof...one that goes beyond what can be known with certainty." (p. 4) "Dawkins doesn't know there is no God...Rather he takes it on faith there is actually no God" (p. 4, italics from Mittelberg). Dawkins "exhibits what might best be described as a religious faith" Mittelberg says, because he can only say God "almost certainly does not exist" (p. 141, italics from Mittelberg).
Labels: "Faith", faith, faith verses reason, Mark Mittelberg
Which Atheist Books Do I Recommend?
I include your question here for the instruction and encouragement of our Reasonable Faith readers. You have masterfully surveyed for us the current philosophical landscape with respect to atheism. You give our readers a good idea of who the principal players are today.To see this you need to read my book Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End. This is the first book I'm recommending, with others to follow below. If nothing else, consider the recommendation of atheist philosopher Nick Trakakis, co-editor with Graham Oppy of several important philosophy of religion books, and the author of his own book on The End of Philosophy of Religion, plus The God Beyond Belief: In Defense of William Rowe's Evidential Argument from Evil. He even wrote a chapter in my book, God and Horrendous Suffering. He said this of my book Unapologetic:
I hope that theists, especially Christian theists, who read your account will come away encouraged by the way Christian philosophers are being taken seriously by their secular colleagues today.
The average man in the street may get the impression from social media that Christians are intellectual losers who are not taken seriously by secular thinkers. Your letter explodes that stereotype. It shows that Christians are ready and able to compete with their secular colleagues on the academic playing field.
I am in wholehearted agreement with you. I actually find it very sad to see a discipline (the philosophy of religion) I have cherished for many years being debased and distorted by so-called Christian philosophers. Like you, I have now finally and happily found my place in the atheist community. I’m slowly making my way through your "Unapologetic book", it’s quite fascinating, loving the Nietzschean hammer style.
Who Would WANT the Christian God Anyway?
He makes too many big mistakes
If we could pose this question to folks coming out of their weekly worship services: Do they really want the God they worship? …we would hear enthusiastic affirmations, “Oh, Yes, I want the Lord! Our God is so wonderful.” But I wonder. Have they really thought it through? There are several things about this God that are a turnoff. Many of us would put he/she/it near the bottom of a list of gods to follow. Let’s look at a short list.
Neuroscience is Destroying the Notions of Free Will, Sin and Salvation by Faith
I'm less than convinced
My line of work affords me the opportunity to convince a variety of people to do various actions. I am acutely aware of motivating factors, and how they impact situations. We realize that we must interact with these motivations, because ignoring them will only bring doom.
It is fascinating to me, communicating with so many different people on so many different levels, as to what one person finds extremely significant, another finds completely irrelevant.
As deconversion stories abound, we see people, due to the variety available in humanity, question their long-held belief for various reasons. This should not surprise us, given the make-up of humanity.
I find it even more intriguing how others will criticize the deconvert for doing it “incorrectly.” As if there is only one proper way in which one can deconvert!
So what is that proper way? What steps must I follow to deconvert? Why is it that the way in which you are convinced; I must be convinced?
This is a deviation from my normal blog entry. No Bible verses. Only little cry for methodology. No hermeneutics. Never fear—I will be back in full form and function.
As I said, I am actively involved in convincing other people.
I convince clients. Perhaps they want to pursue a course of action that is not beneficial to their case. Perhaps they do not fully understand the implication or costs involved in a certain action. Perhaps they believe the practice of law is similar to what is on TV.
And in our discussion, we talk about motives. One of the first questions asked in a new divorce matter is whether there is a new love interest on the part of a spouse. Such a factor will have a huge motivating force. (Those with love interests tend to want to resolve the divorce quickly, even to the point of financial detriment.) Mothers tend to be motivated by maternal instincts; Fathers by finance. The most common tactic in the book is the man fighting for custody to scare the mother, and the female fighting for higher child support to scare the father.
I have seen clients motivated by greed, jealousy, revenge, money, principle, fear, anger, business direction, spouses, friends, parents, children and just about every facet in-between. And each must be deal with at their motivating factor. If a person is motivated by principle, there is no sense convincing them of the unnecessary cost of a matter.
I convince judges. Here’s a great feeling—going into court prepared to the hilt to argue a legal issue. And hear the Judge say, “I don’t find that very important. What I would like to see is some argument on this other legal issue.” One that frankly my position is not nearly as strong. What can I do? Argue with the judge as to what is more important? Or convince him that I will prevail on both the weaker issue, and then attempt to persuade him that the legal issue I originally wanted to argue is clearly the crux of the matter.
And each judge is different. Some follow the letter of the law, some the spirit. Some want the case to go away, regardless of how it is done. Some favor oral argument, some despise it. As we practice, we learn what the judge desires, and what persuades him or her.
I convince jurors. At times, the most difficult of all. We are presented with a mixed cross-section of the community, and are given only a morning to question them. Within that morning, we attempt to learn what they will find important, and what they will ignore. Then, with that little information, we spend the next few days using that data in the hopes to gain or prevent millions of dollars, or decades in prison.
Talking to jurors after a trial is always enlightening. Very often they will say, “You spent way too much time on this point” or “We were surprised you did not talk about this point.”
We think to ourselves, “I have been a trial lawyer for 15 years. My opponent has as well. We have each done 100’s of trials. The Judge has seen 100’s more. Clearly we thought these points were important, or those were not based upon our experience. Had we anticipated the jury would think completely differently, obviously we would have focused our attention otherwise.”
See, at that moment, with those few people, what all our experience(s) informed us was meaningless. To them certain items were persuasive and others were irrelevant. Because each jury has a different make-up; a different motivation.
If each of us look in our lives, we use different methods, different words to persuade different people—based upon our relationship, or their personality, or what they are interested in at that moment.
Why should deconversion be any different?
I read deconversion stories. I read them as a Christian (upon learning such a thing existed!) wondering what would make a person want to stop believing in something as obvious as a God. I read them while deconverting, to attempt to understand what I was going through, what to expect and what to avoid. I read them now because I find the story of the human race continues to enthrall me.
One concept that sticks out, almost universally, is the desire to investigate alternative forms of information. Either we were always reading Christian books, and discovered scholars in fields other than our particular form of Christianity, or creationists discovering scientific fields or historians reading secular history. Does this always lead to deconversion? Of course not! But I cannot think of a single deconvert that does not mention graduated levels of study of a broader spectrum during the process.
But what led a person to investigate originally? Perhaps for some, it was an incident or a tragedy that made them begin to question how God works. Or, for others, a personal struggle that brought them to the point of looking for answers. Perhaps a purely academic endeavor or an interest in debating the topic.
In every other aspect of our lives, humanity’s motivations are too varied to contain in a limited number of boxes—so, too, with deconversion.
Which brings me to the odd question: What makes a deconversion legitimate? Is a deconvert more justified in her action because she decided to engage in a study of the origin of Christianity, as compared to a homosexual that decided to investigate why God made him that way? Or is a scientist that discovers the viability of evolution a more suitable deconvert than a questioning parent who loses a child to disease?
There are two items that strike me as particularly humorous in this regard. First, for a religion that prides itself on faith, it certainly has a fascination and worshipful awe for intellectualism. “Thinking” one’s way out of Christianity is demanded, but “believing” one’s way into it is required. Second, since all deconverts have an equal degree of heathenicity, does it really matter by what method we started or traveled this path? “You were never saved in the first place” is equally tattooed to the homosexual deconvert, the scholarly deconvert, the scientific deconvert, or the {fill in the blank} convert.
So…you tell me. What is the “proper” way in which one becomes a deconvert?
What is disappointing about this discussion is how small the Christian God becomes. Even as humans we figured out that people are different. That their needs, wants and desires are different. Consequently, and certainly not surprisingly, what persuades them is different. To some, a series of books that is complied over the course of few centuries which contain amazing stories is enough. For others, in observing the world about them, they need more.
We are often told “Who are you to ask ‘Why?’ of God?” (“Often.” Heh heh. There’s an understatement!) Who am I? I am a person with different motives than you. I am a person that cannot sleep with “ultimate purpose” as a response to the Problem of Evil. I am a person that is not convinced a series of books with possible, not plausible, resolutions to contradictions qualifies as spectacular. I, like numerous other humans, am looking for more evidence that convinces me.
You, as a human, can figure it out. If you were selling me a car, or trying to date me, or persuade me to not see a Movie, you would understand that you must first learn what motives me. What persuades me. What is convincing to me. And your God cannot figure that out?
So many times we are told, “THIS is what God claims must convince you. THIS is what is persuasive.” And yet it turns out the “THIS” is exactly what persuades the person making the claim. Can’t God do better? Can’t God actually persuade someone else with evidence that convinces them and does NOT convince you?
Because we see that happen in life all the time.
If my deconversion does not meet your standard, if it was deficient and ineffective in some way, please; I ask you. Provide me with the “proper” way in which one can be a legitimate deconvert.
More Jesus Quotes Christians Could Do Without, Part 4
Where would theology be without human imagination? The gospel authors show just how true this is. Matthew came up with dystopian fantasy when he reported (Matthew 27:52-53) that many dead people came alive in their tombs at the moment Jesus died, then wandered around Jerusalem on Easter morning. This detail is missing from the other gospels, whose authors didn’t imagine it. Likewise Matthew reported an earthquake when the women arrived at the tomb on Easter morning: an angel descended from heaven to roll back the stone, then sat on it. This also was beyond the imagination of the other gospel authors. In John’s gospel we find the story of the voice-activated resurrection of Lazarus (i.e., a magic spell)—which the other gospels authors knew nothing about. John’s imagination ran wild: his gospel is so different from the others. Elsewhere I have accused John of theology inflation.
A Hugely Defective Gospel Sequel
A high quotient of fake news
The red flags in scripture are all over the place, and easy to spot. By this I mean story elements that alert readers to be suspicious. If we came across these in a Disney fantasy or in Harry Potter story, we’d say, “Very entertaining, but not to be taken seriously.” There are so many red flags in the gospels, and they show up in the first chapters of each. In Mark, a voice from the sky tells Jesus, “You are my beloved son”—right after his baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus had sins? A god yelling from the sky doesn’t sound at all like a real-world event.