Tag: Christianity

Invictus asks the question at In Mala Fide:

What beliefs do you have and why? Let’s start with religion. I think it’s safe to say that the majority of the world’s population was brought up in some form of religious community. If that’s you, do you still subscribe to those beliefs? If so, your reasoning should be more than just “That’s how I was raised.” As a man, able to reason and make decisions for yourself, you should have a deeper rationalization. If you’re Christian, why do you believe in God? Jesus as your savior? Is it because the Bible says so? Have you ever studied the origins of the Bible or how it was assembled by just a small group of men who basically picked what they thought should be included? What about Jesus? Is there any historical evidence that he actually existed? What about eyewitness accounts (the Gospels are hearsay at best)?
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If these questions have you doubting your beliefs, you may have some soul-searching to do. Do some research. Find out the facts. If you’re still standing firm, you might just be stubborn and ignorant, or you might have other deeper reasons. Maybe you’ve experienced first-hand a powerful interaction with God or Jesus. Maybe you’ve witnessed a miracle or a prayer that was answered with no other explanation but God. If so, I both respect and envy you.

Since I’ve answered this question concerning why I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ before, I’ll respond with an excerpt from one of my letters to Luke of Common Sense Atheism:

Why am I a Christian? Because I believe in evil. I believe in objective, material, tangible evil that insensibly envelops every single one of us sooner or later. I believe in the fallen nature of Man, and I am aware that there is no shortage of evidence, scientific, testimonial, documentary, and archeological, to demonstrate that no individual is perfect or even perfectible by the moral standards described in the Bible. I am a Christian because I believe that Jesus Christ is the only means of freeing Man from the grip of that evil. God may not be falsifiable, but Christianity definitely is, and it has never been falsified. The only philosophical problem of evil that could ever trouble the rational Christian is its absence; to the extent that evil can be said to exist, it proves not only the validity of Christianity but its necessity as well. The fact that we live in a world of pain, suffering, injustice, and cruelty is not evidence of God’s nonexistence or maleficence, it is exactly the worldview that is described in the Bible. In my own experience and observations, I find that worldview to be far more accurate than any other, including the shiny science fiction utopianism of the secular humanists.

I don’t concern myself much, if at all, with the conventional extra-Biblical dogma that you describe and in which many Christians believe. I am dubious about the concept of the Trinity as it is usually described, do not await an eschatological Rapture, have no problem admitting that the moral commandments of God are arbitrary, and readily agree that the distinction between the eternally saved from the eternally damned appears to be more than a little unfair from the human perspective. On the other hand, I know that evil exists. I have seen it, I have experienced it, I have committed it, and I have loved it. I also know the transforming power that Jesus Christ can exercise to free an individual from evils both large and small because I have seen it in the lives of others and I have felt it in my own life. Now, ever since St. Augustine wrote his Confessions, it has been customary for Christians to exaggerate their sinful pasts; Augustine was hardly the Caligula that he portrayed himself to be. I find dramatic personal histories to be tiresome in the extreme, so I won’t say more except to note that as an agnostic, I enjoyed a sufficient amount of the hedonistic best that the world has to offer across a broad range of interesting and pleasurable experiences, only to learn that none of it was ever enough. It may amuse you to learn that one girl who knew me only before I was a Christian happened to learn about The Irrational Atheist and wrote to me to express her shock: “The fact that you wrote this book proves there is a God.”

And one with a sense of humor, no less. Now, there’s no reason this would mean anything to you or anyone else who was not acquainted with me before. But it meant something to that woman, just as an observable transformation in one of my close friend’s lives made a distinct impression on me.

I certainly do not deny the experiences or revelations of those who subscribe to other religions. I merely question the specific interpretation ascribed to them by those who lived through or received them. After all, the Bible informs us that there are other gods and that those gods are capable of providing such things at their discretion. Among other things, I studied East Asia at university and have spent a fair amount of time reading the sacred texts of various religions, including a few fairly obscure ones. I have yet to encounter one expressing a religious perspective that can be legitimately confused with the Christian one, nor, in my opinion, do any of these alternative perspectives describe the observable material world as I have experienced it as well as the Christian one does. I think it is astonishing that an ancient Middle Eastern text is frequently a better guide to predicting human behavior than the very best models that the social sciences have produced despite having an advantage of two thousand more years of human experience upon which to draw.

I suspect that unless you can understand why the first book in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy is called Out of the Silent Planet, unless you fully grasp the implications of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, you cannot possibly understand much about Christianity or the degree of difference between it and other religions. Fortunately for many Christians, intellectual understanding isn’t the metric upon which salvation is based.

One doesn’t have to be a nasty, anti-intellectual piece of work to be a Calvinist, but one can certainly observe a pattern common to the champions of the self-appointed Elect. In light of this, I have to praise the behavior of the Calvinists at Vox Popoli, as it has been absolutely exemplary in comparison with that of their historical antecedents. Consider the track record of these leading lights:

John Calvin: Responsible for the murder under color of law of Michael Servetus. Calvin was particularly outraged when Servetus sent him a copy of the Institutes of the Christian Religion heavily annotated with arguments pointing to errors in the book. When Servetus mentioned that he would come to Geneva if Calvin agreed, Calvin wrote a letter to Farel on 13 February 1547 noting that if Servetus were to come, he would not assure him safe conduct: “for if he came, as far as my authority goes, I would not let him leave alive.”

Franciscus Gomarus: A Fleming who had been in Leyden since 1594, has been described as “a rather mediocre scholar” but “a forceful defender of the Calvinistic doctrine…a man of deep-rooted faith…. He engaged twice in personal disputation with Arminius in the assembly of the States of Holland in 1608, and was one of five Gomarists who met five Arminians or Remonstrants in the same assembly of 1609. On the death of Arminius shortly after this time, Konrad Vorstius, who sympathized with his views, was appointed to succeed him, in spite of the opposition of Gomarus and his friends. Gomarus took his defeat badly, resigned his post, and went to Middelburg in 1611, where he became preacher at the Reformed church….

John Piper: Intemperate attacker of other Christian leaders and serial backtracker. “I am sitting here trying to figure out why I say things like that every now and then. I think it is a mixture of (sinful) audience titillation and (holy) scorn against my own flesh and against the devil, along with the desire to make the battle with Satan and my flesh feel gutsy and real and not middle-class pious.”

Yes, that’s probably it. You’re just too damn holy for your own good. Perhaps, I suggest merely as a possibility, he behaves thusly because he is not Elect, but rather a vessel ordained for destruction. As amusing as I find The Most Holy and Appointed Rev. Piper, what struck me most about the larger pattern was this statement by Gomarus: In response to the Court’s opinion Gomarus declared that “he would not dare die holding Arminius’ opinion, nor to appear with it before God’s judgement seat.”

La, such drama! It’s not as if anyone was asking Gomarus to die holding Arminius’s opinion, and as events would subsequently prove, Arminius didn’t have any problem doing just that. But it is fascinating that Gomarus presented exactly the same sort of histrionic appeal to the emotions that one often sees in Piper’s writings and which a few of the lesser members of Team Calvin have also exhibited here.

But for me, the anti-intellectual aspects of Calvinism are best exemplified by John Calvin himself. A man who has genuine confidence in his intellect and his faith doesn’t respond with outrage when his errors are pointed out, much less do his best to ensure that his critics are killed. Now, one cannot dismiss a case for the poor character of its champions, but it does cause one to entertain the notion that Total Depravity may be less theology than psychological projection.

There is now scientific evidence supporting my original hypothesis that social disorders produce much atheism. So, I find myself wondering if there may be a similar causal link between this observed behavioral pattern and a belief in Total Depravity combined with the idea that one belongs to a predestined elect. None of this means that the Calvinists could not be correct, just as no amount of social autism could prove that gods exist. But it’s interesting to note how the patterns have persisted in both cases for literal centuries.

Markku mentioned a theory that one reason the Calvinists tend to look like such contortionists here is because I am usually asking the questions. He thinks that the non-Calvinist position will look just as contortionist if it is the one being targeted. That’s addressed easily enough, as I will entertain five questions from the Calvinists here. But choose them carefully; I don’t want any complaints that I took the easy ones and if only I’d had to answer hard ones the results would have been completely different.

So, Team Calvin can use this thread to discuss the questions amongst themselves in order to settle upon the chosen five. Be sure to specify them at the end.

Since there are few things more amusing than the fevered dancing of Calvinists in their attempts to evade the obvious readings of various Bible passages, I’m interested in hearing how they will attempt explain away what is merely one of many, many examples that contradict their assertions of perfect and complete divine foreknowledge and predestination:

Genesis 18:20-32

Then the LORD said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the LORD. Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare[e] the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

The LORD said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.”

Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?”

He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?”

He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”

Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?”

He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.”

Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”

He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

Questions:

1. The Lord clearly states that He does not know if what Sodom and Gomorrah has done is as bad as the outcry that has reached Him. Is He a) lying about His lack of knowledge, or b) telling the truth about it.

2. Does “if not, I will know” indicate that He does not know at the time He is speaking?

3. Do “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it” and “If I find forty-five there, I will not destroy it” mean exactly the same thing?

4. Did did God change His mind in response to Abraham’s requests to reduce the number of righteous men required to save the city from 50 to 10?

5. Did God already know how many righteous men there were in Sodom when He said “if I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake”?

My expectation, of course, is that the Calvinists will resort to their usual intellectual contortions and deceitful word substitutions instead of accepting God’s Word at face value. The ironic thing is that in attempting to shore up their futile case for their concept of comprehensive Divine perfection, they transform the Biblical God into a shifty, unreliable deceiver in their own image.

Some have theorized that my contempt for Calvinist Churchianity is because I have some arrogant psychological need to justify my own autonomy. This is precisely backwards. I have no need to justify the readily observable. It is because a) I know I am autonomous, ala Descartes, b) I know my will is not in perfect accordance with God’s, and c) I know I will be held responsible for my sins that I reject the convoluted, responsibility-evading dogma of Calvinism.

The contradictions between Calvinist Churchianity and Biblical Christianity are vast in number. But the key one is this: if God genuinely wills salvation for everyone and yet everyone is not saved, then it cannot be reasonably denied that God’s will can be thwarted by His autonomous creations. I strongly suspect the core problem with Calvinism is similar to a problem that atheists often manifest with regards to Christian theology; neither group understands the significance of the difference between potential and action.

A Creator God no more has to permit His creations to thwart him than the NFL has to make a touchdown worth six points. And yet, we readily observe both. Calvinists arguing God’s will cannot be thwarted due to divine sovereignty are presenting an argument that is every bit as ridiculous as trying to argue that a touchdown cannot be worth six points because the NFL has the power to arbitrarily make a touchdown worth any number of points it prefers.

The Responsible Puppet emailed me to remind me of our previous discussion, so I’ll address one of his points now. I asked him the following question:

Exodus 3:7-10. In verse 9, God’s statement that “now the cry of the Israelites has reached me” clearly implies that it had not reached Him prior to that moment. I ask TRP, did God previously know about their suffering prior to hearing that cry?

To which he responded:

I would say that God knew before creation the exact amount of suffering the Israelites would experience. He had concern for it throughout their suffering and this quote from God states that this is the time that he is going to do something about it.

Now that’s a lot, but I suspect that you are thinking that there was some suffering that God was unaware of it until this point (if not, just correct me). If you need proof that this is not the case I’ll go back to the same psalm –

Psalm 139:4 – Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.

This says that God knows what we are going to say, before we say it. Assuming that any Israelite vocalized his dissatisfaction of his treatment at the hands of the Egyptians, God knew it at that point at the latest.

This is very typical of the Calvinist attempt to claim that X is not-X. As TRP has previously done, he is simply answering with another variant of “we read X to mean the opposite of X”. It is simply false to claim that a statement that something that “is happening now” means that it happened before the time specified. He then compounds this error with another substitution of the general for the specific. David is only stating that God knows what he, David, is going to say before he says it, which is presumably the result of God having searched him and knowing him, however, this knowledge is not necessarily the case for anyone else less beloved of God than the Psalmist, particularly since David specifically mentions those who are wicked, hate God, and are in rebellion against Him.

Haley summarizes the Churchian message about marriage:

It seems to me that Christian media sets just as high a bar a fantasy for Christian women as the mainstream media does, if not higher just due to the fact that a staunch Christian woman is far more likely to hold out for “God’s best.” I feel like we are constantly assured that God is going to give us his Best if we just have faith and wait for it. This especially includes marriage. Don’t settle for less than God’s Best. Do you want to have a good, God-honoring marriage? Then hold out for His Best. You’re 25? You have time. You’re 30? Keep praying for God’s Best. 35? Keep trusting God to bring you his Best. 40? God’s Best doesn’t have a timetable. 45? Nothing is impossible for God, who is writing your love story. God will bring his Best to you in his perfect timing. 50? Sometimes God’s Best doesn’t include a husband, but that doesn’t mean it’s not God’s Best for you.

Whether one calls it “God’s Best” or “God’s Perfect Plan”, it is readily apparent that one could just as easily, and accurately, express the same concept using the term in sha’ Allah. As evidence, I point to the fact that inshallah-dot-com is “Muslim marriage site, serious and respectful as imposed by our beautiful religion: find love, get married.”

What many Christians, especially those of the Churchian variety simply hate to admit is that God’s Will manifestly does not control every petty detail concerning every single person on Earth. This should be obvious from the way in which Jesus Christ taught his follower’s to pray: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven”.

Either there is no need to pray at all, which contradicts the entire point of Jesus telling his disciples how to do it, or God’s will is not presently being done on Earth. His will prevails in Heaven, as it does not on Earth, just as His kingdom reigns in Heaven, as it does not on Earth. This conclusion also has the benefit of being in accord with the evil we see around us and within us on a daily basis, rather than forcing the sort of intellectual gymnastics of the sort quoted above.

The Bible is not AC/DC. Christians do not pray for the coming of something that is already there. And while it may frighten people to know God doesn’t have a Perfect Plan for them, it shouldn’t. If God trusts you enough to provide you with free will and the ability to act on your own, shouldn’t you trust that He knows what He is doing and accept the responsibility for your own decisions and deeds?

The Church is the people, not the buildings and property. But as these former Episcopalians are learning to their chagrin, and as other churches that made the mistake of joining a denomination have learned, the wolves in sheep’s clothing who presently run the dying denominations don’t hesitate to steal anything of value on which they can legally place their rapacious paws:

Tuesday night, the Fairfax Circuit Court issued its ruling in favor of the Diocese of Virginia and the Episcopal Church in litigation seeking to recover Episcopal church property, according to a report from the Diocese of Virginia. “Our goal throughout this litigation has been to return faithful Episcopalians to their church homes and Episcopal properties to the mission of the Church,” said the Rt. Rev. Shannon S. Johnston, bishop of Virginia.

The court ruled that the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia have “a contractual and proprietary interest” in each of the properties subject to the litigation. The court ordered that all property subject to its ruling be turned over to the Diocese.

The problem is the “accession language” in the contracts through which a church joins a denomination, which means that a denomination which hasn’t contributed a single dime towards the acquisition of a property or the building of a church claims complete ownership of both, contra the interests of the church members whose contributions paid for them and who actually attend the church on a regular basis. This is why no church should ever join a denomination – perhaps demonination would be a more precise term – simply because its theological principles happen to be more or less in line with those presently professed by the denomination.

This isn’t the reason that I describe myself as a Christian, not as anything else. Like every other earthly institution, church denominations are susceptible to corruption, infiltration, and the eventual abandonment of the professed mission. The Episcopal, Lutheran, and Methodist denominations not only don’t appear to be Christian anymore, they can’t even be reasonably described as “churches” in any reasonable manner.

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.
– Mark Steyn, Silent Night, December 24, 2011

The secular War on Christmas throughout the West presently serves as a lightweight bookend for the religious War on Christians throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East. In the West, the persecution is still petty, tentative, and small-minded, elsewhere, it is purposeful, murderous and systematic. One cannot equate the banning of Merry Christmas wishes by elected politicians to the banning of Christians from holding elected office, or pretend that atheists co-opting public parks in order to promote nasty anti-holiday messages is the equivalent of violent attacks on Christian church celebrants.

But if the actions are different, the motivations stem from the same source, which is the desire to eliminate Christianity from the world. This is not a new desire; it was already hundreds of years old when the Emperor Diocletian issued the first of his four “Edicts against the Christians” in the year 303. Like the Western anti-Christians, Diocletian did not initially intend for there to be any bloodshed, but hoped that political and legal pressure would be sufficient to cause Christians to apostatize, but his hopes were dashed by the stalwart faith of the empire’s Christians. His fourth Edict, therefore, demanded summary execution of all men, women, and children who were unwilling to offer sacrifice to any of the pagan gods.

Secular culture is no more intrinsically tolerant than Diocletian. Those who consciously adhere to “secular values” understand that they are fundamentally different than, and inherently opposed to, Christian values. While far too many Christians and non-Christians alike believe that it is still possible to arrange society in such a manner that secular values are given primacy in the public while still respecting Christian values in private, both ancient and recent history indicate otherwise. This is particularly true in any society with an activist government that uses fiscal policy and administrative law as tools for social engineering.

Many of the accomplishments of Christendom are being unwound, often by the unworthy heirs of Christendom itself. The increasingly secular British people bitterly complain about the continental subjugation of their once-independent isle even as they simultaneously continue to support the societal secularization that made that subjugation possible. Slaves are being bought and sold in numbers that have not been seen since William Wilberforce led the evangelical charge against the slave trade. As the concepts of individual rights and human liberty arose under Christendom, it is both logically and empirically apparent that they will decline in tandem with the decline of Christianity across the West.

And yet, Christians need have no fear for the future of their faith in the coming years. The Church has survived every persecution, every attempt to stamp it out for nearly two thousand years. It will survive the current secular assault just as it survived the historical Soviet assault. Kim Jong-Il is dead, while the Christians struggling to survive in the concentration camps he established throughout North Korea have not only outlived him, but celebrate the birth of their Lord and Savior today. We pray that their faith will be rewarded and their suffering will be eased; may they pray that our faith will survive our wealth and comfort.

The Truth is. It does not depend upon one man, or seven billion men, women, and children, acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord. All the powers and principalities of the world will exert their fury in vain, all the Gates of Hell will announce their lethal edicts to no avail, as they have already been defeated by the birth of the boy child who is called King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Merry Christmas, and may God bless us all, every one.

JimH apparently does not understand the basic concept of “fundamentalism”:

Sorry, I’m new here but it sounds like you wouldn’t agree with most Christian confessions of faith or Christian creeds. Nor could you likely hold office in any Christian denomination. How exactly does this square with calling yourself a fundamentalist Christian? You would quite possibly be labeled a heretic by many. I don’t know you well enough, but if you’re somewhat rolling your own religion and are as lacking in humility toward the Church as your blog suggests, there are cult-like overtones to your faith. I’d hardly call that fundamental Christianity.

I don’t agree with most of them. That is why I often describe them as a religion called “Churchianity” as opposed to Christianity. “How exactly does this square with calling yourself a fundamentalist Christian?” It is one and the same; most modern churches are more focused on the man-made edifice they have constructed on top of the Christian faith, be it political ideology, sexual revisionism, or doctrinal inventions.

fun·da·men·tal
adjective
1. serving as, or being an essential part of, a foundation or basis; basic; underlying: fundamental principles; the fundamental structure.

I have no religious regard whatsoever for the various extra-Biblical traditions of the various Christian churches, although I do respect them in the same manner I respect many of the non-religious traditions of Man. But I consider Churchian dogma such as the Trinity, the Rapture, infant baptism, transubstantiation, purgatory, female pastors, bans on alchohol and dancing, Papal infallibility, and Bishop Ussher’s historical chronology to be no more theologically legitimate or Biblically supported than I do the sale of indulgences, Dante’s geography of Hell, or Milton’s history of Lucifer’s Fall.

I have no doubt that some of the very churches that openly violate Scriptural teachings in their organizational structures would call me a heretic. What of it? If an ordained lesbian who subscribes to the Trinity and bides her time awaiting the Rapture by baptizing infants and attempting to revive Prohibition asserts I am a heretic, that merely tends to strengthen my suspicion that she does not worship the same god that I do. It is ironic, of course, that so many atheists like to strike the pose of potential burnee at the stake when history indicates that it was actually Christians who shared my skepticism concerning extra-Biblical dogma that were targeted by murderously inclined church authorities.

How and why should one show any humility towards organizations that teach demonstrable extra- and contra-Biblical falsehoods as the equivalent of Scripture? Consider, for example, that even those Christian scholars who subscribe to the Trinity concept “admit the trinity is not Biblical, did not exist in the Apostolic age, and was developed over a period of 295 years.”

It is even more ironic that what JimH “would hardly call fundamentalist Christianity” is far more genuinely fundamental Christianity than the concoction of Churchian creeds and structures that he considers acceptably orthodox. And adhering to the clear and undeniable teachings of a religious text that was written nearly 2,000 years before one was born is the exact opposite of “rolling one’s own religion”.

As for my failure to subscribe to what most people erroneously call the Nicene Creed, I merely point out that it isn’t even the Nicene Creed, but rather a substantially modified version of that creed produced by the First Council of Constantinople 56 years later. My religious beliefs actually happen to be more in accordance with the actual Nicene Creed than the beliefs of those who confess the subsequent Imperially-approved modification.