Tag: Christianity

Mailvox: irritated by atheists

DB has a tough time maintaining an even keel when arguing with atheists:

How do you maintain your temper when arguing with atheists. I cannot. I find myself so angry that I cannot take anything they say at face value. God has spoken to me and told me to stop arguing with atheists. I can still witness but under no circumstances may I argue. I am directed to pity them and pray for their salvation.

Do you ever wonder if you are helping them or if you are getting through at all? I feel a visceral anger at them and the damage they have caused our society. I am no longer going to be arguing on the internet or in person. How can they be anything but enemies of all that is good?

Since good is defined by God and since atheists are, by definition, active disbelievers in God, logic dictates that atheists are enemies of God and all that is good. This logic is confirmed by observation; examine any evil and the chances are high that atheists are disproportionately caught up in it, or at the very least are overt advocates.

But that doesn’t mean you should get angry with them when they start arguing dishonestly, attempting to pass off rhetoric as dialectic, moving the goalposts, holding you to standards they don’t hold themselves, offering repeated bait-and-switches, and falling silent rather than admitting defeat. To the contrary, such behaviors indicate that they know they are losing the argument.

The reason I never get even a little upset by the atheist with whom I am debating is because I know they are not my intended audience. I don’t care if they cling stubbornly to their erroneous beliefs nor do I care what they do in order to preserve them. To me they are little more than a stage prop, a straight man, a feeder of lines. The worse my interlocutor’s behavior becomes, the more convincing my arguments are perceived by the audience. In fact, for me the difficulty is not maintaining my equanimity, but rather, avoiding the temptation to intentionally trigger the bad behavior and thereby winning a rhetorical battle rather than a comprehensive dialectical one.

(NB: this is precisely why atheists go out of their way to be so offensive and to upset the Christian. It is an attempt to win the rhetorical battle by making you lose your temper.)

So, if you are a Christian who finds that atheists tend to make your temperature rise, apologetic debate is probably not for you. Serve the Kingdom in another role; pray for them. Pick them up when they fall down. Help them when they need assistance. More souls have been won for Jesus Christ by kindness than by words.

But atheists are prouder, more intelligent, and less emotional than the norm, and are therefore less convinced by deeds than words. So, many of them require their pride in their intelligence to be broken before they can reach a state of mind that permits them to hear the Good News and contemplate it rationally. And this is where people like me can open up their minds, by forcing them to acknowledge the myriad flaws in their arguments and by making them question their previously unquestioned assumptions. I know that I am getting through to at least some of them, because they have let me know that has been the case.

It’s rewarding and inspiring to see atheists transform from bitter enemies of God to fearless servants of Jesus Christ. If you keep in mind that the next arrogant, irritating, and slippery-tongued atheist you meet may be the larval form of a John C. Wright or an Apostle Paul, I suspect you will be able to find some charity in your heart for them.

The testimony of John C. Wright

It has been one of the great privileges of my life to make the professional acquaintance of John C. Wright, whom I firmly believe to be the greatest living SF writer. But Mr. Wright is more more than a mere teller of tales like AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND and THE GOLDEN AGE, he is also a formidable fidei defensor. Six years ago today, he was baptized into the Church in the name of Jesus Christ. This is his testimony, as it was recounted on Free Republic and then Strange Notions. It seems appropriate to post it here today.

My conversion was in two parts: a natural part and a supernatural part. Here is the natural part: first, over a period of two years my hatred toward Christianity eroded due to my philosophical inquiries.

Rest assured, I take the logical process of philosophy very seriously, and I am impatient with anyone who is not a rigorous and trained thinker. Reason is the tool men use to determine if their statements about reality are valid: there is no other. Those who do not or cannot reason are little better than slaves, because their lives are controlled by the ideas of other men, ideas they have not examined.

To my surprise and alarm, I found that, step by step, logic drove me to conclusions no modern philosophy shared, but only this ancient and (as I saw it then) corrupt and superstitious foolery called the Church. Each time I followed the argument fearlessly where it lead, it kept leading me, one remorseless rational step at a time, to a position the Church had been maintaining for more than a thousand years. That haunted me.

Second, I began to notice how shallow, either simply optimistic or simply pessimistic, other philosophies and views of life were.

The public conduct of my fellow atheists was so lacking in sobriety and gravity that I began to wonder why, if we atheists had a hammerlock on truth, so much of what we said was pointless or naive. I remember listening to a fellow atheist telling me how wonderful the world would be once religion was swept into the dustbin of history, and I realized the chap knew nothing about history. If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses.

I would listen to my fellow atheists, and they would sound as innocent of any notion of what real human life was like as the Man from Mars who has never met human beings or even heard clear rumors of them. Then I would read something written by Christian men of letters, Tolkien, Lewis, or G.K. Chesterton, and see a solid understanding of the joys and woes of human life. They were mature men.

I would look at the rigorous logic of St. Thomas Aquinas, the complexity and thoroughness of his reasoning, and compare that to the scattered and mentally incoherent sentimentality of some poseur like Nietzsche or Sartre. I can tell the difference between a rigorous argument and shrill psychological flatulence. I can see the difference between a dwarf and a giant.
My wife is a Christian and is extraordinary patient, logical, and philosophical. For years I would challenge and condemn her beliefs, battering the structure of her conclusions with every argument, analogy, and evidence I could bring to bear. I am a very argumentative man, and I am as fell and subtle as a serpent in debate. All my arts failed against her. At last I was forced to conclude that, like non-Euclidian geometry, her world-view logically followed from its axioms (although the axioms were radically mystical, and I rejected them with contempt). Her persistence compared favorably to the behavior of my fellow atheists, most of whom cannot utter any argument more mentally alert than a silly ad Hominem attack. Once again, I saw that I was confronting a mature and serious world-view, not merely a tissue of fables and superstitions.
Third, a friend of mine asked me what evidence, if any, would be sufficient to convince me that the supernatural existed. This question stumped me. My philosophy at the time excluded the contemplation of the supernatural axiomatically: by definition (my definition) even the word “super-natural” was a contradiction in terms. Logic then said that, if my conclusions were definitional, they were circular. I was assuming the conclusion of the subject matter in dispute.

Now, my philosophy at the time was as rigorous and exact as 35 years of study could make it (I started philosophy when I was seven). This meant there was no point for reasonable doubt in the foundational structure of my axioms, definitions, and common notions. This meant that, logically, even if God existed, and manifested Himself to me, my philosophy would force me to reject the evidence of my senses, and dismiss any manifestations as a coincidence, hallucination, or dream. Under this hypothetical, my philosophy would force me to an exactly wrong conclusion due to structural errors of assumption.

A philosopher (and I mean a serious and manly philosopher, not a sophomoric boy) does not use philosophy to flinch away from truth or hide from it. A philosophy composed of structural false-to-facts assumptions is insupportable.

A philosopher goes where the truth leads, and has no patience with mere emotion.

But it was impossible, logically impossible, that I should ever believe in such nonsense as to believe in the supernatural. It would be a miracle to get me to believe in miracles.

So I prayed. “Dear God, I know (because I can prove it with the certainty that a geometer can prove opposite angles are equal) that you do not exist. Nonetheless, as a scholar, I am forced to entertain the hypothetical possibility that I am mistaken. So just in case I am mistaken, please reveal yourself to me in some fashion that will prove your case. If you do not answer, I can safely assume that either you do not care whether I believe in you, or that you have no power to produce evidence to persuade me. The former argues you not beneficent, the latter not omnipotent: in either case unworthy of worship. If you do not exist, this prayer is merely words in the air, and I lose nothing but a bit of my dignity. Thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation in this matter, John Wright.”

I had a heart attack two days later. God obviously has a sense of humor as well as a sense of timing.

Now for the supernatural part.

My wife called someone from her Church, which is a denomination that practices healing through prayer. My wife read a passage from their writings, and the pain vanished. If this was a coincidence, then, by God, I could use more coincidences like that in my life.

Feeling fit, I nonetheless went to the hospital, so find out what had happened to me. The diagnosis was grave, and a quintuple bypass heart surgery was ordered. So I was in the hospital for a few days.

Those were the happiest days of my life. A sense of peace and confidence, a peace that passes all understanding, like a field of energy entered my body. I grew aware of a spiritual dimension of reality of which I had hitherto been unaware. It was like a man born blind suddenly receiving sight.

The Truth to which my lifetime as a philosopher had been devoted turned out to be a living thing. It turned and looked at me. Something from beyond the reach of time and space, more fundamental than reality, reached across the universe and broke into my soul and changed me. This was not a case of defense and prosecution laying out evidence for my reason to pick through: I was altered down to the root of my being.

It was like falling in love. If you have not been in love, I cannot explain it. If you have, you will raise a glass with me in toast.

Naturally, I was overjoyed. First, I discovered that the death sentence under which all life suffers no longer applied to me. The governor, so to speak, had phoned. Second, imagine how puffed up with pride you’d be to find out you were the son of Caesar, and all the empire would be yours. How much more, then, to find out you were the child of God?

I was also able to perform, for the first time in my life, the act which I had studied philosophy all my life to perform, which is, to put aside all fear of death. The Roman Stoics, whom I so admire, speak volumes about this philosophical fortitude. But their lessons could not teach me this virtue. The blessing of the Holy Spirit could and did impart it to me, as a gift. So the thing I’ve been seeking my whole life was now mine.

Then, just to make sure I was flooded with evidence, I received three visions like Scrooge being visited by three ghosts. I was not drugged or semiconscious, I was perfectly alert and in my right wits.

It was not a dream. I have had dreams every night of my life. I know what a dream is. It was not a hallucination. I know someone who suffers from hallucinations, and I know the signs. Those signs were not present here.

Then, just to make even more sure that I was flooded with overwhelming evidence, I had a religious experience. This is separate from the visions, and took place several days after my release from the hospital, when my health was moderately well. I was not taking any pain-killers, by the way, because I found that prayer could banish pain in moments.

During this experience, I became aware of the origin of all thought, the underlying oneness of the universe, the nature of time: the paradox of determinism and free will was resolved for me. I saw and experienced part of the workings of a mind infinitely superior to mine, a mind able to count every atom in the universe, filled with paternal love and jovial good humor. The cosmos created by the thought of this mind was as intricate as a symphony, with themes and reflections repeating themselves forward and backward through time: prophecy is the awareness that a current theme is the foreshadowing of the same theme destined to emerge with greater clarity later. A prophet is one who is in tune, so to speak, with the music of the cosmos.

The illusionary nature of pain, and the logical impossibility of death, were part of the things I was shown.

Now, as far as these experiences go, they are not unique. They are not even unusual. More people have had religious experiences than have seen the far side of the moon. Dogmas disagree, but mystics are strangely (I am tempted to say mystically) in agreement.

The things I was shown have echoes both in pagan and Christian tradition, both Eastern and Western (although, with apologies to my pagan friends, I see that Christianity is the clearest expression of these themes, and also has a logical and ethical character other religions expressions lack).

Further, the world view implied by taking this vision seriously (1) gives supernatural sanction to conclusions only painfully reached by logic (2) supports and justifies a mature rather than simplistic world-view (3) fits in with the majority traditions not merely of the West, but also, in a limited way, with the East.

As a side issue, the solution of various philosophical conundrums, like the problem of the one and the many, mind-body duality, determinism and indeterminism, and so on, is an added benefit. If you are familiar with such things, I follow the panentheist idealism of Bishop Berkeley; and, no, Mr. Johnson does not refute him merely by kicking a stone.

From that time to this, I have had prayers answered and seen miracles: each individually could be explained away as a coincidence by a skeptic, but not taken as a whole. From that time to this, I continue to be aware of the Holy Spirit within me, like feeling a heartbeat. It is a primary impression coming not through the medium of the senses: an intuitive axiom, like the knowledge of one’s own self-being.

This, then, is the final answer to your question: it would not be rational for me to doubt something of which I am aware on a primary and fundamental level.

Occam’s razor cuts out hallucination or dream as a likely explanation for my experiences. In order to fit these experiences into an atheist framework, I would have to resort to endless ad hoc explanations: this lacks the elegance of geometers and parsimony of philosophers.

I would also have to assume all the great thinkers of history were fools. While I was perfectly content to support this belief back in my atheist days, this is a flattering conceit difficult to maintain seriously.

On a pragmatic level, I am somewhat more useful to my fellow man than before, and certainly more charitable. If it is a daydream, why wake me up? My neighbors will not thank you if I stop believing in the mystical brotherhood of man.

Besides, the atheist non-god is not going to send me to non-hell for my lapse of non-faith if it should turn out that I am mistaken.

Truth and the Resurrection

There are those who say that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth is merely a story. They will claim, falsely, that the Risen Lord is derived from an agricultural myth. They will assert, wrongly, that “Easter is originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex.” They will declare, contra the historical evidence, that Jesus Christ never lived or was crucified on a cross by the Roman authorities.

It is strange, is it not, that they should tell so many palpable lies in the service of that which they say to be truth?

The Apostle Paul once said that if the story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not true, then we Christians are the saddest and most pathetic of all men. Everything we do, everything we believe, everything for which we hope and strive, is a lie.

It is strange, is it not, that so many observable and long-lived truths should stand so firmly on such a flimsy foundation of falsehood?

From Plato to Zelazny, men of letters have written of the purer things, that in their perfection spawn lesser shadows and imitations that reflect but an aspect of the true essence. From where does truth come, if not the Truth? And did Jesus not say that he was the Way, the Truth, and the Life?

Those who are Aristotelian devotees of reality stand by the Lesser Truth that A is A, and that A is never Not-A. But the Lesser Truth descends from, and depends upon, the Greater Truth, which is this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Yesterday the light shone in the darkness. Today the light shines in the darkness. Tomorrow the light will shine in the darkness. And the darkness will never, ever, overcome it.

It is not a story, it is The Story, it is the oldest story, it is the true story from which all other stories flow. Light versus dark. And despite the darkness that surrounds us, that pervades us, that haunts us, the light of all mankind is winning.

That is why, all around the world this morning, there are millions of men and women who will greet each other with three simple words of hope and truth and triumph.

Christ is risen!

Broken and lesser beings

You may think that we exaggerate the craven wretchedness of our enemies. You may think that my boundless contempt for the r/selected, Larry’s muscular backhands for his craven adversaries, and John C. Wright’s withering scorn for the wormtongues is fueled by either a) a sense of offense at being opposed or b) an oversensitivity to criticism.

It is not. It is fueled by our clear-eyed view of what these creatures are. It is our awareness that they are, like the soul-destroyed abhumans roaming the Night Lands, broken and lesser beings who seek to pull others down into the mire that torments them.

By way of evidence, consider their own words about themselves. Here, for example, is Damien Walter:

I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere. I had no kind of spiritual practice at all. I was a standard issue atheist, and any encounter I had with religion was edged with inherited and unexamined scorn. Consequentially, I really had no tools to process the pain I was feeling. Today, my argument with the radical atheist rhetoric of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett – both of whom I had read heavily at university – is that it leaves the bulk of its believers utterly amputated from their own emotional reality. It certainly had me. I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse where I had, at long last, collapsed.

This is why they preach equality. This is why they preach tolerance. This is why they seek to disqualify and destroy those who stand above them, immune to the manifold terrors that haunt their empty chests. They are damaged people, broken individuals, fallen souls.

They live lives of lies and self-deceit. They lie about others; they lie about themselves:

I am by nature a non-political person. I tend to see both sides of most arguments, and there are merits and faults with any position in any political debate. Extremism is always wrong. Beyond that, who is right is mostly a matter of your tribal, partisan allegiances.

No doubt that is why he didn’t link to Larry’s piece he was criticizing and why David Barnett intentionally and admittedly evaded The Guardian guidelines in his hit piece aimed at me, lest I defend my position in a convincing manner.

But no matter what lies Damien and his broken kind tell, they will find no comfort whatsoever in confronting the likes of Mr. Corriea and Mr. Wright. They will find no peace through confronting me. They will find nothing but emotional collapse in this lifetime and damnation in the next as a result of their rejection of the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we do our feeble best to serve.

At least Damien has taken one step forward in abandoning the intellectually bankrupt world of the radical atheist. He knows there is something else out there. But he is still caught in the soul-sucking mire, he is still lost in lies and desperately lashing out at the likes of Larry and me in a vain attempt to find fulfillment in the approval of those he foolishly seeks to emulate.

But he will not, because there is no fulfillment to be found there. There is none to be found in telling lies, in making-believe, because even if he manages to convince others of his falsehoods, he will never be able to convince himself that they are true.

What Damien does not realize is that our strength, our being whole, does not come from within, but from without. The Earth-Current flows through us; we are empowered by the Master of the Master-Word. It is not enough for a man to reject the nonsensical teachings of the self-proclaimed wise, it is necessary to repent and to humble himself before God, after which he can stand again, washed in the sacred blood of His Son, unafraid, unbowed, and unbroken.

Spelling it out

This is for the benefit of all the logical slowpokes. It is logic so basic that even those who are intellectually limited to the rhetorical level should be able to follow it:

  • If you have the right to demand that I bake you a cake, then I have the right to force you to attend church, mosque, or synagogue.
  • If you have the right to fire me because you don’t like my political position on the legality of homogamy, I have the right to fire you because I don’t like your political position on the legality of homosexuality.
  • If you have the right to deny me access to the news media because I don’t believe in climate change, I have the right to deny you access to the media because you don’t believe in God.

If atheists truly want a power struggle for the right to be intolerant, Christians will eventually engage and win. Because we will die before we will give up our beliefs and you will not. We invented the Crusade and the Inquisition, two institutions so historically intimidating that atheists still shiver and tell each other scary stories about them centuries after the event.

We will revive them before we will abandon our faith. And while we would prefer to live with both Christian and traditional Constitutional values, if we are forced to choose between the two, we will choose the former without even thinking twice.

Christians: No to Noah

We have this on the authority of no less than Mr. John C. Wright:

I saw the movie NOAH just now. What a load of horse manure. In days to come, time permitting, I will pen a more thorough review, but for now, let me just say: Christian men, save your money. Go see GOD’S NOT DEAD. Tell Hollywood we don’t like movies about Biblical figures that mock the source material.

I have to admit that it never even occurred to me to go see it, but it’s always nice to receive confirmation that one’s assumptions were correct. Wright adds in the comments:

This movie particularly offends me, because back when I was an atheist, I could and did, write stories so convincingly Christian that I fooled at least one editor and two reviewers into thinking I was one. It is a talent all artists have. It is called make believe. No director of this stature lacks this talent. The atheist flavor in the film was not inserted by accident nor oversight, it was deliberate.

The Churchian elevation of sin

Leave it to the Female Imperative-worshipping feminists to not only turn Biblical doctrine on its head, but actually find a sacred and holy purpose to female sin:

  1. A poor excuse for a man and husband does something (often something mysterious) to make his wife unhaaappy.
  2. As a result, the wife lashes out, very often in a way that threatens the family.
  3. Her sinful actions, while of course not sanctioned, turn out to be just the ticket required to shake her complacent husband into attention and get him to seek out God.
  4. His seeking out God, (triggered by her lack of submission), fixes their marriage, makes him a better man, and brings them both to God.

I’m pretty relaxed about women who are unwilling to submit to their husbands, for much the same reason I’m relaxed about atheists who are unwilling to submit to God. First, because they will inevitably reap the consequences of their foolishness. Second, because they don’t have to answer to me concerning their stubbornness, they have to answer to God.

That being said, actively teaching women that being rebellious in marriage is a good and divinely sanctioned act is downright evil. Stay well away from any church or wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing who perverts the Bible in this manner.

The answer to the purported dilemma often raised is absolutely simple. Christian women not infrequently to ask: “Do I have to submit to a husband who [insert various moral failing or perceived flaw here].” Yes. Next question.

Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.
– 1 Peter 3: 1-2 

I understand many, perhaps most, women don’t like that. I don’t like the fact that I can’t split the skull of everyone who annoys me either. But I don’t make the rules. If you don’t like them, then follow the example of Lucifer and take it up with the Rulegiver.

Backfire

In which John C. Wright explains how reading an slanderous anti-Christian short story helped him move on from atheism and embrace Christianity:

Mr. Chiang’s short story, as far as I was concerned, not merely failed of its object, but was counter-productive. One of the things that made me suffer no regret when I was called away from the cramped intellectual jail of atheism into a wider and more wonderful world, was my growing conviction that my fellow atheists were shallow, men without insight into real human nature. I read Chiang’s story and I thought: is this the best my side can do? Is this cheap slander the best argument we can muster against our hated enemies, the Christians? In those days I kept wondering why, since my side had the Sixteen-Inch Guns of Truth and Logic, our gunners kept shooting blanks. Why were we sneering all the time, instead of setting out the evidence?

To get a notion of the depth of the contrast I saw, find a comfy chair by the fire, read HELL IS THE ABSENCE OF GOD by Ted Chiang, and then, without rising from the chair except perhaps to toss another log on the fire, pick up and read SMITH OF WOOTTON MAJOR by J.R.R. Tolkien, or perhaps LEAF BY NIGGLE. It does not matter whether you are an Atheist or a Christian or are another faith or uncommitted: anyone reading those two author’s work in contrast will see that one has an insight into human joys and human woes, a compassion toward even human folly or pride or sloth. And the other one shows nothing, no humanity, no understanding. The heart of Chiang’s work is not in the right place. Even though I thought Chiang’ world view was true and Tolkien’s was false, I concluded Tolkien’s insight into real life was keen-eyed, and Chiang’s was superficial.

He cites an earlier review of Chiang’s short story, written when he was, as he described at the time, “an unrepentant atheist”:

“The satire “Hell is the Absence of God” reads like it was written by someone who never met a Christian, or read anything written by a Christian. In this tale, those who see the light of heaven are grotesquely disfigured (their eyes and eye sockets are removed) and loose free will, and become perfect in faith, so that they are automatically assured of entrance into paradise. The main character, mourning after the death of his wife, seeks to find a spot where an angel is leaving or entering the world, so that he can, if only for a moment, glimpse the light of heaven, so that he can loose his eyes and his free will, but be assured of meeting his wife again in heaven. All goes as planned, but God capriciously sends the man to Hell in any case. Hell is not a place of torment, but a bland area much like earth, merely separate from God, peopled by Fallen Angels who sin was not rebellion, but free-thinking. Hence, out of all created beings, only the main character is actually suffering in Hell, since he is the only one who longs not to be there, and, thanks to his free will being destroyed, is the only one who loves God wholeheartedly. Again, all efforts of the main character to rejoin his wife are futile. There are secondary characters whose lives are also ruined and for no particular reason.

“I myself am an unrepentant atheist, but I would never pen such trite antichristian propaganda. If an author is going to set a story in an alternate universe where the Christian myths happen to be true, the author should become familiar with (or, at least, hide his contempt for) the source material. Read Thomas Aquinas or John Milton. Christians may be wrong, but they are not stupid.

“Over all, Mr. Chiang is an excellent writer, who writes wonderfully about big ideas, but weds them to a theme of dispirited nihilism. He is capable of subtle and penetrating characterization, except when he trots out a tired leftwing cliché, whereupon suddenly everything becomes flat and predictable (see, for example, his treatment of the CIA, Big Business, the Military, and the Victorian Age).”

And so we see that even shadow testifies to the existence of the Light. I thought Wright’s take on Chiang was spot-on. I have the collection of short stories to which he refers, and while I found them intriguing, and even bordering on brilliant, I also thought it was remarkable how every single one of them felt essentially flat. I didn’t know why at the time, but now I do. Put simply, Chiang is a tremendous talent crippled by postmodern secularism.

He is, as I once explained to R. Scott Bakker, a color-blind painter. It makes no difference how flawless his technique and his skill are, because when the sun is green and the grass is purple, there is a certain disconnect from the human experience that cannot be avoided.

As I said to Tom Kratman yesterday, in the end, WHAT you write is considerably more important than HOW you write. An accurate truth, even clumsily described, is more significant than a pretty lie, no matter how eloquently the lie is told.

Mailvox: Answers for MJ 1

This was a long letter from MJ, so I’ll have to address it in parts:

I am 21 years old and a student at a small Jesuit college in Ohio. I just recently came across your blog. To be precise it was introduced to me last spring–March, I believe. I wasn’t part of your regular traffic until October or so. Now I think hardly a day goes by that I don’t read what is stirring in your head. First, thank you both for your insights and your (at least I consider it) courage (maybe you consider it normalcy). To be brief, I grew up in a relatively conservative Roman Catholic household. However, as one who prefers to avoid confrontation, I rarely engage in debates about politics or religion. I’ll speak vehemently about such subjects with people with whom I agree. When it comes to others, I prefer to keep quiet or, if necessary, appease. I say this so that my thanks might be better placed. You have no desire to avoid or appease those whom you consider wrong. Your example is a great help.

Perhaps it was divinely ordained, but I had been reading through a handful of literature on science, atheism, and religion at around the same time that I grew fond of your blog (I didn’t read any Dawkins; I skimmed the first five chapters of Hitchens’s memoir; I gravitated toward Stenger’s God the Failed Hypothesis and Cunningham’s Decoding the Language of God)…. At the time I started this endeavor and even during the initial stages, I probably would have classified myself as an agnostic….

Now, I am not contacting you solely for the sake of encomium; I have a few things that I wish to ask. First, I remember reading some comments you had about the omnipotence, omniscience, etc. of God. You suggested replacing such attributes with ideas about tantipotence, tantiscience, etc. I prefer to think of my theology almost in terms of mathematics (just to note, my theology is incredibly uninformed. A current goal of mine is to become both more biblically literate and theologically literate. The downside of a Catholic upbringing!). I have never been a fan of the arguments of god’s nonexistence by means of syllogism (that is, God is A, but A leads to B, and B is inconsistent with well known fact C, so God is not A or something like that) since syllogisms of this sort seem to be equivalent to abusing and mutilating the dictionary. However, since these arguments are out there, I began to consider the following. I don’t wish to jeopardize God’s infinite nature.

However, pure omnipotence can cause logical problems (if we wish to impose some logical structure on God’s nature, something that I think objectionable). In your suggestion of tantipotence, you (I think) mentioned that to the human mind tantipotence would virtually appear to be omnipotence. To the human mind, there is no significant difference between a God who can do all and a God who can do nearly all things. My only qualm is that to the believer this might be an acceptable concession; but I would imagine that the non-believer would love to poke fun at the not-fully-all powerful God. I was wondering what you might think of this idea. In mathematics there are different gradations of infinity (I am sure you are aware). The set of integers has a cardinality of infinity, but this infinity is less than the infinity that is the cardinality of the set of real numbers. That is, there are more real numbers than integers even though both are technically infinite in extent. If we take omnipotence as the cardinality of the real numbers and tantipotence as the cardinality of the integers, then God still remains infinite even if “less so.”

My point is to ask your opinion about thinking about theology in terms of mathematics. To some degree I think that mathematics presents the universe (or multiverse, hyperverse, or whatever they are calling it now) with its own mind-body problem of dualism. How is it that mathematics, something so abstract, can interact with the physical world? (I suppose something similar could be said about language; how does an abstract concept such as language reflect, relate, and influence the material world?) I read your post today from Spengler’s Decline of the West. I am definitely going to look into that book. As a final point, I am awestruck at one of the most basic ideas in mathematics, continuity, and how continuity affects infinity. For example, I am still puzzled by how an infinitely long number line can be looped up into a circle of radius 1 through a simple compactification method….virtually allowing me to hold infinity in my hand! I am also intrigued that through a few simple lines a mathematician can prove a statement that can solve an infinite number of problems. I suppose it’s akin to what you write in The Irrational Atheist that a few lines of programming can generate the infinitely complex Serpinski Triangle.

In relation to the above, I encountered on Richard Dawkins’s website the classic argument that atheists make: if god is all-powerful and all-loving, then he should wish to stop and be able to stop evil. You know the rest. Just out of curiosity, does this argument presuppose that God operates on a kind of utilitarian moral code? After all, the alleviation of suffering is precisely Sam-Harrisian…er…I mean utilitarian. Not for a second do I imagine a utilitarian God! If, indeed, this argument presupposes such a God, it seems to me all the more reason to throw it out immediately! 

I’m glad that some people are finding my anti-anti-apologetics to be useful. I’m not going to pretend I don’t enjoy beating up on the intellectual cripples of evangelical atheism, as one agnostic described them, but there is a more serious aspect to the activity than my own personal amusement.

First, I think it is important to always keep in mind that whether it is theology, psychology, philosophy, or even history that we are contemplating, we see as though through a glass, darkly. Nothing we do, think, or say can jeopardize God’s nature, whatever it actually happens to be, from nonexistence to omnipotent omnipresence. We are not debating the truth, we are not even capable of perceiving the truth, we are merely debating our superficial observations and our momentary perceptions of the truth. The truth is out there, but it is grander and more complicated than we can possibly hope to comprehend.

In other words, don’t flatter yourself, sport. Neither God nor nature depend upon MJ’s opinion of them. Or mine.

So, the idea of shying away from an idea due to its potential effect on us or anyone else is fundamentally misguided. Anyone who attempts to make hay with regards to the imagined limits of a tantiscient and tantipotent God is doing nothing more than demonstrating himself to be a midwit and a fool. The analogy of the limits of the two infinite sets MJ mentions is a very good one; regardless of whether one is considering integers or real numbers, it is objectively stupid to claim that the number 100 is bigger than the upper limit of either set.

As for the idea that an all-powerful and all-loving God should wish to stop and be able to stop evil, to say nothing of the idea that the existence of evil therefore disproves the existence of such a god, well, that doesn’t even rise to the level of midwittery. One has to have a truly average mind and remain ignorant of basic Biblical knowledge to find either of those concepts even remotely convincing.

Imagine the Sisyphean hell that is the existence of a video game character, literally created to die over and over and over again. Does the misery of his existence prove that the video game developer does not exist? Of course not. Does it prove that the developer has any limits upon him that the video game character can observe? Of course not. Does it prove that the developer has any particular enmity for the character? Not at all.

Now, it does prove that the developer is not all-loving. But then, the Christian God is not all-loving. He plays favorites. He loves some and He is very specific about others for whom He harbors not only antipathy, but outright hatred. It is fine to attack the idea of an all-loving god, but it is a mistake to assume any such attack is even remotely relevant to the Christian religion.

The argument is stupid, ignorant, and while it can theoretically rest on a presumption of utilitarianism, more often it rests upon the clueless moral parasitism of the atheist who subscribes to it. It is ironic that the more foolish sort of atheist often attempts to disprove Christianity by an appeal to Christian morality, but then, as MJ has already discovered, we’re not dealing with intellectual giants here.

Ban government marriage

The State’s push to force homogamy on the Church has finally resulted in the realization that the Church should never have accepted the State’s encroachment in its affairs in the 19th century:

State lawmakers are considering throwing out marriage in Oklahoma.The idea stems from a bill filed by Rep. Mike Turner (R-Edmond). Turner says it’s an attempt to keep same-sex marriage illegal in Oklahoma while satisfying the U.S. Constitution. Critics are calling it a political stunt while supporters say it’s what Oklahomans want.

“[My constituents are] willing to have that discussion about whether marriage needs to be regulated by the state at all,” Turner said. Other conservative lawmakers feel the same way, according to Turner.

Banning state interference with marriage is the conservative position. Since most people are historical ignoramuses, it will likely surprise many that marriage licenses didn’t even exist until 1631. And as I noted in my 2004 WND column entitled Divorcing the State, some State governments didn’t interfere with the sacrament until 1958.

All the misguided attempts to accommodate the State have failed. It is time for the American Church to accept the fact that it must now go into the implacable resistance mode that has characterized Christianity for a good part of its historical existence. This may mean persecutions and the falling away of those of weaker faith in time, but then, that is nothing that the Church has not seen or survived before.

Rep. Turner’s action is well-advised. Oklahoma would do well to cease recognizing all marriages as would the other States. If they don’t, they will find that people will simply cease to bother obtaining marriage licenses as is the case in the majority of the black community and an increasing percentage of the white community as well.

Banning government marriage is the right thing to do on libertarian grounds, on religious grounds, on practical grounds, and on the grounds of sexual fairness. I am pro-marriage but I would not recommend obtaining a marriage license to any unmarried young man or woman these days. And if a woman isn’t willing to marry a man without a marriage license, that will serve as sufficient notice that she is already married to the State.