Tag: Christianity

Team Calvin: Question 2b

Jamsco attempts a summary:

Okay, I’m going to do what I did in Question AA and say what I think Vox is saying. Vox, again please correct what I have wrong.

We cannot apply Vs. 28-31 to all Christians, because it is in the context of vs.10-15, in which Jesus describes what the 12 should do in their first mission. This means we can’t apply Vs. 16-27 to all Christians either.

And since the comparative passages in Luke are in Chapters 9 and 12, we can’t apply the verses in Luke 10 and 11 to all Christians either.

This includes the Parable of the Good Samaritan, The Lords Prayer and the instruction to Take up your Cross and follow Jesus.

I have decided much of this in the last day or so, because I don’t like what it means if the Sparrows and Hairs passage applies to all Christians.

So what do I have wrong?

Most of it. But before I begin, I will note that this summary further supports my contention that Calvinism is primarily a consequence of a problem with reading comprehension.

We cannot reasonably apply Matthew 10 verses 28-31 to all Christians, because it is clearly in the context of verses 1-15, in which the twelve disciples are listed by name and Jesus describes what the twelve should do in their mission to the lost sheep of Israel. This means we can’t apply verses 16-31 to all Christians either.

I decided this the first time I read this passage, because my reading comprehension abilities have been objectively determined to be superior and I tend to have very little difficulty correctly determining to whom a message is being addressed.

Being a Calvinist, Jamsco can’t possibly understand that I don’t dislike the Sparrows and Hairs passage because I have never thought, for even a moment, that it contradicted my opinion concerning the voliscience of God, as compared to the omniscience postulated by Calvinists and other Christians. It’s not as if I hadn’t encountered the passage prior to the last day or so, after all.

With regards to Luke, it’s quite clear that because he was working from second-hand sources, he has certain events out of order. The fact that there are passages related to the sending of the Twelve in both chapter 9 and chapter 12 says absolutely nothing about the contents of chapter 10 and chapter 11, which quite clearly refer to different events taking place at different times. This is hardly remarkable; in the massive and magnificent The Cambridge Medieval History, just to give one of many possible examples, there are references in Volume VIII: The Close of the Middle Ages to events that precede events recounted in Volume II: Foundation of the Western Empire thousands of pages earlier.

Now, the fact that Jesus Christ’s specific instructions to his twelve disciples are clearly not intended to be specific instructions to us does not mean that we can’t learn something useful from them. But it does mean that we cannot assume that the message He was providing to them was also meant for us in precisely the same manner that it was meant for them. And the fact that even at the end of the chapter, verse 40, Jesus is still making specific references to the mission of the twelve is indicative that the entire chapter is best understood through the context of that mission.

I note that when Jesus is speaking in general terms in this chapter, he does so. Verse 32: “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven”. Verse 37: “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” And yet, in the two verses immediately prior, he did not say: “Even the very hairs of everyone’s heads are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; everyone is worth more than many sparrows.”

The fact that Jesus uses specific terms in verses 30 and 31 then switches to general terms in the verses immediately following them strongly supports the interpretation that the earlier verses are not intended for general application, but apply to the individuals to whom he was speaking.

Team Calvin: Question Two

The second question devised by Team Calvin and my response to it:

BB. Matthew 10:29-31

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

If God indeed didn’t know of Israel’s suffering in Egypt for 400 years, and if He indeed didn’t know how many righteous men were in Sodom, then what do these verses mean? If they are a metaphor or poetry, then a metaphor or poetry signifying what? Please write a paraphrase of the passage such that it helps the reader understand how it doesn’t actually say that God watches the earth to the detail of each hair of one of his own or one sparrow, since such detail would conflict with God not even knowing of the existence of the person in Sodom.

It’s not exactly a surprise to see an appeal to this verse. And while it might look initially persuasive, as is so often the case, the superficially convincing Calvinist reading becomes significantly less sustainable when it is viewed in the proper Scriptural context. As I have remarked previously, the Calvinist case tends to be heavily based on verses taken out of their specific context and applied to a general case that was never intended and does not reasonably apply. I believe that is precisely the situation here, so let us consider what is the proper Scriptural context of Matthew 10:29-31. In order to correctly establish that context, I quote this excerpt from the preceding section:

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give. “Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts— no bag for the journey or extra shirt or sandals or a staff, for the worker is worth his keep. Whatever town or village you enter, search there for some worthy person and stay at their house until you leave. As you enter the home, give it your greeting. If the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it; if it is not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. Truly I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town. – Matthew 10:5-15

In other words, the context is the specific instructions to the twelve disciples named in the preceding verses with regards to an important mission to the Jews of Israel during Jesus Christ’s ministry. It is clearly erroneous to argue that any of the verses in this section are intended to be applied broadly and literally to all Christians in all times, unless one is also willing to insist that Christians should avoid going among the Gentiles, refuse to utilize hotels, and anticipate being arrested and flogged in a synagogue one day. So, now that it is clear that the context of this section consists of detailed historical instructions to a small group of specified people, let us examine the disputed section in its entirety, as it actually begins one verse before the citation provided.

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. – Matthew 10:28-31

Read in context, it is readily apparent that this is not any sort of theological revelation about the extent of God’s knowledge, it is simply a promise that the twelve disciples being sent out to the Jews, not to the Gentiles or the Samaritans, are under God’s particular protection during the course of their mission. The reference to the sparrows are nothing more than a rhetorical means of establishing the relative importance of the disciples to God and the reference to the hairs of the head being numbered is simply a way of saying that God would not permit them to be harmed. What the verse means, in my opinion, is that the twelve men were being told that they could go out among people that hated them and speak their message without fear that they would killed because God was protecting them.

I therefore paraphrase the requested section thusly: “Nothing, no matter how small, is too trivial for God to concern Himself when He chooses. You need not be afraid that you will be killed on your mission, because what I have told you to do is important and God will not permit anyone to harm so much as a hair on your head.”

There is obviously no conflict between this paraphrase and the idea that God did not know of the existence or the precise number of the righteous individuals in Sodom. In fact, the entire section actually tends to support the concept of God’s attention to detail being variable, as there is the clear implication from the nature of the special and detailed assurances provided here that this is a very special task to which God intends to pay particularly close attention. I find Team Calvin’s perspective to be a bizarrely literal one that transforms what are caring and perfectly clear instructions concerning a specific situation into an incoherent message inexplicably divided in half by an unrelated and tremendously important theological statement. I assert that Team Calvin is reading the verses too literally because they are ignoring the clear and obvious Scriptural context and thereby leaping to unwarranted conclusions that violate other Biblical passages with contrary conclusions that are, unlike this one, entirely in line with their correct Scriptural context.

As I pointed out in TIA, based on the reasoning exhibited here, the Calvinist would be forced to argue that Hercule Poirot is omniscient on the basis of his direct claim to “know everything” at the end of pretty much every book. When contradicted, the Calvinist could then indulge in the customary Calvinist theatrics, wondering if I was calling Poirot a liar or if I was being dishonest due to my assertion that Poirot not only does not know everything, but is not even claiming to do so despite his direct statement to the apparent contrary. My response, of course, would be that the book was a murder mystery, and therefore the context of “knowing everything” was clearly limited to “knowing who the murderer is and how he committed the murder.” This conclusion would be conclusively supported by the fact that Poirot’s subsequent address to his audience dealt solely with those murder-related issues, and not the average airspeed velocity of an unladen African swallow in flight, the number of acorns shed by oak trees in the state of Minnesota in 1985, or the victor of the Sino-Turkish War of 2185. This is not a case of x = not x, but rather, x ⊂ X.

In exactly the same way, the swallows and hairs references apply specifically and solely to a singular historical event rather than to the fundamental nature of God’s relationship with Man and Creation. The strength of my conclusion is strongly supported by comparing the passage in Matthew, where “two sparrows sold for a penny”, to the related one in Luke, in which it is written that “five sparrows sold for two pennies”. Now we can certainly take the Calvinist’s literal approach and conclude that although He is paying very close attention to every little detail, God’s mathematical abilities are limited in a manner similar to those of the rabbits of Watership Down, but I suggest that would be absurd. Even a child is capable of recognizing that 0.5 does not equal 0.4 and a Doctrine of Divine Innumeracy would raise some very serious questions about the potential significance of unreliable hair-numbering, among other things.  What we should do instead is read the quoted verses in their correct historical context and realize that there is no special significance, theological or otherwise, to the comments about the sparrows except in that they illustrate God’s particular concern for Jesus’s disciples on their historic mission and His promises concerning their safety on it.

The trivial, but material difference concerning the reported price of sparrows is a reminder that the Bible is the Word of God as revealed through the flawed and imperfectly reliable mechanism of human transmission, and that attempting to read Scripture by means of detailed exegesis as if it were some sort of perfect divine code is not only doomed to failure, but will reliably produce misleading results that are contrary to the plain meaning of the passages examined.

Team Calvin: Question One

Three weeks ago, in response to the idea that we non-Calvinists were as prone to contortionism as I accused the Calvinists of being, I offered The Calvinist Challenge, in which I asked Team Calvin to produce the five most difficult questions they could devise in order to determine whether or not I would be forced to resort to similar contortions of Scripture in my responses.  Nine of the planet’s finest Calvinist minds busily occupied themselves with concocting more than 30 questions, and after an intense series of debate during which charges of heresy were hurled back and forth and Markku narrowly escaped the fiery fate of Michael Servetus, they finally settled upon five of them. Here is the first question, followed by my response.

AA. Vox: Is this paragraph something you could write and agree with? If not please make it something you agree with, while editing, changing and deleting as few words as possible.

The God I worship is probably not aware of much of what is happening on earth today. You should not tell a child that God has a plan for her, because not only does He not know which husband will be right for her in twenty years, He doesn’t even know that she will be alive tomorrow. And it’s quite possible that if she does die, he will not be aware of it. If on the other hand she lives through an accident in which the car is totaled, thanking God for protecting her may be giving him credit for something he didn’t do. It is quite possible that my God knows less about your daughter than you do. To find out what is happening somewhere on earth, my God has to do research (or, if you like, “go and see”) to find out about it. My God most likely doesn’t have enough knowledge about me and my soul to know what I will do in a given circumstance.

No. The edited version that is consistent with my beliefs is as follows:

The God I worship is not necessarily aware of everything that is happening on Earth today. You should not tell a child that God has a specific plan made just for her, because not only is it possible that He does not know which husband she will choose in twenty years, He doesn’t necessarily know that she will be alive tomorrow. And it’s quite possible that if she does die, He will not be immediately aware of it. If, on the other hand, she lives through an accident in which the car is totaled, thanking God for protecting her may be giving Him credit for something He didn’t do or even intend. It is even possible that God knows less about your daughter’s current activities than you do at the moment. To find out what is happening somewhere on Earth, God customarily investigates Himself or instructs others to find out about it and inform Him. However, due to God’s knowledge of human nature and the human heart, He most likely has sufficient knowledge about me and my soul to know what I will do in any given circumstance.

Dissecting Divine Hiddenness

This is one of the more feeble arguments against the existence of God I have encountered, but since I haven’t actually critiqued it before, I thought I would take the opportunity to do so now. From Wikipedia:

The argument from nonbelief (or the argument from divine hiddenness) is a philosophical argument against the existence of God, specifically, the God of theism. The premise of the argument is that if God existed (and wanted humanity to know it), he would have brought about a situation in which every reasonable person believed in him; however, there are reasonable unbelievers, and therefore, this weighs against God’s existence. This argument is similar to the classic argument from evil in that it affirms inconsistency between the world that exists and the world that should exist if God had certain desires combined with the power to see them through. In fact, since ignorance of God would seem to be a natural evil, many would categorize the problem of divine hiddenness as an instance of the problem of evil.

1. If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
2. If a perfectly loving God exists, reasonable nonbelief does not occur.
3. Reasonable nonbelief occurs.
4. No perfectly loving God exists (from 2 and 3).
5. Hence, there is no God (from 1 and 4).

This argument is a dreadful one because it manages to be unrelated to the Biblical God as well as logically fallacious. Even if it wasn’t outright admitted in the very description, it is trivially easy to demonstrate that the argument cannot possibly apply to the Christian God by simple reference to the Bible. Contrast these two statements:

a) If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
b) ““Because of all their wickedness in Gilgal, I hated them there. Because of their sinful deeds, I will drive them out of my house. I will no longer love them; all their leaders are rebellious.” Hosea 9:15

Since perfect love both proscribes hatred and is not equal to conditional love, the argument clearly fails to apply to the Biblical God at the very first step. As can be readily verified, the verse from Hosea is only one of the many verses in the Bible that describe, in some detail, those whom God hates, in some cases, with a self-described passion. Therefore, it is patently obvious that the argument from Divine Hiddenness has absolutely no relevance to the Christian God.

As is so often the case, the atheist argument is dependent upon an intellectually dishonest bait-and-switch. The argument doesn’t, and can’t, apply to the Christian God, and yet is presented as an argument against the Christian God, thus relying upon the failure of the interlocutor to notice the substitution of a hypothetical and nonexistent “perfectly loving god” for the actual God worshipped and described in the Bible.

Moreoever, the argument against the imaginary “perfectly loving God” even fails in its own right for the following reasons:

1. It is false to say that God must be perfectly loving since the available evidence, both observable and documentary, indicates that God is not.
2. “No reasonable nonbelief” does not follow from “perfectly loving”.
3. There is no evidence that reasonable nonbelief occurs. There is, to the contrary, considerable evidence that most nonbelief is both unreasoning and unreasonable.

To understand how astonishingly illogical the argument is, consider the following variant utilizing the same “logic”.

1. If there are frogs, they are purple.
2. If a purple frog exists, no ribbetting will be heard.
3. Ribbetting is heard.
4. No purple frog exists (from 2 and 3).
5. Hence, there are no frogs (from 1 and 4).

Thus by the Argument from Ranine Hiddenness we are able to conclude that no frog exists, even though our conclusion flies in the face of the observable fact that something out there – though clearly not a frog! – can be heard going ribbet, ribbet. And frankly, I think I’d be more impressed with the intellectual prowess exhibited by the average frog’s ribbets than by the cretins who produced this illogical drivel.

So, I will now pose the obvious question to Smiley, who was good enough to bring this argument to our attention earlier this week. Do you still find the Argument from Divine Hiddenness to be “infinitely more convincing than any argument ever proposed by any Christian?”

UPDATE: In the interest of spelling things out more slowly for those who are too ignorant to realize that the Christian God is the God of the Old Testament as well as the New, and are too lazy to bother looking up the various other references I mentioned, I will point out the obvious. “But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” – Revelations 2:6.

The NFL on Tebow

Michael Silver, who was never inclined to be a natural Tebow fan, nevertheless put together a short and interesting history of the Denver quarterback’s remarkable season, beginning with his first start against the Dolphins:

I don’t have a problem with what Tim Tebow’s doing with [his outspoken Christianity]. I’ve seen him try to articulate why he has the belief and why he believes the things he does, in a very easy way to understand. He’s not the guy, when the cameras are put in his face, saying, you know, “Praise to God, because he supernaturally let that ball hit my receiver!” You know what I mean? But he’s up-front with it, and he makes many people uncomfortable. I do have a problem with what the Christian community is doing with his faith, that they are almost becoming a cult following. I think it’s an “us” problem, not a “him” problem.

Like Dilfer, I have no problem with Tebow whatsoever. I still very much doubt his long-term future as a starting NFL quarterback, but I like him, wish him well, and have thoroughly enjoyed the entertainment he and his team provided last year. He is an excellent role model as a person, a player, and a competitor, but he is not a theologian, a prophet, a pastor, or a proof of the existence of God.

There is no reason why Christians shouldn’t cheer for men like him and Jeremy Lin and wish them continued success. But rather than pray for their sporting success, pray for their ability to resist the temptations that will inevitably be presented to them. It doesn’t matter if the world that the world sees Christians are good athletes. It does matter that it sees they remain strong men of good character, regardless of what fate throws at them.

Kurt Warner: “Often we want to focus on the individual and the great things he’s done, kind of like Tim Tebow, and rightfully so. But the thing you always notice in the Bible is that the result of those things is other people believing.”

Mailvox: an ironic failure of reason

Smiley reaches a logically erroneous conclusion:

So how is the average person who did not have the same experiences as you, and does not find the logic convincing, supposed to believe? Elsewhere, you, like most christians, indicate that non-christians intentionally choose hell over heaven as though they deep down know that christianity is true.

This also seems at odds with a claim you made once, that you believe that it is rational to not believe in Christianity. So if it is rational, how can one be held accountable for not believing?

The Divine Hiddenness argument against the existence of the biblical god, uses that precise fact, as its core. I find that infinitely more convincing than any argument ever proposed by any Christian.

1. God sincerely wishes with all his heart to believe in him (I know VD’s God is much more cruel and indifferent than most Christians’ ideas, but he still does desire every individual human to believe in him)

2. It is rational to not believe in God

3. So there is no biblical God

Most Christians deny 2. But they are wrong. And you, VD, appear to agree.

First, it is both absurd and petty to avoid capitalizing a proper noun. Regardless what one thinks of Marxism, Buddhism, or Christianity, they all merit capital letters. This is basic punctuation. Second, I think this is a very common and reasonable line of thought which nevertheless reveals several logical errors on the part of the questioner.

The answer to the first question is simple. Observation. Even if we do not have certain experiences ourselves, we can reach valid conclusions by observing the effect those experiences have had on others. Indeed, this is both how science operates as well as being one of the primary forms of transmitting Christian beliefs from its inception; the observed transformation that took place in the life of Saul, to say nothing of the cowardly disciples, no doubt played a large role in the subsequent beliefs of others, just as an observed transformation in one of my friend’s lives made a major impact on my own thinking about Christianity.

To say that non-Christians choose Hell over Heaven is not quite the same thing as saying that “they deep down know that christianity is true”. While some consciously do make such a choice, most do so by rejecting the choice, but of course, the refusal to make a decision is tantamount to making a negative decision when a choice must be made. Also, what most Christians actually mean in this regard is not that most non-Christians deep down subscribe to the Nicene Creed, but rather that they understand, deep down, that they are flawed and fallen beings in need of salvation from their sinful nature.

As the vulgar expression has it, they are aware there is a Jesus-sized hole in their hearts. While one can certainly quibble about the size and shape of the hole if one wishes, it would be very difficult for anyone with any experience of humanity to altogether deny its existence, even though the materialist has no choice but to do so. This, of course, is why so many people instinctively, and correctly, reject material reductionism regardless of whether they possess religious faith or not.

Now to get to the errors.

A. To say that it is rational to not believe in the tenets of Christianity is not tantamount to saying that it is justifiable to not believe in those tenets. Nor does it mean that belief in Christianity is irrational. (For the sake of the pedantic, I will point out that I used “belief in Christianity” in the sense of “being a Christian”; obviously it would not be rational to insist that Christianity does not exist.)

B. When has the rationality of an action ever excused one from accountability for it? It is perfectly rational to print your own U.S. dollars from a laser printer and one can even present a sound mainstream economic argument for doing so, complete with a utilitarian moral justification, but that will not prevent one from being held accountable should one actually attempt to buy something with them.

C. The Divine Hiddenness argument is both deeply stupid and theologically ignorant, so the fact that Smiley finds it “infinitely more convincing than any argument ever proposed by any Christian” tells us very little about anything but Smiley’s knowledge base and capacity for reason. The number of questions being begged in the argument are downright embarrassing. From Wikipedia: The argument from nonbelief (or the argument from divine hiddenness) is a philosophical argument against the existence of God, specifically, the God of theism. The premise of the argument is that if God existed (and wanted humanity to know it), he would have brought about a situation in which every reasonable person believed in him; however, there are reasonable unbelievers, and therefore, this weighs against God’s existence.

I will address this argument in detail in a future post, but for now, Job 38:1-2 is sufficient to demolish it.

Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?

D. As to the syllogism presented, it is hopeless from the start.

1. No. The Biblical God clearly does not “sincerely wishes with all his heart” for people to believe in His existence. In fact, such belief isn’t even enough to ensure one is not His enemy. “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.” And God knows perfectly well that some people genuinely don’t believe He exists. “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”

2. Yes, but as was already pointed out above, so what?

3. The first step is false, the second step is irrelevant, and the conclusion is therefore false. But even if both steps had been true, the conclusion still wouldn’t follow.

Why do you believe?

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.

Another pattern observed

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.

The Calvinist challenge

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.

A tale of two persecutions

Conrad Black notes that 100,000+ Christians are annually murdered for their faith:

Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians. A comprehensive Pew Forum study last year found that Christians are persecuted in 131 countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population, out of 197 countries in the world (if Palestine, Taiwan, South Sudan, and the Vatican are included). Best estimates are that about 200 million Christians are in communities where they are persecuted. There is not the slightest question of the scale and barbarity of this persecution, and a little of it is adequately publicized. But this highlights the second half of the atrocity: the passivity and blasé indifference of most of the West’s media and governments.

It is not generally appreciated that over 100,000 Christians a year are murdered because of their faith.

On the other hand, the Financial Times laments the plight of “persecuted” atheists in the USA:

In Dallas, five of them took turns to list examples of the constant pressures of living in a religious society. One was a businesswoman in Plano, a city that’s part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolis and was ranked as the fifth most conservative in America by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research. She insists that, if she came out, she would lose her business. “I’ve worked for years to get these people to trust me, to want to do business with me.” So she constantly has to bite her tongue when Plano City Council opens its meetings with prayers, which it does in defiance of the constitutional separation of church and state….

The most extraordinary story I heard was from a woman in Tuscaloosa county, Alabama. She grew up in nearby Lamar county, raised in the strict Church of Christ, where there is no music with worship and you can’t dance. She says her family love her and are proud of her, but “I’m not allowed to be an atheist in Lamar County”. What is astonishing is that she can be pretty much anything else. “Being on crack, that was OK. As long as I believed in God, I was OK.” So, for example, “I’m not allowed to babysit. I have all these cousins who need babysitters but they’re afraid I’ll teach them about evolution, and I probably would.” I couldn’t quite believe this. She couldn’t babysit as an atheist, but she could when she was on crack? “Yes.” I laughed, but it is hard to think of anything less funny.

One’s heart bleeds for these poor American atheists. While their godless counterparts are among those murdering large quantities of Christians in a number of foreign countries, dreadful Christian bigots are not letting them babysit their children and forcing them to bite their tongues. And note that the would-be babysitter even admits that the parents are perfectly justified in not permitting her to spend any unsupervised time with their children.

I also found it fascinating to learn that the Plano City Council opening its meetings with prayer is somehow supposed to be the equivalent of Congress passing a law to establish religion. This, in a nutshell, illustrates why many people quite rightly despise atheists and want nothing to do with them. If you consistently attempts to take a mile every time anyone gives you an inch, you shouldn’t be surprised when people learn to stop giving you any benefit of the doubt.