Tag: Christianity

We are bad Churchians

An actual email dialogue:

“I have something else from the bible that I feel is a word for you. Proverbs 27:14.”

“I just feel so blessed by your sharing….”

He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.
– Proverbs 27:14

I don’t know about you, but anytime someone uses the word “blessed” about themselves, Matthew 6:5 insensibly comes to mind. Particularly when they use it multiple times in a single conversation. They tend to strike me as the sort of Churchians who think prayer is a means of communicating with other people in their religious circle.

Mailvox: the search for science-based faith

I’m not sure AD can find what he is looking for, mostly because I don’t believe it exists or even can exist:

Thank you for your blog. I started reading it through WND then over the last several months have learned a lot about being a beta. I was raised in Christian churches and accepted Christ at an early age but looking back I was playing church. After [many] years of a rocky marriage my wife filed for divorce. We hadn’t attended church in about 14 years and I decided to go to a local congregation.

For the first time I’m actually going because I want to learn about having a better Christian walk. The trouble I’m having is I want to know what I’m talking about when I talk to someone, (e.g., ex-wife) about Christ and the Bible. I am no Bible scholar and I only have basic answers to her talking about discrepancies in the gospels and the story of a virgin birth savior being included in other religions.

I believe God’s word should stand up to legitimate scientific scrutiny but I can’t say, “well, it is a fact that this or that original text confirms what the modern Bible translations say.” I really want to know what I’m talking about.

Are you able to direct me to sources so I can start to really know I’m basing my faith on a sound foundation? Maybe I’m not showing faith by asking this question but I think I need to know for me.

This is somewhat outside my area of knowledge, as common misconceptions about TIA to the contrary, I don’t get into apologetics, particularly science-flavored ones. So, it might behoove me to step back and allow the scientists here, particularly Stickwick and the other physicists, to provide any recommended reading. I’ve never paid much attention to the present state of the scientific consensus or considered it to be any sort of truth metric because I am old enough to recall it having been the precise opposite of what it is today in many different areas. No one who recalls the butter-margarine consensuses, the global ice age-global warming consensuses, the steady state-Big Bang consensuses, or the low fat-low carbs consensuses is likely to be overly concerned about what scientists happen to be asserting is absolute truth today. Give them a few years and there is a reasonable chance they’ll be saying something very different, if not the exact opposite. Never forget that scientists do not study history and very few of them even know anything about the history of science.

That being said, Patrick Glynn’s God: The Evidence: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, wouldn’t be a bad start. It’s nothing I would consider conclusive, but it will disabuse you of the notion that you cannot balance your faith in science with your faith in God.

But a word of warning. It is not so much indicative of a lack of faith to seek a sound scientific foundation for one’s religious faith as it is evidence of flawed reason. As I have demonstrated on numerous occasions in the past, science is not a reliable basis for one’s faith in anything, religious or otherwise, due to its dynamic nature and its intrinsic reliance on human honesty. It is engineering that is truly reliable by virtue of its much more stringent system of material verification of truth claims; only when science has been transformed into engineering can it be considered more or less reliable, and even then, it can be less than perfectly accurate.

Note that at the moment, after decades of “scientific certainty”, science is attempting to ascertain if supra-luminal speeds are possible. The idea science is capable of being used as any position at all on the supernatural beyond the purely philosophical not only defies reason, but history and scientific history as well.

And if religion got things as reliably wrong as science does, no one would believe in it. When science fetishists complain that religion claims absolute truth, they are projecting. It is religion’s room for and acceptance of doubt that accounts for its persistence; it is science’s false pretensions to being the final word on truth that explain why the world has become increasingly skeptical of science and scientists.

Mailvox: answering the inevitable response

Some atheists appear to view homosexuals as comrades in the great struggle against Christianity. In light of this, MD wonders if Christians can be similarly considered to harbor disproportionate inclinations towards pedophilia on the basis of the Catholic priest abuse scandal:

Hmmm. Wonder what proportion of Christian clergy molest children cf general population? . . . Conclusion: Christians more likely to molest children?

To some extent, the answer depends upon your definition of clergy. But in the end, the inescapable conclusion by MD’s metric is not only that Christians are less likly to molest children than the general population, but that gays should not be permitted in the clergy. Now, there are three significant caveats here which I will point out afterwards, but consider:

Clerical abuse
– 4,392 priests and deacons were accused of engaging in sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002.
– The Jay Report stated there were 10,667 reported victims of clergy sexual abuse younger than 18 years during this period. The RCC victims per abuser rate was 2.43
– The 4,351 priests who were accused amount to 3.97% of the 109,694 priests in active ministry during that time.
– There were 28,700 active priests in 2005. The historical/current rate is 3.72.

Teacher abuse
– It is reported that 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from 1991-2000.
– This indicates an estimated 1,508,000 cases of school children being abused by school employees between 1950 and 2002.
– There were 3.8 million school teachers in 2010. Multiplied by the 3.72 historical/current rate, we estimate 14.1 million teachers active from 1950.

Dividing the 14.1 million historical teachers by the 1.51 million victims, then dividing by the 2.43 victim/abuser rate, this means school children have a 4.4% abuse per teacher rate compared to 4.0% per Catholic priest.

Now, the three problems. The first is that this includes the abuse by school employees who are not teachers without including the non-teachers. Currently, teachers only make up half of the PUBLIC school employees in the country, but that number was historically much lower. Nevertheless, we can safely assume that teachers historically made up about three-quarters of the school employee total, which would lower the teacher abuse rate to 3.3 percent. However, we don’t know if teachers have a higher rate or a lower rate of abuse than janitors, counselors, and administrators. I suspect it is higher, due to low average teacher IQ and the larger amount of contact with children intrinsic to the job, but I simply have no information on this.

Second, the RCC abuse numbers include the victims of priests and deacons, but don’t include the number of permanent deacons. This is because there were only 41 deacons accused of the 12,500 ordained during the period concerned. This gives a total of 122,194 clergy and reduces the RCC abuse rate to 3.6 percent.

And the third problem. 81 percent of the RCC victims were male. All of the abusers were male. This is an astonishing statistical outlier, since in the general population, girls are sexually abused three times more often than boys. The heterosexual abuse rate was therefore 0.7 percent for the clergy compared to 2.5 percent for the teachers.

The conclusion, therefore, is that Christian clergy are 3.6 times less likely to abuse children than the general population unless they are homosexual. The larger part of the clerical problem is not the Church, but Teh Gay. In fact, four-fifths of the sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests could have been avoided simply by barring homosexuals from the clergy, just as Christian doctrine has always deemed necessary. And the increasing restrictions on homosexual seminarians is the obvious reason why the rate of clergy abuse has been significantly dropping since the 1980s.

However, due to the increased embrace of homosexual clergy by the Episcopalian and Lutheran churches, we can safely conclude that the chickenhawks will be gravitating to these organizations as well as to other gay-friendly institutions that are actively involved with children. It should therefore be no surprise that the Sandusky scandal took place on a college campus and concerned a children’s organization; twenty years before, Sandusky might well have decided he was “called” to the priesthood instead of setting up a “children’s charity”.

Mailvox: is God on our side?

JH wonders:

I have read your coloumn faithfully for years, and have come to admire your level-headed and logical approach to the problems you present.

I have a question. Most social conservatives declare that life begins at conception, thus concluding that all abortions are murder. If you take this stand then you must conclude that America has the blood of 50 million innocent lives on her hands.

What right do we have then to drop bombs on ” ragheads and goat herders ‘ and the like if this is so, and how can we possibly think that God will bless our troops in foreign wars when we can’t possibly be on HIS side?

It is so. And America has no more right to bomb the goat herders of the Middle East than Rome had to invade Pontus, Armenia, and Parthia. Nor does America have any better reason to believe that God will bless their invading troops than the Romans or the National Socialist-era Germans did. Gott war nicht mit der Wehrmacht, their belt buckles notwithstanding, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that a nation whose government increasingly denies and rejects God, a nation that has slaughtered more of its own children behind closed clinic doors than the Moloch-worshipping Canaanites ever threw into the fires, enjoys divine favor.

America was founded on predominantly Christian principles, but she no longer lives by them. She is profligate, gluttonous, murderous, and repressive. She can no longer be reasonably described as either the land of the free or the home of the brave, but rather the land of the fat and the home of the indebted. I concluded some time ago that America was already finished in the historical sense, but it may take some time for most Americans to realize it or for America’s foreign policy to reflect that reality. This is entirely normal, few Britons understood that their empire was in decline until the sun had already set upon it.

It would, of course, be deeply ironic if the neocons were to get their way and America were to eventually learn of her loss of global superpower status not too terribly far from where Marcus Licinius Crassus lost his seven legions and met his death at the hands of the Parthians. Interestingly enough, Crassus, rather like Bush and Obama, failed to abide by the legal forms of making war before launching his ill-fated invasion.

Filling the spiritual void

My, I wonder how and why that could be?

Halloween taps America’s spiritual void

The holiday just keeps getting more popular. Seven in 10 expect to celebrate it in some way this Oct. 31, up from about six in 10 last year, according to a National Retail Federation report. This is the most in the nine years the NRF has been tracking…. Christmas and Easter may be secularized these days, relative to their past, but they remain Christian holidays. People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.

But as much as we’d like it to be, Halloween isn’t secular. It is Pagan. There’s nothing else to call a set of ceremonies in which people utter magical phrases, flirt with the night and evoke the dead.

I always enjoyed Halloween as a kid, but we don’t celebrate it since it is virtually unknown in continental Europe. I don’t see anything wrong with kiddy trick-or-treating and I don’t think that most people are actually celebrating it per se. That being said, as the pagan world continues to encroach upon Christendom, don’t be surprised as the celebrations grow darker and more serious.

Pagan worship primarily concerns propitiation. In other words, they are religions based on pure fear rather than repentance, contract, or submission. The West is at most mildly nervous now, the real pagan revival is unlikely to seriously begin until it reaches a state of genuine fear and desperation. And Halloween celebrations will likely prove to be a good means of tracking its development.

So the Pope really is the Antichrist?

I’m not what you’d call a Left Behinder, but I am eschatonically aware and I have to admit, it would certainly be a little ironic if the more extreme Protestants actually turned out to be correct after all:

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.

“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said…. It called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions.

No offense, Catholics, but it does tend to look pretty, well, evil, for the Pope to be calling for world government and a one world bank. I’m not saying the case is settled yet, but if the Vatican next announces implanted debit cards with Benedict’s smiling face on them along with the excommunication of anyone who uses cash, well, that will pretty much tend to serve as all the confirmation needed. Especially if it throws in a big, splashy peace agreement with Israel.

Mailvox: concerning the questions

MD has a few follow-up questions:

Enjoyed reading your answers to NYT ‘questioning’ If nothing else, I think you exhibit the (admirable) virtue of honesty. As you can probably imagine, a couple of points I need to raise:

1a) firstly, and most importantly, there is absolutely no way that evolution is ‘a minor aspect of biological science’! I wonder which professor of biological sciences you are quoting? Evolution is the central and unifying concept of modern biology & medicine. When you say you are skeptical of evolution, I’m not sure you are clear about on what level you disagree. I too (as a holder of 2 1st class BSc. s. & an MSc. in the biological sciences, you could say I am skeptical about some aspects of some hypotheses of evolutionary theory. However, Do you :

1b) believe that the Judeo-Christian literal creationist hypotheses are equally likely to be objectively true as the theories of modern evolutionary science?

1c) On what level do you NOT believe in evolution? I’ve never met anyone that says that the gene pool of one generation is IDENTICAL to the next. The basic premiss of evolutionary theory is that there is a difference (ie a CHANGE in the gene pool).

1d) From what basis do you say that mainstream scientific theory shouldn’t be taught in public schools?!

2) I agree that America could be described as a ‘Christian Nation’ as the majority of it’s citizen’s consistently describe themselves as such in all respectable polls that I have seen. [of course we shouldn’t forget that the reason that America is a Christian nation is because the Christians got rid of all the pagans! ]

However, I feel it is a bit disingenuous of an educated American to say that it was founded by Christians; the founding fathers were clearly a mixture of Christians and deists and agnostics. In the official words of John Adams : ‘As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion . . . ‘

3) on the issue of teachers leading students in prayers, I myself have no problem with this. I did have an issue with my daughter being forced to pray at school – which has now been resolved. She has decided not to, but sits amongst her peers as a time of reflection during prayer. (actually, she switches between praying and not praying – which is, from my perspective, is how it should be.) For me, the most important thing is for my children to be free to form their own beliefs.

Lastly, I think it’s important for Christians to realise that the reason that I don’t describe myself as a Christian is because the overwhelming majority of THEM have excluded ME (not the other way around), because I happen to believe that Jesus didn’t have magical powers like Harry potter, despite thinking that he was highly likely to have been an admirable and remarkable man in his times.

1a. Evolution is not the central and unifying concept of modern biology and medicine. It is almost completely irrelevant to both. No doctor, and few biologists, need know anything about evolution at all in order to perform their various medical and scientific duties. Even if you subscribe fully to whatever the Cult of Darwin’s latest dogma happens to be, this is akin to saying that the Greek Classics are the central and unifying concept of economics and plumbing. The fact that there may be some intellectual relationship, even a direct causal one, doesn’t necessarily make it the least bit relevant today. Men – religious men, ironically enough – managed to figure out both artificial selection and genetics without any help from evolutionary theory; even if true, it’s almost completely useless. True or not, evolution’s only significance is philosophical, which is why its advocates invariably sound more like cultists than scientists.

1b. There are too many hypotheses on both sides for me to possibly say. I can only say that I believe some form of Creator is far more likely to be objectively true than either abiogenesis or any form of Darwinian evolution. It may be my technological bias, but I see genes as being more akin to the primitives of a programming language than to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle gradually assembled over time by the processes of natural selection, biased mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, or any other epicyclical mechanism the Darwinian cultists can conceive. This implies both the creator of the language as well as a programmer or two.

1c. The level on which I am skeptical of evolution – I do not entirely rule out the possibility – is that any of the various evolutionary mechanisms proposed are sufficient to modify the gene pool to such an extent as to create new and entirely different species regardless of the amount of time involved.

1d. There is zero utility in attempting to teach science to schoolchildren who can’t read, can’t do math, and will never be scientists. They can’t understand it, aren’t interested in it, and have no use for it. It makes no difference if you’re trying to teach them mainstream scientific theory, iambic tetrameter, or running the 100m dash in five seconds. It isn’t ever going to happen. My return question: how can you justify teaching public schoolchildren mainstream scientific theory and not teaching them basic personal economics like how to balance a checkbook or calculate compound interest or basic physical fitness?

2. The “mixture of Christians and deists and agnostics” among the Founding Fathers was on the order of 99% to 1%. It would not merely be disingenuous, it is flat out wrong to state that America was NOT founded by Christians. There were more Founding Fathers with theological degrees than deists and atheists combined; there were more Founding Fathers who personally translated the Bible than there were deists and atheists combined. This is why even intelligent, educated atheists often find themselves inadvertently looking very historically illiterate, as they tend to be maleducated in certain areas. Unfortunately, the reason many are maleducated on this particular issue is due to an all too typical atheist dishonesty with regards to standard word definitions; in this case, whoever constructed the atheist talking point attempted to revise the term “Founding Fathers” to mean a very small number of men, as few as seven “key” Founding Fathers. This is blatantly incorrect, as there have always been two groups of Founding Fathers, the Signers and the Framers. In both cases, nearly all of the men involved were Christians.

In fact, the maleducated atheist opinion doesn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia: “Of the 55 delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, 49 were Protestants, and three were Roman Catholics.” And more detailed information is readily available.

3. Admiration, even belief, is not worship. Even belief in Jesus Christ’s “magical powers” would not be sufficient to make a Christian. Even the demons believe, but they do not worship. No man can exclude a man from the body of Christ except that man himself.

Killing the churches

One tolerant step at a time:

Halifax’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people are without spiritual anchor after their church of 20 years closed on Sunday. Around 50 people gathered at Safe Harbour Metropolitan Community Church on Veith Street to hold one last worship service. The congregation of 27 decided to disband on April 17 after a vote at their annual general meeting.

“We reached a point in our history where we realized we couldn’t go on,” says Jane MacConnell, the vice-moderator of the church. “The biggest (reason) being the financial side of things.”

Let’s see if the usual signs of the church death spiral are there. Female pastor? Check. “Reverend Darlene Young” and “Reverend Jennifer Paty”. Homophilic? Check. “Safe Harbour was the first church in HRM to accept lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people.”

One wonders if this gentleman understands the irony in his words: “Tim Doufar has been a member of Safe Harbour since 1993, yet sees the church’s dissolution as a step forward for gay people… “Now (gays) are accepted in my home church, the Anglican church.” Doufar said it’s only a matter of time before all churches accept gay people.”

It’s never going to happen. Eventually, even the most would-be tolerant Christians are going to notice that once a church starts throwing out the clear teachings of the Bible, it leaps into the death spiral that killed Safe Harbour and is now in the process of relegating the Anglican church to the dustbin of history.

Mailvox: atheist assistance

According to TN, it would appear to be not so much lacking as nonexistent:

My son-in-law and I went to Joplin, MO (about an hour from where I live) and spent a long day in the heart of the disaster area helping several people dig out and sort through what was left of their homes. There was not much to save. The pictures posted on several news sites can’t begin to tell the story.

While driving through the wreckage, we spotted Salvation Army, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran and Mennonite volunteer work teams. Free child care services are being provided by a host of local churches. Local gyms and warehouse facilities are loaded with donated items from regional churches. Of course, local businesses and individuals shared as well.

Not once did I see one atheist-sponsored group or work team. Not one. They were busy that day snarking on the internet. Just pull up any Joplin or Oklahoma tornado story or YouTube video that has a comments section and you will find hundreds of examples of aspie athiests taking pot shots at any reference to prayer, Divine Intervention or miracle that was witnessed.

As one survivor told me, “129 of us died, but thousands more would have if God hadn’t been with us.” I understood what he meant, but sadly, non-believers would only laugh.

I’m going back in a few days. There’s much more to be done.

I’m told that PZ Myers would very much have liked to help the unfortunate people of Joplin, but he was too busy desecrating Cheez-Its and posting snarky comments about Ken Ham’s Creation Museum. To be fair, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science did put out an appeal for money, which was sent to the American Red Cross.

In any event, I congratulate TN, his son-in-law, and those who are dedicating their time and effort to help those who are in need. It should never be forgotten that that is one of the core commandments of Jesus Christ.