AW! Epistles
From Frank L
Abstract
Monday, 13 September 2004
I flicked through your long diatribe against John Polkinghorne’s book “One World” just now. Would you be interested to find the holes in my 50 page presentation The Universe & Me—a Christian Primer? Having looked through Bill Brice’s recent History of Everything I am all too aware that such general accounts are wide open to citicisms concerning selection of material and of emphasis as to what is important. Since I am aiming to present Christianity to those with a science culture I should much appreciate having the worst gaps pointed out to me. If this is on interest I would be happy to email you the file. Not to worry if you are too busy.
I find that Christians find any criticism of their beliefs a “diatribe”, a word they select with pejorative intent. I enjoy criticising Christian beliefs because I can hardly believe myself that anyone today could seriously accept such primitive mysticism. Still, if you want to send me your primer on Christianity, I am ready to take a look at it, though, if you look at other pages on the same index as the Polkinghorne piece, you will find other arguments against the pretence Christians have made at reconciling their fantasy with reality. I have to tell you that recently I have been quite ill, and so I cannot promise an immediate response, but, as I say, am happy to have a look.
Hope you get over your illness. Many thanks for the invitation to send my screed for looking at whenever you feel up to it. Herewith.
I have been as brutal as usual in this reply, it is such a lot of typical Christian drivel. Sorry about that, if you are a student. Perhaps then you have some excuse. If you are a lecturer, you have none. I do think your scientific descriptions are good. Stick to it, and forget the hogwash part. I got bored at the end, it was all so crashingly typically Christian. The first part seems to me to be no more than the bait meant to catch the unwary science undergraduate. But in the latter half you abandon any scientific pretence and turn to the usual apologetic ploys and deceits.
It will always be a matter of faith which view one accepts.
Perhaps it is for a Christian a matter of faith but for a scientist it is a matter of parsimony. That everything happened once is more parsimonious than that a God had to exist and then the God made everything happen. Moreover, God has to exist eternally or some previous events have to be postulated whereby God happened, and that is even less parsimonious, especially since God had to be formed instantly with a complexity far in excess of the universe to be able to plan it all. And, if God can be hypothesised as being eternal, why cannot the universe? The Big Bang can be an illusion akin to the apparent way parallel lines meet at a point in the distance. Quantum time might not be the same as the time we experience.
Stephen Unwin has recently used Bayes’ Theorem of conditional probability to sharpen an initial “a priori” probability of 50% that God exists
Surely you mean Stanley Unwin!
If there is no God then nothing is lost by believing in him. If there is a God, everything is gained. It therefore pays to believe.
Do Christians believe that God is so idiotic that he cannot detect such cynicism? (The question is rhetorical. Don’t bother answering! I know they do.) I had understood that belief had to be sincere. Hedging your bets can be no sign of sincerity.
The biblical presentations merely point to the existence of everything we observe and conclude that a Power and an Intelligence infinitely greater than ours created it all.
Doubtless you are a religious man, but if you are a scientist you should take care about using expressions like “infinitely greater than”. Consider it the other way round. Our power and intelligence is infinitesimally less than His (or Its). What is infinitesimal disappears from view all together. No doubt an almighty being can even see the infinitesimal, and a believer will have no trouble with it, but your more sceptical audience will, I hope.
In your section 2 you start to make assumptions that are not validated in the bible or in science. For any God to be responsible for the laws of Nature, you have to believe there is a God. Despite your Stanley Unwin’s use of Bayes’ theorem, the scientific attitude is not to believe what is not proven by observation and experiment. If there is no observational evidence for something, then the proper thing for a scientist to do is to deny it. Not to do so is to believe everything. There is no reason to believe that any God is necessary to formulate the laws of science. Moreover, since God is almighty, the huge hierarchy of levels of emergence, seems an enormous waste of divine effort. It ought not to be necessary for an almighty God, but Christians will tell us it is a divine mystery, and that is how Christians must accept it. Much of the rest of 2 is an exposition of scientific discovery utterly independent of anything that priests, prophets or any Christian has told us out of their Christian convictions. In section 2:5, your own argument evaporates into a plea, “Surely the writers did not mean us to take the six days of creation plus one day of rest literally”. Why should I, or anyone, agree with your plea? Did God, or the Holy Ghost, write or inspire this work or not? If I am invited to doubt this, firmly asserted fact at the very beginning of the Holy Word, then why should I believe any of it. Lawyers commonly discredit a witness by showing some fault or contradiction in their testimony. The point is that the jury should then doubt anything that witness has said in testimony. Christians are not natural skeptics. They are not skeptical enough to be lawyers, and certainly not scientists, for whom skepticism is the basis of their method of discovery. To explain that the seven was some sort of magic number is irrelevant to the truth of the statement, and indeed the explanation is inadequate even for what you attempt. Why not seven years or seven weeks of years or seventy weeks of years, if magic numbers have to be used? At least the timescale gets more convincing. Week is the true reason, and days were meant. God did his work in six days and ended it resting on the seventh. It is plainly the myth that justifies the length of the week and the sabbath. That being the case, it has nothing really to do with creation.
Stories have to be used to make these ideas understandable. We are usually not expected to accept as literally true.
How do you know this? It is apologetics, and apologetics are mainly lies. These stories were meant to be understood as the truth. They were the scientific explanations of the time, but now are known to be inadequate, and any scientist worthy of the name ought to reject them, not to try to defend them on spurious grounds. Christians have to do it, and that is why they cannot be good scientists.
You even fail to understand Jesus. The story of the Prodigal Son, is scarcely a parable. It meant what it said. Jesus wanted all Jews to repent and be eligible for God’s kingdom, which he thought was at hand. His point is precisely that a man who repents the second before the kingdom began is just as saved as a man who had been pious all his life. Jesus was building a revolutionary movement against the Romans, and it did not matter to him whether a man had always been a Nazarene, or had just become one. All were equal in the revolutionary struggle and as long as they did their duty, they would all have the same reward. They would enter God’s kingdom. Needless to say, Jesus was wrong about all this, God’s kingdom never came, and the Romans won the bloody war when it started. Christians, of course, cannot bring themselves to accept the truth, and have always pretended anything but it.
The only point you seem to be making in this section, other than reviewing cosmological and physical discoveries, is that everything is random but for the laws of physics. It is like saying everything is black and white except for colour, or everything is static except for motion, and so on. You can do just as you like except for the laws of society! The very point of the laws of physics is that they declare things not to be random. You are trying to make use of the concept of “emergence” to bring in God where, as usual, there is no need of Him. If the concept has to be used, it is independent of any supposed God. The emergence of whatever is conditioned by the laws of Nature alone. No intelligent entity is needed to be behind them, and if there has to be a deity for some people who cannot live without one, then it is Nature.
If scientist X thinks something and scientist Y thinks another thing, then no scientist would imagine that these different views were a part of science. The views would have to be tested and one of them might pass while the other did not, or both might fail. Scientific controversy such as this is part of the scientific method. It is how science progresses. Christians do not get it, or they deliberately offer it to their gullible sheep as evidence of the inconsistency of science. If Jones and Dawkins think chance has more a part to play than Conway Morris or Morowitz, then let both supply the evidence as fully as they can and we shall make up our minds whether one or the other pair are right. You apparently have the evidence already because you tell us that Jones and Dawkins have overstated their case. You had better write it up. You might get an accolade among the discoverers of evolutionary theory. That God knows, however, will not suffice. In fact, it seems to me that you are the one going overboard about chance, because it suits you. The whole point about evolution is that it is not pure chance, indeed, as you seemed to explain earlier, chance has little to do with it except to produce different genetic variations. These variations are selected by the environment that the species lives in. There is nothing chancy about it. If they are suitable to survive, then they do, but if the conditions are against them then they do not. Frankly, I cannot believe that either Dawkins or Jones would think anything other than this.
It is nice that you should display a picture showing Egyptian religious dualism. The Christians consistently make out that their religion is monotheistic when it plainly is not. God, called by modern Christians in the USA, Jarvey, has an equally powerful and unbeatable enemy called Satan. The word Set can be recognized in the word Satan. The modern believer in Jarvey is like Pharaoh. He is caught between the two principles. Why Christians should want to deny what is evident in their own beliefs is inexplicable, but it demonstrates that neither Christians nor Christianity are consistent. Moreover, you show quite effectively that Christianity has evolved from a religous idea at least 3000 years old, and could not therefore have been revealed a mere 2000 years ago. I apologise for being analytical about these matters, I realise that Christians cannot be. Their beliefs are carved in tablets of stone and cannot be reconsidered. That is, though, not scientific.
Nor is it scientific to talk about life moving to higher leves. Evolution leads wherever necessary. Often it leads to lower levels, perhaps more often, but so long as there are higher levels, then life can evolve there.
We are the most complex and intelligent life form to have emerged on Earth. For the Christian this is no problem—it is simply the plan of God being worked out. For the atheist this remains a puzzle with no answer beyond naively saying that this direction is just an illusion.
Your pretence at being scientific finally dissolves utterly, though no doubt your gullible audience will be worshipping you as a teacher and a prophet. The point is that the god of chaos in scientific understanding is entropy. Entropy tries to make things chaotic, more random, and more complex and structured things need to be built by opposing entropy with energy. More complex structures need more energy, and are therefore less likely, and no energy is needed to decay—energy is released. This is the very reason that it is absurd to imagine that an entity more complex than the whole of the universe somehow spontaneously arose before, under the name God, it created everything. God is an extremely unlikely being.
Section 3:1 is a mishmash and a hogwash. It has to be because you need a confusion so that you can argue that faith is “an essential part of being human”. It really is crude trickery, and if you are not aware of it, then you should be, though Christians often do not know when they are lying, which is what most of it amounts to. In the first part of your confusion, you ask questions in a sort of rhetorical way, but make no attempt to offer answers, as if it is too hard, being a hard question. In fact, most of your hard questions are answered by what you have just tried to explain but now have conveniently forgotten. The difference between any machine, prgrammed or not and an animal or human is that the latter have evolved over long periods of time, and their responses have adapted with them. Conscious animals, like us, have evolved our consciousness. It is not something that can be constructed, even by God. Consciousness has obviously grown, and we have been able to see it growing in part through history. All of us who experience a certain environment have similar experiences, and our consciousness can be expected to be similar. You have just spent a lot of effort persuading us of the importance of convergence, and have forgotten it. You have extremely selective memory, you apologists. Why not try to be honest? And again, why should an almighty God, intent on making slaves to worship Him, bother going through the long and apparently pointless process of waiting for consciousness to grow when He could just make it?
Why do I have to believe that my awareness is real? It is real to me because it is what I experience. What else could be real to me? We cannot know that people love us, you say. I must have faith that they do, except, of course, that I know Christians generally do not love me. They are fond of saying they love everyone, even their enemies, but then, of course, they would, wouldn’t they? They think their God demands it of them, so they have to say it, though they have been in the forefront of retribution seekers in history. Like the crude example you gave at the beginning, that of Pascal’s wager, they think that God cannot tell what they are really doing or thinking, even though He is omniscient. Christians never underestimate the idiocy of their God. He is their own reflexion! In fact, I can have confidence, if not scientific proof, that others love like I do, because we have all evolved the same way to get where we are as the human species. For the same reason, I know that not one of us can love our enemies. It is a habit that would have led any of us who had it rapidly to die out, leaving us without that particular disadvantageous adaptation. What is more sensible is for us to respect each other, even enemies. That is possible, love is not.
To accept that our consciousness and awareness of each other, as well as that of God, is real involves faith.
Even supposing that you are right about our consciousness and awareness of each other needing faith, it is pure trickery to bring God into it. We are perfectly aware of the existence of each other but we have no equivalent awareness of the existence of God. We might doubt whether these other humans think like us, but we know from our senses they are there. Our senses tell us that God is not there.
Immanuel Kant philosophised that even science must begin with the belief in the reality of what we are studying.
You do the same here. We certainly experience in the world we call real, via our senses, something that we chose to study, whatever it is. Whether it is real or not perhaps has to be assumed, as a working assumption, before we can conclude what reality is. The very fact that we can get consistent results from set procedures suggests that our assumption of reality is confirmed. Something unreal would be fantastic and would therefore have the properties of fantasy. The property of reality is the one that matches our experience. It is quite different from fantasy. Experience of the supernatural is a fantasy, and it is not consistent or repeatable. Consistency, as you say, implies order, and order is no characteristic of fantasy
The systematic emergence of living things would have been impossible under conditions of no order or consistency at all. Belief in this consistency is essential to awareness. Without this faith there is not only nothing to attempt to describe in science, there is no possibility of experience which makes sense. We owe our very humanity to the consistency of the Universe.
More mishmashing! Your first sentence tells us that we could not be here unless the real world was orderly, and in the last sentence you confirm that the universe must indeed be consistent for our existence. That seems an excellent logical reason for us to dispense with anything as crude as faith. Awareness has nothing at all to do with what we believe about the orderliness of the world. It simply would be impossible, if nothing was repeatable, if everything was purely white noise. So, you are quite artificially, because of your absurd need to justify the blind unquestioning faith in impossible things that Christianity demands, finding silly parallels in science. It is hogwash again.
You seem to need to read more about the work on chimpanzees.
Normal human consciousness is far more sophisticated than the consciousness of the animal world we emerged from. And we want to know why!
Let me suggest again that you seem incapable—not because you are thick, no doubt, but because your stupid reliance on an absurd belief makes you so—of applying your own teachings on evolution from earlier in the essay. Let us suppose that a chimpanzee or a dog had become as conscious as a human, but first. Do you imagine that human beings would then have evolved as another conscious creature? Consciousness is an evolutionary advantage that would allow the already conscious chimpnzees or dogs to realize the danger of another conscious being joining it in the world. In the early days of humanity, our ancestors had several rival hominids, all of which are now extinct. Consciousness is only possible in any one species at a time.
You conclude this section by gloating that God has put everything in place for us. I am not going to argue the case here, but my contention is that this disgusting belief is the cause of much of our present malaise. God tells us we are free to do as we like! Nature tells us that there are many things we cannot do without dire consquences. I prefer to listen to Nature. Our proper relationship with Nature is not parasitic, but symbiotic. The failure of Christians to realize this is one of the causes of their utterly uncomprehending wickedness throughout history.
Tell me, are Spinoza and Morowitz more scientific in their outlook than you are, since you prefer to believe that “God is revealed in His creation”, rather than that Nature is God? Who cares what theologians say about it, or even philosophers, many of whom are merely toying with speculations without finding any reason why they should be relevant to the real world. They are, in short, theologians by a more respectable name. The scientific view is that God is irrelevant. Nature is sufficient. It is parsimony. Ockham’s Razor. If you profess to be a scientist, why will this not do for you? You say there is no logical reason why God should not be simultaneously transcendent and immanent. So you say. Is there a logical reason for God? What does transcendent mean? What does immanent mean? What does universe mean? To get compatibility between these things requires you to ignore completely the meaning of words. If words have no meaning then you are creating disorder, but you have extolled the importance of order in the world. Christians do not need to be consistent, but scientists ought to be. It is a reason why you are pissing in the wind, to be colloquial, in trying to make them compatible. There is absolutely no need to torture language and meaning if you just abandon the childish beliefs that the clergy oblige us to believe before we can think properly. Incidentally, false analogies might seem pleasant to a Christian as a sort of parable, but they prove nothing, despite what bishop Butler might have thought.
Look again at your apologetics in the next section. You have to find ways that God can intervene without breaking His own laws. Why not just abandon the idea of God then the phony ways of finding Him to intervene are unnecessary? That is what the scientist would do, but perhaps you are an ecstatic dancer.
God said Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of…
You say this implies God is “in some way within us and working through us”. Of course, I am merely a scientist, not a Christian theologian, or a deliberate torturer of words, but I cannot get what you say these words imply. To me, ignorant as I am, they say God made man as something like Himself. If they were like God then they were not the same as God, and there is no sense at all that God meant to dwell within these likenesses, here at any rate. I have said repeatedly that you lot just do not know when you are lying, and the reason is that you think God tells you what to say. Tony Blair is the prime example. He just cannot accept that he is an inveterate and bare-faced liar. What conviction Christians say is automatically true because God makes it so. Not scientific, but makes you feel god-like!
You end this paragraph by inventing more crazy ways that God devises to achieve His aims, God, the Almighty! How you cannot see that all of this is a pipe cleaner and sealing wax construct of pathetic minds unable to rid themselves of a superstition, defeats me, especially if you claim to be a scientist. By now you have abandoned all pretence, and use nonsense words like Holy Spirit and Creator, with no jot of scientific evidence that they mean anything at all in the real world.
If God is out of time, then how does he do anything at all. Time is needed otherwise nothing can happen. The idea of heaven is perfection, implying no motion, and therefore no time. Heaven is static. A God outside of time is static. Nothing in Him can change because change implies imperfection, but God, like heaven is perfect. He cannot even think, because thought requires motion of something. He needs to think to operate His mouth, the words uttered from which implement Creation. You cannot even think, let alone pretend you are a scientist. No doubt the Christian answer to all these is that for God all things are possible no matter how impossible they are. But it only satisfies feeble minds.
Prayer comes next briefly in your list of explanations. Yet God is omniscient, so why is prayer needed at all? God must know before you even think about praying what intervention you will ask for. If it is a prayer to prevent suffering, then why did God even allow the suffering to happen, since He already knew people would soon be praying for His intervention? God has His reasons! Well, perhaps so, but it still makes prayer a waste of time, because the fact that something has happened requiring prayer shows that God had His reason for doing it, and so prayer is futile.
You next turn to the writings of David Rohl, a man with few pretensions of being scientific, and a story full of perhapses and maybes ought not to be considered of any more value than the fiction which it is. Eden can be identified precisely. It is Bit Adini or Beth Eden, an old country by the Euphrates in what is now Syria and Turkey, a few hundred miles from where Rohl puts it. Moreover, the idea that people retain accurate folk memories of events 8000 years before is an unlikely assumption, to say the least, but it suits biblicists. Why it should be necessary when God is directing the production of the book, is another Christian mystery. It arises because they have no real faith that people will believe the God-given version but will accept it if it sounds pseudo-scientific.
Section 5:1 is more Christian hogwash with little pretence at being scientific. You say what you like, what suits you, with no reference to the historic circumstances because your assume throughout that your God is directing the whole thing for the good of mankind, though he could have done it all much more simply by appearing in person occasionally and telling them. Your ultimate citation of Woolley’s report on the flood he found is purely dishonest. His initial reaction was that it was the Flood, but, as you say, it proved to be local. Other places had similar “floods” but also local. They were then shown to have been large ponds or lakes created and preserved for fishing. You are a typical Christian phony! What happened to the science? Again you pick what suits you, even though subsequent findings have revised the previous conclusions. We know the sheep will believe you, after all, they believe the flood was as deep as mount Ararat! That is a good reason why the flood, at least as it appears in the bible, is not history, though you seem to think it is.
You are right that the bible was written for a purpose in section 5:2, but it was to give a fear of God not a love of Him. Try reading all the Jewish scriptures instead of the Christian gospels, and the selections from the Jewish scriptures Christians like. Where is the justice and mercy you speak of in the following few examples? The loving God turned down the sacrifice of Isaac but accepted the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter, He murdered 185,000 innocent Assyrian soldiers merely doing their duty, and unnecessarily, since a peace was negotiated based on tribute, He urged the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites and even their animals, but allowed the young girls to be used by the men as they wished! (What could be more disgusting in a Holy book?) It goes on. Have you read all this, and does it show a God of love or a God of fear? The purpose of the Jewish scriptures was to keep the Jews obedient to the law, presented as God’s law, but when did God ever make laws in this world? The law was the law of the land, imposed by a king, the representative of God on earth. There is no unequivocal evidence for the Exodus, or the Conquest, and Moses is mythical, and is hardly mentioned in most of the rest of the Jewish scriptures. David is similarly absent in history, all bar the Tel Dan stele, which is of doubtful provenance and interpretation. Solomon is unknown outside the bible. These might be didactic myths, but Christians and Jews alike pretend they are real history and proof that God had a long term plan, an absurd idea for an almighty God. If you think that David wrote the psalms, then you are a little cookie, don’t you think?
You now say that the Jewish scriptures are really a collection of writings from all over the place. If some came from Assyria and some from Egypt and others from ancient Akkad, then they were written with other Gods in mind, not the supposed jealously monotheistic Christian God who would rather see his own followers eaten by lions or burnt as human torches rather than accept that other gods had any validity, and then He would oversee His own cardinals and bishops setting up stakes to tie up people the Church considered heretics or witches—seemingly believers in non-Christian gods—so that they could be burnt to a crisp while unable to escape. This is a God of love? Do you know what love means? Does any Christian? Do any of you really know what you are talking about, or will anything suffice?
You say the laws a human society follows must be basically the same anywhere, yet the laws, all well known now, of many ANE societies, older even than the scriptural writings were a good deal more liberal than the laws of the bible. Why did the Judaeo-Christian God have to pick the most cruel and reactionary of the legal systems available to Him? Now, laws do not have to be the same, and the biblical laws are often wicked. “Do not kill” is apparently a commandment, but the laws in the bible show it should really read, “Do not kill” unless X, Y, Z,… where about a dozen exceptions are cited. What sort of God did you say this was? Christians are fools or frauds, most are fools but some are frauds. Which of them are you?
Now you talk of ancient people leading chaotic lives of violence, with no qualification of place or period. Sometimes it was true, but for much of the intervening time, it was false. Some military races like the Assyrians during the times described in the bible, and later the Greeks exhausted themselves through constant warfare, but many people were settled and peaceful. You deliberately want to create a false picture to suit the image you are trying to create of the loving God. It is not scientific. It is fraudulent. It is likely that the poor displaced from the land at the beginning of our industrial revolution and forced into multiply occupied rat-infested cellars suffered more than most farmers in the ANE, in almost any period. The aim of the scriptural authors was to strike fear into the Jews, for whom the laws were written. That is the reason that God is depicted as vengeful, and capable of unleashing every imaginable horror on to those who do not obey. You tell us that Jesus disavowed any one-to-one cause between disobedience (sin) and retribution, but he was adamant that the sinner would be punished unless he repented. Disobedience will therefore be punished, and only repentence could stop it. What are you trying to say? The citation does not back up your argument.
Next you list the things we could have spent our money on if we had not fought each other, advantageous things. It is not obeying God that we have missed out on these things, you seem to be saying. Why then is God so often advocating killing and conquest in His original scriptures? Much of the killing and conquest that has gone on in the world has been caused by people with different religious convictions and different conceptions of God, killing and conquering each other. That is what God told His Chosen People to do, and Christians ever since, taking themselves to be the new Israel, God’s new Chosen People, have consistently done. You are now well into a simplistic, uncritical spouting of your own unsavoury beliefs. It has nothing perceptibly to do with science, or indeed any form of scholarship, whether historical or biblical. Are you a dunce?
But if you obey faithfully the voice of Yahweh your God, by keeping and observing all his commandments which I am laying down for you today, Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world and all these blessings will befall and overtake you, for having obeyed the voice of Yahweh your God. (Dt 28:1-2)
This is as clear evidence you will get that the Jewish scriptures were written to ensure obedience to the law. Anyone rational, like a scientist, must know that no God has ever written down any law in the whole of history. Laws are human social constructs meant to keep social order. The king making these commandments in the name of God was the king of kings, the shah of Persia. Righteousness or uprightness in the biblical context means nothing more than obedience to God’s law, the law imposed 2500 years ago—now an utterly outdated law of the Medes and the Persians. If the bible taught survival and prosperity, then it failed miserably. Is God a dunce? The Jews failed, and for 1500 years Christendom was mainly horrific for all in it except for a small proportion of Christian priests and princes. Now we are getting more quotations from this ancient and discredited book, yet you have no inclination to be critical about it. Christians have to be credulous. No scientist should be.
Now you tell us, having spent dreary paragraphs by the dozen to say how wonderful God’s revelation of His purpose in history was, that the Jewish scriptures are no longer valid, because Jesus said so.
Gradually, it was realised that there has to be a better way forward.
Who had to realise it, God or the politically-minded human beings who wrote all this? You give straightforward evidence that the human notion of God was changing, yet God supposedly is immutable. What are you saying? Is it necessary to have to go through all this tortuous justification when it is all simply answered by human social and psychological evolution. God is made in man’s image, not the opposite. You prove it but refuse to accept your own evidence.
He refused to accept the role of military leader against the Romans.
Neither the Romans, as explained in all the gospels, nor specifically the gospel of Luke which gives the charges brought against him, accepts this manifest Christian distortion. Christians wanted to present their man as a pacifist for obvious reasons. They suppressed the truth about Jesus as a military man, but if you tried as hard as you could to read the gospel stories objectively, you will see that there is no other feasible answer to the events. Naturally, you will not.
Instead, you tell us that the churches—the Christian churches—are not Christian, and apparently never have been. It seems to mean that the true Christians are not to be found in anything as corrupt and power-crazed as the churches where we imagine they are. Naturally, Christians all think they can see the light clearly, but everyone else, or most others anyway, even other Christians, are surrounded by thick fog, or have their heads in buckets. I agree entirely, but would make no exceptions.
In section 5:3, we read of the 1000 years in Europe needed for the levels of Roman Pagan civilization to be equalled. No mention that this period, called the Dark Ages, matches the time when the Christian Church in Europe was at its most dominant. The great preserver of valuable lessons was determined to preserve nothing of Pagan society, and plunged us into a primeval darkness of misery, plague and starvation. So much for the good and loving God. People had no choice but to believe or suffer a cruel death, yet God punished the poor believers even more. Is your God a sadist or just an indifferent torturer? Is there in all this history of religion perhaps the slightest indication that Christian religion is a load of lying twaddle?
Instead of God giving the lead, it was only when men felt free to experiment without the Church burning them to a cinder that discoveries began to be made. It has led ultimately to the modern world, but God has had nothing to do with it, except that many of His clergy were so underemployed and well paid a few hundred years ago that they it was who often had the leisure to experiment and make discoveries. Social changes are, apparently, very painful and take generations. Why then does God not make them easier? He never has and He never will because He only exists in the heads of people like you.
God has revealed his truth to us, independently of science. The aim of this booklet has been to indicate that both ways of understanding the universe and our part in it are essentially the same. Reality is the same no matter how one conceives it. Our problem is that the language and kit of concepts used by science and religion are so different.
If God has revealed His truth to us then he is a liar because, despite your parroted contention that Christianity and science tell the same tale, you demonstrate yourself that the tales are quite different, and can only be made to seem at all alike by generalizing ad nauseum. My reply so far has shown that much of what you say as a Christian is simply untrue when seen in terms of the discoveries of science. Reality is perceived by our senses, and must essentially be the same to all functioning humans because of our common evolution. Yet, Christians fill their drivel with talk of entities that simply do not exist in the real world—soul, spirit, the Holy Ghost, God. Nor is it merely a question of language. Christians just do not try to match up their religious fancies against the reality of the world. That is what science has to do to be valid, and it is the reason why no scientist can simultaneously be a Christian. What is the point of continuing to say that combustion is the release of phlogiston when we know there is no such substance and we have a better explanation in oxidation. Only an idiot would stick to the theory of phlogiston, yet that is what you, and all Jews and Christian do in pretending that ancient rationalizations of social and natural law remain true. You show no common ground to speak of in this account. You begin by expounding science, reasonably well, then you expound the bible with typical Christian deceit. If there is any overlap it is only that both talk of law and history in some sense or another. The bible is partly an ancient exposition of natural causes but all of it directed at filling the hearer (it was originally meant to be read out) with fear and guilt at the prospect of disobedience.
Indeed we can never know everything, yet you imply that everything is knowable in religion but not in science. “Science is always going to be limited”, you say. Religion therefore is not, because religion, presumably, is revealed, and God knows everything even if science cannot. This is plain delusion. Nothing shows that religion has even got a balance of usefulness in human history. I would say it has a terrible and unrecognized deficit in its account—unrecognized by Christians who prefer to act like ostriches. Everything useful we have discovered about the material world we have discovered by science, and the discoveries continue. Religion has told us everything we need to know about the immaterial world.
What has “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” got to do with sustainable living. Your irrational leaps of faith are not in the least scientific. Perhaps to the religious person, words proceeding from the mouth of God is a code for sustainable agriculture, or whatever, but I would expect to have some argument meant to persuade me. You are so besotted you take it for granted that we all have your own delusions. Not that I disagree with the essence of what you are saying about sustainable living. It is simply that it does not follow from your proof text except in your own head.
We need to know why we are here and what life is for. Such questions science is unable to answer.
Why do we need to know these things? It is sufficient for us to unite to save the world just to know that by not so doing we seal our own fate. To ask what life is for is to presume that it is for something. No scientist could miss that simple fact. You beg the question by asking it thus. Science has an answer, though it is not the answer that Christians want. As you say, the purpose of life is procreation of the next generation. You ask then, “Is that really all there is to human life?” All there is? This unimportant “all there is” is the very thing that you Christians consider so important. It is our life after death, the only life after death we have besides our own legacy of works and deeds. This happens to be through our children, and not by some fantastic conception that we live as the undead. It is an excellent reason to motivate us, unless we are so inhuman as to be unconcerned about the fate of our own offspring. By supposing there is some purpose beyond life itself, you also beg the question of the existence of God. Even simple people can see these flaws in the very questions Christians ask, but Christians are too simple to notice.
In your next paragraph you return to the Christian calumny that evolution is all a matter of chance, though you have argued otherwise yourself. You save yourself by attributing it to Dawkins but the intent of influencing your gullible sheep is plain. “Objection overruled!” I have already said that Dawkins does not attribute evolution to chance, so frankly, Frank, you are lying. That is a common Christian trait, not so common in scientists, whose conceptual structures could not stand for long if built on lies. The conceptual structure of Christianity depends on them, as you repeatedly prove. You also seem to think that something that cannot be proved neverthless can remain a part of human knowledge. What then is the criterion of its acceptance into the knowledge canon?
The Nazi medical researchers carried out appalling experiments on people to gain scientific data on the survival limits of human beings.
How many of them were Christians? Most Germans were either Catholics or Protestant Christians, the former mainly in the south and the latter mainly the north. Christians like to talk about Nazis as if they were the religion of the Devil, but many Nazis were devout Christians. Nazis and Christians historically have in common that they have been inordinately fond of killing those they disapprove of. Who killed the most is a moot point, but considering that many of the Nazi killers must have been practising Christians of one type or another, the Christians must retain the lead.
Science can become an idol. And the idol enslaves us.
You are fond of these little unproven sound bites. Idols are images of wood or stone and can enslave no one, any more than the Christian God can. Human beings enslave other human beings. No god, good, bad or indifferent, ever enslaved even an ant. Nor can science enslave ants. Science is a body of knowledge and the method used to get it, as you ought to know if you are a scientist, or even intelligent, as you ought to be with your academic address. Scientists can enslave others no doubt, but none ever have so far as I am aware. Christians have enslaved, and worse, murdered myriads of people, and continues to enlave those it converts. Gladly, in the last few years many have broken free of Christianity’s evil spell. It was the Christians, supposedly monotheists, who declared the Pagan idols to be devils, thus imbuing them with a life they never formerly had. Pagans understood their idols just as intelligent Catholics understand their own images of saints, and a Buddhist might understand a candle flame. The were foci for prayer or meditation. It is far too advanced a concept for Christians to concede, whether Protestant or Catholic, so they keep up the pretence that people worshipped idols.
You give a list of human psychological and economic problems, immediately blaming them on to science and declaring Jesus and the Creator to be the answer, yet this pair of worthy gods have had 2000 years to make the world a better place, or at least to set about putting the right ideas into people’s heads, yet they have not even started the job it seems. If I bought a lawn mower that did not work, I would want my money back. The same goes for second hand cars. Christians expect you to continue to buy even though your experience has been utterly negative. That is why it is a religion of second hand car dealers. You can never get your money back, and cannot even complain when you are tricked. You are no longer alive. Science is not the trouble with the world. Unlike Christianity, science has a huge positive balance of good. Even so, the owners of scientific discoveries are keener to use them for self-aggrandisment at other people’s expense. These are the wealthy corporate bosses and the millionaires whose money curiously often is donated to Christian causes, especially ones like yours, that of finding some spurious commonality between Christianity and science. It ought to be a warning, and one that any genuine believer in the divinity of the impoverished Galilean ought to understand, but few indeed do.
So we come to section 6, purporting to look at the limitations of science. Science cannot answer questions leading with “why”, only those that lead with “how”. It is an assertion that needs no refutation, it is so obviously absurd, and indeed, in your observations on convergence, you answer some possible “why” questions! It is the typical Christian lie you expect none of your gullible readers to question, but I thought you hoped you were writing for a wider audience.
Scientists will often simply tell you that these kinds of questions are for the religious philosophers to answer.
Really? And who are these “scientists”? If you find any, my guess is that they said it to get an idiotic Christian questioner out of their hair. And what is a religious philosopher? Do you mean a theologian? Philosophy is only of any value when it subjects itself to the same validation as science. Its conclusions must match reality or they are meaningless. How does religious philosophy or theology do this?
The scientists must restrict themselves to what can be measured.
Pure hogwash. You are not a scientist. Then again, you cannot read English. The poem by Dean Koonz is not about “Why are we here?” or “What is the point of it all?” It says clearly what it is about in the final two questions. On this imperfect world, are we alone in the universe, even without a God? Are you a Christian liar or just inept? Then you tell us, “these questions demand answers and science cannot provide them”. This is such common hogwash that only the dimmest or most dishonest Christians can keep asking it. The evident truth is that, if the assertion is correct that science cannot provide these answers, then no other discopline can, least of all religion which makes the claim it can.
So what is the Christian answer? It appears in the next section, bragging that nothing could be more simple, and nor could it to Christians—God did it! There you have it. But wait! Christians demand proof of scientific assertions. What is the proof that God did it? You offer none unless it is meant to be that we can appreciate God, and presumably therefore know it automatically. Certainly, Christians take it as automatic, but automatic answers are not within the compass of the scientist. They are given by pre-programmed robots and zombies. It seems there is something frightening about evolutionary convergence. Apparently, it means we are “intended”. The notion of convergence which sometimes happens and often does not, has suddenly become a dogma that proves intent by God. More, facile and boringly stupid Christian dishonesty.
If we were intended, then we relate in some way to the Intender.
Maybe so, but your “if” is not a condition to you. It is an assertion. More idiotic trickery. You will appreciate that hearing all this transparent deceit from people who think or pretend they are spouting God’s truth does get boring. It is hard to believe that university people are so uncritical and actually unintelligent. God made humanity out of clay, like a potter making clay pots, that is sure enough, according to the bible, and then he breathed life into them. It is a procedure that differs utterly from the evolution of humanity from a previous similar species, despite your ability to see what is plainly not there. Then again, the breath God breathed into the clay figurines, something that does not happen in Nature, is called in the Latin “spiritus”. Clay pots in the bible are made to live by having God breathing into them. “Spiritus”, literally “breath”, therefore means life in this context. The supposed spirit that we all contain is God’s breath in a biblical myth but not in the real world, where it is simply the first breath a child takes of the normal atmosphere that surrounds us. Even so, this spirit has a life of its own, so that when we die, it escapes to heaven where, if it was a good spirit, it enjoys a further life after death. Now, just where does the biblical myth end and the non-biblical reality begin? Christians cannot seem to distinguish them, surely a sign of insanity.
You return to natural selection being based on mutation. Such wilful misunderstanding is purely deceit. Your friends might admire you, but anyone a bit more intelligent will see you as a crook. You say you have tried to show it is an error, so the scientific community must offer you thanks for correcting its misapprehension. Yours is yet another ridiculous Christian ploy. You take some early scientific belief, or a disputed one not yet established as part of the corpus of scientific belief, offer the corrected or alternative version, and claim that science is thereby proved to be faulty. Pure dishonesty! There is an underlying direction to a river. Is it to be supposed to be evidence of God?
Lo! Society evolves too! Could it be then that the religious beliefs of people in those evolving societies might evolve too? Is it more likely that beliefs evolve than that an almighty God does, especially as dogma has it that He does not!
It is not easy to discern the underlying law of God in society. It requires trust in the goodness of God.
It does if you are so pigheaded as to ignore the evidence. That is what you do, and you are inviting the rest of us to do too. The whole of world history, but above all—since it is the institution founded by God Himself—the blood and soot-stained history of Christianity proves to the satisfaction af anyone who is not pre-programmed that there is no God or no particularly good one. What is the psychological imperative that makes you and others of your kind believe despite the massive evidence that your beliefs at best always remain unfulfilled, and at worst mutate into pure evil?
Knowledge of God’s law in the biblical understanding of the word, means to have a relationship with him.
I will take your word for it, but Christians have deliberately ignored whole tracts of God’s law, except the bits that suit them. You have cited several passages from Deuteronomy, but is it all true, or not? How do you know which bits are not true, according to the interpretation of God the Son, and which bits are true, according to God the Father. Presumably it is all true according to God the Father, but when He incarnated, He decided some bits were too hard. What are they? Does the same apply to God the Son. When he says it is impossible to get to heaven if you are rich, is that still true, because, if so, why are you wasting your time on these scientific polemics when the real enemies are Bush, Cheney, Murdoch, and so on? Did the law that was true for God the Father apply to God the Son? If so he was justly killed as a false prophet as Deuteronomy prescribes. Go on! Give us more squirming and excuses. You are all masters of it.
Why too should a God give us a brain with immense analytical capability then tell us it is merely to tempt us into sin, and it must not be used? Having a brain is incompatible with suspending its use permanently to have an unquestioning faith based on zero evidence.
Trying to define, exactly, in a set of laws and regulations, what our Maker requires of us is worse than useless—it ends in alienating people with impossible demands.
Now you are wiser than God! How Christianity has advanced. Why did not some sensible angel, or even the Word, since it or he was with God from the Creation, not tell God He was wasting His time laying down a permanent set of laws for His Chosen People? It is something that an omniscient God ought to have foreseen Himself, but God turns out often not to be omniscient at all when it suits the Christian or Jew interpreting a passage. God is not omniscient in the Garden of Eden. Was He ever omniscient really?
Moses himself was frustrated and wished that God’s Spirit would enter everyone in the way he had experienced it.
What is the Christian explanation for why it did not? It would have been as easy for an almighty to do this as to send a single man, Moses, with the message. Single prophets can always be charlatans, especially when people are taught to be utterly gullible. It remains the case today, all too disastrously.
Life changes faster than any rules of behaviour aimed at controlling it.
No alarm bells ringing about the wisdom of continuing to believe a book of ancient propaganda, well past its sell-by date? Not a chance. Christians are emotionally bound to their silly belief. They are the slaves.
Science is throwing up endless novel problems and the only way to deal with this is to have a society which understands the basic principles of what makes a viable community possible.
Here too, you cannot recognize that your own prescriptions drawn from scientific analogies warn us to remain flexible, and not to fossilize our laws or our beliefs! You just do not get it!
The Roman empire was not at its height at the time of Jesus, but 100 years later. A minor point, perhaps, but one showing your habit of saying what suits you whether it is true or not.
Built into society, right at the very beginning, at a very fundamental level, was the seed which would one day emerge, when humankind was ready for it, as the Creator’s solution to a sustainable society—his provision of a way forward.
This is Zoroastrianism. Did you know? Why aren’t you a Zoroastrian?
Those who came into contact with his resurrected body were forced to conclude that in some sense, God was directly at work. Nothing like it had happened before.
Lies! What is so special about the resurrection of Jesus? Jesus resurrected Lazarus in an even more spectacular way. Are you sure Lazarus is not the Messiah, and Christians have had it wrong all along. The bible has eight resurrections besides Jesus’s. So, what do the others mean, three happening hundreds of years before Jesus was even thought of. Whether these are taken to be of any consequence or not, they show that the resurrection of Jesus is no proof event of divinity. Go on! Tell us the others were not resurrections but just resuscitations! But Jesus’s was definitely not a resuscitation. That was definitely a resurrection. Go on! Tell us!
If we can grasp Jesus’ new spiritual level of living then we solve our problems of living together and our problem of alienation from the universe of which we are a part.
Why should a Christian bother? Faith is sufficient to get them the after-life they seek, and we are led to believe it is better than any life on earth. Why indeed do all Christians not commit suicide to achieve their ambition. I am not aware, off hand, of any biblical command against it.
Once we love God we find it possible to love our neighbour as ourselves.
The neighbours Jesus meant were his fellow Jews. Jews had no obligation to love their oppressors, the Romans.
How does it work? There are many ways to explain it, but it will likely forever remain a mystery.
The usual cop out. The fact you omit is that, whereas you say Christianity is the fastest growing religion, there is no evidence, quite the opposite, that it is doing any good, that it works at all. Historically, it has done immense harm. Only obsessive people will stick to an idea despite all evidence that it is useless, if not positively harmful. Christianity has shown time after time that it is wicked, but you all refuse to read the truth, preferring God’s truth, by putting the telescope to your blind eyes. Indeed you are apparently blind in every respect except this wonderful mystery, God’s Truth that always turns out to be lies when tested against reality. There is not the least chance of anyone doing anything about the problems of the world so long as Christianity puts forward its quack supernatural remedies. The real world with real problems needs real solutions, not fanciful universal lovey-doveyness. It has never been achieved, and will not be because it is so grossly opposed to our natures forged through æons of evolution.
…as will the very existence of true love.
Turn to your exposition of evolution and love is explained as an advantageous adaptation for sexual procreation. What was the point of the science since you subsequently ignore it once you get into your religious morass?
We are dealing with what is essentially relationship between persons—here our Maker and the conscious, aware creatures he has parented but who have chosen to ignore him and his laws thus casting themselves as rebels.
Neither “our Maker” nor “the conscious” are persons. The Maker is a figment of your imagination, your projection of your own personality meant to compensate in its godly grandeur for your own inadequacies. It is comforting that the Maker of the Universe agrees with you so well. As for ignoring or rebelling a figment of somebody else’s imagination, the whole idea illustrates how batty Christians are, and even if they have some excuse for the battiness, the implication is that they want to meddle in someone else’s, in fact superior, beliefs. This insane desire to tell others that they are rebelling against their own delusion is exactly why so many innocent people were burnt and otherwise murdered by Christians. I am not rebelling against God, I am rebelling against a load of pious maniacs telling me what I should think and do. That again is something that Christians do not get.
The endless citations from the “holey book” are now getting irritating. You take them as being authoriative, but I do not. It is 2000 years old twaddle, quite inappropriate for the modern world, as someone like you ought to know. Not only that but these supposedly righteous men are often not righteous at all, even in the biblical accounts. Christians, it seems to me, neither read their own bible, nor give honest accounts of it. Abraham was a man who disowned his wife in case Pharaoh killed him to take her into his harem, calling her his sister. Pharaoh therefore was able just to take Sarah since she was not committed to another man. Noble Abraham. David, even less noble, murdered one of his generals so that he could take his wife for hos own. Wonderful David, and he wrote all those psalms too, and miraculously as one of the undead, since most of them were written more than 700 years after David was supposed to have lived. His proper wife expressed her disgust at David’s cavorting pornographically before the Ark of the Covenant in some sort of fertility rite, and she was punished by the good God, for berating the noble hero, by being rendered infertile—a plain confirmation that the naked dance was for fertility. The bible perpetually tries to deny that the rituals of Israel were those of the Canaanites, of whom the Israelites were apparently a tribe.
Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends… You are my friends…
You add that Jesus who said this is God, as if Christians forget it in their desperation to have a supernatural buddy just like themselves. Why don’t you show this passage to Presidents Bush and Sharon? They might then understand why desperate people being publicly robbed of their God-given land and natural resources, and humiliated before the world for it, are willing to blow themselves to smithereens. Indeed, Jesus did the same himself in the end, although he chose to be deliberately crucified because the Romans had not yet invented high explosives, being ignorant Pagans. Did you ever think about this passage yourself? Jesus and the Nazarenes were in the equivalent position in relation to the Romans to the Iraqis and Palestinians in relation to the USA and Israel respectively. Christians are two faced.
A king must execute unrepentant rebels as a rebel insists upon usurping his kingship. That is what a rebel does. One party has to go—the king or the rebel. There is no space for both. Once we recognise this, we realise we have brought down upon ourselves, our own death. We cannot compete with the Almighty.
You just said that either the king or the rebel must succeed, then you assume it must be the king, presumably because, for you, He is almighty. Rebels often succeeded, especially in those ancient days when kingship was far from secure. Of course, you would be right that the rebel had no chance if your God really was almighty but He is a reflexion of you within your head, and similarly for all other Christians. He is dangerous because you all have the same delusion and are willing to act on it as cruelly as you like—history proves it—but God per se is not dangerous. What you are really doing is threatening the rest of us, but your threats are temporarily empty ones, the world being temporarily more civilized than Christianity. In the past you could make them good, and did in the worst possible ways.
If God really were almighty, as I have already said, this whole charade of manifesting himself as a mortal being, seeking crucifixion and the returning to life, could not possibly have been the choice of a sane and rational God, most especially because it violated everything that He has urged previously. The Christian God is a dolt, so Christians believe.
God appointed him (Jesus) as a sacrifice for reconciliation, through faith…
Modrn Christians almost unanimously follow the absurd teaching of Paul because it is easy. You only have to profess faith. Others disagree, notably the Brother of Christ, James, who Christians ought to be more inclined to hear than a fraud and upstart like Paul. I suggest you read the letter of James, and consider whether the Christianity you propagate is the right one.
What more can our God do? He cannot force us—the Kingdom of Heaven is a voluntary one. A Kingdom of Love must be one in which its members are freely choosing to love.
You cannot be serious. If we use our free will, that supposedly given to us by God when He made Adam, and choose not to have faith in a ridiculous concoction, then we are tipped into a sea of boiling sulphur to be tortured ceasely forever. So, heaven is voluntary? Listen! My whole contention is that such monstrous ideas breed monstrous ideas in the heads of those who believe them. Christianity is demostrably wicked, and your utter obliviousness to the implications of your crazy justifications of biblical terror is why. Uncritical acceptance of all this dangerous nonsense is the reason why humanity is in a terrible situation, but your answer is more of the same. You will get it, too, if the human race does not snap out of its faith-induced stupor.
You go on to add to the sheer idiocy of Christianity and its professors by giving us military analogies!
We shall emerge, after death, into the world of the resurrection life. Thus the physical universe is the precursor to the spiritual beings which end up after these few years of physical life, in a future resurrection world in which we can fully relate to God and enjoy him for ever.
And:
One of the main reasons the early Christians were prepared to die for their faith was that they looked forward to this new life which would be so much better than the life we know.
This is the same insane idea that leads unfortunate believers into giving away the only life they, in fact, have blowing themselves us in the certain knowledge that by dying as martyrs they will be admitted directly to heaven. Isn’t it time that you people began to reject such madness. If you do not, why should less sophisticated people abandon it? It is a disgusting belief that is, like the rest of it, valuable only to manipulating tyrants. Only mental infants can believe it. Peasant farmers can be thus forgiven but not western university dons.
If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are of all people the most pitiable.
The mountebank Paul again. The truth is the opposite as it usually is in the analysis of Christian beliefs. What is pitiable is that people put their hope in another life that is imaginary. By so doing they do not make the most of the only certain life they have. “We only live once” is the motto that everyone should be taught from an early age. That single short life is the only chance that people have of making their mark on the world. The moral imperative is that children should also be taught that the mark they make will be remembered as good and useful or bad and harmful. Morality is the choice of what we choose to do to make a useful contribution within this world, not to dream uselessly about an eternity of idleness.
The Christian life is eternal.
I pointed out above that eternal life necessarily means that time does not exist. Eternal life is therefore static, like a tableau in a carnival. The sun is fixed in the sky. No motion of any kind is possible because motion necessitates time. So, eternal life is a life of doing nothing at all, even twitching an eye, and all thought, including thoughts of how pleasant it is to be in the bosom of God, are impossible. How does this differ from death? How can such a life be a reward?
The book of Revelation looked forward to this for Christians who were being savagely persecuted under Emperor Nero.
It is doubtful it was, but the Christians persecuted under Nero were messianic Jews, only some of whom were likely to have been Christians. You ought to know that since many, perhaps most, Jews were messianic but rejected Jesus as Christ. “Christiani” means messianic, not Christians as you understand it.
Jesus pointed out that nobody would be able to understand it if he tried to explain it.
No doubt, or maybe he realised that no one would be tempted into converting by a proper explanation of the implications of perfection. As for the theory of parallel universes, why don’t you use your talent for explaining science by explaining it instead of wasting your time with speculations that you seem to agree are on a par with Tolkien’s dreams. C S Lewis was a drinking chum of Tolkien, and he too wrote stories for children. They are pleasant stories, though dull. The bible is much more graphic. Perhaps children are glad to read it after being brought up on a literary diet of these two’s efforts. I suggest that Hans Andersen is better for kids. The Emperor’s New Clothes is a clever criticism of Christian hypocrisy and delusion.
Israel was to be a pilot project which would attract all other nations and peoples to join it. The NT presents Christians as the New Israel.
An Almighty God needs to have a pilot project now, it seems. God the Idiot! God the Inept! How you can fail to see through this tosh continues to defeat me. The Christians rebelled, to use your word, against God’s own religion which the Jews believed was their own. They justified their rebellion in the ways you do. But it just does not hold water to anyone with a remaining functioning brain cell. God has to be suffering from amnesia, according to you. He lays down precise codes of behaviour in one millennium, then forgetting them, devises another even more fantastic plan in the next, a plan that completely defied what He had previous commanded people to do, so you say. But even the Son says as clearly as possible that the law would exist forever, every jot and tittle of it. Yet perhaps the most important part of it was the first dropped, not by the Son, but by the charlatan, Paul. God tells you unequivocally that you cannot be saved unless you are properly circumcised, according to the law. No Christians will be saved, if the Son and the Father together are to be believed. You would rather believe a rogue who claimed he was an apostle, a mere mortal man. It proves your hypoocrisy and opportunism.
God punishes Israel through both human and natural calamities, is how the OT puts it.
How can any scientist believe that God punishes people by using natural calamities? We can bring calamities on to ourselves, certainly, but then what would God have had to do with it? The people for whom this book was written 2,400 years ago could believe it, but can anyone today, especially people in academia? To believe it today must require an effort of will, but it comes quite naturally to Christians. I cannot myself see why people who wilfully ignore modern knowledge in favour of ancient superstitions can even get admitted to universities. It is a waste of time for both them and their teachers.
Selfish behaviour which ignores the revealed, emergent, truth of God which tells us to respect our neighbour as ourselves, leads to disaster.
I would like to have pointed out to me some world leaders of any significance who are Christians and actually practice this respect for neighbours, presuming, as Christians lead us to believe, that all humans are our neighbours. Christians love to be evangelical and to convert unbelievers, but they show no interest in the least in whether professing Christians practice what they profess or not. I should be much more impressed by Christians if I ever saw them protesting in mass at the actions of their leaders on the world stage. They are far more concerned about what consulting adults do in private than the mass murder of innocent Arabs in simple vengeance for something that their own mad religonists have done.
God punishing us and our bringing it upon ourselves, refer to the same reality.
Christians are people that believe twelve imposibilities before their corn flakes. Free will is not compatible with God determining what we do, except to a Christian, many of which, we learn believe that God can square the circle.
Many philosophers and sages have concluded similar things.
But many more, including the most intelligent and best educated of them do not.
God was making the ultimate appeal to us—to ask for our Maker’s forgiveness.
Forgiveness for what? What you call rebellion against God is using the free will that He is supposed to have granted us because He wanted people to worship Him of their own volition and not as slaves. We use it to do as we decide, and He then demands that we ask His forgiveness. When we refuse on the grounds that we are exerting a right He gave us, He refuses to save us along with those who worship Him anyway, and, moreover, He tells us that we shall be burnt alive forever instead. All of this when the Maker made us with free will even though He knew with His foresight that some would disobey Him. He deliberately made us so that He could despatch us to a fiery place to be tortured for eternity. This is a God of sadism not love, my friend.
But next you tell us that the bible is about saving all people. So, all that stuff about burning in hell was so much hot air! Are we now to believe from you that God is Himself a liar, because it would explain a lot about Christians, if it were confirmed. Of course, as scientists we could deduce from Christian behaviour that God was not the cuddly bunny, they make out. When people lie apparently unconsciously, it is not unreasonable to conclude they have a belief in the virtue of lying. If they also believe in a God, then it is not too far-fetched to deduce that their God must be a liar.
Trying to reach out to non believers with the option to understand and respond to (or reject) the love of God as we see it in Jesus is integral to being a Christian or a member of a church.
How long has it been an option? Theology says it is not, if it bases itself, as it must, on the bible, and the Churches have never considered it optional, though recently they have sounded as if it is. It is the Christian’s persistence in telling other people what they should do and think that is particularly annoying in a liberal and pluralist society. Christians are unsolicited meddlers in other people’s affairs. Christians want to stop outreaching, and leave people to reach them, if they want to. Meanwhile, to stop them from being bored they could do something about the corruption that apparently has eaten at the core of their churches, since loss of vision comes from a rotting within, as you say. Christians regard it as infra dig to criticise other Christians , which is why the churches get full of dead and rotten wood. But Christians do not mind. They welcome it. Jesus came to save the sinners, so they like their churches to be full of them as proof that he was right.
But the amazing thing is that God can use our fallible efforts to communicate his love to those around us.
It is so amazing that an infallible and almighty being should do this, with all the time-wasting and suffering that it entails when it could all be just done, that it is impossible to believe. For Christians it is virtuous to believe the impossible. That is faith to them. To rational people, it is idiocy.
As the laws of science emerge, reflecting a deep underlying law of the complex large and chaotic system we call Nature, so laws of behaviour, suited to our new human situations can emerge as reflections of the underlying Spirit of God. We struggle and discover. God reveals his emergent rules. The two concepts, it is suggested, are two sides of the same coin.
Am I to believe from this that God leaves Nature to its own devices and concentrates Himself on humanity? I cannot see why we need two systems of knowing, esoecially as any evidence of revelation comes in unbelievable myths, whereas we have plenty of plain material evidence that laws of Nature, including the laws of animal and human behaviour, are discovered by science, as you admit, and the laws of society are imposed by rulers, which you do not. In the past, rulers liked to tell their subjects that the laws they imposed had been revealed to them by God. It is very well known that this is so, and is depicted on one stele as Shamash the sun god handing over his laws to Hamurabi, an event dated to 1750 BC. Yet dunces called Christians cannot see in this their own supposedly real and genuinely proper actual revelation by God! Poor things, covered in dust and spiders.
The message of the bible is that what we do with God’s offer determines not only our own personal future but also that of our human race.
Too true but in precisely the opposite sense that you maintain. Christianity has had 2000 years to do what you are still advocating. It has by now surely proved to the satisfaction of anyone other than Christian obsessives that it is an immense failure. That a small poportion of Christians are actually good people is not a good enough argument to maintain that Christianity is itself good. The Christian God called the Son said plainly enough that a tree is judged by its fruit. Christianity stands condemned by its own founder.
Most of the above answers are already on the AW! website in greater detail. Try reading them.
