AW! Epistles
God Commands us to Love Him with our Minds. From Andrew
Abstract
Abstract
“No Christian can prove that believers will get the reward of an eternal life after death. And that is the sole reason for being a Christian” (Questioning Belief pages). You think that Christians don’t think about things like these questions. Are you not aware that God commands us to love Him with our minds as well as our hearts and souls? I came to Christ through researching the evidence about Christianity, asking several of these questions (of multiple Christian and non-Christian sources) before becoming a Christian, and the answers helped me to accept Christ.
“No Christian can prove that believers will get the reward of an eternal life after death. And that is the sole reason for being a Christian” (Questioning Belief pages). You think that Christians don’t think about things like these questions. Are you not aware that God commands us to love Him with our minds as well as our hearts and souls? I came to Christ through researching the evidence about Christianity, asking several of these questions (of multiple Christian and non-Christian sources) before becoming a Christian, and the answers helped me to accept Christ.
Well, I do accept that some Christians do think about such things, but you tend to be like polar bears in the Sahara desert. The little question at the end of those essays simply draws attention the fact that most Christians do not wonder at all. They just believe. Christians might have to love God with their minds as well as their hearts, but it all goes to prove that Christians simply do not do what God commands, so how are they Christians at all, except in their false profession of it? What astonishes me above all is that Christians in general are not Christians. There is much to admire in the teachings of Christ, but supposed Christians who will rant about the value of an unborn and unwanted child in a much too overcrowded world, or what consenting adults do in private just ignore the most important teachings of their incarnated God. In short, you are hypocrites. Yet, if some of you are intelligent enough to think about what you believe, you do not show any concern that the vast majority of your co-religionists do not have a clue what Christianity means.
You have set up a lot of straw men in your website. This is way too big a website for me or anyone else without a lot of time on their hands to go through thoroughly.
As I point out, setting up straw men is a popular ploy of Christian apologists, so their methods must be rubbing off on to me through too much contact with their arguments. But, if I do set up straw men, then it is a poor excuse that the website is too big for you to be able to find one in it as an example.
This question, though, seems like a profound enough question, one that I asked very early in my evaluation of the gospel while in college. You have put a lot of effort into your site, it is impressive to realize that.
I have put a lot of effort into it, that is true, and it is indeed a large website, but it is divided into sections so that anyone interested in some particular aspect of Judaeo-Christian religion ought to be able to stick to whatever interests them, so long as they recognize that some problem they have might be answered elsewhere on the site.
Let me comment on this one question, then—Surely you are aware that all human beings inevitably live by faith in something or someone, a faith that is founded on assumptions about the future.
It might be so, but I suspect that you are not using the word “faith” in the same sense for the skeptic and the believer. People generally might have faith in a set of ideas that help them to manage the world they live in, but faith to a Christian is not that. It is a sort of passport to the Kingdom of God, a passport that is only issued to those with unquestioning loyalty. Ordinary faith is adjustable, and some aspects of it are disposable, but not in Christianity. Christian faith demands bigotry and unreason because the Christian cannot be persuaded by any argument against. That is the “loyalty”. Christianity is a lobster pot. Enter it and you have had it. You are trapped by the requirement of faith, and only the most determined of Christians have the courage to say, “Hold on here. No good God could put such a demand on to people.” Only those are able to gnaw their way out of the pot.
If you hold Christianity to the same standard of proof as you would hold any other belief system to, then you are coming to the question with a false assumption about the definition of “prove”. You seem to suggest that “prove” in your question above implies the obligation to show an absolute, air-tight, indisputable case for the truth of a belief system. But this level of proof is impossible to establish for any belief system that attempts to explain the origins of the universe and everything/everyone in it, as well as the answer to the problems of humanity and to life in this world.
You seem to be doing just what the essay said apologists do. “They will first turn on the questioner and demand to know what they thought proof meant.” Your first sentence here suggests that Christianity should be privileged. It is false to assume the same standards of proof for Christianity as for other beliefs, according to you. To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, “You would, wouldn’t you.” Christians begin believing that Christianity is indeed privileged, but I am not a Christian and declare this to be another false belief. Whatever the level of proof and the criteria of proof, they should apply to all belief systems equally. The more stringent the test, the more faith one can have in the system that passes it.
Ask any judge in either your country’s courts or mine—neither country’s system of law requires any such level of proof in any of its courts (civil or criminal).
Perhaps in your country you do not have the same degrees of proof in court cases as us here in Blighty, but here the criteria are different for civil and for criminal cases. Christianity certainly could not satisfy a criminal court for which there has to be no reasonable doubt. It would not even satisfy a civil court in which the criterion is one of the balance of evidence. That balance of evidence is stacked against Christian belief because there is none.
For any event that took place in the past, whether an alleged crime that was committed or a historical event like the resurrection of Jesus Christ (and Christianity stands or falls on the truth of certain historical events and texts), if we had a videotape of the event taking place then there would be no place for the examination of evidence or the exercise of trust; there would be no need for faith at all in such an instance. If you could hold in your hand a time-stamped picture of Jesus by the side of the tomb, smiling by the rock that was rolled away, then you wouldn’t need faith to conclude that he had risen from the dead, would you?
Your argument is that the absence of evidence for Christianity is a merit because that is the reason for faith. That is a laughable argument. Admittedly it is like one that the Christian Bush administration of the USA is using to jail people without evidence as terrorists, but it is on the utterly unjust and irrefutable principle that their guilt is proved by the absence of evidence showing that they must be hiding it! It is what Christians used against the witches in the inquisition. Despicable.
Do you know of a belief system with evidence as air-tight as this? I don’t.
What about science?
Yet you live by faith every day in your beliefs about the world, about the purpose for your life, etc. just like everyone else.
No, I do not think that life necessarily has a purpose. That is a way of assuming God. It is an unnecessary assumption.
You can’t not live by faith, so to imply that a belief system must show the kind of proof that renders faith unnecessary is nonsensical.
A practical set of beliefs to help anyone through life can be construed as faith, no doubt, but it is not a noose around your neck, like Christianity. It is not an obligation. You are being typically tricky, as Christian apologists always are. The practical beliefs that everyone holds today, but Christians try to deny, is science. It works, and it satisfies practical proofs, and for those reasons Christians have to spend a lot of their time trying to discredit it.
Now, a definition of “prove” to which Christianity and all other belief systems can realistically aspire to be judged by is, I believe, the obligation to show 1) a system’s agreement with the known evidence, and 2) the relative disagreement with the known evidence of all other belief systems. The degree to which Christianity has proof of this nature is the foundation for its compelling appeal versus other belief systems. It is this second kind of proof that was originally why I came to Christ; my relationship with God and His testimony in my life and in the lives of others is the source of my faith as much as the proof now, though.
You are coy. What are these two arms of Christian proof? What evidence does Christianity conform with that other belief systems do not?
The problem in your question is the double-standard that it betrays.
Not so. The problem is your attempt to evade any standard.
16 years ago, I researched this and other questions and, like a host of other agnostics and atheists (the “Case” books of Lee Strobel are instructive here), I came to Christ alone. My research since then, and apologetics of all kinds have been a fascination for me ever since then, has served to strengthen, not weaken, my Christian faith.
Many of you say similar things, yet you are all easily satisfied. There is no evidence but it is enough for you. You are already trapped in the pot, and you are held there out of fear that to question the nonsense you have been tricked into believing might deprive you of some non-existent eternal life.
Now, I know that I am the first person to attempt to respond to you about something on your website, even about this item in particular. I also have not come up with the magic answer to “turn on the light” in your heart, an answer that others have yet to figure out. I write because this is a good exercise for me, to think though what I believe and why, and I like to converse with others about the big questions and their answers. If I have hit a chord with you, great, if not, I’ll not worry about it and neither should you. If you are right in your convictions, then I am the fool and my ignorance is bliss because it has stood the test of time (I have been a Christian for 16 years). But if you are wrong, I claim no great wisdom other than to seek and accept the truth that is in front of me (I am not the first Christian, let alone the first one to respond to your website), but you are dead spiritually. When you die physically, God will give you your wish and you will get to go where you have been demonstrating that you want to go forever- away from Him. No worries, right?
None! If I supply the missing “not” in the first sentence in this paragraph, you are right, and I do not mind your exercising your apologetic talents on me, but I have yet to come across anyone whose apologetics are at all convincing, or even sensible or even honest. As I said above, you are all remarkably easily convinced and seem to expect others to be the same. Perhaps in some parts of the world they are, but it is a tribute to the herd instinct and not to intelligence or to independent-mindedness. Christianity is an asylum in which the inmates get comfort from all of them having the same symptoms. Christians always think they are alive spiritually, but the word spiritual defies definition. Neither you nor any of your fellow believers knows anything about spirits because they do not exist except in the imagination, like fairies and Darth Vadar. Spirituality means religiosity in fact, and that is something we can all do without, as history shows throughout, not least today. It is far better to value one’s physical life, and to determine to do something useful for the world with it, than to moon on about some figmentary after life that lasts interminably. As for God, I at least allow that, if there is one, then He must be far more intelligent than I am, and quite capable of understanding my motives and aims. Christians uniformly think God is an imbecile, because they seem to think he is like them. So, no worries, but you betray that you have.
“In short, you are hypocrites. Yet, if some of you are intelligent enough to think about what you believe, you do not show any concern that the vast majority of your co-religionists do not have a clue what Christianity means” Uh, what are you talking about? I read on your website that you are not a Christian, apparently was not a Christian growing up even though you believe your parents were Christians. You don’t appear to have been involved in a Christian church in your life; I don’t know what church you went to growing up, I don’t know if that church had Sunday School classes. It is likely that whatever limited view of openness to questioning that you encountered among Christians was a very negative impression, perhaps a lack of openness to your own questions that has turned you off to the idea that a Christian can be open to questioning about his faith or the basis thereof.
I mentioned my own interest in apologetics; I taught a Sunday School class on the topic for a few years and I have conversations with people and read books all the time. Whatever ideas you have in your head about thinking Christians not caring that other Christians don’t think as much, they are just that—in your head, with little basis in reality outside of whatever experiences formed your prejudices.
Speaking of non-thinking Christians, you are missing something important. There are not any more or less non-thinking adherents to Christianity as there are to any other faith, including atheism. For you to call Christians hypocrites on this basis would require you to label every member of every belief group hypocrites, including yourself. For such an accomplished atheist as yourself, this is quite an oversight. Surely you are aware that 90% of those who claim to be, say, Christians, are not actually Christians, especially given that to become a Christian one must choose to believe certain claims and decide to accept Christ; if we are as mentally dead as you think we are, there cannot be many of us. Atheists are like that too (you have heard the term “practical athiest”? it is for folks who call themselves believers in God but live like they are not; they’re everywhere), mostly mentally dull like you think we are.
I have to go home now, I’ll read through the rest of your email later. You gave the effort, I want to dignify it with a considered response.
“There is much to admire in the teachings of Christ, but supposed Christians who will rant about the value of an unborn and unwanted child in a much too overcrowded world.” So, you believe that the Earth is overcrowded and that one of the ways to reduce the overcrowding is to kill children before they are born and can take up any resources needed by the rest of us (who, by virtue of already being here, deserve to be here more than they). Let me guess, you are also anti-war, right? Killing the innocent is okay for the population problem but not somewhere else? Wouldn’t killing the innocent through war further the population solution that the pro-choice mentality proposes? Surely you don’t have a moral problem with that? The world is already overcrowded, but please have sex as often and with whoever you want, we surely don’t want to allow anything like some concern for the good of humanity get in the way of a good time. Who is the hypocrite here? You who judge the beliefs of others, are you ready to acknowledge the inconsistencies in your own?
Well, you are ranting on typically, but it is your position that is inconsistent, not mine. The world is certainly overcrowded, and if you do not think so, then it simply shows how divorced from reality you are. You will preserve the life of unconscious embryos, that God often freely destroys as miscarriages or even stillbirths, but seem happy as Larry to bomb shit out of living conscious human beings. Most of you Christians speak of the embryo as if it is a conscious person when it is not, and consciousness accompanied by memory does not develop until a long time after birth. The false identification of an embryo as a conscious person is purely to stir up an emotional response, yet your brothers do not care a hoot about people who are conscious that they do not like, and freely kill them at a distance so as to separate their murder of them from their own conscious mind in case they might feel guilty. Plenty of Christians in the whole of their history have shown others no mercy at all. They simply do not understand, or will not understand what “love your neighbour” means, free of hypocrisy. Failure to stem the destruction of the resources of the world will leave no world for all these embryos that you think should be allowed to live when no one wants them. India and Brazil are full of unwanted children scavenging on the streets, and the publicity given to Katrina shows that the image we all get of the idyllic US is a load of bollocks because there are millions of people there who are similarly deprived. The moral distinction between an abortion and killing conscious people ought to be clear even to dimwitted Christians, but, if people are given the chance and are taught properly, then there is no need for abortions except in exceptional cases. In case you had not noticed, people can freely enjoy sex, something that God has evidently given us as a necessary pleasure just like eating, without having to have unwanted children. Maybe fatness is a sin. Perhaps, you are a Catholic, but more and more Catholics are arguing the case for condoms. Are you protesting that the rights of individual spermatozoans? I expect you will be, if not now, before long!
Moral arguments usually don’t go anywhere, and they aren’t the point in examining one’s opposition to the God of the Bible anyway. Tell you what, I don’t think I want to go there. You stay pro-choice, I’ll stay pro-life, we’ll both be at peace in our ideas.
I shall be at peace, but you will be adding to the pressure on the world that will, in a few centuries, if not even decades, will lead to mass deaths by starvation, drowning, and all the consequences of careless addiction to ancient beliefs that are no longer relevant to us.
“…their methods must be rubbing off on to me through too much contact with their arguments. But, if I do set up straw men, then it is a poor excuse that the website is too big for you to be able to find one in it as an example.” If you let yourself be affected by too much contact with Christian apologists, the effect of that “too much contact” would not be the frequency of straw men in your arguments. I can search your website when I have time and point out something in it that is incorrect. I’m sure it won’t be that difficult to do, but I don’t know what the point is to arguing for the sake of arguing. My interest is in learning about your atheism and in seeing what the point of all these bobhatesthegodofthebible.com websites are, not in arguing you are anyone else into considering the claims of Christ. I doubt I could do that anyway, I’m a far less committed apologist for my faith than you, I bet. Running around playing apologist is fun, claiming superior proof and challenging the claims or thoughts of others, but it has its place and that is not a big place.
Atheists do not have any inbuilt motivation to spread their atheism. Christianity does have. Christians are taught that they have to proselytize. There are far more Christian websites than atheistic ones for that very reason, yet when it comes to arguments, Christians have to ignore the history of their odious religion because they simply cannot refute it. As for hating God, you actually miss the point entirely, as you Christians always do, either out of stupidity or because it is easier to argue with straw men than with the real issue. Atheists do not hate God because atheists do not believe there is a God—not one like the one the Christians and Jews believe in anyway. Atheists hate people who think they are God or know precisely what God thinks, because they are deluded and dangerous, and the events of history, continuing still, prove that religion is insanity.
Christianity is a relationship, not a religion, which means it is not a list of rules or do’s/don’ts (with apologies to whatever version of Christianity that you grew up with). If you want a relationship with God, you can have one; if you want a formula for coping with life, you can go to a lot of places and get that and eventually find one that works reasonably well for you. Jesus Christ doesn’t offer that, though. You are old enough to have found a lifelong rhythm of your own in your beliefs, maybe you don’t think you need Christ or whatever you think Jesus offers. If that is the case, then that is the wedge that must be dealt with before any of this apologetic stuff has any constructive purpose. I am not the person to deal with the source of your hostility to God; God is and you are. It’s up to you two.
I just answered your last point, but you say that Christianity is not a list of dos and don’ts, but a relationship—with God, you seem to add. So having the relationship means you have no obligations in the real world, it seems. It is a nice way of avoiding the issue which is precisely how people, Christians, if that is what you are, have to cope with life. I suggest that, if the Christian is not bothered with the problem of having to cope with life, the best they could do is to leave it, settle in the bosom of Christ, wherever that might be, and leave the rest of us to cope with the life that you will not face, but want to interfere with constantly with your hypocritical morality. If you ever read the bible, you will find it is full of lists of dos and don’ts, so what is the point of them, if they do not apply to Christians? Since there are plenty of lists like that in the New Testament as well as the old one, it seem to me that the original Christians, who presumably knew what they were teaching, knew quite well that Christians had to behave in this world in a certain way or they were not Christians. The trouble with almost all of you today is that you cherry pick this and that in your readings, and make it match your own views. Well, as you say, it is up to you, but if the bible is in fact the word of God, you are simply proving that you are hypocrites because you ignore all of it that you do not like. Too bad for your salvation.
In conversations like this, it comes down to a simple question that apologetics doesn’t answer—Are we talking about atheism or Christianity because we are comparing the strengths and weaknesses of philosophies or because we are seeking something to answer a deep need in our lives and wondering where to turn? Apologetics doesn’t fill the deep need, it only provides mental gratification. Knowing God personally, that’s where it’s at for me, the fulfillment of my need for value, direction, purpose, and significance. If I do not believe that there is a God outside myself, then I look to myself to make up the reasons for these things, and I know intuitively that the reasons I find are equally as useless as the reasons that everyone else must find within themselves who do not believe in God, and I know that our world simply cannot survive if we are all to invent our own significance, purpose, and moral compasses (what is fine for me may be evil to you, how are you to live with that if my “good” includes harming you?). Even the insistence on things like “the common good” or “contract law” (found on other bobhatesGod.com sites) as the source of moral guidance is an admission that we can think like we are our own Gods but actually can’t live that way (this demonstrates the futility of that thinking; it doesn’t apply in real life). I know intuitively that the world is not random in its origins or operation, and that all humans are not intended to make up our significance and beliefs as we go along; if you are not of that conviction, then clearly Christianity is not for you, and no amount of back-and-forth about the evidence for this or that is relevant.
You are seeking a deep need, but you are not willing to tax yourself too much in finding it. It has to be small and perfectly formed to meet your own prejudices. Anything larger and requiring any effort on your part is too much trouble. “You” here is you as a modern lazy Christian. You say you are a personal chum of God, and I say that shows you are deluded. The New Testament is clear enough that Christians have to be humble, and to claim to be a personal mate of God, is the least humble thing, it seems to me, that anyone could claim, and your God as Son declares that many are called and few are chosen which tells you explicitly that of the Christians who exist in the world, including those in the USA, most of them can forget any hopes of salvation. Their smugness might well be the reason. Yet few of you are deterred by this, and continue in your hope that God will not welsh on his personal chums. The fact is that Christianity makes demands. It is not just a relationship. The relationship has to be demonstrated by living in a certain way, and that way is also plain. You have to love your neighbour. Not just the guy next door but any human being who could be next door. Anyone. Everyone! Killing Arabs by high explosive bombs dropped from ten miles high is not loving your neighbour, and no embryo could suddenly buy the house next door and become your neighbour. Modern Christianity seems to me to be characterized by the slogan “hate anyone who is not your immediate neighbour, and sometimes even hate him”, and that, to me, is why Christians are demonstrably hypocrites.
I hope you have a good weekend. You are person of great accomplishment and obvious intellectual strength. If I ever learn as much as you in my lifetime (I am 35 now) I will be very proud of how I spend my time in exercising my mind. I could say more, but I am off to go to a college soccer game, as soccer is a great hobby of mine. I will be reading more of your website, and I congratulate you on the effort you have put into it.
I hope you enjoyed your game. In Europe, and, indeed, most of the world now, soccer is much more popular than Christianity. It could be a great force for good, if loving neighbours is the basis of morality as Christ says it is. It is a shame that Christians in the main can not get it. Humanists, who have no illusions about being a chum of God’s do.
Whoa, Mike, why are you blaming God for miscarriages, stillbirths, and the bombs that humans rain down on each other?
Whoa, Andrew! I wrote—“You will preserve the life of unconscious embryos, that God often freely destroys as miscarriages or even stillbirths, but seem happy as Larry to bomb shit out of living conscious human beings.” If a child is spontaneously born dead, who can be responsible other than God? I say that Christians like you are happy to rain bombs onto conscious people. I am plainly saying that you Christians are hypocrites, like those condemned by Christ himself.
How about we take responsibility for our own evil behavior and the effects of our own sin? Thousands of people died in the US on 9/11/2001 not because God killed them, but because the Islamic Idiot Coalition carried out terrorist attacks on Americans.
You immediately blame the faithless and are incapable of thinking whether you had some part in it by supporting your odious foreign policy that has no regard for any life that is not American unless they are puppets of the US government too. I assure you that people the world over admire the US immensely for its material wealth and freedoms, but they cannot see how they will ever get them because Yankees are determined to stop others from having fair access to their own resources and to world markets. I will note again that US Christian leaders are utterly hypocritical spouting about freedoms and democracy while denying them to others.
If you want to blame God for the killings in London last year, be my guest;
Listen! You Christians cannot make up your own minds whether God has given us free will or not. When it suits you, everything is God’s will, and then at other times, like this, nothing is other than what we bring on to ourselves. I am happy to believe that God has given me free will to do as I choose in the world, and that means that I am not obliged to be a Christian to be saved, because, if that is so, I have no free will at all. God is forcing me to do something that I do not want to do. You think that is perfectly all right, but it is another aspect of Christian self delusion.
God didn’t do it, though, that’s why London police didn’t go to churches right afterword to scream at the ministers. What about the destruction that Israel and Hamas have been visiting each other; is that God’s fault? Which God is to blame, if you still buy into the myth that the gods of both groups exist? Are they both to blame? Either? Neither? How about we blame Israel and Hamas and deal with them about this instead of some nebulous “God did it” that helps no one and solves nothing, huh? If you are in the habit of blaming God for all the reasons why this world doesn’t fit your definition of perfection, then it is you who are divorced from reality.
You are the one who is divorced from reality. As I understand it, Christianity is monotheistic, so you believe their is only one God. That, as a matter of fact excludes another God of any kind whether it is the Moslem one or the Jewish one. Their God is the same one as your own. It also excludes a particular favourite God of the Christians, the wicked one called Satan. If there is a Satan then there is not only one God, and the Christian claim to believe only in one God is bogus. I am more monotheistic than you if I accept there is one God only and that whatever happens in the world that is out of human influence must be the responsibility of God, especially as He has foresight, according to Christians. It is particularly absurd that Christians, who believe in one God only, think it is God’s will that they should bomb Moslems, who also believe in one God only, and indeed, are more consistent in this belief than are Christians, and that Moslems with the same belief should feel God wants them to bomb Christians, and Jews, who also believe in one God only, and in fact began the whole ridiculous hoo-hah because theirs was the original of the God of the other two. Now, if there really is a God and He has a will, it is impossible for anyone intelligent to think that it is that His creations should have to bomb each other. Yet all of you do think that, and go about it with a sickening gusto. I suggest that you consider the safety of your own souls, as you always claim you are doing. They do not look too safe from my vantage point.
Let’s make it on the individual level—I have a scar on my right palm because I sliced it on a pane of glass two years ago; God didn’t slice my hand and cause me suffering, I did; thanks for your encouragement that I blame God for it, but it was my fault and I did not send the doctor bill to God to pay off. Sheesh. I am separated because my wife would rather leave me then deal with the severe emotional issues that have made her unhappy for the 10 years we have known each other; shall I blame God for that? No, she explained to me when she finally came out about it all that it was her fault and didn’t have anything to do with me, so I certainly can’t blame God. I can blame myself for the fact that our marriage wasn’t perfect enough for her to want to fight for it, but even then it still wouldn’t give any ground for me to blame God. My wife left me, and she had never believed in God despite what she told me and told her friends; this is her fault, not God’s. She confirms the universal reality that we sin against each other all the time in our relationships. Not to invite sympathy, but surely you can see that talking in the personal real versus the nebulous “crimes against mankind” realm doesn’t change the argument.
Well, this little confession is interesting but rather off subject because you did not read what I said. Since I do not believe in any God that does anything at all, I obviously do not think any God made you cut your hand or spoil your marriage, and it seems that you do not either. The cut was your fault and the marriage problem was essentially your wife’s. What though about the God’s will part of it? If it is God’s will that people should live as married couples, and you earnestly did what God wanted, who is to blame for the distress you suffered? You say your wife took all the blame on to herself, a noble thing to do, I would say, because I doubt that it can be true (it is certainly not what judges think), but you carried out God’s will and got hurt. Did you pray for help? You evidently did not get any, and if you did, your theory is in tatters because God does involve Himself in these entirely human affairs, if that is so. Bush and his odious tribe claim to pray for guidance, and then send B52s with 15000 pound bombs to bomb Moslems in an Arab country, with no possibility of not killing thousands of innocents, which is exactly what happened. Did Bush really get guidance from God? Evidently he thinks he did. So He is blaming God, at least partly. Why are Christians not outraged instead of continuing as the last bastion of his support? Could it be that Christianity is actually deranged itself?
We live in an ugly, fallen world that confirms the Bible’s teachings about the sin of mankind every day. We sin ourselves and are sinned against, even those of us who think we are pretty good (through 8 1/2 years of lies I thought I had married my best friend); when you drop the denials of this then you’ll be less divorced from reality than you want to believe that I am.
Sinning simply means not doing what you tell us is God’s will. In other words it is your will as a member of the Christian gang. I am comfortable with myself, more or less, as a human being because I will not put up with, and object to pious lies and liars who simply want to do as they like while claiming God’s approval of it. That is the vast majority of Christians.
“If people are given the chance and are taught properly, then there is no need for abortions except in exceptional cases. In case you had not noticed, people can freely enjoy sex, something that God has evidently given us as a necessary pleasure just like eating, without having to have unwanted children.” Educating people won’t change the reality that they are broken from the inside and prone to fill the ache in their souls by any means easily available to them. Imagine how much more educated our world has become in the last 150 years (the public school system in the US is only about 175 years old) and now interpose the exponentially increasing atrocity and destruction that we commit against each other, not to mention the fact that marriages and families are breaking up faster over time as we get supposedly more knowledgable about ourselves; this should tell you that giving people knowledge doesn’t make them smarter or more capable of honoring ourselves or others. You can see it didn’t help me, at least; or it didn’t help you, depending on which of us is right about the God of the Bible.
You might have been happier not being married at all, but your piety forbids it for you. If bad marriages split up, I see it as a boon because it is quite unnatural and socially conditioned that people should marry at all. My parents and grandparents could not divorce. It was not possible for them. Society frowned upon it so much that it was quite impossible for ordinary people without any wealth to be able to afford it or put up with the stigma of it. I was grateful that I was able to divorce, though it was a strain and the kids obviously suffered. The strain of a prolonged unhappy marriage might have been much worse for us all. I have never been married since, and believe that relationships are better, or at least no worse, for its absence.
Even if the world really is overcrowded (and no, I am not convinced that it is even though I am not strongly opinionated one way or the other, because there are parts of the Earth every bit as empty as India is full, and in light of the progress we have made in agriculture and technology in the last 100 years I think it is improper to generalize about the overpopulation issue), your insistence thereof doesn’t say anything in support of your characterization of my “ranting”. You call yourself an intellectual, I think you can do better than that.
I do speak of the embryo as a person, and I don’t think that a person has to be self-conscious or even medically conscious to be a person; this is a myth that folks like you have foisted on the world at large without any scientific evidence there-for.
If I called myself an intellectual, then I surprised myself. I think I am intelligent and nothing more. At least, I am intelligent enough to realize, unlike a well-known US president, that half the population have an IQ below 100. Most Christians fall into that half. If the world is not overcrowded now, the extension of Christian policies on childbirth to the whole world would soon ensure that it was, and, if parts of the world are not overcrowded, perhaps there are very good objective reasons why it should be so. Blair wants the UK birth rate to increase because there are not enough young people to support the old, he says. Yet he seems not to see that he is advocating an irreversible exponential expansion of the population that must end in disaster, even if it is not there yet. We should be trying to reduce the population not trying to expand it, but Christians like you and Blair simply refuse to think rather than follow dogma. As for the technology of agriculture, even Christians are slowly getting to understabnd that our technology has caused global overheating, and agricultural technology gets useless when the viable land is all built over with high rise dwellings. As for ranting:
“So, you believe that the Earth is overcrowded and that one of the ways to reduce the overcrowding is to kill children before they are born and can take up any resources needed by the rest of us (who, by virtue of already being here, deserve to be here more than they). Let me guess, you are also anti-war, right? Killing the innocent is okay for the population problem but not somewhere else? Wouldn’t killing the innocent through war further the population solution that the pro-choice mentality proposes? Surely you don’t have a moral problem with that? The world is already overcrowded, but please have sex as often and with whoever you want, we surely don’t want to allow anything like some concern for the good of humanity get in the way of a good time. Who is the hypocrite here? You who judge the beliefs of others, are you ready to acknowledge the inconsistencies in your own? ”
That is the ranting I referred to, and since you raise and “answer” questions that you put into my mouth, it is self-evidently ranting. Finally, on the question of the person, you say that any human fusion of an egg and a sperm must be a person, even when it is not viable and spontaneously aborts itself! Why then are Christian graveyards not full of miscarried foetuses? Do you go so far as the Catholic Church and consider it sinful even to use contraceptives, because that seems to be logical if any union of sperm and egg is to be classed as a person. Neither egg nor sperm alone is viable, but an egg can be made to reproduce without a sperm by artificial means. Is that a person? You are being absurd in your dogmatism, but do not care a jot about killing conscious living people, especially if it can be done impersonally, by dumb soldiers killing at a distance. All the patriarchal religions seem the same over killing others. “Bugger God! Let’s kick some ass!” is your motto.
“The moral distinction between an abortion and killing conscious people ought to be clear even to dimwitted Christians.” I guess I’m dimwitted, what is the moral distinction? Here’s my take—the killing of a person who is not guilty of a capital crime is murder, whether that person has been born yet or not. This is the moral distinction that I make that is probably relevant to the point you were making. Your worldview denies that an unborn child is a person and therefore makes no moral issue about abortion; thus, we disagree not on whether abortion is murder but on whether the unborn victim of the abortion is a person with dignity and human value to consider. I cannot add to the evidence any argument for you to consider here. Oh well.
And this is the crux of the issue between your moral worldview and mine—your ideas about the value of people and the existence of a personal God versus mine.
I keep making it clear. You are hypocritical because you make no distinction between the unconscious foetus and the living, thinking speaking person, yet you defend the life of the unconscious creature while despising the life of the conscious one, as long as it is not a US citizen. The moral distinction is the one that was used about animals for a long time, and still is by many. They are considered to be unconscious automatons, and so torturing them or killing them savagely was quite all right, even for Christians, the stewards of all life they tell us, and unconscious life like animals could not feel what was happening when it was brutally ill-treated. When we are anaesthetized, we cannot feel pain because we are unconscious, and all of us have been there. When we are conscious, we feel pain and distress. One of our duties in life ought to be to avoid pain and distress in others, and that is what the Christian God taught. It counts out torture, such as that used by the US at Guantanamo Bay, and at the secret CIA gaols in barbaric countries worldwide. Swiftly aborting a foetus causes it no pain, as most medics who are not conditioned by dogma will affirm. Torturing a suspect is barbaric and forbidden by the Christian faith, and so is happily indulged in or condoned by Christian leaders!
We’re getting off track here. I was attempting to converse about Christianity, and you seem to be going off about Christians. I’m not interested in defending Christians; they are just as flawed and evil as non-Christians, and our misdeeds are up there with those of unbelievers.
It means that being a Christian is of no practical value. That is evident enough, to judge by leading Christians over the world, but what then is the point of it?
Again, the hypocrite would diss on Christianity because of Christians but not diss on athiesm because of atheists; does Hitler make you not want to trust in macro-evolution theories (they undergirded his worldview and Final Solution)? Let’s not be hypocritical, shall we?
Indeed not. Atheism is not a religion. It is not believing in the agents that religious believers convince themselves are telling them how to behave. And you are wrong about Hitler, although understandably so. Hitler was brought up as a devout Catholic by his devoutly Catholic mother, and he never renounced his faith, but rather constantly emphasized it. The misunderstanding is deliberately fostered by Christians, especially the Catholic Church, but condoned with by the Protestants, who can see the dangers of blowing open the truth. The macro-evolution theories of Hitler were entirely Christian. He looked to a golden age, a millennium, and believed he could herald it. He thought he was a messiah, or at least a John the Baptist, but, like all megalomaniacs, when his plans fell apart, he determined to destroy everyone along with himself. Blair is exacrly the same on a lesser scale. The country and his own party except for his inner circle of stalwarts are sick of him and want him out, but he is determined to destroy his party, and the immediate prospects of the country by holding out as long as he can, while everyone squabbles around him.
The claims, the historical events, and the person of Christ are the essence of Christianity; Christians are not the essence of Christianity, merely its representatives, as imperfect as anyone else of any other group is of its groups’ beliefs.
You want to divorce Christianity from Christians, but how can you? Christianity is its believers, and when they behave like madmen, you have to conclude they believe in madness.
If you are only interested in examining the atrocities of Christians without examining the overwhelming good that Christians have done throghout history (this includes European history), then you are again using hypocrisy to bias the picture you are viewing, and the straw-man approach that you are so convinced isn’t on your website is showing itself. Do you want to talk about Christianity or about Christians? There’s no defending Christians, we are not perfect and have made mistakes, some of them bad mistakes, and I freely admit that without hesitation. The real issue is where you are before God, not before Christians.
You are wrong. If there are no Christians, then there is no Christianity. I do not think there is any such thing in practice as Christianity, because no Christian actually practices what the Christian Son of God taught them. I do not have to examine the good done by Christians. Christians have spent 2000 years telling us the good, and lying about the wickedness, or ignoring it. I am trying to level the playing field that Christians have tilted by piling up all the evidence at one end, while digging away at all of it at the other. Cannot you Christians bear to face reality? The question is rhetorical. I know the answer. You cannot, because you all believe in a fantasy. There are some Christians that I admire, but we know all about them. Few Christians know anything about the actual harm that Christianity has led to. All they hear is that some Christians were good. Of course, some were, but when Christianity is supposed to guarantee that believers are already saved, why do they not all behave like angels? It is this very delusion, that by professing Christianity, they are saved, that has led to so much wickedness. God is not bound by any such commitment, if He is almighty, and indeed, no good God could give such a commitment knowing, as an omniscient being must, that deluded people will think they are saved whatever they do. The Christian has to behave as a Christian to be saved. They have to love others, not hate them.
“I shall be at peace, but you will be adding to the pressure on the world that will, in a few centuries, if not even decades, will lead to mass deaths by starvation, drowning, and all the consequences of careless addiction to ancient beliefs that are no longer relevant to us.” Really? I’ll take you up on that bet. Unfortunately, you may not have a few decades left, but be sure to describe for me on your website the mass starvation, drowning and consequences of careless addiction to irrelevant ancient beliefs, okay?
What descriptions are needed? It is already happening on a bad enough scale in this world that you tell me is not overcrowded. Keep on feeding people artificially while not giving them the means of self sufficiency and they have no chance of surviving. Perhaps neither have we.
Are you kidding? Irrelevant? You really look like the dimwitted one here. If Christianity were irrelevant, there would not be the revival of debate in the US over how we educate our kids (check out the intelligent design debate in the US, it is in full swing in this country where it wasn’t 20 years ago- not bad for irrelevance), the controversies about discrimination against Christians at all levels of academia and the professional world simply because they are Christians and not good gay-rights advocates, another issue that did not exist 20 years ago. Even in Europe, Christian ministies like Prison Fellowship continue to make gains and achieve recognition for their effectiveness and presence; even in England, PF is growing so much that the courts are getting involved as the outraged atheists try to stamp it out. If you are right, of course, maybe enough of your ilk will kill off enough extra people, after deciding of course who is “extra” (the handicapped, elderly, the unborn- they can euthanize about anyone in Holland now and don’t even need the patient’s permission to kill him), that the starvation threatened by us dimwits, who think that everyone has value regardless of utilitarian concerns, can be averted. Let’s hope.
The ID debate is purely falsely concocted by Christian nutcases, determined to try to foist Christian dogma into the public schools and encouraged by the moronic president who supports them. I have my own pages to contribute to this “debate”, and add them really because Christians seem to think that a lie repeated often enough without an equivalent weight of contradictions must be true. Christians should be discriminated against in academia because they have always discriminated against non-Christians once they had control, and because Christian belief is not scholarship but the opposite of it. Scholarship requires evidence, but belief requires no such thing. Faith is the absence of evidence. England is in the same dangerous position as the US, with a gaggle of Opus Dei and similar secret Christian societies manipulating our secular state led by the madman Blair. It is one of the reasons he does not want to go yet! Both Britain and the US, under these influences, with the war on terror as the excuse, are sleepwalking into fascism, as I pointed out above, a Christian ideology, not an atheistic one. Read the pages. You end up ranting again. Euthanasia is only right when the individual wants it. People who want it are conscious, not like the unborn foetus, and, as I have said, it is religious leaders who are killing people who do not want to die not humanists.
I apologize for misleading you, I in no way think that you are incapable of understanding Christians. You are not, however, in possession of an accurate understanding of Christianity. I think this may be why you are inclined to use your observations of Christians to inform your views about Jesus.
You are misinformed. I would not be surprised if I did not know the teachings of Jesus better than you do. The whole point is that Christianity does not practice the teachings of Jesus. The whole idea that faith is sufficient for salvation is idiotic, yet that is what I get over and over again from US Christians in particular, because they like to say they are Christians even though it is far too difficult for them in reality.
A great tragedy in all this is the fact that many people who call themselves Christians, and who make up the group of people that you refer to as Christians, have little more clue about Jesus than you do.
Quite so! But you, of course, do, just as any other Christian thinks they do, and it is the rest who are misguided.
It is sort of the blind leading the blind. Having a clue about Jesus is easy, one just reads what He said about Himself in the New Testament; we tend to make things more complicated than they are. Now, I don’t claim a perfect understanding about Jesus or about Christians (those who follow Him and also those who claim to), but I am aware of the claims that He made about Himself, me, and about my condition. Many Christians (those in the “claim to be” group) do not live much differently from non-Christians, as you have ably pointed out. I think this reflects that the relationship that have with Jesus is either very weak (certainly not one of Lordship) or nonexistent, in that it has not changed their lives or in how they conduct themselves or in their worldviews. This is one of the reasons why I am not a Catholic, as I observed this phenomena in their churches, similar to what you observed, while I was growing up, and I concluded after I accepted Christ that this was due at least in part to their belief system strangling the influence of a personal walk with Christ, such that to be a good Catholic it is difficult to have a living relationship with Jesus if you are not of a particular temperament, which I am not. See, the essence of Christianity is in relating to Jesus according to who He claims to be. It is not in keeping some sort of formula or obeying a list of rules.
The supposed personal relationship you have with Jesus is your own psychological prop. Perhaps it helps you in some way. But whatever you think this personal relationship is, it is not enough to make you into a Christian. Faith is not sufficient, and neither is being a personal buddy of Jesus. Jesus said as clear as you could wish what the Christian has to do. To Do, notice! They have to love others. You simply cannot be a Christian and hate others, as most of the Christians I am referring to do, or even be indifferent to them, which covers the rest. Nor can you love others and torture and kill them for their own good. Many Christians seem to have believed that. You cannot even judge them. All of that is for God alone, and anyone who takes it on to themselves to judge and kill others of God’s chief creation, humanity, can forget salvation. No doubt you will say I have got it all wrong. Well, you will believe what you like, and I surely do not believe what you do, but I can read as well as you can and I can understand as well as you too, in all probability, and I have read the gospels closely enough, and I am right and you are wrong. The difference is that I have nothing to lose in being wrong, if I am, because I do not believe it anyway, but you believe something that is plainly false, and so you will be shocked when you stand before your maker, because God assumed you would use your brain. He was wrong because the Devil must have fooled you all into believing something that is ridiculous. Just by calling yourself a Christian, you are saved, so you do not have to do anything.
There are many folks who view Christianity in the latter fashion, though, and through the universal human tendency to simplify the abstract to the concrete (Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses do this too, not just Christians), they pick a few rules to follow and then pronounce themselves to be Christians.
They pick any rules except the one that matters most. I would not say that the others do not matter, and cannot see how any supposed Christian can just willy-nilly ignore much of what their God told them on the one occasion when he appeared on earth as a man. The fact is that US Christians, and doubtless many others elsewhere think they can be Christians with no personal effort. They have a relationship with God by some form of grace, and that saves them. Absurd, and not at all what the gospel Jesus indicated.
Three tragedies here in my perspective; first, they misleed folks like you (observers of Christians, thinking they are learning about Christianity) into a false picture of what Christianity is; second, they claim to know God but God never knew them because they never asked to receive His gift of a relationship with Him; and finally, since they claim to walk with God but do not have His indwelling presence in their hearts, their conduct cannot possibly change and they inevitably continue in the nihilistic lifestyle of a person in an art gallery who fails to look up from the floor and thinks they are seeing art.
This perfectly illustrates my point. All of that asking for the gift of a relationship with Him is simplistic rubbish. How do you know you are not being deliberately deluded by the Devil, if you think this relationship is all that matters. The Devil can do all the tricks that God can, it seems, yet you do not think so. I repeat. You are told how to behave. What is the purpose of that, if it is unimportant because some fantasized relationship is all that matters. And what is the point of the incarnated God telling you what to do to be a Christian if it is all hogwash. You, my friend, are deluded, and it stares you in the face, yet you will not accept it. It has to be a gravely serious error.
I encourage you to read what the Bible says about God and about mankind, and then look at what the folks who you are using as role-models seem to think about these things or about the Bible. I have met lots of folks who call themselves Christians but don’t know what the Bible says, which suggests that they are churchgoers but not Christians.
You talk in generalities, but tell me the answer to what I just asked. Why did Christ say utterly plainly what was necessary to be saved, when you ignore it?
“Christians do not seem to understand what Christ taught and therefore cannot know what Christianity means.” See, that should be a clue right there. A Christian is someone who has made a personal decision to accept Christ, just like you have made a personal decision to live in opposition to Him.
You just do not get it. There is no hope for you at all. I am not in opposition to Christ, if by that you mean the teachings of the man in the gospels called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it describes him. I am in opposition to Christians who fool themselves that Christianity is merely a dream state.
Someone who claims to be a Christian but does not know much about Christ, probably isn’t a Christian; a person who takes the time to make a decision about something usually will find out about it first. This also explains why you get bizarre responses from some folks who say they are Christians, at least some are probably churchgoers and not Christians.
If you have a brain in your head, you can, today, find out about Christ by reading the books written about him. They are in the Christian bible, and they are most of what is known of him, certainly of his teaching. If he came to teach, he must have been teaching for some reason, and teaching has only one purpose. It is to change the way people behave. Behaviour is what they do. Christ meant his followers to act in particular ways, and few indeed Christians today do, and they cannot because they think they do not have to do anything.
Surely you must agree that a person with a passion such as yours, who puts together a website openly critical of a faith whose character is evangelistic, will attract individuals of that faith who see the criticisms and want to respond to it whether they have cogent answers to give or not. There are six billion people on Earth, all of varying backgrounds and maturity levels and emotional makeups; we’re not all going to take an intellectual approach to fundmentally emotional issues like those that your site poses. I may not have some magic answers for you, but then again that is not my goal; this is fascinating for me as I hope it is for you, I am learning more about my faith by interfacing with its opponents, which I have done offline for years. This approach works in learning soccer, it also works in apologetics, which along with soccer is a hobby of mine.
“But if you decide to join a particular club, say Christianity, surely you must mind if someone else joins while not accepting the rules.” Another excellent example! I did not accept rules to become a Christian, I accepted the gift of a relationship with a Person, and not on the basis of what the “doctors” of a particular church told me but on what Jesus taught about Himself in the New Testament (I belong to a Christian church, but that church is centered on Scripture as much as I am and not run according to the dictates of its leaders).
You prove my point again. You think you do not have to do anything to be a Christian. That is why Christianity is corrupt and diseased, and causes so much trouble in the world. If you have read the scriptures, why then do you think that having this mysterious delusion of a personal chuminess with God is sufficient for you to live forever, with no commitment to do anything? What scriptures are you reading?
So no, I don’t bother myself about those who claim to be Christians but don’t act like it. If someone claims to be a Christian but does not know Christ personally, I am not the judge of their salvation and, while I feel for them, I must worry about living out my faith and let them take care of livin out their own faith. God does not need me to be his PR agent or His spokesperson or His enforcer, making sure that those who claim to be His adherents come to Him his way, or even His admissions officer, determining whether someone is His or not. There is no need for me to worry about it; if Jesus is real, and He is the head of the church as He said, then He has it under control (if Jesus is not alive, then all is the more for me to pity myself and not others). I need to worry about me and my faith, to see that it is based on truth and not myth. The suffering that you spoke of in your last email can serve to help me in that regard, as I need to learn the hard way sometimes who God is and who He is not.
It is all there! You are empty. You have no commitment to anything, the insane delusion you have that Jesus is your buddy suffices. I suggest you ask yourself what the purpose of all that teaching was. Read what Christ taught and ask why did he do and say that, if all I have to do is imagine he is my chum. You are all crazies.
I have enough to do to know for myself the God I serve and the promises He has made and not made, so that when my wife leaves me I can blame her for leaving and not God for not forcing her to stay and be consistent with my wishes for our marriage, as if I have some entitlement to a long & happy marriage. God doesn’t promise me an easy life or a lifelong marriage; He does promise to always be with us, and to enable us to grow out of the sin that we inherit from our childhoods; but if my wife doesn’t accept God’s promises then that is her fault and not His or mine, and she will answer to Him and not me. My suffering is partially a result of her sin, but God doesn’t promise a world without the effects of sin until after He comes again to take us to be with Him forever, so I need not be mad at Him about my own pain if I know who He is and what He promises and does not promise. Growing in my knowledge of Him is plenty pursuit enough for me, without worrying about what someone else knows.
All the time you blame your wife and absolve yourself. You seem to have the same smugness about your marriage as you have about your Christianity. Maybe your wife was a bitch, but it always takes two to tango. I cannot imagine that I was the utterly innocent party in my relationships, two of which fell apart after a long time, but perhaps you are. The point is that you are obviously not self-critical.
My purpose is not to convince you of anything, as I don’t see it as my obligation to “get you saved” or something. If your heart softens towards the Lord, I hope my words are a benefit to you someday if you remember them. But if your heart doesn’t soften first, then my words have no use to you, as you will find a comeback for everything I say. This may make you angry, but a man has got to know his limitations, and I have learned that much about mine. Your quarrel is with Him ultimately, not with his representatives, be they self-appointed or authentic.
It’s funny you mentioned Bush and Blair, as I was debating with a Christian brother just two weeks ago whether our President is a Christian (I think so, he thinks not). I don’t think that Tony Blair is a Christian; has he ever claimed so? I don’t know much about him so I cannot say, although I have never heard or read anything to suggest that he is. I take a grain of salt to politicians in general, as most systems of power are not set up to encourage someone to live with integrity, so even when someone claims that they do live with integrity, I look to the fruit of their lives before choosing to give their words any credence.
Have a great weekend, we are getting Tropical Storm Ernesto this weekend. I went to a soccer game last night with my church’s pastor, who is himself an Englishman, and it was rained out after just 20 minutes, and I joked that his is more used to this weather than I am. Any tips for dealing with large amounts of rain?
I expect the rain you had was much worse than anything I have experienced, if it was anything to do with the edge of a tropical storm. When I was a boy, we always played through the rain, and it astonishes me these days that games are postponed for a little wetness. And in those days the ball was leather and acted like a lead weight when it was wet. You were lucky if you could kick it more than a few yards. A local professional footballer recently died of a brain tumour, I believe, though he was oldish—in his sixties—and had been a center forward (a striker in modern parlance) when the ball was as I described. He used to head a lot of goals, and the family blame it for the tumour. Unlikely perhaps, but more likely than that God is your personal chum! Was your Christian brother a Christian Brother, a Catholic, in other words? If so, the Catholics are closer to reality than the Protestants. Blair is like Bush a meretricious Christian, with a Catholic wife, and is said to be ready to convert to Catholicism when he leaves office. Several of his cabinet are the same, particularly odious being Ruth Kelly, a member of Opus Dei and until recently the Minister of Education so that she could help to bring in so-called faith schools. When this happens the country eventually will crack up into contending religious tribes, just as they are in northern Ireland. The fight against terror is adding substance to it for the future. Some of the faith schools will have to be Islamic. I have said before on the pages that we are heading back to the dark ages. A great civilization, that of the Greeks was destroyed by Christianity, and it took over a thousand years to get out of it. A lot of people suffered for a lot of years, and we have no right to force similar suffering on to others for another millennium just for dogma’s sake. That is why I raise my voice against it, metaphorically speaking.
