Adelphiasophism
Belief in Insufficient Evidence: Christianity and Christian Confusion
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, Monday, June 21, 1999
God is Love
Don Cupitt tells us some churches have voted out of their hymns and services words they cannot use honestly. He says Christians can worship there and say nothing untrue. What then are they “worshipping?” It seems the answer is “love.”
”Love divine, all loves excelling, Joy of heaven to earth come down.” Love is God, Love takes human form in Christ. Love conquers and redeems all things. There is no God but Love, and to believe in God is to believe in the divinity of Love.
But, he says, to believe in something is quite different from believing it exists. Does he mean the abstraction love cannot materialize itself in the physical form of God as most Christians want to believe. That God is, actually, a metaphor for love. Christian doctrine was considered a poetry of love and nobody disagreed until Anthony Freeman, a clergyman, said it out loud in a book “God in Us” and was turned out of office as a heretic. Now, it seems that it is again:
The word God doesn’t designate a distinct metaphysical being; it is simply Love’s name. “If you don’t love, you don’t know God.”
Cupitt’s main justification is 1 John, which says the words Love and God are convertible. So, Cupitt falls back on the authority of the bible. The truth is that whatever awful prejudices, intolerance and racism people have in their heads, if they are Christians, they will seek biblical authority for them and, because the scriptures are so intolerant themselves, they will find justification for whatever they like. People want authority and reassurance for their power and privilege.
Just look at the Christian Serbs when they were treating people of another unspeakable patriarchal religion like insects. They sing hymns to Love but power counts. Power is for its own sake, and wants more of itself. Spiritual power too accepts only what is in its own interest, and when God gives that power, then its use or abuse is justified.
Christianity is a deeply divided religion. For traditionalists of a colonial and triumphal frame of mind, God is an megalomaniac concentration of spiritual power, always seeking more. For those of the frame of mind of a martyr, God is Love, which lives by sacrificing itself.
Adelphiasophists, forced to choose, would choose the Love that Cupitt prefers as God, but Christianity is wrong-headed anyway. Cupitt says Christ is Love in human form, a silly, childish wish, divorced from the real world. And Adelphiasophists believe that the real world, not fancies, however altruistic, is prime.
It is better to adore Love than to worship a plenipotentiary in your head but Love is derived from the real world, and, despite Cupitt’s pleas, even Love as a God has to have the authority of a potentate, or no Christian would be interested.
Why don’t Christians forget their awful God whether transposed into Love or not, and adore Nature who plainly and obviously gave rise to all of these things? The truth is that they cannot, simply because they have too large a psychological investment in their mistaken belief, and Nature doesn’t frighten them like the supernatural Godzilla they want to worship.
The Point About God
Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, enters the lists against Christian revisionists. He doesn’t like the idea of God simply being Love, a mere “caricature of Christian orthodoxy.”
But neither does he like the idea of God as an interfering heavenly being, itself, he says, a deliberate trivialisation of God.
We do not want Michaelangelo’s bearded busybody God who is merely an ironic anthropomorphisation of the real God.
No the correct idea is—guess! You got it—in the bible. A divine being “hides itself in thick darkness” (1 Kings 8:12), no image can be made of Him, even the highest heaven cannot contain Him, no human can see Him and live, and He is the infinite source of all finite forms, both good and bad. Oh, and His name is ineffable too.
This Professor Ward is a great and important dignitary of the greatest institute of learning in Great Britain. He sounds deranged. If this divine being called God hides forever behind a thick cloud, we have no need to worry that we might see his face and be frizzled up and there is little propspect of anyone making anything other than an imaginary image of him. A wizened old beardy might not be correct but it is as good as any other.
This professor with his degrees and caps seems not to consider that perhaps such a reclusive God might actually be the figment of someone’s imagination, a sort of Cosmic Invisible Man (CIM). Well, Professor Ward is too clever “not” to have thought of it. He actually knows it, but professing all of this about the CIM keeps him in a very comfortable living and as much port as he can drink, should he desire it.
He knows that Moses, in this same bible, actually met the divine being who normally hides in thick darkness, yes and face-to-face, and he did not frizzle. Naturally, he was an exception. But everybody else frizzles… You bet!
It’s all a bit sad for all those clappies who expect to meet the old boy—sorry, thick darkness—when they get to heaven. Most Christians seem to think that heaven is not a place of thick darkness but a place of intense bright sunlight radiated by this divine being, who we now find is really the thickest darkest fog you ever met. Well, by now we understand the God that Christians describe. He is God, so He is anything you like. He is a thick darkness at the same time as being an intense light. Sure!
Just in case we do not understand that God is anything that a Christian theologian wants Him to be, and is not what he doesn’t want Him to be, Professor Ward explains to us that God is, “as Plato put it, “even beyond being,” in that it does not exist as one finite thing among others—yet it is not simply non-existent.” Oh… right!
What is more, this God who resides in a transcendent place, also lives in everything else, so it is impossible for Him to “interfere in a cosmos which has no independent, self-sufficient being, but which exists only as the expression of the divine majesty and glory—though the cosmos finds its fulfilment in becoming a consciously realised sacrament of that glory.” (He really thinks he’s saying something.)
What others do not understand, but Professor Ward does, is the infinity of God, “the utter incommensurability of all human thoughts with the reality which is God.” And, of course, for the same reason, “Revelation comes as a transforming insight into the transcendent mystery which is present in and through finite forms.”
We have to have a taste for the Infinite not a theoretical belief in a disembodied cosmic person. Ward can distinguish wise distinctions between an imaginary CIM and an IIB, or Imaginary Infinite Being. For my own part, the only feature of importance of either is that they are imaginary. Professor Ward and many more Christians will tell us God is not imaginary but here their intellectual wizardry transcends the merely mortal.
Professor Ward is plainly a man who is absorbed by the concept of the infinite as though the concept itself was sufficient to confer divinity. Yet the only infinity that any of us can see is the infinite cosmos itself. One wonders why this infinity is not sufficient for Professor Ward. For Ward, God might be more than a little old man in outer space but the wonder of the cosmos itself is not infinite enough. He wants a bigger infinity. A googol is not enough for him, he must have a googolplex.
Despite the fact that many of his more traditional fellow Christians picture God as a male tyrant who damns everyone to hell unless they join some church and believe in Jesus, Ward accepts there is a wider reaction against it. Naturally, it is the reaction that is wrong because it is “naïve.” The orthodox Christian God is too big and too enclosed in darkness to be literally envisaged at all, but to help us all out he appeared as Love incarnate “in a paradigmatic way.” Eh? Oh… right.
The Christian Church is a community of those who seek, and partly find, true human fulfilment in a love which is given from a source beyond comprehension, which we name God. Without that experienced reality and the hope of its fulfilment in all human lives, orthodox Christianity has little of interest to say.
The learned professor tells us that Christians partly find love in something beyond comprehension. Well, it is certainly that, and Ward does a good job of keeping it that way. A “Bodelin Thirp” is also beyond my comprehension, but will I be able to find love in it, I wonder. Probably not, but, if I offered a clever man, £50,000 a year to explain it in words of many syllables, I bet I’d get some takers. I bet also, he’d convince some people of it.
Now, come on Professor Ward, you make it up as you go along, don’t you? It’s God’s Truth, isn’t it?
And, though it is all made up, though ward will not admit to it, and the infinite incommensurableness is purely imaginary, these people persuade themselves it is an “experienced reality.” All one can conclude is that, for people who live in a dream world, reality is imaginary. Most people who experience imaginary realities are locked up as schizophrenics. Not Christians.
”Union with that which cannot be said, but which words continually and inadequately seek to point towards, is the goal of the Christian life of prayer.” If this is so, Ward thinks Christian radicals might bring people back to “the God of orthodox theistic faith.”
And what if, as is far more likely, it is not so? Already through many centuries people have been wasting their lives doing what Ward thinks is admirable. For him, it is. All of those Christian tyros, trying desperately to achieve the transcendental rubbish he preaches, still fill the platters, and keep clergymen and their professional bulldogs comfortable spouting intellectual glitter to students who ought to learn something useful.
Talking convincingly about infinite and transcendent things that he admits are beyond comprehension, keeps him from not having to dig potatoes. Only the potatoes benefit.
Death
Don Cupitt, who often speaks some sense among a lot of unscientific nonsense, says, in “Face to Faith,” December 1993, a false understanding of the nature of religious faith is destroying religion. He means Christianity. Faith has become a “kind of epistemological miracle that enables one to credit the incredible,” the existence of a great reassuring “Something, Somewhere!” that we will meet when we die.
Cupitt calls this tendency, “Realism,” though most of us would have said “Fantasy” was a better choice of word. It is the dependence upon fictional absolutes and illusory certainties. Spiritual psychological repression is used to keep these absurd beliefs in place to preserve the institutions of religion and spiritua;ity itself is lost. Too true.
Early Christians understood baptism as the washing out of their minds of mistaken and sinful ideas, but modern born-again types think it washes into their heads anything they care to think of as glorifying God and helping them to meet Jesus and feeling pious.
Cupitt thinks we should live without a care, but that must be one of the worst aspects of the Christian world. Living without a care is being totally selfish, as Christians, obsessed with their own souls, are. No one cares a jot about the world itself.
Cupitt admits the idea of the Self is the most important idea most people have. Christianity is built on the foolish idea that everyone’s personality can live forever, when not even the universe will live forever. Cupitt says we have to be ready to lose our “Selves in the flux of life.” This can only mean, “Accept that you will die bodily, and your personality will go with it.” Adelphiasophists can imagine it no other way. We die—physically and spiritually” so that our children can live. Without it the “Chain of Being” would not be. It would be suffocated on its own waste. We live on in our children and in the ripples we make in the world, and in no other ways!
It may not be easy for a modern person, indoctrinated with the idea of eternal life, to learn that they will die, and do good by it, by returning to Nature. We are re-cycled—and should glory in it
Normally we are more or less conscious of being a personality looking out on the world, rather than a part of it. Yet sometimes we can become quite unaware of our Selves. We can lose our Self when we concentrate deeply on a task, or a pleasure—a great film, or beautiful music, or an intriguing task, a video game, a book, a puzzle, any one could utterly absorb us. We briefly cease to be a separate, self-conscious individual and enter into Nature. The experience is comfortable, and in a like manner, our return into the bosom of the Goddess at death need not be unpleasant but the opposite. We return to the arms of our mother as a snuggling child.
Why then are people surprised at the so-called NDE or Near Death Experience? Our mother Nature has prepared us for the experience of returning to her. All necessary acts of living—eating, drinking, reproducing—are pleasant, and, as death is a necessary part of living, since eternal “life” is impossible, being death for everything—death too is pleasant. Few people have an NDE that is unpleasant. People being eaten by a shark or a tiger, when they have survived it, report that they are often in a state of bliss. Death is usually unpleasant only if it comes to us unnaturally, at the hand of human psychopaths, who too often historically have been devout Christians.
Belief
Coleridge wrote:
He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end loving himself better than all. “Aids to Reflections”
Coleridge could only have been implying by this warning that it is what Christians do. Indeed, it is. No Christian loves truth more than faith. That is why they have no compunction about lying, if it is necessary to uphold that faith. But what are the implications of faith—believing in the face of contrary evidence, without evidence, or without sufficient evidence. Long ago W K Clifford offered some little parables to explain this.
• 1. A shipowner had the chance of a lucrative contract to bring 500 refugees across the ocean to refuge in the US. The only ship he had was an old one of doubtful seaworthiness, that had been laid up for repairs and had not seemed worth it. He had doubts about using the ship but knew that to make it seaworthy would cost him a lot. “The ship has survived so far,” he thought to himself. “She was never a great ship but has not looked like sinking yet.” With all these poor displaced families on board, God would not allow it to sink. He thus convinced himself that the voyage would be all right, and took the contract. When she went down in mid-ocean, he collected on the insurance!
Was he to blame for the deaths of those people? He persuaded himself to believe the voyage would be uneventful. But sincerity here is no defence because he knew the ship was not seaworthy from the evidence he had. He acquired his belief dishonestly by not accepting the evidence he had, and indeed seeking more, but by stifling his doubts. Having made himself believe by not honestly facing the evidence, he had to be held responsible for the fate of the passengers.
Even if the ship had succeeded in bringing the passengers safely to their Promised Land, would his personal dishonesty have been any the less? Obviously not. The shipowner took an unnecessary risk with other people’s lives. If it was wrong when the ship sank, it was no less wrong when it crossed the ocean successfully. It was only good luck that brought an unseaworthy ship home, not the owner’s judgement. He might not have been found out for his dishonesty, but would still have been guilty of it. Whether the journey was uneventful or not, he had no right to disregard the evidence, yet he did!
• 2. There was once an island in which some people had a religion teaching neither the doctrine of original sin nor that of eternal punishment. Some others were concerned about this and formed a society to agitate about this matter. They published grave accusations against citizens of high position and character, suspected of the unorthodoxy, and did all in their power to injure them.The government was liberal and appointed a commission to investigate, but after careful inquiry found the accused were innocent. The evidence was not only insufficient, but also such that the agitators could have obtained it, if they had wanted to be fair. The members of the agitating society had sincerely and conscientiously believed in the charges they had made, but had the means to check their allegations, and so had no right on the evidence to believe their own accusations. Their sincere convictions were not based on patient inquiry but on prejudice.
Suppose, though, that the commission after its consideration of the evidence proved the accused to have been really guilty. Would this make any difference in the guilt of the accusers? Clearly not. Their suspicions proved to be true, but they had still made the accusations on the basis of prejudice though they could have used the evidence available had they been bothered to find it.They had entertained their suspicions on the wrong grounds and, though they proved to be correct, they were no less culpable of prejudice. They might justify their position on the grounds that it turned out right, or that they were shrewd, and the people might respect them, but they were still guilty of their own crime. They would not be innocent, they would only be not found out. Each would know that they had nourished a belief on no sound evidence, and, though it turned out all right, it could have led to a terrible injustice.
The shipowner could have said, “I am perfectly certain that my ship is sound, though old, but for that reason, feel it my duty to have her examined, before trusting the lives of so many people to her.” The agitator could have said, “Though convinced of the justice of my cause and the truth of my convictions, I ought not to have made a public attack upon anyone’s character until I had examined the evidence on both sides with the utmost patience and care.”
In both of these parables, the belief held by one was of vital importance to others. If any belief might have some such result, every belief might. So, to believe or to nourish belief on insufficient evidence, or by suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation, is wrong. Belief is only properly based on truths which have been established by long experience in the real world of life—not the fantasy world of ghosts and demoms—and which have stood up to free and fearless questioning. Unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer can be like lighting a match in a firework store. Though simply unnecessary tinsel for people conditioned against the wonder of our lives, they often ignite dangerous prejudices. Though they display a bright mirage beyond death, they distract attention from the life we have and our responsibility and privilege in having it.
The belief cannot be severed from the subsequent events, whether good or ill. Unfounded belief can be disastrous or prejudicial. It is no coincidence that much of the trouble of the patriarchal period has been between warring religious factions, and still is. Religion is based on unfounded beliefs and always leads to prejudice and often to injustice and murder. The bigots cannot see it—they are too prejudiced!—but even when someone’s belief is so fixed that they cannot think otherwise, they still have a choice in the action suggested by it. Nor can they escape the duty of considering alternative choices and the reasons for them just because they have strong convictions. They will be unable to do it fairly because of their convictions and others must make them aware that this is the case and judge them as potentially unstable people.
All beliefs have some influence upon the actions of those who hold them. No belief has no effect though it might seem insignificant. It prepares us for more of its kind, buttresses those that resemble it, and weakens contrary ones. Someday it might explode into overt action, and leave us regretting what we did, or more often others regretting it. So, no belief is a private matter. It is liable to concerns someone else too, sooner or later.
We have the privilege and responsibility of helping to create the world in which our children will live. Every hard-worked mother may transmit to her children beliefs which might knit the world together or tear it apart. No simplicity of mind, no humility of station, can abrogate our duty to question what we believe. It is a hard duty, to be sure, and the doubt which comes out of it might seem bitter compared with our previous false certainty. Yet, a map that only guides us after death is of no value in this world, except as a comfort to some who needlessly fear death. No one likes to find they are ignorant, and have to re-learn false precepts. False knowledge might give a feeling of comfort or even a smug sense of power, but doubting is always more productive because it leads to action here—in this world.
Stealing money from someone might do no harm. The victim might not even notice the loss, or might have been stopped from getting drugs or gambling. But the act of theft is still dishonest. Unworthy acts cannot be justified in general. Believe something for unworthy reasons, and we weaken our powers of self-control—of doubting, of seeking and fairly weighing evidence. Let us believe something on insufficient evidence and there may be no harm done by the mere belief, it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts, but we make ourselves credulous, gullible and defenceless. The danger to society is not merely believing wrong things, though that is great enough, but becoming credulous, and losing the habit of testing things and inquiring into them. Then we put our trust into the hands of tricksters and rogues, charlatans and criminals. Even people who are not criminals will be tempted to take advantage of us. The credulous person is mother to the liar and the cheat.
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. Anyone holding a belief taught in childhood, or persuaded of afterwards, and not tested, must be suppressing any doubts that arise about it. They must be avoiding reading books and avoiding the company of anyone calling it into question or discussing it. They must regard as impious any questions that disturb it. Such a person is refusing to use the abilities that they have been given in life.
Adelphiasophists must test their beliefs honestly to keep believing them. A doctrine is not to be accepted once and for all, and taken as finally settled. Knowledge is never finalised for mortal beings—perhaps not even for gods. So, never stifle a doubt. Answer it honestly from inquiries already made, or investigate the matter further if the inquiries were not complete. When our enquiries lead us to a change of mind, we might lose face, but we gain wisdom.
Even Non-believers can be Noble!
The Rt Revd Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, in an article in “Face to Faith” in the Guardian on 25th September 1993, gives us his patronising respect.
Bravely, the best of such people [who do not believe in God] develop a sense of pity for their fellow suffering, struggling human beings. Such atheism deserves our prayer and respect. These are people who believe that life is devoid of any over-arching meaning, who think that existence, despite its shafts of beauty, is in the end tragic, and yet who simply choose to live for others rather than themselves. It is a noble stance.
It is indeed, bishop, far more noble than your own belief in having to ingratiate yourself before a make-believe bogeyman in outer-space, in order to be altrustic. And what is more, our belief in the meaning of life exceeds yours because we find meaning in this life not your empty closet life-after-death.
But Adelphiasophists are not seeking credit where it is not due. Our own motives for being altruistic are not entirely selfish like the Christian’s, who do everything with an eye to their own personal salvation (which is no less selfish for being a delusion), but there is some selfishness in wanting to live in a pleasant world. We think that by helping out the Goddess Nature she will return our efforts with real benefits rather than punishing us.
We do not want to second-guess her, rather we have adopted a precautionary principle—not to do anything silly. “Anything silly” means anything which we are not sure is safe for her and hers. We are compassionate to others so that, as the bible itself sets out, others will return the good deed.
But, unlike you, we do not believe that God is behind everything. The “spiritual reality behind, beyond and within all things” is Nature herself who extends to realms unknown and perhaps unknowable to us. We have no need of the hypothesis of God. You say “God is a mystery, who can never be fully encompassed in human language” but that is a cynical confidence trick, because anything that does not exists and therefore cannot be ecxamined is exactly the same type of mystery. It is because God does not exist that the language used of Him is metaphorical and metaphors can be interpreted in any way you choose.
The Christian faith stands or falls on the basis of the Resurrection and that equally can never be disproved. If I claimed my dog had said in human words: “Praise be to God,” you would not discount it, but if it had said “God is a lie,” you would just chuckle that anyone could say they had a talking dog.
Christians do not have talking dogs, though they do have talking donkeys, but they often believe the empty air speaks to them. If you are Gilbert Pinfold, it is a distressing, if amusing, malady but Christians often think it is God. The Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered many women at the instigation of the voice of God was, of course, lying or even mistaking the devil for God. Though the scriptural God often instigated people to kill and rape, He doesn’t do it any more. Christian events are what Christians choose them to be. They are not real unequivocal events. That is why Christianity fools children and the simple-minded.
Christians claim to hold to their faith because, through Christ’s resurrection, they think God shares in the anguish in the world. But why then doesn’t God do something about it? After all, He made it, so the suffering is His fault. The whole idea is futile and idiotic.
When George Eliot lost her faith in God she did not lose her sense of duty. The voice of duty spoke to her more firmly. We who do not believe in the foolish Christian confusion they want for a God, feel a stronger pull of duty because we can see what is achieved by it.
Any degree of noble piety does nothing in the world except pump up some cringing fool’s idea of self-worth. Any amount of piety and prayers never saved a single one of Nature’s creatures or a single one of her despoiled landscapes.
Bishop, get a life! If you don’t want one, do not patronise others who want to get on with saving it—in this world not your personal fairy land.
Was Jesus a Christian?
Rowland Croucher, an Australian minister, has explained that Christians, and indeed all major religions, come in different forms in which the believers only select the aspects of the religion they particularly like and make them into the whole by magnifying them above other concerns. He points out that, if you only have a part of a car, it is not going to work as it is meant to.
Plainly, this is true. All human social inventions and institutions must have certain checks and balances to stop unscrupulous people from doing what they like. In practice they never work because someone comes along and cuts out or plays down some check to allow themselves a free hand—and they “know” they are right! So a sect arises which in some respect is out of control.
Of course, the assumption is that the religion was complete in the first place, and that is based on its divine nature. So, Christians think Jesus had the complete philosophy and the troubles arose in the religion by various people being selective. All that is needed is that everyone should follow the original line laid down by the master!
Croucher classifies the varieties of religious experience as follows. It is copied here because it gives an interesting “Christian’s view of Christians.”
- “Sadducees” are rationalists. If your reason cannot comprehend something such as miracles, resurrection, angels, you do not have to believe it. Their God is very reasonable. Their theology is “liberal”. They inhabit mainline church seminaries.
- “Zealots” are passionate about justice. Justice is all about fairness, the relationship of the strong to the weak, the right use of power. Their God sanctions terrorism. Their theology is “liberationist”. Today they are priests and others who advocate the violent overthrow of oppressive Latin American regimes.
- “Herodians” love power. They climb to the top of religious institutions. Their God bestows favours on the “haves” who are “born to rule”. They do not realize that love of power is inimical to a devout spirituality.
- “Scribes, elders, teachers-of-the-law” regard tradition as master, rather than servant. Their religious way of life is ruled by precedent, what has been. “Come weal, come woe, their status is the quo”. If it is new, it is suspect. Their God is unchanging, not merely in faithfulness, but operationally.
- “Essenes” are liturgists. “If only we get our worship right, the Messiah will come.” Their God is “wholly other”. Their liturgies are exact, their worship-forms utterly predictable.
- “Mystics” major on experience. They are right-brain, rejecting rationalism, cerebralism, dogmatism. For them prayer (perhaps divorced from labour) is the essence of the spiritual life. They sometimes form monastic orders.
- “Gnostics” are syncretists. They believe there is truth in every religion. They invite us to make up our own identikit picture of God. They are at home somewhere in the New Age Movement. They develop conspiracy theories from the Dead Sea Scrolls and love the Gospel of Thomas.
- “Sophists or sages” place a high premium on knowledge or wisdom (he says they are not the same). They develop beautiful theories about redaction criticism, whether the four gospels are “reliable” when they describe what Jesus said and did. They write learned papers, which like those of their predecessors, will be seen in future academic circles to be largely nonsense.
- “Sign-seekers” love miracles. With Herod (in Jesus Christ Superstar) they would love Jesus to “walk across their swimming-pool.” Their God wants everyone to be healthy, wealthy (but not necessarily wise—academia is suspect). Anything can be cured, instantly, given enough faith.
- “Materialists” measure everything, not just money. The bigger, faster, more brilliant, the better. Bigger churches are better than smaller churches, brilliant preachers than ordinary ones. Success, fame, ambition, optimism, “imaging” are their watch-words.
- “Do-gooders” are given to paternalism. They do works of mercy for their own benefit, not just for the sake of the one done good to/against. Thoreau said of them, “If you see someone coming towards you with the object of doing you good, run for your life.” These “people-helpers” do not realize they are in it to solve their own problems: pure altruism is very very rare.
- “Antinomians” despise holiness—at least for themselves in private. As the term implies, they are “against law” and misuse grace. “God loves to forgive, it is his business”—so they give God every opportunity to do just that.
- Finally,“ Pharisees” are preoccupied with two things—law and doctrine. So they become legalists and dogmatists. They talk a lot about “truth” and “error”. Their God is unambiguous, reducible to creeds and doctrinal statements. Their gospel, repentance, precedes acceptance (with Jesus it was the other way around as long as you were already Kosher). The acid test: their non-concern for social justice and mercy and true faith. They are fundamentalists, and proud of it.
Croucher tells us that “Jesus did not align himself with any of the above groups: go and do likewise!”
So, it seems Croucher has missed out a category, the category of “Know-Alls” that think they, and no others, know precisely what Jesus meant. It is a wonderful thing—a sort of miracle really—that whatever other category Christians might fall into, they all fall into the “Know-All” category and can go around telling everyone else just what they are doing wrong.
The one thing that all Christians “do” lack is humility, but that comes of the best part of two millennia kicking dogs—everyone that doesn”t believe any of it.
Nature or the Schizophrenic Imagination?
In the Guardian (UK) faith column yet another of those humble Christians knows precisely what other people want out of religion. Those who practise a faith start with an “exploration of prayer and worship, a journey through the scriptures in the company of the saints to pursue justice and peace.”
There is never the slightest doubt in the minds of these bombastic latter day saints that they might not have the right prescription and that their awful prescription might have done untold damage.
Christianity is not interested in history. If Christians read a little about Christian history it is hard to see why they would want to remain Christians. So, they ignore history and stick to mythology, calling it history. This type of history is “travelling in the company of the saints to pursue justice and peace.”
Stripping out imaginary history from religious texts leaves them gutted, and seeking the true meaning of texts fruitless. So, Christians are now telling us they are simply stories, illustrative of various desirable or undesirable qualities. At last they are admitting that they are a mythology, a collection of stories with a moral purpose but not necessarily historical. But we cannot say they are therefore untrue. No, Christian declares, Truth is not a matching of theory to reality but a search for common stories to make our world!
If this is not an admission and justification of the fact that Christianity is the religion of pious liars, it is hard to know what is. Today it is getting plainer and plainer to ordinary people that Christianity is a morass of lies, so, making the best of the public realisation of the truth, progressive clergy accept it. But, they say, Christian lies are the real Truth! Make up any story you like, get it accepted into the Christian canon and lo! it becomes the Truth. Christians want believers to read the bible as fiction—but it is “true” fiction!
Here we have faith not as art but as illusion. It has always been thus but previously the clergy tried to hide it. Now, some at least of them, are so cynical or stupid that they lie openly.
Christians are unconcerned because they “immerse themselves in their God, the God in whom they live and move and have their being.” This epitomises the problem of Christianity. Christians are encouraged to “have their being” in a wholly imaginary Good Fairy instead of facing four square to the world and the problems we are causing it. Christians would sit praying in church while it sank in shit around them. This is not gratuitous vulgarity. It is what is happening to the world.
We are told, the Christian will not distinguish the natural and the supernatural, “forcing life apart.” So, when Christians speak of their baptism as a dying with Christ and rising to new life, they are not speaking metaphorically. They really mean “we are the body of Christ,” an identification which defies common sense views of time, space and personal identity. In short, it is supernatural.
In fact, if this is in any way a real experience and not just pious talk, it is plainly natural. So what could it be? It is the appreciation (which comes to people quite rarely in this world of formless, unimaginable Gods) of being at one with Nature. Since everything is really at one with Nature, it should not be a surprising phenomenon, but it surprises us because it rarely enters our conscious thought. When it does it seems mystical.
And when it does, instead of basking in the experience and rejoicing in the unity of all creation—in reality—Christians run off to thank their ineffable, in solitude or in small groups of ungrateful fantasists who would believe miracles should be stuffed up your nose, if the church sanctioned it, instead of contemplating the miracle they experience daily. They describe awe and wonder as the “nature of religious language and experience” when in fact it is simply Nature—and far more worthy of adoration than the projections of the schizophrenic imagination.
Faith Schools in Britain
Robert Stevens of this little old town, Frome, in Somerset noted in a letter that the pupils of Emmanuel College, Gateshead, were being taught biblical “young Earth creationism” and the Labour government was making no fuss about it at all. It might seem endearingly British to tolerate eccentrics and odd views, but in typical fashion the man responsible there, the headmaster, condemns “liberalism”, even though it is liberalism and not any form of fundamentalism that favours tolerance, even of bigots.
Mr Stevens points out that to make young Earth creationism seem plausible, much scientific knowledge—of biology, geology, astronomy and even nuclear physics, radiometric dating—has to be suppressed. Creationists seek to achieve this through the use of bogus claims of “scientific” evidence supposedly confirming creationism or contradicting evolution.
Should our children be taught complete nonsense as science? Those opposed to creationist lies have no way of communicating with the young people subject to this propaganda, which might make them fit to continue the lying succession, but will count them out of anything science based as a profession. Though Emmanuel College is a so-called City Technology College, tuition like this will render its pupils incapable of pursuing many careers in the sciences. Already, one pupil described evolution as an “atheist lie”, so he is already incapable of discriminating what is really a lie from what has so much evidence in its support, it would require a truckload of encyclopedias to contain it.
Though it should be prosecuted as fraudulent, creationism in the US is a multi million dollar industry. American fundamentalists, Christians and money makers have taken a great interest in the UK since pope Tony wore the tiara. Those ready to invest in British education include people for whom UFOs transport Satan’s lieutenants like Richard Dawkins to spread “evilutionism”. And, yes they think their pun is a sacred give away of the holy truth! God allowed science and terrorism to punish Americans for accepting homosexuality and multiculturalism. Blessed by pope Blair, bishop Brown, and canon Cameron, US fundamentalists will be taking over British schools near you.
They say, it is to offer parents choice! Let us Adelphiasophists choose not to have choices like this.
The Principle of Falsification
The Rev Dr Paul Sheppy of Reading objects to the claim that, while science determines truth from falsehood by experiment and maths by self consistency, there is no basis for determining theology’s assertions. In a letter to the press, he said it is “the sort of knock-down argument that the average first year student of philosophy of religion should be able to demolish in fairly short order”. His reason is that the “verification” or “falsification” principle is itself incapable of verification or falsification and is in it own terms, therefore, meaningless. He continues to say that Wittgenstein showed many universes of discourse exist, each with its own grammar, syntax and logic, and rules cannot sensibly be moved from one such universe to another. So…
…the application of the rules of the natural sciences is unlikely to work with disciplines that make extensive use of metaphor. “Bill’s a brick” is not a scientific statement. As science, it is either untrue or meaningless. But Bill is a brick, and very fine member of my congregation. Moreover, I see the truth of what he believes by my experience and observation of him!
The reverend doctor needs to go back to school and study a little more, preferably in a universe that demonstrably makes sense. The principles of scientific method—including the falsification principle—have indeed been verified because they are subject to constant falsification, and have not yet been thus falsified. The criterion is simple, and, indeed, biblical (Dt 18:22). God explained how a false prophet could be discriminated from a true one. The prophecies of the false prophet were not true. They were not verified in practice. It is the same as the principle he attempts to lambast, and, incidentally, on this God given criterion, the Christian god, Christ, is a false prophet.
Science validates itself by selecting hypotheses that can be demonstrated not to be false—they work in practice. It is a criterion that was good enough for God but is not good enough for his theologians whose true vocation is obfuscation and mysticism to keep themselves employed by gullibles who cannot discriminate fact from fiction.
As for “Bill is a brick” not being scientific, we must concur, but there is no reason at all why it should not be. Science is a part of human thought, and each of us builds it up from infancy as a succession of increasingly complex metaphors based on our experience. Science consists of these metaphors, concepts like magnitude as height, understanding as grasping, time as a journey or a landscape, and so on. There is no fundamental reason why “Bill is a brick” should not be meaningful scientifically providing that the metaphors are defined and Bill’s brickness is falsifiable.
Now, what is the basis for the theological claim that we live on when we have ostensibly died?
