AW! Epistles
Discuss Christianity, Its Reason and Rationality
Abstract
An Online Debate
Christian Mike: I’m amused by your notion that the gospels should submit to rational interpretation. The whole subject of the Gospels is supernatural, not natural, so any natural analysis doesn’t really get you very far.
Magi Mike: Doubtless you are a wonderful human being. Most Christians think they are. Listen, though, to what you are saying. It is quite insane.
You should talk to more Christians: I don’t think I’m a wonderful human being and neither do the vast majority of Christians. If you read the Bible, it’s quite clear that all mankind is hopelessly corrupt (that includes me).
That’s a depressing thought. Is it original, or did Christians get it from somewhere else? The gospels are supernatural so do not have to be rational—you believe in something irrational!
I didn’t say that I believe in something irrational, I said that I believe in something which is not provable by rational means. I was making the point that your chosen tools are inappropriate. Believing that 1+1 = 30 is irrational. Believing that God created the world is not irrational, it’s simply unprovable (by me or by you).
This is what we used to call sophistry—a bit unfair on the Sophists. Surely rational/irrational is one of those dichotomies that are mutually exclusive but all-encompassing. If the gospels will not submit to rational interpretation then they must be irrational. There are people who think that Jesus is entirely irrational from beginning to end. I at least try to find some rational history in the tales. Perhaps you should be reading Earl Doherty or Acharya S if you prefer real mythology.
I suffer from a sad disability, probably congenital. I cannot believe in the supernatural. I realize it separates me from Christians, but I am hopeful enough to think that perhaps I have no disability at all. It is Christians who have it. The reason might be that there is no natural proof of it. How can I find supernatural proof?
Show me a rationalist, and I’ll show you a believer trying to get out.
You mean every rationalist should be insane too!
No. I admit the remark was perhaps a little facetious (apologies), but I think that rationalists should recognise (rationally) the limits of their own rationalism. If they don’t, then it simply becomes a religion, doesn’t it?
You are being a bit mysterious again. The limit of rationalism is irrationalism. It seems you have a zone of rational purgatory between. What is it?
I can’t PROVE to you the reality of the Risen Christ (any more than you can PROVE to me that you love your wife).
The analogy ought to be with the existence of my wife not whether I love her or not. You believe and love a figment of your imagination. My wife is real whether I love her or not.
Now this is the interesting bit: I say that I believe that God exists, and offer no proof because I’m not a rationalist. But, surely it’s not permissible for you as a rationalist to leap to the conclusion that God is a figment of my imagination—it sounds rather imprudent. You may say that the existence of God is UNPROVEN (and I would agree with you), but you can’t make the bold assertion that he does not exist without presenting irrefutable proof. I imagine you could be drummed out of the Rationalist Society for less.
I know what you mean. My buddy, Harvey the Rabbit goes with me everywhere, but I can’t prove it. Strangely, no one believes he’s there at all. They are being pretty irrational for not at least allowing that he might be there.
The point is that anyone can invent anything in their imagination and say to someone else, ‘Just prove I’m wrong’. Those who insist that someone else should prove a negative are usually insane or charlatans. Christians have both. The top ones are charlatans and the lesser ones are insane for believing them. You haven’t said which category you fall into.
But if you’re a rationalist, surely you must accept the possibility that Christ is real, that he was who he said he was, and that he offers you an eternity with God?
If you read my pages you will find that I accept that Jesus WAS real—a real Essene rebel against the Romans who had similar ideas to you.
Oh, the historical evidence for the life on Earth of Jesus is beyond any reasonable doubt.
Well, I am willing to accept it, but it is not true to say it is beyond doubt. The people cited above doubt it entirely, and Professor Wells of Birkbeck College has argued for years that Jesus never existed. He cites William Tell as a more recent myth that became real history. He also cites Faust who was historical but has been buried in legend. Oddly, though I put Jesus into this category, it is not that he has been buried in legend but that the true story has been deliberately distorted by early gentile bishops, but can still be discerned providing that you cast off their baneful so-called supernatural explanations. They were introduced to obscure the real story among people who were highly superstitious so that the crooks called bishops could benefit. What astonishes me is that clever people like you continue to believe this scam.
But you know that what I really wanted you to accept was the possibility that he truly is the Christ, God incarnate, sent to atone for the sins of the whole world. This is who Jesus said he was in several biblical passages (although all around him were people conspiring to liberate their country from Roman occupation). In the gospel record, Jesus leaves us no room to dismiss him simply as prophet, moral teacher or political revolutionary. In fact, whenever he met Roman soldiers, he was very nice to them.
Did I say you were clever? He thought God was going to start a supernatural kingdom on earth. That was 2000 years ago. Did you drop asleep in the meantime?
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by this. Jesus did not think “God was going to start a supernatural kingdom on earth”. In the Old Testament, God was always at work in the world, directly and indirectly. Jesus predicted that he would be killed, and would be raised from the dead before returning to Heaven. He said that he came to offer the gift of eternal life through his vicarious death and resurrection. And that he would come again to gather the believers.
Yes, that was 2000 years ago.
Are you saying that nothing has happened since then of any consequence? And that therefore Jesus was obviously a fraud? If so, I think your knowledge of Scripture is a little flawed. Even if you don’t believe it, the theology is quite clear: This period we’re living in, between the Incarnation and the Second Coming, is the period in which all people have the opportunity to choose whether or not to accept (through faith) the gift of eternal life through Christ’s death and resurrection. Those who died before the Incarnation are to be judged on their belief in Christ prospectively (there are lots of Old Testament passages prophesying the coming Messiah), those who have lived since the Incarnation on their belief in Christ retrospectively.
That is a succinct summary of the scam, including excusing the messiah from returning on cue. I suggest that you read your own gospels, though. It is quite impossible to read them without appreciating that Jesus expected the end of the world soon. He thought the ‘end of the world was nigh’ then, and large numbers of Christians since have thought it was nigh in their own time. Recently hundreds of unfortunates in Africa thought it was nigh, and it was for them—their bishops incinerated them. What does this mean?
And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven. Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.
Remember it? It is one of the places where Jesus says that the Son of Man shall come before a generation has passed. A generation to a Jew was forty years, but it certainly is not 2000 years.
All God wants is for you to give this your honest consideration! All the Devil wants is that you should die before you consider it at all.
God and the Devil are more figments of your willing imagination. People believed in such things when they could not understand the normal distribution law. They explained good fortune and misfortune for them. Now we do not need them to understand such things. They are either random or we bring them upon ourselves.
Smacked wrists again from the Rationalist Society for your totally unfounded assertion that both God and the Devil are figments of my imagination!
Harvey.
Thank God for statistics. Well, I’m not convinced that the Ancients, whom you seem to dismiss as stupid savages, couldn’t appreciate Forrest Gump’s observation that ‘Shit happens’, even if they didn’t have degrees in Maths or Pentium 3s.
They did, and that is why they invented good spirits and evil spirits. It was an explanation to them, and still is for you. Somebody with an extra 2000 years to think about it must be stupider, that’s true, though the absence of books and teaching for about a thousand years of Christianity did make it harder. Incidentally, why did they think books were unnecessary? Because they thought like you—people should only need god—so only devotional books were printed.
Have you ever considered randomness as part of God’s plan? Why can’t God operate in the world through the Laws of Nature, since he designed them in the first place? I agree that we bring many disasters upon ourselves, but that’s part of God’s plan, too. God is permissive toward sin—he won’t stop you from doing something bad, because if he did, you wouldn’t have a choice and you wouldn’t learn obedience.
Have you ever considered why God’s plan should be so complicated? Have you ever heard of William of Occam? He warned his learned scholastic monks not to multiply entities. I can get by with randomness that is not part of god’s plan.
You also seem to think that mankind has progressed remarkably over the past 2000 years—fuelled no doubt in the last few hundred years by our rationalism.
Mankind regressed for over 1000 years under Christianity. Did you ever notice that in your Christian studies? I expect it was part of God’s plan.
I beg to differ, and the weight of evidence is all on my side. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really fond of science, but I have no delusions about the limitations of its scope. Science can only take as its subject the observable universe. The observable universe is a part of (what I would call) Creation. As the tools get better, there is more of the universe which is observable, and new phenomena are encountered.
Are you getting confused? The tools are scientific tools and the universe that is revealed is therefore observable. The logic of your statement that science can take only the observable universe is that Christianity can handle the non-observable universe. It tries to and is always proved wrong by science.
Nor is science about truth; science is about finding models to predict observed phenomena. When a better model is found which predicts an observed phenomenon more accurately, the previous model is discarded. For this reason, the vast bulk of what you might refer to as “scientific knowledge” has long been consigned to the scrap heap. But not even the most arrogant cosmologist today would claim that he/she is engaged in the pursuit of “truth”.
One of my pages is called “God’s Truth—Pious Lies”. That is what Christians are—pious liars. You might well be correct that the truth is unknowable. That does not mean it is not worth pursuing. When I was a squirrel I saw a wonderful mountain from the top of my tree. I jumped from tree to tree to reach it, but never did—it was too far away. But I found lots of wonderful trees.
When you meet Jesus, you’ll know the truth personally, and nothing else will matter in your life, and His Spirit will open up Scripture for you.
When this happens I might as well think I am Napoleon. But you might be right. Lots of us go barmy before we die. It is a sign of the body wearing out with age.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. I understand perfectly why you think I’m mad: it’s becasue I refuse to accept your definition of sanity. Your modus operandi is “Proceed with extreme caution” and you step gingerly from one solid rock to the next. Whereas mine is an absolute trust in something I can never prove, and you can always dismiss. We live in different worlds, you and I, separated by an abyss. The only difference is that I’ve lived in both worlds, and I hear echoes of myself in everything you say.
Confirmation of the delusion. You might save yourself, if you start realizing that this world is your heaven and instead of mooning about a hypothetical better one, you ought to be taking practical measures to secure this one for your children. That is the route to salvation.
Until then, you will not understand, unless you have an open mind, rather than the timid, dismissive one you display in your sequence of hand-picked anecdotes.
I fear you are projecting, as Christians are apt to do. Cast the beam out of your own eye, brother Mike.
Well, I hope I’ve shown you that I’m more than game for you to challenge my faith, and for me to do so myself. You haven’t shown me anything yet which makes me feel that what I have is less real—but is that your failure, or does it just mean that I’m more stupid and more deranged than you previously thought? Bit of a Catch 22 for me, that one…
These things are always hard, whether you have been brought up to be devout or have become devout by conversion. I haven’t the least doubt that it is comforting to have a supernatural buddy at your shoulder and the conviction that you will go to a better world when you die, but they are delusions that stop you from properly facing and tackling, through action not wishful thinking, what is wrong. Our standard is that the world is sacred. Christians, if they wish, can take it that god is the world. But there is no transcendental god outside of the cosmos. The very conception of a transcendental god is stupid. If there is something outside the cosmos, then what we thought was the cosmos, was wrongly defined. It is everything there is. The definition cannot be gainsaid, except by fools. If there were a transcendental god, he would still be part of the cosmos. So, the cosmos itself is the god! Except that once more, there is no sense in defying reason and experience just to create supernatural mysteries. If the deity creates, then it must be female. God must be a Goddess and she must be identifiable with Nature. When you criticise the human world for illusionary progress, you blame science, but I blame the Christian culture. I use the expression because I agree with you that many people are not practicing Christians but have been brought up in the culture created by Christianity. It is a greedy and self-seeking culture with no regard in the least for the world we live in. That is why I disdain Christians. You might change. I hope so, but I do not expect it.
Do you really believe that when God invited us to engage the large brains he endowed us with, he meant that we should spend our time winkling out tiny pebbles of inaccuracy from the vast landscape of heart-wrenching eye-witness in the Gospels, and parading those few inaccuracies under an electron microscope as if they were our prisoners of war?
If I am obliged to use your metaphor, among other things, Yes! He gave us a brain so that we might use it, not least according to your own bible so that gullible humans would not start worshipping false gods. He said false prophets should die. Jesus died because he was a false prophet.
Jesus said beware of false prophets, and know them by their fruits. None of Jesus’ contemporaries who claimed to be the Messiah have survived in widespread memory much longer than a few years beyond their death. Jesus constantly predicted his own death, and his resurrection too.
You only know what the bishops who were recruiting converts allowed to be written down. Jesus was already dead, so it was easy to say he had prophesied it. In fact he prophesied the end of the wicked world and the beginning of God’s kingdom on earth. It never happened and indeed it has got millions of times worse under Christianity. He also said that there was only one saviour. He did not say it was Jesus because he meant it was himself. But 2000 million people cannot read their bibles and instead follow the Devil. Too bad for them!
Ermm… run that past me again? Yes, he said there was only one Saviour. He DID say it was Himself ("I am the way, the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me"). Where did the Devil get in here?
Come on, you’re not concentrating again. God! Not Jesus. Turn to Isaiah and read:
- I, even I, am the Lord, and beside me there is no saviour (Isa 43:11).
- Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour (Isa 45:15).
- Who hath told it from that time? have not I the Lord? and there is no God else beside me, a just God and a Saviour. There is none beside me (Isa 45:21).
- I the Lord am thy Saviour (Isa 49:26).
- Thou shalt know that I the Lord am thy Saviour (Isa 60:16).
You have to ask yourself, has God gone to all this trouble saying there is no saviour except himself, over and over, so that some man can say he was the saviour, and be believed. The answer is simple. The Jews did not believe that Jesus was their saviour, because God denied that there was any other but him. Do you think that God would say it over and over again—“anyone who says they are the saviour are lying because I am the only one”, then appear in the flesh of a man saying, “I am the saviour”? If he did, it was to see whether his people were attending to his words. The first gentile Christians were not, but that is hardly surprising because they had no Old Testament to judge by. You however do have an Old Testament, but you do not read it. God himself tells you that Jesus is not the saviour. The church had to invent the Trinity to get past this obstacle.
So I have a question for you: How much longer will you be able to hide with your hands in your ears inside the paper tent of your own scepticism, hoping with all your strength that the Risen Christ is not outside, and gently whispering your name?
You are sounding CRAZY AGAIN, brother!! When people hear voices whispering in their ears, they are lucky if they finish up in the asylum BEFORE they murder some innocent unfortunate and get 20 years on death row before they fry. Nearly every serial nutcase ever arrested heard the gentle voice in his ear.
Hmmm… I was speaking metaphorically, of course, although the real phenomenon is not without precedent (eg. Saul on the road to Damascus). Jesus has never whispered in my ear, nor in the ear of any Christians I know personally. Be careful not to judge Christ by the company he keeps (and that includes me). I’m familiar with schizophrenia, and I’m also familiar with the notion that claiming that God asked you to brutally murder several innocent young girls is better than telling the court that you simply enjoy killing people. It’s an obvious fib, don’t you think? Are you saying that banning religion would prevent serial murder by taking away the only motive?
I agree it is an obvious fib. But for some it is genuine. The Yorkshire Ripper and the former chief constable of Manchester both had the same delusion, but the copper only ranted about prostitutes. They are crazy. A certain fly boy who was a minister not long ago got a sentence and also an astonishing conversion. It helps them get early parole, but it shows how crooked or gullible Christians are. As to banning religion, it makes martyrs out of fools and rogues. The evil of Christian history needs exposing, and the absurd respect for Christians should be abandoned. But people will have to learn it for themselves or dissolve in a world of pollution and faeces.
I could spend hours (believe me) telling you how Christ has changed my life, but fortunately for you I always wait to be invited. I look forward to your reply.
Well, here it is. Read the pages, you started. You might learn a lot. If you dare not then you have no faith or it is so weak you dare not test it. Believe me, you will not change, because the pages try their best to be rational. You boast that you are not.
Yep, I’ve read the stuff, and if you’ve got some more, I’ll read that too. I don’t have a problem challenging my faith, in fact it’s quite healthy to do so, but you must see that you can’t use rational argument to bludgeon me into denying God, any more than I can do the same to you to prove he exists. I’d challenge you, however, to visit a church where the gospel is preached, just as an observer. You might like to read C S Lewis’ ‘Mere Christianity’ at some point, which explains much of what faith is about. Let me know what you think. How weak is your faith in rationalism that you’re scared to have it challenged?
To be honest I tried to read it once, but it was too illogical and full of dishonesty. The Screwtape Letters were better but I don’t go a lot on fiction. The huge difference between us are the following:
- The truth is out there. It is not imaginary but really there. Only by accepting what is plainly and obviously true will you take your head out of the pillowcase you have it stuck in.
- The cosmos is sacred, and for us that means in practice where we live, the earth. The earth should be respected like a god, and the earth includes all of the fruit of the earth, landscape, animals, plants, human beings, even microbes. It is not a temporary obstacle course on the way to heaven—it is heaven! Or hell, as the case may be. If we were taught this from the outset, as we should, then people would be trying to make it into heaven. Those who try to do the opposite can be justifiably punished.
- Because we have spent so long following the tenets of false gods and false religions, the world is being tortured to death. “It does not matter. God has put us in charge, so whatever we do has his sanction. It is a Vale of Woe to be passed through as a test of our endurance.” Two billion Christians will sit praying in their churches as the filth and pollution engulfs them. God saves. It just does not hack. It is a religion of irresponsibility—leave it all to God, to Jesus—Jesus saves. All twaddle. We shall save ourselves or destroy ourselves, brother Mike. That is why we have brains, and why I think we have not been using them. It is not using your brain to base our existence on myths laid doen 2,500 years ago when the world was quite different and mankind was relatively rare in population density.
By the way, I admire you if you have really read my pages, but think you have told a little porky! Anyway, nice talking to you. Best wishes, Mike
