AW! Epistles
From Maureen
Abstract
Tuesday, 25 May 2004
Comment on:
http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0530Resurrection.html
My problem with all this is that it is all presented as factual and well-attested, whereas it is, like all biblical scholarship, highly speculative. In the end, your guess is as good as the next person’s; nobody really is in a position to assert anything as being beyond dispute…
The subject line of your interesting email refers only to the last section of the first page of a three page article. You refer to “all of this” so imagine that you have read the lot but I am not sure. You say that it is presented as factual but it is “highly” speculative, yet the first three sentences on the page say this: “Resurrection is supposed to be the basis of Christianity. Dead bodies do not rise again. It is a physical impossibility and contrary to the laws of nature.” What is speculative about that? Now when you make huge generalisations which can be disproved by a simple citation, it is hard to take you seriously. I am happy to discuss these matter with readers but on the basis of specifics. What is highly speculative in what I have said? I am not saying you are wrong in claiming some of what I say is speculative, but you cannot discuss specifics in the abstract. I agree with you that history cannot be necessarily asserted beyond dispute, and I have several pages on the question of the approach to history on this website, but history cannot be based on exceptions. Religion is always based on exceptions—incredible ones for credulous people.
There are, for instance, discrepancies of hundreds of years in dating.
Now what do you mean by that in this context? Do you mean the supposed resurrection is hundreds of years out? Or are you talking about the bible as a whole? Again your generalisation defies analysis because it is too vague to be meaningful.
Too often the important question in biblical scholarship has been seen to be “How has this come into being?” rather than “Why has this come into being?” and therefore we have lost a vitally important dimension to the study of the Bible. To my mind, “why” is what we should be asking ourselves before “how”. The former might enlighten us as to the latter.
I cannot see your reasoning here at all, unless you claim psychic powers yourself. Asking “why?” is aiming to get to understand someone’s motivation—to get into the brain of the ancient people you are studying—but how can you do that until you know what they have been motivated to do and how they went about it. So the question “why?” has to be the last one asked, and there is never any guarantee it will be adequately answered. On these Christianity pages, I carefully go through the biblical episodes and relate them to what is known about Judaism and the historical circumstances of the time. By examining the “hows” and “whats” the answer to “why” begins to appear. The pages give a perfectly good historical reason why Christianity began. That surely is what we want to know.
“Why” is a question which has come to be much despised, particularly amongst scientists, who will often deride it as “a meaningless question” when what I suspect they are saying is, “I don’t know the answer; you must ask someone else”. But the “someone else” is not to be despised because their criteria are different from scientists. One might be entitled to say that you can only attain knowledge of the physical world through our senses; it would take a very arrogant or foolish person to say that, therefore that is all there is.
So, you are saying that you have psychic means of knowing things that the rest of us do not have. I certainly think we can only know the world through our senses, though I am happy to accept a scientific demonstration that we have senses that hitherto have not been recognized. There are pages onsite that discuss the sense of a presence, and so on, but none of it seems inexplicable, and ghostly or godly presences can be induced. There will always be people who will not accept evidence for their own reasons, but they are not rational people.
Thanks for your interesting response, which seems to me to assume that I was writing from a particular standpoint. Try reading my comments again, without making such an assumption.
Try reading my reply again without assuming I am assuming something I am not.
I think that I could be forgiven for feeling that you thought I might not have read the whole site and that I might be referring to the resurrection, when actually my thoughts were centered mainly on your pronouncements on the Hebrew Bible.
Thank you for telling me, but since the subject line of the email you sent originally referred to a page on the resurrection, as indeed it still does, it is hardly surprising that I should think that is what you meant to speak of. I made this clear in the first sentences of my reply, so it was no assumption.
It turns out you are speaking of the Judaism pages of my website, but your comments are hardly any clearer. Nobody is able to assert anything beyond dispute you say, but that is hardly how Jewish and Christian professionals treat it, so perhaps your comments should be directed at them. This is ancient history, and little indeed from so long ago is beyond dispute in detail, but the general lines have become reasonably clear. Omri is the first king of Israel attested in world history as opposed merely to the book of Jewish mythology called the bible. Everything before then is as mythical as Jason and the Argonauts.
You make a point about answering the question “Why?” but, in this context, I have answered that question. Why did Judaism arise? It arose because the Persians wanted to enforce respect for their rights to empire among some of their their conquered subjects whom they wanted to be a buffer against Egypt. The Greek kings, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, carried on with similar geopolitical policies, each using the Jews as a buffer against the other, and the Macabbees more or less completed the process. You think this is speculative, but it is deduced from the growing knowledge we have of the ANE at the time. It fits in without the need for God to be wiggling his finger in history. In other words it is a historical, not a theological, deduction. I agree many details are still up for discussion, but this is a realistic hypothesis, unlike the previously held surrealistic hypotheses!
Anyway, I look forward to any further comments you wish to add, though it is helpful to use an appropriate subject line, then there is no danger that, based on it, I will be misled about your meaning.
This is getting to be fun!
Arguing is not only fun, it is instructive, providing that you hear your opponents as well as yourself.
What makes you think I don’t also address my complaints to Jewish and Christian apologists? My whole point is that you’re all as prejudiced and opinionated as each other, prone to use sloppy thinking and language, except some are more arrogant about it than the rest and this is my strong objection to your oeuvre (as it is to others who take a contrary view to yours).
Well my remark was to do with whether anything historical can be established beyond dispute. It is a necessity of religion that it is beyond dispute because it is revealed by God. My own view is that whatever is revealed is done by hard human investigation. So, in respect of the subject under discussion when I made the remark, I cannot be as culpable as the religionists. I now find that I am opinionated, and not just that, but as opiniated as a believer in the Jewish God. If opinionated means obstinate in holding an opinion, then the accusation really depends on the basis on which the opinion is held. If it is mere believe, then opinionated is the word, but not when it is based on a lot of evidence. So, I cannot accept that I am as opinionated as a believer.
The accusations fall like rain. I am guilty along with Christians and Jews of sloppy thinking. I might have to accept what you say, if you are willing to demonstrate it, but even so, I plead that at least I do think about these matters, and no believing Christian or Jew does. Belief requires no thought. Indeed, it demands no thought, because thought immediately begins to undermine belief. Finally, I am arrogant. I take it you mean that I am disdainful to my opponents. If that is your meaning, I cannot disagree with you. No one who just believes, not only with no worthy evidence at all, but contrary to such evidence as exists, deserves to be treated no other way than insolently. Yet these people demand that others should respect them for their idiotic beliefs. I find that impossible to do, so, on this charge of yours, I have to plead guilty.
If I were to pick holes in all your text it would take me a very long time—much more than I can spare—but let’s look at Omri as a sample. As far as we know to date, he is the first Bible-mentioned King to be recorded outside that book but that only means “in the present state of our knowledge”, which is not very adequate and, of course, “absence of proof is not proof of absence”.
It would take a long time, but I do not expect you to cover it all in one sentence.
On Omri, I notice you are actually agreeing with me, while contriving to find a difference. All hypotheses depend upon the condition you mention. That is how discovery, notably scientific discovery, works. Hypotheses have to change in the light of knowledge, but it does not mean that we should not make hypotheses. It is making them that allows us to find ways of testing them, and thus we advance our learning. If our state of knowledge today is not adequate for making a decision one way or another about these things, how could it have been done with any justification before? You know that religion does not require any “state of knowledge”.
You finish up here citing the Christian’s favourite aphorism, albeit in a harder form than even they normally use. No believer is interested in “proof” except to gull their opponents. They demand that others give the proof because their belief is not based on any proof, but they will dishonestly pretend it is, to make a convert. The simple answer is that nothing at all can be proved unless it is a logical deduction from given premises. The whole point, especially of ancient history, is that the givens are often incomplete. Nevertheless, we have a brain, God given, if we are to believe the believers, which means that we can make comparisons, inferences, use analogies, etc, etc, to join up the missing dots between the ones we have. Historical deduction is about probability. Improbable hypotheses should be rejected in favour of the likely ones. God wiggling His finger in history is hugely unlikely!
Lets also look at the origins of Judaism; you write as though the last word had been said on this but the truth is that the jury has hardly even been sworn in on this matter, never mind still being out.
So we come to the issue. You say I write as if the last word has been said on it, when I am simply presenting the evidence for a certain hypothesis. On the basis I just explained, I happen to think it is a likely one, certainly much more likely than the one presented in the Jewish scriptures, for which, we agree, there is no evidence before the king of Samaria called Omri. You seem not to like the hypothesis, but all you do is give an unfavourable opinion of my style of presentation of it. Have you got any arguments against the evidence itself?
I maintain that your viewpoints are as speculative as the people you condemn.
You illustrate my last point perfectly. You express an opinion that my viewpoint is speculative, but offer no evidence for it. Hypotheses are not all as good as each other, especially those requiring supernatural intervention.
I could ask some more questions, such as:
- what do you mean by mythical?
- is there a necessary identification of truth with reality?
Do you want me to answer these, or are they offered merely rhetorically? Since you ask, mythical pertains to a story used to explain something, but which is not historical or scientific. It is a fictional or imaginary explanation. Regarding truth and reality, when the subject is an actual event in the world, the answer is plainly, “yes”. If there is no actual event to which the truth is being referred, then what remains is opinion.
Tightening up your language would improve your argument: “Surrealism” is best used as having a very specific (not woolly )meaning, which you seem to give to it. To me you, fundamentalist Christians, ultra-orthodox Jews (and I could go on) all suffer from the same intellectual problem—the closed mind.
Ho! Who is being arrogant now? My use of “surrealistic” is not in the least woolly. Surreal pertains to the absurd, to the subconscious and to dreams. In these terms, religious belief is utterly surreal. So, “surrealistic” seems to me an appropriate word in the phrase “surrealistic hypothesis” used in this context of religious history to contrast with a “realistic hypothesis”, unless, of course, you are yourself of a closed mind. If your mind is so inflexible that you insist “surreal” only applies to art, then just pretend I said “unrealistic”.
What should be the attitude of those with an open mind to the lies that are spread by professional Jews and Christians, whatever sects or denominations they belong to? Does being open minded mean we should believe their lies? Is truth no different from deceit? What is the purpose of our brains if we must believe lies? Must we all enter the same asylum?
[After some delay in replying, through illness…]
I do appreciate your taking so much trouble over me…
You must now think the opposite, but please accept my apologies. I was taken ill on 2 June and spent almost a month in hospital with pancreatitis. I am just now convalescing having endured antiobiotic induced colitis too as a consequence! So, I am not feeling too great, but let us see what you are accusing me of today. Perhaps it will cheer me up!
1. You seem to think that it is appropriate, in debate, to disregard your opponent to the extent that you do not consider their starting point. “At least I do think about these matters and no believing Christian or Jew does” That really won’t hold water; belief does not start from nowhere. You may disagree with its basis but to claim that belief requires no thought is unjustified and, I think, shows a lack of understanding of the matter.
It might be easier if Christians had a fixed starting point that the rest of us could understand, but they do not. They have multiple starting points, changing them according to whatever suits their argument. The three obvious ones are God, the bible and Jesus Christ, but there are others, especially if many liberal minded people who claim to be Christians—but can scarcely be believed—are also admitted, even though they often reject much of the supernatural paraphernalia of Christianity. I do not think belief, whatever it is, should be arbitrary, and Christians in their dishonesty will agree, citing one or another of their starting points, but, pushed in argument, they simply believe! There is no starting point. They believe because they believe. Most often it is because they have been indoctrinated to believe from being small children and simply can do nothing else. There are few Christians indeed who have thought about religion and having dwelt upon it choose Christianity with no other predisposing factors. Christianity is not an intellectual religion.
2. You seem to think that because people sincerely believe some things that you do not agree with that they are liars. Again, in my opinion, this shows a lack of understanding. A lie is told deliberately to mislead, knowing that it is untrue. Many of these people sincerely believe what they are saying.
You are concatenating what I have said about different Christians in a slightly simplistic way. I have distinguished between the shepherds and the sheep. Some Christians do the same. Shepherds mainly know what they are up to and they are the outright liars. The sheep are simple folk who cannot or will not think and instead believe everything that the shepherds tell them. They are gullible. The success of Christianity depends on there being a lot of gullible people. Many of the gullible sincerely believe what they have been taught by the liars, and doubtless there are even liars who save themselves from self-loathing by convincing themselves that what they say is true. I have had debates before from those who criticize me for making blanket or universal statements, and my reply is that to qualify every generalization would be exceedingly tedious and wordy. Those who want to criticize what I say should read what I say first, even if there is a lot of it to be read to understand adequately everything I say. Anyone critical and intelligent need only read the unveiled history of Christianity to realize that Christians are liars. It is no different from someone saying the USA won the soccer world cup in 1966, and millions or billions believing it. It is very simply for them to look up the truth and dispose of the lie, but they will not. That is what I am trying to do, but then I am accused of being unfair on poor, sincere believers!
3. You seem to carry on from a belief that they are possibly liars or, at best, being mindless and thoughtless, to say, therefore, it is appropriate to treat them insolently and use pejorative language about them. (This is a point of view which you share with/have borrowed from Richard Dawkins, whose work I find very admirable, in all but this area.) I don’t. In fact (though it ill befits me to speak for them) I do think that Christianity has got the edge over you here. Christians may not always have lived up to the ideal set before them but it is at least an ideal. Can you seriously claim that yours is better in this respect? To me your point of view—they don’t subscribe to my tenets therefore I can treat them as I like because I believe them to be wrong and even dangerous—could be used to justify terrorism and a whole lot else that is very undesirable. I commend to you your first sentence in your recent letter.
Thank you! I did say it with a purpose but it seems to have evaded you. The trouble with you, whether you are a sincere believer yourself or a misguided liberal, is that you cannot distinguish between sound fruit and rotten fruit, good cloth and shoddy cloth, validity and invalidity. You cannot even see that I can have views like Dawkins because we share a common view and not because one has copied the other. I have explained the common view often on my pages both in justifying my criticizms of Christianity and also in explaining separately what that view is and why it is valid. Like the people I mentioned above who deny what can simply be read about, once the liars are discounted, there are plenty of people—and you seem to be one—who will simply refuse to look, like the cardinals allegedly refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope. There is a proper view that can be shown to be correct because it works, and there are many incorrect views which do not work but people foolishly think will do eventually—often after they are dead! Christianity has no edge on the scientific view. If it has, then we should believe second hand car dealers, forgo all standards, and accept whatever crooks and shysters tell us, and not what is established by dedicated endeavour. For a long time Europe was the place of crooks and shysters. It was when Christianity was most powerful. As for ideals, there is nothing commendable in having ideals that mean nothing in practice. The ideal of science is truth, a word that Christianity cannot comprehend. It defines truth as whatever it choses. Truth is better than any supposed phony Christian ideal that has never seen the light of day, in the practice of Christianity as a whole. As for treating Christians as I like, let me repeat for the umpteenth time in these pages that I am criticizing Christians, I am not burning them to death!
By the way: 1. I think you have not fully examined the meaning of the word “truth”; 2. apart from throwing a jibe of “psychic” against it, you still haven’t given a answer to a point in my first communication.
Perhaps you would remind me of what these two points are that you say I have missed. I certainly do not claim to be psychic.
Your next short letter was too cryptic for me.
As the day has worn on I have given increasing thought to your last reply, especially the final paragraph. I think that it has made me see the barrenness and weakness of a position that seeks to defend itself by villifying the hypotheses of others (being unable to prove its own), and the value of an approach which respects their dignity. Thanks for helping someone who, formerly, thought little of Christianity to sympathise with it more.
It seems to show that you are perverse.
Sorry to read of your afflictions. I can’t reply in full at the moment, as I’m not very well myself), but will do so in due course. Meanwhile, please write a proof of the non-existence of God—not just a statement that he’s not necessary or that he probably doesn’t exist.
Two weeks later you wrote:
So where’s this proof of the non-existence of God that I asked you to write for me, then?
The reason I have not replied earlier is that I had to spend another two weeks in hospital. As you can see, I have been discharged again but, since I continue to have symptoms, I am still not right!
Regarding your hectoring request for a proof of the non-existence of God, I can only assume that you take me for a fool or you are one yourself. I thought you were intelligent enough to know that it is those who make a positive assertion that have to justify it, not those who deny it. If I claim that the dodo is not extinct, then it is up to me to prove it. It is not up to you to check every location in the world to show that no dodos exist. If you claim that unicorns, fire breathing dragons or fairies exist, then you must demonstrate your claim is true. I do not have to disprove such claims. You claim that God exists, so you must prove it. I do not have to prove the contrary. Neither you, nor any Christian or Jew in over 2000 years has ever succeeded in producing any such proof.
The scientific attitude, and the common-sensical one, is that nothing should be believed without proof, and the whole of science is built on making observations and hypotheses, then seeking to prove them empirically. In practice, this is showing that a hypothesis works better than any rival hypothesis. Science accepts whatever works, within given parameters such as size or speed. Doubtless you will believe that God works, but that is your subjective opinion, and no objective investigations have unequivocally shown that any of the claimed attributes of God are of any consistent value at all. The obvious contradiction is the manifest hatred inherent in all patriarchal religions, though God is supposed to be a loving God. His love manifests itself in few of His worshippers, and certainly no more than it manifests itself in non-believers.
God is a comfort blanket for immature people lacking the confidence to face the world on their own. People like me would not mind this in the least were it not for the obnoxious way you all want to impose your delusion onto others who do not need it and do not accept it or its underlying primitive “theology”. It is the main cause of conflict in the world, and has been for millennia.
I shall not ask you to prove the existence of God because I know that Christians believe in God without proof. That is why they are gullible weaklings. Just do something that Christians always turn their heads from. Read the vile history of Christianity and try to justify your belief knowing that the product of the loving God is indescribably wicked. Your own God in his manifestation as the Son, clearly pointed out that a tree is known by its fruit. A rotten tree has rotten fruit. The fruit of the God of the Hebrews in world history has been utterly rotten.
Wow! That really was a liverish response, wasn’t it ! Generally the more abusive people get the weaker their position is. You still haven’t got your mind wrapped round my stance have you. Atheists claim that there is no such being as God; that is what the suffix implies. If you assert that, you ought to be able to prove it. The fact is that you can no more prove it than those who believe that there is such a being can prove there point of view. Yeh, yeh, there’s a sorry history attached to Christianity but there was also the good side—it was the Social Services, NHS and Education Service of its day. I reckon that when you’re feeling better and stronger, you’ll feel more able to argue your viewpoint rationally.
It is interesting that people who like to boast of their own irrationality accuse others of it. Christians simply believe, as Celsus pointed out 1800 years ago before Christianity had even been accepted as the state religion. Simply to believe was recognized by this primitive pre-Christian Pagan as being irrational, but modern Christians think it is a virtue. Christian boast of their immovable loyalty to their faith, defined as a conviction that something is true though there is no evidence to prove it. What could be a better scam?
Now you try to switch the burden of proof back on to me, but though I might call myself an “afairyist”, because I maintain there is no convincing evidence for the existence of fairies, it does not mean that I am asserting fairies do not exist. I am saying there is no evidence for their existence, and therefore no reason to believe they do exist. The assertion is that fairies exist, and it remains your burden, as a fairyist, to prove it. You say that I am irrational, but I suggest you read a few books on logic and philosophy and you might begin to see how ignorant and irrational you are. If you are not ignorant about the burden of proof, then you are being deceitful.
You are being ignorant or deceitful to make the throwaway claims you do next. You say, “it was the Social Services, NHS and Education Service of its day”. Which day would that be then? The culture that the Christians destroyed had all of these services, and some of them, in the Byzantine empire, continued into Christian times. In Western Europe the whole of Pagan culture was wiped out and nothing replaced it for centuries. These are the Dark Ages.
NHS—Such medicine as occurred was confined to prayer because disease and afflictions were proclaimed by God’s authority to be punishments for sin. Eventually some monks and nuns began to cultivate herbs in their monastery gardens, basing their selection on folk tales. It was not approved by the Church!
Social Services—the Romans provided hand-outs of bread for the urban poor. The Church tythed their congregations ten percent of their income. As for education, this is the biggest lie of all. There was no full education service in Britain until 1870 when compulsory primary school education was introduced. It was introduced by liberal, often free-thinking social reforners, and few Christians had anything to do with it. Indeed, the bishops in the House of Lords were notorious for opposing any social reforms. The myth of the education service rendered by the medieval church in the Dark Ages is false, or rather it is a gross exaggerration of the genuine scholarship of a few isolated monks, added to the fact that the monks purported to give other clergymen, and those meant for the cloth, some sort of education in Latin for purely liturgical reasons—they were meant to understand the Latin mass and to read the Vulgate bible. Many could not read or write Latin, and got by, in the few masses they had to serve, by mumbling it—whence mumbo-jumbo. Whole books could be written on these public services, and the Church had little to do with them until the writing was clearly on the wall, when suddenly they had revelations and claimed everything for themselves.
When I am feeling better, I might find time to write about these very things. It will require quite a bit of reading and note taking, something that is alien to Christians except perhaps when they are studying that ancient horror book, the bible. Knowledge is quite beyond the majority of them, and I suggest you read a good deal more to save yourself from writing unadulterated tripe.
Sorry, probably typed suffix when I meant prefix about atheism but my message is the same—justify your position and no, you can’t get out of it by your bit about the dodo. That’s just a cop-out. I’m an agnostic; probably a sympathetic agnostic, getting more sympathetic towards Christianity the more I read your diatribes. They make me feel that you are on the defensive and cannot defend your position except by abuse and ignoring what you don’t want to acknowledge. Get better and more intellectually with it soon.
If there is an argument here, I cannot see it. Perhaps my eyesight is failing as well as my body. I freely admit that I cannot argue against such fatuous “arguments” as “That’s just a cop out”. Whatever you personally mean by a cop out here, perhaps you would explain it. I thought I explained, in terms comprehendable by a child, the burden of proof. Cop out or no cop out, the burden of proof is with those who make an assertion, including that there is a God, not on those who deny it. Since there is no evidence there is a God, it cannot be proved, in which case the proper position to take is that there is no God.
Being an agnostic is the real cop out, because it is a non-position—there is no need for it. We are all necessarily agnostics about anything for which there is no evidence, from unicorns or alien abductions to ghosts and gods, but we can take a sustainable view on them precisely because there is no unequivocal evidence for them. If many primitive Christians accepted this, they would be relieved of the terror they suffer that they will be waylaid by a demon or even Satan himself, or even by carelessness commit some grave offence to God, and either way lose their fancied salvation. Christianity is additional torment to mentally uncertain people. It is yet another aspect of its wickedness.
If my arguments are driving you to Christianity, as I have already suggested, you should consider the perversity of your own nature. In ignoring plain evidence while believing on the basis of none at all, Christians are certainly perverse.
You see, what really puts me off you is the “unadulterated tripe” diatribes. If you were really confident of your position you would not descend to abuse. Sorry you’re obviously still feeling poorly. No, I’m quite justified in asking you to defend your position, most books of logic I’ve read would say that I’m not out of order. You’re actually moving me futher and further towards sympathy with Christians because you seem to have nothing to offer in the place of the Christian ethic, however much it has been abused. Your viewpoint, as you present it seems to be entirely negative and you are only prepared to defend it negatively. Sorry, mate, bad logic.
I have argued my case on a large number of pages as well as in correspondence like this. Since I am arguing against a false belief, those who believe it will say my argument is negative. In all truth, it is false belief that is negative, and to refute it is positive.
Once again you write without a single argument except that if someone classifies your words as “tripe” with an accompanying explanation, you take exception to it as abuse. Your argument otherwise is to repeat falsehoods, seeming to imagine that through repetition they will come true. Since you will not interact with me, I suggest you re-read your books and discover your errors.
If you have nothing more to offer this discussion, perhaps it is time we concluded it.
You once recommended that I read books on logic. From my student days, admittedly over 40 years ago, when I did a course on logic (but I don’t think this has changed) I seem to recall a fault called begging the question. It seems to me that your last response might be guilty of this.
Much of what you say demonstrates your ignorance. Begging the question is a fallacy of argument. My last response was: “Since you will not interact with me, I suggest you re-read your books and discover your errors”. Any bright reader will notice that this is not an argument, and therefore cannot be an example of begging the question. It is a bit of advice rather like, “Since you will not read your schoolbooks, I suggest you play golf”. You might be better off with this new suggestion.
Sorry to see that you’re thinking of pulling the website and I hope your health improves. I have enjoyed our exchanges and thought that you might like to know that they have encouraged me to sign up for a BD from the Univ of London.
I seem to be picking up, having managed to stay out of hospital in September. If the BD means a Bachelor of Divinity, it is a shame you want to waste your time, and presumably life on empty subjects. Science is unfashionable, and so entry standards have been reduced at universities which does not augur well for the future of Britain. The Chinese whether in the Republic or in the many other countries where they live have shown themselves to be excellent scientists, and, the way things are going, our children and grandchildren will be in the third world of a few generations time. Without proper science, and instead an obsession with mysticism, fantasy and other forms of proven claptrap, we can only go back into the Dark Ages.
You could take your chance of doing something useful by enrolling in a science class instead of a pointless banter, astrology class, or whatever you call it. The trouble is that science requires effort and it matters. I can see why students want to enrol for things that are easy and do not matter. Good luck, anyway.
You seem just a tad confused about the meanings of words, eg the difference between divinity and astrology. I should look them up in a good dictionary.
I do not know why you think I am confused about these things, though the difference between Daniel and Mystic Meg might not be that easy to discern, and that is the trouble with religion for unsophisticated people.
You also seem to be making the unwarranted assumption that, because I am interested in theology, I have no other interests. On the contrary, recent Adult and Higher Education courses which I have undertaken include Modern Languages, four IT courses, Astronomy, and History of Art.
You seem again to be making assumptions about my assumptions. However meritorious these other interests might be does not stop the study of theology from being a waste of time and perhaps talent.
You might also be interested to know that the London Univ BD syllabus, which I am studying, includes a Science and Religion component. It reads:
- The history of the relationship between religion and science in the Medieval period (including Ptolemy), the Renaissance period (including Copernicus and Galileo), the Enlightenment Period (including Newton and the 19th century (including Darwin.
- Contemporary and philosophical issues. Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle, quantum physics, Chaos theory, Neo-Darwinism, genetic engineering and cloning. The aims and processes of religion and science (including Popper and Khun) and the relationship between religion and science.
Ptolemy was not himself medieval, as you will know, but I guess the reference is to the scholastics’ acceptance of Ptolemy’s cycles to explain the movements of the celestial spheres. The rest of this part of the syllabus sounds interesting and useful, but what I fear is that it will all be told by theologians, and theologians cannot distinguish truth from lies. They have no criteria for it, and so have become professional liars over the centuries. Since science is the natural enemy of lying and particularly empty beliefs, you are not likely to get much truth from these lectures. If you have not done already, you should read some at least of the articles on my Truth index, such as those on Coulson, Polkinghorne, and no less than six pages on a moron called Fuller. Doing it might prepare you for a load of bunkum. The salvation of the syllabus would be if these scientific aspects were given by scientists. No scientist can be a Christian, so, if the lecturers claim to be both, like the three just mentioned, be prepared to have dishonesty. Be prepared to have dishonesty from anyone who says they are scientists and Christians simultaneously. Ultimately, Christians bend their knees to their imaginary Lord, and science is abandoned.
Nice to have you talking again, even though there is little evidence of improvement in your critical outlook.
Oh dear ! I think that this is a case of “physician heal thyself”. You seem to be saying that theologians who teach at distingushed universities have a closed mind. I have to say that I have never come across anybody with such a closed mind ( and vituperative in the manner of expressing it ) as your good self. I think that there is something in the Gospels about taking the log out of your own eye before you try taking the splinter out of someone else’s.
The various maxims of Jesus are wonderfully dialectical things, yet Christians never can see them in that way, and so never apply them to themselves. I said that Christians have no criteria of truth and so they do not need to tell it. Science has such criteria, and it cannot get away with telling blatant porkie pies. There are no planks in my eyes. They are in the eyes of Christians, not that they care about it, or take any notice of the sayings of their own God. Truth is the proof. Remove the planks and you can see for yourself.
I attended a weekend course on Rome and the Rise of Christianity at Cambridge University last weekend and we were asked to submit some answers to questions as course work afterwards. One of the questions was, “Do you think that Celsus was right about Christians?” The tutor, who is a member of the Religious Studies faculty, had given no indication at all of his own opinions on the matter. Indeed, in his introductory remarks he invited us to express our own views freely, his only qualification being that we should be prepared to justify them.
Christians do just believe, don’t they? So Celsus was right. QED.
I quick gander through the letter pages of the Roman Catholic press, which I now take, would show that they are not as brain-washed as people like Richard Dawkins and company would have the world believe.
Anyone who believes that a wafer biscuit is human flesh must be brain-washed or already insane, is it not so?
I don’t think it’s quite right to say that Christians don’t have criteria for truth; it seems to me that they claim a strict criterion ie whether they think it is true or not.
It is interesting that you should say this. Is it what Christians think? If so, it is just what I have been banging on about for some time. Christians are under the delusion that their opinions are truth. Many of them end up thinking they are in direct contact with God. It is, on their own criterion, true. So when the Yorkshire Ripper was braining women with a pein hammer, and claimed the voice of God told him to kill prostitutes, he should have been let off because it was true. According to him! I simply cannot see how anyone can say personal opinion is any criterion of truth. Except demagogues and lunatics, that is. God is in the White House apparently, or so many US citizens think, among them US1 himself.
Scientists have been known to be wrong, you know, even fiddle their results to fit pre-conceived theories.
You are right, and the ones who have done it have been exposed by other scientists. Science is self-correcting. No one can get away with untruths for long because science checks its hypotheses and discoveries. You have just admitted that Christianity does not. It is all a matter of what anyone thinks. Science is true, Christianity is delusion.
I think that, as I’ve pointed out before, the trouble is that you have a limited understanding of lit crit and the history of historiography.
Well, if you think it then it must be true!
No, I don’t think that Christians claim that they "just" believe, some of them seem to have quite an intellectual approach. Celsus was a believer too, though not in Christianity, and so are you—you accept things that you cannot prove.
We all have a world view that keeps things understandable for us, and I am persuaded that there are many such world views. Though that is so, they are not all true. The criterion of truth is the key to it all. Science has such criteria, Christianity has not. Christians “just” believe. The “just” is important. It means they have no criteria of belief. Celsus knew that, and that is one of the reasons he disparaged Christians.
I think that in your presentation of what I think is called the doctrine of Transubstantiation, you present a rather jejune approach to the matter. Whether it is credible or not, I should try a little reading of Aristotle to improve yor understanding of someone else’s point of view.
I do not need to read Aristotle to know that magic is something that professional tricksters do as stage acts to get money. That is precisely what transubstantiation is. The tricksters are professional Catholic priests. I suggest you read Angela’s Ashes to get the honest professional Catholic view of it.
In my association with Christians and atheists one thing strikes me. Many of both are good living and charitable towards their fellow men and women. When I ask Christians why they perform, often heroic, acts of charity, they tell me it is because they are Christians and it is their rule of life that they should help others. No atheist has ever said to me that they help anyone else because they are atheists.
That is because they do not help people because they are atheists. They help people because they are human. The Christian response is their own rationalization. Being human is not sufficient for them because they have been indoctrinated into the idea that everything is ordered by God, and so they try to please their own figment. Atheists do not need to. Of those Christians who actually do try to help other human beings, most would do it whether they were Christians or not. If they were Buddhists, they would say it was for that reason. Good people will be good whatever world view they adopt. My argument is that by being Christians, they make it harder for themselves because they begin by choosing a lie. From then on it is all uphill, and many succumb to the strain and start to go insane, or at least become utterly self centred and cynical.
