AW! Epistles
From Mike H
Abstract
Saturday, 21 August 2004
Mike, I have the following comments on: AW! Psychology of Christian High School Kids—God’s Truth or Pious Lies? Science or Religion? AskWhy! Publications.
If this email is read, I will totally amazed, because it does not agree with your point of view, and somehow I doubt that you will live up to the thought in the last line of your essay “Keep your eyes AND MINDS open”. But perhaps I will be amazed, and you will read it.
You are indulging in the popular Christian habit of projecting your own failings upon others. I have reams of pages of discussion with Christians on my pages so how can it be that I succeed in arguing with people even though I do not read what they say. You, on the other hand, cannot even read closely enough to notice that this piece is not my own but is a piece written in anger by a 16 year old high school kid in Connecticut, abused and tormented by his Christian school pals for taking an openly atheistic position. You have to read this declaration of the author’s position and purpose before you read on, but, like all Christians, you do not need to read or learn anything because you already know, presumably through God’s revelation.
The completely anecdotal essay The Psychology of Christian High School Kids was… interesting. Dripping with antipathy and outright hatred, I was surprised to see the words “Keep your eyes and minds open”. Your mind sounds totally closed on this subject.
Well his mind is probably no more closed than that of any Christian, especially his schoolfellows, but Christians have a peculiar mentality that denotes anyone who is not a Christian, especially those who reject Christianity, as having a closed mind. It seems to me that the ones with the closed minds are those who accept fundamental ideas on no sensible evidence while wilfully rejecting overwhelming evidence that other ideas they reject are correct, and actually work in practice as everyday proof.
As a Christian and a Christian School teacher, I find that my mind is more open than yours.
Not while you are in those shoes.
I appreciate your point of view, and agree that many who call themselves “Christian” are not.
If many who call themselves Christians are not, then what is the point of it? If I were inclined to be a follower of God and His son, then I should not want to be obliged to get into the same bed as a load of odious liars, crooks, charlatans and confidence tricksters. Regretably, when you say many Christians are not Christians, this is what you mean, but none of you have the courage to tell the others what they are and evict them from the Church. The only people ever evicted from churches have been the ones trying to expose the corruption. You evidently are not one of them.
You ponder why your “group” is not recognized as the second largest group in the world. You listed a couple of religions, so I presume that you are equating atheism with them, acting as if atheism should be among them in the number two slot. The reason it obviously would not be there is that it is not a religion, but the denial of religion. Apples and oranges.
If you are a schoolmaster you will realise this is nonsense. You are arrogantly saying that only religious people are humans. That is typical. Human beings can be for, against or indifferent to religion. According to you, only the religious people count. Mr Moirez, rightly, thinks being against religion or indifferent to it are perfectly acceptable positions to take, and he prefers to be against religion. Your own narrow mindedness prevents you from seeing it.
Also, atheists are not a “group” in any real sense, as they are not organized together in any visible way, and in fact many atheists find the “group” mentality of the religious to be a pathetic thing.
Your perception is again so utterly distorted, I am surprised you are able to teach at all. There are many atheistic and secular groups, and your weasel words, “in a real sense”, are simply there to make nonsesne seem slightly acceptable, but are meaningless. I would imagine that most countries in the world have a variety of atheist groups, meeting on a regional or even city basis. Perhaps not, though in the USA where correspondents with me, adults, not just schoolboys, tell me they have met the same treatment as Mr Moirez. More important is the lack of unity among Christian groups. The last count I read was that there are 35,000 of them in the world, some holding utterly different views from others, the only common features being that God fatuously made himself into a man to get killed. This is the same God that can create the universe in seven days, including his rest day! Believe it, if you wish, but I prefer to believe the pupil rather than the self-confessed teacher.
You also say that “Basically those who don’t conform to their mind-bending, overpopulated, idiotic, cult are obviously evil and should be hunted down and murdered as their fictitious and fairy-tale like god commanded them to do”. I’ve not heard of anyone in the United States since the 1690s who was hunted down and murdered in the name of God. I certainly hope that you have never experienced this first-hand, and if you have, that you have reported it to the authorities. A person in a position of such obviously antipathy to Christianity would surely have made himself a target by now. Personally, I have never hunted anyone down for not believing in God, and find no call in scripture to do so.
I suggest that you should examine your beliefs, and read your bible. You obviously do not understand either. Tell me this. If it is a dire sin to murder anyone for any reason, then how can any murder be justified by those who believe God’s commandments? The Canaanites were butchered mercilessly for not believing in God. The Mosaic laws are full of reasons for killing people who disbelieve or refuse to accept God. I agree that contrary to these laws and explemplary actions of God, there are repeated instructions that people should not kill, but when have Christians, not constrained by the secular laws of the land, ever followed them. Black men and women were commonly being strung up on trees not far from you only a century ago, probably Christians every one. Only a few years ago they were still being dragged through streets tied to the back of UVs. This was gratuitous killing by Christians of people they decided from the bible were an inferior breed, following in the wake of centuries of the same in Europe, South and Central America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Mr Moirez is right. You are the blind one.
If you have read this far, then I commend you for listening to a few of my thoughts on your essay. Thank you for your time, and I hope that I have not provoked you into hating this lone Christian who came across your website purely by chance. (I would say it was Providence, but I don’t think you’d agree)
Chance will do for me, but if it teaches you anything I am happy to accept your word. It will not, though.
I have numbered my replies to coincide with those paragraphs that were your responses in the previous email. Openning the previous email side-by-side with this one on the computer screen may facilitate in understanding the references I have made, rather than continually scrolling up and down this page. Thank you.
1. I did realize that this was written (supposedly) by a young man, and not yourself. But it does seem to go with the theme of your website, and by propogating it, I presumed that you gave it tacit approval, if not an endorsement based on empathy. And your lumping of “all Christians” into a group is as foolish an assumption as my lumping all atheists together, when there are clear differences between various atheists. As for the essayist’s supposedly “Christian” tormentors, having known hundreds of Christian teens over the years, I, while not doubting the veracity of the essay, do have a hard time believing that these tormentors were truly Christians. I know you understand the distinction that I am drawing, between those who call themselves Christians and those who act like Christians, and therefore truly are. I do not know if you will appreciate the distinction, or even agree that there is one. Just as some “Moslems” are terrorists, many in the Islamic community would hold that they are not true Moslems, because they do not demonstrate their faith, or rather, they do not live what they claim to believe. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and many, many so-called Christians are not what they claim to be. While this does not condone their behavior (far from it), it does reveal a distinction between those who are and those who only claim to be.
You said before that many who call themselves Christians are not, and I asked you what then is the point of being called a Christian. If a minority are good Christians, it is hardly worth constantly making conditional statements to exclude them from my criticisms, and since all claim to be Christians, why should I not criticize Christians as they manifest themselves in the majority? You doubtless claim to be a good Christian, so why do you condone a load of crooks and confidence tricksters in your own ranks giving you a bad name. You are attacking me for not making the distinction but it is your problem. You sort it out, and then your reply might have some meaning.
2. When you say that Christians have a peculiar mentality that denotes anyone who is not a Christian, especially those who reject Christianity, as having a closed mind. Again, lumping all Christians together, you mistake the actions and/or beliefs of some for the beliefs of all, projecting the faults of some onto all of the others.
Read what I just wrote. If you cannot distinguish the good and the bad Christian yourself, then I have no obligation to do it for you.
Most Christians I know have doubted their faith at times, which would clearly indicate an open mind; many Christians wonder at times if they are wrong in their beliefs, and even if God really does exist at all. Not exactly “closed mind[ed]”, as you say.
Let me remind you that the words “mind” and “closed” were introduced by you. The Christians you know are hardly a representative sample, and your opinion of how they think is hardly a scientific assessment of them. To use your word it is no more than anecdotal. Christians who really doubt their faith and therefore examine the basis for it closely, usually leave their church, a reason why Christianity has been on a long decline. The clergy no longer have the shamanic and indeed absolute power they once had. In other words people are increasingly recognizing they are frauds. Those who have doubts but do not leave, get their “faith” bolstered by some pastor or friends eager to earn brownie points with God, they imagine.
Also, many who call themselves Christians in the modern world also believe that there are many paths to God, and not just their own. I have met some of these people, so I know that they exist. Lumping all “Christians” together, once again, leads to confusion, and perhaps to erroneous assessments on your part.
If this is true then the bible is false. It clearly states there is only one path to God. “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. John 14:6” What then are all these alternative paths? Like all Christians, you say whatever suits you. That is Christian truth even though it is objectively false.
As for people accepting “fundamental ideas on no sensible evidence”, that, by definition, is what faith is. It cannot be proved scientifically, although science continues to prove the Bible correct, at least in its historical information.
You are, for once, correct in your definition of faith, and it is precisely the core of the Christian scam. You would do nothing significant in life on the basis of faith, and those that do buy timeshares, cars, jewelry merely on someone’s say so are usually tricked. Christianity is the same but far more comprehensive. As for science proving the bible in its historical information, this is an outright lie, and my pages are full of the real findings of science regarding the events of the bible as opposed to Christian deceit.
Before the twentieth century, scholars scoffed at the Bible’s seeming misinformation when it mentions at civilization to the north where the people were called Hittites. Earlier last century the civilization’s existence was confirmed by archaeology, and all books on ancient civilizations contain information on it today.
As a matter of fact, the Hittites of the bible were not the Hittites who were discovered to have had a great empire based in Turkey. David the great king had a sordid episode with Uriah the Hittite—an episode that no good man would want to relate to his growing son—but this Uriah was a worshipper of Yehouah, as his name betrays, and so he could not have been a Hittite. Hittites did not worship Yehouah. They had their own gods. Hittite in the bible was a description of a Canaanite from a particular part of Canaan. No doubt this was at some stage occupied by the Hittites but it was not in biblical times. And while the bible had this name right, just as it names some of the kings of Assyria, many other names such as Hivites, Midianites, Perizzites, and many others never seem to have existed unless they are coded names for better known peoples, in which case the Jewish Scriptures are in large measure allegorical, though Christians do not realize it. Read the pages. Nothing has been verified in the biblical account of history before Omri! All your favourite Old Testament people are mythical.
Though this does not prove the Bible’s metaphysical claims of God, Heaven, the ressurection, etc., it does show that the sciences have been put up against the claims of the Bible, and so far there has been nothing discovered that has disproved any part of it.
Blatant deceit. Read the pages.
As for proving there is a God, I cannot do that, just as you cannot prove to me, sensibly, that there is not a God. You certainly do not seem open minded to the idea of God’s existance, so you are certainly more closed minded than I, a professing Christian.
If this is the way of thinking intelligent people should adopt, then I should believe in fiery dragons, unicorns, fairies, banshees, gnomes, trolls, centaurs, Harvey the Rabbit, Mother Goose and the Tooth Fairy. No one should believe anything on an utter lack of evidence. That is why no one sane believes any of these today. Angels are just Christian fairies, and demons are Christian trolls. God is the Christian Fairy Godmother, except that Christian women are classified as Cinderella, a scullery maid, and they clean the pews, so Christians have a Fairy Godfather. The sensible rule for belief, the scientific one, is not to believe anything without adequate evidence. There is no evidence for God except subjective sensations best explained by psychiatry. No Christian has been able to prove His existence, though the burden of proof is on them, not on those who refuse to accept such credulity.
3. Again, you assume that I am closed minded because of my profession and religion. The fact that you assume I cannot be open minded only indicates that you are close minded as to that possiblity.
That someone believes with no sound evidence can only betray a closed mind. If your mind were open you would quickly realise you have been conned, unless of course, you are one of the conners.
4. The point of calling myself a Christian, when there are clearly some “Christians” who are abberant in their behavior, is that I will not be ashamed of what I am, even though there are others who defame the title. I am also an avid movie enthusiast, and will not stop watching movies simply because there are other “avid movie enthusiasts” who are bad people.
What sort of analogy is this supposed to be? Christian is a title that Christians say denotes a pure and honest man, someone trying to be perfect just as God is perfect. People watching movies are making no such claim. Is this how you teach your pupils?
When you say that “The only people ever evicted from churches have been the ones trying to expose the corruption”, perhaps you have not been to many churches, or have not attended any particular one for a lengthy period, and again are simply assuming this is so because you have not seen it on the nightly news. I have known people in own church who were shunned until they left because they had been involved in innappropriate behavior. Again, you would have to go to church to find this out. Then again, why should a church kick out “the odious liars, crooks, charlatans, and confidence tricksters?” Aren’t they the ones who need to be in church, so they can perhaps once day learn to change? A church is supposed to be a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints. You go to be made better, although I would agree with you that there are those who go and never change. It sounds, from your characterization of Christians, that you believe that the majority (if not all) are odious liars and crooks. Again, go to church and actually get to know the people sitting around you. And when you say that “You evidently are not one of them”, you choose to insult me by assuming that I have never tried to expose corruption in my church, since I am still there. Does it make you feel better about yourself to put others down? I have tried to avoid any such harsh judgements about yourself or atheists in general, and have kept this discussion on an intellectual level. Yet you choose to take the low road and insult me personally.
I am not talking particularly about any particular congregation. Doubtless, the normal distribution law being what if is, some churches have exemplary people in them. I am talking about the history of Christianity over 2000 years. This is a far more representative sample of Christians than your church is, quite apart from the fact that I have to take your word for it, and you have already shown, in respect of your knowledge of the relationship of the Jewish scriptures to history, that you are less than honest. I am therefore not insulting you. I am describing you on the basis of the evidence you have provided yourself.
5. You put words in my mouth that are not there. In fact, my words are printed on the screen, so you would have to be purposefully misunderstanding them to make some point. I was simply stating that atheism would not be listed as a religion in the world’s religions, simply on the fact that it is not a religion. Atheism would also not be listed as a record company or a designer jeans manufacturer, because it is not one. Nowhere in my sentences did I say, or even hint, that I believed that “only religious people are humans”. An purposefully incorrect statement on your part. You also say that according to me, only religious people count. When you are listing world religions, that is true. When the U.S. census calculates the number of people living in the U.S., it does not count those in France or Brazil; not because they aren’t humans, but because they aren’t Americans. When you said that “If you are a schoolmaster you will realise this is nonsense”, perhaps you meant your paragraph.
As usual, you are wriggling on the hook. I have personally had correspondence from Christians who freely describe atheism and agnosticism as religions, so again, you Christians are hardly coherent in your beliefs. I accept, with you, however, than they are not religions. My point, which is perfectly clear, is that anyone is entitled to take the atheistic position rather than adopt a religion. The set of choices open to humans is to deny religion or to accept it, and the denial of religion must be included as an option. By including only religions as possible human choices, you are doing precisely what I said, ignoring large chunks of humanity. Plainly it suits you, in your Christian dishonesty, because you care not to admit that people can live perfectly well without religion, and a very large number do. That a schoolmaster should see a tendentious analysis as nonsense stands. The full set of human choices includes atheism. To exclude it is to make nonsense of the analysis.
6. I said that atheists are not a “group” in the sense that they are not organized as a whole, most atheists being members of no specific atheist organization or group. You own website says that atheists are not organized in a large way. I was simply agreeing with you. I was not unsulting atheists, and I never have.
You were attempting to find absurd distinctions between atheistic organisations and Christian ones. There are none, except that atheists do not feel the need to have a large number of people around them to uphold their beliefs. Christians are on dodgy ground, however, believing the impossible on no evidence, and need the comfort that a large number of equally deluded people can bring.
You seem to be getting quite angry in this reply to my earlier email. You do prove my point, though, when you say that there are so many Christian groups, “some holding utterly different views from others”, while you continue to lump them all together in your generalizations. Which is it? Are we all the same, or are we totally different from each other in our Christian beliefs? You cannot have it both ways.
Why not? There can be no reason for the Christian religion to have spallated into 35,000 sects if they all believe precisely the same things, yet they all happily call themselves Christian. Answer your own question. Are you the same or not? You insert the weasel word “totally” in your penultimate sentence, a typical and transparent Christian ploy. Christian sects are not presumably totally different otherwise one or other of them can not be Christian. My arguments, and the generalisation of my criticisms to you all are precisely on your core beliefs. Christianity is false at its core. Round the periphery it is also deceitful, because you all select what you choose to believe and what to ignore in the teachings of your own god. Your God insisted that poverty was a virtue, a virtue that he considered so important that he practised it himself, and announced that the poor were already blessed. How many Christians now practise this virtue? It is no longer convenient, so they drop it with utter cynicism.
You say that “God fatuously made himself into a man to get killed”. Fatuously meaning, according to the dictionary: “Complacently or unconsciously stupid; asinine, inane, delusive”. Again you insult my beliefs, when I never, Never insulted yours. That is not the mark of an educated person, nor of an intellectual person, to attack someone on a personal level when your arguements, if they are so obvious and persuasive, would not need to be imbued with such attacks on the debator.
Do you realize that God made the world, according to your own myths, in only six days. He is described as almighty, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc. He clearly says in the Jewish scriptures that He alone is the saviour and that false prophets should die. Yet you claim that he acts like a dolt, ignoring everything He has previously insisted upon, to personally appear as a false savoiur, a false prophet, and have Himself killed as one while expecting everyone to believe here is a new revelation. That is what is fatuous. Christians take their own God to be an idiot, not me. I do not believe in God. The first Christians had no respect for intelligence and enouraged everyone to be fools or act like children. Why am I supposed to respect this mishmash. Despite it Christians contrive to say that Jesus refutes the Mosaic law when he does the opposite, more than once, yet they retain the Jewish scriptures within the Christian bible, though its main purpose to uphold the law has been abrogated. There is nothing to be respected here, and I refuse to be obliged to respect garbage.
7. You say to read my Bible, that the Canaanites were “butchered mercilessly for not believing God’s commandments”. First, I doubt that the Israelites would butcher people because they didn’t believe in the Ten Commandments. Butchered for their land, or during war, perhaps. Killing in war is not murder, except in the minds of a few. Otherwise, what the U.S. did in freeing Europe from Nazi Germany in World War II would have been murder, since we killed to many Germans. I doubt you will find many people who would consider that murder, even among today’s Germans.
Your analogies are, as usual, utterly faulty. If this analogy were to be correct the Israelites would have the role of the Nazis. The Nazis had the plan of conquering neighboring countries, and most of the rest of the world thought that was intolerable. The Israelites, according to the biblical myth, invaded a perfectly peaceful people who had lived in their land of Canaan for millennia thinking that it was theirs. God, in terms of justice, should have been on the side of those defending their homeland. The point is that the Canaanites did not have the law of Moses. It had been given to the Israelites by Yehouah, but not to the Canaanites. The Canaanites were therefore dispensible precisely because they did not believe in God’s Commandments! Even if you think it proper than people should be butchered for their land, I suggest that is no commendation of Christianity, even though Christians have willingly stolen other people’s land and possessions throughout history. The American Christian leadership today claim they are defending their homeland by invading a country that happens to be loaded with oil, 12000 miles away. It is a disastrous continuation of Old Testament morality.
You also state, as if all instances were the case, that those who were lynched in the South and even those tortured horrifically today in crimes are always the victims of Christians. You offer no proof of this.
You must be joking, aren’t you? Common sense is sufficient, though documentary evidence cannot be hard to find. Even today 50% of Americans attend Church. Then it must have been over 90%. Who then would have done the lynching, other than Christians.
Furthermore, I feel certain that there may have been one or two crimes in the past that were committed by atheists, assuming that you are all not perfectly pure in your treatment of your fellow man.
You are undoubtedly right that some atheists have committed crimes, but so what. The temptation to commit crimes is equally present for all humans. The point is that Christians are supposed to be of a stronger moral substance. History and psychology does not proove it, rather the opposite. The worst crimes in Europe over the last 2000 years have been committed by Christians, acting officially. Louts who are taken aside and given religious instruction often do become religious, but they remain thieves and vandals, as psychiatrists have shown.
You imply that Christians only hold back in their wicked behavior because they are “constrained by the secular laws of the land”. Surely you realize how absurd this statement is, as all of the laws we have today are moral, and are based on religious laws (such as those pesky Ten Commandments). You can’t steal, you can’t murder, you can’t lie under oath… sounds like the secular law codes are perfectly in sync with the religious moral codes. That being the case, then the Christians have restrained themselves from bad behavior by getting their moral codes enacted into the legal codes of all civilized nations today. They have restrained themselves! I would have go agree with you in this matter.
You have your blinkers on, as ever. How many countries never subject to Christianity permit theft and murder? These are rules that are invented by societies to make life tolerable and allow social congress to work without fear. In primitive times, the laws of the land were said to have come from the local god, and so law and religion got intertwined, as the law of Moses shows. To imagine that the secular laws of western states came from the Christian God is simple. You need to return to your study, teacher. The point I was making however, is that the Churches would not apply the law to their own, and many Church leaders have been criminals, but the average parish priest and his flock were subject to secular law, and occasionally popes and bishops were, when they became unpopular or ineffective. The secular administration of the law is what restrains people then and still.
8. You cannot end without an insult which also reveals your own closed mindedness. “Chance will do for me, BUT IF IT TEACHES YOU ANYTHING I AM HAPPY TO ACCEPT YOUR WORD. IT WILL NOT, THOUGH.” So you assume that I will not learn anything from this? How closed minded of you to say such a thing. I have indeed learned a great deal from this encounter. And the wait was well worth it. I am sorry to hear about Mike’s illness (you probably will not believe me when I say this, as I am one of those odious liars), and I pray for his quick recovery. Perhaps that best shows the difference between a Christian and an atheist; I would give my life (as so many others have through the years) to protect your right to believe in no God, though from your hostility and insults, I doubt that I would receive the same from you, a humane, truthful, insightful, concerned atheist. I suppose I may be more liberal minded than you, and more open minded, because I believe you (and indeed, anyone) can change, while you are certain that I cannot. I am sorry that you would not engage my points in a spirit of intellectualism, rather than demeaning personal attacks.
I took your reference to Providence to refer to coming across the website not to this discussion. I happen to believe that discussion is valuable to both parties. It is an important way of learning. So, when I speak of “it not teaching you anything”, I meant reading the pages. The reason is surely what you would defend—your faith. Christians who stand by their faith cannot be persuaded otherwise. Will you deny this? As for wishing me well or even praying for my health, I am glad of your concern, though neither wishes nor prayers, except my own, are likely to be helpful. I usually make a point of ending a letter with those who enter into a discussion with me with “best wishes”, and I mean it too. My main wish in this, of course, is that they will find a better religion than Christianity, but I am aware that few indeed will. The last point, that Christians can never understand, is that what you say are personal attacks, are merely descriptions of your own position. If you argue foolishly, then I am entitled to describe you as a fool. You ought to be proud of it. Your chief missionary told you all to be fools (“We are fools for Christ’s sake, hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?”), and I take it that you are all following his dictum.
The reply to this author’s numbered responses was repeatedly bounced back from the address cited (<EMRYS@peoplepc.com> “Me”), though my earlier reply had obviously been received!
