Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
God, Bible, Conscience: Sources of Revelation
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Quest for Certainty
The quest for certainty in religion that motivates some people to seek Christianity has to face up to natural human questioning. Some people seek a sure faith but want their natural questions answered adequately. That is a problem for professional Christians, and even for those vapid but enthusiastic amateurs who think proselytising is the way to get noticed by God. The trouble is that there are no adequate answers and so inadequate answers have to be made as convincing as possible.
The lack of answers is covered up by claiming that Christianity is based on a “once and for all” revelation by God. The claim has the advantage of explaining why the evidence is pretty thin on the ground, but has the disadvantage of coming down to us entirely through the work of human beings. No one of a skeptical bent can see any difference between the story of the revelation being entirely a human invention and a supposed supernatural revelation, when it comes to us solely through human agencies. All we are sure of in this revelation is that it was passed on by humans.
We have a set of books about 2000 years old that tell us God appeared on earth pretending to be a human being and deliberately getting hung. Quite why this was the best an all-powerful god could come up with to save humanity is one of those questions no one should ask, and which has no adequate answer. God “moves in mysterous ways” or “it is not for us to know the ways of God” are two of the inadequate “answers”.
So, the evidence for this astonishing sacrifice by the almighty God is an ancient book so transparently written by human beings that no pretence remains in the book itself that it was written by God. Some Christians however, put more faith in the authority of a church to assert Christian truth than in the Holy Book. Their reason is in direct contradiction to those who accept the book itself as being God’s own revelation, and therefore infallible. It is that because the book has been written by humans, who were merely inspired by God, it contains human faults. This is one of the many examples of how Christianity, in some form or other somewhere, claims to be right over every question that is put—there is always a brand somewhere suitable for everyone!
Anyway, most Protestants will only accept the book, whereas Catholics put their faith in the saints and doctors of the church correctly interpreting whatever is in the book. The doctors effectively dispense with the book by summarising the main requirements of Christianity in the form of eternal infallible creeds, simple sets of rules easily remembered to make Christianity as simple as possible for unsophisticated people—the type the churches prefer.
Both of these varieties of Christians illogically claim, despite their infallible creeds and book, that conscience and intellect have to play a part in interpreting and expressing the revealed “truth”, God apparently not being able, despite his almightiness, to put over a “once and for all” message. Some modern Christians say this work of communication of the revealed message will itself take until the end of time, which rather destroys the urgency of a “once and for all” revelation, one might think.
Then again, some forms of Christianity have no faith in the book or the church but accept that God acts directly through the person’s own conscience. Why God had to come in person and get himself sacrificed when he could operate through individual consciences is another of His unfathomable mysteries. And why He only selects some people to get this holy conscience while others have so little of it that they rape, murder and commit genocide, often with the approval of other Christians, is yet another of God’s mysteries.
Indeed, more mysterious still is that many of God’s own people, imbued with what they call the Apostolic Succession, a way of describing the Holy Ghost being required to reside within your body making you an official of the church, took to burning people while they were tied to a stake and could not escape the flames. This was not a happy pastime of barbaric peasants at the time but an entertainment devised entirely by the Church for its own amusement.
Obviously, Christians of conscience cannot accept the other brands for whom conscience plays only a minor role, or none at all. If there are any Christians who come to their belief purely through intellectual enquiry, they remain remarkably silent, though that might be because they have intellectually deduced that Christianity offers them a comfortable income and disproportionate respect for little hard work.
It ought to be easy to see that the whole of Christian “reason” is just a patchwork of contradictory ideas meant to hold the threadbare Christian banner together. Like the sun signs in the daily papers, there is something in there for everybody gullible enough to persist in finding it.
