Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 11 January 2007

Religious Faith

Theology presupposes religious faith. Without religion, arguing about God would be a minor subdivision of philosophy, or psychology, practised mainly by drunks and madmen. Again, believers will claim that no one can be a theologian without being religious, because they cannot have the passion for it, or might even be opposed to religion. Yet how can someone who believes unquestioningly, as pastors like Luther say the faithful must be, be honest when attempting to discuss it rationally. Luther said Protestants ought not to let themselves be tempted even by reason. “Unquestioningly” meant what it says, so God cannot have made us in His image at all, unless God does not use His own brain. Presumably, for Protestant sectarians, it was all right for Catholic dissenters to question Catholicism and thus become Protestants, but, thereafter, they had to be unquestioning again. The dishonesty of it is transparent. Every believer must not question what their own sectarian leaders tell them, and nowadays nor must they question any other Christian sect’s beliefs. How do they get convinced that one greedy opportunist or madman rather than another is right, without questioning?

Whatever is Christian has to be accepted as a matter of faith, not knowledge or reason. Christianity is therefore, at root, the same as Islam. Moslems have to submit to God’s will. Christians must have faith in God, and show it by submitting to God’s will. The fact that God’s will is expressed in fallible books written by fallible men, guided by ghosts or angels that are also demonstrably fallible, does not matter to them. They just want to have a rule. If it were Satan’s rule, it would not matter as long as Satan had made sure they believed it was God’s! That is the whole point. The powers or rulers of the wprld use religion to keep people in their control, doing what they want—even giving up their lives when necessary. As the Grand Inquisitor says to the returned Christ in Dostoievsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

We have corrected thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority… why hast thou come now to hinder us?

This story has been told and retold in anthologies, but has not impinged at all on the Christian conscience in well over 100 years.

Feeling strongly about Christianity, or any religion, inevitably makes it much more important to anyone than it is:

A healthy appetite for righteousness, kept in due control by good manners, is an excellent thing, but to “hunger and thirst after” it is a symptom of spiritual diabestes. A white-heat of moral enthusiasm is not the most favourable condition to conduct the analysis of ethical concepts or the criticism of ethical theories.

Professor C D Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory

The need for objectivity in the analysis of everything has been the ideal of good scholars, so why is theology special in that it can be free of this ideal? The theologian has to be a believer to do theology. It is special pleading. It guards against the analysis ever contradicting the belief. So, it can only be corrected from what is a distinct and maybe antagonistic viewpoint, like this one. But any such criticisms cannot be valid theology because they are not offered from the position of belief necessary for it! Theologians safeguard themselves from criticism by excluding anything critical. It is utterly dishonest, as most of Christianity turns out to be on inspection, and as pious Christians have to be to maintain their belief. Theology cannot be proper analysis at all. It is merely apologetic.

The same type of approach is to single out Christianity as different from all other human endeavours because they are human inventions, whereas Christianity is sent by God! Immediately, it shows the irrationality of belief, and the way that it engenders special pleading. To claim that something is uniquely sent by God has to be demonstrated, and, to support any such unique claim, the demonstration ought to be unequivocal. Yet, if the Christian claim is that their revelation has been sent by God, should it not first be proved that there is a God to be able to send anything? God and the idea that Christianity is His unique message are assumed in the unquestioned belief of the faith.

Two Billion Christians cannot be Wrong

“Ah! But two billion Christians, and 2000 years of belief cannot be ignored”, say divines, like Robert Beckford, the TV theologian, who broadcast precisely that, in his disgracefully tendentious justification of the holy family, on UK TV at Christmas 2006. Presumably, that many people cannot be wrong for so long. Unfortunately, everybody in the world can be wrong about something, so what is to stop them all being wrong about the same thing? It is obvious enough that once the world was thought to be flat by most people, if not everyone. Only a few hundred years ago, Christian clergy were certain the sun went round the earth, and we can be sure that therefore the congregations thought the same. Christians felt so certain of it, they would burn alive anyone who contradicted them, while they were tied up and could not escape the flames. They said they were helping God by saving souls. They were all wrong and so were cruel murderers, and added to Christianity’s murderous past.

What then is God’s attitude to the Christians who ordered, or even condoned, the wickedness that they practised in God’s name? Has He got them on His list of candidates for burning forever in hell, or has he forgiven them their false murderous faith? To hear many modern Christians, God is not even willing to forgive minor sins, such as those between consenting people in private, so why should he forgive the serious one of prematurely ending the life of a creature that He has made? That, at least, is what they say they believe. If God made men, and, moreover, He insists that He is their judge, what right have men to anticipate God’s own judgement, especially as their belief turns out to be wrong while the victims turned out to be right? When perpetual torture is at stake, you might have thought that the sensible Christian would be more circumspect, but it shows that Christianity is not about goodness, despite what the sheep dream, it is about power.

Modern Christians plead that torture was wrong and had nothing to do with them, yet they continue to support Christian dogma that is no more known to be true than that it was then known the earth is spherical and circles the sun. Indeed, fundamentalists and evangelicals support a twisted president of the USA and his devilish administration that advocate and practice torture as an expediency, while claiming to be saved for their goodness! Christians are certain that theirs is a universal God, but have no compunction in believing that, despite it, he favours them in human disputes. Hatred not love is what evangelical Christiansity relies on. So, as the Jews did first, in the time of the Maccabees, they have nationalized the universal God, this time as the God of the Stars and Stripes, and politicised the God of the poor as the God of the neocon Republicans. God, of course, is proud of them because the Christian God has reverted to the savage God of the Israelites, and the God of love, Jesus, has become their personal buddy, the guardian angel of lunatics. This God of the Stars and Stripes likes His disciples to kill Arabs, whether they know they are terrorists or not, pour encourager les autres. That makes it all right then.

Of course, Moslems, whose God is the same God of Abraham as the God of the Stars and Stripes, are convinced that He has made them so that they can tie bombs around themselves and blow up innocent passers by. The only difference is that the God of the Stars and Stripes has bigger and more mobile bombs, but the beliefs are essentially the same—as you would expect if the God was really the same one.

This God does not sound too worthy to we people who lack the belief to be theologians. Few of the qualified theologians try to stop either side doing what is not to be tolerated by civilized people, let alone loving gods. Far from it, too many pastors and imams, theologians and mullahs, are actively encouraging both sides to prove the extent of their faith. What more proof is needed that, if God is truly good, these people are the agents of the Devil? It is not an abberation. It has happened too often and too regularly in history for it to be an abberation, and the theologians and mullahs must know it because they are educated even if the sheep are not.

All religion is the same at core. They trade on the lowest common denominator of tribal belief that is compatible with the control and beguiling of the masses. People choose the God that suits them from those on offer by the clergy, and it soon becomes clear whose marketing is more successful. Then the less successful leave the field, swap sides, or struggle on pretending they are righteous in the face of adversity. The whole exercise is a scam based on psychological trickery, an illusion, or rather a delusion. Wiles admits there is no conclusive answer to it. Beliefs held with absolute conviction turn out to be false. Believers’ absolute conviction that they have made the right choice often has not been absolute enough! Because biblical belief depends on interpretation, no believer can ever be sure they have the right one. Their certainty is therefore a delusion.

Another ploy, to avoid having to consider the truth of belief, is to study religions phenomenologically. Their beliefs, habits, practices and rituals irrespective of the meaning of them can be examined simply as phenomena—something that happens in a society. Any study of behavioural or natural phenomenon in the world has to begin with a descriptive study of it before analysis of it can begin. Phenomena can be described in whatever detail is needed, but eventually the other questions have to be addressed. Phenomenalism ends at the description!

But the interesting questions remain. Why are the phenomena happening, and, in social phenomena like religions, are they practised for any good reason—are they true? People are worshipping God, but does God exist, and how do they know it? What is the evidence that persuades them? Is it good enough evidence to justify the practices? If not, then what is the point of it all? If the belief is inadequate, then it must have some incidental effect that makes it seem worth the time and the effort. What is it, and how did it arise, and why in this disguised way and not directly? There is plenty here to study, but the trouble for theology is that all these are studies for psychology, sociology and evolutionary biology not theology.

Even as a phenomenon, surely religious service is below the gamut of needs of an almighty being. Why would an almighty being want people to serve Him? The ancient belief in gods, from the time of the bible some 2500 years and more ago, was that they had created human beings precisely to serve them as their slaves. Believers are still servants, or more accurately translated, slaves, of their God, this ancient notion still being reflected in the common words of religion. It shows how religions, especially book religions, fossilize ancient ideas. People have to imagine an almighty megalomaniac who needs human time, attention, and money to serve Him in His interminable services, and attending them is part of the believer’s duty that proves their faith. People can believe all this because they are obliged not to question the whole shamoozle. The only people it suits are the rogues and vampires who live off the backs of these deluded creatures. It is not something that theology can consider.

Biblical Frauds and Grifters

In treating the bible as a subject of theological study, Wiles makes the usual apologetic caveat:

The study of any book requires some degree of sympathy with its subject-matter if one is to go beyond a superficial level of interpretation.

Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?

It is a maxim that stops us from understanding the works of the Maquis de Sade unless we are a Sadist, and Mein Kampf unless we are a Nazi, the works of Richard Dawkins unless we are an evolutionary biologist, and The Communist Manifesto unless we are a communist, or at least an economist or a politician. It is nonsense, but a plausible excuse for Christians to deflect criticisms before their uncritical lambs to make Christianity seem invulnerable. Poor lambs, it is unfair when critics who are not Christians criticize Christianity.

The bible was not, of course written in English but in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and our theologians and apologists also like to claim a degree of exclusiveness by saying we must learn Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew to read it “in the original”. “Translating”, says Wiles, is more than a matter of decoding, and “something is always lost” in the process of translation. These are the reasons why “familiarity with the original language is essential”. He is right, but for the wrong reason.

What any scholar is doing in translating dead languages is decoding symbols, and whether you are able to do it yourself or some expert does it for you, you are not getting the native sense of it. If the biblical books were honestly translated by competent scholars, the job they did would be far better than any amateur trying to read Greek or Hebrew in the original. The trouble is biblical scholars cannot be trusted even to decode the symbols properly. The bible has been deliberately mistranslated to suit popular conceptions of Christianity and Judaism.

Knowing the original languages exposes this simple fact, but anyone who goes so far as to seek tuition in them to read the bible “in the original” will be taught by biblicist experts in Hebrew how to read it too. In any case, to go so far as to learn these languages must mean they are so committed to Christianity that they will regard knowing the distortions as a secret of initiation that they will willingly excuse.

If the problem were simply the one suggested of losing something in translation, there is no way past it, except a deep and thorough study of the language in question and all of its nuances. Unless you are able to think in French like someone French, then you cannot get all the subtleties of the native speaker. How much harder it is for someone learning a dead language. No one except professional scholars have time for it. Anyway, it is impossible even for them to get the subtle nuances of dead languages, and Hebrew was already dead when the bible was written. Aramaic had replaced it. The temple priesthood, probably after the demise of Persia, had revived it as a religious language, because anything the masses cannot understand sounds to them all the more mysterious.

As a simple and common example, Yehouah, apparently the name of the Hebrew God is habitually translated as “Lord”, and “elohim” which literally is “gods” is translated “God”. So, when the Christian punter reads “the Lord God”, it is literally translated “Yehouah of the Gods”, or, if we accept an excuse that biblicists offer for the plural “elohim”, that it is a “plural of majesty”, then it is “Yehouah the xxx God”, where xxx is some adjective that translates the meaning of the plural, like “highest”, “majestic”, “chief”, and so on.

Quite frankly, the so-called “plural of majesty” looks like a stage in the deliberate elimination of polytheism in favour of monotheism, the plural “gods” being deliberately designated a singular to convert popular hymns and prayers to monotheism without having to change them much at all, thus retaining their rhythms and cadences. There would have to be a stage in biblical history when this seemed likely, and that time is under the Persians. At any rate, the biblicists are not trustworthy when it comes to translating the bible. They connive in mistranslating the texts to preserve their sinecures.

One of the advantages of reading the works of scholars is that they have no need to kid each other. Indeed, scholarly commentaries on the biblical texts can be bought in most good bookshops among the populist and tendentious garbage that evangelical demagogues turn out. The scholarly authors rely on not many ever reading their commentaries because they are expensive and “hard”, and that those who do buy them are so committed that they will not be deterred by the truth. Such readers can be depended upon not to be dismayed to find that the law codes of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy appear in the scriptural narrative of the exodus from Egypt, making God give an unsettled people a law that was suitable only for a nation that was settled down and stable, something that did not happen for hundreds more years, according to the internal chronology of the Jewish scriptures. Detailed laws about temple sacrifice are irrelevant to people who do not have a temple.

Should the theologian consider God as a dolt, or at least unreasonable, or should they consider Moses at fault, and, indeed, that Moses must have lived when the laws were introduced many years after he was supposed to have died, and the country was settled? No scholar thinks these laws were given by God when the Israelites were in the desert, hundreds of years before any temple was built! Only Christian bent scholars do. They are the ones for whom the bible cannot be wrong, and they are “bent” because no one with such a belief can be an honest scholar. Yet, “scholar” is what the call themselves. Scholars are having to accept slowly and painfully that the whole of the saga of Moses, apparently central as it is to Judaism, is a late myth grafted on to the bible that was otherwise complete without it at the time. They cannot easily admit it to the flocks of bleating sheep they depend upon for their incomes, and who are fond of the Moses stories.

Central to the beliefs of the Christians is Daniel, long known to have been written 400 years after it pretends—known by everyone, that is, except the Christian crazies for whom the bible can do no wrong. If it seems to have been written in Babylon, then that is good enough for the crazies, who refuse to recognize that old books could be altered, and were, or even forged, and were. This one was not, they declare, despite the plain evidence that they are wrong. This forgery is so blatant it was recognized by Porphyry (232-305 AD), a Greek or Phœnician Neoplatonist philosopher, before Christianity was even accepted as the state religion of Rome. Its internal allusions betray it clearly as having been written in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, the king of Seleucia, the Greek kingdom that covered Babylon and Judah at that time.

To claim that something is not what it seems is fraud, and the author of it is a grifter. Christianity has been laced throughout by acknowledged frauds beginning with the bible, but the willingly blind cannot see. They refuse to. In fact, there is a whole genre of pious frauds so common that scholars of both types have given them a name—pseudepigraphs—and a justification—it was a way of attaching to a work the name of a distinguished person, and thus giving it kudos that it did not deserve. That makes it all right. It has to, because most, if not all, of the books in the bible are pseudepigraphs.

Evident frauds like these pseudepigraphs also undermine another argument that Christians have always liked from the earliest days, and that is the antiquity of its writings. The point about pseudepigraphs is that people in ancient times were easily fooled by stings like this. After all, they had no criteria to judge them by, and they were no less ready to believe charlatans than people still are, especially when they have some ancient authority a grifter has recently written himself. It is not surprising that gullible people in ancient times should have fallen for pretty transparent confidence tricks. What is surprising is that they still do in the days of computer technology, organ tranplants, and space stations. Today, they have no excuse for it, certainly in countries with advanced secondary and tertiary educational schemes like the USA.

The theologians have little to say about it, except to keep plugging the bible which suits the perpetrators of the Christianized fascism of the modern USA. Yet, the bible is made up of pseudepigraphs. It was written as a false record. Why was it written to fool people? It began, not as history, but as fake history written years later than the events it purports to record “live from Jerusalem”. It is not an unusual occurrence, and competent historians are well aware of spurious books. The trouble has always been that biblical belief stops the believer from being a competent historian.

Assumptions and Expectations

Historians always take into account the assumptions of the age, its culture, acceptable practices and expectations. Need it be said that they rarely match our own. The purpose of history for ancient people was not to tell them their past, but to explain to them why things were as they were in the, then, present day. If a ruler had something to gain from presenting the past in a way that never really happened, then he did it. It is well known, and still happens, as recent events have shown. Good historians do not trust their sources without corroboration, but biblical historians would not test the bible because they believed it was the infallible word of God.

Did David pay fifty shekels of silver (2 Sam 24) or six hundred shekels of gold (1 Chr 21:25) for the site of the temple? Did he kill Goliath (1 Sam 170 or did Elhanan (2 Sam 21:19)? If Christian belief depended on 2 + 2 equalling 5, then the Christian analyst would use their clever sophistry to find that 2 + 2 did indeed equal 5, or, at least, was not incompatible with it equalling 5, and so Christianity is always true. Here, the lying pastors will make up some story, gazumping maybe, to explain the two land prices quoted, and that David had two names, but the plain evidence is that the bible is faulty, and the excuses are excuses! Contradictions like these are frequent in the bible and cannot be reconciled except in the imaginations of ingenious evangelicals. Whatever God might be reluctant to do, despite His power, telling lies, or giving contradictory information can hardly be a choice, if He is good.

Naïve Christians will take it that Mark understood the Jesus he described in his gospel in just the same way as they do, yet his understanding of it, as a man of his own time and situation, was certainly not that of a modern Christian. Strictly, Mark’s words cannot possibly mean to us what they meant to him. What everyone does is reduce the original, which can no longer be strictly understood, into whatever means something to the modern reader. Sometimes, perhaps, it does not matter too much, for the gist of the original meaning remains, but other times the exegetes force an interpretation that is certainly what was never intended. Modern evangelical pastors are fond of doing it to oblige their flocks to think like them. Wiles warns:

Only when we have asked our questions about the author’s intention, about the reliability of his information and the fairness of his attitudes, and the meaning of the text for us ourselves are we in a position to raise the even more fundamental question about the truth of what is being said.

Maurice Wiles, What is Theology?

In short, only when we have interrogated the ancient text for its original intention and decided whether it means the same to the modern mind can we ask whether it was right. Fundamentalists cannot get that far at all. They cannot understand that unless they do it, they are just taking on trust the word of others. And it does not matter how trustworthy was the person who first convinced them of the truth of the gospel story, they too were just accepting what they had been told. At some point down a long line, it is inevitable that someone told either an outright lie, or told an effective lie in affirming it was true when they had no idea that it really was. These people will not question the bible at all, and continue accepting even its obvious errors as God’s truth!

It is here that the honest scholar tries to take account of their own presuppositions, and that is what the fundamentalist rejects. Even the most reasonable people have presuppositions, and they try their utmost, if they are historians or scientists, to face them and take account of them. Not Christians. They prefer their presuppositions to verifiable knowledge. They already know the bible is true because they have been told it from birth or from a conversion experience that depended on their previous Christian upbringing, so they are simply believing what they have been told without any examination. In short, they refuse to inspect their presuppositions. For them, their presuppositions are God’s truth! It is the reason why any Christian analyst is not to be trusted. Even so, some Christian scholars do an excellent job in approaching the texts honestly, but even they often think God needs defending, if not by outright lies, by suppression of their findings, obfuscation, or otherwise dissimulating, as Wiles demonstrates. So, everything any Christian says, except for some aknowledged honest scholars, has to be tested.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History