BeAttitude gives his reasons for Why He Walked Away From Christianity. Don’t skip this. Read it carefully and don’t start talking. Just listen.
1. I always want to commend anyone who moves to a position of authenticity for themselves. If you don’t believe the claims of your own Christian community, then by all means please move to a position where you are able to say “This is what I do believe.” What you don’t believe is a step along the way. We’ve got thousands of Christians who are actually unbelievers, agnostics and atheists. We’d all be better off to ring a bell and go to our real position. Even if it makes mom and dad cry, which it will.
2. The hand of the new atheists is heavily apparent here. If you don’t believe their assault on the Christian faith and religion in general are making an impact, you’re out to lunch. Their arguments may be weak and answerable, but they are persuasive to millions of ordinary people. Most Christians won’t be professional apologists and they aren’t coming to your seminar or class. For many people, a Chris Hitchens or a Sam Harris are devastatingly confident voices of self-proclaimed reason. Investigation may prove otherwise, but that’s hardly well-publicized or well communicated.
3. The hand of shallow evangelical thinking is just as apparent. Does this read like Bart Ehrman’s discovery that inerrancy wasn’t true? Yes, and I say where are the evangelicals with the courage- and that’s what it will take- to say that simplistic inerrancy isn’t the default Christian position? Where is the awareness that the vast majority of the Christian world isn’t playing by the rules of a minority segment of evangelicalism determined to make their ideas of inerrancy the definition of Christianity. Read the Catholic Catechism on the inspiration of scripture, for goodness sake. Find out why you don’t have to have your faith detonated like Ehrman did, by a bomb that was defused long, long ago.
4. Once the content of the Old Testament is out there folks. you better have some answers and some honesty. Here’s a violent, bloody book of sacrifice and war, much of it endorsed by God. Books like Christopher Wright’s The God I Don’t Understand aren’t going to sell many copies among today’s Christians, so very few Christian young people will ever hear someone really wrestling with these questions. It’s not an easy problem, and anyone who concludes that atheism is more moral than a God who orders up violence and destruction shouldn’t be ridiculed. But as Razi Zacharias has pointed out over and over, atheists like BeAttitude are engaging in a moral argument that atheism itself undercuts. The believer in God has a problem with what God does. The atheist has a problem with the fact he/she has a problem. So after we’ve all vented, we actually come back to a common problem: can we trust our own moral instincts completely to give us all of the truth?
5. BeAttitude has discovered that Christianity- and theism in general- is extremely unlikely. The problem with so many preachers and teachers is they speak constantly as if Christianity is so obvious, so apparent, so easy, so plain, so likely to be true that only morons are unbelievers. Wrong. I once had a preacher at our ministry who would say you were stupid to not believe in God or the Bible. Now the Bible says the fool says in his heart that there is no God, and I believe that….from inside the faith. But from outside of it, it’s very unlikely that miracles happen, that dead men rise, that God speaks, etc. It’s totally unlikely. But as C.S. Lewis says, so are noses. So is everything else. You have to move past that, and if you have been in an environment where all of your questions were placed in the category of “what stupid, foolish and unbelieving people say,” then you kept quiet, and now, like BeAttitude, the whole business seems completely outrageous. Well…it is. And the Psalms bear witness to that as does the rest of scripture. You have to be in that place a bit and to consider that the biggest claim Christianity makes isn’t that God parted the Red Sea, but that there is a reason there is something rather than nothing.
6. BeAttitude is now free to say that Christians have terrible flaws and have done terrible things. What does that tell you about the kind of Christianity we’ve fostered? That’s right….we blame our critics. We deny our history. We explain away our bloody and oppressive actions. We act as if being a Christian- on the large and small stages- must entail a loyalty oath to defend the indefensible. This is, of course, bizarrely ironic given the fact that we are the one religion that openly proclaims we are so bad we can’t do anything to help ourselves.
7. The doctrine of hell needs a lot of work in how we present it. (See C.S. Lewis for details.) Again, bad evangelicalism rings through statements about 70% of the world going to hell for refusing to believe Jesus is God. There’s a big conversation on hell that gets silenced whenever it breaks out. The doctrine of hell becomes a pragmatic flag that has to be waved to create the requisite conditions for aisle-walking evangelism. I have to answer this objection every week. I always say the same thing: Christianity doesn’t empower Christians to tell others who is going to hell. It reveals who God is and who we are. It gives us the Gospel. It asks us the question: How are your sins forgiven? It doesn’t put you or me in the place of God in what we know about anyone. It addresses you. Not groups. Not bumper sticker theology. Your real life in relation to a particular God and what he has revealed. But BeAttitude has walked into the dilemma that Jesus is the one who delivers the Christian doctrine of hell most plainly. If you judge that Jesus isn’t to be believed on those matters, then there is NO argument about theology and NO apologetic that’s going to repair that problem.
8. Which reminds me that BeAttitude has very little to say about Jesus aside from 1) he didn’t do everything I think he should do and 2) the Gospels may be a different kind of literature than I was told. I always note that Jesus seldom leads the reasons people abandon the faith. Not faulting BeAttitude at all. I just would say Jesus is the “heaviest” factor in any consideration of Christianity. Not a minor matter. If he’s the clue from God to all these questions humans have, then he changes everything.
9. I am a Christian because I was born into that culture and family? No, as true as that is, I am a Christian because I remain one, despite the strong arguments against Christianity provided by being in a Christian family and culture.
10. Let me repeat myself. So much of what you will read here is the price tag of the typical evangelical view of the Bible as inerrant, without significant issues, never raising moral questions, always explainable, etc. If it were not for Jesus, passages like Genesis 22 would put me right where BeAttitude is now. His objections are significant and important. There is an entire discussion and level of understanding Christianity that BeAttitude hasn’t been introduced to within an increasingly shallow and doctrinally compromised evangelicalism.
The Internet Monk Archives 
In respone to #9 in the above article — if this is his only link with God, that it was passed down, then I have to ask did he do anything to get to know God for himself? Or did he just continue throughout his 33 years of allegedly believing, just take everybody else’s word for who God was?
(I find this the biggest problem in Christendom today — saints take someone else’s word for who and what God is — instead of getting into the Word and getting to know God for who He really is.)
Relationship, as I know it, is always a two way street. You continue to seek the one you love, to grow in knowledge.
We, as a Church, are wrong. We take for granted that because you came to Christ, that is it. We offer these classes and such every week, and if you don’t come — oh well.
I have always thought discipleship was one on one. That is how I was discipled, by an old saint, and I try to give to others I encounter, what she gave to me.
theBEattitude, my heart goes out to you, my prayers go up to God to bring someone in your life, who can live the reality of knowing the Godhead before you.
And as part of the Body of Christ, I ask your forgiveness for having let you down.
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Mamazee,
I too had that problem with some of the sayings of Jesus and I would like to share my solution with you. You may not find it satisfactory, but it makes the most sense to me.
There is a tendency for us believers to take the words that Jesus meant “spiritually” in a “literal” sense. When Jesus said “beware the leaven of the Pharisees”, for example, Peter and the Apostles immediately began to look for some bread that they could throw overboard when what Jesus actually meant was the “teaching” of the Pharisees. When Jesus said that we could move mountains through faith, maybe he was not talking about “literal” mountains? I am convinced that if we could see the “spiritual” world that is veiled from our eyes, then we would see that getting one person to profess a genuine faith in Jesus Christ required the removal of a “spiritual” mountain. In praying for a particular friend of mine, I once thought to myself, “There is no way that this person will ever become a Christian” only to be pleasantly surprised by the spiritual mountains moved by God.
By the way, I want to congratulate you on the fact that you are comfortable with unanswered questions. When I consider many questions that people ask about God I often wonder, “Do you really think that if God himself came down and explained the answer to that question to you personally that you would be capable of understanding it?” To me, it is not obvious that the answer to this question is yes. (I guess this is because I have had quantum mechanics explained to me by people who knew what they were talking about and I didn’t understand a word of it.) For this reason, being comfortable with unanswered questions seems to be the only reasonable way to approach certain issues in our faith.
robert van de water
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Brian,
Some of the best fun I have had has been having my simplistic theistic arguments systematically destroyed over the years by one of the most thoughtful people I know (a Jewish atheist and a very good friend). If my current positions make any sense at all, then it is because I have constantly had to adapt them to his rigorous and scathing analysis. It has been a pleasure discussing these issues and I hope we can do it again some time.
robert van de water
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Thanks for this link and for the book recommend “the God I don’t Understand”.
I’ve been talking to my pastor lately about some pretty basic stuff Jesus said (John 14:12 – 14″anyone who has faith… will do what what i have been doing…he will do even greater things than these… because i am going to the Father”)
– and the thing is, i do have faith that there is a reason Jesus said what He did. But instead religious people just want me to pretend i don’t see it, too… To be really honest, i haven’t gone to church for a few weeks now. I don’t fit in. And it’s not that i don’t love Jesus. Not that i don’t read my Bible and pray and teach my children. I just don’t fit. I believe Jesus and Reason are compatible. And yeah, i do think Faith is the missing link – and i’m comfortable with a certain amount of chaos/unexplained missing links.
I just don’t get the “pretend we don’t see it” posture. It seems so weak intellectually, and one more thing that pushes people away from a stagnant culture… which isn’t a bad thing. But if that stagnant culture holds a flag with Jesus’ face on it, it ends up pushing people away from Jesus…
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Robert,
I don’t want to get on a point by point debate on this gentleman’s blog, so I will refrain from posing the reasons for my skepticism of your offered solutions to these problems I have with certain Christian issues.
I am pretty sure if we knew each other in person we would find many interesting things to discuss, and I do appreciate you taking time to comment on my post. 🙂
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Brian,
Thanks to you as well for your thoughts Brian. Allow me to respond if I might.
“I suppose I just don’t have the ability to label the behavior of Yahweh in the OT as anything other than barbaric. We can speculate about “higher purposes†and “mysterious waysâ€, but honestly, an all powerful and loving deity could certainly find methods that don’t involve genocide, infanticide, slavery, and plundering neighboring nationalities over a chunk of real estate.”
But what if the point was not finding His people a chunk of real estate but of teaching them their need for grace, forgiveness and love? I certainly agree that the behavior of the Old Testament barbarians in the Old Testament was barbaric, but are we so sure that it was according to God’s will? Allow me to bounce some ideas off of you.
It is my view that the closest analog we have to the culture and outlook of the Old Testament nation of Israel in the modern world is Osama Bin Laden, Al Queda, the Taliban and other Muslim extremist groups. I believe that the ancient Israelites shared the same self-righteousness, the same clan loyalty, the same brutality and vicious outlook as these modern terrorist groups.
I further believe that the modern nation of Israel is the most secular, thoughtful, liberal, accomplished in every field of human endeavor nation in the world today. (Just look at their disproportionate share of Nobel Prizes.) How do you transform a barbaric, self-righteous and willfully ignorant people into the most civilized nation in the world? I believe the Old Testament is the highly counter-intuitive answer to that question. You give them a minimal standard (the Mosaic law) that points them in the direction of the Law of Love (“Love the Lord thy God and Love thy neighbor”) and watch as they struggle to realize that they need the grace and forgiveness of God just as much as the gentile “sinner” nations around them.
“An all powerful being can’t be limited to just two options to accomplish its will.
Hell is not necessitated because heaven exists. Annihilation is a merciful option. Only allowing those who would accept Him to come into existence is possible. I’m sure you have considered these but they are incompatible with the writings that are allegedly inspired and explain Yahweh’s will.”
The view of hell that I spelled out in my earlier post was somewhat simplified due to spatial constraints. I believe that there is a third option, for those who will accept it, where they have an existence that is much better than any existence that you could have on Earth. In the Bible I believe these two different options are spelled out clearly. In Revelation, some people are cast into the “Lake of Fire” and some people are said to live “oustide the city”. In my view, the “Lake of Fire” is where people go who choose not to be subject to God and his laws. The eternal torment that they experience there is not done by God but by the other people that are there (Imagine living on a resort island with Stalin, Hitler and Mao and other mass murderers for all eternity. No matter how pleasant the surroundings and amenities, the company will make you miserable.) Those who choose to live under God’s rule, however, are allowed to live “outside the city” where they have live a life of “lesser blessing” than those who have excepted God’s gift of eternal life.
“I suppose one can take that road, but it seems just as sensible to me to set it all aside and live by the golden rule which seems at the root of most spirituality anyway.”
“Setting it all aside” admits the whole thing to be false and I find it more reasonable/hopeful to believe that genuine and perfect love exists.
robert van de water
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Thanks for the thoughtful reply Robert.
I thought I might bounce a few things off a couple things you wrote.
“The Old Testament stories of wrath and judgment, for example, can be viewed as basically historically accurate but badly misinterpreted by theologians with little understanding of God or His plan. Likewise the doctrine of hell can be understood if the traditional notions of literal flames and pitchfork wielding demons in red spandex jumpsuits are rejected.”
I suppose I just don’t have the ability to label the behavior of Yahweh in the OT as anything other than barbaric. We can speculate about “higher purposes” and “mysterious ways”, but honestly, an all powerful and loving deity could certainly find methods that don’t involve genocide, infanticide, slavery, and plundering neighboring nationalities over a chunk of real estate.
“What would eternal life be like if a group of people made a habit of refusing divine correction and did not forgive one another or “love their neighbors†in the manner specified by God? Over eternal time, people would gradually harden their hearts against one another and trust would breakdown. Eternal loneliness is the unavoidable longterm consequence of these kinds of decisions.”
An all powerful being can’t be limited to just two options to accomplish its will.
Hell is not necessitated because heaven exists. Annihilation is a merciful option. Only allowing those who would accept Him to come into existence is possible. I’m sure you have considered these but they are incompatible with the writings that are allegedly inspired and explain Yahweh’s will.
“Having thus considered the intellectual problems of the faith, I have found it necessary to reject much of conventional Christian theology.”
I suppose one can take that road, but it seems just as sensible to me to set it all aside and live by the golden rule which seems at the root of most spirituality anyway.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on the matter. I remain open to the possibility of a spiritual order, but every faith I have examined looks like the work of fallible human minds.
Thanks.
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Brian,
When I was a younger Christian, I was extremely ignorant. Unfortunately, I made up for my ignorance with volume and bellicosity because I was threatened by rational arguments against the faith. I have since come to believe this behavior was shameful and disgraceful. This being the case, I can simultaneously sympathize with your intellectual issues and also sympathize with other Christians who have failed to deal well with these issues.
I have found that the key to dealing with these issues for me is to be comfortable with my need of Jesus Christ. I simply cannot stand the idea of being the money-grubbing, materialistic, lustful, self-centered, proud, insensitive and egotistical man that I was without Jesus Christ. The loving, kind, selfless, forgiving person that I want to be can only conceivably be accomplished with lavish divine assistance and Jesus Christ is the only source of such assistance on the market. Basing my faith on my need of Jesus Christ in this way, I am not threatened by intellectual questions regarding the faith and can approach them in a calm and reasonable state of mind.
Having thus considered the intellectual problems of the faith, I have found it necessary to reject much of conventional Christian theology. While the basic beliefs encapsulated in the various creeds are reasonable, much of the other attendant beliefs must be rejected as nonsensical. The Old Testament stories of wrath and judgment, for example, can be viewed as basically historically accurate but badly misinterpreted by theologians with little understanding of God or His plan. Likewise the doctrine of hell can be understood if the traditional notions of literal flames and pitchfork wielding demons in red spandex jumpsuits are rejected. While I have explored these issues at book-length elsewhere, allow me to explain briefly my views about hell.
Let us imagine that God was trying to create an eternal paradise for human beings. How would He go about this task? Does paradise merely require certain materialistic comforts? Or does paradise require something of the human beings that inhabit it?
My belief is that paradise requires human beings to be humble and amenable to divine correction. If human beings refuse divine guidance and correction, then paradise would gradually breakdown as individuals accumulated petty grievances against one another and refused to forgive one another or acknowledge guilt for their own infractions. Paradise is only possible if human beings “turn the other cheek” and “love their neighbor” as themselves by acknowledging their own infractions and forgiving the infractions of others.
What would eternal life be like if a group of people made a habit of refusing divine correction and did not forgive one another or “love their neighbors” in the manner specified by God? Over eternal time, people would gradually harden their hearts against one another and trust would breakdown. Eternal loneliness is the unavoidable longterm consequence of these kinds of decisions.
Now sometimes “loving our neighbors” requires us to do things that we don’t want to do. “Who cares about that loser who will get his feelings hurt if I have sex outside of marriage with this beautiful young woman? I want it, she wants it and nothing else matters.” Though these kinds of attitudes may seem harmless over the short term of a seventy year lifespan, over the course of an eternal life they will eventually result in the hell of loneliness described above. (These consequences can sometimes even be visible within the context of our brief seventy year lifespans!) Is it any wonder that God, who loves every single individual more than we can imagine, describes such a fate in the starkest possible terms?
This has been a long post and still does not do justice to the questions you have asked. I wish you the best as you continue to journey in search of truth.
robert van de water
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You write, “Yes, and I say where are the evangelicals with the courage- and that’s what it will take- to say that simplistic inerrancy isn’t the default Christian position?”
At the moment I am writing my master’s thesis at the Free University in Amsterdam about the discussion among evangelicals (in the broad sense) about the authority of scripture, focusing on claims of inerrancy. Included is a short research on the early church fathers all the way up to the reformation and later, about what their respective positions were. It reveals all kinds of things, as you can imagine.
I agree with your statement and am somewhat afraid of the outcomes of my thesis.. 🙂
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I can relate to BeAttitude’s story because it is very similar to my own.
His list has many items that I can fully appreciate and wrestled with myself.
Unlike the many who never consider intellectual issues, I was very interested in apologetics and counter cult efforts but the more I looked at the issues, the less convinced I was that Christianity was true.
Though it was not necessarily the foremost reason, inerrency was among the top problems I wrestled with as I was trying to hold on to my faith.
Perhaps it was the constant reminders that “if you couldn’t trust all the Bible you can’t trust any of it” that led to my inability to have confidence in a collection of writings that had errors, alterations, contradictions, and absurdities in it.
The conflict between creationism vs evolution and a literal global flood was a constant wedge between faith and reason and there seemed no way to reconcile them without becoming a “liberal” Christian and that was often described by my pastors as on the same level as atheism. The doctrine of eternal torment and the billions who live and died without any gospel was another sore spot that I couldn’t heal.
It is usually common when I discuss my departure from the faith that someone will try and pin it on some desire to live an immoral life or wanting to be my own “god”, but I left Christianity kicking and screaming. I just couldn’t remain honest with myself and continue to go through the motions when things fell apart.
I suppose you could consider me a causality of literal fundamentalism and a skeptical disposition.
Thinking back, I don’t know what anyone could have done or said to prevent my departure, though I did feel those I confided in felt threatened by my doubts and sort of kept their distance.
To this day, almost 8 years later, believing family members, coworkers, and acquaintances who know I don’t go to church any more never mention it.
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Scott,
I just had a couple of questions after reading your post.
“Indeed, it is primarily the structure and (in)coherence of scripture along with the tension between the claims of the Bible/Christianity and the reality of the world as I experience it that convince me that the likelihood of the existence of the Christian God is not great enough to entertain seriously.”
How does the “structure” of the Bible make the “existence of the Christian God” unlikely?
What truth claims does the Bible/Christianity make that conflict with the reality of the world as you experience it?
“I find it baffling that so many consider C.S. Lewis a serious Christian thinker.”
What are the requirements for being a “serious” Christian thinker and how does C.S. Lewis fail to meet them?
I ask these questions so that I might better understand your thinking. If I am able, I might even take a stab at answering some of them.
Thanks,
robert van de water
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Not always good at the putting-word-together-thing, but here goes…
There are always those atheists who, like BeAttitude, claim the repugnance of God’s actions as the reason for their departure from faith. However, I also see some who, like myself, consider the evidence for each of the two (?) options, God or No-God, and find the later the only “likely” alternative.
Michael argues that this is a decision of the “heart.” I don’t buy it unless that is to say it is an emotional decision. Even then emotional decisions are simply made in a different part of the brain and equally subject to our perceptions.
We all make choices based on what we conceive as True, our model of the world and how it works. Do Christians really make a commitment to faith based on no reasoning at all? I find that hard to believe. If I grant that there is a mystical/magical way of converting then I also have to accept so much philosophical baggage that I might as well write my tithe check now (wrote it last week, actually):) If I open myself to such a faith-based concept, I have little reason to resist theism if not out-and-out Christianity.
I could argue that there are Christians who profess based on emotional needs, etc, but most will cite an external reason for their belief. The most common that I encounter is the Existence of the Universe. This one is debatable to me but it is common and natural. The “reason” that I have come to accept as the “best” for belief is Personal Experience – ie John Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed”. I might argue that the mind is a tricksy beast but to the person who experiences it, it is a valid point of data to consider when building a model of reality. That said, I don’t consider it good evidence for the purpose of converting others to you viewpoint. They can’t share the persons “evidence” in any meaningful way.
So, although Old Testament morals may inform my decision, Christians have behaved about as poorly as every one else. George Barna’s polls and my own observations at the church I attend as well as in the community at large tell me that Christian behavior is essentially the same as that of everyone else. Indeed, it is primarily the structure and (in)coherence of scripture along with the tension between the claims of the Bible/Christianity and the reality of the world as I experience it that convince me that the likelihood of the existence of the Christian God is not great enough to entertain seriously.
Note on apologists: The work McDowell and Strobel are considered sad jokes among atheists, for the reasons at least one commenter pointed out, above. Personally, I find it baffling that so many consider C.S. Lewis a serious Christian thinker. But then again, people eat up Strobel’s books, too.
Note on the source of morals: Shared evolutionary and biological history offer enough of a counter-explanation for whatever common moral ground you can find among modern and historical cultures as to erase the slamdunkness of the God-must-tell-you-what-good-is argument at a minimum.
Note on debates: Debates may inform an audience (rarely) but do NOTHING to establish truth. Some are more skilled at the technicalities of debate irrespective of the truth value of their positions.
Finally: Christopher Hitchen’s and Richard Dawkins’ atheist works are shrill and not very compelling.
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great post. thought provoking and humbling. i appreciate it.
i have a sister who recently “de-converted” after a long series of events. she spent time listening to WOTM Radio (Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron, and Todd Friel) and they told her that if she didn’t look like the picture painted in the book of James, then she could NOT be a Christian…and she started to believe them.
ultimately, she’s been reading Hitchens and Dawkins (and every other anti-theist she can find), and she finds their “logic” compelling. she is not willing to call herself “athiest” yet, but is now “agnostic” at best.
the failure of Christianity, in my opinion, is our rigidity. “we are right, and the detractors be damned (literally).” we’ve forgotten that the heros of our faith were flawwed and fallible. we neglect that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Solomon were failures and sinners…who were used by God in spite of their frailty. we like to paint a picture of what we think we should be, then try to live up to that false ideal.
God expects us to be real. He expects us to be honest. He expects us to say “i don’t know” when that’s the best answer we have. instead, we try to put on a good show…impress others with our righteousness…and play games. we throw around words like “inerrant”, “Calvinist”, “Arminian”, “sinner”,”salvation”, and “hell”…not understanding what we’re talking about. we’ve put God in a box and are determined to define Him, whom we cannot understand. we place on the Infinite, characteristics that we (the finite) can grasp, rather than accept that we cannot comprehend Him. we drive people away as a result.
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I found Christ when I had a need for Him in my life. After the need to fill the void was filled, a new need emerged. Understanding. Understanding of what had happened to me, and of how I needed to relate to it.
I found that the vehicle for this understanding came in studying human nature. If human nature is really good, then its just limited by external forces thru oppression, and salvation comes from the outside thru eliminating that oppression created by others.
But if human nature is fallen, then the evil exists in everyone, therefore everyone has a personal accountability for it, and some kind of salvation is needed inside on a personal level for it.
When I looked at the world for examples of the above, the two pre-eminate figures were, of course, Christ on the one hand. And then Karl Marx on the other. Hitchens, by the way, comes from an unashamed Communist background, as the followers of Marx see that as the only real salvation of the world. Talk to any atheist and it will be the same, as this becomes their only hope.
It was then that the Bible truly started to make sense to me, as this is pretty much what the message of it is all about. Its a binary thing, and it all works according to the one way or the other. Those attempting to straddle these ideas will find nothing by conflict.
So to me, learning about this ‘contrast’ and explaining it to others is how I approach pretty much everything. Understanding man has a fallen nature can’t help but lead one to Christ, so that is what I hammer on in all my endevours. God’s Word will always shine a huge spotlight on that theme.
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iMonk,
The primary problem is that human pride makes us incapable of admitting when we don’t know the answer to a given question. Because we cannot stand unanswered questions, we seize on the best available answer and insist that it is satisfactory, no matter how poor it may be. We then use peer pressure tactics to enforce this view as “known truth” and close our minds to discussion. No greater example of this can exist then the insistence on the 24 hour yowm in Genesis.
As Christians, I think we make 3 fundamental mistakes that make our faith ridiculous:
1. We assume that Moses and the Old Testament prophets were perfect men who revealed God perfectly like Jesus Christ. (In contrast, I believe that Moses commits two of the greatest sins in human history in Exodus 33.)
2. We assume that morals are relative. Any act performed by God is okay because “might makes right”. (In contrast, I believe that the love of 1 Corinthians 13 is the basis of morality and that God cannot perform certain actions because of his loving nature.)
3. We assume that hell is absolute. God actively punishes those who do not believe in him forever. (In contrast, I believe that God is warning us of the consequences of making decisions for ourselves by rejecting his offer of the grace, forgiveness and guidance of Jesus Christ. What would it be like to live forever among those who do not believe they require the forgiveness and grace of God? Reject Jesus Christ and you will find out that it is not as much fun as you might think.)
It is very frustrating for me to watch people peddle entirely inadequate defenses of these basic problems as “Christian truth”. We need to admit our ignorance and question our basic beliefs. Aside from the fact that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior and a small set of attendant beliefs, everything should be on the table and no question should be ridiculed.
robert van de water
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A note of clarification regarding my fellow North Carolinian, Bart Ehrman. It wasn’t his discovery that the inerrancy of Scripture was not true that “detonated” his faith. Rather, his inability to reconcile a loving, all-powerful God with a world of suffering. See his most recent book for his thoughts on the possibility of faith without inerrant Scriptures…well worth reading!
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“Ground Zero of the Sexual Revolution,” eh? Well, be careful over there! You might wake up in the middle of the night to find a mob of amply-bosomed blonde lovelies banging on your door like the men of Sodom, demanding to slake their lusts.
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BTW, I did not find this out until today, but A.N. Wilson, prominent biographer and atheist, “re-converted” to Christianity recently.
His story might serve as an informative contrast to BeAttitude’s experince.
One article among many is at http://www.christianpost.com/article/20090507/a-n-wilson-returns-to-the-faith/index.html
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Headless Unicorn Guy
Aha! Now I finally get your username!
Hmmm…but does this mean you see yourself as a martyr in an Age of Reason? — Terri
More like a guy who had a vivid image burst into his head back in Spring of ’99 that wouldn’t come out until three color pieces and a 2000-word short story later. (Besides which, I have a fairly common name; “Headless Unicorn Guy” is unique.)
Yes, I have seen obsession on Reason to the detriment of all else. I work in computers and you see a lot of it in my field. Immerse yourself in the machine too long and you become a machine. And the destruction of the world becomes “Only a six-point-one Gigadeath Situation — Insignificant”. (Actual quote from one poster boy of Sola Intellect.)
Also remember that the Unicorn is also a symbol of Purity. (Which was the original angle of the picture; the Age of Reason corollary came later.) I live in SoCal (Ground Zero of the Sexual Revolution) and am just old enough to have spent my formative years in the Fifties; when I came of age, La Revolution Sexual had hit and I found myself in an alien universe with unicorn blood staining my boots to the ankles while the mob cheered in mass orgasm. Like Howard the Duck, trapped in a world I never made.
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Wow! So much to think about here! Thank you, iMonk, for bringing this to more people’s attention! And thank you, all of you learned folk, for bringing to bear such excellent arguments!
Although not knowing BeAttitude, I understand his struggle to make sense of the religion of his youth when compared to what’s happening in the world arena. He also shows his heart: a very brave thing to do in a world/society/culture dominated by those who must insist theirs is the only way.
I also understand the walking away, as well as the need to list the reasons why. When I was almost 28, I walked away from the religion of my youth. I was a Jehovah’s Witness and, even four years after leaving, while I couldn’t bring myself to return I still thought it was the only way. But, six months later I said “yes†to Jesus’ offer of a lifetime relationship with Him and have spent an incredible 20 years on that road.
As I look at BeAttitude’s post, I realize something has taken his eyes off the Lover of his soul and placed it squarely on the screwed up people who claim to be His. Listen to what BeAttitude wrote about his beliefs: “I did truly believe in God for most of my life and worshiped and prayed to him daily. I believed he was at work in my life at all times and using me to touch other people’s lives. … With the countless religions of the world, I began to question why the god of the Bible is more believable than all other gods worshiped on earth.â€
In my two decades with the Lord I’ve discovered that some of His children put more stock in their denominations than they do in Him. Some haven’t yet grasped that it’s more about relationship than rules. Some believe you can’t be Christian if you don’t regularly go to church. Some haven’t immersed themselves in the Word to know what’s in there, missing out on the vignettes and subplots that explain God’s love. Some have allowed others to interpret Scripture for them, not knowing that often these are taken out of context.
I don’t know the languages in which the Bible was written but I know Who wrote it, and I believe:
as Job continued to do even though his world was falling apart.
as Gideon did, that a God who empowers isn’t afraid of questions.
as Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah did, that God could save them but they’d still worship Him even if they died.
as the beloved apostle John did, when encouraging disciples to accept Jesus though they’d never seen or heard Him.
as my poor mother did, that people will hurt you (and have, badly!), but God never will and His Word is always true.
as a former pastor of mine did, when he stated, “When we get to Heaven, God’s going to straighten out all our theologies, ’cause we all have it a little wrong somewhere.â€
I know in whom I have believed. I know to the core of my being that:
God is love;
Jesus’ died for every person who ever lived or ever will live, not just for those who have said “yes†to Him;
only God knows the heart so we cannot say whether or not someone else is accepted;
the flip side of that coin calls us to live what we believe;
none of us will fully understand until we go Home because a finite mind cannot wrap itself around The Infinite.
It is my prayer that all of us, BeAttitude included, will understand that God is not afraid of questions, nor is He upset when we’re angry with Him. I also pray he will accept that people’s inherent right to choose can make for some pretty lousy decisions, none of which can be laid at the feet of Love.
all of Heaven’s best to you and yours,
Margret
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Thanks Christopher
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Headless Unicorn Guy
Aha! Now I finally get your username!
Hmmm…but does this mean you see yourself as a martyr in an Age of Reason?
I’ll have to psychoanalyze this a bit further! 🙂
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A question I’ve had for a while is why is it that the Christian Scriptures has Jesus appearing for Thomas to allay his doubts? And if it was done to allay his doubts, out of pity for his lack of faith, or just to convince him, why is that lacking so much for the modern day skeptics?
I wish BeAttitude could step outside of his Christian box and perhaps try to look through a different prism. Not believing in the claims of Jesus does not make one an atheist, it makes one a non-Christian. Judaism, and a more scholarly view of Scripture would have been an antidote to at least half of the complaints.
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Martha – nicely said. Amen.
You don’t wake up thinking, “I’ll stop being Christian.” You wake up and realize that you haven’t been for a long time.
And yet the Father waits for and welcomes his prodigal sons home again.
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Great post / thinking Michael. Thanks. E.
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“None of us who believe is immune.”
Amen to that, wcwirla.
Suppose five years ago, someone had asked BeAttitude “Do you believe?” I imagine he would have said “Yes.” I don’t know if he was struggling with doubt then, or how long this has been going on, but I don’t imagine he woke up one morning and said “Hey, I think I’ll stop being Christian.”
I get a sense of a lot of weariness, a lot of depression, a lot of beaten-down by the struggle to reconcile what he had been raised to believe and the doubts he was feeling. I don’t get triumphalism. I do get a prickly self-defensiveness that wants to get his retaliation in first: one of his posts on the falsity of Christianity was a case of a nun from a Traditionalist – and I suspect schismatic – Catholic order who had been acquitted in a dangerous driving case that resulted in the deaths of two teenagers.
That’s not a reasoned argument on “how I was convinced Christianity was false”, that’s a wounded person striking out with “If it’s true, why aren’t all you Christians better than ordinary folks? And if you’re not better, how dare you condemn me?”
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Thank you for linking this post and for the response to it. There is certainly much that could be said about sin and grace in Christ.
I note with sadness that the author of BeAttitude has a Lutheran background. He certainly reflects the writings of Dawkins/Harris/Hitchins/Dennett, though these are hardly original or unique. I believe it is possible to reason oneself out of faith. This is not to say that faith is a blind leap or unreasonable, but that it is strongly relational and existential as well as intellectual. Apologetics and rational arm wrestling will only get one so far. If our intellectual doubts keep us from prayer, from worship, from participation in the sacramental life of the Body of Christ, faith will indeed grow cold and die. I recognize as a trained scientist that this isn’t a scientifically provable statement, but that’s the nature of relational things, I’m afraid. If I continually press for evidence of my wife’s love, I will wind up destroying my love for her. Fortunately, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Not even our doubts and skepticism.
BeAttitude’s post is a poignant view of what faith looks like when it has died. None of us who believe is immune.
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†“More people have been killed in the name of God than in the name of gold.â€
Really? Why would you think so?—
Wow, I’m not sure how that first post happened, but your point about them overlapping is a great one. Especially in our society, God and Gold are two sides of the same coin. God loves capitalism, it seems.
I was also thinking of how the Bible is used as a weapon, compared to say, Adam Smith. Paul and how he’s been used to justify slavery and oppression of women. Spreading Christianity as a rationale for the genocidal conquest of the new world. Northern Ireland, etc. Just recently here we had a child abuse case where the father said he was simply following Biblical principles when he beat his child.
The OT is mostly violence, and you don’t have to surf far before you can find blogs where claiming Jesus was a pacifist will get you flamed.
That’s where I run aground on the idea that God must exist before we know what good and bad is. The altruistic impulse was necessary for our evolution; it’s built in. Perhaps that’s what is meant by being created in the image of God. Perhaps along with original sin we have original good.
I think the broad point that the new atheists make, that religion causes more harm than it does good, should not be dismissed out of hand.
There are overlapping factors on the “goodness” Venn diagram, too. If someone’s passion is to feed the homeless, they’ll feed the homeless with or without a church.
If we were to compare the things that don’t overlap on the diagram — good things that people do only because they’re Christian vs. bad things that people do only because they’re Christian — I’m not sure what we’d find.
Perhaps those non-overlapping things don’t even exist. Perhaps Christianity as practiced mostly serves as a cover for our own impulses.
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†“More people have been killed in the name of God than in the name of gold.â€
Really? Why would you think so?—
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Oops, *Geiger*
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Memphis Aggie,
Also, see Larry Gieger’s comment above mine. It is helpful on the “moral” component of unbelief, regarding Christianity.
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Memphis Aggie,
I *think* what Michael is trying to say (not completely certain, obviously, as I’m not him) is that the evidence is already there for Christianity, but that ultimately, the non-Christian’s deepest issue is one of the heart. Will one submit oneself to God, or will one continue to trust in oneself as one’s own highest “authority”? Evidence definitely plays a role in Christian conversion (for many people), and evidence, as part of apologetics, can be helpful, but it is ultimately a matter of submitting oneself and one’s will to God.
(If I’m wrong about any of this being what Michael is saying, I trust that he will correct me. :-))
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“I can say that finding the answer to all of them did not bring any real faith. My faith is the result of a long 18 year experience where God showed be what would happen to me if I continued in the sin I was engaged in, and that the only reason it hadn’t happened thus far was because of his grace.” Thank you Scott. You are one of the few here to speak to the core issue. And very well spoken. Most everyone else is dancing around it. Lots of “apologetic”, “evangelical”, “goodness”, “objection”, etc.
Like Scott, and all the rest of us, what is beAttitude going to do with his sin? That’s the question he must answer. He’s right in one way. What happened 3000 years ago on a plain in Israel really doesn’t have much to do with his life.
And yet, in a very vital way it does matter. What happened 3000 years ago is connected to that day on Calvary a thousand years later and right up to today and his sin today.
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DLE,
WROTE: Placing the burden on him is one of the major, major faults of modern Christianity. It is why people like theBeAttitude exist and why they fall away from the faith. While everyone is ultimately responsible for his or her faith, it is the COMMUNITY of faith that failed theBeAttitude. It is the responsibility of leaders to lead, teachers to teach, and disciplers to disciple. When these people (excuse me) SUCK at what they do, either because they have no training themselves or they stopped caring a long time ago, then people like theBeAttitude are inevitable.
———-“Then Agrippa said to Paul, ‘Do you think that in a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?'”
I wonder, DLE, is the ‘COMMUNITY’ of faith to be held responsible for Aggrippa not coming to faith? Did Paul fail Aggrippa; therefore, he must be held responsible? So the burden was on Paul not to fail in his presentation of the gospel, not Agrippa to embrace the light of truth? Interesting.
fishon
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Originally, I paid very little attention to the picture of the church sign. But after reading it, I think it’s dead wrong. Reason isn’t the enemy of faith, our emotions are.
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it is fascinating that within a week of posting his thoughts on losing faith in Christianity, he was laid off from his job.
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One of my coworkers has a quote posted in his classroom: “You may not live what you profess, but you WILL live what you believe.”
With God’s grace, this may well simply be another step in BeAttitude’s journey to Christ. He’s been shaken loose from all the things he professed; now he comes to what he believes. If he continues to seek the TRUTH, I think he will eventually come back around to Christ.
It’s been my experience that many people who turn from their faith did so because of some watershed event in their lives. I’d like to ask him what precipitated his decision; what was the straw that broke his back? And that is where Imonk’s point about argument and apologetics comes in: now is the time that BeAttitude needs to see real Christ-love in action. He’s not in a place where he can be persuaded by reason; he needs to see God’s unreasonable, scandalous love in action and extended to him. And that has to come from Christians.
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Headless Unicorn Guy,
Do you mean to say that faith is oversold as fact? This is not Catholic teaching. The Pope recently wrote about the commonality that atheists and religious face although from distinct viewpoints. Doubt is part of everyone’s faith and everyone’s struggle. Atheists and religious both share crises of confidence and go through ups and downs. He quoted St Therese of Lisieux as an example of a fully devoted religious immersed in the faith since childhood and who yet still has to battle with doubts.
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I am so grateful for what you do.
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We all “believe†in all kinds of things whether we’re religious or not. Maybe it seems arbitrary. Maybe, sometimes, it is arbitrary. However, there’s no such thing as a human who doesn’t “believe†in some things without evidence or because reason has led them to every choice in their lives.
I would imagine romance would be dead in such a person….if they existed. — Terri
Oh, they exist. Check out the history of the French Revolution for such triumphs of the Age of Reason. And they’re still out there, usually in the form of Activists — the type of Activists that wind up on South Park.
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“What qualities should a system of beliefs have that should be trusted, that one should have faith in? It is the supported by evidence, rational, revisable, testable, and tested that is important.â€
This is not faith this is confidence in facts, you are describing empiricism. Religion can and should be rational and supported by evidence , but not in a conclusive manner. — Memphis Aggie
Then somebody had better inform whoever made and distributed those tracts with the little toy train diagram with the FACT boxcar ahead of the FAITH caboose. Especially when the only evidence for the FACT is that “The Bible Says So!” via lots of quoted proof texts. Those tracts always disturbed me.
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Teenage Mutant etc….or as anyone with kids would call you..–TMNT
We all “believe” in all kinds of things whether we’re religious or not. Maybe it seems arbitrary. Maybe, sometimes, it is arbitrary. However, there’s no such thing as a human who doesn’t “believe” in some things without evidence or because reason has led them to every choice in their lives.
I would imagine romance would be dead in such a person….if they existed.
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Teenage Mutant Ninja:
On the basis of respectful engagement of the topic, it stretches the limits of moderation at least half of the time you post. On most Christian sites, many of your comments would bring about a firestorm. I hope you appreciate that you get quite the free forum here, and I get lots of practice saying “No….I’ll let that one go.”
ms
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“Our problem, at root, is not intellectual or evidential, but moral.”
Meaning too few works, or lack of charity in social circumstances? Not sure what you mean here Imonk.
Erp,
If your still interested let me address this point:
“What qualities should a system of beliefs have that should be trusted, that one should have faith in? It is the supported by evidence, rational, revisable, testable, and tested that is important.”
This is not faith this is confidence in facts, you are describing empiricism. Religion can and should be rational and supported by evidence , but not in a conclusive manner. What you miss is that your definition is a small and cramped way to address a wide open world. Strictly within the realm of science there are many untestable theories and there are many truths for which we can not give sufficient evidence.
If you seek truth you will quickly learn that some truths are not testable. Your criteria will fail you on many important questions: questions of morality, eternity, purpose, and serenity.
Religion is an untestable part of metaphysics, but the truth or falsity of religion is very important. If it’s true then nothing in the world is more important if it’s false it’s still interwoven into human nature (that fact is based on strong evidence) and provides the basis for morality, a critical part of a functioning society. So like it or not very large parts of our worldly understanding and daily lives hinge on questions science can not test.
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–quote–
9. I am a Christian because I was born into that culture and family? No, as true as that is, I am a Christian because I remain one, despite the strong arguments against Christianity provided by being in a Christian family and culture.
–quote–
I’m curious as to what you’re trying to say here. Are you saying that you are a Christian because of where you were born or are you merely saying that is the reason you became a Christian?
One of the most common responses in England (and I suspect the States as well) is “I was born a Christian”. What they really mean is that they were born in what was perceived as a Christian country and they have a basic understanding that being a Christian involves one of Jesus, God, Church and religion. Being a Christian is about turning away from a life without God (where we make ourselves or anyone but God as the focus of our living) and ask for forgiveness – as Paul writes in Galatians, the Law shows us that we cannot be good enough on our own, we are not able to fulfil the whole of the Law.
Now before anyone points out any errors in my “argument”, let me point out that I’m far from perfect and I don’t expect to understand everything (or be able to put all those thoughts into an universally readable form) this side of glory! I know I make plenty of mistakes! (That doesn’t mean I don’t want you to point them out)
Being a Christian is not about being “religious” or doing good works (we cannot “work” our own way to Heaven because our good works are “as filthy rags”) but, as James states, we demonstrate our faith by our works – everyone has gifts and, as a Christian, we want to use our gifts for His glory – some are called to youth work, others to pastoral ministry, some to chat with friends over a cuppa or be the friendly face at the door, others see a month or a lifetime overseas.
In fact, just reflecting on many of the things I know I’ve done wrong makes me rejoice that the Lord of all the Universe did it all because I am unable.
On a slightly different point, apologetics alone cannot convince you to become a Christian. What they can do is point you to the Cross, lead you to a place where you need to consider the possibilities. God/Jesus is the one who does the saving after all!
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I grew up in church, departed from and eventually rejected the Christianity of my youth, finally descended into a pit of utter nihilism, and then rediscovered belief and faith in an unlikely turn of events — so, on one side, I truly relate to what BeAttitude has to say. Many of his reasons for leaving the faith were the same as my own. On the other side, I hold out hope that he will someday rediscover his faith, as well. Sometimes, you have to let go of fake religious pretensions in order to find what is real. It’s a dangerous journey, and most don’t come back from it — but some do.
The key for me was actual experience of God — and, yes, I’m being mystical and spooky here. My problem is that there is no rational argument for God’s existence that I can’t counter-argue, so reason is just not a foundation on which I can build faith, not without intentionally suppressing the rational progression of my thoughts when they start probing out beyond the standard stock of Christian apologetics.
For me, it took the literal indwelling and supernatual activity of the Holy Spirit, which was something the religion of my youth would not touch with a ten foot pole. I think there was a very good reason why the apostles made sure that those early converts received the Holy Spirit, and that’s because literal experience of God is a necessary element in sustained faith and belief. The purely cerebral game is one that we’ll never win, not in the long run.
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“Reason” doesn’t work. You can’t give good reasons for accepting Christianity, at least not that would be persuasive to clear-thinking outsiders.
“Faith” is arbitrary. Why believe in this, and not that? Indeed, why suppose that it is important to “believe” anything special, other than what we would normally be inclined to?
And then there’s personal inclination. One goes to church for an aesthetic experience, or in order to meet people and look good, etc. But churches can’t always give people what they want. Musical styles are divisive, and there is always a more “with it” church somewhere else. As society, churches, and people all change over time, the chances of mismatch approach certainty.
What’s left? Maybe the “innoculation” theory. Sure, Christianity is boring and nonsensical, but since religion exists everywhere, and nominal Christianity beats the hell out of turning Moslem, better send the kids to Sunday school once in awhile.
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Michael, you wrote:
“Apologetics deals with reasons, evidence, objections, etc. But I have almost never seen apologetics alone have any sort of evangelistic impact. Our problem, at root, is not intellectual or evidential, but moral.”
This is why I tend to prefer presuppositional apologetics over the evidential sort. Neither can ultimately convert the human heart and give spiritual sight. However, presuppositional apologetics, in my view, is more helpful, because it goes to the crucial matters of 1. the ultimate *foundations* for one’s thinking and 2. one’s ultimate heart/mind/soul *allegiance*– self and autonomy, or God and dependence on Him in our thinking and living.
Left to ourselves and our sinful preference for our own reasoning and understanding, Christianity *will* look foolish. We naturally tend to think that we are sufficient, and we need no God to tell us who He is, who we are, and how we are to think and live. It’s not a matter of evidence; it’s a matter of *allegiance.* (This does not mean there is no place for giving evidence and answering questions and objections to the Christian faith.)
As I wrote above, no form of apologetics has the power to convert people to Christ. I tend to go with the presupp kind because it gets to the heart of the issue, which is an issue of the *heart.*
However, as others have written here, most churches aren’t teaching serious apologetics of the presuppositional *or* evidential kind. This is a very grave problem. Christianity is *not* an anti-intellectual religion, and I lament it when churches, especially, treat Christianity as such, a la “Don’t ask questions; just believe!”
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There was a time when I would have been apprehensive about even going to review this list of reasons because of the challenge it would mean. But now, I was pretty sure what I was going to see, and I can honestly say that nothing on that list surprised me at all. I’ve wrestled with all of them and read books on most of them. I can say that finding the answer to all of them did not bring any real faith. My faith is the result of a long 18 year experience where God showed be what would happen to me if I continued in the sin I was engaged in, and that the only reason it hadn’t happened thus far was because of his grace. This is something I only know from my own experience and couldn’t prove it to anyone. In short I was blind and now I see.
I think it’s good beattitude has done his list and is walking away. If he gets far enough away he might turn around and be able to see the Church of christ as it can only be seen if you stand far enough away. I’m stealing from Chesterton here.
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iMonk, fantastic article as always. I don’t remember where I read the story, but most people who grow up in non-religious (not necessarily Atheist) households turn to a church later in life, and the largest reason they give for changing is because their spiritual needs are not being met. So while the non-religious folk are becoming more mainstream, there are plenty of people going both directions
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I think that the most dangerous attitude to walk into something like this with, as a Christian, is “oh, well, it’s only a small minority somewhere that I’ve never seen that does things this way…most normal people, like my church, are fine, and there’s no real issue”.
Holy fingers in holy ears, nyah nyah nyah.
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” I think the evangelical belief in the Bible as the Word of God (something that I feel uncomfortable about – it’s Jesus who is the final revelation) that has led to this shallowness, the Bible is seen as a quick fix for everything”
But how do you know that revelation without the testimony (The Bible)?
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Also, Jesus is the Word. Read the Gospel of John.
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Ruben,
This reminds me of a story Richard Foster told . He saw a picture of Jesus giving the Bible to the world. He said that is backward. The Bible gives Jesus to the world.
I have had people tell me Foster is wrong Jesus gave us the Bible.
Two different points of view.
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When I left the faith many years ago (I have since come back) I was forsaking a faith that only captured a small part of the truth. I hardly knew Christ and my faith was grounded on propositions, the Gospels only quoted to support those propositions. I think it is easy to walk away from a faith like that, there is only an intellectual attachment and I had faith in doctrines not a person. I think the evangelical belief in the Bible as the Word of God (something that I feel uncomfortable about – it’s Jesus who is the final revelation) that has led to this shallowness, the Bible is seen as a quick fix for everything
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I don’t mean to say pointing out good works are apologetics. This is in response to how many people have been killed in the name of God. Christians do some good things.
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I’ve always felt that Christians pointing out there good works was not a particularly helpful apologetic, no matter how much it corrected false information.
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DLE-
I apologize for my mis-representation of your position. I did not read the last sentence of your post closely enough.
I should have said I agree with the first paragraph of your post, but I disagreed with the last statement regarding the assignment of culpability.
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In all of this giant discussion I have yet to hear anyone say(although imonk hinted it)that God is the one who converts. We are just messagers of the story.
or: How much good have people done in the name of God? Feed the hungry, cloth the naked and so forth?
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Haven’t read Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” but have read “The Dawkins Delusion” by Alister McGrath – which intelligently answers the usual atheistic arguments. McGrath began his career as a noted scientist, then obtained a doctorate in theology, and has bested Dawkins in more than one debate. When I returned this book to my local libray, the librarian exclaimed “Wow, someone’s written the book I was looking for!” She had read “The God Delusion” and had found it laughable and unconvincing, and was wondering who would take on Dawkins. I highly recommend the McGrath book. Have not yet read his latest, “A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology” but have heard it’s excellent.
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@JohnB5200, who wrote: “I agree with DLE.
If BeAttitude had seriously wanted answers, he could have found them.”
We don’t agree. You place the burden on theBeAttitude, while I am placing the burden on the Christians around him.
Placing the burden on him is one of the major, major faults of modern Christianity. It is why people like theBeAttitude exist and why they fall away from the faith. While everyone is ultimately responsible for his or her faith, it is the COMMUNITY of faith that failed theBeAttitude. It is the responsibility of leaders to lead, teachers to teach, and disciplers to disciple. When these people (excuse me) SUCK at what they do, either because they have no training themselves or they stopped caring a long time ago, then people like theBeAttitude are inevitable.
If you or I grew up in a house where all the walls were painted black, and we were told by the most important people in our lives that all houses have black walls, why should we assume other houses have walls that are painted a color besides black?
Our belief systems are largely a product of our environment. If the environment is bad, how are we going to turn out excellence? A bad tree does not produce good fruit.
In theBeAttitude’s case, the community around him comprised the bad tree. The community failed and the result was bad fruit.
We Christians have got to stop going for the jugular by laying all the blame on the victim. That only excuses us from culpability. I see theBeAttitude as a victim of a lack of decent training. If he went 33 years and crapped out in the end (though I doubt the final epitaph has been written on his Christian life), then a whole lotta people along those 33 years failed him severely. They need to own up to that failure. WE need to own up to that failure.
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Why is an A/G quoting Luther? (on the billboard)
I googled it and found this on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism
It does have an interesting tale of how thinking on faith has changed through the years and philosophers.
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John Morehead:
I don’t believe atheists are drawing away the “faithful,” or in large numbers. I do believe a significant number of evangelical young adults, whom I see as primarily shallow adherents in evangelicalism, if they understand the arguments, are affected more deeply than in past generations.
The “faithful” are less inclined to be deconverted and it so, like Be Attitude, it will be a long walk, of which the new atheists may play a part.
ms
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” “More people have been killed in the name of God than in the name of gold.â€
Really? Why would you think so?”
The problem in making that God vs. Gold judgement call is that the Venn diagrams have often been known to overlap. (See also: The Crusades, most colonial wars)
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Interesting thoughts and comments on an important topic. As someone who has worked among the new religiou smovements for decades, and in the past primarily from an apologetic framework, I have come to a different stance with continued experience among the new religions, and broader reflection on the topic.
While recognizing the ongoing significance of appropriate forms and contexts for apologetics, I strongly disagree with iMonk that reasoned arguments are drawing away the faithful, at least in any great numbers. Sociological data on the deconversion process indicates that, in general, this process takes places over an extended period of time, and that rational arguments may play a part at the end while someone is flirting with the final steps in deconversion and assuming a new identity, but rarely do people leave any faith for another or for no faith at all for purely rational reasons. A number of factors are at work in terms of identity crisis, psychological issues, new social contexts, as well as rational considerations, and a tipping point is reached which results in an exit process and the initial steps in the forging of a new identity.
In our continued reflection on the relevance of apologetics, my hope is we can find balance between the extremes of ignoring it on the one hand, and investing too much in the discipline on the other.
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Maybe the problem is not with religion as such. Maybe we just need a better religion. Unitarianism? Or maybe we should start from scratch and make up a new one, then put it in whatever we want.
If you like Jesus, you can still have him in it. Just interpret the Bible in a different way, or use some of those gnostic gospels. Or trance-channel him like the New Agers do. (Whoops–so much for being more rational.)
If you are completely cynical about ethics, then it would still make sense to pretend you believe in them–but violate them secretly. Sound like any TV evangelists you know?
We are animals.
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“And we have the devil whisper to us, “You know this bible stuff is wrong. You are wasting your life on a lie—
the christian attributes that whisper to the devil, whereas the atheist attributes that whisper to the voice of reason.
I never had a problem with the concept of Hell, or violence in the old testament, etc. But recently, the idea that i might be wasting my life in being a Christian has been nagging at me. Like what Paul said re: if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead then we are the biggest idiots of all time.
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“More people have been killed in the name of God than in the name of gold.”
Really? Why would you think so?
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JJoe,
Your comments bring these thoughts to my mind.
Humans have tried the “better off with no religion” idea. See USSR 1917 – 1991. It didn’t work out too well.
Most people have been killed (whether in a back alley or a battlefield) for the following reasons; hatred, greed, lust, envy, anger, jealousy, pride and power. Those reasons don’t go away when you take God out of the picture.
The cruelest, most hateful people I’ve known in my life worship the god of Me, Myself and I. Sometimes they identify culturally with a particular religion too. But their real allegiance is plain to see. It certainly isn’t to Christ.
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I meant to say ‘weren’t reasons, evidences, etc.’
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Like I said, I believe I am mostly a product of apologetics as evangelism… going on 9 years in my faith.
I also believe that if there were reasons, evidences, etc. I would almost certainly not be a Christian, and might even be agnostic.
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Apologetics deals with reasons, evidence, objections, etc. But I have almost never seen apologetics alone have any sort of evangelistic impact. Our problem, at root, is not intellectual or evidential, but moral.
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“Why- in an atheistic universe- are acts like 9-11 morally outrageous? That’s the language of a theistic universe. Atheists need to say, “I find this act outrageous to my chosen ideas of morality†or “Many people find outrageous to their chosen view of morality.—
like what CS lewis said about straight vs. bent and how do we even get the concept of straight unless God gave it to us.
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Dave N.,
There are certainly some apologetics that come off that way. I own McDowell’s original book and never cared for it. I’ve never loaned it to anyone, never recommended to anyone, and don’t think I’ve ever referenced it since reading it the first time.
However, there are some very good apologetics out there — and some that don’t even market themselves as apologetics (which are usually even better at the apologetics). Not all are smug and shallow.
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iMonk said:
“What if he listened to apologists and wasn’t convinced? Who do apologists convert anyway? The assumption that a failure to appreciate our really great answers is the problem doesn’t impress me. Atheism isn’t an argument over evidence anyway. ”
I’m curious what you mean by this. You obviously put value into apologetics. And of course, I recognize the limits of apologetics, though I consider myself one of it’s success stories. There are others who would likely claim that as well (like Strobel).
Is this more about — not always having the pat answers to questions? Because if that’s the case, I think we’re on the same page. It’s one of the reasons I liked Chris Wright’s book. It was without a doubt apologetics. But I never felt like he was giving you the ‘right answer’ but instead wrestling with the issue and conversing with you about it… eg This is how I make sense of it.
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The truth of the matter is that the new etheists are doing to Christianity, especially evangelicalism, what Protestants have long been doing to Catholicism. It simply is thought-provoking
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My brothers and sisters, sometimes, I guess many times our faith is tested and shaken to the core. We are saved by faith in Jesus Christ, whom we have never yet seen in the flesh. Our sinful and feeble minds throw every ounce of human wisdom at us as fiery darts to destroy our faith. And we have the devil whisper to us, “You know this bible stuff is wrong. You are wasting your life on a lie”
This was predicted. Jesus said that the love of many would grow cold. Paul said that many would abandon the faith and turn to fables. One time Jesus said, “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?”
We are saved by faith. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the certainty of things NOT SEEN. Faith is not easy, it is HARD. It is HARD to believe in Jesus Christ. But I am like Peter. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life”
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It’s a compelling list. I have often wondered myself if the world would not be better off without religion.
More people have been killed in the name of God than in the name of gold.
If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve felt God’s presence, I’d have no problem being a radical atheist and doing everything I could to make Christianity (it being the closest target) go away.
I don’t think “churched” people have a clue about the evil they can bring to the world.
The cruelest, most hateful people I’ve known in my life have operated from a platform of Christianity.
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It is not the main point of this thread, and so I will respect that and won’t belabor the inerrancy point (and I know you’ve expended lots of ink; I’m just not sure it’s some of your better “ink”, my friend!) any further than to say that I have little fear of those who want to “hold (my) feet to the fire” with regard to inerrancy when the issue is put simply: when “God breathed” the Scriptures, did error come from His “lips” or not? Yes, I understand that there are some definitions that are important, and have to be explained (if I say “1000 people were in church yesterday”, and there were actually 1004, is that an “error”? Of course not.), but I really don’t think that the problem is that big. Maybe I need to read Bart Ehrman’s issues, though…
OK, no more from me on that; a great post all-in-all, and thanks again for making us think.
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Martha: “We’re veering perilously close to the same attitude that tells someone, at a time of tragedy or failure, “Well, if you’d only prayed harder/more/right, this would never have happened†or “You must never have been *properly* converted, this is all the fault of your lack of faith!†and the like.â€
I realize that what I just said could come off sounding exactly that way. Just to clarify, I know from firsthand experience that sometimes you have to move quite a distance from your religious teachings before you can find Christ. I think iMunk is right. It is often more about emotional experiences, even when we use intellectual arguments.
I had to reach a point of longing, however slight, before I could knock. My point is that making such a list suggests to me that the author may still be seeking.
When I walked away I wanted nothing to do with religion. I simply didn’t care enough to write down a list of all the reasons.
What I’m suggesting is that Christians should not get angry at such lists. People have many different ways of seeking answers.
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The problem with apologetics (including and especially with authors like McDowell) is that it’s very much “a house built on the sand.” Apologists usually present a skewed, one-sided presentation of an argument/problem, while either not presenting alternative views or mis-representing them, or simply making them a subject of ridicule without explaining their faults or merits. Statements are often improperly sourced (or not sourced at all) and sometimes the scholarly works quoted are no longer even considered legitimate within their own field (e.g. Albright in the case of McDowell). In sum, the shortcomings, problems and faults of the apologist’s own arguments are NEVER presented or admitted to. When people subsequently learn that there’s much more to the story that what they were told (usually through their education), they react like BeAttitude–they jump to the conclusion it’s just all one big lie, which is tragic. This is a huge a problem entirely of our own making.
In short, apologetics is by its very nature usually dishonest, inaccurate, assumes too much and practices little humility regarding its own case. Christian thinking in this regard needs to be entirely “re-thought.”
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I took an interest in deconversion stories last year, and read the God Delusion and a few other things. It struck me that atheism of this kind seems to be mainly a legitimate protest about Christianity being turned into idolatry. Dawkins’ idea of the ‘God delusion’ is spot on, that we often project an image of our desires and fears onto the world and call it God or Jesus. Fair enough if people see through that and get angry and walk away. But the Christian faith is based on a much deeper understanding of the nature of God. I don’t know how we teach this in our churches, though. It is a matter of the heart more than the head. I understand why the apostle John ended his letter with, ‘little children, keep yourselves from idols’.
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I haven’t commented here for some time, partly due to the fact that a lot of comment threads seem to end up taking a nose-dive in the argumentative direction.
FWIW, I can see why BeAttitude feels as he does, even though my beliefs are different than his. And he is (undeniably) there right now. Attempts to persuade or “reconvert” (or whatever) aren’t going to reach him just yet. I doubt any of the choices he’s made are easy, or un-painful for him personally.
Be there with him, be his friend, just listen to the guy – I think that’s a Christ-like reaction/means of showing support and love for someone who’s going through what he’s going through. It’s not at all dissimilar to what many earlier writers have called the “dark night of the soul.”
And please, don’t blame Dawkins or Hitchens for it. They’re as human and fallible as are the rest of us. (Yes, I said “us,” specifically meaning Christians!)
I highly doubt that God is either upset or offended by BeAttitude’s post… quite the opposite, in fact.
Let’s do likewise, eh? 😉
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Aggie: “I should say that there is one test I think we are allowed to make: we can pray for faith. You’ll recognize a certain circularity there, in that you must offer up at least a little faith to make the prayer in the first place.â€
It starts with a longing deep inside.
These 20 questions, that’s not what this is about. I’m sorry, but if you need to come up with 20 reasons why you don’t want something, odds are, you want it pretty badly.
But me saying it doesn’t matter. The realization has to come from within, even if only the tiniest grain of longing. This is all it takes to knock. Jesus didn’t define how we should knock. He didn’t say knock really loudly and clearly and the door will be opened. A soft, hesitant, uncertain knock is sufficient. I know. I’ve been there.
We cannot dissect God in a laboratory, or study Him under a microscope. How can we define certainty about something that is beyond the human mind to fully comprehend? However, we can get to know the Risen Son. We knock.
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Erp,
Your right, I was making a straw-man of your argument, my bad.
But as for concern on whether a belief system should be “supported by evidence, rational…” and etc, as a previous commentator said, read Prof. Stanely Fish’s God Talk on the New York Times website. It’s great stuff and directly relates to your issue about faith and whether or not it holds to evidence, rational, and so on.
Here’s the link:
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/god-talk-part-2/
It should directly answer your question about rational and faith.
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I don’t think BeAttitude was looking for a reason to lose his faith, or if only he had looked hard enough he’d find an answer, or any of that.
(Well, yes, I think the answers are out there, but that’s not the same as “Just reach out your hand and there it is.”)
We’re veering perilously close to the same attitude that tells someone, at a time of tragedy or failure, “Well, if you’d only prayed harder/more/right, this would never have happened” or “You must never have been *properly* converted, this is all the fault of your lack of faith!” and the like.
If I were in a church where I heard that, I’d be running for the door as well.
Now, to take his objections – there’s a mishmash there, and since I don’t know what tradition or denomination he came out of, I can’t comment on, say, what he learned regarding free will or inerrancy or the rest of it. Part of the list seems to be specific to a certain theology, part of it is common to all struggles with faith (theodicy, or the problem of evil, or ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’), and part of it is the modern confusion that “Science tells us…!” which, colliding head-on with “But the Bible says…!” means that he thought science being correct in a description of the physical world, was therefore correct in its dealings with metaphysics.
Yelling at him for not trying hard enough to believe isn’t going to convince him, or anyone else struggling with doubt.
If anyone is interested in a scientific take on religion, and if anyone has any answers (other than “Read your Bible!”) they’d give someone who trotted these out as reasons why science has ‘disproved’ religion, here you go:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=religious-ideas-burrow-in-brains
“Boyer’s detailed model provides something of a more nuanced version of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s view of religion being an ideological parasite that worms into the minds of unwitting hosts (i.e., gullible children) and inoculates them against all forms of secular reason. In Boyer’s book Religion Explained, he lays out a very elegant scientific model that shows how the evolved human mind is especially vulnerable to religious concepts because they exploit our everyday, mundane, run-of-the-mill thought processes. What makes a particular concept “religious†or supernatural, says Boyer, is its counterintuitiveness—the extent to which it violates our innate assumptions about basic aspects of the natural world.”
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Did I say just one set of beliefs? Or even that violence was the only terrible thing?
There were the Xhosa who in 1856 trusted a prophet and killed all their cattle as a sign that they had faith in God to save them from the settlers who were taking their land. Not Christian, not violent towards other humans (until the aftermath when people starved).
What qualities should a system of beliefs have that should be trusted, that one should have faith in? It is the supported by evidence, rational, revisable, testable, and tested that is important.
Admittedly I am getting off track since this thread is meant for Christians to talk about losing and keeping people.
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Erp,
Two words for you my friend, “French Revolution”….
It was atheistic, individualistic, liberal, progressive, democratic, grass roots…oh, but look what happened…
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“Jesus did not fulfill major Old Testament prophesies or even fulfill his own promises and predictions.”
If BeAttitude really believes this, then he needs to do this biblical, exegetical scholarship. Jeremiah’s new covenant is a prime example; even orthodox Jews pause at this one. Also, Jesus did predict the destruction of the 2nd Jewish Temple by the Roman army in 70 AD in the Gospel of Luke.
“The Bible promotes hate and persecution against women, homosexuals and those who worship other gods or no god at all.”
This is a pretty blanket statement…I don’t see how this correlates with ethics as described in the New Testament, but yeah…in the Old Testament context, I see where he’s coming from.
“It is absolutely irrational to continue to believe archaic teaching with the amount of knowledge we’ve gained through science and technology. The Bible reads like a book of primitive folklore, not divinely inspired insight into our true reason for existence.”
This point is self contradictory. So does “the amount of knowledge we’ve gained through science and technology” give “insight into our true reason for existence” then? I don’t see how this point holds any weight. It’s not like science and technology gives us a reason for existence…
But I empathize with BeAttitude’s deconversion…it’s just that, as a previous commentator said, his reasons seem to be on a very “teenager” level. There are probably deeper emotional, psychological, communal issues at play here.
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I first encountered the morality-coming-from-God argument when I read CS Lewis. I found it persuasive.
What troubles me is when this gets turned into “if you don’t know my God you *have* no morals”. A seemingly popular alternative is “Christians need to show they are better than non Christians”.
I truly believe many Christians should talk less, not more.
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I should say that there is one test I think we are allowed to make: we can pray for faith. You’ll recognize a certain circularity there, in that you must offer up at least a little faith to make the prayer in the first place.
I think many atheists find religion to be something of an irritant. Without religious faith you can go on undisturbed in your world view. I think the best an apologist can do is help you to see that irritation as an impetus to explore and perhaps as an intriguing possibility. The rest is up to you and God, of course.
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(Another long one, I apologize. I appear to be in full ‘windbag philosopher’ mode today…
rr,
“So I can see some validity to your pragmatic approach to ethics, though if I was an atheist I wouldn’t necessarily see any reason to help the poor.â€
For me (and I wouldn’t call myself a pure pragmatist, more on this below), It’s a subset of the basic fact that we’re all in this together. There’s the more cynical logic that a well-fed, financially stable person is less likely to be in a situation that makes it more profitable to rob, murder, foment revolution, etc. than to work for the benefit of society as a whole. Also, I, like most geeks, am at core a meritocrat. The United States’ financial and military success since the civil war is rooted in our collective belief that all are equal and should have equal opportunity to succeed to the extent their innate abilities allow. We’ve slipped into elitism from time to time, but we’ve also had great leaders of both political parties who came from extremely lowly backgrounds.
If you follow our American core value to its conclusion, it means that our relatively meritocratic republic requires all of our youth to have access to the education, quality health care, and other opportunities needed to succeed within our system, and for our nation to succeed in the competitive market with the other great financial powers. All of us who have been relatively fortunate have a responsibility to make sure that happens, both in serving others personally and making sure that the government is a good steward of our tax dollars.
Finally, a somewhat un-philosophical anecdote. I worked as a welfare caseworker for several years while I was in grad school. The book’s worth of material on my experiences is mostly irrelevant here, but I would like to mention one event that occurred several months after I left that job.
I was sitting in a local coffee shop one morning on my day off, munching a bagel, reading, and feeling moderately sorry for myself. I was about to turn 30, and my accomplishments to date (marketing for a dying dot-com, a welfare job where policies tied my hands with the genuinely striving and awarded benefits to known frauds) seemed rather pathetic and pointless. One of my former clients worked at that same coffee shop while going to community college, and we exchanged a few pleasantries. She then told me she was quitting school temporarily. I asked why, sure that she’d met another “Prince Charming†who would soon turn into a toad.
“I got accepted into management training. I start next month, and I wouldn’t have applied for it if it hadn’t been for what you told me.â€
And that’s where my worldview transcends pragmatics. I’m not sure what I said to her, beyond my standard comment I gave to all the ladies on my welfare-to-work caseload, which itself was one of the most important bits of advice given to me as a kid, that “You can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it.†She was ready to hear and believe that, took up the task with vigor, and is one of a very small group of people who I truly believe have what it takes to escape the system that is typically all they’ve known.
Those words made me feel better, but more than that—they made me feel that I had been doing what I was supposed to be doing in my life all along. If I may quote only slightly facetiously from the Gospel according to Stan Lee, with great power comes great responsibility. Especially in the US, we all come from a long line of people who have worked and struggled to make the world better than they found it, at least for our own families or clans. Whatever we have as individuals and a society is the fruit of those labors. Therefore, we owe a debt to our ancestors who sacrificed for us to make the same sacrifices for those who come after, in order to form a more perfect union and a more perfect world. A belief in God is not necessary for that worldview, simply a knowledge of history and what ordinary people have sacrificed against the odds so that we might have relative peace and prosperity.
And this leads into the second point I wanted to reply to, in addition to RR’s comments. Several have mentioned that atheists and agnostics don’t understand or believe in faith. In the case of the more hard-core materialist of us, you have a point. I would not go that far, however. Faith can and has moved mountains. I’ve seen religion make profound changes in the lives of friends, both positive and negative. I’ve experienced it myself. But sometimes faith is used to drop mountains on others. Or a mountain is moved for person a, but not person b, of equal or greater faith. It seems more like a knife than anything—something very powerful that can be used to cure or kill, and one that by definition can’t be predicted or measured.
For reasons too boring and personal to get into here, I grew up both with a deep need to believe and be a good Christian, and some very burning and challenging (to a child, anyway) philosophical questions that I needed answered in order to fully buy into the notion of a benevolent God. Those early experiences also made me a control freak, one of those less lovely traits I have partially overcome but still struggle with. I have yet to find a middle ground where I can open myself up to the non-rational without being taken advantage of in some form. Faith is used for good, but it is also the chief weapon of every charlatan, huckster, and despot the world has known. So…I simply don’t go there. And lately I have to admit I’ve been feeling that lack. I do suspect there are things that are not dreamt of in my philosophy. But are they your Christianity, a good friend’s Buddhism, Jung’s collective unconsciousness, or all of the above?
Sometimes, especially in the last few months as I’ve become a regular reader here and opened myself up to Michael and the other people of good will and sharp mind who post here, I’ve wished there was a way to sever personal belief in and worship of God from religious practice and dogma. I’ve seen and experienced too much harm done by religious groups (Christian and non) in the name of their deity to ever be able to totally let down my intellectual guard in those situations. While I don’t agree with C.S. Lewis on all points of his theology, I have to admit there are striking similarities between his personality and mine, and his spiritual journey and mine to date (though I’m still an honest agnostic).
Can I ever find a faith that is rooted in true wisdom? And if I can, can I find a community that honors and reinforces both logic and belief? I’ve spent my youth rattling back and forth between the Scylla and Charybdis of materialism and mysticism. I know the truth lies in the middle path, a route that I have only begun to navigate in the past few years. I can’t wait to see where that new current takes me.
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Erp,
Then you’re stuck because you can’t put God to the test in an empirical fashion. The best an evidentuary argument can do is demonstrate that the possibility of God can not be excluded in the same manner of Godel’ incompleteness theorem: there is always at least one unprovable theorem in any complete and perfect system.
As for the universal misbehavior of human beings, that doesn’t address the question of whether God exists
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Humans do terrible things, Erp. And they justify their violence with their beliefs, whether that’s religon, romance, atheism or sports. Isolating one group of violent humans and one set of beliefs doesn’t advance the discussion at all.
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I can’t speak for all atheists or even most, but, I suspect that we distrust faith unsupported by good evidence and testing. People with strong faith whether within Christianity or within other religions (or within ideologies such as communism) have done terrible things.
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Kenny,
Actually, I haven’t seen the Biola debate with Hitchens and Craig. I will check it out, thanks.
I was talking about a recent Christian Book Expo debate with Hitchens against four other apologists which included Craig.
Hitchens owned the floor with all four apologists being for the most part very subdued.
Going back to Beattitude…There are tons of folks with precisely the same thoughts and reasoning over at http://www.ex-christian.net
I am not plugging their site but a lot of their testimonies will have the same common themes and complaints.
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iMonk
Here ya go team:
I believe in the inspiration of scripture.
But if the Bible were NOT inspired, but accurate, I would be a Christian.
Michael,
This is my position, too. It might be interesting to your bunch to learn that “inspiration” was NOT considered when Eusebius/Constantine put together our NT. That’s because all the hundred plus documents they considered all claimed inspiration. They had other criteria. This from Peter Enns’ “Incarnation & Inspiration.”
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“But in the typical evangelical church, they are singing and listening to pick-me-up success stories.”
And they get upset if you do want to go deeper.
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“I think atheists are not looking for faith but for certainty. Faith exists in a climate of doubt and requires an act of trust to start.”
MA, I think you’re correct. What I have encountered in many of the athiests that I’ve conversed with, is that they reject and even seem to despise Chritianity because Christian evidences do not back them up the wall and MAKE them believe. They do believe that evolution and certain materialistic/naturalistic positions do have the level of certainty that they desire.
But this is, IMO, another example in which the traditional approach of evangelicalism has failed. Christians have sometimes presented Christian beliefs as being so strongly supported by evidence that only the willfully wicked would reject it. This is a serious distortion which I believe causes both the shipwreck of faith for believers and also prevents non-believers from taking Christian faith seriously.
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JohnB:
This gets into the whole area of evangelical diversity, something I talked about in Coming Evangelical Collapse. There are places in evangelicalism that have produced a reasonable apologetic. But walk into evangelicalism’s largest denominations, sip the seminaries, and go to the churches. You’ll see something else. In my case, I’d have to drive 2 hours to find a church that I know teaching apologetics.
So I agree with you. It’s there (we can talk about the quality some other time.) And it’s quite confident. (Listen to James White.) But in the typical evangelical church, they are singing and listening to pick-me-up success stories.
peace
ms
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iMonk –
My post was in response to your comment that “There is NO training in thinking in 95% of the churches I’m aware of.”
I, perhaps incorrectly, equate “thinking” with reasoning and apologetics, rather than faith alone.
And don’t get me wrong, I am not a big apologetics fan. I definitely think apologetics has limits. Reason alone doesn’t take anyone into the kingdom.
But I believe that “Evangelicalism” (as I have know it in the past 40 yrs) has promoted a reasonable, not unreasoning, faith.
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I think atheists are not looking for faith but for certainty. Faith exists in a climate of doubt and requires an act of trust to start.
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“You aren’t going to reconvert a guy like BeAttitude with a batch of books and mp3s. He might not know the quality of the conversation and the cariety of answers, but what I wish he knew is that faith, esp in Jesus, doesn’t need all these things lined up and answers.”
Nice point faith is willing to suspend disbelief in the presence of unanswered questions or apparent conflicts. Faith trusts the answer is there even if hidden or unclear and is patient enough to wait for revelation.
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“The problem of evil is only a problem if there are transcendent morals, which normally come from God/gods.”
Normally true but you can construct through philosophy a moral framework based on natural law and the pursuit of truth. Aristotle did it largely (though not completely) without resorting to God or gods in his case in Nichomacian Ethics. Of course maybe his book makes your point more strongly because it was no simple task to define good in the absence of linkage to God.
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Okay. From the post.
“I no longer felt the weight a Christian carries. The weight of guilt, unworthiness and fear of god’s judgement.â€
If anyone is attending a church where you only learn the above, don’t walk away. Run!
“I continue to spend my days striving to be a good husband, father and son. I help others in need around me as often as I can. The big difference is I do these things today because it brings me joy, not because I believe it brings an imaginary god joy.â€
I truly don’t understand this statement. Back in my agnostic days I donated time and money to charities and did all sorts of helpful things. There is a huge difference now. I go into a nursing home, and I don’t walk in alone. Christ is with me. Before I felt despair because there was so little I could do. Now Christ is with me and when I pray with the fragile, bedridden elderly lady, Christ is with us. It’s not two in that dimly lit room. It’s three! We both feel it. I walk out of her room uplifted. This isn’t about scoring brownie points with God. Besides if God is so cruel, why would He care? It’s not about what I do. It’s about Christ with us. This is what changes everything.
“Faith is belief in the unseen and unprovableâ€
I see a difference is saying I believe in God and faith.
To me faith is a living thing that grows, and sometimes wavers. Faith can be shaken, but it can also envelop you in a way that makes everything different. I don’t know if this makes sense but for me a living, growing faith is a miracle.
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JohnB:
Blame BeAttitude for not getting himself convinced? Huh?
What if he listened to apologists and wasn’t convinced? Who do apologists convert anyway? The assumption that a failure to appreciate our really great answers is the problem doesn’t impress me. Atheism isn’t an argument over evidence anyway. At the core of all of this is a set of complex matters of the heart. More about morality and experience than apologetics. You aren’t going to reconvert a guy like BeAttitude with a batch of books and mp3s. He might not know the quality of the conversation and the cariety of answers, but what I wish he knew is that faith, esp in Jesus, doesn’t need all these things lined up and answers. The idea that faith resolves all questions is false advertising.
peace
ms
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LibrarianSarah,
If I was an atheist I would want to live in a society in which I didn’t have to fear theft, assault, murder and the like. I would also want to live in a peaceful world and would see war (especially modern war), the spread of WMDs, terrorism, pollution of the environment and so forth as negative. So I can see some validity to your pragmatic approach to ethics, though if I was an atheist I wouldn’t necessarily see any reason to help the poor.
However, it is still worth pointing out that this pragmatic approach doesn’t exactly give us a strong foundation for ethics, especially absolute claims to wrong and right. There is a world of difference between saying “murder is inherently wrong” and saying “I don’t want to be murdered so I want to promote a society that discourages murder.” Also, if one is simply pragmatic, then one might find it beneficial to take advantage of a group of people if one was convinced one could get away with it. After all, pragmatism is ultimately about the best way to get what is good for me. In the end, pragmatism is a very shaky foundation for a system of ethnics.
rr
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I’ve expended a lot of ink on my problems with inerrancy. Anyone reading the story of Bart Ehrman will realize I’m exactly right: this concept amount to a special definition, and when all the money is placed on that special definition, and it doesn’t pay off, the whole structure collapses.
That’s the problem with a definition that needs pages of explanation of what an “error is and isn’t.”
If I use inerrancy with my internationals, I have to spend an hour explaining all the exceptions. Believe me, many people are loaded and ready for bear to hold your feet to the fire on inerrancy.
ms
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iMonk –
If 95% of evangelicals have poor reasoning skills, I do not think it is the fault of “Evangelicalism.” Prior to Josh McDowell, you might be able to make that argument, but not today.
We live in an age of unprecedented Christian apologetics overload. Christian publishers are putting out tons (literally) of apologetics books every year. Christian radio inundates America with apologetics programs. The internet is a cornucopia of serious apologetics.
And every church I have been a part of has had apologetics teaching and seminars. (Of course, I may just be part of the 5%)
I agree with DLE.
If BeAttitude had seriously wanted answers, he could have found them.
To lay the fault at the feet of “Evangelicalism” is wrong.
Is it reasonable to think that every church will have a Dan Wallace or Ben Witherington as the pastor? Of course not.
It is equally unrealistic to expect more than a small minority of believers to be the anytical types who even think about apologetics. Most are just not wired that way.
But my point is that there is more than enough material out there, readily accessible to any serious inquirer.
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Great post, iMonk, and I think that your respectful willingness to listen to the BeAttitudes of the world, to wrestle alongside them with such issues, is commendable. Further, to not be willing to hear from BeAttitude some criticism that we need to hear is to demonstrate a hubris, a cocksurety, that is neither wise nor Christian. Daniel Taylor’s The Myth of Certainty ought to be required reading for every believer. I appreciate your posting, and BeAttitude’s list of twenty, while containing some relatively easily-answered issues, also ought to prod us all to think.
All of that said, my one quibble with your post is your (ongoing) rush to criticize the inerrancy of Scripture. What puzzles me most is the feeling I get, having read some things you’ve written before on the subject, that you’ve erected a straw man based upon a misunderstanding of what is meant when we say that the Bible is “inerrant”. Granting that there is some confusion as to its meaning on the part of certain of its propagators, to lump the doctrine of inerrancy with the idea that the Bible is “without significant issues, never raising moral questions, (and) always explainable” is to extend the meaning of the term beyond its bounds. I believe the Bible to be without error in the original manuscripts, and at the same time, I recognize that there are difficult questions, that there are some things difficult to explain, etc. There is no contradiction whatever in that statement–and to suggest otherwise strikes me as holding a deficient understanding of the concept. Christians assuredly need to be challenged by BeAttitude’s words, but inerrancy ain’t the culprit you seem to make it out to be.
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I was cheering as I read your post. I’m not qualified to address the issues you raise (just your everyday thinking Christian, no deep theological knowledge here) but you obviously are, and what you’re saying makes sense to me.
Your posts get an interesting variety of comments. Thanks for keeping this one open.
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“DLE: In the evangelical world I live in, I couldn’t find 1 Christian out of 500 that would understand 5 of those objections. There is NO training in thinking in 95% of the churches I’m aware of.”
Oh, good. Based on other comments, I was beginning to wonder if I’d managed to fall into America’s least spiritually educated church as a child, even though they are a moderate mainstream faith, and relatively rigorous in their theology (at least on paper). I asked some version of most of those questions in bible studies or sunday school classes from first grade on up to the young adult group (I was a geek who thought she was called to ordained ministry), and rarely got any logically coherent answers. Though in fairness, I tried several other faiths in my 20s, and they all had a similar or worse track record.
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Sorry, Brad, but CCA has been one of the many prices I’ll have to pay to write a book…if ever…
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I’ve been frequenting blogs that trumpet de-conversion, and I’ve seen them reference Hitchens and Dawkins less and less. I really do think their influence will fade as people begin to see their actual arguments.
But I think the problem is that people just aren’t interested in this kind of learning. How do we get people to read and stretch themselves when contemporary worship and preaching go down so smooth? And I may get accosted for this, but our newfound insistence on home-schooling and private Christian schools cloisters our kids, setting them up for this type of experience. (apologies to imonk since I think he does interact with the world at large).
I’m so interested in the subject, but I almost look at it as a pastime now. Perhaps good new evangelical scholarship will filter down in a decade or two.
BTW, are we going to see Coffee Cup Apologetics back anytime soon?
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DLE: In the evangelical world I live in, I couldn’t find 1 Christian out of 500 that would understand 5 of those objections. There is NO training in thinking in 95% of the churches I’m aware of.
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Rich W
As I understand it ( although I am sure some of the scholars {which i am not} contributing to this blog know more)Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ had to come to the earth through a people. God choose the Isrealites. Their survival as a nation had to be secured (kill the enemy). Even after being carried off into exile a remmnant had to return. To eventually produce the savior.
Instead of a nation ie Isreal, the Church, beginning at Pentecost with the coming of the Holy Spirit is for all people and all nations. Before the coming of the Messiah the Spirit spoke through the Prophets. In these days He speaks through all believers. He calls His people before they believe to come to Jesus and through Jesus to the Father.
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Forgive me if I am tactless here, but the list theBeAttitude gives reads like a junior high school atheism manifesto. For someone who claimed to be a Christian for 33 years, his reasonings for abandoning the faith, though honest, are frankly rather primitive.
In truth, aren’t these the kinds of questions one must wrestle with within the first three or four years of discipleship? If anything, I feel for theBeAttitide because it seems the Christians around him must have been astonishingly shallow if this is as far as his discipleship got in 33 years.
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As a believer, I think it did me a lot of good to “read” (I actually listened to it on tape during my work commute) Bart Ehrman’s book “Misquoting Jesus”. The good thing is that it divested me of some ridiculous beliefs (that were legitimately ridiculed by my non-Christian friends, which in turn reduced my credibility with them) that I realized I subconsciously held, like that the New International Version, Ryrie Study Guide Edition Bible that I’ve been studying for 25 years was somehow given to me straight from God. Of course, it was not, and I learned a whole lot more, from a historical perspective, about how Scripture was authored, transcribed, and interpreted – the actual processes – in an age when the vast majority of people were totally illiterate – such as was the case with many scribes who could copy, but who could not read.
At the end of the book, I was not convinced at all by Ehrman on his essential points; however, I accepted what I had long been moving towards: that Scripture (or at least the present-day version we have, regardless of translation) is both inspired and true, although I’m no longer willing to say “inerrant”. It’s not a hill I feel I have to die on any more, as true and inspired are enough. As a small twist to what I-Monk stated earlier, if the Bible is true, even if not inspired, it would be enough. But I believe it is both inspired and true. So there you go.
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The violence in the old testament is something that I really wish there was an explanation for.
Lately I’ve noticed the violent nature of the “Bible Stories” church kids hear in Sunday school and realized that hearing those violent stories all my life greatly influenced my worldview. It resulted in me looking at the U.S. as a righteous nation (like Israel) that could justly kill its enemies. I dehumanized people, but after all, didn’t Samson do the same thing or Joshua for that matter?
I think the old testament (and the associated “righteous” violence) might be a reason why Evangelicals tend to have such nationalistic and militaristic views. For example, 6 out of 10 white evangelicals support torture. (For those that aren’t members of religious organizations 20% fewer 4 out of 10 support it.)
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This is slightly beside the point (and long to boot), but my struggles and eventual making of peace with the question iMonk just posed was a big part of my de-conversion process, which was also very similar to BeAttitude’s.
“If there is no God….what is the basis of your moral outrage?”
Whether intelligently designed or not, we are here on this planet as sentient beings capable of free choice. We’re also highly dependant on other human beings for everything from survival to companionship to propogation of the species. ‘No man is an Island’ is more than a nice thought from one of my favorite writers, it’s a hard truth of being human. Therefore, through history we’ve formed communities, most bound together by common spiritual beliefs, to help each other grow and prosper. Up until the last 500 years or so, each of these communities were essentially separate entities that had no need to worry about the survival of the planet as a whole, assuming they even knew of a world beyond their borders. When growth or the scarcity of resources caused two cultures to bump into each other, they sometimes merged peacefully, but typically went to war to determine supremacy. In that paradigm, if your faith decrees no moral responsibilities toward the out-group (they are infidels, heretics, unclean, what have you), then you are perfectly justified in any and all actions including genocide. In this system, morals are assumed to come from above–whether the God or the Dear Leader. You follow the rules because that’s what the members of your group do. If there is no central authority telling you what your ethical code is, you are amoral. While this system generally has worked well in history and generally brings the cultural stability needed for a prosperous culture, it also can lead to well-known excesses of authoritarian dictatorships, which eventually cause the bloated structure to crumble under its own weight of dogma and hubris.
However, ever since the Rennaisance, a competing paradigm has been developing, that has reached full fruition, for better or for worse, in the 21st century. It’s a slightly paradoxical shift toward individual codes of ethics, and toward a more global understanding of community. The Rennaisance gave the world new understandings of science, art, and geography that suggested that the existing power structure didn’t really have all the answers. Martin Luther and Gutenberg launched the reformation, which lead to a similar empowerment of the individual in spiritual affairs. The Enlightenment and Industrial revolution followed, leading to the similar exhaltation of the individual in political and indutrial matters. At the dawn of the twentieth century, man had evolved beyond his petty needs for morality and superstition. Nihilism seemed to be the next logical step. God was Dead, and the old laws with him. We celebrated our victory with a triumphal voyage on the Titanic.
We all know what happened next. The old tribal battles simply went global, we kept on building better and more advanced weapons of destruction, and humanity came within an eyelash of extinction. If anything, that threat has only increased since the end of the cold war. If the 20th century teaches us nothing else, it is that we must all find some way to hang together, or we will most assuredly hang separately. That is contemporary mankind’s rationale for ethics in 2009–an honest, pragmatic assessment of the fractured state of our ‘global village’. If we do not find a way to get along, to treat our fellow humans with respect, give more to our fellow man than we take, and punish those who would seek to cause unrest and divide us as a community, then we are doomed. That’s why I help my neighbor, serve the poor, and help the uneducated gain the tools they need to transcend ignorance and social class. it’s why I give to charity. It’s also in large part why I left organized religion, and why one day, after the current strain of extremism, anti-intellectualism and materialism runs its course…I hope I might be able to come back.
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ALL: I’d prefer to discuss the post or BeAttitude’s post, and not get into a typical atheist/Christian debate. Not shutting it down, but asking we not go in that direction to any great extent.
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“Because, then you are either defining “good†as “what god says†or “god does goodâ€.”
Antigone, that question has been and is being considered in Christianity (not just Christianity; wasn’t it Socrates who questioned is something good because the gods order it or do the gods order it because it is good?):
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1006.htm
“Question 6. The goodness of God
Article 3. Whether to be essentially good belongs to God alone?
Objection 1. It seems that to be essentially good does not belong to God alone. For as “one” is convertible with “being,” so is “good”; as we said above (Question 5, Article 1). But every being is one essentially, as appears from the Philosopher (Metaph. iv); therefore every being is good essentially.
Objection 2. Further, if good is what all things desire, since being itself is desired by all, then the being of each thing is its good. But everything is a being essentially; therefore every being is good essentially.
Objection 3. Further, everything is good by its own goodness. Therefore if there is anything which is not good essentially, it is necessary to say that its goodness is not its own essence. Therefore its goodness, since it is a being, must be good; and if it is good by some other goodness, the same question applies to that goodness also; therefore we must either proceed to infinity, or come to some goodness which is not good by any other goodness. Therefore the first supposition holds good. Therefore everything is good essentially.”
Those, I take it, are fundamentally the objections you mention: that is, God (or god/gods) is not necessary to originate goodness since a thing, act or being can be inherently good of itself?
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ugh…terrible typist “They seem like night and day to me.”
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I don’t know if I agree with that. Jesus spent a lot of time correcting the Pharisees view of God and refining how people understood the Mosaic code. He seems to think the natural default position of the religious community at that time was far off course from where God wanted them to be.
When the disciples ask Jesus to show them the Father, He responds by saying that if they had seen Jesus they had seen the Father. I wonder how that image bumped up against what the disciples thought they knew about the Father?
Jesus came forgiving, healing, extending God’s power in a much more inclusive way than the religious leadership did. They seems like night and day to me.
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It seems that a lot of the certainty in our apologetics in based on a belief in modernism, which then informs our belief in God. As long as the right kinds of facts are processed through rationalist epitemology, we can high-five each other that we have all the answers. But if Hitchens comes through with an opposing set of facts, then it reveals the foundations of our apologetics.
An great read, from someone who’s waded into the thick of it, is Stanley Fish’s recent column responding to his skeptical readers in the New York Times, “God Talk”.
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/god-talk-part-2/
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Antigone,
The third option, one that sidesteps the Euthyphro problem, is that “God IS the Good”. The Good is God’s nature, and He is inseparable from it. Peter Kreeft discusses the matter in a number of places. Here’s Google Books link to the entry in the _Handbook of Christian_ apologetics:
http://books.google.com/books?id=1DH1ZPyyTkIC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=kreeft+euthyphro&source=bl&ots=Vtv7sAUHWE&sig=Wmte91n9iZJW6i2CmeoutQoAvms&hl=en&ei=IxMkSuDECM27tweQzfHKBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4
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Having read Christopher Wright’s “The God I Don’t Understand” when you recommended it not long ago, I have a much better understanding of what a sovereign God is. There is a movement and plan of God throughout human history, more comprehensive than my former knowledge that some Old Testament verses were presaging the messiah. And on a personal level, I know that when I knell I do so because He is indeed the Most High. But these few words do not do justice to his book.
Questions are important. We need someone who is willing to grapple with our ideas.
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iMonk
Finally, a couple of posts above, you actually begin dealing with the issue of sin. It’s almost completely absent from the whole beAttitude thing.
I’m a sinner saved by Grace. Everything in his 20 item list is irrelevant until he deals with this. He never mentions it. I know my sin. I know what bondage is. The atheists claim there is no bondage to sin. It’s just a bunch of false guilt and psychology. Oh well, it’s the same old story. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
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God was in plain sight as a pillar of smoke by day to the Isrealites. It didn’t seem to matter when crafting the golden calf. The fact that you and I can draw a breath is proof there is a diety. Ten commandments written on stone. Noah getting drunk after God saving him from the flood. Adam and Eve even walked with God in the Garden.
Literal or poetic the stories prove over and over again if God jumped out and bit us we would run and not believe. Christianity is a ridiculous story. Born of a virgin-Yeah ha ha. Feed 5000 men lunch-right!Heal the blind-how? Raise from the dead-when you are dead -you are dead. None of us believe this because it makes sense. We are convicted by the Holy Spirit.
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terri,
I’m aware of that position, but I find that just a troubling as strict fundamentalism. I’m more comfortable not understanding God’s character (as to why he commanded slaughter) than I am with the idea that God’s prophets were wrong.
Besides, I think Christopher Wright makes a good point in his book: The God I Don’t Understand. No one ever corrects the position that God commanded and willed this violence. Not even Jesus.
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I am confused by the reasoning of the “new atheists.” As I see it, atheism is not the antithesis of Christianity, it is the antithesis of theism.
How can Hitchens et. al., reject a god, any god, just by arguing against the Christian God?
What if God was a mean, petty, vindictive, capricious, arbitrary God, like the Greek gods? Does that make him/her any less God? Who said a god has to be personal, fair or all loving?
If I were to try to move someone from atheism to Christianity, I would do so by way of theism first. And the reverse is true as well. To jump all the way to atheism from Christianity is to skip a lot of logical intermediate philosophical steps.
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I meant: “the recorded interaction of people with God”….forgot the “with first time through.
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I’ve been there. Reading not just what the Ehrmans of the world have to say, but even biblical scholars who have Christian faith, yet freely admit that the Bible is not as airtight as the average Christian thinks it is….well… that was a stark moment for me.
I think its important to think of the Bible as “true” in the sense that it is the recorded interaction of people God, sometimes from their very earthly perspective. It’s people putting into words what they believe and think about the Divine. So, it’s “true” in that sense.
We need to look at the development of the relation between God and man as culminating in Jesus…the same person who revised “an eye for an eye” and replaced it with “turn the other cheek.” The violence in the Old Testament is not necessarily a depiction of God’s divine character, but what the prophets thought was God’s divine character.
uh…..did any of that make sense?
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Michael is absolutely correct in his 12:43 p.m. post on atheism and morality. To elaborate a bit more, if God is simply something that humans made up, then it is also highly likely that morality is just a social construct as well. Nietzsche’s idea that the weak invented morality to control the strong would thus make sense. Moreover, if we live in a universe in which human life emerged through some random process, then life has no ultimate purpose. Morality would therefore be as much a fairy tale as God and it would be superstitious to believe in right and wrong in a universe without God.
Much of BeAttitude’s criticism for Christianity as well as much what comes from the “new atheists” is in essence a moral critique. Indeed, men such as Dawkins and Hitchens are as moralistic as any fundamentalist preacher. As far as I’m concerned, however, this is where much of the “new atheism” breaks down and becomes illogical and perhaps even emotionalistic. Nietzsche’s atheism is far more coherent and genuine than that of Dawkins or Hitchens. These “new atheists” rely on Christian concepts (especially notions of good and evil) a lot more than they would care to admit.
rr
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Last comment (I really should have read the whole thread before commenting :).
iMonk
Surely you know the re-joiner to this one? The existence of god/gods doesn’t make the morals less relativistic. Because, then you are either defining “good” as “what god says” or “god does good”. If it’s the first, than it’s completely arbitrary; then the god-of-the-old-testament demanding slaughter and rape is 100% peachy-keen, and is in fact the highest good you could do. If it’s the second, than good exists independent of god; we don’t need it/him/her to find out what “good” is. If I’m missing an option, please tell me. I think the only thing in church I ever heard was “God is good”, which leans towards the former interpretation, but still leaves the problem of the “ordering hundreds of thousands to die” thing.
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i would have to look up too many words to understand what you are talking about.
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Oh, and Jon S.-
I don’t really think that it’s fair to put words in his mouth. Not have “authority” on something, and not being familiar enough to recognize it’s claims come from the same place (an unverifiable holy text) are not the same things. I went to church for years; I’m much more comfortable discussing the nitpicky things in Christianity than Islam. But I still know that Islam is based on a holy text, written by a guy who is long dead, with lots of unresolved claims of authenticity, and is so open to interpretation that people use it to justify whatever they already personally believe. Just like the Bible.
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Unlurking again for a bit-
Miguel
You’re absolutely right. Well, in the interest of full disclosure, I only paged through Hitchens book, but I did read Dawkins. They are most definitely NOT philosophers and their (unexamined) attachment to naturalism might as well be written in red ink. However, atheism/ agnosticism/ free-thinkers don’t actually rely on anybody or any book for their morals. Most of them are going to have most of the morals of the society around them. A good deal of them are going to be secular humanist (which, itself, is a hodgepodge of a bunch of moral traditions, including naturalism), but not all of them- there are nihilists, there are non-deific Buddhists, heck, there are lots that are christians, in the sense that they decide Christ knew what he was talking about and adopt his philosophies.
But the point of that is, we don’t have to apologize for Dawkins or Hitchens beliefs, because more than likely, they aren’t the beliefs of anyone else’s. The only thing we all have in common is a lack of belief in any god (or in my case, the lack of evidence to support a belief in any god). So, we don’t need to care about what Dawkins is saying about, except because that’s how people are going to view atheists (because we’re not numerous or powerful enough to be individuals yet).
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BeAttitude said that leaving Christianity gave him relief because:
I think here we see a major failing of his former Christianity. The weight he speaks of is supposed to be the weight we’re relieved from when we come to Jesus. To me, this may have been the lynchpin of the deconversion. If that’s how his Christianity made him feel, where was Christ in his Christianity?
I understand the non-Christian not getting this point. But if a Christian doesn’t get this point, chances are we’re doing something seriously wrong in our churches.
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I am compelled to ask one question:
If God were in plain sight with a perfect Bible and a perfect world, would it make a difference in my faith?
I seriously doubt it.
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iMonk: I think you meant that for Rich — right? He was the one in that 4-panel discussion that Rich mentioned. I’ve seen the video and I never thought Hitchens had the upper hand, but I also think that the other 3 failed at making a compelling case (something that is unusual for Craig).
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Tim W:
Let’s use 9-11 as an example. After the attack, an atheist says “Such an outrageous and immoral act proves there is no God.”
Watch out for the trap door there, sir. If there is no God….what is the basis of your moral outrage?
Why- in an atheistic universe- are acts like 9-11 morally outrageous? That’s the language of a theistic universe. Atheists need to say, “I find this act outrageous to my chosen ideas of morality” or “Many people find this outrageous to their chosen view of morality.”
Atheists would be just as justified to say “It’s outrageous that 3000 chickens were killed today” or to say “It was an event. It has no meaning.”
The problem of evil is only a problem if there are transcendent morals, which normally come from God/gods.
ms
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I love this blog. Great questions, Michael.
How did Jesus answer his skeptics? He just stated what He saw the Father doing. He demonstrated it. Some believed. Some didn’t. He didn’t condemn anyone but they were their own judges. Jesus had compassion on the multitudes but He did not seem to be overly concerned with stating their demise. His ire was turned toward the religious people who were giving a false view of who God was. Sometimes we learn as much about Jesus from what He doesn’t say as from what He says. What does Jesus NOT address regarding this that we would have liked Him to? That can be a starting place to understanding how we deal with this.
I think that a lot more needs to be said about the power of the Holy Spirit in this type of discussion than ever seems to be said. That isn’t a copout.
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“But as Razi Zacharias has pointed out over and over, atheists like BeAttitude are engaging in a moral argument that atheism itself undercuts. The believer in God has a problem with what God does. The atheist has a problem with the fact he/she has a problem.”
I’m not sure i understand this.
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Here ya go team:
I believe in the inspiration of scripture.
But if the Bible were NOT inspired, but accurate, I would be a Christian.
Kenny J: I think Douglas Wilson makes a fine showing. No demolition, but toe to toe.
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Rich,
I disagree. The Hitchens/Craig debate at Biola was a complete embarassment. Craig destroyed Hitchens.
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This is pretty personal to me. I have a friend who left the faith about 6-7 years ago. He became very angry at both Christianity and Christians. I hadn’t spoken to him since he left the church (he actually hung up on Christian friends who attempted to contact him). Then a few months ago I re-connected with him on Facebook… He also re-connected with many of his Christian friends and decided to post a note as to why he left the faith (similar to BeAttitude).
Much of his reasons were the same. He said he was convinced by atheists like Dawkins, and Bible criticism by people like Pagels. Much of his reasoning though came off as “newly enlightened” as if these issues he brought up were completely unknown to Christians — though perhaps they are to many.
I wrote him a couple times suggesting that he never read the counterpoints. That he appeared to have let Dawkins convince him without ever reading William Craig. Or that he let Pagels convince him without ever reading NT Wright.
But you know what. I struggle myself. I’m very aware of apologetics. I’ve read WL Craig, Blomberg, Geisler, Moreland, etc and I still struggle.
The biggest assault to my faith though — is Biblical criticism. If I can’t rely on the Bible as true, then what do I have.
And like iMonk, I bring it all back to Jesus. If Jesus rose from the dead, then all my skepticism is moot.
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iMunk, I often wonder if it wasn’t necessary for me to make a complete break with religion to go from the fundamentalist teachings of my childhood to a place where I could know Christ.
I didn’t walk away from Christ because I barely knew Him. And the Christ I heard about was easily confused with Santa Clause – checking a list to see if I was naughty or nice. I walked away from religious interpretation.
I notice that many atheist arguments assume a fundamentalist view of scripture. If the disagreements are about religious interpretation, as they usually are, I can’t blame them from walking away. How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? …faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.
At too many churches the message is too cluttered to sift out a word of Christ.
Christians don’t need some new theory or gimmick. We need to get back to the basics of the word of Christ.
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I read Christopher Hitchens’ book “God Is Not Great” and it is a real slap in the face to all religions. I don’t agree with all of his assertions but he rips Jewish and Christian apologists to shreds in every debate I’ve seen (if you’re interested, do a Youtube search.) There is one debate in particular where he takes on three Christian apologists by himself and dominates the entire dialogue. An example of how now the atheist or “anti-theist” are now becoming the “salt” in terms of their honesty…
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…when i first read the church billboard i thought “how backwards”…..but upon second thought……….
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Imonk,
In reference to faith, love and works you said:
“Jesus keeps these things together, and makes the life of a disciple very difficult at times.”
Your thought carries over into this thread in that we don’t make credible witnesses to Christianity unless are lives are demonstrably changed by Christ. WE are the evidence that atheists are weighing and in that analysis our lives are more important than our words.
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The questions of BeAttitude are excellent and if we haven’t struggled with them we need to. I left the church for ten years because of a quetion. God never left me. I only returned because I got married and my husband insisted that we be members of a church. I worked most Sundays so I said fine. He can go and it will make him happy.
Soon I didn’t have the Sunday job so there I was going to church. The pastor had excellent sermons and made me start thinking about stuff again.
It was a Baptist in my neighborhood who invited me to a Bible Study that really did it though. I started asking myself if I died was I ready to meet my maker? The answer was no. I had to pray for forgiveness and ask Jesus to love me. I wasn’t sure He would. In His mercy he did and took me back as undeserving as I was. So began my Spiritual journey. Looking back I can see how God was with me every step of the way. As He is with BeAttitude.
A young man at my doctors office told me he was raised Catholic and is now an athiest. He said he even went to seminary to study for the priesthood. There he learned he had learned everything he was suppose to but didn’t believe any of it. God isn’t finished with him yet. I pray for him and will pray for BeAttitude because I know our prayers do make a difference for I have seen those miracles BeAttitude has missed.
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I just would say Jesus is the “heaviest†factor in any consideration of Christianity.
He ain’t heavy / He’s my Brother … 😉
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oops sent that first one before it’s time
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A very sobering and humbling post. I’m going to have to chew on this one.
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I agree that the influence of the new atheists is highly evident in this list. For example, he lists this item:
In the very first comment to the post, someone asks:
His response:
In other words, he admits that he has no basis from which to critique other religions, but he’s already determined those religions to be as valid as Christianity. Why has he made this determination? I’m assuming it’s because a persuasive person told him that it is so.
You don’t have to be religious to have faith, I guess.
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A fact about faith, it doesn’t always come naturally, by itself. You have to open to it and to pursue the truth and then you still have to receive it as a gift. I sat on my hands in a Church for 3 + years open to the concept of faith but not believing. Even that stage was a long way from the skeptical instinct that I learned was the natural mode of human inquiry and the basis for science.
Christianity makes several wild claims: existence of God, existence of a God that cares about me personally, existence of a God that is willing to die for me, resurrection of the dead , life after death etc. None of it can be demonstrated in a scientific sense. Without faith you are truly blind and Christianity sounds as plausible as Greek myth. I’m incredibly fortunate to have been given reason to doubt my doubt and the desire to look beyond the surface. Even then it would not have been enough: faith is an indispensable unmerited gift. I could not have come to it on my own.
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It is hard to find Jesus sometimes amongst the mess of Christian ideals and evangelical certainty. Sadly many feel like BeAttitude, left with little choice in the end. And even sadder is those who continue to proclaim such a gospel of bad news.
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A fact about faith, it doesn’t always come naturally, by itself. you have to open to it and to pursue the truth. I sat on my hands in a Church for 3 + years open to the concept of faith but not believing. Even that stage was a long way from the skeptrical instinct I learned was the natural mode of huamn inquiry and the basis for science.
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Ouch a terribly painful read. But he does have an incredibly comprehensive list of reasons. He hit just about all the major ones I have heard before. Honestly, it deeply pains me that I simply do NOT have an answer for many of his reasons. I could give an answer to each and every one, but I couldn’t honestly buy all the ones I would come up with.
About the new atheists, though… I truly believe that the Dawkins and Hitchens crowd are to atheism as shallow consumeristic evangelicalism and moral therapeutic deism are to Christianity. While they may be making an impact, real atheists are very put off by their rhetoric. They rely heavily on transference of expertise and it simply isn’t putting them on the historical map of philosophical greatness. I think that after some time many new atheism followers will become disillusioned with the bitterness and skepticism that drives the movement and return for a search into spirituality once again.
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Catholics are hardly immune. We have plenty of folks who go only through the motions of a religious life, including many very public examples. It terribly undermines our credibility.
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Very well stated. I am a Catholic who works for an evangelical organization and I tell them that they ignore what you have to say at their considerable peril.
What passes for “apologetics” is, at best, weak sauce and, often enough, an invitation to abandon the faith like “BeAttitude.”
And don’t get me started on what I call “culture war induced distortion” or CWID for short.
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