An Understanding of Christ's Atonement Without Financial or Civil Paradigms

The following essay is from DOXA. I put it up because tonight on CARM I ran into an argument I've seen a number of times, but not until now did it dawn on me why people make it. I suddenly realized so few people understand why there was an atonement. The average Christian understanding is so screwed most of them can't explain it to another person. This is reflected in the answers to this argument.


The argument goes like this: So what if Jesus was crucified? what's the big deal? There re much worse ways to suffer. Crucification is bad but it is far from the worst thing that can happen to you. So why was it a sacrifice, I mean after all he is God, what would it matter to him if he dies? And he got to come back."


Now this is incredibly ignorant, but it occurs to me there re some resins for this kind of chaotic thinking, but also one big hidden premise. Before launching into that analysis, however, I would like to comment on the inadequacy of Christian understanding.

First, most Christians try to answer this out of a need for piety. They do not give a theological answer, they give a pious one. The pious answer can't be understood by modern people, they lack pious feelings, so it just makes it worse. The pious answer of course is to try and mount up the pain and make it seem so very much worse. O. Jesus suffered in hell and he suffers every minute and he's still suffering and he felt all the agony in the world. Of course it doesn't' really say that anywhere in the Bible. While I think this is true, and while my pious side feels the prier sense of reversions Dan gratitude to our savior for this work, we can't use this to answer the question because modern impiety can't understand the answer. They just hear us reiterating their hidden primes.

The other Christian answers are Propitiatory atonement, Substitutionary, or Moral government. These are the tree major ways of looking at the atonement. Propitiation means to turn away anger. This answer is also incomprehensible t moderns. God is so very angry with us that he can't stand the sight of us, he hats o stick Jesus between himself and us so he will see Jesus and turn away his anger. This just makes God seem like a red faced historical parent who couldn't comprehend the consequences of his creation when he decided to make it. Substitutionary atonement says Jesus took our place, he received the penalty our sins deserved. This comes in two verities. One is financial translation, Jesus paid the debt. the other is closer to moral government, Jesus was exiducted because he stepped in and took the place of the guilty party. Both of these are also problematic, because they really allow the guilty to get off Scott free and persecute an innocent person. The thing is in real Fe you could not go down to the jail and talk them into letting you take another prisoners place. WE can harp on how this is a grace so fine we can't undersigned it in the natural mind, and relapse into piety again singing the praises to God for doing this wonderful act, but it wont answer the atheists questions.

I realize that the view I hold to is a little known minority view. I know I'm bucking the mainstream. But I think it makes a lot more sense and actuals why there was an atonement. Before getting into it, however, I want to comment upon the atheist hidden premise. The explicit premise of the atheist argument is that atonement works by Jesus suffering a whole lot. If Jesus suffers enough then restitution is made. But wait, restitution for what? For our sins? Then why should Jesus suffer more than we do or more than our victims do? Why do antes seem to think, as was argued on CRAM tonight, that Jesus must suffer more than anyone ever has for the atonement to work? It's because the hidden premise is that God is guilty and the atonement is the time God pays for his own mistakes. Jesus has to suffer more than anyone to make up for what God has done, inconveniencing us by creating us.

The sickness of the modern mind can scarcely comprehend Christian theology now. I wonder if it isn't too late and we are just past the day when people in the West can really be saved?

I mean consider the idea that usually accompanies this argument: well he is God after all, a little torture death cant' hurt him. In the old days, when we had a culture that ran on Christian memories, people said how great that God would do this for us when he didn't have to! NOw the argument is "Of course he had to, it's the least he can do, after all I didn't asked to be born, so I'm entitled to whatever goodies can get in compensation." That's why I think the hidden premise is to blame God; its as though they are saying God has to suffer more than anyone to make up for the suffering he caued as creator. This sort of attitude is very troubling.

In any case, my view is the Participatory atonement. It was embraced by several church fathers and modern theologians supporting it are mentioned below:





I.The Atonement: God's Solidarity With Humanity.



A. The inadquacy of Financial Transactions

Many ministers, and therefore, many Christians speak of and think of Jesus' death on the cross as analogous to a financial transaction. Usually this idea goes something like this: we are in hock to the devil because we sinned. God pays the debt we owe by sending Jesus to die for us, and that pays off the devil. The problem with this view is the Bible never says we owe the devil anything. We owe God. The financial transaction model is inadequates. Matters of the soul are much more important than any monetary arrangement and business transactions and banking do not do justice to the import of the issue. Moreover, there is a more sophisticated model; that of the sacrifice for sin. In this model Jesus is like a sacrificial lamb who is murdered in our place. This model is also inadequate because it is based on a privative notion of sacrifice. The one making the sacrifice pays over something valuable to him to appease an angry God. In this case God is paying himself. This view is also called the "propitiation view" because it is based upon propitiation, which means to turn away wrath. The more meaningful notion is that of Solidarity. The Solidarity or "participatory" view says that Jesus entered human history to participate in our lot as finite humans, and he died as a means of identifying with us. We are under the law of sin and death, we are under curse of the law (we sin, we die, we are not capable in our own human strength of being good enough to merit salvation). IN taking on the penalty of sin (while remaining sinless) Jesus died in our stead; not in the manner of a privative animal sacrifice (that is just a metaphor) but as one of us, so that through identification with us, we might identify with him and therefore, partake of his newness of life.



B. Christ the Perfect Revelation of God to Humanity


In the book of Hebrews it says "in former times God spoke in many and verious ways through the prophets, but in these latter times he has spoken more perfectly through his son." Jesus is the perfect revelation of God to humanity. The prophets were speaking for God, but their words were limited in how much they could tell us about God. Jesus was God in the flesh and as such, we can see clearly by his character, his actions, and his teachings what God wants of us and how much God cares about us. God is for humanity, God is on our side! The greatest sign of God's support of our cause as needy humans is Jesus death on the cross, a death in solidarity with us as victims of our own sinful hearts and societies. Thus we can see the lengths God is will to go to to point us toward himself. There are many verses in the Bible that seem to contradict this view. These are the verses which seem to say that Atonement is propitiatory.



C. Death in Solidarity with Victims


1) Support from Modern Theologians


Three Major Modern Theologians support the solidarity notion of atonement: Jurgen Moltmann (The Crucified God), Matthew L. Lamb (Solidarity With Victims), and D.E.H. Whiteley (The Theology of St. Paul).In the 1980s Moltmann (German Calvinist) was called the greatest living protestant theologian, and made his name in laying the groundwork for what became liberation theology. Lamb (Catholic Priest) was big name in political theology, and Whiteley (scholar at Oxford) was a major Pauline scholar in the 1960s.In his work The Crucified God Moltmann interprets the cry of Jesus on the cross, "my God my God why have you forsaken me" as a statement of solidarity, placing him in identification with all who feel abandoned by God.Whiteley: "If St. Paul can be said to hold a theory of the modus operandi [of the atonement] it is best described as one of salvation through participation [the 'solidarity' view]: Christ shared all of our experience, sin alone excepted, including death in order that we, by virtue of our solidarity with him, might share his life...Paul does not hold a theory of substitution..." (The Theology of St. Paul, 130)An example of one of the great classical theologians of the early church who held to a similar view is St. Irenaeus (according to Whiteley, 133).



2) Scrtiptural

...all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were Baptized into his death.? We were therefore buried with him in baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the death through the glory of the father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him in his death we will certainly be united with him in his resurrection.For we know that the old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.--because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.Now if we have died with Christ we believe that we will also live with him, for we know that since Christ was raised from the dead he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him; the death he died to sin he died once for all; but the life he lives he lives to God. In the same way count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.(Romans 6:1-5)

In Short, if we have united ourselves to Christ, entered his death and been raised to life, we participate in his death and resurrection thourgh our act of solidarity, united with Christ in his death, than it stands tto reason that his death is an act of solidarity with us, that he expresses his solidarity with humanity in his death.

This is why Jesus cries out on the cross "why have you forsaken me?" According to Moltmann this is an expression of Solidarity with all who feel abandoned by God.Jesus death in solidarity creates the grounds for forgiveness, since it is through his death that we express our solidarity, and through that, share in his life in union with Christ. Many verses seem to suggest a propitiatory view. But these are actually speaking of the affects of the solidarity. "Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him! For if when we were considered God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! What appears to be saying that the shedding of blood is what creates forgiveness is actually saying that the death in solidarity creates the grounds for reconciliation. IT says we were enemies then we were reconciled to him thorugh the death, his expression of solidarity changes the ground, when we express our solidarity and enter into the death we are giving up to God, we move from enemy to friend, and in that sense the shedding of blood, the death in solidarity, creates the conditions through which we can be and are forgiven. He goes on to talk about sharing in his life, which is participation, solidarity, unity.



D. Meaning of Solidarity and Salvation.

Jurgen Moltmann's notion of Solidarity (see The Crucified God) is based upon the notion of Political solidarity. Chrsit died in Solidarity wiht victims. He took upon himself a political death by purposly angering the powers of the day. Thus in his death he identifies with victims of oppression. But we are all vitims of oppression. Sin has a social dimension, the injustice we experience as the hands of society and social and governmental institutions is primarily and at a very basic level the result of the social aspects of sin. Power, and political machinations begin in the sinful heart, the ego, the desire for power, and they manifest themselves through institutions built by the will to power over the other. But in a more fundamental sense we are all victims of our own sinful natures. We scheme against others on some level to build ourselves up and secure our conditions in life. IN this sense we cannot help but do injustice to others. In return injustice is done to us.Jesus died in solidarity with us, he underwent the ultimate consequences of living in a sinful world, in order to demonstrate the depths of God's love and God's desire to save us. Take an analogy from political organizing. IN Central America governments often send "death squads" to murder labor unionists and political dissenter. IN Guatemala there were some American organizations which organized for college students to go to Guatemala and escort the leaders of dissenting groups so that they would not be murdered.

The logic was that the death squads wouldn't hurt an American Student because it would bring bad press and shut off U.S. government funds to their military. As disturbing as these political implications are, let's stay focussed on the Gospel. Jesus is like those students, and like some of them, he was actually killed. But unlike them he went out of his way to be killed, to be victimized by the the rage of the sinful and power seeking so that he could illustrate to us the desire of God; that God is on our side, God is on the side of the poor, the victimized, the marginalized, and the lost. Jesus said "a physician is not sent to the well but to the sick."The key to salvation is to accept God's statement of solidarity, to express our solidarity with God by placing ourselves into the death of Christ (by identification with it, by trust in it's efficacy for our salvation).



E. Atonement is a Primetive Concept?


This charge is made quite often by internet-skeptics, especially Jewish anti-missionaries who confuse the concept with the notion of Human sacrifice. But the charge rests on the idea that sacrifice itself is a primitive notion. If one commits a crime, someone else should not pay for it. This attack can be put forward in many forms but the basic notion revolves around the idea that one person dying for the sins of another, taking the penalty or sacrificing to remove the guilt of another is a premitive concept. None of this applies with the Participatory view of the atonement (solidarity) since the workings of Christ's death, the manner in which it secures salvation, is neither through turning away of wrath nor taking upon himself other's sins, but the creation of the grounds through which one declares one's own solidarity with God and the grounds through which God accepts that solidarity and extends his own; the identification of God himself with the needs and crys of his own creation.



F. Unfair to Jesus as God's Son?



Internet skeptics sometimes argue that God can't be trusted if he would sacrifice his son. This is so silly and such a misunderstanding of Christian doctrine and the nature of religious belief that it hardly deserves an answer. Obviously God is three persons in one essence, the Trinity , Triune Godhead. Clearly God's act of solidarity was made with the unanimity of a single Godhead. God is not three God's, and is always in concert with himself.

Christianity: Salvation and Other Faiths

Buddhist Priest


The Nature of Religion:


In my view Religion is an attempt to identify a human problematic, that is the basic problematic nature at the heart of being human. Having identified it, religious traditions seek to resolve the problematic nature of human life by offering a transformative experince which allows one to transcend the difficulty and to be fulfilled or feel more human or be "saved." Religious traditions also usually seek to mediate this transformation through ceremony or some sort of theological orientation. These three things make up the nature of religion:

(a) identification of the problematic

(b) Transformative power to overcome the nature of the problematic

(c) a means of mediating this transformative power.

All religions offer these things, weather the problematic be seen as seperation from nature, or imbalance with cosmic forces, re-birth through desire which leads to suffering, or moral sin in rebellion agasint God.

Transformations come in all sorts of packes too, they can be the big experince of bron agian Christianity (mediated through the "sinners prayer") or they can be the mystical experince, mediated thorugh the mass, or enlightenment, mediated through mediation, mandala, mantra and other mediation aids, or what have you.

The reason for identifying with a particular religious tradition is because one feels that this particular tradition identities the problematic better than others, and offers mediation in a more sure or certain or complete way. One must go with the tradition with which one feels the strongest connection.



Shinto Priest


For me that is the Christian Tradition, primarily because I feel that the historical connection to Jesus of Nazareth, and the unique concept of Grace mark the Christian tradition as the best mediation of the Ultimate Transformative Experience. But more on that latter.






Mystical Theology

We can draw conclusions in these matters of God's nature and that of the universe, and the relation between the two, through logic and other means. But we cannot turely know the reality of God other than or apart form mystical experience. That is to say, we experience God as the deepest level beyond words, thoughts, or images. This is because God transcends our understanding. We cannot say what God is, we can only make the most rudimentary guesses, which is all this stuff is. We cannot truly know, but we can experince. We do experince God this way; mystical experince is at the heart of all organized religion.


Mystical Theology and Religious Traditions

We seek to talk about our experiences because we are social creatures. We have to talk about our experiences of God, even though they are not in words and we even understand them ourselves. Thus we must encode them into language and for that we must masks these deeply contradictory feelings with cultural symbols from our symbolic universe. Thus all religious traditions are different, because they all involve their own cultures and are made out of their own cultural constructs; yet they all represent the same reality which stands behind them all. The details just don't' matter. One faith calls its' God "wooden" and thinks he wants virgin sacrifice hung on a tree. Another faith calls its God "Demeter" and thinks this God a she and that she wants a sacrifice of Grain from every harvest. None of this matters. the gender doesn't matter, the sacrifice doesn't' matter, not the names, not the countries, all are just meaningless details constructed out of the constructs of each naion, the symbols that are meaningful to each group. But they all represent one true reality standing behind them all. Like a prism they break down the true white light into colored details and each one fixates upon each detail; one is a "red" tradition, red is the truth. Anther is a "blue" tradition, only blue is true, but in reality, they are all just reflections of one reality which only makes real sense when it's all together and shining naturally upon the eye.

This is what I mean by the slogan I use a lot, "all gods point to 'God.'" One cannot paly the various religious traditions off against each other. The atheist who constantly harps "how do you know which God is true" doesn't know what he's asking. Because none of them are, and all of them are, because they all reflect the same reality behind all religious traditions, but a reality we can only understand in metaphor.





II. Is Belief in Salvation Unfair to Those of Other faiths?


1) Well meaning people will not be saved?

Many good and well meaning people do not feel the need to be saved. Some wonder why is it not enough to jut be good and well meaning. Surely God knows that we are well meaning, if God looks upon the heart, so why do we need to conform to the ideological strictures of a particular religious view? Wouldn't God be extremely unjust to condemn someone who was well meaning? And aren't Christians really unfair to assume that all but those who follow their views are not well meaning?2) Unfair because believers in other religious traditions will not be saved?This is an often heard objection and it is not without merit. Why should God send someone to hell for all eternity, simply because he/she was born in a culture that is not open to Christianity, perhaps has not herd of Jesus, and perhaps even at a time before there was any possibility of hearing (say before Christ came to earth). Such a person would have no chance of being saved. Closer to home, a person in another culture who is very committed to the religious tradition he/she was brought up in, why should such a person suffer eternally just for being who they are? That is basically what it amounts to, everyone is proud of their own culture, and everyone identifies with his/her own religious tradition in a very personal way. Why should someone be condemned just for being who they are, being born and raised in the culture they were born into?



B. Unjust because it implies an unjust alternative?

Since hell is eternal, and sin is finite, it seems unjust to punish someone in a manor that far exceeds the crime. Moreover, isn't the punishment unfair in the first place? Just to go to hell simply for not being a Christian, this is very unjust because it means that who the person is and what they live for, and the nature of their intension's aren't even considered. To just whisk people off to hell forever, where there is no learning process so no chance to correct mistakes, is unjust.



C.Popular misconceptions of the nature of the Gospel.

"Gospel" means "Good News." The Good News is not that people are going to hell. The Good News is that God cares and provides a way to orient our lives toward him so that we can know him in this life, and in the world to come.




1) Are there really well meaning people?

"All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God." From a human perspective, relatively speaking from one human to another there are, of course, well meaning people. There are good people all around us, from a human perspective. Relative to the Divine however, no one is good, no one is capable of meriting salvation. We all have our sins, we all have our human frailties. We are all caught up in "height" (our ability through the image of God in which we were created to move beyond our human finitude and seek the good) and "depth" (our nature burdened in the sinful wickedness to human deceit).

These are Augustinian terms and they basically mean that we are both, good and bad, saint and sinner. God knows the heart, He Knows what we truly seek. God is merciful and is able to forgive our trespasses. But, if we are really well meaning toward God we will seek the truth. If we are seeking the truth than God will make it plan to us.




2) Other Religions

Paul said "To those who through persistence seek glory, honor and immortality he will give eternal life.But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the good and follow evil there will be wrath and anger...first for the Jew and then for the gentile; but glory honor and peace for everyone who does good. For God does not show favoritism. All who sin apart from the law will perish apart form the law and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.

Indeed when Gentiles who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirement of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences bearing witness and their hearts now accusing, now even defending them..." (Romans 2:7-15). New American Standard and other translations say "their hearts accusing, now excusing them..." Most Christians are afraid of this conclusion and they down play this verse. Often Evangelicals will come back and say "he makes it clear in the next passage that no one can really follow the law on their hearts." Well, if they can't, than they can't. But if they can, and do, than God will excuse them. God knows the heart, we do not. The verse clearly opens the door to the possibility of salvation (although by Jesus) through a de facto arrangement in which one is seeking the good without knowing the object one is seeking (Jesus). In other words, it is possible that people in other cultures who follow the moral law written on the heart know Jesus de facto even if they don't know him overtly. Paul backs up this conclusion in Acts 17:22 Paul goes to Athens as is asked by the Athenian philosophers to explain his ideas to them.

These were pagan followers of another religion. Paul stood up and said to them, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious for as I walked around and observed your objects of worship I even found an alter with this inscription 'TO AN UNKNOWN GOD' Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."He basically says that they are worshiping God, they just don't know who he is. That's why he says "I will make it known to you." He doesn't say "you have the wrong idea completely." Most Evangelicals dismiss this as a neat rhetorical trick. But if we assume that Paul would not lie or distort his beliefs for the sake of cheap tricks, we must consider that he did not say "you are all a bunch of pagans and you are going to hell!" He essentially told them, "God is working in your culture, you do know God, but you don't know who God is. You seek him, without knowing the one you seek. He goes on,(v27)"God did this [created humanity and scattered them into different cultures] so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him though he is not far form each one of us." This implies that God not only wants to work in other cultures, but that it is actually his plan to do things in this way. Perhaps through a diversity of insights we might come to know God better. Perhaps it means that through spreading the Gospel people would come to contemplate better the meaning of God's love.

In any case, it does mean that God is working in other cultures, and that God is in the hearts of all people drawing them to himself. Of their worship of idols, Paul said "in past times God overlooked such ignorance but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (v30). Now what can this mean? God never overlooks idolatry or paganism, in the OT he's always commanding the Israelites to wipe them out and expressly forbidding idolatry. It means that on an individual basis when God judges the hearts of people, he looks at their desire to seek him, to seek the good. That their status as individuals in a pagan culture does not negate the good they have done, and their ignorance of idolatry does not discount their desire to seek the good or the truth. IT means that they are following Jesus if they live in the moral life, even though they follow him as something unknown to them. IT also means that all of us should come into the truth, we should seek to know God fully, and when we do that we find that it is Jesus all along.




3) Justice of Punishment.

Jesus himself never speaks directly of hell, but always in parables. The other statements of Hell are mainly in euphemistic passages or in apocalyptic passages such as the book of Revelation. But I suggest that for some crimes hell is deserved. The slaughter of innocent people, the disruption of thousands of lives, the Hitlers of the world, and those who rationalize the deeds through "following orders" deserve to suffer the consequences of their actions. Evil has consequences, and those who commit evil should suffer the consequences, and they will.I have no direct knowledges of what hell is. It is based upon the Greek mythological concept of Tartarus which got into Hebrew thinking through Hellenization. There is no "hell" in the Tennach or the Pentateuch ("OT"). In the Hebrew scriptures there is only mention of Sheol, or the "the grave" to which everyone goes. But in the books of Revelation it does speak of those who work inequity being "outside the Kingdom of God." I don't' believe that hell is litteral fire and brimstone, I do believe it is some state of anxiety or separation from God.



C. Knowing God.

Heb. 8:10-12 "...I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will a man say to his neighbor 'know the Lord' for they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more." This passage promises a "personal religion ship with God."The word for "to Know" is the Greek Term Ginosko, which means personal expirential knowledge. To give one's life to Jesus means to develop a personal relationship with Jesus. Jesus said (John) "My sheep know my voice..." Personal relationship means that it is more than a set of rules, more than an ideology or a belief system, but a matter of the heart, the emotions, religious affections. IT may not be through dramatic miraculous effects (although I do believe that that is open to all Christians) but it is deeper than mere rule keeping, and does make for a satisfaction nothing else can match.God acts upon the heart. Salvation is a matter of "knowing God" not of mere intellectual asscent. What does it mean to know God? It means that being a Christian is a matter of experiencing God's love in the heart and of loving God and others. It is also a matter of being "led" by God through impressions upon the heart, and not merely a set of rules or a list of beliefs that one must check off. IT is the development of "religious affections."The excitement of knowing God is unequalized by anything else in this life.

III. Developing Personsonal Relationship with God.



A. Getting Saved.

This is very simple. God keeps it simple so all of us can do it. John tells us "...that whosoever believes on him shall be saved." (3:16). Belief is the first step. But believe doesn't just mean intellectual ascent, it means to place our faith in him, to trust him, as said above to place ourselves into his death, to express our solidarity with him.

Paul says "...That if you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the Dead, you will be saved, for it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved....everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." (Romas 10:9-12).

Note that the resurrection is stipulated as a criterion of belief, and notice that it also says believe in your heart. Belief is not mere intellectual ascent but is a decision of the will to trust in God. Does this mean we must believe in the resurrection to be saved? It at least means we must believe in the thing the resurrection points to, the new life in Christ, that we trust God to give us this new life and that such life is found in him. Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. What does it mean to call upon the name of the Lord? It means, to place our trust in God and in Jesus as God's Son, as our savior.



B. The Name of Jesus

The name of Jesus then becomes our expression of solidarity with God, that we state clearly that we choose God's way, we want to change our lives and we are ready to accept God's terms for life; that we respond to the solidarity he shows us by committing to solidarity with him.In Acts 2: 38 the mob asks Peter what they must do, in response to the miracles of Pentecost and Peter's sermon on Jesus being raised form the dead. Peter tells them "Repent, and be baptized everyone one of you in the name of Jesus Christ that your sins may be forgiven." Does this mean that baptism is a pre-requiset for salvation? I don't believe so. They were really asking a more general question than "how do I get saved." IN response to Peter's sermon they were asking in a general way "well, we curcified the Messiah, what can we do about it."

Peter tells them two things, repent (change your mind, express sorrow for sin and determine not to sin any longer) AND be baptized as an expression of surrender to God (in keeping with the Jewish custom). The key here is to repent, turn from the present course of life and follow Jesus. Baptism is something we should do. It is an expression of our faith, and a symbol that we palce our hope in God, die to the old way, it is an outward symbol of placing ourselves in solidarity with God and in Jesus death. But the important thing here is to repent. And, "you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."Latter in Acts when Peter takes the Gospel to the gentiles for the first time, the house of Cornelius. He tells them (Acts 10:43)"... everyone who believes in him recieves forgiveness of sins through his name." With that the Holy Spirit comes upon them while Peter is still talking. He does not tell them to be baptized, nor does God wait for that to give the gift of the Holy Spirit (which is the renewing of the spirit, the "born again" experience and empowering for service to God). So here again the common link is belief, which implies a commitment of trust.Eph 1: 13 "Having believed you were marked in him with a seal the promised Holy Spirit who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance unto redemption of those who are God's possession."Romans 5 "since we have been justified through faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have gained access into this grace..."Therefore, "getting saved" is very simple, although it may be the hardest thing you will ever do. Just place our trust in Jesus and give your life to God. Actively determine to believe (place trust) in Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross, God's expression of solidarity with humanity.

Now to refute what religious people "can't refute"

Religious person at worship?



On the atheist blogDebuncking Christianity, Valerie Tarico at 11/02/2007 posts an article with the interesting title "What Religionists Can't Refute." So you Know I have to refute it.

A recent article and book by Mr. Dinesh D’Souza argue that atheists can’t refute the possibility of God. From there, Mr. D'Souza goes on to argue for an affirmative belief in his god: the god of orthodox Christians. It seems like Mr. D’Souza misunderstands atheism and because of this inadvertently supports the argument of the atheists: Whether God is real or not is a separate argument from what we can know. Religionists claim to know that a god exists and typically which god it is. Atheists simply say there is insufficient evidence to call this knowledge.

But D'Souza said atheists can't refute the possibility of God. You can't. you can't prove God is impossible. that's what he's saying. Now Tarico confuses that with saying we can prove there a God, or so it seems. The existent to which "Religionists" claim to "know" God exists, is not in a demonstrable objective sense but is existential sort of knowing; deep conviction based upon some form of personal experience of insight. It's a subjective sort of knowing. Again Tarico falls into the mistake so many atheists think of believing that there is a distinction between Gods. God compete for existence in the mind of the atheist. But that's because they don't get the notion of necessity. They don't understand that God can only be one thing,a nd one thing only, eternal necessary being. Any disputes identity of God are disputes about religion tradition, communication, cultural constructs or knowing wht God wants, not disputes about "which God." The goes goes on to demonstrate a misunderstanding about the nature of knowledge.

Might there be realities that we finite humans can’t perceive? Of course! The claim that there could be gods or a god that we can’t perceive is valid. But to call this knowledge, and then to engage in the slight of hand that takes one from this ambiguous opening to religious assertion is absurd.

Why do they think that only empirical "facts" can be called "knowledge?" knowledge is what we know, while it may be only fictional, the idea that Tom Sawyer is Becky Thacher's boy friend is knowledge, it doesn't matter it is literal historical knowledge or not. But this tendency to take only the empirically demonstrable as knowledge demonstrates that theism is much more than merely the lack of a belief. Clearly atheism is not knowledge,t he lack of a belief cannot be knowledge. Tarico fails to come to terms with any sort of distinction between one kind of knowledge or another.

There might be fairies we can’t perceive. There might be djinns we can’t perceive. The world might rest on the back of an imperceptible turtle. There might be an invisible warrior waiting to whack my head off outside my front door. I can’t say there isn’t because if he’s there, he’s invisible. And if I survive when I go out to feed the chickens, maybe it will be just because he moved on to my neighbor’s house. And if I survive tomorrow, perhaps it’s because he only appears once in 2000 years. Neither I nor you can rule him out.

You can see where this leads—to a paralyzing lot of mental clutter.

The mental clutter I see is the ever present arrogance of the empiricist who thinks because he/she has an idea that idea must be universal and only his/her concept of reality can ever be taken seriously. I see the tired familiar begging of the question, obligatory for membership in the atheist fan club, and once again, the famous atheist stereotype of religious views, refusing to think seriously about any religious persons ideas. After one atheist has demonstrated the ability to appreciate sophisticated Theological concepts, although she had to desacralize it and turn it into something other an God concept, now we are back to lumping in all religious ideas with the most superstitious and with concept s totally unlike any modern ideas of God. Note: these are all contingent concepts from folklore, none of them count as eternal necessary being. Yet there is the old atheist straw man, all religious concepts must be reduced to silliness. They are really afraid to take on the real religious ideas.

In order to function, humans generally limit themselves to making claims about things that they can perceive using logic and evidence.

No in fact this is not the case at all. What we do is to rely upon our senses and extrapolation from our sense data, but we extrapolate using criteria or regularity, consistency, and shared confirmation. We take for granted many aspects of reality that are not derived from either evidence or logic. But before I give examples I must point out that the major


And, in fact, this is exactly what religionists do. Believers say that their beliefs rest on faith, when in reality what they rest on is frail and faulty evidence—the same kinds of evidence that have always been used to support the existence of magical creatures: anecdote, emotion, testimonial, folklore, and inexplicable sensations of transcendence, otherness, or transformation. Religionists don’t see that this kind of low-grade evidence fails to differentiate among the many magical gods and creatures that have populated human history, and, therefore, a position of integrity would require that one argue for the existence of them all.

The reason we don’t hear this argument is because each supernaturalist is actually believer of a specific sort. Each has been infected with a specific viral ideology that creates an emotional inclination, a desire to believe in a certain kind of magical being or a fear of not believing in this being. This emotional valence in turn protects that single set of supernatural beliefs from the ravages of reason.

This is the kind of special pleading that makes my blood boil. It's special pleading by default because the implication is everyone else has a "viral infection of an ideology" (whatever the hell that means) except of course, my view is the really true truth! It's so obviously special pleading. Of course the author would argue around this by saying atheism is the lack of a belief (which is itself a mistake and propaganda line) thus can't be an infection. Its all so campy and clever by half. Atheism is clearly just as much an ideology as religion or communism or any other belief. The absence of a religious belief becomes the presence of a materialist belief, Derrida couldn't have invented the Hegelian irony any more effectively. Like deconstruction, Like the transcendental signifier, being absent it is presence, absence becomes presence. The claim fostered by the idiot Dawkins that religion is a disease, that ideas are diseases, is nothing short of Nazi.

The fomenting of propangandistic device is truly Herr Dawkins triumph of the will, if you catch my meaning. He's found a final solution to his problems with religious people. If ideas offend you declare them "diseases." What do we do with diseases? We eradicate them along with the "germs" that spread them.

To make matters worse, if the resonant beliefs are tried-and-true handed-down religions, they fit the structure of human information processing the way that heroin fits receptors in the brain—damn near perfectly, even though that isn’t what the receptors were made for. All of the rational argumentation about whether god could exist is just window dressing, people making abstract arguments for an abstract deity because they want to believe in a personal deity, the image of which has been virally implanted in their brains through social contagion.

Holy assumption not in evidence batman! These atheists are really trying to create their own er zots science. This one is trying to do brain/mind functionalism without any data. Likening religious belief to heroin is argument from analogy. that's a fallacy.that's real actual informal fallacy. The assertions of social contagion what has no support. There is no data to back that up. This is entire unfounded assertion stems from drawing an analogy between disease and drug addiction and belief. It is nothing more than an analogy.Here we see the familiar attempt to privilege the atheist position. We must always start from the base assumption that atheism is true without ever having to establish any truth value to the constituent building blocks that make it up, such philosophical reductionism, materialism, positivism and the like. Argument from analogy cannot demonstrate a causal relationship because it is the unfounded assumption that like cases are always perfectly parallel in all respects. But heroin is not an apt analogy for religious belief to any degree.

Heroin is an addiction because one who is hooked cannot live without it. It is debilitating and the need for it is not a natural endowment, such as the need for food. The only similarity is that heroin makes you feel good, but it fosters a false sense of well being because it is breaking down your system as long as you use it, and the withdrawal pains are so great you can't give it up.These assertions fly in the face of the major work in the field of brain/mind study of the God parts of the brain. A voluminous body of work exists which tears asunder this foolish assertion. The major researcher in the field which studies God parts of the brain,
Andrew Newberg, says nothing about religious experience being like heroin. In fact Newberg sees religious experience as valid and healthy. The title to his book says it all; why God wont go away. The idea of God, he finds, far from being like heroin or the misuse of receptors, is natural and hard wired. We are endowed (by Nature?, or "someone"?) with this idea, a ready formed innate idea! There is even a more voluminous body of work which shows that religious experience is far better for the experience than any other form of experince. To liken it to heroin is crazy. You are comparing regenerative addictions to the most positive experince of life which is progressively more positive over time. Religious belief is more analogous to food. It is nourishing, good for you, has good effects (although food can be bad for you, and one can get improper nutrition. one must be careful to get a balanced diet).

Mountains of evidence doesn't affect the beliefs of true believers. Why? Because, the rationality of believers is in fact a false rationality.

Of course that is drawing an illogical conclusion form sign. Why would false rationality lead one to cling to an experince if they didn't get something out of it? Obviously the more plausible reason is that the believers experiences or a nature such that the believer has deep seated conviction of the truth of such beliefs. to dispute this is to claim a knowledge of others experiences. Strange, I would swear materialists can't believe in being clairvoyant. This interpretation is backed up by hundreds of studies. Moreover one would think that fallacious reasoning such argument from analogy wold go hand in hand with false rationality. Why wouldn't false rationality be just as likely to lead one to conclusions drawn from informal fallacies?

To some extent this is true of all of this; most of the time we use reasoning simply to support our emotional preferences.

Hmm you don't say! You mean like if we are really hurt by religious people and we want to get even with God so we lash out at all of religion and try to prove through bogus conclusions about science that religion is not good? Then we would use fallacious reasoning like argument from sign and argument from analogy as a bait and switch in lieu actual scientific data! like that?

In the case of religionists, supernatural beliefs are not bound to follow logic and evidence to their rational conclusions. Argumentation may appear to seek truth, but it does not.

Of course this is a statement turns upon the modern misunderstanding of the concept of sueprnature. supernatural beliefs do follow logical rules. I suggest it's more like the author knows very little about such things because, because like most atheists. she doesn't read theology. I have demonstrated on this blog on more than one occasion that the modern understanding of supernatural is not the true concept of the Christian faith but a watered down and bastardized left over from the enlightenment. The arguments turn on the myth of "rationality" that fostered atheism since the days of Laplace. The idea that atheism is rational and scientific and is needed to free humanity form some dark days of superstitious has been long exploded by modern scientific (and atheist) thinkers such as Maslow. Perpetuating that myth is one of the ggreatest disservices modern atheism is doing. They are simple unaware of or ignoring a vast body of works in philosophy, psychology, historical studies, social critique of the new left, the brunt of Western culture, to perpetuate a myth tauted by a small band of holdovers from ninteeth century positivism and the 1939 world's fair.

It seeks to maintain the status quo. That is why arguing with true believers is so maddening. Even the most lucid arguments put forward against specific magical creatures ultimately are a waste of breath. They may change the minds of a few people who are more compelled by evidence than their peers. (Ironically these may be people who have an emotional aversion to not following the evidence where it leads.) But this has always been and always will be a small minority.

What she's really voicing here is a level of frustration born of her own inability to comprehend arguments from traditional Western thought stretching back to Plato, and the refusal to grant the value of diversity in outlook. If we do not buy into the myths of reductionism, positivism, and naturalism then we are being obtuse and uncooperative and using bad logic. Of course she's already demonstrated that her main argument is based upon an informal fallacy. But we have the bad logic. I think one thing that creates the frustration level is when atheists really don't understand the rules of logic, they think theists are merely being stubborn to keep insisting that necessity is a valid concept and that argument from sign doesn't proven anything.

If this were not the case, our devout friends would be subject to rational argumentation.

you mean like not begging the question? Not arguing from analogy? What purpose does this sort of statement serve? It's merely a question begging generalization that aplys as much to her as to anyone.

We now have excellent reason to posit that the gods humans believe in (Yaweh, Shiva, Allah, Zeus, and company) are modeled on the human psyche. Evidence abounds that they are the products of human culture and evolutionary biology. Increasingly, we can describe where they come from, both in prior religions and in the structure of our brains.

It's always so amusing when they discover something obvious that liberal theology has been saying for centuries, then act like its some big damaging insight that destroys the truth of religion. Of course individual characters used to portray gods in various sacred literatures are modeled after the human psyche. What else would they be modeled after. That's like saying 'ah ha! all those old sermons use words to convey their meaning, we have them now! They can't refute that!" If God is beyond our understanding, as the bible says "he" is, then of course we can't understand God. We have to relate god to something we do understand, don't we? Relating God to humanity is a way of trying to relate to God. We can only think in cultural constructs. WE cannot think beyond them because that is the fabric of the symbolic universe from which we derive language. We think in language,we do not think in nameless feelings. The reality of God is beyond our understand then it is beyond our cultural constructs. But it is not beyond nameless feelings, yet we can only filter it through cultural constructs if we wish talk about it. That's ok because God is an expirential reality. We have to experience God. We cannot capture the truth of God exhaustively on paper. The image of the big man on the throne is a metaphor, place holder for the experience.

In addition, as knowledgeable former Christians and ex-Muslims have demonstrated over and over again, the claims of traditional monotheistic dogma are refutable because they are internally contradictory and they are empirically contradictory. They violate morality, evidence, and logic.

That is a totally groundless generalization. All that is demonstrated is that a lot of people don't understand their own faith, or the religion tradition to which they claim connection. It's a question begging tactic that reveals more bad logic on the part of an atheist who likes to use small groups to represent the whole. This nothing more than a form of guilty by association. Well there are ex Christians who fell away so that proves Christianity is wrong. But they that same logic, the fact that I was an atheist and became a Christian should prove that atheism is false and Christianity is true. Those who think this rarely happens think again. There are more former atheists who became Christians than there are former Christians who became atheists. Atheism is still just 2 of the world population. Atheists who try to write off the main body of Christian thinking by chalking it up to bad logic have try to claim elite status when faced with the possibility that 90% of humanity is just stupid.We can make that argument on any side. Any minority view can say "we are the special smart people everyone else is stupid." She just doesn't get it, its' really dyslexics who are the smart elite.

Mr. D’Souza makes his abstract arguments in the service of his religion, orthodox Christianity. But we shouldn’t waste our time arguing with him about either philosophy or specific orthodox doctrines.

Don't confuse me with the facts, If I don't know it ant worth knowing. This is a way of dismissing the vast ancient tradition of western civilization because tis' against atheism. They do not have anything close to a lion's share of the thinkers. So they have to dismiss the entire western tradition and start from a position that says real knowledge was invented last Thursday and we are the only one's that have it.

Perhaps the best argument against the time-worn understanding of Christianity is that it is vile. It is selfish, materialist, and morally repugnant.

Nothing like cold dispassionate logic is there? Not in her thinking. I'm glad she hasn't stooped to name calling!

The heart of orthodox theology is a god who demands human sacrifice. The Bible gives sacred status to some of the ugliest impulses of the human heart: tribalism, sexism, vengeance, rape, genocide, and a host of other brutish self-indulgences. Ironically, it corrupts the deepest values of Christianity itself, the love of Love and the love of Truth. It promises an afterlife in which the saved will be as rich as Paris Hilton (not just gold jewelry, streets of gold; not just gem studded purses and high heels, gem studded walls; not just good make-up but eternal youth) and as blissfully indifferent to the exquisite suffering of their brethren as, well, Paris Hilton (partying it up with their riches and friends including the Jesus friend-- while Baghdad or Southern California or Hell--burns). It isn’t just misguided. It’s disgusting.

What can one say when confronted with a huge pile of generalizations and bad stereotypes demonstrating that one knows little about the subject which one is dealing. Perhaps if this person really understood Christianity when she was a Christian she would still be one. The greatest disservice the fundies are doing is to cut us off from our cultural and intellectual heritage in the Christian faith. Even the first generation of Pentecostals knew more about Christian history than do the current generation. They were known to be less literate than their modern decedents. These atheists, not all of course, but the vocally crusading ones, are people who have been hurt by religious people and they can't distinguish between those who hurt them and the tradition with which those people are connected. I think we have the fundamentalists to blame for this. This kind of crusading atheist, and the author here is no exception. Consistently demonstrate a lack of understanding not only of the depth of Christian theology but of the Western philosophical tradition as a whole. Happily there are exceptions on both sides. There are critical thinking atheists, as well as Evangelicals, who understand the Western tradition in letters. I wish these people would have more of an effect upon their respective camps.



Here are some quick links to pages that might help fix the misconceived ideas about the nature of Christian theology:

Hug a Dyslexic Today

Dyslexia is not the result of low intelligence. An unexpected gap exists between learning aptitude and achievement in school. The problem is not behavioral, psychological, motivational, or social. People with dyslexia also do not “see backwards.”

Neartheast Tarrent country Dyslexia Council

People are odd. They are always confusing emotional reason with logical ones. One poster sends in a comment, which I did not publish because I will not publish comments that are attacks on personalities. This all knowing commentator deems to know that event hough I'm Dyslexic I still "just being lazy," when bad spellings appear in this blog. Let me clue you in on something, a person who does not have to look up every word he uses has no right to speak of Lazy to dyslexic. No dyslexic could get as far as I got in school and be lazy, because to get that far without spell check means I did a hell of a lot of looking up. I did not have a computer until I was in doctoral work. that means I got my Masters degree while typing on a typewriter and looking up ever word in the dictionary or paying someone to proof the papers.

This poster wasn't there in class with me as a child in the 1960s when no one knew what dyslexia was, and when teachers humiliated me for being lazy. I got my little butt whacked with a board because I was lazy. I was lazy because I looked at the words on the paper I could not see the same thing thing the teacher saw. Just imagine you are wearing special glasses that scramble the words you look at. you can't take them off they are somehow attacked to you. So what good would it do to look up words when the definition will have mistakes in it? This commentator, the all knowing one, was not there when the teacher would call on me to read and I was in a six grade class and only read on a second grade level. Why is she calling on me anyway? Then making some snide comment about "this is how not to be." Everyone was laughing their little heads off. But I'm lazy. I'm just so lazy I just love to be humiliated in class. Hearing classmates whispering "he must be really stupid." It was so fun being hauled down to the principle's office and told i was bad, and I lazy I was no good and then having my butt whacked with a big board for some reason I could not phathum.

This was before anyone got any special treatment for being "challenged." No one with a problem was "challenged" in those days, they did not have that concept. If you could not walk you were crippled. If you had a problem they did not understand you weren't trying hard enough. This all knowing commentator who deems to decide that I am lazy was not there when a fine loving mother driven to despair because her two little twin boys has some strange problem no one could understand, would jump up an down literally thrashing the table with her belt (she never hit us with it) and banging her head on the fridge cried "maybe you are lazy!." I would think, as the horror that he one person who still believed in me didn't anymore, and I would whine "I'm sorry I'm bad mommy!" But the all knowing one knows all about this I"m sure. He must know because I didn't. I had no idea what they were talking about because when I looked at the words they didn't say the same things. "Saw" was "was" and Elise was Elsie, and 29 was 92 and so on.The authorities of the school board had a talk with my parents. They already had it worked out, either we were restarted or we were lazy. they sent us to a testing place, certain that the test would show our IQ's were lower than average. The testing people had a nice little chat with us. I remember they were really friendly and I liked what we were talking about. So I got into it and chatted amiably. My mother would keep saying "I they are smart. I know they are."

They kept dragging other researchers in and saying things like "tell him what you think about Daniel Boone," or "explain to Dr. so and so why oil floats on water." I knew the answer because my father told me. My Dad was a tool design engineer in air craft. He loved to give long winded technical explanations. My eyes would glaze over and I would think "I'm sorry I asked." But tried really hard to remember what he said. The funny testing people said we were "geniuses." They said there was no way we could be restarted. They told my mother our IQ's but she wouldn't tell us at first. They were real high. Then the people back at the school decided to work on plan B. If we weren't stupid we had to be lazy. My parents worked really hard in all kinds of wasy to get us to learn. They thought lazy meant we needed to be spanked, but they also tried more intellectual activities. When nothing worked they became frustrated and started beating the table as though we would feel the pain through the table and shape up. I know it caused them a great deal an anguish. I made me feel that I must be just bad because they said I was bad (lazy = bad right?).

I remember we first heard of dyslexia because our family doctor had it. He had stories of how hard he had to struggle in the 30's to become a doctor when he could not spell. Through him I guess we found Scottish Rite Children's Hospital in Dallas their "language lab." Back then I think it was called "Hospital for Crippled children" But they can't use that word today. Going to a hospital to have my spelling worked on made me feel that I must be crippled in my head. I was marked out as a special wounded freak from early childhood. I will never forget Luke Waites. He was the great guy. He discovered dyslexia. He wore a while lab coat and ran the "language lab" (which today is named after him). He was my friend he worked at treating every kid in the program like his friend.In those days that was the only program in the country, and it just happened to be where we lived or we would not have gotten to go. When I went to college he wrote a letter to my professors saying I was smart but couldn't spell and that there were scientific reasons why I could not spell. They didn't meet with the Scottish Rite guys once, the had a million meetings. Those guys had to deprogram them of years and years of having it pounded into their heads that something was wrong with us we must be stupid or bad. It was the major thing in my life for a long time in childhood.

I will never forget how happy and relieved my parents were to learn about dyslexia. I will always hear my mother's voice telling everyone she knew over and over "there aren't lazy, they aren't stupid, there's a reason why they can't learn to spell." Even though it was like finding a miracle cure (although one cannot ever get over dyslexia--the language lab just taught us tricks like phonetic spelling)it still made me feel like a wounded special helpless freak. But my parents were so relived. Then began a life long journey of looking up words. This all knowing poster, who must know all of this, even though he was not there, has the nerve to tell me I'm lazy. The one word I would use for that part of my childhood is "anguish."

The little brown shirt atheist thugs on message boards quickly discovered that spelling is a weapon to use against me. "your spelling is horrible." After a 25 post thread in which I've batted down all their arguments, here comes the stuff about spelling, like clock work. That's all they have to say so they use that like a weapon. Even after I got firefox they still say it even when there are no mistakes. I know mistakes get through but clearly its' better. But they still feel called upon to point it out. I even put up a thread saying "isn't my spelling better?" they all agreed they could tell a difference. btw I used to hypothesize when I was a child that someday they would invent a technological device like spell check that would spell for you. I was elated when I first heard of spell check.

When I first got saved I prayed that I would see Mrs. Messenger, my old Scottish Rite Language Lab teacher, so I could tell her "thanks." I'll be damned if I didn't see her in an air port just a few weeks latter! What are the odds? She lived in another part of the country by then, the odds are I would never see her again. I did thank her and told her about the prayer thing. She was really happy.

So this is why I will not post comments telling me "your spelling is horrible."


Here is a link to the best dyslexia site I've found. The NTDC If you think your child might have learning problem I urge you to read this site.

Page by Scottish Rite

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An Atheist Discovers "The God Beyond God"

I came across an interesting article by Marlene Winellon the atheist blog "Debunking Christianity. This person is a therapist of some kind. Her profile says that she offers therapy to those traumatized by religion. What I find interesting about this that her statement about the alternative to religious belief that she has found for her own personal world view is none other than Paul Tillich's notion of The ground of being! this is in fact my very understanding of God!

Winell indicates some basic misunderstanding about theology. In her statement she tries to attack religion. Although, this is not meant to be an attack. I can see some value in her attempts to help traumatized ex fundie s move forward in their lives. I do think religion can be very debilitating if it is not done right. Half truth is a very powerful weapon. But in making these theolgoical mistakes Winell is contributing to the half truth. The half truth of which I spoke is that of the fundamentalists, the way they distort the Gospel. Windell says:

Thursday, November 01, 2007

I keep getting asked, So Do You Believe in God?

So do you believe in God?

As a therapist working to help people recover from the damage of religion, I get this frequently. So I’ve decided to make a better effort to reply. To be honest, I don’t like the question because it presumes we know what those words mean. Here are some responses, touching on more or less serious aspects of the topic.

Yes I think I know what the words mean. She further demontrates lack of understanding in the nature of God in terms of necessity and contingency.

1. Which god? Do you mean Zeus, Baal, Athena, Shiva, Allah, Jehovah, or some other? If you mean one of those, then no. I am not a theist. I don’t believe in an individual being that created and now controls the world.

When people say things like this, which ;God, as though they are all so much alike, I see a read flag. It usually means a lack of theological sophistication. The similarity is in the metaphor suggested by ancient concepts of suzerain authority, the big man on a throne,t he ruler the potentate. That's a literary metaphor and that's where the similarity ends. The God of the Bible is totally different from these other little human figures because they are contingent.
They had parents. Zeus was the son of Saturn (Chronos in Greek set up). Athena was the daughter of Zeus and sprang from his head fully grown. Allah is the same God as the God of the Bible the Muslims just think he wants different things. that's not an argument about how he is, except they literaize the metaphor and just make him the real guy in the sky. Of course Jahova is the corrupted name of the God of the Bible. So clearly she doesn't understand the Christian concept of God. Like so many atheists they just take the literal version as the whole thing. This means basically that atheists are fundamentalists. Then she does something staggering. I really can't understand this, she denies that belief itself is an intelligible concept.

2. What is belief? Is it a cognitive conclusion that I have reached basic on logical consideration of evidence? That would assume I have access to all the information, and I do not. Is it an emotional feeling for something beyond myself? Well, my emotions vary, and some days are hopeful, other days are dark. Emotions are a rocky basis for “belief.” Do I make a leap of faith, not knowing anything really, but simply wanting to “believe,” and putting stock in a “scripture” to give it support? This is also difficult because knowing about the origins of “scripture,” I know the complexity; they were not simply dictated. Also, the strength of my blind faith can also vary and I’m not sure how completely I am supposed to convince myself in order to say I “believe.”

Here we see the typical atheist conception of faith; just blind leap into the darkness with no evidence. We really need to talk about this some time. These people have have just got to start looking thing up. The proper source to use would be Westminster Dictionary of Christian theology. You would not use a refrigeration manuel to define automotive standards or weighs and measures for agriculture, so you would not use a popular dictionary to understand theology. You would use the dictionary made by theologians to explain the way theologians use their specialized terms. See my recent blog piece on Faith is not belief without reason.

After questioning the concept of belief as a coherent concept she then speaks of what passes for belief, and for God, in her world view.

4. If I must use the concept at all, I would equate it with the “nature of being.” This is close to “ground of being,” a phrase coined by John Robinson many years ago in Honest to God. For me it involves a perception of existence grounded in the profound science of modern physics. Most ordinary people do not know much about this. Yet, we now know from findings in both relativity theory and quantum physics, that the universe is much more strange and incredible than we ever realized. It calls for massive humility because there are things no one understands, yet we now have good reason to question all of our basic assumptions about “reality.” The difference is bigger than finding out the world is not flat. We have evidence for questioning our ideas about matter, linear time, cause and effect, and more. String theorists agree there are eleven dimensions. Yet the general population operates all day every day assuming things that are completely out of date. The knowledge has not reached the masses. This is akin to having everyone act as if the earth is still flat. The issues are intensely profound, with implications for everything we do. The big words for me are “mystery” and “possibility.” Feelings are humility, awe, and excitement. There is no religious description of “god” that matches the grandeur of the universe as it is – elusive, ever-changing, impossibly mind-boggling. And this includes us. We are part of the fabric; there is no separation. If this is believing in god, then by all means, a hundred times YES! But I’m still not drawn to the language.

First of all, John Robinson did not coin the term "Being itself." It is found as far back as the intertestamental translating of Exodus by the Rabbis who produced the LXX. In Exodus 3, 11-21 they translate the phrase often rendered "I am that i am" in English bibles, as "I am the being." Since the definite article (ego o' ami) carries a sense of quality when used in this way, "I am being " or I am being itself is the best translation. By the way John 1:1 should be translated "the word was deity" not "the word was the God." The concept is picked up by John of Damascus in the eighth century AD. Robinson got it from Tillich, it is also used by Ware in The Orthodox church to describe Eastern Orthodox beliefs about God, and John MacQuerry uses it extensively.

Secondly her tak about knowing beyond langauge is just coming out of Christian mysticism. People are seeking God like it or not. She is a believe in Gdo even though she doesn't know God, ust as Paul said of the Athenians in Acts 17: 11-21.

She quotes a couple of notables to back up her view:

A couple of quotes that I find consistent with this:

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”`
-Carl Sagan

The actual fact is that atheists have stunted their spiritual growth. they tend not to understand Christian views at the higher level of sophistication. Of course its hardly their fault. liberal theology gets almost no air play, one never sees clearly references to it and even on PBS they give it short shrift. There are concepts by Christian thinkers which dwarf anything short of Einstein Process theology certainly is as sophisticated s anything Sagan ever thought about. Greater scientists than him have been Christians, even in the modern age.

“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
-Albert Einstein

He was wrong about the uncertantainty princple too.

We need to be careful that in our attempts to move beyond the traumatizing aspects of our lives that we don't miss the valuable things. I was traumatized by my fundamentalist environment as a child. I think it caused no end of problems for me. I think the "sucky" parts of my personality can be traced to that era of my life. I and my brother used to stand up in church and lead singing, or help. we really weren't we were jut waving our arms, people thought it was cute and encouraged us. They would go "good job leading sining today." One day I thought "I think I'll preach the sermon today." I stood up, faced the guy sitting right behind me, (I was about five or four) looked him in the eye and shouted "You are going to hell!" He was horrified and didn't know what to thin.. I will never forget the look on that guy's face. As "luck" or "fate" or god whatever would have it, he was a visitor so he didn't know about the two little twins leading sining and how everyone encouraged us. What's interesting about that is that acting out my idea of what a sermon was I immediately went right ot the condemnation and threats of hell. Now no preacher had actually done that in our church. How did I know to do it? I probably saw something on tv, but it fit the mentality of the church.

My point is I can understand the problem with religion. I have more air curling stories than that that I could tell. One thumbnail example, I once dreamed that I was at one of the old churches we went to when I was in high school int he dream it was a center of satan worship. In another dream of the same era the little religious private school I attended in eighth and ninth grades was ran by a secret cult of vampires where sucking the kids blood. That might give an idea of ho these places affected me. Yet, I found healing when I found Jesus. My solution to the bad religious experince was to have good religious experiences.

Not only does Winell throw the babby out she watns to kill the whole concept of God.

5. Dispensing with the “god” word, it makes a little more sense for me to address “spirituality,” although this word has often meant a focus on other-worldly things. I prefer to describe spirituality as a way of living which is here-and-now. These are attributes rather than a definition. They involve feelings and perceptions and experiences which depend on openness. This openness can be chosen and developed. Rather than escaping into a different realm, I think of spirituality in terms of how we live our lives – the choices, the consciousness, the texture of daily life. There are several aspects of this:

I don't totally disagree there. But the interesting thing is she wants to do away with the term "God" and yet her alternative to it is the more sophisticated concept of God that is less known, but no less Christian. The idea that the reality of God is beyond words and must be explored experimentally is hardly new in Christian thought, ti is the stuff of which Christian mysticism is made. The idea that the reality of God is something beyond our cultural constructs of God is explored by Tillich in his book The Courage to Be, in the chapter "The God beyond God." I highly recomend it.

A God by any other name...?

Loftus responds to responses to comments all still coming from the comment box. But I think this one needs answering in an extended format.

Joe said...why do we need propositional? Its' phenomenological and existential.

Isn't that a propositional statement about the content of your revelational beliefs?

Yes, bu that doesn't establish that the content of revelation has to be propositional, at least not always. Just because you make propositional statements about existential statements doesn't make the existential statements propositional. Anything can be a proposition. That doesn't mean the upshot of revelation must always be so.

Joe said...I challenge you to debate on them. I wanted to lead off with pro God arguments anyway.

Well, as I said, get in line. But if you'd like to debate me then do so on this proposition: "The Christian faith should be rejected by modern civilized scientifically literate people." I have already made my opening statement in my book! Take it on chapter by chapter and I'll respond.

Clearly you cannot pull off that proposition. To do do so you must show that Christianity is somehow opposed to modern scientific knowledge. Since Christianity is not a scientific proposition ipso facto it cannot be scientifically false. The extent on one's scientific literacy is a matter of the individual's choice of learning and has nothing to do with religion,.of course he's ignoring all the noble prize winning Christians.




Nobel Prize Winning Scientific Christians

Fritz Shafer, nominated for Nobel Prize in Chemistry, University of Georgia, himself a Christian:	"it is very rare that a physical scientists is truly an atheist."
Martin Rees at Cambridge:	"The possibility of life as we know it depends upon a few basic values which are constants. And it is in some aspect remarkably sensitive to their heir numerical values. Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences."
Arthur Schewhow, Nobel prize winner from Stanford, identifies himself as a Christian.	"We are fortunate to have the Bible which tells us so much about God in widely accessible terms."
Charlie Towns Nobel prize winner:	"The question of science seems to be unanswered if we explore from science alone. Thus I believe there is a need for some metaphysical or religious explanation. I believe in the concept of God an in his existence."
John Pokingham, theoretical physicist at Cambridge, left physics to become a minister.	"I believe that God exists and has made himself known in Jesus Christ."
Allan Sandage, The world's greatest observational cosmologist , Caregie observatories won a prize given by Swedish parliament equivalent to Nobel prize (there is no Nobel prize for cosmology) became a Christian after being a scientist,	"The nature of God is not found in any part of science, for that we must turn to the scriptures."

who is more qualified to judge the scientific compatibility of Christianity, noble prize winning scientist who is a Christian, or an atheist who naive enough to think that science is a straight forward proposition rather than a cultural construct. Atheists are so naive when it comes to this sort of thing. They've never read Chomsky, just close down the understanding of cultural and adopt a strict naivety of what you see is what you get. But Loftus seems to make no attempt to aim for the sophisticated versions of the faith. It's all the fundies but he never qualifies his statements to reflect this. Here's a real born burner.

I'm not interested in merely debating the existence of God, since what you must defend is the existence of YOUR Christian God.

Loftus is well read certain aspects of philosophy. He's clearly pretty bright. But he's clearly just bought a bill of goods, as do so many ship jumpers. He doesn't seem to remember what the higher level of Christian really entails. Suddenly it's all creation vs evolution and the big sky Daddy vs science. He expects all Christians to be uncle Jed in the Sunday school with the God of Samuel Beckett, who for reasons unknown loves us dearly and send us to hell, qua qua qua qua....

The page he links to is worth looking at because this illustrates so clearly what I'm fighting on both sides, and it gives me a chance to jump on a favorite hobby horse.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Theism Without a Revelation is Deism

Theism is used as a springboard for defending Christian theism, for if theism is true then Christianity isn't far behind. I disagree.

Theism without an adherence to a particular branch of theism reduces to deism, for the three main branches of theism (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) all depend upon embracing a particular revelation from their God, along with the "correct" interpretation of that revelation.

Here he's pulled a very clever bait and switch. He has substituted his own straw man Christianity for the real thing on pretense that unless the real fits his version then it collapses to something else. But if you buy his straw version it collapses anyway. This is what gets me. Loftus seems like a bright guy and he seems to have taken a lot of graduate level stuff, studied with Craig, while Craig was totally unknown to anyone Perkins, he's big stuff in the Evangelical end of things, academically speaking.. Yet this grad student of Craig's doesn't seem to remember the nature of Christian thought outside the insular world of biblical literalism and sure you would think he would. I mean do you really think Nicholas of Cuza, of whom Tillich said "this is one of the most sophisticated concepts of God in human history" really just collapses into deims if it isn't a big sky daddy on a throne? Of course Cuza is just one idea. We could bring in any number of great Christian philosophers. But Loftus' straw man is predicated upon a big fallacy. He doesn't say the term "sky daddy" and he doesn't specify but we know that's what he's talking about. He's talking about the so called "God of the bible." But he can't read between the lines where God tells Moses "I am being itself." Or where it says God is beyond anything we can conceive of. Like so many as soon as you say "God is beyond anything we can conceived of" then immediately they have to try to conceive of it. If they can't they either revert to a very simplistic metaphor or just proclaim it a hazy concept not worth thinking about. What is the atheist fascination with the sky daddy? one would think if Freud was right about religious people and the super ego, surely atheists are living out their adolescent desire to kill the father.



"Without a revelation from God theism collapses into deism,"

No that is absolutely wrong. The difference in Christianity, theism and deism is specific concepts about what God want,s not the nature of God himself. The two very different things. They make a huge difference. To assume God wants all sinners to be saved one need not assume God is the big sky daddy on a throne. Concepts about what God wants are totally different from concepts about what God is. All concepts of God must orient around necessity as opposssed to contingency. The basic permaiters for any view of god are necessity, eternality, and relation to being. God is eternal necessary being. Any concept that posits eternal necessary being as the basis of reality is talking about God. The difference then is merely one of understanding what God wants. If Loftus view is right than process theology is deism. He certainly should know better than that. That is an ultra simplistic formula for dismissing theology.

Where I will agree with him on the statement that Christianity requires revelation is that this is what makes the specific difference, not God concepts per se but our ideas of what God has done to community. But Loftus concept of revelation is far too conditioned by the fundies. The true revelation is not an inerrant Bible but Christ himself. To that existent it is not propositional but experiential.

which is basically equivalent to the philosopher's god, since deism is not a set of beliefs;

Here he does the bait and switch. Unless you are willing to settle for the cartoon God, the angry sky daddy, then you are deist. Unless you have the literalistic God of the bible, translate big mean sky daddy, then you ant got no God at all. That is the most unsophisticated approach to theology I've ever seen. Carly this guy is hanging at the secular web too much. He should just know better than this.

it is a method whereby a particular theological viewpoint is adopted based upon reason. Anything not supported by reason is to be rejected by the deist.

what he's really saying between the the lines is that the kind faith that uses reason i the based kind tha is opposed to Christianity; ergo Christianity is unreasoning and opposed to reason.

And moving from deism to Christian theism is like flying a plane to the moon. [Deism went through four stages which traveled from continent to continent and flourished in the 16th-18th centuries, although people still maintain it today.

Of course that's only because your straw faith says the do. You label anything not the fundie sky daddy as "deism" so then it flourishes. and you have dismissed the major theological movements of the 20th century so you only have to deal with the five year old who are easy to beat up.




Next I'll give the reader a break and pick on another atheist. But I'll get back to Loftus with some God arguments next week. I'm determined to make him debate sooner or latter. Without reading his book. but I do want to thank him. It makes it so much more interesting to dialog with an intelligent person who does not assume one is a fool. I may not ever go back to CARM. Loftus is so much more fair and reasonable and intelligent than most atheist their. I forgot what it was like to deal a real dialog partner.

The atheist turn of mind

Nothing can ever count as evidence for God or against atheism in the mind of the atheist. I established this last time I was posting here. The skeptical mind forces itself into a corner which eventually, through constant use in a skeptical mode, tricks the user into thinking he/she is making some big gain of insight but he/she is actually closing off the ability to take the necessary risks to step beyond that which is proven and extrapolate to a position of belief.

I am not saying all atheists always think this way. I'm just saying these tendencies that are brought by the skeptical habit of mind.

(1) the mentality to dobut as long as possible.

If any kind of doubt is possible, however slight the probability, the atheist must take it.



(2) Unless something is totally proven it cannot be given any kind of presumption no matter how rationally warranted or how strongly evidenced.


If God is not 100% proven God is 0% proven and though one may consider God 99% proven if it is not 100% then its nothing.


(3) The "no evidence" circle.

this is a form of question begging/circular reasoning that works like this


*there is no evidence for the existence of God because God is not absoltuely proven.

*Since there is no evidence there can be no evidence

*since there can be no evidence than anything presented as evidence must be wrong.



these are all just a large circle of reasoning based upon the false premise in no 1. There are probably corresponding problems that the faith habit of mind produces. But what this mens is that atheism is unverifiable/falsifiable. It's not an analytical position because it's not open proof or disproof.


This applies especially to atheist on message boards. I think atheist seek to gain preferences for their view. the dictum about extraordinary evidence proves this. why should religious experience be deemed "extraordinary?" when it includes 90% of the people in the world.? the assumption is that their assumptions should be the "default." That's why they are always trying to claim mass populations they are not intitleed to, like Buddhism or all new born babies.


The better paradigm would be:

(1) doubt as long as you have real doubts and be willing to assign prima facie to good arguments.

(2) rational warrant.

rational warrant is about all any world view can offer. belief in God is a world view. there is no reason to islaote it form other views or set the bar any higher for it than for any of them.


This is only to rich. I put this put on CARM atheist board. And this atheist is going to show me what's wrong with it. here are his responses:

Fixed:
*there is no evidence for the existence of God because we've for naturalistic explanations for almost everything we've ever studied.

*If the God hypothesis were correct, we'd have found evidence for it by now.

*Since there is no evidence yet, we can feel comfortable in assuming tentatively that there is no God. Taking this assumption will put us in a position where atheism may disproved by contradiction.

Is it possible to saything that would more clearly illustrate the points I just made?