Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Atheism

  • Does God Care about 2% or 5%?

    Mike, at The Creation of an Evolutionist, calls attention to an article by Dinesh D’Souza on Townhall.com, in which D’Souza replies to an argument by Christopher Hitchens. Mike says this is worth thinking about, and I agree, but I’ve got some bones to pick with D’Souza’s approach.

    Hitchens’ argument is essentially that God has been absent for 98% of human history. According to this argument, humanity has been around for 100,000 years, while Christian history, which is apparently the only part of concern in this argument, has lasted only 5,000 years. Thus, man is unredeemed for 95% of human history. One hardly knows where to start in discussing this abuse of math and logic.

    Here’s the quote:

    Here’s what Hitchens said. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for a long time, let’s say 100,000 years. Apparently for 95,000 years God sat idly by, watching and perhaps enjoying man’s horrible condition. After all, cave-man’s plight was a miserable one: infant mortality, brutal massacres, horrible toothaches, and an early death. Evidently God didn’t really care.

    Then, a few thousand years ago, God said, “It’s time to get involved.” Even so God did not intervene in one of the civilized parts of the world. He didn’t bother with China or Egypt or India. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere. It took another thousand years or more for this message to get to places like India and China.

    (Note that the move from 5% to 2% seems to happen in the time the message takes to spread.)

    We are assuming that because Jesus came at one particular time, and because what we count as the Christian Bible was initiated at a particular time, God must have been inactive before that time. But there is no particular reason to believe that. One also would assume, on this basis, that the massive destruction we can inflict today, and indeed have inflicted is a better indication of God’s absence than the misery of life as a caveman.

    Human misery is an issue for Christian apologetics, but the argument against Christianity is really not strengthened by this particular argument. Since I have been blogging on theodicy for some time, and am not nearly finished, I’m going to leave that issue aside at the moment. Whatever arguments apply to things like the holocaust will likely apply to the misery of cavemen.

    D’Souza justifiably attacks the numbers. He has discovered that only 2% of the 105 billion people who have ever been born were born in the time before Jesus came to earth. I haven’t checked those statistics, but let’s assume that they are essentially correct. D’Souza has put the math in perspective, a worthy accomplishment, but he hasn’t really answered the underlying problem. As one commenter on the article points out, if God can ignore 2% of the population, how can he know that he isn’t part of a 2% that God is ignoring now?

    D’Souza’s other argument, that human prehistory and the sudden explosion of civilization are much more of a problem for atheists, deserves a separate response. It is not an area that interests me nearly as much.

    There seem to be several assumptions regarding revelation and salvation on which this argument is based. The ones I noticed off-hand are:

    1. Revelation has only occurred in the written scriptures of Judaism and Christianity
      While many Christians may believe that, a substantial number of Christian theologians do not. C. S. Lewis, surely not a liberal leader, held that God revealed himself many times, and that myths in pagan religions bore truth that led toward the eventual truth about Jesus. Accepting the Bible as God’s revelation does not require that one deny that God spoke to other people, even to cavemen.
    2. Redemption only occurred in that same period
      I would not expect Hitchens, an atheist, to be concerned with this issue, but Christians surely should. The death of Jesus was efficacious for people who lived prior to his death, and even prior to the first written prophecy. If this is a critique of Christianity, Christian understandings on this issue should rule.
    3. Absence of records means actual absence
      We really have now idea how God might have related to cavemen. Amongst those who care about such things, there are debates about just when the image of God came to be. Personally, I’m not that interested, though if I were to argue, I would suggest that God’s image is not a binary thing. Those who look toward their creator, however fumbling that effort, are manifesting some aspect of the image of God. My own efforts to seek out God may well not be sufficiently different from the earliest caveman to even notice.

    D’Souza has place the numbers in context very effectively. As stated, the argument appears to suggest that God didn’t care about 95-98% of the people who ever lived, whereas we’re talking about 2%. But is this a good answer for a Christian? I think it simply buys into the assumptions of D’Souza’s debate opponent. Theodicy will continue to fail, I think, as long as we make the assumption that God’s “care” involves making us all comfortable. There’s a harsh reality in there that many Christian apologists don’t want to have front and center–God lets people reap what they so for the most part.

    Christian theology teaches that God cares about everyone, but it also teaches that he does not resolve everyone’s problems. He doesn’t prevent all wars, death, disease, or suffering. Why that should be is another subject. But whether it happens to 2%, 5%, or 95% is not the issue.

    I recall a sociology class I took in my first year of college. The professor was a communist. No, not a liberal I accused of being a communist. He was a self-proclaimed communist. In a discussion I brought up Solzhenitsyn’s figure of 66 million dead as a result of communism in Russia. (I’m working from memory here. Solzhenitsyn was citing a statistician who calculated the figure.)

    “I think you’re wrong about that,” he said. “The cost in lives was only about 40 million.”

    I was fairly stunned. Using “only” and “40 million” together with reference to people killed was pretty astonishing. The reduction of the estimate by 26 million didn’t make Russian communism look any better to me. Similarly, reducing the number of people ignored by God to 2% or 5% of human doesn’t help me here at all.

    What does help me is that I don’t believe God ignored them, any more than he ignored those 66 million people in Russia or 6 to 10 million in World War II. In all cases, the problem remains the same: Why doesn’t God make it better? It’s a good question, or better it’s one that will certainly be asked, and it remains the same despite the numbers.

    [Note that I leave this here even though someone is sure to note that I have not responded to the more basic issue of why God allows any of the things I’ve cited. I’m addressing those in the posts in my theodicy category, and will continue to do so over time.]

  • What Would we Do Without PZ Myers?

    Some of us like to be angry, and if we’re Christians and angry, then PZ Myers is a very useful person. After all, how can one be properly angry without someone at whom one can direct one’s rage? Enter PZ Myers, who has now performed his act of desecration on the communion wafer.

    At first I found it fairly rude. As it has gone one it has become more and more ludicrous. On reading his post I can’t even tell whether the wafers are even consecrated. He seems to be indicating that he had more than one:

    You would not believe how many people are writing to me, insisting that these horrible little crackers (they look like flattened bits of styrofoam) are literally pieces of their god, and that this omnipotent being who created the universe can actually be seriously harmed by some third-rate liberal intellectual at a third-rate university (the diminution of my vast powers is also a common theme).

    It would be interesting from the viewpoint of Catholic theology if these had, in fact, not been consecrated. The rudeness seems to me about equal, but it would probably give a few theologians a laugh along the way.

    I still stick with my earlier point. These actions are not courteous, in my view, but they do not deserve sanction of law, firing from one’s job, or the outpouring of sheer hatred that has resulted from this whole incident.

    What would we, as Christians, do without PZ Myers to reveal our insecurity, our limited view of divine power, our anger, and our hatred? Someone else would have to come along and reveal the weakness that is within. Because the biggest argument against Christianity that is being made here is not made by PZ Myers, but rather by those of us who react as we do.

    By this reaction, we demonstrate that Jesus has not, in fact, done very much transformation on us. We demonstrate that we do not, in fact, believe that God is love. Instead, we believe that God is a God of hypersensitive feelings, overreaction, anger, and hate, and in addition that at times he can’t spell, punctuate, or construct a coherent sentence.

    If there is any good that will come of this I think it will have to be in some heart searching on the part of Christians to ask just why someone can do us this kind of harm without actually touching us.

    Some may ask we I use “we” and “us” in the paragraphs above, since I have indicated that I lack this anger. While I think the actions were rude, I face rudeness quite regularly and I can live with it. But as someone who is involved in teaching, I think it is important not to distance myself from the community. It would be easy to label all the angry people “not real Christians” and claim that I don’t have to recognize any connection. But in fact there is a great deal of connection. When one part of the body suffers, all suffer (1 Corinthians 12:26).

    One last note on a personal reaction. I surprised myself in reading about PZ’s actual desecration. While I regarded the proposed desecration of the wafer as rude, that really was all I felt. It was more the feeling of someone who cussed in a place where I think such language was inappropriate. When I read about the actual desecration, however, I felt the same about the wafer, but I had a stab of annoyance about the books! Why do such a thing to perfectly good books?

    I think the symbolism of book burning or defacing has more power over me emotionally, and in this case it did not involve books that are sacred to me, though I have read them. I have a fine copy of the Qur’an, for example, a gift from an Imam with whom I studied for a period of time. I treasure it, and despite having no belief in its inspiration, I nonetheless would not want it defaced.

    But emotions aside, doing stuff to stuff, provided no property issues are involved, should not evoke the type of response that this has.

    (PS: Ken Brown has written an excellent response, which is more concise and to the point than mine.)

    (PSS: I will have to hold a contest sometime to find a blogger who is not more concise than I am. The very idea boggles the mind.)

  • Who Speaks for Religion?

    If I went around my neighborhood asking friends and neighbors just what evolutionary biology was all about, then went and found an evolutionary biologist and asked him to defend the comments of all the “evolutionists” in my neighborhood, I think he would be justly annoyed. He would probably tell me that these people didn’t understand the details of the field and in fact that most of them didn’t understand the broad outlines. He would certainly define terms differently than they did.

    Suppose, in turn, that I chastise him for using eccentric terminology and not understanding the real issues involved in the field because, after all, this is the way that regular people, folks who haven’t been to university and studied such stuff, understand the terms. How dare he refuse to defend their viewpoint? After all, one must defend this activity as it is actually understood out there among the masses.

    Pretty stupid of me, no? Well, that’s a slightly exaggerated version of how I felt upon reading the post Saving Religion from the Religion Scholars. What is a “religion scholar” anyhow? Can I start referring to evolutionary biologists as “science scholars”? Probably not. I’d get accused of failing to comprehend the many and various disciplines involved, the terminology used, and the interests and perspectives.

    I’m not here to defend the particular “religion scholar” referred to in the post (nor to attack him, for that matter). That’s not the major issue. I would point out that I could always find one biologist who says really dumb things (I think Answers in Genesis and Reasons to Believe could provide me with a couple), and declare as a result that we should rescue science from scientists in general.

    The simple fact is that religion is not a single entity, the study of religion is not a single field, and the arguments against one sort of religion are not effective as arguments against another sort. You may want to make it so for convenience, but it really doesn’t work. I don’t get worried when an atheist chooses to argue against someone else’s beliefs and then demand that I defend them. I simply shrug and move on to more productive pursuits.

    Now most atheists with whom I have interacted have taken the time to hear what I’m saying, just as I try to take the time to hear what they’re saying. It should shock nobody to discover that not every atheist has the same set of beliefs, and not every person who has some religious beliefs shares the same set.

    It should similarly come as no surprise that those who spend their time studying one scholarly discipline that is part of the broad field we call religion will have specific vocabulary and ways of talking about the subject that those who are not specialists don’t share.

    To use myself as an example, I am often called a “theologian” by laypeople. I’m not a theologian. I don’t claim this, as some think, because I don’t like theology, but because I am not trained as a theologian, and haven’t researched or taught in that broad set of disciplines grouped under “theology.” My actual training is in Biblical and cognate languages, a field which requires no religious commitment, just a scholarly one. My actual work, to the extent I’m involved in religion, is popularizing, but that still doesn’t make me a theologian.

    Within Biblical studies and theology there are again many subfields. Just as I am annoyed when a “scientist”–a physicist, for example (with reference to nobody in particular)–claims to speak authoritatively regarding biology, I am annoyed if someone whose training is in pastoral ministry claims to speak authoritatively on issues of Hebrew grammar. Each person will have some knowledge of other fields, but we must each be careful.

    Thus nobody speaks for religion, and it’s even less likely that anyone could than it is for science in general. If we are to have dialog on these issues, then we will have to take the time to find out the specific nuances of our opponents’ views. If those hardliners on either side of the issue don’t want to do so, that is their loss.

    (Note: James McGrath has also blogged on this issue.)

  • Does Science Education Lead to Atheism

    Several discussions have led me to think about this question over the last few days. There is a significant group of scientists who think that the inevitable result of scientific knowledge is a loss of faith or a turn to atheism. On the other side of the line there is a significant group of fundamentalist Christians who feel much the same way. The major difference is in which they would give up. A recent MSNBC.com story gives the encouraging reminder that about 40% of scientists believe in God. Encouraging, indeed, but for which side?

    There has been a great deal of discussion on just how compatible religion is with science. Obviously for myself I’ve decided that good science is compatible with my theology, though not without some adjustments to how I understand the theology. My theology today is not the same as what I grew up with in any number of ways. But let’s lay that one aside.

    What does the church offer to the educated person? My education is related largely to theology, and I have spent a good deal of my church life being urged to ignore some things, greatly simplify others, and basically to leave my education behind at the doors to the church. This is by no means a universal attitude. At the same time as one person would be telling me not to bother people with things I knew, others would be inviting me to teach.

    But consider the difference between my education and that of an evolutionary biologist for example. Since I’m trained in Biblical studies and most particularly in languages, there is always someone in church who wants some portion of my expertise. I have even been invited to programs where I’m pretty certain my primary role was to sit with the other speakers and be “the guy who knows Greek.” There’s a certain respect for that. But the hypothetical evolutionary biologist isn’t going to find much call for his knowledge in church.

    Now that is the trial of the specialist. You have to gather with other specialists to talk about your specialty. But in church, other people frequently feel free to express uneducated opinions on just about any topic, and especially to talk about the great danger of education to faith, and the one way to be accepted in that society will be to claim that your education is not important to you.

    I’m painting this rather negatively, more so than I actually feel, but I do believe there is a problem. It’s variable with churches. In the United Methodist Church, for example, I have found a great deal of appreciation for education in any area. At the same time, for many people in the pews the educated person, especially one who questions any of the standard explanations of life, the universe, and everything, can be looked on with suspicion.

    In my view, faith and fellowship go together. Someone’s faith is not going to be nurtured when there are no other people to take that walk with them. While I think many churches do try, and I really appreciate the United Methodist congregations of which I’ve been a member, I think there will be a substantial problem for a scientist looking for a congregation where he or she can explore and examine faith freely and openly–in other words, to have constructive fellowship.

    It may well be that a significant number of those scientists who have slipped away from faith did so not because they were philosophically convinced that God does not exist, but because they never found a place to explore faith in a vital and constructive way with other people who welcomed their questions, their doubts, and even their unbelief.

    I do not mean in any way to question the intelligence or judgment of those who have made a conscious decision based on their view of the evidence to reject belief in God or to become agnostic. I even find many of their arguments quite reasonable myself in a certain context. But I suspect there are many who have slipped away from faith simply because they are not particularly trained to deal with spiritual issues, and those who should have helped them were unwilling, or perhaps unable, to deal with them doubts and all.

    I don’t know what numbers would be involved, but I’m convinced that having fellowship is an essential part of one’s faith journey. I’m further convinced that many people don’t take the fellowship needs of the educated seriously. Education is simply another characteristic of the people God brings together into his church; their needs need to be served as well.

  • Jason Rosenhouse on Evolution and Atheism

    Jason has weighed in on this topic here. He has some interesting points that merit a response, but due to a stack of other things I need to respond to I’ll have to just point you there to enjoy what he has to say.

  • A Teacher of Myths

    Ed Brayton promoted a discussion I had with another commenter on his blog, and that has generated yet another discussion of whether religion and science are incompatible. A certain number of folks believe they are not, and that religion should fade away as science rules all. For some unfathomable reason, I disagree.

    One of the commenters there, bernarda, stated:

    Sorry if I am a bit brutal, but what rational person cares about “theological systems”? Theology is entirely summed up by trying to count the number of angels on the head of a pin.

    “Henry is a Christian, a Hebrew scholar and the director of a Bible school;”

    So he believes mythology, he studies mythology, and teaches mythology.

    I often have a reaction to a comment that is clearly not what the author intended. My first thought was, “Yeah, that’s me!” My second was, “I’m going to steal that and use it next time I need to introduce myself to a class.” But then I remembered a post I had bookmarked a couple of days ago in the hopes I’d have time to write about it and respond to it.

    This article by Lifewish on the blog Areté, is beautifully titled The Art of Religion, and comments on a post of my own, Believing in Words and Symbols. I can hardly fail to respond to a post that starts: “Henry Neufeld is a really nice guy.”

    A little further on, however, he notes the following with reference to my post (already linked):

    . . . The underlying theme is that he really only has one core belief: that there is Something out there. Everything else – the Trinity, the Resurrection – is really just a language, a set of myths that seem to convey the feelings he experiences.

    Now note that Lifewish has said about me pretty much the same thing that bernarda did, though clearly with a bit of a different intent. Now it’s quite likely that I take the language I use more seriously than an atheist imagines, yet at the same time considering that I don’t believe I actually know, but rather use the best language available to describe an experience that is intensely personal, I will have a hard time quibbling.

    When you add it all up, just what does the doctrine of the trinity mean in terms of any sort of physical reality. Actually very little. It’s not supposed to. It is language that works very well for me in speaking about God. When I speak about my car I have a very clear referent. It’s sitting outside the window. I can look at it and verify my understanding. When I speak about God, I’m far out of that world. When I add to that and use the language of trinitarian theology, one can justifiably say that I do not truly know what I’m doing.

    Yet I believe that, I have faith that, I am somehow talking about something, even though I find the word “something” grotesquely inadequate. Thus the very obscurity of some of the language of the trinity helps make it work for me.

    So I think the description, presumably intended as negative is very good for me, though I would do it in a different order. So I study mythology, I teach mythology, and I’m so mentally primitive that I actually believe mythology. On some days I believe it more intensely than physical reality.

    But as for ever knowing it, I confess the doctrine of infinite ignorance. I, a finite person, am ever infinitely ignorant of God. No matter how much knowledge I gain, when subtracted from infinity, it leaves infinity.

    Ouch! Or Wow! (Hallelujah is “churchese” for Wow!)

  • Expelled! and the Atheism-Evolution Connection

    There is something I want to clarify from my previous post on the topic. Nobody has mentioned this to me, but it is a common enough error that I think I need to say something explicit.

    I object both to the comparison of scientists supporting the theory of evolution to Nazis and the equation of acceptance of evolution with atheism, but I do so for rather different reasons.

    I regard Nazism as ethically repugnant and pretty much without redeeming value. It’s manifestation in Germany was particularly evil. The passage of years, however, has resulted in a variety of people comparing just about anyone they disagree with to the Nazis. If you get by with it, it guarantees a win. I regard the comparison of scientists denying tenure to a professor with Nazis as a slander. It also demonstrates a lack of ethical judgment, and specifically devalues the true evil of Nazism.

    I think it’s quite possible that for the producers of Expelled, the connection to atheists is more important. Atheism is more present and real to modern Americans, and it is the one thing they expect Christians of all denominations and believers from other faiths to be able to agree on–atheism is bad. So if you can hammer the concept into people that belief in evolution is the equivalent of atheism, they will viscerally reject evolution as they already do atheism.

    It’s a fairly standard propaganda ploy. Find something that is already in disrepute amongst your audience (and polls on the perception of atheists will show the basis for this), then all you have to do is completely (subconsciously if possible) relate the idea you dislike to the one people already dislike. Unfortunately, all that is necessary to accomplish this goal is to repeat it often enough and loudly enough.

    So my problem with “evolution is atheism” is quite different from my concern about Nazism. Nazism is nasty, and it is slander to connect it with evolutionary science. Atheists are generally good, moral, productive people, and there is nothing about their belief system that says they will be anything else. There’s a big difference between a group of people who believe as a tenet of their ideology that you ought to be killed, and a group that disagrees with you on certain philosophical points, even very basic ones.

    So I want to make myself clear. I do not object to the connection of atheism and evolution because atheism is nasty, and you shouldn’t smear evolution in that way. I object to this connection because it is incorrect. The theory of evolution describes the natural world, and is not incompatible with theism. It is also not incompatible with atheism. It is simply organized information about the natural world. Connecting it with a philosophy is completely unrelated to determining its truth value.

    Nazism is an ideology with an ethically repugnant set of actions inherent in it. It is slanderous to connect evolution with that ideology.

    It remains true, of course, that both connections are inappropriate propaganda ploys and the producers of Expelled! should be ashamed of themselves for both.

  • Responding to Richard Dawkins

    There’s still a good bit of discussion of Richard Dawkins around the blogosphere, focusing on <a href=”The God Delusion, though not exclusively. This morning I encountered a post by The Christian Cynic that gives an interesting response to one point, and also lets me know that the Christian Cynic is posting again.

    The point to which the Christian Cynic is responding is simple and annoying: What’s to keep Christian moderates from taking the next step and blowing things up? There are so many things wrong with the question. You can read Cynic’s good answer. I would answer with a counter-question: What’s to keep Dawkins from taking the next step after despising religious moderates, and start rounding them up and killing them (or advocating it)? If you’re an atheist and find that question offensive, then consider the offensiveness of Dawkins’ approach to religious moderates of all stripes.

    Cynic also linked to two other posts, these by macht of Prosthesis who is an occasional commenter here on Threads as well. The first is Self-Deception and Faith and the second is More on the reasonableness of belief systems and on comment on Sam Harris. Both are good. I personally have less concern with talking about leaps of faith, though I do not find theism unreasonable. I simply don’t believe there is sufficient evidence to force all reasonable people to agree–here is a leap at the end, because the evidence doesn’t carry one all the way.

    But this whole issue leads back to a sort of binary thinking. In discourse on theism vs [tag]atheism[/tag] much of the discourse is done in black and white, proven or not proven, rather than looking at shades and probabilities, even if they involve some guesswork. Science is suited to study the natural world and nothing more. But it is an assumption, and a leap whether of faith or not, to go beyond that and say that nothing exists other than the natural world as we perceive it.

    As a side note with commercial overtones, this binary approach is constantly applied to scripture. Either the Bible is inerrant or it is useless. I take a different approach, one which I discuss in my book When People Speak for God. I’m unlikely to convince anyone that the Bible is inspired with that book, but I do present an alternative to the all or nothing approach that pervades the discourse. I related this to Dawkins in The God Delusion and the Bible. For a full list of my posts responding to The God Delusion, see my category Dawkins.

     

  • Dawkins and the Jewish Lobby

    Ah, that’s a provocative title, isn’t it?

    [tag]Richard Dawkins[/tag] is setting up an organization to help lobby for atheists. Despite my many serious disagreements with him, I don’t think that’s a bad idea, because atheists are viewed very negatively, and I think unfairly so. In fact, in many ways Dawkins himself is unfairly viewed in a negative light.

    But in this Guardian unlimited story, the following paragraph is not going to help, especially here in the United States:

    In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told – religious Jews anyway – than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.”

    Now I would put this in perspective simply because Israel is viewed very differently here in the United States than it is in Europe, and the conversation is very different. But to a whole bunch of people I know personally, and a whole bunch more I know of, them’s fightin’ words!

    As soon as you talk about “the Jewish lobby” and claim that they are monopolizing some aspect of American society you’ll be seeing the anti-Semitism charge come up pretty soon after. I’m moderately pro-Israel myself, and I think it’s extremely easy to overstate the influence of Jewish groups on the government. It’s also very easy to see “Jewish groups” where there are only groups with Jewish members.

    All of this combines with a very real anti-semitic movement, and a prejudice that lies just under the surface in many places. I’m assuming that Dawkins is merely taking a more European view and is not himself anti-Semitic. I know many people don’t believe that’s possible, but I have encountered that position and respect it while disagreeing. But such language is going to provide ammunition for his opponents.

    You think I’m overstating it? Joe Carter has already put it in his 33 things post today as “shades of anti-Semitism”. Oh well, I guess it’s fun harvesting questionable quotes from atheist speakers.

  • Is Liberal (or Moderate) Christianity Authentic

    Barry Jones of The Village Atheist has suggested a discussion with me on the issue of the whether my sort of Christianity is authentic. He doesn’t believe it is. After the exchange of a number of comments, we’re going to discuss this here on this blog. He’ll be putting his notes in the comments, but I will promote many of those comments to full posts so that his points get equal attention.

    If anyone spots items that have gotten lost in comments and that should be placed in a regular post, please let me know. Since Barry doesn’t have a blog I would like to make sure that all of the debate gets as close to equal billing as is possible.

    This won’t be a formalized debate. We’re just going to discuss publicly on this blog. Anyone is welcome to join in via the comments, or from your own blogs with trackbacks. I will promote any links to or trackbacks from relevant posts from the comments into a regular post so that you get your incoming links numbers up as well. Note that I will only promote relevant posts.

    I’m going to start by entering three comments from the previous post, the first from Barry, my response, and his response to that. Probably tomorrow, I will respond further to this exchange in a new post.

    First from Barry:

    I genuinely don’t understand why you are so annoyed at the actions of these “Minutemen” in their condemnation of the church’s accommodation of homosexuals. No-one can deny that the Bible, and by inference God himself, is violently opposed to (male) homosexuality (despite the fact that, by creating Man, he must also have created homosexuals.)
    Are not these Minutemen simply obeying God’s proclamations, and is it not hypocritical of you and other Christians to pick and choose which parts of the Bible you wish to observe and which you will sideline? Surely, God’s word is absolute, and if he wished his rules to be modified or muted for the modern world he would have let you know?
    Although I find the anti-gay sentiments of the Christian fundamentalists quite obscene, I have some grudging respect for their willingness to stick to their guns, where you and others like you try to weasle out of what your God actually said, and invent your own version of sanitised Christianity.

    My initial response (backquotes are in italics):

    I genuinely don’t understand why you are so annoyed at the actions of these “Minutemen” in their condemnation of the church’s accommodation of homosexuals.

    The question is, “Which church’s condemnation of homosexuality?” They have a church that does, but the two churches they are protesting disagree.

    No-one can deny that the Bible, and by inference God himself, is violently opposed to (male) homosexuality (despite the fact that, by creating Man, he must also have created homosexuals.)

    No one can deny? That’s interesting, because it appears that there are at least two churches in Columbus, OH, who apparently do deny it. There are several disconnects. First, that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong. There are certainly people who deny this. Second, that by inference, if something is stated in the Bible, it must also be what God thinks. There are those who believe that and those who don’t.

    One of the differences between streams in Christianity is whether theology is founded solely on scripture. The larger portion of the Christian faith does not hold to a purely scriptural foundation.

    Are not these Minutemen simply obeying God’s proclamations, and is it not hypocritical of you and other Christians to pick and choose which parts of the Bible you wish to observe and which you will sideline?

    There is nobody, and I repeat, nobody who actually obeys all the commands of scripture. It would be hypocritical of me to claim that I kept all the commands of scripture and then not to do so. It would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone else of failing to obey scripture, while failing to obey it myself, but since I have done none of those things.

    The charge of hypocrisy must be based on my claimed beliefs. That I fail to live up to someone else’s standards is not a basis for a charge of hypocrisy.

    Surely, God’s word is absolute, and if he wished his rules to be modified or muted for the modern world he would have let you know?

    And why is it that God’s word, in this case as reflected (if they are) in the Bible, must be absolute? Further, why should my understanding of them be absolute?


    Although I find the anti-gay sentiments of the Christian fundamentalists quite obscene, I have some grudging respect for their willingness to stick to their guns, where you and others like you try to weasle out of what your God actually said, and invent your own version of sanitised Christianity.

    It’s quite silly of you, who are not a Christian, to decide what should be my authentic faith. Apparently you have decided that only Biblical literalists who teach “sola scriptura” are to be regarded as authentic Christians. I will assure you that is not so. But more importantly, I follow my faith as I understand it, not as the fundamentalists understand it, nor as you understand it.

    And, if it matters to you, the issue I raised was one of courtesy. Even believing that homosexuality is evil does not give people the right to invade other people’s worship service and disrupt it.

    And finally Barry’s response to that:

    You ask “Which church’s condemnation…”

    I mean, the Church that bases its teachings on the Bible, which I take as the basic definition of “Christian”.

    Yes, you are correct, I do take the view that “only Biblical literalists who teach “sola scriptura” are to be regarded as authentic Christians.” How else can one make a definition of “Christian”, considering that the very name derives from a character in the book? Consider this – what would be the tenets of your faith if there were no Bible? You may well believe in some kind of creator God, who listens to prayers, performs miracles and grants an afterlife to those she deems worthy. But you would have no knowledge of Jesus Christ, or his resurrection, or the Ten Commandments or any of the other Bible stories that sustain your faith. No different, really, to the thousands of other religions around the world, past and present, who believe(d) in similar gods. What distinguishes the Christian faith from all others is its unique holy book, the Bible. This book is where the Christian faith originates; this book defines Christianity.

    For centuries, up to and including this day, the Bible has been promoted by the religious establishment as being the “inerrant word of God” (or some similar phrase), meaning that the Bible – ALL the Bible – is sanctioned by God. Those who wish to dispute this, and argue that certain passages are untrue or irrelevant, should, in my opinion, find a new name for their belief set, and then explain the origins of this “new” religion.

    You say there are questions over whether theology is founded solely on scripture, and that the larger portion of the Christian faith does not hold to a purely scriptural foundation. I dispute this, unless you are talking purely of the Christian “intelligentsia” (who number probably less than 1% of the total). I submit that the average Christian believer, sitting in a pew in Biloxi, or Rio, or Rome , or Seoul, believes 100% that Christianity is founded solely on scripture. However, it as a very restricted subset of scripture that they are exposed to, and a very pervasive and oppressive system that has drummed it into them probably from childhood, carefully skirting over any parts that might give rise to doubts.

    Returning to the central point of the original post, the two churches in Ohio that you mention do not “deny” that the Bible and God are opposed to homosexuality – they can’t, because it’s there in black and white for anyone to read (”If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Lev 20:13). They simply try to ignore it, and try to deflect criticism by emphasising other Bible passages that promote love for all. But the elephant in the room will not go away.

    In closing, I would say that I would not presume to decide for you what should be your faith – that is a personal matter for you. And I do agree that rudeness is never to be condoned, no matter what one’s beliefs.

    . . . and . . .

    One more point I forgot to make:

    You ask: “Which church’s condemnation of homosexuality?”

    You mean there’s more than one Church?? Why?

    I will begin my response from this point in a post, hopefully tomorrow.