In lieu of posting new content…
…allow me to instead re-post, for a wider audience, my reply to Rich Chappell’s comment on the Atheism Demotivators article.
You are quite good at debating this topic. Probably the best I’ve seen from your side of the argument.
Thank you kindly, but I shudder to think of what examples of “my side of the argument” you have been witness too, then; I could name perhaps a dozen people off the top of my head, some of whom I know from having met personally, who would be hear, shoulders, and torso above me in this debate, in terms of their ability to argue for Christianity.
I can hold my own, I suppose, though it helps when the other side fields their B team.
You’re certainly a better debater than I am, so I probably ought to keep my mouth shut.
But where’s the fun in that?
You actually raised some very good questions I’ll have to try to answer for/about myself, like, would I accept evidence if it were presented to me. I don’t know that I would accept what you consider evidence, but now I need to at least consider that my standards may not be fair.
Well, that’s cool. And in a way, it’s made my day. Not that I expect your worldview will come crumbling down, but one doesn’t usually expect to effect even this sort of small change in a person by writing something on the Internet.
I was somewhat disappointed that you never seemed to want to define the evidentiary standard in your debate with Korinthian, instead asking him to define it and then telling him that his standard didn’t count because he couldn’t prove that it was the only possible standard worth using.
That is because the point was not to establish the standard proper. Sorry if it seemed that way, but the intent was to ridicule strict empiricism as self-defeating. Ultimately, I never got to the point where I could do more than imply as much, because Korinthian declined to respond.
That’s an impossible proof, so it’s irrelevant. What standard do you propose?
I don’t, actually. The point, again, is to demonstrate that strict empiricism — to which many atheists cling — is ultimately a self-contradicting standard; it is self-defeating.
I understand that it’s important to be sure you’re talking about roughly the same thing, but evidentiary standards can be debated after the evidence is presented.
Not to seem rude, but this sounds like another attempt to set up mobile goalposts.
Since Korinthian never answered certain questions, I’ll do it for him. Yes, children can be programmed atheist too (as well as Republican, Democrat, or even an Ohio State fan like I was). Parents don’t realize how much of what they do and say is absorbed by their children, and it’s very difficult to keep one’s own biases out of a child’s upbringing.
I agree with the first part, and should note that it articulates something close to the point I was driving toward. I admit that I expected Korinthian to answer in the negative, and to proclaim that his atheism is a freeing from the shackles of childhood programming…which would of course not be true even if he was raised in a religious household.
This is because it is not just children who can become programmed; adults are similarly vulnerable, in certain circumstances. I’ve known too many people who’ve abandoned their faith for “reason” (read: atheism, which is not the same thing) in the wake of some terrible personal tragedy…this in spite of the fact that Christ promises us, His followers, that our lives will know tragedy, in spite of His promise of salvation. I’m not sure why my acquaintances consider it “rational” to have abandoned a faith for living up to some of its tenets…but I suspect that the tragedies suffered left each of them vulnerable to suggestion and errant thinking.
Or to programming, as Korinthian has put it.
To your last point, I agree with reservation; I think parents should take care as to what they allow of themselves to imprint on the child. It does not necessarily follow, however, that this restraint should be total.
Let’s face it, people think everything they believe is necessarily correct (or why would they believe it), and thus believe they have a moral imperative to pass it on to their children.
That might be the case for most, but a guy like me can honestly admit that what beliefs he personally holds might not necessarily be correct. In fact, I will go one further and admit that to the degree that they deviate from the articulated, documented teachings and doctrines of the Church (and there are deviations), my beliefs are incorrect.
In which case, it is my moral imperative to pass on to my child the truthful teachings, rather than my personal permutations thereof. But to the degree that I am correct in the faith I profess, it is my duty to pass on those correct teachings as well.
This gets us back to what I said just previously; a parent should refrain from passing some things on to his children, to the degree that he holds to wrong or incorrect things.
Luckily, we all have the power to overcome our programming as we gain knowledge and (hopefully) wisdom.
It is at times a lucky thing, and at times not. Man’s reason is fallen, and while it more or less works most of the time, it can easily lead man astray, or be led astray itself. We do have the ability to overcome our programming, but we need to ask the additional question of whether our programming needs to be overcome. If we’ve managed to come into adult life having absorbed an entirely correct set of beliefs and teachings from our family and friends, there’s really no need to strive to break out of that framework…and to do so would, in fact, be a grave error.
(This leaves open the question of whether an entirely correct set of beliefs and teachings exists, of course, and also leaves unspoken the point that it is still good to test the boundaries of correct teachings, if only to discover (or re-discover) their inherent rightness.)
It is entirely possible that the bad things from my childhood pushed me in the direction of atheism (or at least agnosticism). I grew up in a household that was supposedly Christian (Church of Christ, then Lutheran after my mom died when I was 10), but I had an abusive alcoholic father.
I realized I’m interjecting here before your point is complete, but it’s worth noting that there is apparently some level of statistical correlation between “daddy issues” (or, more broadly, parental authority issues) in childhood and atheism in adulthood.
As a child, I would pray for the abuse to stop. Years later, when I discovered that the Bible says if a believer asks for something in Jesus’s name he WILL receive it (no equivocation that I could find), I had a hard time justifying my faith given that my prayers weren’t answered.
I could ramble on at some length about the dangers of personal Biblical interpretation, as this is a prime example. Instead, I will merely note that while there’s no equivocation in that teaching cited per sé, it is a broader teaching than simply the promise that every question will be rewarded with the requested answer.
In particular, one notes that the foremost articulation of “ask and ye shall receive” is followed up with the observation that ” If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” What this ultimately means is that in the tension between what we ask for and what we need (since we humans, being fallen and imperfect, do not necessarily always know what we truly need, and so do not ask for it), God will come down on the side of addressing the need, not the want.
I realize that the easy assumption is to assume that I’m asserting that living in abuse was what you needed to be doing; I am not so asserting. But do I suppose, for one moment, that some plan for good was not at work in the circumstance you describe? No, not for one moment.
As an adult, I came to the realization that the God of the Bible wasn’t real, but it’s possible my childhood experience was a contributing factor.
I’d say so, and will again refrain from a tangential rant about the dangers of radical private interpretation of Scripture. I do find it interesting that you attribute your present lack of faith, in part, to a child’s interpretation of a complex theological teaching; given that said interpretation was almost certainly in error in some way, that would rather mean that your subsequent atheism is ultimately built on a foundation of sand or straw, rather than concrete.
You say you came to the realization that the God of the Bible “wasn’t real.” I would be interested to hear of how this realization took place, and what informed it, in more detail. There’s a certainty in the word choice that I find most curious, in that I wonder what prompts it — certainly, it does not derive from weight of (empirical) evidence.
The “bad things happen to good people” argument isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) used as an argument against God, but rather as an argument against one of the traits attributed to God by his followers… that he is benevolent.
Two points.
Firstly, if you can argue against the existence of a benevolent God, you can argue that the Christian God does not exist.
Or, you could try to do so, but it would still not be a rational argument. This is because, secondly, the argument that the existence of suffering or evil precludes a benevolent God still makes the error of not differentiating between action and the capacity for action; it does not differentiate between being able to do X and actually doing X. A benevolent being can still allow for evil and suffering to exist, if to do so is to the greater benefit of…well…us.
As a parent, I can say I know as much; it would actually be to be one year old’s detriment if I took pains to prevent her from ever coming to injury, no matter how slight. What I mean by that is that obviously it is my duty to protect her from serious harm. By the same token, it is also my duty to allow her the risk of the occasional bopped nose or faceplant — she wouldn’t learn to walk properly if I constantly held her up and supported her every movement. In a few years, when she’s learning to ride a bike, it will be my duty to prevent her from coming to serious harm, by teaching her about how to safely ride her bicycle in situations where automobile traffic is present. It will also, however, be my duty to let her take the risk of the occasional skinned knee, or even a broken wrist…as it will one day be my duty to let go of the bike seat, to let her ride using only her own balance.
That’s a “micro” example, effected in the lives of imperfect and fallen human beings. It stands to reason, however, that in the perfect existence of the divine, the “macro” of that example also exists; some evil and some suffering are necessary parts of the human experience, because we — and others around us — cannot grow without them.
And just as I, the parent, more or less have the ability to prevent most harm from coming to my daughter (though only by essentially condemning her to life in a bubble), so too does God have the ability to prevent us from ever coming to suffering or being set upon by evil. And unlike myself, God’s capacity to do so is both unlimited and perfect.
But there is, of course, a difference between possessing a capacity and acting upon it. I could keep Ella in a bubble, but that would do more harm than good. God could likewise keep us in an essentially perfect state of existence…but I suspect the result would be equally ruinous to us as my bubble-fication of Ella would be to her.
There’s one further error that is made in the “argument from evil/suffering,” which is to assume that God is the lord of this world. But unless you’re intimately familiar with the full implications of Jesus’ temptation in the desert, that’s not a discussion we should verge into.
The “things seem to run fine without God” argument is really just a plea to avoid adding unnecessary elements to the equation.
I get that…but the question that has not been settled is whether God is an unnecessary element in the equation, or whether God is not still present in the equation even if we don’t necessarily see the need to mention Him directly. This argument speaks from the standpoint of human reason, which is necessarily fallen and flawed; how do we know that we are correct in thinking that there is no “need” to include God in the equation?
We know that 1 + 1 = 2. It would be unnecessary to say “1 + 1 = 2 because God made it so”. The God element in that statement is not required, and therefore should not be added.
You’re building a ton of assumptions into that statement concerning the necessity of God. To be fair, I don’t see the need to attach divine attribution to the end of answers submitted on math exams…but that doesn’t mean that the piece of the order of the Universe governing what results when 1 and 1 are added was not defined by the Creator.
In other words, my stance is both/and on the matter: I’m fine with just noting that 1+1=2, but if asked I will confess in no uncertain terms that this order was set in place by the Almighty.
Miracles are a tricky issue, largely because the term is so mis- and over-used these days to describe everyday natural occurences like childbirth. And also because our senses are so easy to deceive. I once saw Criss Angel pull a woman apart at the waist. The bottom half stood up, and the top half crawled away screaming. Should I believe that Criss actually pulled a woman in half, or does it make more sense to believe that there was some other explanation? I would expect a true miracle to be the main topic of every news source in the world for an absurdly long period of time.
You’d think so, but I think you’re far too charitable in your assumption of what the various media outlets of the world would see fit to report. The Catholic school in my wife’s home town is lucky if it can get the local newspaper to run a classified add for it, but the public school can get full-page spreads announcing its events. Media systems, being one more human creation, are necessarily imperfect, and are vulnerable to bias. And while a miracle might be a newsworthy event from a strictly objective standpoint, if reporting on it doesn’t fit a pre-conceived narrative bias, it will go unreported.
As to the Criss Angel remark, this is an interesting (but still tired) re-hashing of the “mass delusion/mass illusion” argument that has been deployed in the past to no great effect. 70,000 people from all walks of life, dozens of different countries and several different belief systems all seeing the same miraculous dancing of the Sun is a far different thing than some optical effects making it look like a woman has just been sliced in half. Also different from said sliced woman is a nun suddenly cured of a well-documented, medically-attested case of advanced Parkinson’s disease…this after seeking the intercession of John Paul II.
The logic you’re using here is the same logic as that of the recent “debunkers” of the Shroud of Turin, whose basic argument seems to be that because they were able to produce a forgery of the Shroud, the Shroud itself must be a forgery as well. I will grant that our senses can be fooled, a fact which different people exploit to different purposes. But equally, the fact that our senses can be fooled does not mean that every single instance of witnessing something profound and apparently supernatural is necessarily an illusion wrought by a human actor only.
Perhaps you can help me out with something that has confounded me for years. How is it that every Christian seems to have a different definition or understanding of God and Christianity? If there’s one God, shouldn’t everyone who truly believes (not your Christmas and Easter believers, but the real deal) have the exact same beliefs?
I’ve often lamented that the divisions we Christians presently suffer have the negative effect you give voice to above: who, indeed, should trust us and the message of salvation we carry, if we cannot even agree on lunch, let alone on the proper recognition owed to the Blessed Virgin?
But humans are sinful, especially prideful, and Jesus predicted that division and strife would afflict Christians. Heresies and schisms are no new thing to the Church, regrettable though they may be. All these differences truly mean is that some Christians are in error, while others are not. That’s the human condition, and the risk God took in using human beings to spread and give voice to the message of salvation that is faith in His Son.
And how do we tell the difference between parable and stone cold truth in the Bible? In my experience, once something is proven inaccurate (like Genesis 1-11) it is labeled a parable or metaphor, while equally extraordinary things that can’t necessarily be disproved (like the virgin birth or the resurrection) are not.
In a sense, it all comes down to a single hermeneutical rule: truth does not contradict truth. Scripture and science are both complex things, requiring interpretation by suitable authorities (I could insert another rant about private interpretation here). Both are also, in their own ways, living things, ever-changing in response to learning and avenues of inquiry.
Truth does not contradict truth: if there is an apparent conflict between an interpretation of Scripture and a theory or postulation of science, then the problem is not with the science or the Scripture, but with our understanding of one or both. If we have to re-think one or both in light of this revelation, then so be it.
As to how we can go about discerning what parts of Scripture are meant more as metaphor than as e.g. historical accounts, there are many means of literary analysis which can be (and are) brought to bear. There are also means of theological analysis which can be brought to bear, to achieve the same end. I’ve no time to expound upon these matters here, as they are beyond the level of complexity of this discussion. If you would learn more, I can offer some recommended reading material.
BTW, both LOLcats and Zombie Jesus are hilarious, but that could just be because I love all things zombie or cat.
I’ve actually never gotten into zombies in general, either as objects of humour or staples of horror movies. But I love cats.
BTBTW, Dawkins and Hitchens are bullies. Funny sometimes, but not overly intellectual. I expect my intellectuals to be considerably more intelligent than I am. Their books are disappointing in their lack of detailed explanations in the same way that apologist books are. They all (both sides) claim to be able to prove or disprove something, but then never even TRY to accomplish that goal. I’m sad that they and Bill Maher are the face of atheism these days. I’d much rather it be someone like Matt Dillahunty from The Atheist Experience TV show in Austin, TX (hundreds of clips on YouTube, in case you haven’t seen him).
I could go on at some length about how I wish the public faces of Christianity were, in many cases, different faces; if nobody ever mentioned Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort again, or the Institute for Creation Research (or whatever “ICR” stands for), I wouldn’t be upset at all. Religion (or lack thereof) does not prevent idiots from being…well…idiots, nor does it prevent vocal idiots from being vocal idiots. At least, not in all cases; the Christian exhortation to humility has hopefully muffled a few fools along the way.
Rather talk about me than to me? More proof that you lied about not having enough time to continue the discussion. Still not admitting to being a coward?
I seem to recall that it was ultimately you who blew off the discussion with a parting note…something to do with not coming back? Which I suppose would mean that this comment of yours makes you a liar, for the record.
As it is, I also seem to recall that there were a few outstanding questions put to you which you were required to answer if in fact you wanted to continue commenting here. I will allow this one comment from you to illustrate the need for my restating that point…but until and unless you offer up the requested answers, you’re persona non grata here.
If that’s your standard of proof, it’s not hard to understand why you’re an atheist; you really would be one to believe in anything, then!
The fact that I was able to post a longer comment or article at a later point in time in no way proves that I had equally large amounts of time to invest at the (earlier) time I was talking to you, in the same way that a free afternoon on Saturday does not prove that I did not work at the office on Friday.
Still not admitting to the possibility that a child can be indoctrinated to be an atheist? Still not answering direct questions posed to you?
It’s not me who has an issue with cowardice here, methinks.