Posts Tagged “atheism”
Kenneth Hynek • 28th Jan 2010 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Catholicism, Religion, Christianity, Society, Law, Politics, Religion, Protestantism • atheism, Barack Obama, Catholicism, Dave Armstrong, Democratic Underground, God, Guantanamo Bay, Holy Trinity, Karl Marx, Liberal Party of Canada, Massachusetts, Protestant Reformation, Protestantism, recession, television, the Bible, the Church, US, Vancouver
From Dave Armstrong’s list:
The absence of the idea of submission to spiritual authority in Protestantism has leaked over into the civic arena, where the ideas of personal “freedom,” “rights,” and “choice” now dominate to such an extent that civic duty, communitarianism, and discipline are tragically neglected, to the detriment of a healthy society.
It shouldn’t be a controversial thing, at this late stage in our society’s decadence, to assert that we, as a society, have largely set aside the idea that rights possessed are accompanied by responsibilities in turn. We have a right to vote for one of a slate of candidates in an election; we should recognize that having such a right places several responsibilities on us, including:
- the obligation to actually get out and vote, rather than just sit at home bitching about the result
- the obligation to vote only the allowed number of times and, relatedly, the obligation to both not become involved in, and to report, any attempts by any group to taint election results with e.g. false ballots
- the obligation to inform ourselves about the issues relevant to the election and the stances if each candidate thereupon
This is one small example, but it is also a revealing one. Think of a typical election…and at how it is often genuinely surprising to hear, afterward, that fully 34% of eligible voters actually turned out, since that’s almost 2% more than in the last election. Think of any number of people whom you, good reader, may know personally who refuse to vote yet reserve the right to complain, loudly and frequently, about what the government is doing wrong. Probably, they have even worked out compicated reasoning to “explain” why yes, it-is-in-fact-perfectly-fair-thank-you-very-much that they get a say about the state of things even though they abdicated their most direct, meaningful ability to influence that state in the first place!
Vote rigging, meanwhile, is nothing new, of course. And yet while “questionable” ballots were a huge issue in the 2000 US presidential election, various examples of vote fraud (illegal voter registrations, dead people casting ballots, trunkfuls of fake ballots, etc.) in the 2008 presidential election went more or less unreported.
(No, I’m not claiming that Barack Obama stole the election…this isn’t Democratic Underground I’m running here. Obama won by a wide enough margin to leave me with no doubts that his election was anything but legitimate.)
One expects to hear of such things in far-away places, where tin-pot dictators hold “elections” periodically to give evidence to the claim that their despotism is the will of the people. But the same sort of election-rigging happens in a place like Massachusetts, or Vancouver for that matter, and seems to be doing so with increasing frequency. It’s no longer a sensational thing, or not as much as it once was.
And let us only briefly mention how woefully under-informed the average voter is today. Stephen Harper is a competent leader to a certain reasonable degree…but he’s also done some stunningly unpopular things whilst in office, and some stunningly dumb things as well. One suspects, at times. that one key to his remaining in power has to do with the fact that his principal opponents, the Liberal Party of Canada, have lately demonstrated a talent for picking leaders who do not resonate well with the public.
Things arent any better in the US. Barack Obama is president today for three reasons: “hope”, “change”, and his skin colour. And as he has yet to deliver on the first two, it’s not unreasonable to look on the third as being his principal — and ongoing — qualification for holding the office he does.
(And in a way, Obama’s most ardent supporters — in the media and amongst the general public — help to prove this on a stunningly frequent basis. One cannot attempt a criticism of any of Obama’s policies without risking being denounced as a “racist,” which suggests that even Obama’s own supporters see him first as a (half-)black man, and second as a skilled politician/orator/Messiah.)
Any reasonable person — in looking at Obama’s stated political views, and his electoral platform — could probably have predicted that Obama would have flubbed handling the recession, or that he would have gone back on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay, or that his health care bill would have started out poorly and gotten progressively worse as it made its way through the House and the Senate.
But few people actually considered such things when casting their vote, I suspect.
What’s the point to all this, the good reader might now be wondering. Weren’t we talking about Catholicism?
Well, yes, yes we were…and still are. What the above example illustrates is how, with respect to voting, things like “personal ‘freedom,’ ‘rights,’ and ‘choice’” have come to dominate the practice of voting and people’s approach thereto. And it also demonstrates how “civic duty, communitarianism, and discipline” fall by the wayside.
This happens everywhere in society, at all levels and with respect to all things. Rights predominate, but nobody takes responsibility for, or ownership of, anything…except their new 52″ flatscreen television, perhaps.
You can trace this decline back to things like the 1960s and the deconstruction of social norms that the hippies advocated — and agitated — for. That movement, in turn, grew out of, among other things, socialist philosophy, which of course owes much to e.g. Karl Marx. (Yes, I’m simplifying a bit. Bear with me.)
Marx’s philosophy, in turn, grew out of Enlightenment philosophy, including Enlightenment atheism. Indeed, atheist formed a part of the core of Marxist communism. Enlightenment atheism, in turn, was a logical outcome, and in some respects an offshoot, of the Protestant Reformation. It’s not exactly a profound logical leap to note that the rejection of the authority and validity of the Bible flows pretty naturally from a rejection of the authority and validity of the Church, who first promulgated the Biblical canon (Protestant claims of Scripture’s perspicuity and self-authentication are little more than wishful thinking).
Indeed, as was previously noted, what is an atheist if not a Calvinist who, in addition to rejecting everything else the Church teaches, has gone ahead and rejected the Holy Trinity as well?
And it is the Church alone who sets herself against all the destructive ideals that have thus far enabled — if not accelerated and encouraged — the degradation of Western society. Partly, this is because the Church alone understands who it is that has inspired all these destructive things and worked to set them in motion. And partly, this is because the Church alone understands, or grasps to the maximum possible degree, the genuine roles and obligations of men (and women) in their relationship to God, and furthermore understands that those roles and obligations are — or should be — reflected in how men and women inter-relate, both at a personal (one-to-one) level and at a societal level.
Kenneth Hynek • 26th Jan 2010 • Religion, Catholicism, Religion, Christianity • atheism, Calvinism, Catholicism, evangelism, Holy Trinity, Protestantism, sola scriptura, the Church, twitter
From Dave Armstrong’s list:
Protestantism has no way of settling doctrinal issues definitively. At best, the individual Protestant can only take a head count of how many Protestant scholars, commentators, etc. take such-and-such a view on Doctrine X, Y, or Z. There is no unified Protestant Tradition.
I’ve taken more than a bit of flack from a couple of atheists on twitter recently over precisely this issue: that Christians — or, at least, Christians that these atheists have evidently observed and interacted with — can’t agree on various doctrinal issues…even basic ones like the Holy Trinity, unfortunately!
(When you dismiss the Trinity as a mere “teaching of man,” you really have wandered too far into the wilderness of sola scriptura.)
Which, I suppose, goes to show that these atheists have principally debated Protestants, rather than Catholics.
But anyhow…the ability to resolve doctrinal disputes in a way that is both centralized and binding is one of the hidden strengths of the Church, and is a powerful tool for evangelism and witness.
(I’ve been in debates where two or three Catholics have been able to mop up handily, against atheists and evangelicals alike*, simply because we were uniform in our arguments, despite having never met before.)
If you’re an atheist, you jump from evangelical to evangelical, asking for a theological opinion about a certain issue, and you can make quite the game (and no end of fun) of the myriad responses you receive. You can’t play that game with Catholics, typically.
And as an added bonus, Catholics — for the same reason as the above — don’t usually care if atheists try play that game with both Catholics and Protestants, nor are we likely to find it particularly convincing.
Because at that point, the atheists would basically be arguing against the validity of all fruit based on the difference(s) between apples and kumquats.
* * *
* of course, as someone once observed, what is an atheist except a fundamentalist Calvinist who has rejected all the usual Catholic trappings…and the remaining three as well (by which I mean: the Trinity)?
Kenneth Hynek • 21st Jan 2010 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Christianity, Entertainment, Literature, Health, Parenting, The Sciences • atheism, charity, David Warren, evolution, evolutionary psychology, faith, Just So Stories, love, Religion, Rudyard Kipling
Between the ages of about three and five, and perhaps for some time thereafter, I can recall being read Rudyard Kipling‘s Just So Stories on a fairly regular basis…almost a nightly basis. My dad had a very engaging and entertaining way of reading them, and to this day I am occasionally known to let the phrase “insatiable curtiosity” past my lips.
And I find I quite agree with David Warren‘s quite excellent praise for the book and the virtue it served to inculcate in me:
Kipling — perhaps our greatest 20th-century prose author in English — was a satirist of the deepest kind. I say “deepest” because on the surface he is hardly a satirist at all, except in some rather overtly political verses; and even those are subtly loaded with paradox, under the surface. In the Just So Stories he was not merely trying to enchant young children, as adults think he was doing. He had a mind too knowing for that kind of play. He was instead arming his young readers to defend themselves against the faithless simplicities of their adult keepers.
No modern writer is quite so subversive as Kipling. And at the heart of him you find, in Just So Stories, the Jungle Books, and everywhere, this shining truth: that faith, good faith, good loyal faith, transcends all “explanations” of the unexplainable.
Note to self: retrieve copy of Just So Stories from Mom & Dad’s.
Warren’s larger point in heaping such fine praise on Kipling has to do with the tendency of modern materialists to lean on evolution — and in particular evolutionary psychology — as a means of explaining away everything, from love to charity (as a moral precept) Not that there are not natural components to these things; there certainly are. But neither is that all there is to them; they are not dysteleological.
And it’s good to inculcate kids against thinking in such absurd terms. Which I agree is one of the charming benefits of things line the Stories; they really help numb the power of “QED”-type statements, whether made by fundamentalists of the religious or atheistic variety.
Kenneth Hynek • 18th Jan 2010 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Christianity, Stray Thoughts, I question the utility, Stray Thoughts, Just Plain Dumb, Stray Thoughts, Secularism makes you stupid, World News • atheism, charity, Doctors Without Borders, Haiti, reason, Red Cross, Religion, Richard Dawkins, Vox Day
Seriously…the guy can’t even talk about contributing to the relief effort in Haiti without trying to make some kind of irrational and irrelevant anti-religious statement.
Seriously…someone wrote this with a straight face:
It is widely imagined that, in times of crisis, religious people render aid in disproportion to their numbers. Richard Dawkins has now created an opportunity for non-believers to put the lie to this myth.
One hundred percent of the funds raised will go to Doctors Without Borders and/or The Red Cross (you decide). But giving in this way will send an additional message: one need not believe in God to care about one’s fellow human beings.
No…but it helps. Empirical evidence has verified, time and again, that religious people give way more of their money and their time to charity organizations, both religious and non-religious. Even if, in this one instance, atheists do in fact donate more money than believers (a highly unlikely outcome, it must be understood), the most they will have created is a statistical abberation…not a rule.
Then there’s this:
It goes without saying that your donations will only be passed on to aid organizations that do not have religious affiliations.
Who frakkin’ cares? Seriously…this is the sort of thing only an atheist or the most militant sort of Calvinist (note that the two species are more alike than different) could get hung up on. The money should go to the agency that is able to best translate it into effective aid for the people of Haiti! If that’s a secular group, so be it. If that’s a religious group…so be it! If the goal is helping people (and it should be), nothing other than the group’s dollars-to-aid effectiveness should be a consideration.
Of course, as Vox points out, Dawkins isn’t interested in helping people, not primarily. He’s interested in trumpeting the imagined virtues of atheism and atheists.
Which…kind of makes him the antithesis of his stated goal. But why would the champion of reason get hung up on something like that?
Ah, well…it’s no matter, really. One wonders if Dawkins will have the integrity to admit defeat at the hands of religious people when the final tally of donations comes in and it is seen that religious folk once again out-donated atheists by a wide margin.
Personally, I doubt he has the stones to admit any such thing; this contest will quickly vanish down a convenient memory hole. Still…it’s nice to dream.
Kenneth Hynek • 14th Dec 2009 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Christianity, Entertainment, Music • atheism, Christianity, Flyleaf, NFL, NFL Network
Saw this band — Flyleaf — on the NFL Network (of all places) as the backing track to a montage of daily game highlights.
Yeah, it’s on the harder side of alternative, but the group is evidently quite unabashedly Christian (the lead singer is evidently a convert from atheism). And I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for metaphysical music. Have been since before Evanescence basically set the example of a sound and style that Flyleaf here builds off of quite handily.
Kenneth Hynek • 18th Nov 2009 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Christianity, Site News, Reader Comments • Apologetics, atheism, Christ, Christianity, email
Just so Korinthian (wherever he’s got himself off to) can be certain that he’s not the sum total of my readership:
Hello Kenneth,
I by chance found your blog and I am delighted. I am an amateur apologist myself and have greatly enjoyed reading your responses to the atheists who seem to be so offended by your blog. I think it is great and I intend on telling all my brothers and sisters in Christ to check it out.
Thanks and keep up the great work,
J. Larry Brewer
Well, Larry, you’re more than welcome, and thank you in turn for your enthusiastic and supportive words (the email’s subject like was “YOWZA!”). I can only offer you, in turn, my prayers that your own apologetic and evangelistic efforts will be fruitful, and wish you luck in them.
Cheers!
