Kenneth Hynek • 14th Jul 2009 • Religion, Catholicism, Religion, Christianity, Religion, Protestantism, Religion, Theology • Calvinism, Christ, damnation, emotion, evangelism, faith, Gamespot, God, Jesus, logic, Manichaeaism, Mark Shea, reason, soteriology, the Gospels
Mark Shea nails the first one, which I can likewise relate to:
Normal people do not pit God against his good creatures this way. But Calvinism (which Trent analyzed as a resurgent form of Manichaeaism) routinely does, at least in its anti-Catholic polemics. Of course, five centuries has done something to wear the edge of Calvinism into more demented hatred of creatures. Even the guy who wrote this would probably not slap his child if he sought comfort in the arms of his mother after a scraped knee or (like Calvin) have somebody flogged for praying at the grave of a loved one. Calvinists, after long exposure to normal human emotion, have backed down on the creatures are absolutely worthless in providing help and comfort. They have figured out, at least on a day to day basis, that humans rightly seek help and comfort from creatures all the time. That’s why there aren’t any Calvinist Child Rearing Books urging parents to punish their children as godless infidels when they call for their mothers after a nightmare, or Calvinist counselors slapping grieving parents around for their sinfully misplaced love of their dead child or Calvinist marriage counselors urging couples to stop finding love and consolation in the idolatrous love of their spouses.
Instead, the Calvinist zealot now confines his denunciation of enjoyment, supplication, and love of creatures strictly and solely to those creatures who happen to be dead. That’s what that qualifier about the “spirit realm” is all about. My combox Calvinist knows, at some level, that it’s insane to shout “trust in God alone” to a child who wants his Mother. He senses at some level what non-insane people know: that one of the ways God mediates his love and help to us is through creatures like our mothers. So he doesn’t denounce people for honoring their mother or asking her help. But when it comes to the Mother of God, all the demented rhetoric comes out full throttle, even though it is no more crazy to ask for her help than it is to ask for the help of our earthly mother.
The other thing is something I’ve noticed. Calvinists have this thing about “planting seeds” (not that way, sicko), and I notice the phrase is used in many of the debates that take place in the Gamespot Off-Topic Forum (and in the post-debate analysis conducted elsewhere). The dive-bombing evangelists come in, stir up anti-Christian vitriol with their whimsical, half-baked theological ramblings, and then — when logic, reason, and somewhat-more-sane Christians have dismantled their arguments and backed them into a corner — leave with a pithy comment about having planted seeds, and how the rest is in God’s hands.
This disgusts me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for evangelism. I’m just not for evangelism-as-a-means-of-damning-someone, which is why Calvinists mean (I think) with all this rhetoric about seed-planting. Banner images like this are not intended to actually compel people to seek salvation in Christ; they are made to use the reality of Christian soteriology as a weapon with which to sentence people to damnation (or, at least, that is the intent with which they are used). The Calvinist believes that simply by yelling “Jesus saves you, you damned rotten sinner,” at another person is a sufficient and fully legitimate mode of preaching the message of the Gospels; if the damned rotten sinner does not immediately go out and “get saved,” he deserves what he gets.
Of course, the person is vanishingly rare who will, upon hearing the above, go out and “get saved.” The Calvinist knows this, but spews forth his bilgewater preaching anyhow. The possibility that in so doing, said Calvinist is genuinely concerned for the salvation of the other is small, so small as to be non-existent against the statistical margin for error. The Calvinist can thus only be uttering his bilgewater preaching not to bring about the salvation of the other, but to ensure the damnation of the other (who, rightly, has indeed been informed of the truth).
Now, perhaps I am a Catholic pagan idolater infidel prostitute zealot, and a “Romanist” (17th century rhetorical polemics are just de rigeur, you see…) besides…but it seems to me that preaching to someone for the express purpose of ensuring his damnation is about as far removed from what is right, moral, and Christian as can be. Or nearly so.
Planting seeds from which faith can grow doesn’t mean spewing a venomous iteration of the message and then shrugging it off when nobody listens; it means preaching a message that actually speaks to others and encourages them to further explore a fledgling, nascent faith. It means teaching something which is true, and encouraging the other to seek after more and deeper truths from that starting point. Bellowing at someone that he’s a dirty rotten sinner destined for the Pit might make for good catharsis, but it’s actually counter-productive to spreading the Good News (actually, believe it or not, it makes the Good News sound like Bad News) and, moreover, sets up the one who bellows it out as a stumbling block in the other’s walk with Christ.
Jesus had something to say about stumbling blocks. It involved millstones.
Anyhow, it’s been a crazy day, and I haven’t had time to do much in the way of blogging, or to give complete and just answers to some threads in the CU. I’ll attempt to do so tomorrow, though I of course make no promises in this regard.
Kenneth Hynek • 23rd Jan 2009 • Religion, Atheism, Religion, Christianity, Religion, Islam, Site News • atheism, emotion, God, Internet, Islam, logic, metaphysics, OS X, Religion, science, social autism, Vox Day, Windows XP
Avid followers of the sidebar content will have observed that I’ve been involved in a discussion with a certain jolly atheist. And while it was an interesting discussion, it’s worth noting that it didn’t begin on the best note:
Of course, new atheism is not all that new. There have always been rational men, though very few.
This is, of course, the tired old implication that only atheists are rational people. It’s one of the more common forms of what Vox Day has termed social autism that one encounters especially in dealings with Internet atheists.
But the discussion proceeded well enough from that point, for a bit. Then jolly atheist made this remark:
For any knowledge to be considered as serious for the atheist, needs scientific proof – that is objective, rational proof based on experiment, testifiable and falsifiable.
This, of course, reduces to positivism, more or less, and thus suffers from the same inherent logical flaws that positivism does. But it also establishes a baseline, and served — within the discussion — as a kind of minimum expectation that I could apply to anything that jolly atheist said.
Because surely, if he were to make any formal statements about e.g. the falsity of religion, or the non-existence/cruelty of God, then surely he would be able to back up these statements with “rational proof” that was “testifiable [I think he meant testable] and falsifiable.”
Well, as the debate rolled on, he made any number of interesting assertions, but the evidence provided in support of said assertions was pretty thin on the ground. I chastised him for this a few times, until I decided to draw a line in the sand. After all, as the self-professed “rare” rational man that was party to the discussion, he should have been able to produce — per his own standards — rational proof based on testable and falsifiable evidence for so direct a statement as this one that he made:
Any religiosity is a function of emotions.
He also had this to say:
You may add reason as well; no problem for me. This only proves that you have created God emotionally and by illogical reasoning! And so far, we would be in agreement. You have created Him! Not vice versa..
There is, of course, much that is wrong with the above statements:
1) Religiosity is not, itself, an emotional process by definition. The process of conversion is an emotional one, and always begins in the heart. But religiosity is not conversion, especially for someone like me who has never been a convert to another faith or philosophy.
2) jolly atheist supposed rationality and logic evidently failed him at one point. I remarked that my Catholicism was the result of rational inquiry into, and testing of, the Church’s doctrines, which I concluded to be the highest truth at a result of said investigation.
His response to me, seen above, is that because my Catholicism was a result of rational inquiry, this somehow proved that it was actually irrational and based solely upon emotions. That is, I suppose, atheist logic for you, good reader: when religious people exercise reason and rational inquiry, it’s actually emotion-driven irrationalism.
I suggest an alternate conclusion, namely that it is more likely that by this statement, jolly atheist‘s latent social autism is showing.
3) I didn’t quite see how he could assert that we would agree over a point such as my having created God in my mind and heart.
Then he said this:
You cannot claim that I, as an atheist, insist on his non-existence through my emotions and illogical reasoning, because I cannot feel for what there isn’t!
To which I replied that while I wasn’t insisting on anything concrete, it was worth noting that, since jolly atheist had earlier appealed to the “problem” of evil and suffering in his attempt to argue against my faith, there might in fact have been a strong emotional component to his atheism, despite his assertions to the contrary.
Moreover, it should be noted that there are a number of emotionally-driven “predictors” for atheism. For example, “[i]f you encounter an intelligent, self-centered boy with zero social skills, you can predict he’ll turn out to be an atheist by the time he’s 25 with a high degree of accuracy.” That’s a pithy observation by an author I’m something of a fan of, but in general it rings true — atheism can be strongly correlated with the display of traits that could be termed “social autism” earlier on in life.
Likewise, in my own experience, I’ve noted a high degree of correlation between atheism and “daddy issues” (or just general issues with parental authority). A number of atheists I know are atheists because they have experienced e.g. crisis of faith in the wake of personal traumas or the loss of loved ones.
In other words: emotional reasons, all.
Now, the above reasons are your reasons may not be jolly atheist‘s reasons, specifically, for being an atheist. His appeal to the “problem” of suffering and evil suggests an emotional component to his worldview, which I previously noted, but it’s equally possible that he hasn’t experienced shattering loss/personal trauma, that he doesn’t have “daddy/parental authority issues,” and that he was a very sociable little lad.
In my last response to him, I posed a question at the end, but also a challenge at the beginning. Following up on his comment, above, concerning how religiosity is always a function of emotions, I drew a line in the sand: this being another one of those statements which, per his own standards, repeatable and testable evidence should be cited for, in order to be considered valid and truthful, I opted to hold him to the standards he had previously professed.
I told jolly atheist, plainly, that I awaited his presentation of repeatable, testable evidence justifying his statement…or that, in the absence thereof, I awaited his retraction of it.
And since this was hardly the first time I’d pointed out that he was violating his own standards, I made the line a bit firmer, and let my patience run out.
And so, until such time as jolly atheist either a) presents evidence meeting the above criteria or b) retracts the relevant statement, I won’t be quick to publish any additional comments he submits. In fact, I will delete any submitted comments which do not present the evidence, or the retraction, as requested.
Oh, and my question to him (provided he satisfied the stipulations set out above) was: had he been brought up an atheist, or did he convert? If the latter, what events in his life had precipitated that conversion? If the former, how far back up the family tree does that atheism go?
Well, jolly atheist wrote back. And no, I didn’t publish the comment, because he didn’t provide the testable evidence as requested, nor did he provide a retraction. And so, until such time as he does, his comments won’t be published, and have in fact been deleted.
But he did say a few things that, for sport, I’ve decided I want to respond to all the same. But to contextualize my later responses, I need to cite his last remarks first:
I’m an ex-muslim. It still says so on my birth certificate which I intend to change. I have questioned the faith, decided it’s no different from superstition and left it behind. I’m the only atheist in my family, though the others are not very loyal muslims either. So, it’s not emotion at all. It’s reasoning!
Note that there is no actual reasoning in the above statement; he says that he is an ex-Muslim from a very faithful Islamic family, and from this concludes that his atheism is not emotionally-derived or driven, but is in fact based solely on reasoning.
Really?
Admittedly, one cannot draw concrete conclusions from the above statement…but it hints at certain possibilities. Perhaps he had a crisis of faith stemming from the realization that Islamic doctrine is full of contradictions and false claims — if so, that’s an emotional process in addition to being the outcome of potentially rational inquiry. Perhaps he has issues with his parents, and so rejected the faith they hold dear out of spite or anger — that too is an emotional process, and in fact is also irrational.
He keeps coming back to the issue of natural disasters, so perhaps he lives in a part of the world that sees a lot of that kind of turmoil, and perhaps has even lost someone near and dear to him. Though unfortunate, if that is in fact the case, that is not a rational reason for losing or rejecting one’s faith — it is in fact an irrational reason, and then an emotionally-drive one.
Yes, I’m speculating…but I’m doing so from the evidence that jolly atheist has himself presented, and I can’t help but think that his atheism is not nearly so free from being emotionally-driven as he claims it is. Certainly, lurking in the subtext of what he has said, it is not hard to find several subtle hints that his atheism is, in fact, largely predicated on emotion.
Knowing that he is an ex-Muslim, by the way, also helps explain why he thinks that the “problem” of evil and suffering is an objection to the Christian faith. It isn’t, of course…but it is an objection to Islam.
Two year-old dying in an earthquake – there need not be any building; a break on earth would be enough. A crippled child born – how can you punsih a child for the wrong of his parents? And we are talking about an all-powerful, all-good god.
Within Islam, everything happens solely through the will of Allah — if Allah wills is, the ground will shake and crack; if Allah wills it, the ground will be calm again. There’s no room for free will in most Islamic theology — there is only inshallah. Knowing that jolly atheist is an ex-Muslim, then, we can see that his reliance on the “problem” of evil and suffering — which is not a problem at all for Christians — can be explained away quite easily.
Despite his profession of having rejected the Islamic faith, he has not shed all of its intellectual trappings, and it is still the lens through which he views all other religions. Which is itself one additional irrationality on his part; arguing against Christianity with objections that are properly targeted against Islamic theology makes about as much sense as arguing in favour of wireless mice in a debate about which operating system — Windows XP or OS X — does a better job of managing task priorities.
It should also be noted that he did address my request for him to justify — with evidence matching his own established criteria — his statement that all religiosity is emotional in nature.
You want “evidence that religiosity is emotion?” And you won’t publish my comments – I couldn’t care less. You just referred to and I started writing. I can stop just as easily. At this point, again, it is a clash of our truths and it’s funny of you to ask for proof. By now, you know that my truth lies in evolution and that involves body and mind only and it’s all there is to it. So it is oly natural that I should regard religion as emotion because there is no place for metaphysics in science.
The last half of the last statement is true: there is no room in science for metaphysics. But I am not asserting that there should be; science is concerned with the physical realm, not the metaphysical, and thus can and should only be used to describe and draw conclusions about the physical realm. Which means, in turn, that science cannot be used against the metaphysical either — and therein lies yet another irrationality in jolly atheist‘s thinking, or, rather, an irrationality already noted, way back at the beginning of this article.
The first half of the last statement is not true, necessarily: although one could dismiss Religion as merely emotional because science has nothing to do with, or say about, metaphysics, others have argued that religion is mere delusion on the same grounds; emotionalism is one possible conclusion, but not the only one. And one further notes that whatever the conclusion might be — emotion or delusion — said conclusion does not actually follow from the assertion given to justify it.
Note also that while he asks, as though to confirm, if I want evidence confirming that religiosity is merely emotional in nature, he never actually gives it! He just goes on to remark about my threat to delete his comments. What’s even funnier is his assertion that his truth “lies in evolution,” as though I somehow rejected evolution as a legitimate theory (hint: I don’t).
But in the end, this debate was, by and large, fruitful. It established that jolly atheist is a positivist, and that his atheism is probably a lot more emotionally-driven than he cares to admit. It is my hope that this will be a good jumping-off point for him, then, to re-evaluate the error of his atheist philosophy, or at least of his justification for his beliefs.
And if, at any point, he wants to present that evidence I asked for, I’ll be happy to let him comment here again.
