Philosophy

What was Meant

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There are two versions of this blog post, one short, and one long. I’ll put the short version first, so you can skip all the words without losing the overall message. EFFICIENCY!

Today, many people will tout that they know what the Bible means, or how to interpret the stories in it. Some will use that knowledge to preach love, some will use it to preach hate. I hope that statement isn’t overly controversial, the Westboro Baptist Church has the same Bible you do, at the very least.

But really, no matter your confidence, do we know what the people who wrote the Bible down, from Old Testament to New Testament, really wanted us to learn?

Short version answer: Nope.

Long version answer: That is a complicated question, and certainly you require a redefinition of terms at the very least to even begin to unravel the ball of yarn that is historical interpretation, translation, and intent.

To start, before the books of the Bible’s Old Testament were written down (and yea, before they could be written down) they were oral traditions. How long were they oral traditions? Well, to pin that down with any high degree of accuracy, we’d have to rely on either asking them, or having them write it dow… Wait. Nope.

So we don’t know exactly how old some of the stories are (though they do have historical markers in many of them, which help to date them). Then we continue to walk down the road of history as far as oral tradition can take us. Well, how do we know the stories that got written down were anything close to the original orations?

Well, the common rebuttal is that there were professional oral historians whose sole job was the maintain and recite history. We can see Hebrew mnemonics in certain areas of the Old Testament that are evidence of methods in use to improve recall of the stories. Certainly, a person whose sole job is to remember would do better in such an arena than would your average person off the streets… But they would have no error checking, no oversight. What would happen if or when they make a mistake?

And if you are going to tell me that stories survived 800 years orally, without any errors, I have some pieces of the original cross to sell you. Or maybe the Shroud of Turin is more up your alley?

Let me make a few modern examples to show you the flaws in that logic, in any case.

A banker’s primary role is in dealing with money. I would say the bulk of it is counting money, and ensuring accuracy in tallies and counts. They have the money in front of them, concrete, physical, unchanging. They will double and triple count money at the beginning, end, and during the day. And yet bank errors occur, despite the fact that the banker’s sole (and some would say primary) purpose is to ensure money changes hands reliably without change and… Wait, was I describing your orator or a banker? Some of those words got a little aligned there. Weird how that is.

Howe about me, in my current field of information technology. A server is designed, from the ground up, to prevent me from making errors. In order to do anything on a server that runs, say, the heating and cooling for an entire building, I will have to accept one hundred warnings, check one hundred boxes, agree to one hundred confirmations… And there are times when I, or yea, people with many years more experience than me have made errors. My sole purpose is to change these settings, to ensure they are changed properly and correctly and without error, and there are systems whose sole purpose are to stop me from making said error… But errors get made.

How about your grandparent? They will tell stories, and I am sure you have thought at times that it could not have happened like your grandparent recalled, but you’d not say anything, of course. But it is well known that dementia and Alzheimer’s are diseases primarily affecting the elderly in the population. In the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, I’d be willing to say that your slips would be so minor that they could be attributed to a slight dimming of your recollection, to the point you (and anyone around you) would write them off simply as slips of memo–oh damn, what was the sole purpose of the orators? Memorizing things?

And who was the most revered, respected person who would pass along knowledge? The elders of the tribe? Let’s give that elder a generous age of 60 (if they lived in a nice place, a clean(ish) city, it could have happened even in time before history), and they’d be the elder for… We’ll say 20 years? Hell, give them 30 years, we’ll say for the sake of gentle argument that they were the elder for a full generation. If we assume only 800 years of oral tradition (The earliest parts of the Bible were written down in 800BC, and I know they reference events at times as early as 1600BC, though the accuracy is in question), then that was some 26 or 27 generations of elders. That is a lot of time for one of them to have had some degree of early Alzheimer’s.

But… But they obviously wouldn’t be trusted when they couldn’t recognize the face of their own kin, they wouldn’t be the elder any more! So they wouldn’t have passed on the failed stories!

You have to remember that even if we assume a generous life expectancy, they would never have had an 80 or 90 year old Alzheimer’s sufferer, or Dementia sufferer in the 10th and earlier centuries BC. The person entrusted with oration could have had slight slips of memory and died, and so the story altered over time.

But… But there would have been many orators! Many people who remembered! Several for each village, maybe!

Yes, but then you’d have conflicting versions of the story, and how would you resolve those? Well, I don’t know how they’d have done that, but it wouldn’t be hard to think that they would accede to the eldest and most respected of the elders–the one ironically with the highest chance of misremembering a detail. Even if that wasn’t their method, even if it was democratic (against all logic, since democracy was certainly not widespread at the time), you’d have younger elders who learned the slightly altered version voting for the slightly altered version.

You’d have inaccuracies creeping in over time, even if you had ten thousand safeguards. The modern translations of the Bible attest to that, for even within two years there will be versions with differing translations, errors, typos, mistakes in meaning or scholarship. Think of the monks who made copies of the Bible before the printing press; again, they had concrete copies, and yet if you look at old Bibles, you will see scholars marking “Copyist error” in the margin… And that is when they had an older version to copy-check again.

Or how about some of the earlier mass produced Bibles? There was a copy with the Commandment “Thou Shalt Commit Adultery” that was mass produced in the 17th century, only 30 years before the King James version was officially published.

So tell me again that there were no errors in the oral histories, and again I will find more evidence to show that wishful line of thinking will not hold.

How about even the word “history”? Certainly in the times of the Roman Empire, history was a much more sinuous beast, harder to catch, harder to pin down. People did not write down history as we understand the term, history was an idea, was morals and fables, not so much “writing down an accurate account of what happened.” What we call history today is more often viewed in the tax records of the time, or the census records, birth and death certificates, than it is in things that people wrote down — for what people wrote down and what happened are often at odds, and you can see what happened far more in the number of troops reported dead at some location than you can with some historian writing down about the battle. A historian may have written down that it was a great victory, where the death toll was nearly equal on both sides. This is two knives, not just a double edged sword; at work here is the fact that history was the lessons (in this case, the lesson of “we are so much better than x barbarian tribe), and also the fact that history is, was, and will be often written by the victors. In the global world we live in, it is becoming less so, and underdogs tell their tale to fanfare in these days more than ever before, but the principle still stands.

Reza Aslan wrote about this in greater length and with more gravitas than I can–though if you don’t trust Aslan, you can check with any historian who specializes in the centuries around year 0 and you will find similar messages.

So what was written down in the Bible, even when it was close to the events that happened (and you must remember that the earliest gospels were at the very minimum written in 70AD, 40 years after the death of Christ) likely weren’t written with a mind for exactly what happened. They would have been written with a mind for teaching the lessons of Christ, and if those lessons were of humility and sacrifice, well… The events of his life were certainly a great parallel. Almost a perfect parallel. One might say they were perfect for teaching the lessons of his ministry, and by gosh, we’ve come full circle. Again.

I am not calling into question the lessons they taught, as they are certainly good lessons. I am calling into account the historical veracity of the Bible. The YECs may be the only faction to take the Old Testament as historical fact (or as absolute historical fact, as in a 6000 year old world created in exactly 6 days, and with genealogies that can be traced back to Adam), but most people believe the life of Jesus was reliably written down.

It wasn’t. Depending on the details you are viewing, many traditions were in the Bible that were not present at any other time. The tradition of freeing a single prisoner during passover? Find me another reference to that outside of the Bible. Or, even taking that tradition as fact, what about freeing Barabus instead of Jesus? Were there only two prisoners? When given the choice of a rabble rouser (Jesus) and a serial killer (Barabus), wouldn’t they just vote to release no one at all?

Or what about the trial before Pilate? Pilate is recorded by history as having signed so many death warrants without having even so much as read the name on them that a formal complaint against him was lodged with Rome. The crime for which Jesus was condemned, Sedition, wasn’t even a crime for which you would have been given a trial. If you were said to be guilty of sedition, it was off to the cross with you, no questions asked. And during the Passover, when tensions were already heightened? The idea of Jesus having an audience with Pilate is almost silly.

I think I’ve belabored that point extensively enough. The idea is that the Bible can’t be taken as historical fact, as it had a political fact from over a thousand years before it would even have been recognized as a cohesive book, as the Bible you know.

So the people who decide what was meant by these stories? What allegories and laws and ideas and histories and world views should be taught? That adulterers should be stoned, that it is OK to kill an abortion doctor, that homosexual sex is a sin, that Jesus would support this or that idea… Those are what you have discovered two or three thousand years separated from the person who originally came up with what you are reading. Who is to say you learned the lessons they even wanted to teach?

For those reading between the lines in the Old Testament to come up with meanings that aren’t there in a plain reading of the text, I’d like you to step back and read this story, told colloquially (I can find no reference for it aside from a newspaper clipping, so it is at best anecdotal).

When asked about the themes and morals in his book Hatchet (part of the Life of Brian series), Gary Paulsen said that he was happy that so many people have gotten so much out of his book, but that he didn’t write it with all of these themes and morals in mind. He just wanted to tell a good story.

With that in mind, how can anyone today say that it is they that have the themes of the Bible correct? That they have interpreted them correctly, when billions of Christians who came before them with likely billions of differing interpretations have obviously gotten them wrong? That is it you who knows exactly what Jesus meant when he spoke the parable of the mustard seed, when it is a completely nonsensical parable unless it is explained to you?

Again, I do not want to shake your faith or your morals, but I want you to be careful what you claim you know. You don’t know it any better than I do, and believing that someone is going to hell because they believe differently than you is condemning everyone who isn’t you to hell, because chances are their beliefs differ in some core way from yours, but you haven’t had a conversation with everyone in your congregation, and who knows what is going on in your pastor’s head. He can’t tell you one tenth of what he is thinking in all of his sermon’s combined, so who knows where you differ from him? Where your core beliefs, something you completely disagree on based on some word of Jesus or another, may shake your relationship to the core–if you ever knew.

Just some things to think about.

Divisive Apologetics

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I have so many things I want to write, and I didn’t know how to pick which to write to start my return to my general discussions–so I ended up picking the one that had been fermenting in my mind the longest. I fear that my failure to write it down may have caused the idea some stagnation and rot, so bear with me as I try to pull the relevant bits together into something that sounds coherent.

A fairly recent post on Creation Today is titled “Today’s Church trumpets an uncertain sound.” The goal stated by Creation Today, and its founder’s father, Kent Hovind, is that the Church of Christ must preach a consistent message in order to be taken seriously in a modern world. I won’t lie, their stated goal is admirable, until you get to the point where they state “And the message we have to preach, because it is the only correct message, is the message that we came up with.” The following part is implied, but I suppose I have little choice but to take it at face value, “Because we have discovered the truth behind the message of Jesus that has been hidden from everyone for the last 2000 years.”

Their message is hardly unique, and it definitely has some roots in the Bible, but the ferocity with which they believe in it, to the exclusion of all contradictory evidence, is the problem. I suppose how fiercely they believe it is neither here nor there, but they are getting new followers in the American South faster than I find entirely comfortable. The point, though, is that most people I know who are staunch Christians do not share their message. The Pope himself doesn’t share their message, though many Protestant Christian belief systems believe that the Pope is the seat of the antichrist, so perhaps his endorsement of an opposing view is something of a detriment to my side rather than something that speaks to my side.

Obviously science has something to say in this arena… And no, I am not talking about the arena of whether or not God exists. That is something that is still (and perhaps indefinitely) beyond the scope of scientific range. I am talking about the still very young field of “Creation Science”, or if you prefer “Intelligent Design.” To claim the Earth is 6,000 years old stands in stark contrast to modern scientific consensus. I am not saying that science knows the age of the Earth to an absolute value, but to compare hundreds of dating methods that agree on the general age of the Earth to within 5% to a book written by scientifically illiterate middle eastern shepherds… That is something of intellectual dishonesty that is difficult to understand, let alone believe in. Even then, to believe the Earth is 6,000 is your right, and I suppose I don’t have a problem with the belief itself. I do, however, have a problem with the attitudes that come out of that belief system.

Many Young Earth Creationists who hold fast to creation science will often speak of the “Arrogance of scientists,” and their “presuppositions.” To say “You are definitely wrong, we are definitely right, and your looking for evidence makes you the arrogant ones with a prestanding belief that ruins your objective outlook,” hurts me. It really does.

I am not writing this to merely state that I don’t like their view, but to state that I find their view to be somewhat reprehensible in a way that isn’t absolutely obvious. The issue is, they claim several things; they claim that they are right, that science bears them out, that the evidence of God is self-evident, that (as per the legendary Bible quote Romans 1:20) anyone who does not realize they are right is a fool (and they will use it as an insult, though while telling you they mean no such thing).

The other issue with this belief system is that it exists within an echo chamber; the population of the United States consistently shows in polls that they believe the Young Earth View. The United States as a general idea seems to have grown increasingly arrogant in the last decades, believing themselves to be the World Police, morally right, the freest nation on the planet. Somehow, though they only came to nationhood in the 18th century, you will hear many people say that they are the elect of God and Jesus; George W. Bush believed (or at least stated his belief) that he was elected to the Presidency by God, a view that perhaps gave him a surety in his many objectively poor decisions that borders on dangerousness. If a strong believer actually fully believed that their ideas were endorsed by He of the Most High, what ruin could he wreak with his decisions, believing they were correct the whole time?

That question isn’t really rhetorical, we have evidence, in the global recession that occurred under Bush. Bill Clinton managed to create a budgetary surplus; the United States was on track to clear their debts. They are now so far in debt, so far in the red, no one on either side of the party really knows how they are going to reverse it.

This comes down to the religiosity of the voting public, and I think this has some kind of basis in modern apologetics. The reason apologetics has become divisive isn’t in their message (they do mostly preach peace, though there are certainly some issues with hatred in some parts of their message, I believe they could be ironed out), but it is because of their fanaticism. Like so many religions that came before, young earth biblical fundamentalism has some malignancy that has yet to be ironed out. To believe, for example, that their religion should be spread at the point of a sword is still a problem many face. Even if not at the point of a sword, many in the young earth movements believe that the world would be a better place if everyone believed in their brand of religion. This has created a divide. (HAH! See, I worked this post around to the title, and all it took was one thousand words! With a word economy like that, I could really be a writer, hey?!)

The problem with apologetics is that it relies, leans, depends, upon the statement that “Our God is not a God of confusion,” and further that the Bible should be read literally. The idea that the Bible is without error has been proven false, both here and elsewhere, and many have done it far better than I could. This has created an issue where people on the same side, that of young earth evangelism, end up fighting each other. Dr Henry Morris is credited with founding the idea of modern creation science. It is odd, but I think it worth pointing out that the PhD that earned Dr Morris his title was in hydraulic engineering, a field that I am not sure really aligns with any requirement to make definitive statements about the Bible. That being said, his book (the New Defender’s Bible) is generally heralded as the best book on apologetics that the average person could hope to find. Obviously, it is based on the King James Version, which for some reason is touted by many as the perfect bible despite modern translation improvements showing certain phrases to be in error…

If God is not a God of confusion, why does Kent Hovind repeatedly state in many of his speeches that he disagrees with Dr Morris on several counts? If God is not a God of confusion, why do so many apologists trumpet such a different sound? As an improvement on the old message, it is worth noting that the modern message of Eric Hovind (son of Kent Hovind) is aligned with Answers in Genesis… Though I would go as far as to say that this is less that he believes as they do, and more to do with the fact that AIG is such a powerhouse in modern apologetics, to fight against that current would be to drown and disappear.

The other reason apologetics is divisive is that it also balances upon the statement “We know everything now that we need to know.” So often evangelical preachers have stood against science, mostly when it runs perpendicular to their own personal message, but it isn’t always so. We know almost nothing, so little that it is impossible to list what we don’t know; that list would dwarf the list of what we do know so completely that it would hardly be worth the time to write down what we know… Except for the fact that we need this basis to build more knowledge.

What was it that eradicated small pox? It wasn’t religion. What was it that caused the murder of women in Salem? It wasn’t science.

The above was incredibly unfair, but rhetoric often helps to make a point. If everyone in the world were a peasant making food in the service to some enlightened person in the Church, I doubt we would be where we are today. I am not calling the Church anti-scientific, though it has had… Phases? There are times when it has stood against scientific flow, and modern YEC evangelism is still standing in stark opposition to science. To argue against Darwinian evolution is a failing point. To argue against spontaneous life is certainly valid, but I do not understand why “from nothing came something” is impossible, but God created everything by speaking it into existence, and only an ignorant person would stand against that! I do not understand what it is about that statement that makes it so compelling to so many people.

That being said, to say “You don’t know how life began,” is not an insult; it is a mere statement of fact. Science does not know how life first formed, though they are at least working on the problem. If they figure it out, what happens then, I wonder? YEC scientists would never try to create life in a lab, I think, because their belief system calls the idea impossible.

I’d like the think that science relies on the idea that nothing is impossible, just very, very, unlikely.

The point of this semi-coherent ramble is this; if you are right, secular science will eventually come to the same conclusions of you. So shouting “you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” at the top of your lungs helps no one. You should be working with scientists in secular laboratories, helping them find the answers. The problem is, in order to do that, you must start from the assumption that we don’t yet know the answer, that we have yet to find it.

Perhaps you can use the Bible as an answer key, in some cases, but only in hindsight. You still have to show your work, and quite often most scientists will say that the creation scientist has ignored a key piece of evidence or has ignored some new piece of information found after the presented information, and anyone who keeps up with the field would have known that.

If that is the case (and I would tend to think it is so), why should we rely on scientists who ignore contradictory evidence? How does one trust them?

It is a universal thing, really; a fanatic will ignore anything that would stand in the way of their fanaticism. It creates a divide between the true and the imagined. I think Justin Bieber is almost the perfect example; he has been caught doing awful things, like spitting on fans, like driving under the influence of alcohol, like being a general jackass… But many Beliebers will say that he didn’t really, or that he was misunderstood, or any one of a thousand excuses. The same is true of YEC scientists, I fear.

Again, this wouldn’t be a divisive issue if they kept their beliefs… But their own ideas require the Christian to attempt to spread these ideas.

They don’t even want to work with secular science, that is why they have their own schools, their own colleges and universities, their own areas of study and labs–they don’t even want to work with scientists unless the scientists will agree with them.

So what I propose is we leave each other alone for fifty years, let the YECs toil away in their labs, general scientists toil away in the labs of public universities, and then we can compare notes in 2065. I am sure we will all learn a lot from each other, and I think science would progress at a much higher pace if we stopped fighting… Particularly because the United States has a lot of money to spend on science, and the YEC influence that is huge in that country is slowing things down.

It’d be awesome if we all just acted like adults rather than kids who could fight for weeks about “MY DAD IS BETTER THAN YOUR DAD!”

Bah, I don’t really like how this post came out. It is kind of negative, doesn’t really prove a point. I suppose it is just here to put some information down, consolidate some of my own thoughts. When I take two weeks off of writing, a whole bunch of crud builds up. I think it is going to take me a few posts to get over it all. The next few days will probably see me writing with less cohesion than normal, so please forgive me while I figure some stuff out.

Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful 2015!

Everything You Ever Wanted

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I know I’ve spoken about morality and religion frequently, but each time my understanding moves forward a notch, I feel like I should post something that helps me consolidate my own knowledge.

The Old Testament is a moral mess, almost no one will argue against that. Whether you are a literalist or a moderate, the apologia you must construct for the Old Testament is a mine field of carefully constructed defense and the slightest misstep can end with your argument blown up and out. “Well, the book of Leviticus is just a set of rules for the Levites, so we can ignore that part.” That kind of thing.

But Exodus! That is a good book; it contains the Ten Commandments, and a wonderful story of redemption from slavery and a kind God who saves His people–but that’s the whole point; He saves His people. He goes out of his way to torture an entire nation (as I’ve written about before). His rules for morality and being Good in the eyes of God are a bit of a mess, too; there is specification of when it is OK to kill, there are commandments directly from God to steal from people, and the real ten commandments are odd to the modern reader, to say the least.

But let’s go back even further, to Genesis, and take an internal look at the beginning of the three Abrahamic faiths. Abraham, after whom the faiths were named.

What you have to remember about the story of Abraham is that there was no religion of God before him, whether God interacted with others; it was never formal.

So now we have a guy who heard a voice in his head that he attributed to God telling him to kill his first born son. Whether you believe that having faith in God is the highest calling, you have to admit; if your closest relative, your mother or father, son or daughter, brother or sister, came up to you and said “I’m sorry, the voice in my head that claims to be Jesus said I have to kill you,” your first reaction would generally not be “This is a reasonable statement, and I support you.”

But even then, God stopped him! To steal an example that Richard Dawkins has used in the past, what of the Judge of the people, Jephthah? He vowed to God that if he won in an upcoming battle, he would “sacrifice whatever first came out of his door when he arrived home.” That just seems to be a wildly unintelligent thing, though, because what did he expect would come out of his door? Probably not a cow or a sheep, unless he had pets of that kind, so he was left with only two options… Either it would be his wife or his only child. In the fullness of time, his own daughter comes out, and he rents his shirt in despair–but “Did to her as he vowed to do.” The whole story is recounted in the Book of Judges (11:31-39).

Whether you believe this literally happened or did not, a general Christian will accept that it is in the Bible for a reason. I am no scholar of theology, I could not tell you why this is in the Bible, but to me it indicates that “the God of Life” does not shy from death. A man sacrificed his daughter as the price for having killed hundreds of people, maybe thousands! And yet, as per the Arithmetic of Souls, we are not allowed to experiment on Blastocysts, as they may have souls? Jephthah killed without any reason to believe he was protecting lives; yea, the war he was fighting was to protect God, not people. The scientists who perform stem cell research have strong reason to believe that this may be the biggest medical breakthrough of a generation, of several generations.

To quote Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, “A blastocyst is a collection of some 150 cells. To contrast, the brain of a fly has roughly 100,000 cells… But the rights of this blastocyst has the same rights as a seven year old girl with third degree burns over 80% of her body?”

That seven year old girl will likely die, but not before spending days or months in excruciating pain. Obviously, as per Christianity, we cannot just let her die, perhaps even if we know she has no chance of surviving. But stem cells? There is promising research to show we could regrow her skin. There is promising research that we could give quadriplegics the use of their arms and legs back, the horizon for the benefits of stem cell research is so far off we cannot even begin to imagine what this medical breakthrough could do for the good of the world–and all it would cost is a bundle of cells so small a fly would not even notice them.

One would think, as per the morality (if you can call it that) of the God of the Old Testament, we should be in full support of the death of the blastocysts to improve the lives of His acolytes. Using blastocysts to save lives and reduce suffering surely must count as a lesser evil than Moses’ slaughter of the Jews (Exodus 32:25-29), or the countless slaughters and rapes in the book of Numbers or Judges, that God is a direct party to?

How about God’s own chosen righteous? Lot, who said “Oh, you want to rape my guests? No, they’re men. Rape my daughters instead.” (Genesis 19:6-9) Or the Levite priest who was visiting Gibeah. An old man took him and his concubine in (Oh yes, the priest had a concubine), and people came to the house; “Send out your guest so we can have sex with him!”

The owner shouts back “No, this man is a guest, but my daughter is a virgin, do what you want with her. Also, he has a concubine, go nuts with that too.”

So the daughter and concubine are sent out. On the morning, the priest gets up and prepares to leave. When he opens the door to his host’s house, his concubine is laying on the doorstep. “Get up, time to go.” She does not move, for she was dead.

For good measure, the Levite cuts her body into 12 pieces and sends the parts to the 12 tribes of Israel because… Wait, what the hell? What the ACTUAL F***?! What is going on here? What am I supposed to learn?! (Judges 19:22-29) I think, at least in context, that they are supposed to be angry that the woman was killed by the rapists (that, it should be said, had full permission) when they receive the body parts… But killing someone by accident is not really grounds for serious punishment according to God, for He lets accidental killings happen (Exodus 21:12-13).

Now, all of this has been working up to a point. Most people say we can safely ignore the Old Testament, or take from it symbolic lessons — but the thing is, I do not know what I am supposed to learn. What do I learn from God wrestling Joshua, losing, then dislocating Joshua’s hip? (Genesis 32:22-30)

I think I know why Christians are so bitter towards Muslims. Muslims have had the good sense to call the Bible a holy book, but not make it binding, per se. Muhammad (PBUH, for the purposes of cultural sensitivity) cites the Bible frequently in the Qur’an and Hadith, but cites it as lessons–not as binding. I think Christians are bitter that the Muslims had foresight, and the ability to designate canonical readings of their holy books. The Hadith is a sort of magnifying glass through which you are to read the Qur’an.

I think everything the Christian has ever wanted is the ability to feel superior (something that comes directly from the Old Testament) while not opening themselves to moral criticism. So maybe take a page (ehehehehe) from Islam and designate the Old Testament a book of great origin, but which is not part of the True Gospel. Make the Bible contain only the New Testament, then designate the entirety of the Old Testament as the Tanakh; important reading, but nonbinding. Then you could cherry pick to your heart’s content, and close those gaping holes in your theology that let people like me read through the Old Testament and think with pure horror that people believe the Bible is a book of morality. BAM! So many problems solved.

It would seriously be everything you ever wanted.

Worldviews: My Manifesto

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I’ve mentioned it before, but many religious evangelists and apologists cite “the atheist worldview” as something to be scared of, worried about, and blotted out. It has never really bothered me, as my world view is in no way colored by religious leanings unless perhaps subconsciously; thing is, I hadn’t considered it from enough angles.

On Creation Today, they posted a story from a Christian who was “re-saved” after becoming “bored with atheism”. Those were his words, “I became bored with atheism.” That opened a whole new avenue of research for me, and I realized that reading books by exceptional atheists with whom I share a great deal of common thought really doesn’t capture the breadth of beliefs in the atheist culture. So I went digging down another rabbit hole, and came out knowing more–and that is the greatest compliment I can pay to any venture.

I had paid lip service, in the past, to the different kinds of atheism, but I can honestly say that I understand it now much more clearly than I did even a week ago. I watched the documentary “The Case for Christ,” which many people (for reasons unclear to me) have said is a convincing argument for becoming Christian. It also opened my eyes to the views of certain atheists, and I feel like I finally understand the vitriol one sees on the legendary reddit sub-site (subreddit, to those who reddit) /r/atheism.

The type of atheist that Lee Strobel (Case for Christ) and Mark Sebert (linked Creation today de-re-conversion story) are is that of what I am going to term (and perhaps there is a better term used by more learned people) a religious atheist. They believe atheism as a dogma, and while they don’t really strive to understand the underlying ideas, they believe (often with far more overt conviction) that there is no God. This is not a lack of belief in God, this is a group of people believing there is no God simply because very smart people told them so, much as a congregation believes in God because someone very smart wrote the Bible.

A primary reasoned cited by Lee Strobel for his conversion to Christianity, for example, is something I have written about sarcastically in the past; that of the mathematical chances of Jesus fulfilling prophecy (See my earlier post, The Mathematics of Prophecy). If you are an atheist and are able to take the idea of Jesus as a historical construct in the Gospels, you are not an atheist for what I will term the right reasons (though with trepidation, as I do not like to call anyone outright wrong) as it does not take a very thorough look into history to understand that while portions of the Gospels may be true their bulk is historically invalid. The culling of the innocents by Herod sounds like the kind of thing that would bear mention in at least one other history book, but it is invalid. The Census taken that was the excuse given for Jospeh’s presence in Bethlehem happened many years after Herod died (The census wasn’t taken until 6AD, and wasn’t even a census ordered by Caesar–it was merely a small, provincial census), therefore Herod would not even have been around to order the culling of the innocents anyway. What I just did, in only a few lines, was taken a huge chunk out of the historicity of the Gospels and simplified your calculation for Jesus’ “chances of fulfilling prophecy” greatly.

An atheist who can be convinced by this fallacious reasoning (taking the Bible as historically accurate) was never an intellectually honest atheist. Mark Sebert cited that he “became an atheist” (which I don’t believe is the way most atheists would describe themselves; for me, I would say “the long period over which I questioned my belief in God”) because he “wanted to be a free thinker.” That’s right, “I wanted to be a free thinker, so I thought how other people thought. I mean, I can’t see a problem with that.”

To me, and at least to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, one does not “believe in atheism”, one “does not believe in God.” To further expound that point, as Mark Sebert said “there was so much more going on than a dictionary definition, that is ‘the lack of belief in God or gods,” I have looked at data, at history, at science. I did not begin to believe in atheism, I lost my belief in God. I did not lose my belief in God because Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens told me to, I lost my belief in God because I read books about science and history, because I read the Bible and found the narrative lacking, because when speaking with a Pastor about my issues with faith, he was unable to answer my questions and replied instead “I can see that you are digging holes and then looking for holes, but you really just have to have faith.”

This was deeply unsatisfactory to me; I wasn’t digging holes, I was walking through a minefield and looking for dirt to fill the holes I kept falling into. This brings me to another class of atheist, and this next statement is going to sound highly egotistical, but I can think of no better way to word it. Lee Strobel and Mark Sebert were religious atheists; I would describe myself as a rational atheist. The rational atheist, which generally contains the vast majority of those in the upper echelons of scientific discourse share(and here is the ego, for I would like, if you would let me, to count myself as sharing beliefs with them, beliefs that I came to independently), is one who comes to atheism through an extended search through the evidence for both sides. Lee Strobel stresses repeatedly “I was a hard core atheist. I didn’t want to hear about Christianity, I didn’t want to talk about the Bible, I thought it was all just stupid superstition.”

The view taken by atheists such as Strobel is not the view of almost any rational atheist. Extensively in their books, Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins cite chapter of verse of the Bible. Frequently in my blog I have done the same; I do not avoid Christianity, and I don’t even want to take Christianity from anyone. I don’t want to “make anyone become an atheist”. I became an atheist of a sort, there is no doubt about that, but the loss of religion is something that takes a serious toll of anyone who was brought up in the fold. What I ultimately want is for Christians to examine their own beliefs, and at the very least discard the hateful parts of it. What I write here is not prompts to leave your faith, but prompts to think. If you lose your faith, I do not want it to be because I told you so, but because you internally decided it was the correct course of action. I am sorry if I have harmed anyone through my blog, in any case.

I read and immerse myself in the Christian Bible, or with those teaching the Christian Bible, nearly as much as I immerse myself in the works of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. I also immerse myself in books by people who do not profess their stance either way; to read a book on history, one does not need to believe or not believe, that is irrelevant; history is a study of what happened and when, and your opinion about those things does not change what has already passed. I do not avoid the teachings of Christians, I merely seek to find what it is that they see as evidence that makes them believe as they do. Often, I will say that their science is bad, their assumptions erroneous, but I will never insult them for their assumptions (though for the purposes of theatrics, I will make fun of the assumptions themselves very frequently). I love Eric Hovind, because he is clearly sincere in his beliefs. He gives me an almost pristine case study of what it is that the hardline Christians believe, and that is valuable to me.

Another thing that you will often see in religious atheists is that they do want, actively, to take away your religion. They will insult “the stupid Christians,” something I would never say. They will say the world would be better if “everyone thought as we think.” I do not believe this is so, because the underlying world view they take is dangerously exclusive. They are as likely to go to war as they would accuse Christians as being, and that is never what I want.

Richard Dawkins opened his book “The God Delusion” with a preface containing a line I think speaks volumes. “I will never go out of my way to offend, but I will also not dawn [white gloves] and handle [religion] with undue care and reverence.”

I know what I say offends the beliefs of many, but what I say is never meant to offend, as so often Christian comments, and atheist comments do. Again, I will stress that any atheist that will offend or insult Christians is no friend of mine.

Sometimes, I reread what I wrote in stream of consciousness style, and see that I ran off on a tangent. This happened, but I am going to leave it. Let’s get back on track as I near my conclusion, though, and I apologize for wandering off; what I wanted to clarify is the view of a rational atheist.

Now we come to the core of the Christian criticism of “the danger of the atheist world view.” There are those who very likely would take it to the extreme you do, whoever you are that spreads this dogma. In fact, I believe if those I have termed “religious atheists” become the norm, we will eventually end up with at least a small outbreak of people whose conscience was eroded by the fact that they fear no hell; it is, admittedly, something I worry about. Any faction, any faction, any faction, (I have repeated this three times for clarity) will have its extremists. Religious atheists have a strong militant dogma against religion, much as religious people have a strong dogma against atheists. Men have killed in the name of religion, no one can deny this; you can say they were misguided, they were extremists, they were wrong in their beliefs, but no matter how you try to justify it, they killed because, in their mind, their religion commanded it. I am afraid this works more for my side than it does for yours; there will be those who kill in the name of stamping religion out (and, in fact, many have done so). These are not rational atheists, these are those who embrace a dogma of atheism.

An extremist rational atheist would be someone along the lines of Richard Dawkins. At his most vitriolic and vehement, he will aggressively try to talk you out of your religion, but any well educated, intelligent, rational person would never kill you for your belief, other than in self defense. They may punish you for things you do because of your belief, but I’d say that is fair game.

The point of this long rant is this; there are different kinds of atheists, and I will stand beside many Christians in their criticism of those I would term religious atheists. They sully the name of atheism, poison the pool, and darken the hearts of Christians against anyone who doesn’t believe in God. They hurt our cause as much as you believe they are hurting yours.

You can have them. You can have people like Lee Strobel and Mark Seber. They do not bring anything to the table, and I know how you do so love to swell your numbers. You will take anyone, and that is fine for you, but I do not want people like that on my side of the fence, frankly.

If I were the only atheist left in the world, I would still be happy. That is a huge difference between you and I, theoretical Christian. I believe what I believe not because it is cool, or because someone told me to, or because there are others I admire who share my belief, but because I have walked a journey of discovery and this is where I am right now. Do you know what, though? The difference between you, who have planted a pole with a sign that reads “God” and chained yourself to it for all time, and me is this: I am still journeying. If your God is out there, I may find him. I may find Brahma, I may find Allah, or I may continue in my nonbelief until the end of my journey; death. But rest assured, I will keep journeying until I die.

And people who are on this same journey, this journey of discovery and learning, this journey, where anyone walking the road in good faith (and I chose these words more carefully than many I choose) is welcome to share in my journey and share insights and ideas, those people are those I want on my side of the fence. We do not fight, we discuss. We do not insult, we learn. If there are Christians walking this same journey and finding God, I still want them on my side of the fence, so I can enjoy their company and their reason. We can all learn together. We can make the world a better place.

You can have the religious atheists, for they have planted a pole that says “No God,” and chained themselves to it. They are not welcome on the road I travel, and I don’t want them on my side of the fence.

This is my world view. This is my manifesto.

It is different form my simple mission statement, which is to bring more happiness into the world than I take out of it, but the two are compatible.

This is my “atheist worldview”, if you are dead set on pigeonholing me into it. But I would call it a “rational worldview” or a “personal worldview”. I do not believe I have to share my worldview with anyone else; I am happy holding it in any case.

Thanks for reading, thank you for being part of my journey. I look forward to walking this journey with all of you.

The Tight Ties of the Body, the Mind, and Nature

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Warning: This post is new age philosophical bullshit, and I am not going to apologize for that. As I’ve done before, you can read only the first two and last two paragraphs to skip my nearly interminable (and nearly nonsensical) ramblings.

One thing that was always hard for me to understand, for a long time, was the angry, often violent reaction of theistic adherents to criticism of their beliefs. Whether it is a core doctrine or a minor verse, often the backlash seems to be wildly out of proportion to the attack; as a writer on the internet, I am familiar with that backlash (oddly, “writer on the Internet” feels as though it is completely adequate to explain why I have been targeted by this backlash). I am not going to blame anyone, I just want to explain what I have learned; unfortunately in hindsight this lesson feels painfully obvious, so if it has occurred to you feel free to skip it.

We all have multiple identities (please forgive me the philosophical leanings of this post), two primary of which are our physical identity and our ideological identity. The physical identity, the identity that people around us see and understand and interact with. The ideological identity is internal, it is a concept of ourselves we have formed in our own minds that contains our thoughts, feelings, ideas, our own perception of our own identity.

For some, these two identities are separate, and I would consider it a mark of emotional maturity to understand them as such. For what seems like the majority (though the study to give concrete numbers would be impossible by definition), these identities are tangled; whether atheist or theist, to attack the ideological identity is to attack the physical identity for the reason that the idea of the world view is used by the person to form their public persona. That bears some degree of explanation or example, as even my rereading it leaves me … Confused, at best.

To speak with many theists (and my experience is mostly with Christians, as a function of where I came from and where I live), the core of their world view is contained within the answer “I am Christian.” To be fair, it does give a very broad idea of what they believe; to speak with a Christian, one can make a vast number of assumptions about their political leanings and views, their understanding of the world, their purpose… These should, however, be tempered by the understanding that there are many levels of Christian, ranging from casual to fundamentalist. When the identities overlap (parts of their physical identity corresponding in a 1:1 relationship with their ideological identity), you have a sort of entanglement that results in damage to one identity being felt by the other.

When I say “I do not believe in the Christian God,” and list my reasons, this is not only blasphemy and apostasy, this is an attack on the ideological identity of some 2.18 billion humans (as per the 2011 Pew research forum on religion and public life). For many, my words pass over them like a gentle gust of wind; it may not always be pleasant, but it does not damage them. To others, it hits them (speaking from a hormonal level) with the same force as a strong punch to the gut. How does the human fight or flight instinct react? More often, when you have been physically attacked (as far as you are concerned), your fight instinct takes over.

The boon and blight of the Internet is that it does not allow for physical altercation, so people who feel assaulted respond in kind; they attack the ideological identity of their attacker. Often, as is the case with me, my ideological identity has no ties to my personal identity; attacks by the theist on my nontheism hurt me as much as the aforementioned gentle gust of wind.

If my body is the representation of my physical identity, and the soul the representation of my ideological identity, then there is a third identity outside of both that I believe is represented by Nature herself. Whether our body and soul are directly entangled or completely separate in our mind, they affect the way we see nature; for myself, an avid seeker of science, truth, and understanding of the nature we live in, nature is a mysterious entity to which we must bend. To an anti-theist, Nature is the avatar that represents god, whether they will admit it or not–it will garner the same reactions, when attacked, as a particularly blasphemous outcry towards a staunch fundamentalist.

Conversely, from a theistic point of view (and particularly from a very fundamentalist theist), nature is a beast of burden, one whose sole purpose is to host them until they achieve their True Nature, that of the soul. To that end, since the ideological identity is formed almost purely out of religion, Nature must be bent to their ideals. To study and understand nature, especially where it conflicts with the Word of God (The Bible), is to build a Neo Tower of Babel, to challenge the ideas of God. To that end, Nature is attacked, bent and bound, to fit the nature of The Bible. It is this attack on Nature that atheists (and, more vehemently, anti-theists) find so reprehensible that they will fall back into their baser instincts and attack with all the direction and thought of a bull who has had his testicles bound by the rope of a cowboy. It is not pretty, but (admittedly) it is certainly entertaining.

I think the way to bring this dialogue to an even playing field, we must understand where our ideological and physical identities tie together and disentangle the mess. When I attempt to use evidence to chip slowly away at the more reprehensible ideals of Christianity (such as the latent homophobia), I do not intend to attack the ideological identity of 2.18 billion Christians; I intend to remove the ugly parts of the soul whose sole purpose is to harm other souls. In order to ever achieve peace, we must recognize the parts of our own identities that inflict pain on others and look (deeply and thoroughly) at them, deciding if they are truly worth fighting over.

I am going to paint a picture, because I know this rant has made next to no sense and is mostly New-Age Bullshit.

Someone whose two primary identities are separate is like a man with a rope; the rope can be changed and shifted, tied into knots and untied, used for one purpose, restored, then used for another. When someone makes a statement that directly addresses your ideological identity, you can modify the rope to fit that idea, and you will not hurt yourself in so doing. If you do not like the way it has modified your identity, you can restore the rope to however you had it before, and move on.

Someone whose identities are tangled is like a man with a rope tied around him, looped and knotted. When someone makes a statement that directly addresses the ideological identity (the rope), pulling on any one thread will cause pain in another area of the body. Like a dog that is cornered, instead of accepting help, they will lash out at anyone who comes near, afraid that the only thing they could bring is pain. If they could disentangle themselves from the rope, we could speak freely, without hurting each other. I do not want to steal the rope and bend it to my will, I just want you to understand that changing the knots in the rope is not always a bad thing, and give you the opportunity to understand the joys of Nature and science as I do, without hurting you. So let’s all get along, body and soul, to forge a better, more peaceful world. Who knows, you may even like it.

Humans Suck

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One of the greatest ironies in all of human history is those preaching greater tolerance while in practice are spewing some of the most vitriolic, hate-filled intolerance that you can read. Perhaps you will not see it that way, but being blind to oneself is a theme that has run throughout of all of human history.

One might think I am about to jump on the bandwagon of Christians commenting with hateful slurs on atheist and nontheist videos, telling them they should die, and saying how happy they are knowing that the atheist will BURN IN HELL for all eternity when they die… But that bandwagon is full of people. Yes that happens, and yes I believe those people need to do some deep introspection before they post another comment to YouTube.

What I am going to talk about is the opposite, and why there will never be peace on Earth even if 49% of the entire population campaign for peace, 50% don’t care, and 1% campaign for war. The reason for that is even among the people that campaign for peace, there will be those who do it in the most aggravating, horrible ways, giving the 1% who want war an avenue for attack.

I have been watching a ton of videos, as always, on the sides both of Christianity and of atheism, and the comments sections are almost perfect mirrors of each other. For every comment of “I hope atheists burn in hell,” on an atheist video, there is an equal comment of “ur an retarded christin and u shuid no ther is no god”. You know what, I want to say I am ashamed to be on the same side of the fence as people who would insult someone’s intelligence flat out like that for no good reason, but then I would be on the same side of the fence as those that profess a loving and merciful God (unless you are gay/nonbeliever/born in a different part of the world/woman/etc). What does it all round out to, then?

It all rounds out to the fact that I am pretty much ashamed to be a human. We are hateful creatures, we remember and stick to pain for much longer than happiness, and we seek our own validation too often from taking happiness away from others.

I do not want to make atheists out of Christians, and I think it is obvious I don’t want to make Christians out of atheists. Hell, if a Christian could restore my belief in God, I don’t think there is anything in the world that could make me happier, but I don’t think that is possible any more. Please, don’t let that stop you, though — perhaps it is through trying that I could believe again. I don’t know. I am not sure.

What I do want to do is to make people realize that everyone on both sides of this argument is a human being with hopes and dreams, with things that make them happy and things that make them sad, with emotions as rich and vibrant as your own… And what people on both sides are doing is spewing a corrosive vitriol that does not chew at the soul of the other person, but at their own soul. For every bit of joy you take from making someone else unhappy, you are sacrificing your… I wanted to write “humanity” there, but that’s not right. You are sacrificing your godliness and reason, and becoming more human, more earthly. For those who read the Christian Bible, I think you should not miss the reference to the Worldly man, here, for those who become Worldly are not of the Father. As it says in 1John chapter 2, renounce worldly things, for the desires of the flesh, and the desires of the eyes, and pride are not of the Father.

For the atheists, it should be noted that by calling Christians names, and attacking their person rather than their argument, you are making yourselves look exactly like what the Christians knew you would be. You are making all nontheists look bad. You are making all atheists look bad. You are proving to Christians that without God, we are evil beings.

Elevate the conversation; Christians, love thy neighbor, atheists, prove that there is some good in humanity. I know there are good Christians and good Atheists, but the bad tend to shout so much louder. If you know someone who is spitting corrosive acid into their own better nature, talk to them about it, make them see (reason/God).

Until then, I will continue to try to renounce my humanity, but being as I am currently stuck as a human, I am having troubles with that idea.