A quote, on That Subject
Aug. 3rd, 2014 11:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerThe quote is here.
As you will see, the logic is quite clear, and a wake-up call to Christians everywhere.
And this is the logic that seems to elude the logical secularists, when they say that it is perfectly all right to have a religion, but not to force it on anyone else. This is the reason why Christians, ordinary good decent Christians who already know what The Parishioner has stated in the quote, do sometimes try to bring non-believers into the faith; because to believe as a fact that God created the whole universe is to believe as a fact that God is God for the whole universe, and that it were better that other people should know this fact. And when they find it cannot be done, they try to console themselves with the popular compromise, that perhaps God appears in many forms to many people and that all religions are the same really, and that if the Christian God is indeed all-loving and all-forgiving he will forgive even this. It might be instructive to wonder, if there were a God of Science, what attitude he would take to someone who, having been informed of a fact, flatly denied it and resisted with hostility any attempt at persuasion. But of course a God of Science would have provided readily testable proofs of his existence, perhaps in a book of some sort, and not simply relied upon the idea that just telling people would be enough. The Christian God seems to have overlooked this simple idea.
The other Christians, of course, secretly welcome the popular compromise while publicly rejecting it outright. They are no more interested in converting unbelievers than they are in following any of the teachings of Christ. Their God, they believe, is God for them alone, for they are his chosen people and the universe belongs to them, and those who do not believe are damned anyway and can be dealt with in whatever way is most pleasing to them; ostracised, denied rights, beaten to death in the streets, burned, shot, bombed, whatever. Unbelievers are enemies, and these supposed Christians need enemies to reassure them that they are in the right. When they ask "Are you saved?" it's not an attempt to reach out and offer God's mercy to another human soul; they're just finding out who's in their club.
And again, the logic eludes the logical secularists, who persist (unless challenged on it) in regarding all Christians as identical (and revert to that view as soon as the challenge is withdrawn), who vigorously defend their right to judge a group by its worst examples while vilifying anyone who does it to them, who frequently can not find it in their hearts to credit any believer with good intentions, honesty, intelligence or even basic sanity, when they try to tell people about what they believe. They enhance the popular compromise, in the manner of scientists, by finding new shades of meaning in words like "believe," so that they are perfectly willing to allow that people may "believe" in a god as long as they do not inadvertently show any evidence that they actually believe in him; by redefining "faith" as an absurdity in order to demonstrate that it has always been absurd; by assuming that generations of scientists and philosophers expanded the frontiers of human knowledge in spite of their faith and not because of it; by ignoring the fact that in the much-reviled Dark Ages the only light of human knowledge at all in Europe was to be found in its monasteries. I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone who it was who remarked that those who bellow the name "Galileo" at Catholics as though it were an unanswerable refutation of all religion (as someone did to non-Catholic me quite recently) always assume that they know more about Galileo than Catholics ever do or did.
There is much that needs doing to put right the ongoing wrongs done in the names of various gods. That is beyond question. Being religious does not make one perfect, or even good; or to put it another way, salvation is not attained by faith alone. But it is as well, sometimes, to consider the parable of the mote and the beam, and wonder if--assuming anyone actually wants such a thing--a productive dialogue that might lead to such change for the better might be easier to begin if someone on the side of logic were to allow a little logic to enter the discussion.
And it would be quite unpardonable of me to suggest that that might be against their religion.
As you will see, the logic is quite clear, and a wake-up call to Christians everywhere.
And this is the logic that seems to elude the logical secularists, when they say that it is perfectly all right to have a religion, but not to force it on anyone else. This is the reason why Christians, ordinary good decent Christians who already know what The Parishioner has stated in the quote, do sometimes try to bring non-believers into the faith; because to believe as a fact that God created the whole universe is to believe as a fact that God is God for the whole universe, and that it were better that other people should know this fact. And when they find it cannot be done, they try to console themselves with the popular compromise, that perhaps God appears in many forms to many people and that all religions are the same really, and that if the Christian God is indeed all-loving and all-forgiving he will forgive even this. It might be instructive to wonder, if there were a God of Science, what attitude he would take to someone who, having been informed of a fact, flatly denied it and resisted with hostility any attempt at persuasion. But of course a God of Science would have provided readily testable proofs of his existence, perhaps in a book of some sort, and not simply relied upon the idea that just telling people would be enough. The Christian God seems to have overlooked this simple idea.
The other Christians, of course, secretly welcome the popular compromise while publicly rejecting it outright. They are no more interested in converting unbelievers than they are in following any of the teachings of Christ. Their God, they believe, is God for them alone, for they are his chosen people and the universe belongs to them, and those who do not believe are damned anyway and can be dealt with in whatever way is most pleasing to them; ostracised, denied rights, beaten to death in the streets, burned, shot, bombed, whatever. Unbelievers are enemies, and these supposed Christians need enemies to reassure them that they are in the right. When they ask "Are you saved?" it's not an attempt to reach out and offer God's mercy to another human soul; they're just finding out who's in their club.
And again, the logic eludes the logical secularists, who persist (unless challenged on it) in regarding all Christians as identical (and revert to that view as soon as the challenge is withdrawn), who vigorously defend their right to judge a group by its worst examples while vilifying anyone who does it to them, who frequently can not find it in their hearts to credit any believer with good intentions, honesty, intelligence or even basic sanity, when they try to tell people about what they believe. They enhance the popular compromise, in the manner of scientists, by finding new shades of meaning in words like "believe," so that they are perfectly willing to allow that people may "believe" in a god as long as they do not inadvertently show any evidence that they actually believe in him; by redefining "faith" as an absurdity in order to demonstrate that it has always been absurd; by assuming that generations of scientists and philosophers expanded the frontiers of human knowledge in spite of their faith and not because of it; by ignoring the fact that in the much-reviled Dark Ages the only light of human knowledge at all in Europe was to be found in its monasteries. I'm sure I don't need to tell anyone who it was who remarked that those who bellow the name "Galileo" at Catholics as though it were an unanswerable refutation of all religion (as someone did to non-Catholic me quite recently) always assume that they know more about Galileo than Catholics ever do or did.
There is much that needs doing to put right the ongoing wrongs done in the names of various gods. That is beyond question. Being religious does not make one perfect, or even good; or to put it another way, salvation is not attained by faith alone. But it is as well, sometimes, to consider the parable of the mote and the beam, and wonder if--assuming anyone actually wants such a thing--a productive dialogue that might lead to such change for the better might be easier to begin if someone on the side of logic were to allow a little logic to enter the discussion.
And it would be quite unpardonable of me to suggest that that might be against their religion.
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no subject
Date: 2014-08-03 11:04 am (UTC)A popular solution you will hear is that the evil is the Devil's, spread by his fellow fallen angels. Indeed, the whole fallen angels thing may have it's genesis in the Problem Of Evil. Certainly, it is my understanding that Judaism doesn't have a story of the Fall, and that they believe Satan and his cohorts are angels that are loyal to God, just that they have been given the "nasty" jobs (Angel of Death in Egypt, etc.) whilst Gabriel and so on got the "nice" ones.
Another is that it is the fault of Human Sinfulness, and that the "evil" somehow owes its existence to our greed, etc.
Both seem to me to imply that something other than God is a creative force, which sounds like a contradiction to the idea of monotheism.
But maybe that's just me.
The Christians do face a dilemma here. They believe in a God that loves all humans, but they also appear to believe in a God whose love is conditional on the behaviour of the loved ones (correction, all the ones I get preached at by seem to). I guess it is a reflection of the fact that Humans cannot love everyone, and often find it hard to keep on loving those they do when the "loved one(s)" do things that are disagreeable to the "lover". We project our selves onto God, and the result is not pretty (which is the true meaning of the quote about "making God in our own image", I believe).
You have talked about the idea of a truly All-loving God being beyond our imagination, and you may well be right. Certainly, religious teachers in many traditions, and not just Christian ones, seem to assume that the deity/deities they worship have limited capacity to love humans.
Can Christianity, or any other tradition for that matter, transcend this human flaw? I'd love to believe so. But I fear it may be a pious hope.
Note that, though most of what I have written refers to Christianity, that is because (a) I know more about that faith than any other and (b) I assume (rightly or wrongly) that others reading this also familiar with that tradition. I'm sure the same issies apply to other religions in some form.
Personally, I seek a dialogue with someone who can actually show me a "eureka" argument that proves the existence or non-existence of a deity. Not necessarily the specific one(s) they worship, but a godhead of some sort.
None seems to be forthcoming so far, and what I have heard combined with my own observations and logic is, though strongly suggestive of a specific answer (no), has not been able to give me a totally convincing one.
I suspect that I will never find that argument this side of the grave.
EDITED to make the point I was trying to make clearer.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-03 12:22 pm (UTC)My own exploration of the problem of evil leads me to another theory. Evil arises from the human capacity for choice, i.e. free will: nothing that is not human (that we know of) can be "evil" as such. God gave us that capacity*, knowing that it would bring evil into the world, but unable in conscience to do anything else, just as a parent lets their child go out into the world knowing that it may suffer harm, or even do harm, but that it must make its own choices. It doesn't mean the parent loves the child any the less; in fact it's a hard choice that actually demonstrates the depth of that love. So with God, if God exists.
A related problem is that humans (including the ones who write religious books) arrive at their own definitions of evil, often wrongly, and their own conceptions of the nature of deity, often flawed. My own hypothetical conception is no more likely to be right than anyone else's; the only thing I can say in its defence is that it makes sense to me.
I believe that some of my friends are speaking truthfully, or at least honestly, when they say they have a "sense" of something they call God. Knowing how often human beings are born lacking in one sense or another, and how there are other senses we don't usually acknowledge and of which we may not even be consciously aware, I find it entirely credible that there could be such a sense, possessed only by some and unrecognised by others, and that it might be perceiving something real. Sadly, I don't seem to have it, but there's enough testimony to make it at least worth considering that others might.
None of which constitutes anything like a "eureka" argument, but it's enough to persuade me to keep my mind open to the possibility.
*In fact, as I read the parable of Eden, he allowed us to make the choice to acquire "the knowledge of good and evil," i.e. the capacity to sense what seems "wrong" to us and still to choose to do it. The act of disobedience completed us as moral beings and freed us, in a way. It's a tricky thing to talk about, but it makes more sense to me this way.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 11:25 am (UTC)There's also no concept of a Fall as such. Nor any eternal damnation (to most Jews, I suspect, the entire concept of an eternity in Hell is not only weird, it's sick). But we also don't really spend a lot of time worrying about the afterlife, whatever it is.
" This is the reason why Christians, ordinary good decent Christians who already know what The Parishioner has stated in the quote, do sometimes try to bring non-believers into the faith; because to believe as a fact that God created the whole universe is to believe as a fact that God is God for the whole universe, and that it were better that other people should know this fact."
My understanding of Christian belief is somewhat limited, but is it not the Great Commission, to go out and evangelize and bring people into the church? I mean, that's part of what they're supposed to do, right? (Fortunately, most of them take "no" for an answer -- I've only who didn't)
no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 03:45 pm (UTC)Taking no for an answer--in other words, communicating the information and leaving it to the individual to decide--would be the way of doing it that best fits my conceptual model of God. That would perhaps be a way of reading that bit about shaking the dust of a place from one's feet. "Give them the facts, let them decide. If they're interested, great. If not, don't waste time trying to persuade them, move on to the next place. Lot of ground to cover, guys, time is going by"...well, you get the idea. All the high-pressure sales tactics, torture and persecution and such, would be our idea.
The thought of those long discussions fascinates me. So presumably in Judaism there's no concept of Lucifer the fallen angel either? (I see him as maybe an early trial of Free Will beta...maybe the patch wasn't compatible with his OS, or maybe it was and then God had to find somewhere to put him where he couldn't do damage. Angelic powers and free will could be a dangerous mix. See various movies with Christopher Walken for details.)
no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 04:10 pm (UTC)Although...again...Jews are notorious for talking this stuff to death and I wouldn't swear that there doesn't exist a branch of Judaism somewhere that doesn't believe that. Ask 2 rabbis, get (at least) 3 opinions. (As someone (perhaps
no subject
Date: 2014-08-04 04:17 pm (UTC)And yes, we do not have any concept of fallen angels as such -- though there are midrashic stories about angels arguing with God, we don't have any of them actually disobeying, let alone flat-out rebelling.