avevale_intelligencer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2014-08-03 11:26 am
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2014-08-03 11:26 am
A quote, on That Subject
The 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.
no subject
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.