A quote, on That Subject

[avevale_intelligencer]

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(unless challenged on it) in regarding all Christians as identical (and revert to that view as soon as the challenge is withdrawn), who vigorously defend their right to judge a group by its worst examples while vilifying anyone who does it to them, who frequently can not find it in their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.

Comments

[alun dudek (from livejournal.com)]

The fact that, if God made everything, God made EVERYTHING including all the things anyone thinks as "evil" is the "Problem Of Evil". And Christianity has been struggling with that one pretty much since St. Paul's day.

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.