Interviewing Jeff Schweitzer soon!

I feel sort of bad, because it took me about 4 months to read Jeff Schweitzer's awesome book, Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World. During that time, he actually took time out of his busy life to email me and ask if I had finished it – and I had to tell him that my internship was taking up all of my free reading time.

However, I have officially, finally, finished Mr. Schweitzer's book, and so you will find, in the coming weeks, an e-terview between he and I.

Beyond Cosmic Dice is perhaps not the book you would expect from the title. To me, the title suggests that the book is primarily about morality and ethics in a world in which there is no ultimate purpose or absolute morality. In a very real way, this is what this book is about, but not in the way you'd think.

Chapter 1 is an extremely compelling description of the difficulties in defining life. Schweitzer explains quite convincingly that life is not an either-or proposition. Rather, the difference between life and non-life is a gradation. Instead of life being white and nonlife being black, life is closer to blue and nonlife is closer to green, with gradual shades in between. One can look at a dog and say, "this dog is definitely alive" and one can look at a rock and say, "this is definitely not alive", but not all things are so easily classified. As he puts it, "Nobody would deny the existence of green or blue, yet nobody can define when one color becomes the other. That inability to draw a clear line between them does not diminish the reality of the two colors" (pp 46). This is important to understand because when people ask, "how did life arise out of nonlife" they imagine life and nonlife as binary constructs, when in fact they are constructs on a spectrum. "Life" is nothing more than "an arbitrary label we apply to distinguish extremes of complexity along a continuum" (pp 47).

After explaining that life is an arbitrary label, Schweitzer goes on to briefly explain evolution. What I find most spectacular about this chapter is that while I am a seasoned reader of explanations and treatises on evolution, he offered a very unique perspective. He explains that evolution has no direction, purpose or drive toward complexity. Humans, in all of their complexity, are not abnormal in the grand scheme of evolution. In the grand scheme of evolution, simple, single-celled organisms are much more favored by natural selection than complex beings such as us. As Schweitzer puts it, "bacteria can easily live without us, but we would die quickly without them" (pp 65). Bacteria and other simple organisms outnumber us by both sheer numbers and mass – we are the latecomers, a "biological aberration", and when humanity is gone, the bacteria will go on living, having for all intents and purposes not noticed our coming and going at all. If there is a god and he designed the earth for any type of organism, it is not for complex humans but for the single-celled. The earth is far more suited to their kind, and they can survive where we absolutely cannot.

Chapter 3 deals specifically with humans, and the fact that most of the cells in our bodies are not ours (they are the cells of microorganisms using our body as a convenient apartment complex) and most of our DNA is not human either. We are they, and they are us. The other characteristics that we believe make us unique and special (intelligence, tool use, self-consciousness, self-awareness, etc) are not uniquely human. They are present in other species as well, to different degrees. A cheetah could just as easily point out that they are the pinnacle of evolution because they are the fastest land animal, making our claims to superiority quite arbitrary. The only thing that really separates us from everything else is our capacity to choose to be moral.

I found the first three chapters to be the most enlightening aspects of the book. These chapters make up part I. Part II of the book (the next 3 chapters) deals briefly with how religion arose and the shortcomings of religious morality. Part III deals with cultivating a natural ethic based on part I. Schweitzer defines a natural ethic as, "based on the principal that with the ability to choose to be good comes the obligation to make that choice; Choosing to be moral is what makes us special. The act of choosing to live a good life is the foundation for all pleasure, peace and happiness" (pp 176).

All organisms exploit their environment to the maximum extent possible, and humans are the only organism capable of recognizing this and then rising above this exploitative relationship. We should do so because we can.

Schweitzer then lays out moral foundation that he feels arise out of this natural ethic, but he stresses that these are personal guidelines and not universal ones. While I absolutely understand this tack, I feel as though the loose link between the strong and insightful first half of the book and the guidelines for ethical behavior in the second half of the book leave something to be desired. I wanted the book to end as strongly as it started. It didn't, but in a way I think that reflects the reality of morality. I have yet to find a system of morality that operates prescriptively that is also based on solid foundations, and instead I am left with shades of gray and bell curves of behavior. Perhaps that means it is time for me to abandon my childish notion that moral questions can be examined in the same way that we examine other empirical facts about the universe.

Beyond Cosmic Dice is written in an accessible, almost conversational style and is an excellent read for non-theists and theists alike. It may even be a good starting point for a theist with a desire to better understand the naturalistic worldview.

Insufficient Christianity: Petter’s review

When Ziztur first began to blog about Mere Christianity, I leapt at the chance to read it. I ended up writing a review, which is rather briefer than the chapter-by-chapter dissection that she and Flimsy have posted here. I didn’t want to post it here at the time, because I felt it would be more interesting for blog readers to see the blow-by-blow account, and figured (even back in early June) that I might post my review as a sort of quasi-summary once the project was done and over with. I say “quasi-summary”, because (of course!) this is my opinion, and while it’s pretty similar to theirs, as blogged, I speak for myself, not for them. Nonetheless, it may stand on its own as a briefer review (or dismissal) of the work…

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Over the course of many a fruitless religious debate, one book that my ‘opponents’ have often urged me to read is Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I had never done so, but when I found out that the whole thing was available online (here), I went ahead and read it—in stolen snippets of two days, at that; it’s short and a light read. My very brief conclusion is that C.S. Lewis is an entirely different brand of apologist from the raucous, idiot, Ray Comfort kind to which I have previously been exposed. I get every impression that he was being quite sincere and honest. He may also very well have been intelligent. —I say “may” because this book provides no evidence that he was, but nor do I think that it provides strong evidence that he wasn’t.

That said, in the early chapters of Mere Christianity, comes off as honest, sincere, quite possibly intelligent, and completely unconvincing and to all appearances dead wrong. (This review originally contained a part explaining why I consider it coherent to be intelligent, honest, and completely wrong; that aside grew into this.) So unconvincing and so wrong, in fact, that while I consider it entirely possible that he was intelligent, and while some of his fans may very well be very intelligent (with the same rationale), anyone who was convinced by it must have had their critical thinking faculties shut off for the day. Much as a palæontologist accepts a single fossil or a physicist a single relativistic experiment, you may accept Mere Christianity as fitting into a worldview, but it is no more sufficient to build a complete theory upon. Unlike fossils and physical experiments, however, Mere Christianity attempts logical arguments, and—well, we shall see how it succeeded.

The book is written in a compelling way—easy, conversational language, and a structure where each chapter builds directly and explicitly on the one before it. Thus, he starts off by establishing a universal moral law; shows that the universal law must reflect some underlying reality; shows that this underlying reality must be an Intelligence; shows that it must be an Intelligence rather like the Christian God—and so forth. He is not mealy-mouthed, nor needlessly offensive, nor does he sound insincere. All of this gives me a rather favourable view of him as a person.

As a logician and persuader, however, I can’t give him much respect. My initial reaction to the first few chapters was that, with some minor restructuring, they could easily be retitled according to which logical fallacy he built each chapter’s claim upon. Thus one early chapter took St. Anselm’s failed Ontological Argument and applied it to moral law: We can conceive of a moral law better than our own; therefore there must be a Perfect moral law. (Not true: We might have and fully grasp the ultimate moral law but fail to recognise that it’s perfect.) Another was based on Equivocation (descriptive natural laws with prescriptive moral laws). Another, while not a formal fallacy that I’m aware of, was based on equivocating percepts with objects: That is, he went from All humans feel that there is something rather like X to Therefore, there exists an X with some sort of independent reaction. (Nonsense! If we find that all humans feel X we have indeed discovered a fact, but it’s a fact about human brains, not about the world outside them.) These percepts, once reified, were deified in short order.

Unfortunately, the book went rather downhill from this point. In the early chapters, I can really respect what Lewis was trying to do. Of course, I find that his arguments were not in fact valid, but he clearly believed the premises were true, he obviously believed in his conclusion, and as I have said before and will gladly repeat, it is often very difficult to find flaws in your own inferences when they make a path whereby, as far as you can tell, you get from the right starting point to the right end point. And in these early chapters, I am inclined to agree that if his arguments had been valid and sound, as he believed, then he had some very right and very valuable things to say; and he does lay out his arguments, however flawed, clearly and lucidly.

But this, alas, was not to last. Having once established (in his mind) that there must be a deity that shares some important, basic traits with the god of Judeo-Christian mythology, he went on to implicitly assume a whole slew of Christian dogma, and he did it so suddenly and unselfconsciously that it took me a chapter or two before I went Hang on a minute…! It is as though, once you accept a good, omnipotent creator deity, Moses, the Ten Commandments, Jesus, Judas, and the whole cabaret just followed naturally. This was a huge disappointment—he didn’t even try to show his work in this part of the examination.

The redeeming aspect of this part of the work was that if you once accept his assumptions, a lot of the things he says are very cogent and sensible. But that is not much help if you haven’t accepted those assumptions! He also argues an awful lot by metaphor. This is fine—he manages to explain a number of very weird things in Christian dogma in a way that made a lot of sense to me. So far, so good. However, a critical feature of an explanation by metaphor is that you have to be able to show how it reduces back to the real issue. Again, Lewis doesn’t fail to do this—he never even attempts it. It felt very much as if it never occurred to him that this had to be explained.

And I found this very peculiar, because C.S. Lewis was by all accounts an atheist, and he was brought to believe in all these things. How did this happen? I feel as though he must have had more of a story to tell, because the argument he lays out is completely insufficient to take an intelligent person from atheism to Christianity. Even if his initial arguments had been sound, there just wasn’t a chain of logic available to bring an atheist any further than a sort of nebulous proto-Judeo-Christian monotheism with no specifics of ritual or dogma, let alone such esoteric notions as the Trinity (which, by the way, he explains in lucid, wonderful metaphor that he completely neglects to show to be equivalent to any underlying reality). I supppose Lewis, if he was an atheist before, must not have reached that point by skepticism so much as more specific disappointment with points of dogma.

The part of the entire book that I found the most rewarding to read was, and this might surprise you, the two chapters on Faith. Now, I make it no secret that I regard the concept of faith with derision and contempt—faith, as I generally see it used and defined, refers to belief without evidence, and in some circles (particularly US fundamentalists) even belief in spite of evidence, which is lunacy and the least ethical and virtuous thing you can possibly do without involving others. However, C.S. Lewis defines faith very differently. I can do the concept no better justice than to quote him:

Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people-at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.

Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then—and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.

With this second definition of the word faith, it actually makes sense. What this teaches me is that when I next meet someone extolling the virtues of faith, I need to explicitly establish what, precisely, this person means, because he or she may not be referring to it in the sense that I am used to encountering it. If someone believes in the virtues of faith¹, they are beneath being reasoned with. Faith², on the other hand, is in fact a positive thing! I do not need to be persuaded of its virtue; I agree with it! On the other hand, faith² is not a way in which religion can be reached. If somebody tells me that You won’t find God by evidence; you just have to have faith, they are using faith¹ and I will continue to dismiss them. If they take offence at this, I can now not only explain why, but also point out that C.S. Lewis regarded that claim as stupid.

Insufficient Christianity: Done!

This is it! The last Chapter of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.

In the last chapter I compared Christ's work of making New Men to the process of turning a horse into a winged creature. I used that extreme example in order to emphasize the point that it is not mere improvement but Transformation. The nearest parallel to it in the world of nature is to be found in the remarkable transformations we can make in insects by applying certain rays to them. Some people think this is how Evolution worked. The alterations in creatures on which it all depends may have been produced by rays coming from outer space. (Of course once the alterations are there, what they call 'Natural Selection' gets to work on them: i.e. the useful alterations survive and the other ones get weeded out.)

I don't know about you guys, but I honestly have no idea what Lewis is talking about here. Some people think evolution worked by applying rays from outer space to animals to transform them? What the hell? Is he talking about mutations caused by UV light? Did people think this in 1944? Lewis goes on to explain that most people know about evolution (as an aside, he mentions that some educated people disbelieve it. I wonder why he specified that some educated people disbelieve it, especially given that he seems to accept evolution) and that some people wonder what the "next step" in evolution is. Clearly, even though we can speculate, we really cannot say for sure what the "next step" might be in a general sense, because natural selection is so complex and our capacity to predict the path of evolution is limited by our imaginations and knowledge of future events. If we were to guess the trajectory of an evolutionary path, we could easily be wrong. Lewis claims that we're missing the point of evolutionary paths entirely because the "next step" has already taken place, going in a direction we could not have imagined to the point that some of us don't even realize that it is the "next step" at all. That next step is Christianity:

Now, if you care to talk in these terms, the Christian view is precisely that the Next Step has already appeared. And it is really new. It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction - a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago. In a sense, the change is not 'Evolution' at all, because it is not something arising out of the natural process of events but something coming-into nature from outside. But that is what I should expect. We arrived at our idea of 'Evolution' from studying the past. If there are real novelties in store then of course our idea, based on the past, will not really cover them. And in fact this New Step differs from all previous ones not only in coming from outside nature but in several other ways as well.

So Lewis believes Christians are essentially more evolved than non-Christians. They are the "next step". They are the "new humanity". Clearly, from the paragraph above, this is supposed to mean that Christians are "better" than non-Christians. They are humans 2.0. They are akin to "superman" or "having more armor" or in general being greater. Lewis goes on to say that this spiritual evolution to the new humanity of Christianity is not quite the same as evolution by natural selection for several reasons:


1. It doesn't happen via sexual reproduction. You can't pass Christianity down genetically.


2. Organisms do not have a choice to "evolve", but people can chose to become spiritually evolved. "Progress was, in the main, something that happened to them, not something that they did. But the new step, the step from being creatures to being sons, is voluntary. We can, if we please, shrink back; we can dig in our heels and let the new Humanity go on without us."


So people who are not Christians are being left behind while humanity goes on without them. This certainly sounds a lot like the Indigo and Crystal children movement. It must be nice to feel like you're on a higher plane and have such a bright and awesome light compared to the dim and less worthy life of a nonbeliever. People who aren't Christians are lower creatures simply by choice. We choose not to have "progress".


3. Jesus was the first human who was a spiritually evolved version of the new humanity. 


4. Evolution to the new humanity of Christianity took place really quickly. Two thousand years is nothing compared to the entirety of the history of the universe. Every time it looks like Christianity is dying, it's not: "(Never forget that we are all still 'the early Christians.' The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy: we are still teething. The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the' opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has thought that very often before. Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense - and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them -that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us.)"


To say that "they" hate Christianity simply because it is popular is an incredibly simplistic and naive understanding of how the world works. Lewis sounds like a hockey fan cheering for his favorite team. Raa raa raa we're #1! They hate us because we are so awesome! We can't be beat! Look how they try to knock us down but we just spring right back up! Also, Christianity would be nowhere without the crucifixion! The crucifixion is supposed to be the whole reason Christianity is so cool – because Jesus died for our sins. That was supposedly god's plan all along. 


5. The stakes of new humanity are higher because if an organism "falls back on earlier steps", the maximum it can lose is life, but if we fail to be Christians we will lose our eternal life which is infinite.

On this view the thing has happened: the new step has been taken and is being taken. Already the new men are dotted here and there all over the earth. Some, as I have admitted, are still hardly recognisable: but others can be recognised. Every now and then one meets them. Their very voices and faces are different from ours; stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They are, I say, recognisable; but you must know what to look for. They will not be very like the idea of 'religious people' which you have formed from your general reading. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less. … They will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from. When you have recognised one of them, you will recognise the next one much more easily. And I strongly suspect (but how should I know?) that they recognise one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of colour, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun.

This sounds a lot like the Indigo and Crystal child movement. Christians are recognizable by their stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant voices and faces. This whole paragraph is simply ridiculous: imagine if I said this about atheists, or gay people, or any other group for whom I wanted to explain my favor for. Lewis goes on to explain that even though these superior Christians are easy to recognize by their obvious awesomeness, they are not all the "same". They are all totally unique, unlike non-Christians who all fade into the background of sameness and dullness. As an illustration, he says

I will try two very imperfect illustrations which may give a hint of the truth. Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e. all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are. Or again, suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. Might he not reply 'In that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the same: because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything else.' But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the salt. (Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a very good illustration, because you can, after all, kill the other tastes by putting in too much salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human personality by putting in too much Christ. I am doing the best I can.)

He goes on to say that Christians are super unique and awesome and they got that way by letting go of their pitiful selves and letting Christ overcome them:

It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

Oh, so non Christians don't have personalities of their own. I hope I don't need to explain why I think this idea is filthy, bigoted, and dangerous. Dehumanization 101.

At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

The bigotry at this point is almost pouring out of Lewis' ears. To Lewis, I have no real self. I am a monotonous sheep, not unique and different and awesome like Christians. 


Lewis spends the rest of the chapter talking about how we have to completely give ourselves up to Christ in order to find our real selves. In order to save our life, we have to lose our own live, our personal ambitions, our favorite wishes. Here is his last thought:

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

THE END

Basically, a Christian can look at an atheist and see, "only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay" if he really believes the same things Lewis believes. It really makes me sad that my life could be summed up in this way regardless of the evidence to the contrary that my life is fulfilling and meaningful. It makes me sad that people can believe things like this about another human being, simply because of their lack of a belief in Jesus. I am a human being, and I am not living a less worthy life because I don't believe in Jesus. 


I hope that Flimsy and my analysis of Mere Christianity has been helpful to you, whether you're an atheist, a theist, or something in between. If you're a theist, please read Lewis' words from the perspective of an atheist. If you cannot possibly see that Lewis is advocating a bigoted version of Christianity that is unsupported by evidence or logic, pretend he is an atheist explaining "Mere atheism" and telling you that your life is meaningless unless you give up your belief in god. Pretend that every time I have pointed out a bigoted statement, Lewis is making that claim about you or your beliefs. Perhaps then you might come to understand our perspective. When people start to believe that they are better than everyone around them, it can and has easily lead to the mistreatment of others. Really, we're all the same people. We all have a story to tell. These divisions brought about by religious belief might make people in a particular religion feel better about themselves. People should not view themselves are more evolved, more enlightened, closer to perfection, and unfathomably more awesome than those around them due to their religion or the connection they think they have to god. This belief does not make the world a better place – it serves to divide and to justify treating people as less than equal. Not only can this line of thinking lead to injustice and inequality, but it has led to injustice and inequality. 


Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity 31.1

Holey smokes, after a week-long hiatus from our refutation of C.S. Lewis (so near the end of his book, too) we're finally back. For those of you not in the know, Flimsy and I have been training our skeptical eye on C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, a book heralded by many Christians as a great example of Christian apologetics. If you'd like to read our previous chapters, click on the "C.S. Lewis" label at the bottom of the page.

This is chapter 31 of Mere Christianity, in which Lewis writes about how when you become a Christian, the Christian god will help you become a better person. According to Lewis, god does say that he will not help you unless you're perfect – he will help you all right, and by helping you he will bring you closer to perfection. The Christian god only intends to help you become perfect and he will help you with nothing else.

Because of this, Lewis says his god is like a dentist – fixing all of your mouth when you've only got a toothache in one tooth:

Now, if I may put it that way, Our Lord is like the dentists. If you give Him an inch, He will take an ell. Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of (like masturbation or physical cowardice) or which is obviously spoiling daily life (like bad temper or drunkenness). Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment.

So, god gives you the "full treatment" for things like masturbation, and as such you cannot be expected to get away with any bad things – even if you think you're getting away with it, god intends to fix you. Because of this Christianity is really difficult and also has the associated cost of letting god "get this job through". God does not care what kind of suffering you have in life – the goal is perfection in heaven, and so if you let him, god will do everything he can even if it makes your life miserable at times.

What bothers me about this is that life in this case ends up not being particularly important for life's sake – life is important because your behaviors during life will result in eternal glory or eternal punishment. This reminds me of all the educational opportunities denied to Flimsy when he was a child for the goal of hiding him from reality to increase his chances of remaining "saved".

I know I have a lot of Christians who read this blog, so let me put it this way: You're not a Muslim. In many Muslim societies, women are treated like chattel and forced to cover almost their entire bodies in order to keep them pure. To a Muslim, eternal life is more important than being able to freely dress and converse with men with whom you are not related. Should women be denied these rights in favor of the "life" after death? If the answer is some variation of, "no", then you understand how I feel when children are denied any opportunity at knowledge, intellectual pursuit or ethical freedom.

The rest of this chapter is about how god will be pleased with your feeble attempts at perfection and so the goal of perfection should not discourage you. God, however, wants us to desire to be like saints, because even if we cannot actually achieve that goal, the desire can help motivate us to behave. No particular arguments are given, rather we're simply told that whenever illness, money troubles, or new types of temptation come along, it is because god is disappointed with us and wants to "force us up to a higher level". If we don't understand why god is doing this to us, it is our fault for not understanding things:

That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected), he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along - illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation - he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.

In the end, if we really let him, God will make us awesome:

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were 'gods' and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him - for we can prevent Him, if we choose - He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.

This last paragraph reminds me of that movie and social movement The Secret. If a Christian sees someone having illness or money troubles, can't they conclude that their troubles are not due to circumstance but due to god being angry at them? Is this why my friends who use wheelchairs have all had the experience where a Christian approached them and told them that if they just believed hard enough, prayed the right ways, or acted in a way that pleased god/Jesus, they would be able to walk again? Are there people who walk around and think that those who are unfortunate are unfortunate due to their own sinfulness and immorality?

Lest you think I am jumping to conclusions where no conclusions are warranted, here is a quote from a very famous Youtube Christian, VenomFangX:

"Many people have been bringing to my attention, they feel somehow considered by amputees. You're gonna run into a lot of these, and you gotta be aware of them, and you gotta be able to call it for what it is. So if you don't recognize them as amputees, they could probably throw you for a loop. But when you recognize them for what they are, they're just like, 'Are you joking?' Okay, let me show you an example. I can grab a box: I don't deserve to die. You've been separated from your arm in the first place. You deserve death and the loss of your arms. Amputees don't deserve their arms, they deserve to die; that's what the Bible teaches. Why should God heal amputees? He's the one who allowed you to lose your arm in the first place! So here's the real question: Why do people lose their arms? I'm just gonna take a stab at it and see what I can do. Now, I cut off my arm. So why doesn't God heal amputees? 'Cause they don't deserve their arms. They deserve to die; that's what the Bible teaches. Sorry if you don't like that! Jesus said if you're even angry with someone, you're a murderer in your heart!"

Now, obviously many theists do not believe that people who are ill or having troubles in their life are having those troubles because they deserve them. But, this kind of thinking presented by Lewis can easily cause people to excuse human injustice or other negative situations under the rationalization that those situations are in place because god is disappointed. Think hurricane Katrina.

Mere Christianity online

Insufficient Christianity 29.1

 After this chapter, there are only four more chapters of Mere Christianity! I think Flimsy and I have decided to either tackle a Lee Strobel book that has not previously been tackled excessively, or Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, a book recommended by a commenter. Our other option of interest is the Alcoholic's Anonymous Handbook. We're still waiting for the philosophy book to come in the mail before we decide which we'd like to do next. Anyway, onward to C.S. Lewis!

Lewis spends the first part of this chapter explaining that one of the things his god wants us to do is pretend to be Christ-like, despite the fact that we realize Chris is utterly amazing and we are but pieces of trash in comparison. He says that this pretending will make us more Christlike, much in the same way that smiling when you are unhappy might make your unhappiness fizzle away. Children do this all the time – though they are not adults, they play games of pretend where they imagine that they are adults, and this is fodder for future adulthood. Lewis insists that when you do this, the real god will be at your side to show you the right way to be Christian and to turn you into a Christlike being. The reader is told again that Christians who are very faithful are so real and alive whereas non-Christians are shallow, hollow "tin" versions of real people.

It seems to me that this is a version of dehumanization, only instead, non-Christians are mere humans while Christians are a sort of spiritual superhuman. According to Lewis, Christians are "coming alive", they have a life that non-Christians do not have. Non-Christians are but a shadowy and symbolic resemblance to Christians. Christians are like a place, whereas non-Christians are like a photo of that place. Christians are like men, and non-Christians are like statues of those men.

To be fair, what Lewis actually says is that the "spiritual life" is the higher life. The spiritual life, obviously, is the life you get when you're a Christian. But the implication is clear. Lewis believes that when you become a Christian, you go from being a shadow and symbolic representation of real people, to a real and alive person. Of course, perhaps some Christians will say that they really aren't better. I call doublespeak. If you claim that one subset of humans are on a higher plane of existence than another subset of humans, than you are dehumanizing – not in the literal sense of the word but with the same effect – you are asserting the superiority of one group over another and thus asserting that one group s inferior to the other. When people become things, they become dispensable.

Similarly, if I were to assert that when one becomes an atheist, one's mind becomes open to freely think and freely question, my unstated assertion is that people who are not atheists do not have the ability to think openly, freely think and freely question. If I were to assert that when a Christian deconverts and becomes an atheist, it is like turning a stone sculpture of a person into a real, in the flesh person, my unstated assertion is that Christians are mere representations of real people.

To Lewis, even the good works done by humans are only by the power of Jesus. He encourages us to dismiss all of the help we have received from humans as not due to their pure unselfishness but due to Christ:

"You may say `I've never had the sense of being helped by an invisible Christ, but I often have been helped by other human beings.' That is rather like the woman in the first war who said that if there were a bread shortage it would not bother her house because they always ate toast. If there is no bread there will be no toast. If there were no help from Christ, there would be no help from other human beings. He works on us in all sorts of ways: not only through what we think is our 'religious life'. He works through Nature, through our own bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time) anti-Christian. When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going-provided he does it for honesty's sake and not just to annoy his parents-the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before. But above all, He works on us through each other."

Apparently Jesus is all around us, mirroring himself whether we are Christians or not, so that we may at times unconsciously leads other people to Christ. This is especially true if you're a Christian, such that "you might say that when two Christians are following Christ together there is not twice as much Christianity as when they are apart, but sixteen times as much." Dude. Christianity can be measured in units! Let's call one unit of Christianity a CU and one Christian a ©. One © following Christ together is 1 CU, but two © following Christ together are 16 CU!

Doing a little math, it seems that Clearly a CU is ©⁴. So one © is 1⁴ CU. Two © are 2⁴ CU = 16CU. Clearly then, three © are 3⁴ = 81CU. A whole congregation of 300 members sitting in pews for Sunday services are a whopping 8,100,000,000 units of Christianity. I wonder what a unit of atheist (AU) is per atheist?

Okay, fine, I'm digressing again. Lewis finishes the chapter by waxing poetically about how when people become Christians they kill that tired old, shadowy natural self and are literally reborn into a new special Christlike person. After this, of course, we start to notice just how sinful and bad we are, which of course means that non-Christians are simply blind and ignorant to how terrible they are. It all sounds very nice and wonderful to someone who is a Christian but I can completely understand how this type of thinking has been used in the past to commit terrible atrocities against non-Christians. If you think you have the spiritual highground because you "realize" how sinful and bad you are, you believe you can reduce your sinfulness of your own accord. Someone who you believe is unaware of how sinful they are cannot reduce their sinfulness of their own accord, because they do not "realize" how sinful they are. If you believe someone's eternal soul is on the line here, then you can be justified in oppressing them in the name of saving their souls and diminishing their efforts at finding the truth as efforts of blind Chihuahua's to climb Mount Everest. The problem is, that there is no reason for me to believe that Lewis, or anyone else, has found the spiritual highground.

To put it another way: Muslims believe they have the spiritual highground too. It is not that they are "evil islamofascists who just hate freedom".

Mere Christianity online

Insufficient Christianity 28.1

Admittedly, I did not so much as analyze the last chapter of Mere Christianity as read it and go off on a random tangent about how our lives really are worth living even if the universe does not have a purpose. Lewis basically spent all of the last chapter (chapter 27) comparing humans to tin soldiers and saying that god created us as tin soldiers who would eventually become "real flesh" and that this was akin to humans becoming Christians.

In this chapter, Lewis answers two questions from his critics. One individual asks Lewis, "why, if God wanted sons instead of 'toy soldiers,' He did not beget many sons at the outset instead of first making toy soldiers and then bringing them to life by such a difficult and painful process."

Lewis says that there are two answers to this question: one is easy to understand, and the other is not. Let's look at the first, easy answer:

"The process of being turned from a creature into a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not turned away from God centuries ago. They were able to do this because He gave them free will: He gave them free will because a world of mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness."

Now, I often wonder why a perfect god would punish his creation for behaving exactly as he planned to have them behave. One could say that if I gave birth to a child, I would certainly punish my child for misbehaving, and god is doing the same thing. However this is not an appropriate analogy because though I "made" my child in the sense that I copulated and then grew and birthed him, I did not "make" him in the same sense that god supposedly made the human race. God punishing the entire human race for using their free will to sin is kind of like me punishing my child for eating with a spoon after I have taught him to eat with a spoon and repeatedly told him that it is his choice to eat with a spoon or not.

Also, since when is it just to punish people for mistakes their great great great great great great … great grandparents did? Basically, the Christian god is punishing us for being human. It's like punishing Lewis' tin soldiers for being unable to be easily oxidized in air. The tin soldier can't help but me made of Sn*, yet without Sn, the tin soldier would not be tin at all.

And the difficult answer:

"All Christians are agreed that there is, in the full and original sense, only one 'Son of God'. If we insist on asking 'But could there have been many?' we find ourselves in very deep water. Have the words 'Could have been' any sense at all when applied to God? You can say that one particular finite thing 'could have been' different from what it is, because it would have been different if something else had been different, and the something else would have been different if some third thing had been different, and so on. (The letters on this page would have been red if the printer had used red ink, and he would have used red ink if he had been instructed to, and so on.) But when you are talking about God i.e. about the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend-it is nonsensical to ask if It could have been otherwise. "

Well that's fine, but when people say, "Could god have done things X way" they are asking for the individual on the other end of the conversation to imagine a hypothetical situation. It is not nonsensical to ask people to imagine a hypothetical situation that is contrary to fact and then take that hypothetical situation to some conclusion. Similarly, even though it is a "fact" that I have been living with Flimsy for about a year, I can easily imagine a hypothetical situation in which that did not occur. That and, Lewis has still failed to establish that his god is an irreducible brute fact.

He goes on to say that it does not make sense of god begetting more than one son, because if he did then we would have to invent some sort of space or distance in order to say that the two are separate things. I don't see how this is a particular problem given that Lewis and other creationists have already invented some sort of eternal time in which god resides in order for the universe to have not existed and then began to exist. There had to, then, be a time before the universe was made. So basically, he is coming up with an ac hoc justification for why there can't be more than one son of god. I think the whole paragraph is pretty silly:

"I find a difficulty about the very idea of the Father begetting many sons from all eternity. In order to be many they would have to be somehow different from one another. Two pennies have the same shape. How are they two? By occupying different places and containing different atoms. In other words, to think of them as different, we have had to bring in space and matter; in fact we have had to bring in 'Nature' or the created universe. I can understand the distinction between the Father and the Son without bringing in space or matter, because the one begets and the other is begotten. The Father's relation to the Son is not the same as the Son's relation to the Father. But if there were several sons they would all be related to one another and to the Father in the same way. How would they differ from one another? One does not notice the difficulty at first, of course. One thinks one can form the idea of several 'sons'. But when I think closely, I find that the idea seemed possible only because I was vaguely imagining them as human forms standing about together in some kind of space. In other words, though I pretended to be thinking about something that exists before any universe was made, I was really smuggling in the picture of a universe and putting that something inside it. When I stop doing that and still try to think of the Father begetting many sons `before all worlds' I find I am not really thinking of anything. The idea fades away into mere words. (Was Nature-space and time and matter - created precisely in order to make many-ness possible? Is there perhaps no other way of getting many eternal spirits except by first making many natural creatures, in a universe, and then spiritualising them? But of course all this is guesswork.)

So what Lewis is saying is that imagining the idea of more than one son creates more questions than it answers and so the idea of multiple sons does not solve any problems or make much sense. But Lewis' god is the same way, as that god brings up tons of questions in order to solve a painful few.

The second criticism Lewis addresses is the idea of individuality. He says that we must remember that we are both part of the human race: "You and they are different organs, intended to do different things. On the other hand when you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are 'no business of yours,' remember that though he is different from you he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist."

He goes on to say that the devil will get us if we decide that we dislike one of these two errors in thinking worse than the other, because the devil will lead us to be drawn gradually away from the one we dislike and into the one we don't mind so much. I realize at this point that Lewis is running with Christianity and largely speaking to the converted, but if he wants to provide a more compelling argument as to why dislike of totalitarianism over individualism or vice-versa might lead one to become a totalitarianist or an individualist, a justification other than "the devil will lead you to do this" might make a wee bit more sense. There really isn't any evidence that dislike of individualism will lead you on a slippery slope to totalitarianism.

*Okay, this joke may be a little too obscure for some people. Tin's symbol is Sn, and it is a metal that does not easily oxidize in air.

Insufficient Christianity: 27.1

Lewis spends all of chapter 27 talking about how Jesus died for our sins, and to be honest I don't really feel as though I have anything insightful or profound to say about most of the chapter. He writes again about how dirty and filthy and worthless people are unless they are real Christians and imbued with the Holy Spirit. Suffice to say, Lewis echoes typical Christian theology about not being able to understand or be a part of god without Jesus, though he makes no mention of being unable to be drawn into the Holy Spirit unless you profess belief. I suppose that is coming though.


Lewis says that the "Natural life" which is the type of life that nonchristians necessarily have, "is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been brought up to be dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite right. It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."


Couldn't we say the same thing Lewis says of "dirty people" of "clean people"? That is, people who are brought up unexposed to dirt and always kept clean are afraid to get dirty.


I can see here why some anti-evolutionists get offended at the idea that humans and other animals are descended from a common ancestor. To say that we are descended from a common ancestor is to say that we have the "natural life". It is to say that we are selfish exploiters of everything including fellow humans, that we hate things stronger than we are, that we want to be petted and admired. Perhaps it would be better to show that Lewis and others who think the way he does are mistaken about what the "natural life" means.


To me, the implications of there being no god are that no one is special or chosen above anyone else by an ultimate power. It means that this life is the only life we have and that this life is not a stepping stone on the way to eternity or a switch that leads us to either damnation and destruction or eternal life. Because this life is the only one we have and other people's lives are the only lives they have, exploiting people or infringing on their rights is one of the highest offenses imaginable. Because this earth was not tailor-made with us in mind by a god with infinite power, we have to take care of it as best we can so that those who are born after we are long gone continue to have the best means at a fulfilling life. It means realizing we won the genetic lottery, given that so many possible combinations of DNA will never get the chance at life. It means realizing just how insignificant we are, realizing that there is no ultimate purpose in this universe and then saying, "So what? I'll make my life have a purpose even though one day all of humanity will be gone and the universe will go on ticking perfectly fine without us" rather than expecting something else to hand us some purpose that was decided for us before we were born. Being given a purpose is easy – just find out what it is and do it. Giving yourself a purpose is something I will probably wrestle with my entire life. Making a decision about my own purpose is made more difficult by people who insist that without their god life is meaningless.


Sometimes I look at something beautiful – my relationship with Flimsy, for example – and I realize that in all likelihood, relationships like that have a maximum length of 80 years or less. After that, something beautiful is lost forever. It does not return. It does not live on. We are intricate, complex, amazing creatures, and each one of us is a finite, tiny piece of the world that will one day just… cease. Even things that are more permanent cannot last forever. I look at the city I live in, and I realize that most of these buildings, these roads, these communities – will go on without me. They will stay. A building has more permanence than a human being but is still so temporary. One day, all of those buildings and streets will be gone.


If the earth is to become an inhospitable ball of charred rock, does it really matter if something is there to cry over the annihilation of life and every last visage of human existence? Honestly, I'd love to be there rather than nowhere at all, but wanting something does not make it real, so I intend to make the best of the things I know for certain that I have.


Impermanence is not grounds for exploitation. It is grounds for ensuring that in our impermanence we do not take away the ability for anyone else to make the most of their own impermanence.

Insufficient Christianity: 26.1

I'm trying out using Word 2007 to create blog posts. I have no idea how well this is going to work out, but we shall see!

In chapter 25 of Mere Christianity, Lewis writes about "Good Infection", which is his explanation of the Holy Spirit.

"I begin this chapter by asking you to get a certain picture clear in your minds. Imagine two books lying on a table one on top of the other. Obviously the bottom book is keeping the other one up-supporting it. It is because of the underneath book that the top one is resting, say, two inches from the surface of the table instead of touching the table. Let us call the underneath book A and the top one B. The position of A is causing the position of B. That is clear? Now let us imagine - it could not really happen, of course, but it will do for an illustration -let us imagine that both books have been in that position for ever and ever. In that case B's position would always have been resulting from A's position. But all the same, A's position would not have existed before B's position. In other words the result does not come after the cause. Of course, results usually do: you eat the cucumber first and have the indigestion afterwards. But it is not so with all causes and results. You will see in a moment why I think this important.

Apparently Lewis thinks that "eternal" things (which he has failed to establish the existence of) are immune from a cause occurring before an effect. He does this to explain how none of the elements of the trinity came "first". I really don't have a problem with the causality some elements of some nonexistent god, just as I have no problem with the causality of the big bang – cause and effect break down in a singularity, as there is no such thing as time. Which came first: the id, the ego or the superego? Who knows. I don't think this is particularly important or relevant. If one can accept that god exists causelessly, it is not a far cry to accept that god is a causeless trinity either. 


Lewis says that the point of seeing god as an eternal causeless trinity is that "god is love" is meaningless unless you have at least two entities: 

"Notice the practical importance of this. All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that 'God is love.' But they seem not to notice that the words 'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love. Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they really mean 'Love is God.' They really mean that our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement 'God is love.' They believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.

I am one person. I love myself. I think Lewis is actually trying to us this love thing as an argument: 


Love is a thing that occurs between two or more people.

God is love

Therefore god is at least two people

Therefore we have support for the trinity being necessary


Of course, if we accept his argument (which I don't) then we only have support for a trinity and the necessity of dualism. 


Lewis goes on to say that this is a really important difference between Christianity and other religions – god is a "dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance." Once again, Lewis is displaying his ignorance of other religions, as if other religions are mere dead shadows of his religion. He basically spends the rest of the chapter waxing poetically about how stupendous his religion is. He explains that the union of god and Jesus is so concrete that the union itself is a person, and that this person is the Holy Spirit. He says that the Holy Spirit is akin to the "spirit" felt at a community gathering or in a family except that it is much more real and awesome. He says that we all have to enter the Holy Spirit (or have it enter us) in order to have any happiness at all or live forever. Once we enter into the Holy Spirit we become "sons of god" and thus we are "begat" by god instead of just "made". This is what Lewis considers the "good infection" and the whole purpose of becoming a Christian. This is what he means when he says that nonChristians are like mere shadows compared to Christians. 


I actually like Lewis' little description of the Holy Spirit, because I can honestly say that before I read it, I really didn't know what on earth Christians were talking about when they spoke of "having the Holy Spirit in me". I actually learned something from Lewis about Christianity! I still think his description of the difference between the two is rather bigoted, but at least I'll know what people are talking about when they praise the Holy Spirit.

Mere Christianity Online 

Insufficient Christianity: 24.1

Moving on to Chapter 24 of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, we’re going to discuss, refute and offer criticism for the idea of the trinity in Christian theology.If you'd like to see all of the critical analysis of Mere Christianity we have done thus far, click the "C.S. Lewis" label at the bottom of this post.

Lewis says that lots of people believe in god, but they don’t believe in a personal god as they believe god is beyond personality. Christians, however, are the “only people who offer any idea of what a being that is beyond personality could be like. All the other people, though they say that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as something impersonal: that is, as something less than personal. If you are looking for something super-personal, something more than a person, then it is not a question of choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas. The Christian idea is the only one on the market.”

Really. When Lewis makes statements like these, I have to wonder if he knows much of anything about religions other than Christianity. If one is looking for a transpersonal god, it is “a question of choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas”. Brahman is a transpersonal god. Allah is a transpersonal god. Waheguru is transpersonal. Christianity is not unique in this respect.
Moving on, Lewis explains that only Christians know how human souls can be absorbed into the life of god yet remain themselves, and warns that the whole purpose to existence is so that we may one day be absorbed into the life of god, and that wrong ideas about what god is will make this more difficult, so we had better pay attention to this trinity thing. Once again, Lewis is setting up his arguments to be immune from questioning and criticism. If we ask how souls can be absorbed into god and remain themselves at the same time, he can just reply with, “well, you can only understand it if you’re special like me”.

Lewis explains the trinity with an analogy (surprise!) using other occurrences of trinities: 3 dimensions (up-down, left-right, back-forth). God is like this.

Admittedly, trinities are cool. We’ve got the Id-Ego-Superego, Past-Present-Future, Consciousness-Subconsciousness-Unconsciousness,  Here-There-Inbetween, Mind-Body-Spirit (actually there is no evidence for spirit, but I digress from my digression), and more.  I can get how the Christian god is a trinity, though I don’t really understand this Holy Spirit business. Is it like a piece of god that god puts into all of us?

No matter, Lewis says if we can’t quite imagine is, that’s okay as long as we know that we’re interacting with all three all the time.  Lewis also argues that this is obviously not all made up because if it were made up, it would be a lot simpler. The simpler a religion, the more likely it is to have been made up. The rest of his chapter is a several paragraph diatribe about how we can’t know or understand god unless we want to understand him, insisting that god will not show himself to the unwilling or the filthy.

“When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others - not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.

This is the ultimate cop-out. It is totally unfalsifiable and makes Christianity immune to Criticism. I could say that when you come to know metaphysical naturalism, the initiative lies on the side of metaphysical naturalism, and that the naturalistic rational universe shows itself much more readily to some people than others, and that this is because some people are simply thinking wrong.

Apparently though this cop-out is “why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.”

Lewis ends the chapter with this: “If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.”

Anyone can be complex if he has no facts to bother about too, so I don't see why this is relevant.  Complexity does not make one thing true over the other.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 23.1

We’re in the home stretch of our review of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis: This chapter is the first of the last of the four books contained within Mere Christianity: on to theology!

Lewis begins his book by telling his reader that lots of people advised him not to include theology in his book, but to simply give the reader the plain practical religion of Christianity. He is ignoring their advice because he thinks that if people want to be Christian they should know something about Theology, defined by Lewis as “The science of God”

In a way, I can see why many Christians reject theology: they feel god, but they don’t want to get caught up in the particulars of religion: like Emily Dickinson, they believe attempts to dogmatize god places the infinite in a finite little box.

Yet, Lewis says, theology is important because many people have “confirmed” it, in the same way that a man experiencing an island feels that in a sense a map of the island he experiences is less real than the island itself, yet the map is based on the experiences of many people who confirmed its accuracy. Lewis believes that theology fits individual experience with collective experience; much like the map of the island fits an individual experience of the island with a collective experience of the island.

This would be a great analogy if god were a thing we could measure as we do an island, but god is not like this. If god were an island, he would be an island that took on different qualities depending on one’s preconceived ideas about it.

Lewis  says:

“Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God-experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion-all about feeling God in nature, and so on-is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.”

If theology is like a map and god is like an island, then what we have in the world are a bunch of contradictory and conflicting maps of an island along with a small number of people who contend there isn’t any evidence for the island because they don’t have a map or have looked at the maps and determined that none of them seem to lead to or describe the island. What’s more, people with map A think that people with map B have got it all wrong, some people think maps A,  B and C both have nuggets of truth about the island so they follow all three maps, people with map A occasionally kill people with map C for having the wrong map, people with map A insist that their map is the only way to the island, people with map D think their revised map is more accurate and that no one should be killing anyone, while still more people think all maps lead to the island. Mapholders insist that their island is somewhere even though it is actually located outside the world and cannot be tested; rather we must have faith that the island really exists. Meanwhile, the world looks exactly as it would look if there were no island at all to people without a map, while mapholders insist that the island has a profound effect on every aspect of the world.

I really don’t see this map analogy working out too well *for Lewis*, but I digress…

Lewis goes on to say that theology is best based on history rather than new religious fads, because a new religious fad might be one that theologeans “tried centuries ago and rejected”. He then goes on to explain some basic theology, starting with the theology of “begetting”

“One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God 'begotten, not created'; and it adds `begotten by his Father before all worlds'. Will you please get it quite clear that this has .nothing to do with the fact that when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin? We are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We are thinking about something that happened before Nature was created at all, before time began. `Before all worlds' Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean?

We don't use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set-or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set : say, a statue. If he is a clever enough carver he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.

“Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.

I’d also like to (randomly) point out that evolutionary biology says the same thing. It really annoys me to no end when silly creationists say, “evolution says a dog can give birth to a cat” or “evolution says that if you put a seed of corn on a shelf for 75 years, if you plant it you could grow a fern” which is the same thing as saying, “evolution says a man can beget little beavers”.  Evolution does not say that. Anyway, the point Lewis is making is that Jesus was different from humans because Jesus was begat and not made. All of the other stuff in the universe is also made by god and not begat by god.

There is also, Lewis says, a different between “spiritual life’ and “biological life”, and once we become Christians, we are like statues coming to life. This is a very interesting, if not bigoted, metaphor. What Lewis is saying is that people who are not Christians are like representations of real, living things: we heathens are like statues or photographs, while Christians are like living people. We non-Christians are merely shadowy and symbolic representations of real things.

Do Christians really believe this? Is this really, “The Science of God?” To say that Christians are the only ones fully alive is to say that non-Christians are... not fully alive.

Insufficient Christianity: 20.1

Chapter 20 of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis is about hope. Specifically, Lewis states that hope is a theological value defined as “continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.”

He claims that, “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.”

Actually, the Quakers began the abolitionist movement, convincing the rest of the Christian world (who often used the Bible as justification for slavery) through various means that slavery was wrong. I wonder if in 200 years, Christians will claim that Christianity is responsible for gays being granted equal civil rights.

When I read history, I recognize that the majority of people in the world have been religious, and thus the majority of good marks left on earth will be due to people who happened to also be religious. Here though, Lewis is claiming that those who hoped the most for heaven are the ones who had the greatest positive impact on society now directly because they had so much hope about heaven. No evidence or justification is given for this whatsoever.  He goes on to say that since Christians don’t hope for heaven as much anymore, they are no longer effective at bringing about positive change on earth. Again, this is stated without any evidence. Apparently if we hope for heaven all the time, goodness will come to the earth as an indirect consequence, but if we hope to change the world, we won’t be able to change the world or get to heaven. As an example he writes about health, stating that if we think about improving our health all the time we’ll become hypochondriacs, but if we focus instead on good food, fun, and open air, then good health will follow. Why heaven is immune from this type of reasoning is not really explained but apparently if our goal is to save civilization, we can’t do it if we make civilization our main object.

All I can say is that the Quakers didn’t seem to be focused on heaven with the goal of indirectly abolishing slavery. They worked directly to abolish slavery, by writing persuading literature, forming organizations in which abolition was the direct goal, forming and supporting the Underground Railroad, and so on. They did not abolish slavery indirectly.

If I donate blood, my donation can have a measurable effect on the life of another human being. If I sit at home and hope for heaven or pray, I don’t. It’s that simple.

Lewis goes on to wax poetically about longing for heaven, saying that we often have difficulty hoping for heaven because we’re trained to think about that which is happening in this world, in this life. He also says we sometimes do not recognize our want for heaven and gives three examples of this:

“(I) The Fool's Way. - He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after. Most of the bored, discontented, rich people in the world are of this type. They spend their whole lives trotting from woman to woman (through the divorce courts), from continent to continent, from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is 'the Real Thing' at last, and always disappointed.

So this guy thinks that the things will make him happy, and does not recognize that the happiness he continually seeks is actually heaven.

“(2) The Way of the Disillusioned 'Sensible Man'.-He soon decides that the whole thing was moonshine. 'Of course,' he says, 'one feels like that when one's young. But by the time you get to my age you've given up chasing the rainbow's end.' And so he settles down and learns not to expect too much and represses the part of himself which used, as he would say, 'to cry for the moon'. This is, of course, a much better way than the first, and makes a man much happier, and less of a nuisance to society. It tends to make him a prig (he is apt to be rather superior towards what he calls 'adolescents'), but, on the whole, he rubs along fairly comfortably. It would be the best line we could take if man did not live for ever. But supposing infinite happiness really is there, waiting for us? Supposing one really can reach the rainbow's end? In that case it would be a pity to find out too late (a moment after death) that by our supposed 'common sense' we had stifled in ourselves the faculty of enjoying it.

Oooo, a minor Pascals wager shows up here. Suppose that the earth is actually the only life we have, and all of this wishing for heaven is pining away at something that does not exist? We will have missed out on the grandness that is earth, and the wonder that is life, Much like the fool who can never find happiness in his women or holidays.

(3) The Christian Way.-The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, then; is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.'

So what Lewis is saying is that the fact that we long for something not here proves that the thing we are longing for actually exists.

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of 'Heaven' ridiculous by saying they do not want 'to spend eternity playing harps'. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.

 Oh I see, so if we’re not Christian, we can’t understand Christianity. Yet another unfalsifiable hypothesis that makes Lewis’ religion immune to criticism.

Insufficient Christianity: 19.1

I really have very little to say about Chapter 19 of Mere Christianity. Lewis talks about charity, saying that charity is not just “giving stuff to the poor” but also love in the “Christian Sense”. The Christian Love does not mean “having a fondness for” or “adoring”, so much as wanting what is right and best for people, regardless of whether or not you personally like them.
Lewis says that we should not bother wondering if we like someone. Rather, we should just act like we do, and this act will contribute to actually loving them.

Lewis also offers up another hallmark of the True Christian™ brand of Christian:

“The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or 'likings' and the Christian has only `charity'. The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on -- including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

Huh… So nonchristians don’t treat people kindly for the sake of charity? They “only” treat people kindly because they like him? Lewis, that’s a very bigoted thing for you to say. It’s as if he somehow knows the inner motivations of everyone, and anyone who treats people kindly because they like them is labeled as “worldly” and anyone who treats people kindly for the sake of kindness is labeled “Christian”, and then he goes on to say how wonderful Christians are.

I’d like to also point out that Lewis himself warned against this in the preface of his book:

“Far deeper objections may be felt - and have been expressed - against my use of the word Christian to mean one who accepts the common doctrines of Christianity. People ask: 'Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian?': or 'May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who do?' Now this objection is in one sense very right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every available quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without disaster, use language as these objectors want us to use it. I will try to make this clear by the history of another, and very much less important, word.

“The word gentleman 'originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone 'a gentleman' you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not 'a gentleman' you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - 'Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?' They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man 'a gentleman' in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is 'a gentleman' becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A 'nice' meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.

“Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say 'deepening', the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word. In the first place, Christians themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men's hearts. We' cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word. As for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the refined sense. It will become in their mouths simply a term of praise. In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts xi. 26) to 'the disciples', to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being extended to those who in some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were 'far closer to the spirit of Christ' than the less satisfactory of the disciples. The point is not a theological or moral one. It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

He goes on to say that if you treat people badly, you’ll hate them even more after doing so: “The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become-and so on in a vicious circle for ever.” Apparently this works in reverse as well – the more loving you are, the more you’ll love, and the more you love, the more loving you’ll be, etc.

Lewis ends the chapter by claiming that chastity also means loving god and god loving man, but some people don’t really feel as though they love god. The solution is to simply act as if you do love god, and then you will love god.

Insufficient Christianity: 18.2

For those of you just joining us, Flimsy and I have been reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and writing up a thorough critique of it in near-daily blog posts. If you want to find all of the posts we have written on this subject thus far, go to the bottom of this post and click the “C.S. Lewis” label. This is part II of my critique of chapter 18, which deals with pride/self-conceit.
For the second half of Chapter 18, Lewis provides us with a lovely little bit of unfalsifiability. I’ve heard variations of it before:

“In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison -you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

In other words, if we question god (which is what I think Lewis means by “come up against”), we are being prideful in questioning the Great Superior One. Thus, questioning god shows that we are full of pride and therefore do not know god.

This line of reasoning frustrates me to no end, partly because the people who typically employ it are so smug in their imagined airtightness. This argument specifically sets up the Christian god’s awesomeness as unfalsifiable. 

This argument can be used to nullify criticism of anyone:

In Flimsy/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Allah/This Doorknob you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know Flimsy/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Allah/This Doorknob as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison -you do not know Flimsy/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Allah/This Doorknob at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know Flimsy/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Allah/This Doorknob. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

In other words, Lewis is plugging his ears and shouting that being critical of his god proves that we just don’t know his god at all and are proving just how prideful we are.

I’d kind of like to lay this argument out more formally:
P: God is immeasurably superior to humans.
C: Humans are immeasurably inferior to god.
C: If a person is unaware of god’s status as immeasurably superior then the person does not know god
P: Proud people are those who see themselves as superior to other things and people
1: proud people cannot know god.
C: People who cannot know god have no business questioning him.

Now, there is an unstated premise in Lewis’ argument that proud people think they are superior to god, though he does not say this directly. Seeing yourself as superior to “people” or “things” does not necessarily mean you see yourself as superior to god, unless by “prideful” Lewis means, “seeing oneself as superior to everything, including god.” Of course, merely questioning god’s actions could be seen as seeing oneself as superior to god, and thus we skip merrily off into the flaming circle of unfalsifiability.

“That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellowmen.

What exactly is the difference between this kind of pride and the kind of pride you get when you believe god has a special plan for your life? Can a Christian explain this to me please? It’s okay though, Lewis has a test:

 I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that He had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good --above all, that we are better than someone else -- I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

This seems like one of those moral virtues a lot of Christians don’t follow, so how can I be sure that it really is a Christian virtue? This is, after all, supposed to be “mere” Christianity, that is, Christianity whittled down to its most basic parts. This virtue seems very hard for people to follow.

Lewis ends the chapter with a few points he wants his reader to be aware of, to guard against misunderstandings. Namely that pleasure in being praised is not pride, pride in your son is not the same as the vice pride, god is not worried about your pride due to his own pride in himself, and if you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

Insufficient Christianity: 18.1

For those of you just joining us, Flimsy and I have been reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and writing up a thorough critique of it in near-daily blog posts. If you want to find all of the posts we have written on this subject thus far, go to the bottom of this post and click the “C.S. Lewis” label. You can also read Mere Christianity online by clicking the link at the bottom of the post. This is my critique of chapter 18, which deals with pride/self-conceit.
Lewis says that Christian morals differ sharply from other morals in that Christians value humility as a moral good.

Lewis is absolutely, point blank wrong on this. Just to make sure we’re clear, here is what he says:

I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. … I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

It almost sounds here as if he is just saying that humility is different from the other Christian morals, but I do not think that is what he is saying. It is all in the wording of this sentence: “I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals.” The word “they” here refers to the subject of the sentence, “Christian morals”. In other words, Lewis has come to the point where Christian morals differ most sharply from other morals. This difference is the moral virtue of humility.

Humility is not a moral virtue that separates Christianity from other morals. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and other religions consider humility to be a central virtue.

What I find especially interesting is how theists can say things like this, heard on the local Christian radio station the other day: “Look at the vast, vast universe. In this universe, each individual is a tiny, speck. There are billions of humans in the world, countless organisms, and even more vast empty space in the universe for God to watch over. Yet God is specifically concerned about you. Every hair on your head is numbered. He knows every thought, every action, every cell on your body. He has a special plan laid out just for you, and he cares about you so very much. He knows you and he will hear every word you speak to him” while simultaneously calling themselves humble and atheists arrogant. I am at a loss to understand this.

Moving on, Lewis says:

“Does this seem to you exaggerated? If so, think it over. I pointed out a moment ago that the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in others. In fact, if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, `How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me,. or show off ?'

… Yes, what he said.

“The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. Now what you want to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive-is competitive by its very nature-while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not. The sexual impulse may drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl. But that is only by accident; they might just as likely have wanted two different girls. But a proud man will take your girl from you, not because he wants her, but just to prove to himself that he is a better man than you. Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more just to assert his power. Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride.

“The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But pride always means enmity - it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

Now, it seems to me that by specifically saying that Christians are right about pride, that Lewis is being prideful, especially given that he is a Christian. I suppose if he were actually correct, then this would not be the case. Then again, am I being prideful by pointing this out?

Stay tuned, I’ll conclude this chapter in the next Insufficient Christianity post.

Mere Christianity Online

Book reviews: give me ideas

We're more than halfway through Mere Christianity, which means we need to pick a new book to deconstruct.

We'd like to do something good. Something that theists find really convincing.

We need ideas. give us your ideas. Pwease?

Insufficient Christianity: 17.1

For those of you just joining us, Flimsy and I have been reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and writing up a thorough critique of it in near-daily blog posts. If you want to find all of the posts we have written on this subject thus far, go to the bottom of this post and click the “C.S. Lewis” label.

I read all of chapter 17 of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity and discovered that for the most part I have no real objections to most it, philosophical or ethical, but I do have a few points to make. Lewis lays out the idea of forgiveness in his convoluted and analogy-heavy way, going so far as to say some things about forgiveness that I wish people of all stripes would take to heart, namely:

“The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, `Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything - God and our friends and ourselves included - as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

I’ve noticed that in many circles where atheists and theists butt heads, there is a tendency to demonize the opposition or to paint them in the worst light possible. Atheists and theists often accuse each other of destroying the fabric of morality or persecution, demonizing their opponent into being a wholly selfish and cruel individual. I don’t particularly think this practice will necessarily lead to the slippery slope Lewis lays out, but I do think that the apparent pleasure some people seem to derive from the ability to demonize their opponent is the moral lowground.

Though I have characterized atheism and theism as being guilty of the same moral crimes, there is a distinct difference. Atheist groups do not have leaders all across the country to stand in front of groups of followers, proclaiming that religion will destroy America and that all theists are immoral. We have a few people who hold this opinion and want nothing more than the total annihilation of religion, but they are at the very end of the bell-curve of atheist beliefs about religion.

On the other hand, preachers and pastors regularly claim that atheism will destroy America and that atheists reject god so that they can be immoral without consequence. I know this because I have personally observed this to occur. Atheists continue to be vilified in the way Lewis describes above, and this is one of the major contentions I have with certain religious people. They have every right to hold the opinions they hold, but I cannot see this hatred as moral.

After this, Lewis goes on to talk about killing, stating that Jesus did not mean “thou shall not kill” but “thou shall not murder”

I’ve had this discussion with theists before about this particular commandment. Focusing just on human beings, killing means, “to take the life of another human being” and murder means “the wrongful or unjust killing of another human being”. Obviously the difference between the two is the wrongfulness of the act. Anytime you accuse someone of murder, you are accusing them of doing something wrong.

In my discussion with theists about whether or not the Christian god murdered people the Bible, theists will often argue that god did not murder people because the killing that occurred in the Bible is always justified by god, since god always does just things. God is therefore exempt from “murder” because god is incapable of being unjust. I find this line of reasoning disturbing.  I do not think it is morally acceptable to teach people that if they have god on their side, they are right and just, no matter what the opposition thinks.

To the theists that read my blog, I have a question for you: If your god spoke directly to you and told you to kill me, would you do it?

“My god would not say that” is not an answer – this is a hypothetical question, and so the point is not whether or not god would say that but what would happen if in a crazy world he did.

In which a book author notices me

A few days ago I wrote this post about refuting the Argument from Reason (AFR), which was championed by C.S. Lewis and others, including Dr. Victor Reppert, who wrote “C.S. Lewis’ Dangerous Idea”

Dr. Reppert has a blog, and he mentioned that I had written about the AFR, presumably because I had mentioned that I had been thinking about it due to reading the back cover of his book.

Here is what he had to say:

This atheist website offers a refutation of the AFR, going not from actually reading my book, but from the Wikipedia commentary.

It appears from the wording of this sentence that I am being criticized for not reading the book and using Wiki instead. While it is true that I did not read Dr. Reppert's book, when I posted the AFR using the layout Wikipedia used, it is not because Wikipedia was my sole source for the argument. I read the C.S. Lewis version, and I also consulted sources here here and here.

I suppose my post is not clear on this. Regardless, this is not an argument against my criticism, unless my criticism relies on an incorrect version of the argument.

The AFR is not solely laid out in Dr. Reppert's book, though from my admittedly didn't-read-the-book understanding, Dr. Reppert expands on it and provides several versions of the AFR. It is possible that I could be criticized for using the Wiki entry to discuss the AFR if one could show that the Wiki entry is an inferior source to quote from when laying out the argument. Interestingly, Dr. Reppert even presented the Wiki version of the layout on his own blog without criticism. Given that I consulted several sources including the blog of the author, I assumed that the Wiki version was apt.

In the comments section I was accused of failing to understand both Deductive reasoning and Begging the question, though not by the author but by a commenter:

Setting aside Ziztur's reworking of the argument for the moment, it seems to me as if she doesn't understand that all deductive arguments contain the conclusion in their premises. She also doesn't understand 'begging the question' very well, since the so-called instance of it she points out is anything but. That's pretty embarrassing: she doesn't understand what a deductive argument is, she set up a strawman, *and* she failed to knock it down!

A deductive argument is one in which it is thought that the premises provide a guarantee of the truth of the conclusion. In this way, the premises are given as support for a conclusion in such a way that if the premises are true than the conclusion must be true.

A circular argument (I.E. Begging the question) is one in which the conclusion is contained in the premise! That is, the conclusion occurs as one of the premises. 

One could describe a circular argument as deductive, but not all deductive arguments are circular (I.E. contain the premise in the conclusion) and a deductive argument which is circular fails precisely because the premise contains the conclusion. Restated, a circular argument is an invalid deductive argument precisely because the premise is contained in the conclusion.

What do you guys think? Should I be embarrassed? I welcome your wrath. Seriously. If I have failed to understand deductive reasoning and/or begging the question, I deserve your wrath.

Lastly, I would like to direct you to this alarmingly complete analysis of Dr. Reppert's book written by Richard Carrier, who wrote Sense & Goodness without God, and clearly has read the book. His analysis is approximately 90 pages long.

Insufficient Christianity: 15.2

Next in Lewis' discussion of Christian sexual morality, he explains (*note: not a rational explanation) why actual open discussion of sex is a bad thing:

We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not.

They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess.

So that's Lewis' theory - the solution to any problem with sex is to ignore it and don't talk about it, and it will go away.  He seems to have missed the fact that he himself is talking about sex in a book and on the radio.

Keep in mind that these twenty years, which Lewis describes as containing all the open discussion about sex that one could hope for, are the twenties and thirties (!).  Mere Christianity was first given on radio, during the forties, and published in book form in 1952.

First off, Lewis should explain some of his terms a bit better.  He says that sex is completely "in a mess."  What does he mean?  Does he mean that sex, when openly and rationally discussed, does horrible violence to Christian ideas about the biological urges of human beings?  If this is Lewis' assertion, I am inclined to agree with him, though Lewis obviously believes this to be a fault of our biological urges, while I conclude that it is a clear indictment of primitive and irrational Christian ethics.

On the other hand, does Lewis have more logical and meaningful criteria for determining that sex is "in a mess"?  He might mean that there are many more new cases of sexually transmitted diseases and infections than there should be.  He might mean that unwanted pregnancy is much higher than it should be.  He might even be referring to a potential negative emotional impact of sex, if one's actions are not well thought-out.  If this is the case, he really should look at the actual data a bit more closely.  As medical science advances, we will always be increasing our accuracy at diagnosing STD/I's.  Both STD/I's and unwanted pregnancy are far higher in areas that "hush up" sexual discussion (as per what Lewis seems to be suggesting), and are very low, by comparison, in areas and communities that do indeed "chatter about it all day long" with accurate sexual education and available contraceptives.

Modern people are always saying, 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.' They may mean two things. They may mean `There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure.' If they mean that, they are right. Christianity says the same. It is not the thing, nor the pleasure, that is the trouble. The old Christian teachers said that if man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater. I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body - which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.

Sad, isn't it?  He insists that it's not the pleasure of sex that's the trouble, while hanging the closest thing to a rational argument that he has on the claim that actions that are too far beyond their "biological purpose" are immoral.

Christianity certainly does not "thoroughly approve of the body."  Has Lewis even read the Bible?  His explanation is laughable - what does it matter if you believe that matter is good?  How does this even distinguish your religion in any way?  That's really the best you can do, to explain how your religion isn't against sex?  The best you can say is, "Well, Christianity does think that matter is a good thing . . ." (!)

It's funny that Lewis mentions Jesus as an example of how Christianity believes that the human body is good.  So let me get this straight:  God gives himself a specifically male body, presumably with male genitalia.  This man's claim to fame is that he is morally perfect in every way.  This moral perfection means, at least in part, that he completely ignores the existence of that genitalia for his entire life.  He never even thinks about having sex.  He even declares that thinking about a woman with any degree of lust is the same as committing adultery.  This is how your religion exalts sex?  That moral perfection means to never think a single lustful thought about our filthy human genitals for your entire life?

Our physical bodies in heaven will demonstrate that God loves biological organisms?  I've noticed a pattern, here, Lewis; we're not just talking about physical bodies, we're talking specifically about sex, remember?  You have to stop this vague equivocation of God allowing physical bodies, yet not allowing those bodies to be used for sex, and then desperately trying to imply that God and Christianity approves of sex.  What about Matthew 22:30?  "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven."  Whether or not God allows us to have physical bodies in heaven is irrelevant to our discussion about sex - Jesus himself says that sex and even marriage itself will simply not exist in heaven.  It amazes me that these were the best arguments Lewis could come up with to try to refute the obvious fact that Christianity, beginning with the Bible itself, uses irrational sexual guilt to maintain it's converts.

Lewis continues:

But, of course, when people say, 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,' they may mean 'the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of'. If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

No, no there wouldn't.  In no uncertain terms, there would be absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in any way, shape or form if someone derived immense pleasure from looking at pictures of food.  Seriously, just try to look at that last assertion objectively, instead of through the filtering lens of Christian sexual morality.

Finally, Lewis offers three reasons why it is so difficult to resist sexual immorality:

In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so `natural.' so `healthy,' and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. . . .  The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act of which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense.

Yes, such an assertion would be nonsense, but Lewis has concocted a horrendous straw man.  I know of nobody who seriously claims that we should immediately indulge every single sexual whim we might have at the drop of a hat.  The most unashamed sex-positive persons I know, the genuine self-described sluts and the biggest man-whores, are all well aware that one must often refrain from sex, and they do.  What people claim is that having sexual urges, and very frequent ones, is normal and healthy.  That does not mean that we claim that we should indulge every such urge without delay or any awareness of situational prudence.  No one I know has ever said such a thing.  Christian sexual morality, as stated in the Bible, claims that having lustful thoughts is immoral.  This is nonsense.

In the second place, many people are deterred from seriously attempting Christian chastity because they think (before trying) that it is impossible. But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility. Faced with an optional question in an examination paper, one considers whether one can do it or not: faced with a compulsory question. one must do the best one can.

A - Christian chastity almost certainly is impossible, at least for the vast majority of people.  Ever looked at research into the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education programs?  B - Lewis has miserably failed to show that the chastity question is, in fact, a compulsory question, or even whether it's on the test at all.

Thirdly, people often misunderstand what psychology teaches about 'repressions'. It teaches us that 'repressed' sex is dangerous. But 'repressed' is here a technical term: it does not mean 'suppressed' in the sense of 'denied' or 'resisted'. A repressed desire or thought is one which has been thrust into the subconscious (usually at a very early age) and can now come before the mind only in a disguised and unrecognizable form. Repressed sexuality does not appear to the patient to be sexuality at all. When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression.

A fair distinction, except for one thing:  In a great many cases, perhaps even the considerable majority of cases, Christianity ends up attempting to instill Chastity through the repression that Lewis warns of here, not through suppression of a conscious desire.  Indeed, the Bible supports this directly with Jesus' claim that even thinking "lust" is equivalent to actually committing adultery.  Actively resisting a person's conscious sexual desires would absolutely require the open dialogue that Lewis offered such dire warnings of earlier.  Lewis pretty clearly implied that we might want to "hush up" our sexual instinct; how on earth does he come to the conclusion that this will enable us to intelligently smother these instincts?  The entire concept is contrary to all reason.

And, of course, again, Lewis has completely failed to show that normal, healthy sexual urges should be resisted.


Mere Christianity Online

The Argument from Reason Refuted

The other day I came across the book “C.S. Lewis’ Dangerous Idea” by Victor Reppert which uses C.S. Lewis' argument from reason as a springboard for the entire contents of the book. I didn’t buy the book, but I wanted to write a post about the Argument from Reason.

The argument from reason was pretty aptly described by Wikipedia, so I will now quote shamelessly from it:

Argument from reason

Philosophers and scientists such as Victor Reppert, William Hasker and Alvin Plantinga have developed an argument for dualism dubbed the "Argument from Reason" and credit C.S. Lewis—who called it "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism," the title of chapter three of the book—with first bringing the argument to light in his book Miracles.

In short the argument holds that if, as thoroughgoing naturalism entails, all of our thoughts are the effect of a physical cause, then we have no reason for assuming that they are also the consequent of a reasonable ground. Knowledge, however, is apprehended by reasoning from ground to consequent. Therefore, if naturalism were true, there would be no way of knowing it—or anything else not the direct result of a physical cause—and we could not even suppose it, except by a fluke.
By this logic, the statement "I have reason to believe naturalism is valid" is self-referentially incoherent in the same manner as the sentence "One of the words of this sentence does not have the meaning that it appears to have." or the statement "I never tell the truth". That is, in each case to assume the veracity of the conclusion would eliminate the possibility of valid grounds from which to reach it. To summarize the argument in the book, Lewis quotes J. B. S. Haldane who appeals to a similar line of reasoning:

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
—J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds, page 209

In his essay Is Theology Poetry, Lewis himself summarizes the argument in a similar fashion when he writes:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.
—C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, page 139

Wikipedia lays out the argument in a confusing manner, so I’ve tried to rearrange it to be less confusing, though I don’t think I have really succeeded:

P. A being requires a rational process to assess the truth or falsehood of a claim (hereinafter, to be convinced by argument).
C. if humans are able to be convinced by argument, their reasoning processes must have a rational source.

P. Rationality cannot arise out of non-rationality. No arrangement of non-rational materials creates a rational thing
P. No merely physical material or combination of merely physical materials constitute a rational source.
C. No assertion that is true or false can come from a merely physical source.

P. The assertions of human minds are, in fact, capable of truth or falsehood
C. Human reasoning processes must have a non-physical, rational source.
C. Naturalism, the position that everything (including reason) arose out of physical processes, is false.

Even though the argument from reason may sound good, the argument is a good example of begging the question (I.E. circular reasoning). The premise (that physical sources cannot constitute a rational source) is the conclusion (That naturalism - which says physical sources can constitute a rational source - is wrong).  The reason that this is hard to see initially is due to the way in which the argument is laid out.

The central point of the argument is that merely physical sources cannot constitute a rational source, and therefore Lewis (and others) come to the conclusion that naturalism is self-refuting. Yet this premise is left without a proper explanation, and I don’t see why merely physical sources cannot constitute a rational source – in fact, this is one of the things that naturalism argues – that rationality can arise out of a purely physical source. A person employing the Argument from Rationality simply posits as a premise that it cannot, and then claims that this makes naturalism self-refuting. Obviously, we could refute nearly any worldview in this manner. Similarly, we could claim that any abstraction - from love to opinions to ideas to art - cannot arise out of purely physical sources and our argument would be no different. Why abstractions cannot arise out of physical sources is not explained, and I think they clearly can. It's easy to create an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem.

There is perhaps something that I have missed here. I’d really like to see a discussion on the Argument from Rationality in the comments section – I want to know what you guys think.

Sophistry is a joy!

Pie god

I’m reading the book Why God Won’t go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg, and I came across a fun passage:

Imagine, for instance, that you are the subject of a brain imaging study. As part of this study, you have been asked to eat a generous slice of homemade pie. As you enjoy the pie, the brain scans capture images of the neurological activity in the carious processing areas of the brain where input from your senses is being turned into specific neural perceptions that add up to the experiences of eating the pie: olfactory areas register the delightful aroma of apples and cinnamon, visual areas perceive the sight of the golden brown crust, centers of touch perceive the complex mix of crunchy and gooey textures, and rich, sweet, satisfying flavors are processed in the areas responsible for taste. The SPECT brain scan would show all this activity in the same way that it revealed the brain activity of the Buddhists and the nuns, as blotches of bright colors on the scanner’s computer screen. In a literal sense, the experience of eating the pie is all in your mind, but that doesn’t mean the pie is not real, or that it is not delicious.

Similarly, tracing spiritual experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness. If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality.

Clearly, in this situation the pie is the cause of the neurological activity. We know this because we can observe the pie and the causal relationship between pie and neuron firing.

I don’t have any reason to think neural imaging can disprove god, but it can prove that spiritual or mystical experiences can be created by the mind itself. Pie is unnecessary. Thus, neurology disprives the idea that something must exist outside the mind for it to have and effect on the mind.

Insufficient Christianity: 14.1

In Chapter 14 of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, Lewis opens by telling his reader that he is going to explain how to be a good Christian.

First, we should use the golden rule, “Do as you would be done by”. Of course, I think the silver rule is equally important to the golden rule: do not do to others as you would not have them do to you.

Before he goes into specifics of how to be a good Christian, he first explains that Christian morality is “a technique for putting the human machine right” and so in some ways is related to psychoanalysis. He says that psychoanalysis is good except for the odd philosophies that Freud added to it, but that the two techniques are doing two different things. 

“When a man makes a moral choice two things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The other is the various feelings, impulses and so on which his psychological outfit presents him with, and which are the raw material of his choice. Now this raw material may be of two kinds. Either it may be what we would call normal: it may consist of the sort of feelings that are common to all men. Or else it may consist of quite unnatural feelings due to things that have gone wrong in his subconscious. Thus fear of things that are really dangerous would be an example of the first kind: an irrational fear of cats or spiders would be an example of the second kind. The desire of a man for a woman would be of the first kind: the perverted desire of a man for a man would be of the second. Now what psychoanalysis undertakes to do is to remove the abnormal feelings, that is, to give the man better raw material for his acts of choice; morality is concerned with the acts of choice themselves.

Note here how he claims, among other things, that male homosexuality is perverted, wrong, and due to something screwed up in the subconscious.

He goes on to explain that psychoanalysts might be able to “fix” these “abnormalities”, but that individuals, having been fixed, might still make morally abhorrent decisions:

“Well it is just then that the psychoanalytical problem is over and the moral problem begins. Because now that they are cured, these two men might take quite different lines. The first might say, `Thank goodness I've got rid of all those doo-dahs. Now at last I can do what I always wanted to do - my duty to my country.' But the other might say, 'Well, I'm very glad that I now feel moderately cool under fire, but, of course, that doesn't alter the fact that I'm still jolly well determined to look after Number One and let the other chap do the dangerous job whenever I can. Indeed one of the good things about feeling less frightened is that I can now look after myself much more efficiently and can be much cleverer at hiding the fact from the others.' Now this difference is a purely moral one and psychoanalysis cannot do anything about it. However much you improve the man's raw material, you have still got something else: the real, free choice of the man, on the material presented to him, either to put his own advantage first or to put it last. And this free choice is the only thing that morality is concerned with.

Now, why can’t psychoanalysis change a person’s morality? Lewis makes this claim without any justification whatsoever. I really don’t see why counseling and therapy can’t change the moral outlook of an individual. But, Lewis needs to make this argument in order to contend that psychological abnormalities are a disease that can be cured, while sin is something for which people need to repent.

“The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.”

He continues on, explaining that if one is born with a psychological problem, and that psychological problem causes you to behave badly, god will not judge you for that. Instead, you will be judged after you die and your body falls off of you, revealing the “central man”.  Thus, god cares far more about what you think than what you accomplish. One might donate all of their free time to work in a soup kitchen but if they do so only to raise their chances of getting into heaven, it won’t count.

The problem with this is that people who sit at home praying and thinking good thoughts will believe that they are better off than people who are actively working to accomplish something. Personally, I’d rather they went to work in the soup kitchen, believing that they would be rewarded for doing so rather than staying at home praying and thinking godly thoughts. Yet Lewis thinks there is no middle ground – either you’re progressing toward being a heavenly creature in harmony with god or a hellish creature who hates god.

Because you’re either a heavenly or a hellish creature, any “mark” on your soul will lead you toward being a hellish creature unless you repent So, it doesn’t matter if you say, “Jesus Fucking Christ” or kill a village of orphans: these crimes are equally terrible for your soul. To Lewis, it’s all or nothing.

Lastly, he offers an entertaining unfalsifiable piece of uselessness:

“Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

This kind of thinking leads many people to ignore arguments, reason or facts in favor of their own self-rigorousness, claiming that things like homosexuality are so bad that a gay man is blind to how terrible his gayness is, and they can see how terrible it is only because they are so good.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 13.1

We’ve moved on from the other chapters of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and are now analyzing chapter 13.

Lewis begins chapter 13 by rightly pointing out that Jesus did not come to preach a brand new morality. This is something I really wish other people would understand, as I hear people claim that Jesus was a great moral teacher who had bright, fresh new ideas about how to treat other people that no one had ever heard before. Lewis says that great moral teachers don’t introduce new moralities: rather they reinforce morality. He goes on to say that Christianity is not morally relative: it was not meant as a detailed description of what was right for a particular culture in a particular time, instead, scripture is meant to work for all people in all places. In other words, scripture is unchanging morally and should be applied everywhere.

That’s fine, except that Christians today don’t really preach the morality found in scripture, and this is blindingly obvious to anyone who is being honest with themselves. Let me give you an example that isn’t from the Bible – perhaps the Christians reading this can understand what I mean if I use another set of principals as an example. Pretend, for a moment, that the Affirmations of Humanism is actually a 2,000 year old text that secular humanists use as their holy text and claim they get their moral principals from it. The Affirmations of Humanism state, “We cultivate the arts of negotiations and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding” and “we believe in the cultivation of moral excellence” and “We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.”

Now, imagine if you will, that nearly all humanists, humanist societies, and leaders in humanism proclaimed that humanists should use violence to prevent churches from speaking out against homosexuality by wiretapping church services and attacking congregations. Imagine that humanists insisted that they were still following the Affirmations of Humanism. Imagine of we said, “it is you who misunderstand the Affirmations of Humanism. You’re interpreting it wrong. We are interpreting it correctly. The Affirmations is absolutely correct and applied to everyone everywhere.”

Would you consider humanists to be following their own Affirmations of Humanism, or would you consider them to be interpreting the Affirmations of Humanism to fit their worldview?

Moving on, Lewis says “People say, 'The Church ought to give us a lead.' That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way.”

What?

He goes on to explain how he thinks the Bible says a Christian society should look:

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no 'swank' or 'side,' no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would he what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls 'busybodies'.

If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that sense, 'advanced,' but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old fashioned--perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the original plan is the plan itself. You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: every one is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest. That is why we do not get much further: and that is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can both say they are fighting for Christianity.

Leftist?! Socialist?! Gasp!

Lewis blathers on about the economy, saying that Christianity forbids the lending of money at interest, but forbidding the lending of money at interest might be wrong given that the stock market didn’t exist when scriptures were written. On one hand we have a book that supposedly is the giver of a universal, objective morality, but on the other hand, god didn’t foresee the stock market? If we can discount certain moral imperatives on account of god not foreseeing social changes, then we cannot claim that the Bible is the giver of a universal, objective morality.

The last point Lewis makes in this chapter is that we should all give to charity, stating, “Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce this kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality.”

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 12.2

This is the second part of our analysis of chapter 12 or Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. For an analysis of the whole book thus far, click the “C.S. Lewis” tab at the bottom of this post.

Lewis defines justice like this: “Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts. It is the old name for everything we should now call 'fairness'; it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, and all that side of life.”

Perhaps Lewis will talk more about justice later, because this is all he says about it in this chapter and this is a wholly inadequate discussion of justice. We cannot, for example, determine if his god is just based on this definition.  For instance, is it “fair” to give someone the maximal punishment possible (hell) for committing a submaximal crime (like the denial of god)? This is a sticking point for me. There is a lot we could say about justice; it is one of those ideas that we assume is good but have difficulty defining or explaining exactly why it is good.

Lewis defines fortitude as “include[ing] both kinds of courage--the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that 'sticks it' under pain. 'Guts' is perhaps the nearest modern English. You will notice, of course, that you cannot practise any of the other virtues very long without bringing this one into play.” He then goes on to explain that to label an individual as virtuous, it is not enough that they follow these virtues sometimes, but that they must follow them in general in a way that is above average, much in the same way that a good tennis player is above average in general, not that they make good shots every so often.

This is a note to all of the Ray Comfortian Christians out there: just because you have lied in your life does not make you a “liar”, any more than missing a shot at tennis once in awhile makes you a bad tennis player, or having wet the bed occationally as a child make you a “bed wetter”.

Lewis says that understanding the concept of what makes a person virtuous is important for three reasons:

“(1) We might think that, provided you did the right thing, it did not matter how or why you did it--whether you did it willingly or unwillingly, sulkily or cheerfully, through fear of public opinion or for its own sake. But the truth is that right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called a 'virtue,' and it is this quality or character that really matters. (If the bad tennis player hits very hard, not because he sees that a very hard stroke is required, but because he has lost his temper, his stroke might possibly, by luck, help him to win that particular game; but it will not be helping him to become a reliable player.)

This is interesting, given that theists often accuse atheists of being atheists so that they can be moral free agents, not held accountable by a god’s watchful eye. If we only behave because we know we are being watched, then we are behaving for the wrong reasons. What Lewis is talking about here is a post-conventional morality, to use Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.  I think that most people would agree that one should not behave morally merely because one wants to avoid punishment, yet when theists accuse atheists of denying god as another way of avoiding punishment, they are essentially sticking atheists in a childlike, pre-conventional morality.

“(2) We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.

This obviously implies that there are certain people Lewis’ god does not want.

“(3) We might think that the 'virtues' were necessary only for this present life--that in the other world we could stop being just because there is nothing to quarrel about and stop being brave because there is no danger. Now it is quite true that there will probably be no occasion for just or courageous acts in the next world, but there will be every occasion for being the sort of people that we can become only as the result of doing such acts here. The point is not that God will refuse you admission to His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character: the point is that if people have not got at least the beginnings of those qualities inside them, then no possible external conditions could make a 'Heaven' for them--that is, could make them happy with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness God intends for us.

These last two points are really Greek to me. I don’t really understand this idea of heaven. Can you leave once you get there? What will it be like, aside from “unfathomably awesome”? Will there be rules? Conflict? If, as Lewis says, we need to have evil in the world in order to understand good, won’t there be evil in heaven so we can understand how awesome it is?

Insufficient Christianity: 12.1

In Chapter 12 of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, Lewis divides up morality into 7 “virtues”. Four of these are “cardinal virtues” and three of them are “theological virtues”.

The four “cardinal virtues” are: prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude. Lewis describes these virtues in detail, beginning with prudence. Prudence, is defined as common sense, or “taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it.” He further explains that Christians should come to Christ with childlike faith, but at the same time not remain as children in intelligence. In effect, he is claiming that we should be skeptical in everyday matters. To illustrate this he gives the example of making sure a charity is not a fraud before you give to it.

Obviously, Lewis and I would agree that prudence is a virtue. I imagine that most people would do the same. I wonder though, why prudence seems to be applicable to everything except Christianity. Why is it that, to a Christian, Mohammad’s ascent to heaven on a winged horse is easily dismissed as an obvious myth, but Jesus’ ascension is not? How is it that Lewis can so easily dismiss deism using an argument that can be just as easily applied to his own religion?
Lewis also claims that “anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.”

This may be true, but I think it also depends on how you define intelligence and what kind of Christianity you follow. The more fundamentalist sects that teach blatant scientific falsehoods cannot do much for intelligence, unless you define intelligence as “.

Lewis moves on to temperance; “Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually means teetotalism. But in the days when the second Cardinal virtue was christened 'Temperance,' it meant nothing of the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion.”

So, we should indulge in pleasures with moderation. I can definitely jive with this. In fact, Flimsy and I are both teetotalers with respect to alcohol – drinking makes me tired and antisocial, while it makes him angry and sad. Lame, isn’t it?

Note, however, that while I consider moderation to be a virtue, in a way it is amoral – If you’re not infringing on anyone else’s rights or hurting anyone by being immoderate, then you’ve not done anything immoral. It is not immoderation itself that is immoral, but the possible consequences of immoderation could be immoral, depending on those consequences.

I like what Lewis says next:

“One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons--marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.”

Exactly.

Note, however, that Lewis does not justify this statement. I think I can do it for him. These things are not bad in themselves, but their consequences may be bad. For example: if we argue that eating meat is wrong because animals are tortured in factory farms, what we are really saying is that it is wrong to torture animals in factory farms. Eating meat has this consequence, but eating meat does not necessarily have to have this consequence.

Similarly, individuals sometimes argue that being gay is bad because gay people tend to have higher rates of suicide, STD’s, depression, etc. Being gay does not necessarily cause these things, but these things are a side effect of the negative attitudes of society toward homosexuality. The most amusing thing about the “homosexuals are depressed” argument is that they are depressed because society oppresses them, and someone actively working to oppress them is making the argument. Ironic. It’s like the United Murderers of Homosexuals Association (not a real association, thankfully) arguing that being gay is bad in part because gay people are more likely to be murdered.

Lewis moves on to explain that we should be temperate about everything, including mundane things like golfing and dogs. He says that his god is not deceived and will recognize intemperance anyway.

Of course, He is contradicting himself. He says on the one hand that Christians should not say that certain things (marriage, meat, beer, movies) are bad in themselves, but then says that intemperance is bad in itself without any justification.  It is the consequences that matter. One might point out that there are usually negative consequences to intemperance, and I won’t argue with that. There are, however, not necessarily negative consequences to intemperance.

Stay tuned, next up we’ll talk about justice, fortitude, and how to know if you are a virtuous person.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 10.2

Lewis finishes up chapter 10 by explaining what it is like to be a Christian: he says that Christians attempt to copy Christ, and that Christians have a “Christ-life in them that they can lose if they don’t make an effort to be Christian. He says that Christians can do wrong things, but when they do they can repent and pick themselves back up due to this “Christ-life”. Additionally, Christians are “Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or--if they think there is not--at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him.”

Lewis says that this “Christ-life” is not merely mental or moral, but that “Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts-that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. And perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea; it is more like evolution--a biological or super-biological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it."

There is an interesting point here. I have often heard theists ask where all of the matter in the universe came from, and when they find that any answers I give are insufficient, say that this proves their god “invented” the matter in the universe. Why is it that we assume “nothingness” is the natural state of things and “somethingness” (matter) being a state of affairs that needs explanation?

I also couldn’t help but notice that Lewis thinks evolution is a biological fact. Nice.

“Another possible objection is this. Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil?

Secret… society? I’d certainly like to know why the Christian god is said to disguise himself from people, but Christianity is absolutely not a secret society. Some Christians may think so (Flimsy felt that way when he was a Christian) but the Christian influence on our society is pretty pervasive. Perhaps this pervasiveness is not notices quite so acutely by a Christian as it is an atheist.

“Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world.

Obviously, at this point Lewis has ceased to argue for his god and is now asserting Christian doctrine without any justification. The rest of this chapter is a dire warning to convert now because we are all in the shadow of the apocalypse. I am unsure as to what kind of meaningful comments I could make.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose I were to set a rock down upon my kitchen table and proclaim that this rock would one day turn into a monster and invade us all, but we don’t know when. All I have to do is say, “one day, it will happen. It just has not happened yet. You’ll see” and I have created an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If I can use the same argument to argue that my rock is going to destroy the world as a theist uses to insist that his god is going to destroy the world, the argument is pretty useless.

“When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else--something it never entered your head to conceive -- comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

These same arguments could be made about any god who people believe is coming down to get us all one day, and thus they have no strength when applied to this particular god. There are people who believe aliens will destroy the world one day and so our best bet is to join their side. If we used this same argument, claiming that aliens are going to invade without disguise to destroy the world and so we better get on their side, would this argument be convincing? No.

Insufficient Christianity: 10.1

This is a critique of chapter 10 of the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. You can find the critique of this book so far by clicking the “C.S. Lewis” tab at the bottom of this page. You can also find an online copy of the book by clicking the link at the bottom.

The first half of this chapter is interesting because Lewis lays out two bits of apologetics: one a very popular apologetics argument and one less so.  We’ll start with the first.

In this argument, Lewis points out that this process of atonement and receiving a “new life” as a Christian involves at least these three things: belief, baptism, and partaking in Communion/Mass/Lord’s Supper. He says that he really does not see why these three particular things are the conductors of new life. He likens this to sex: when people are children, they don’t know how sex works, and they could never guess that mommy and daddy bonking each other nine months before they were born produced them. It seems so odd to children when they learn of conception that many of them react in disbelief. Lewis says, “Now the God who arranged that process is the same God who arranges how the new kind of life-the Christ life--is to be spread. We must be prepared for it being odd too. He did not consult us when He invented sex: He has not consulted us either when He invented this.”

To me, this argument could be used to explain the actions of any religious practice – and if you can use an argument to explain the actions of any religious practice, it has no authority as an argument. The issue we take with the Christian religion in particular is not that it is odd, but that its followers can use it to justify unethical behaviors. To use a recent example: when you believe so strongly in your religion that you are willing to let your own children die for it (in the case of parents neglecting medical care for their children in favor of prayer), yet you believe it is immoral to allow certain sounds to escape your mouth because those sounds insult your god, we consider your moral compass to be fundamentally broken by your religion.

The truth is that the universe is unmistakably odd. We humans only understand the universe within the narrow band created by the lumpy tissue and the exchange of sodium ions from one area to the next within our skulls. When I call religion odd, this is not because it is oddness atop a mountain of evidence. It is because it is odd, and that oddness stands alone. If there were compelling evidence, I would gladly change my mind and shake the hands of the individuals responsible for such change. If I believed in god I would fully expect his ways to be beyond my understanding. Alas, the crux lies in the premise.

In the second argument, Lewis says that he believes Jesus is god due to his authority. He says that most of the mundane things we believe in we believe on authority, and so believing Jesus is no different:

“Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority--because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.

We’ve heard this argument, or one like it, from various sources. The central problem I see with this argument is that while things like New York or the Solar system or blood flow can be measured objectively, the claims of religion cannot. It is easy for me to accept that New York exists (having not been there) for several reasons:

1. New York is a city. St. Louis is also a city (that I live in), so I know things like cities exist. I have been to many other cities besides St. Louis. I have seen many pictures and videos of New York, and know many people who have visited New York. It is no impeccable feat of faith to accept that New York exists.

Now, let’s pretend that I currently am incapable of observing New York in any way. If 30% of the world told me New York existed, but was floating 15 feet above Rhode Island, 20% of the world told me New York existed, but was actually an ancient sunken city, 10% of the world told me New York existed, but was a part of every city, 10% of the world told me New York existed but only in my heart, 10% of the world told me that New York was actually called Planet X and was a mystery planet in our solar system we could not actually observe at all, and they all told me that I could not see New York unless I really believed in New York with my whole heart, I’d side with the 20% remaining who had come to the conclusion that there is no New York.

2. If someone whom I trust told me something that was contrary to empirical evidence, I would not trust them, no matter how great an authority figure they were. I trust Flimsy very much. If he told me he had Taco Bell for lunch, I would not ask for evidence. If he came home from work one day insisting that he had been abducted by aliens in the Taco Bell drive through during lunch, I would not believe him. This is because I apply a standard of evidence to extraordinary claims: namely that the more extraordinary the claim, the greater wealth of evidence such a claim must have before I accept it.  We apply this standard all the time: if a telemarketer calls us, we know the offer is probably too good to be true. If someone claims to have discovered the cure for cancer, we require evidence. We understand that our senses deceive us: this is why we do not think our dreams are real. We might not know for sure what will happen if we stop paying our mortgage, but we do not stop paying it simply because we cannot know for sure whether or not it will matter.

3. I believe in evolution because I have studied the theory, and the theory makes sense. I need no authority other than my rational mind and observation.

4. History is another matter. I do not blindly accept histories as Lewis says, neither do historians. History is far more complicated than simply accepting things we see written. I would not accept a history if it contained things contrary to physical laws or empirical evidence. There are two stories of Nazi Germany: I accept the one with evidence. I understand that fables, legends and stories are told along with histories. How do we determine which is which? How is a talking wolf less extraordinary than a talking serpent? How is it that a story of a man walking on water is believable, but a story of a man on a flying carpet unbelievable?

5. Finally, other people will claim that they believe in their gods on authority. What do we do with a spiritualist who believes in the authority of her spirit guides, the new-ager who believes in the authority of her psychics, the Muslim who believes in the authority of Mohammad, the conspiracy theorist who believes in the authority of the Holocaust denier? I would imagine that Lewis might look at the claims of these authority figures and analyze them based on reason, observation, empirical evidence, and the like. He would absolutely apply some measure of standard to the claims made by other religions, yet in this one instance when his religion is on the line, these standards do not apply. It is not unreasonable to apply the same standard by which we judge other claims to our own claims.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 9.2

Here is part II of my critique of chapter 9 of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. For those of you out of the loop, we’ve been going through Mere Christianity argument by argument and deconstructing them; partly because no one else has done this, and partly because I need a hobby and this is it.

So far, Lewis has led us down a rabbit hole of non-sequiturs and profound-sounding but inapplicable metaphors. At this point he is running with scissors, and those scissors are his religion.

He continues on by defining “repentance” using the Lewis Dictionary of Christianity (not a real book) as: surrendering to his god by realizing just how wrong and worthless you are so that you may start your life over again because that is the only way to fix all the fucking up you’ve done. Apparently this involves unlearning self-will. It sounds quite a bit like an Alcoholic’s Anonymous 12-step program to me. Apparently though, there is a catch. Once you read this catch, you’ll see why it is a catch.

“And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person--and he would not need it.

Here is why Lewis thinks god cannot just do the repenting himself: “Now if we had not fallen, that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all--to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has; this thing, in His own nature, He has not."

So who might this perfect person be, who can actually repent perfectly? Obviously it can’t be god, because god doesn’t suffer and die. Hmm… I think his name starts with J.

Sometimes, honestly, I marvel at the silliness of the ideas of repentance and atonement. I wish someone could explain to me why an omni-powerful god would create beings in his image, recognize that they are all horribly flawed by nature, send himself down to his creation as one of them to atone to himself for the sins of the things he created, and then reject them if they don’t believe he did this. This is supposed to be flawless, perfect, beautiful godly justice. The compass of justice, I bend thee.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 9.1

C.S. Lewis opens the 9th chapter of Mere Christianity with the Lord, Liar or Lunatic argument. Lewis popularized this argument, which goes something like this:

P: Jesus claimed to be God.

Q: one of the following must be true:
1.    Jesus was not god, but believed he was (Lunatic)
2.    Jesus did not believe he was god, but spoke as if he did. (Liar)
3.    Jesus is god (Lord)

C: Jesus either is god, or is neither great nor moral.

This argument has been criticized by theologians and non theologians alike. First, the premise assumes that there was a historical Jesus and that said historical Jesus claimed to be god. The argument is supposed to prove Jesus was god by disproving that he was a liar or a lunatic, leaving Lord as the only choice. Of course, the classic argument usually leaves out two unstated premises: that Jesus was both perfectly moral and perfectly good. Thus, if he was a lunatic he could not have been perfectly good, and if he lied he could not have been perfectly moral. In a sense, this argument is sort of circular, as in the premise, Jesus both claims to be god and is also perfectly good and moral, yet any being “perfectly good and moral” would be either some kind of deity or at least a really amazing human.

The three choices set up a false trilemma, given that it leaves out a third option – Legend.  It is not necessary to choose between only the three options Lewis gives. Yet this is exactly what Lewis claims, saying, “I have to accept the view that He was and is God.” There is no reason to accept this view, as we can easily reject both the premise, the structure of the argument, and the conclusion.

The rest of this chapter is essentially an explanation of the basic ideas of Christianity. At this point, is seems like objectivity has been tossed out the window and I doubt it will return. Lewis moves on to claim (without evidence to back up his assertions) that the purpose of Jesus coming to earth was obviously to teach, but also to suffer and be killed.

 “The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. … A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

This is the antithesis to critical thinking. When one engages in critical thinking, they begin from a neutral or evidenceless position and then proceed to use observation, critical thinking, reason and experimentation to arrive at a conclusion. If one begins with one’s conclusion already firmly seated in place, proving your conclusion is easy – you simply find evidence that corresponds to your already established beliefs while ignoring or rationalizing away evidence that does not support your already established beliefs. Claiming that one cannot know how Christ works until one accepts that Christ works sets the believer up in such a way as he cannot be disproven. Any evidence, logic or argument the skeptic might use is invalidated by the mere fact that he or she is a skeptic.

The same argument can be used to prove the claims of any other deity. I might say that one cannot understand how Allah’s mighty power works unless one accepts Allah. I doubt this argument would hold any water for Lewis.

In the empirical world, I do not have to accept a theory before I can understand how it works. I may accept a theory before I understand it, but this does not mean I have to accept a theory before I understand it. Rather, my understanding of how it works (if it works) will lead me to its acceptance.

Lewis claims that all we have to do is believe that Jesus was killed, that his killing washed away our sins, and that in his dying he disabled death itself, and any theories as to why or how this insanity works is entirely secondary. Yet, he feels that they are worth looking at. Thus we look:

“The one most people have heard is the one I mentioned before-the one about our being let off because Christ had volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us. Now on the face of it that is a very silly theory. If God was prepared to let us off, why on earth did He not do so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all that I can see, if you are thinking of punishment in the police-court sense. On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take 'paying the penalty,' not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of 'standing the racket' or 'footing the bill,' then, of course, it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend.

So being “punished for our sins” is, according to Lewis, not so much a punishment but a paying of a debt for our sins. But there is a problem. Lewis fails to explain why the punishment for our sins is eternal damnation, and why a perfectly innocent person had to pay said debt. What's more, while we can pay a debt by having someone else pay our debt for us, we cannot pay a debt of imprisonment by having someone else go to prison on our behalf. Is hell more like a prison or more like owing someone a "debt"? I'd say it is much more like a prison.

Honestly, the whole thing is completely arbitrary. If I were god, it would be as if I were creating an inescapable cosmic game of cards in which if any of my card-playing creation draws a card, they have to quack like a duck forever. This is okay though because I am going to create a version of myself to go play card with you who is incapable of drawing cards, and they will quack like a duck once and pay the quacking debt for everyone, but only if they believe. On the face of it, the atonement is a very silly theory, I agree. Explaining that the “debt” is not like a punishment but more like someone “footing the bill” does not make it make more sense, as it is so patently absurd to begin with.

Also, I should point out that Lewis continues to fail at providing evidence that a god, much less his god, exists.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 8:1

For those of you just joining us, here’s a recap: we’re thoroughly dissecting C. S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity in excruciating detail. This is chapter 8. The previous chapters can be found by going to the bottom of this post and clicking the “C. S. Lewis” label. You can also find an online copy of Mere Christianity using the link at the bottom of this post.

Chapter 8 is amusingly titled, “The Shocking Alternative”. Of course, what Lewis is referring to here is an alternative to atheism and deism. The shock, you’ll surmise, is that the alternative is Christianity.

Lewis begins this chapter by stating that Christians ‘believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World.” He says that a skeptic will then ask if the existence of evil is in accordance with the Christian god’s will. His answer is: free will allows for evil. He says this is akin to a mother’s will being for her children to clean up after themselves, but sometimes they don’t. 

That’s all well and good, except that a mother would not punish a kid who didn’t clean up after himself with eternal hell and separation from mommy because the kid didn’t do or think the correct thing while calling this act “perfect justice”. But, Lewis has not made this claim yet, so I am merely speculating that as a Christian he believes in Hell and in his god’s perfect justice.

As an aside, I don’t think Lewis’ definition of free will is not a counter-causal definition, so I’ll tentatively accept that (somewhat simplified) definition.

“Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible.

Doesn’t Lewis’ concept of god throw a wrench into the idea that he can’t imagine a creature which is free but cannot be bad? Does Lewis’ god have free will? If so, then wouldn’t it also be free to be bad? If having free will means you have the capacity to be bad, then Lewis’ god either does not have free will, or it has the capacity to be bad.

“Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Lewis has this backward. Love/joy/goodness seems to be a consequence of our capacity to be good or bad, not the purpose of being able to be good or bad. Lewis goes on with an unsupported assertion that his god wants us to be freely united to him and each other and that this union is really super awesome. He gives no rationale.

Lewis’ next point is that we can’t argue with the things god says because he is the source of our reasoning power so we can’t be right and his god wrong. Of course, this conclusion only works if we agree with all of Lewis’ other prior premises and conclusions, namely that morality proves there is a god, and that said god is the Christian god, only god, and that the Christian god created everything and is all good (despite the fact that we don’t know if this god has free will or not). Lewis has failed to support that there is a god. He has failed to support that his god is the source of our reasoning powers, and he has failed to support that his god is all good. If we are incapable of judging his god’s actions, how do we know he is good?

This argument can also be applied to any god and is thus completely useless in proving anything. I could say, for example, that we can’t question the actions of Allah because Allah created us and is all good. When you have magic and supernaturalism on your side, you can prove anything.

Lewis goes on to talk about Satan’s sin of wanting to put himself first, be the center, and be god.  He asserts that Satan taught this sin to all of humanity. Because humans think they can “invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God,” they have created all of the bad things in the world – “money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery”. All of this is due to trying to find something outside of god to make us happy.

I have to wonder why Lewis even needs Satan (who he supposes exists without any proof whatsoever) to explain all of this. If god gave us the capacity to either be good or be bad, aren’t we just doing what god gave us the capacity to do? We don’t need a superpowerful bad guy to explain that we screw things up.

Lewis goes on to say that his god’s solution to this was 1. consciousness. 2. Jesus!

If you think I am skipping huge chunks of his book in which he provides a decent rationalization for this, you’re dead wrong. He doesn’t.

The “shock” of this chapter is that this Jewish dude showed up and told people he was god. Lewis describes this as “quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.” Apparently some Jewish guy showing up claiming to be god and capable of forgiving any sins is so asinine that it must be true. Otherwise, this is pure silliness.

My vote is for pure silliness. Lewis is actually arguing (for the second time in his book) that if someone says something incredibly absurd, the absurdity makes it more likely to be true.
You know, atheism seems patently absurd to lots of people…

Mere Christianity online

Dennett and sugar taste

I have been re-reading Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon due to having scheduled a book club meeting, and I came across an idea that caught my eye:

Coevolution endorsed the bargain between plant and animal, sharpening our ancestors' capacity to discriminate sugar by its "sweetness." That is, evolution provided animals with specific receptor molecules that respond to the concentration of high-energy sugars in anything they taste, and hard-wired those receptor molecules to the seeking machinery, to put is crudely. People generally say that we like some things because they are sweet, but this really puts it backward: it is more accurate to say that some things are sweet (to us) because we like them! ... There is nothing "intrinsically sweet" (whatever that would mean) about sugar molecules. (pp. 59)

So sugar molecules aren't sweet, we just interpret them as being sweet. Rather, sugar molecules are valuable forms of energy, and we've evolved to prefer valuable sources of energy, so now sugar molecules make our brainmeat go, "Yum! Eat that!"

Now, of course, this powerful instinct is working against us, given that food is so plentiful.

Insufficient Christianity: 5:3

To finish up chapter 5 of Mere Christianity, Lewis continues:

Now my third point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing.

It still does not make sense to me, because the “fact” described herein are not face – merely rationalization. Lewis has arrived at this point by believing Christianity is true at the outset, and then proceeding to rationalize his beliefs if a five-chapter circular argument.

 Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power--it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

In that case, since Lewis has failed to prove there is an absolute moral law given by god, Christianity will continue to not make much sense to me. 

When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor.

Good doctors don’t treat illness unless they have solid evidence to back up their diagnosis. If Lewis were a doctor, he would assume before you walked in that you had a broken leg, and then based on his diagnosis, rationalize that all of your symptoms fit that of “broken leg”.

When you have realised that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God.

Ha! I’ve had some people tell me that “god became a man to save man from the disapproval of god” misunderstands Christianity (Actually, I put it like, “god sent down himself to have his creation kill himself as a sacrifice to save his creation from himself”) yet here Lewis uses similar phrasing and tells his reader that Christianity can explain this oddness. What he does here is assume that doctrines of Christianity are true and that the Christian religion can explain it.
A person of another religion could say the same thing – that the doctrine of their religion is true and that their religion is the best explanation of said truth. This would probably be quite unconvincing to Lewis, or any other Christian, for that matter.

All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts--to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer.

As I have explained already, sometimes it does not make sense to ask those questions in the first place. 

And they are very terrifying facts. I wish it was possible to say something more agreeable. But I must say what I think true. Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort.

 But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion.

I might say the same thing about the conclusion of atheism. Of course, that woould not really add anything to the persuasiveness of atheism, as you could say the same thing about any religion, worldview, etc.

Insufficient Christianity: 5:2

Lewis continues chapter five of Mere Christianity…

And we have not yet got as far as a personal God--only as far as a power, behind the Moral Law, and more like a mind than it is like anything else.

To sum up Lewis’ points thus far.

1.    god made the universe happen
2.    god gave us morals
3.    god is actually really scary and not nice to people

Lewis goes on to assume that the thing that produced 1, 2 and 3 is a “mind” or sorts. Why? Why not “minds”? There is no reason to assume that 1, 2 and 3 come from a single mind – this could have all come about as a result of the meddling of ten eternal beings working at an eternal shop of infinity. They could be a group of new hires proving their worth during their probationary period by creating a prototype universe. There is no reason to assume, even if you accept that the universe and moral laws came from somewhere outside the universe, that we know anything at all about the thing(s) that are outside the universe. It is a wholly unjustified premise that only comes about because Lewis is not engaging in skepticism in which he lets logic and reasoning lead where it may. His logic and reasoning clearly has a goal and thus falls squarely in the category of “rationalization” – and you know that one can rationalize anything one wants if one tries hard enough. Let’s move on…

But it may still be very unlike a Person.. If it is pure impersonal mind, there may be no sense in asking it to make allowances for you or let you off, just as there is no sense in asking the multiplication table to let you off when you do your sums wrong. You are bound to get the wrong answer. And it is no use either saying that if there is a God of that sort--an impersonal absolute goodness--then you do not like Him and are not going to bother about Him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on His side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation.

What Lewis is saying here is that since humans ask god for things, claim that we don’t like god, that god must be a personal god. He is right – it doesn’t make sense for people to ask an impersonal god for things, much like it doesn’t make sense to ask a doorknob to save your marriage. I think that Lewis intends for the reader of this paragraph to think, “Oh! I ask god to forgive me, so he clearly must not be an impersonal force, because otherwise my asking makes no sense. So god must be a personal god”. Of course, you could also use the same reasoning to conclude that the doorknob is not an inanimate object, but a personal force.

You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do.

A lot of people wonder how a being composed of absolute good can create beings that are so imperfect it hates most of what they do.

This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless.

Why? I hear this all the time from people and do not understand how they can come to the conclusion that unless there is an absolute good, all the good we do is pointless. It just does not follow. It seems to assume, perhaps, that our eventual goal is to get as close to absolute goodness as possible. If we build a sandcastle, is our goal to build a cool sandcastle or to get closer and closer to the ultimate absolute sandcastle?

I think that this is a fundamental flaw in thinking – assuming there is a “perfect” or “absolute” version of abstract concepts like “goodness” or “love”. This is another kind of reification – assuming that an abstract concept (goodness) must possess a certain abstract property (perfection). This is essentially a version of Plato’s Theory of Forms.

But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we must need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger -according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way.

This is definitely a “religious jaw”.

Why Evolution Is True; and cumulative selection

The other day, I picked up Why Evolution Is True by Dr. Jerry Coyne from the library. A few days later I had finished it, and a few days after that, I want to write a few lines on what I think about it.

The book’s aim—as very straightforwardly implied by the title—is to lay out in concise form a reasonably comprehensive (and comprehensible) body of evidence for evolution. As such, it spans a pretty wide range of areas—biogeography, palæontology, genetics, and so forth. At only ~300 pages, it has to go at a pretty good pace, and it does—but it’s largely a good thing. The book is accessible, but not dumbed down; it is brief and concise, but not superficial. It lays out a huge breadth of evidence with plentiful references (many internet references) for those who want more depth.

My brief opinion is: This is one of the best, and possibly the best book I have read in terms of laying out precisely what the title claims: Why Evolution Is True.
 
The funny thing is, when I put it down, my mind was actually full of gripes. I was constantly wondering about the tone—it wasn’t very technical, but couldn’t it have been simplified in places? I now think that, yes, it could have, but I don’t think it would have been to its advantage. It’s simple enough to be accessible to laymen, and that is enough. Let’s not pretend that it isn’t science, don’t give the impression of condescending, and don’t sacrifice precision by avoiding scientific terminology altogether.

I also found one argument missing that I might have liked to see—one that Richard Dawkins has made wonderfully lucid in more than one book—that of the difference between “single-step” and cumulative selection: The counter to the old “747 in a junkyard” argument¹. In fact, its omission irked me very greatly because I think it is such an excellent counter to fairly common creationist/cdesign proponentsist objections to evolution by natural selection as being statistically impossible.

However, I think that the reason why this irked me so very greatly may be because virtually every other persuasive argument is either explained or alluded to; and the focus of the book is, after all, on evidence rather than argument. If someone near you suffers under the delusion that evolution is not a fact, and the neo-Darwinian synthesis is not a very solid scientific theory, you could scarcely do better than to recommend this book to them—perhaps with an explanation of cumulative selection to solidify the deal; or have them graduate to Dawkins, e.g. The Blind Watchmaker, which takes a complementary approach of theoretical argument (though on a very accessible level!) as contrasted to Coyne’s straightforward presentation of evidence.

---

¹ The “747 in a junkyard” argument stems from this quote by astronomer Fred Hoyle:

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

Hoyle was not a creationist—but never mind his motivation. Creationists have hijacked this quote and use it to point out a perceived implausibility of evolution. The chance of something so complex as an eye, for instance, arising by chance, is of course minuscule. How can “Darwinists” claim that it arose purely by chance? The answer is, of course, that they don’t, because nobody thinks that the eye sprung forth fully formed from a single mutation, but rather incrementally, and if it was improbable, it was a matter of cumulative selection.

What do I mean by “cumulative probability”? I mean that we can build up on past successes. Take, for example, a coin flip. The odds of getting heads on a single flip is ½. The odds of two flips simultaneously resulting in heads are ½×½ = (½)² = ¼. Three heads at once? ½×½×½ = (½)³ = ⅛. —And so on. The odds of, say, 100 heads all at once are 1 in 2¹⁰⁰: Less than one in a thousand billion billion billion. If we flip our 100 coins once a second, it will take us on the order of a million billion billion years to flip all 100 heads at the same time. That’s about 100,000 billion times the age of the universe. This is single-step selection: We’re looking for a specific result, and we need to get it in a single step: The simultaneous flip of 100 coins.

But natural selection doesn’t require this. The theory of evolution by natural selection predicts that any helpful change will be “saved up” and passed down to further generations—it doesn’t have to be perfect—it just has to be an improvement, however small. If we flip 100 coins, we’ll almost certainly get some heads—the odds of getting 0 are the same as getting 100, and that will virtually never happen. We’ll probably get about 50 heads. Now we’re allowed to save them, and only have to re-flip the 50 tails. Probably about half of them will be heads. —And so forth. If we assume that we get half heads, half tails every time, we’ll have 100 heads—on average—after 7 flips or so.

You will note that 7 is rather less than a thousand billion billion billion. We can now accomplish the task of flipping 100 heads in about 7 seconds rather than 100,000 billion times the age of the universe (if we can sort through them quickly enough…). The argument is vastly simplified, and obviously none of this applies at all closely to biology.

What should be clear—and the point of the argument—is that there is a huge (in fact, a geometrical) difference between single-step and cumulative selection.

Insufficient Christianity: 5:1

Lewis opens chapter 5 by explaining that some people might be annoyed that he has tricked them into listening to a “religious jaw”. He says that he is not – that he is simply starting at the beginning and following the rabbit hole of reason where it leads. Thus, he asserts he is not coming to a conclusion that his god exists based on any religion.

…we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam. And I want to make it quite clear that what we find out on our own steam is something that gives us a shock. We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds.

Alas, Lewis has failed to prove that there is a somebody. The universe is not evidence that the universe was created, and Lewis does not provide any evidence that it is, aside from the moral argument used previously. I’ve explained this in previous posts, so I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Let’s consider for a moment the beauty of the universe. It certainly is beautiful, but this says more about our perceptions than it does about the universe itself. I think that the chaos and destruction of an abandoned building is beautiful. But the beauty of peeling paint and broken windows does not mean that the abandoned building is a product of an intentional artist. It’s just there, being taken over by various forces: nature, physics, vandals. An abandoned building is a far more apt metaphor for the universe than a painting.

The comment about this “somebody” being merciless and no friend to man is interesting. Surely, the universe is an inhospitable place. Again though, it depends on your perspective. As to the “somebody” being the giver of moral law, I’ve already refuted that.

And this [the moral law] is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.”

The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data. The idea that you can find out more about a man by listening to conversation than by looking at a house he has built is pure speculation and depends on what information you are seeking. I can gather plenty of information about someone by looking at the house they have built –how skillful a craftsman they are, what kind of eye they have for design, how much thought they put into finer details, how they think a house should look, etc. If I observe them actually building the house, I can glean much more information – how fast they work, whether they hire outside help, what kinds of tools they prefer, how they hold a hammer, how often they take breaks for food, how they solve problems, and so forth. A person cannot tell me how they balance on two feet with conversation.  The only thing that listening to myself tells me for certain are things about myself. The fact that I have morality and know that I have morality is not good evidence that there is a creator any more than the fact that someone believes they were abducted and raped by aliens means they were abducted and raped by aliens, especially in light of a lack of externally observable evidence. So what Lewis is saying is that even though we can’t observe god, we know he is there because we intuit him based on the fact that we have morality.

Now, from this second bit of evidence we conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given by Christianity and some other religions, that God is 'good'.

This simply does not follow. So, let’s pretend for a second that I accept Lewis’ arguments that the universe was created, and that said creator put morality in our heads. It really does not follow that this creator is intensely interested in our morality. Could he not just have set our moral programming on autopilot so he could go off to do something else? Once again, this is like reaching into an infinite cosmic grab bag with an infinite number of prizes (which contains prizes we cannot begin to imagine) and knowing that you will pick a yo-yo. We could argue that sexual desire it outside of humanity in the same way Lewis argues that morality is outside humanity. The creator also put intense sexual desires in our heads, so the creator must also be intensely concerned with matters of sex, so by Lewis’ reasoning, his god must be a nymphomaniac. Even accepting the premise that there is a god and that said god put morality into us, it does not follow that this god is good, as this god also put everything else which is “outside man” into our head, not to mention all of the things inside the heads of animals, whatever those may be.

But do not let us go too fast here. The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is 'good' in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic. There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft. It is no use, at this stage, saying that what you mean by a 'good' God is a God who can forgive. You are going too quickly. Only a Person can forgive.

Only a person can forgive? I’d really like some supporting evidence for this. Yet, this assertion is made with no justification whatsoever.

Since god gave us morality, and morality is not easy stuff, then god must not be easy stuff either. Why not? Why couldn’t god have given us morality, but be forgiving of everyone, or be easy and soft? Again, Lewis offers no justification and simply asserts ideas as facts, paving the way endlessly and convoluted toward Christianity. Is this a "religious jaw"? Absolutely.

Ref: Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 4.2

Lewis continues chapter 4 of Mere Christianity…

Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make

I have earlier rejected the premise that men did not make the moral law – there is no reason to assume that we haven’t, any more than we make any other social law.

 Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he? For his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do.

We do not need to know exactly what other beings think in order to come to a conclusion about their morality. We can and have obtained information about “inside knowledge” from observation of the behaviors of other animals that behave in a moral way. We can infer from animal species what behaviors they “ought to do” by using reason to determine which behaviors will produce whichever outcome. Lewis provides no justification for why something outside man cannot get even the “slightest evidence” of moral law. We can, in fact, get more than slight evidence of the morality of other animals by studying them. Thus, Lewis fails at establishing that morality exists outside of the populations that possess it.

 The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it.

But certainly that power has an effect on the universe –and effect which can be observed. If that power has no effect which we can observe, then that power is essentially irrelevant. How does one determine that inobservable effect exist? How do we know what those effects are if we are unable to observe them? I like to use this analogy: determining that we know the effect of an entity that escapes observation is rather like reaching into an infinite cosmic grab bag with an infinite number of prizes (which contains prizes we cannot begin to imagine) and knowing that you will pick a yo-yo. Any sort of attributes we can claim to an inobservable entity is nonsensical.

So, Lewis is saying we cannot use facts to determine whether or not the universe just IS, or whether or not the universe was created. He says we cannot use facts to determine the ISness or the CREATEDness of the universe. His justification is that since we cannot say anything about the morality of a given population by simply observing them (we can), that the universe works in the same way – the creator of the universe must be outside of the universe, just as morality must be outside humans. But morality isn’t outside humans. It is outside of individual humans, but it is more likely a product of evolution, the fact that our species is a population of individuals, and culture than anything else. Additionally, evolutionary psychology provides a better, if not complete, picture of how morality may have evolved. The book “The Moral Animal” by Robert Wright is a good start.

Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe--no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house.

I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around how this metaphor is supposed to work. If there is a controlling power outside the universe, it can show itself to use by having an observable effect on the universe – for example, if it wrote its name in million foot tall neon letters across the sky just so that we could see it every night of the week, “MADE BY GOD”. A controlling power outside the universe could reach its metaphorical hand into the universe and poke us in the face.

The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.

This statement is absolutely unjustified. Why is this the “only” way? How is this different from the metaphor above? This sure seems like an example of the architect of the house being a wall to me. So to sum up…

1.    Morality is separate from humans
2.    Either the universe IS, or was created.
3.    We can’t observe a creator as a fact
4.    The creator only shows itself by giving humans morality

Lewis’ Conclusion: we have morality, therefore there is a god.

My conclusion: we have morality, therefore we have morality.

Ref:  Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 4.1

Lewis begins Chapter 4 of Mere Christianity with this:

I now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live in. Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one chance in a thousand something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive; and then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us.

Before I begin explaining why this is a strawman misrepresentation of the materialist view, I will note that there is a note at the end of this chapter wherein Lewis explains that these are not the only two views on origins. Now…

The question as to how matter and space “got here” (cosmology), is a separate question from how biological life arose from matter and space (abeogenesis), is a separate question from how biological life became so complex (evolution by natural selection). Lewis essentially boils down the materialist position into that of a smug scientist shrugging his shoulders.  Materialists hold the position that there is no supernatural, that all things operate according to laws of nature, and that life is a product of natural processes. Materialists, assuming they follow consensus cosmology, do not believe that “matter and space have always existed and that nobody knows why.” To even ask “why” is to presuppose a purpose. But, I’ll leave the long-winded explanation of materialism aside and say simply that materialism is not quite as Lewis describes it, though I suppose we can give him a free pass for condensing materialism into its creationist soundbytes, given that Mere Christianity is essentially a transcription of a radio essay.

The other view is the religious view.* According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself--I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up.

This is very interesting. Instead of beginning an inquiry as to the nature of the universe by looking at the evidence we see, Theists like Lewis begin an inquiry as to the nature of the universe by first asking what the purpose of the universe might be, and then proposing a conscious entity to give the universe its purpose. Yet, we have not yet established that the universe has a purpose. That the universe has a purpose is an unstated premise. On a smaller scale, this is akin to walking outside and seeing a smudge of mud on the sidewalk. On seeing the smudge, we ask what the purpose of this smudge might be. Once we inquire as to the purpose of the smudge, we propose a smudgemaker who created the smudge with the intention of having us go outside and ponder the purpose of the smudge. We have not even considered that there us no purpose to the smudge. I realize this paragraph is only loosely related to Lewis’ text, so you’ll have to forgive me for going off on a tangent. Here, Lewis seems to be boiling down the materialist and the religious viewpoint into, “viewpoint that the universe does not have a purpose” and “viewpoint that the universe does have a purpose”.

Moving on…

And note this too. You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense.”

What Lewis is saying here is that we can’t use observation, experimentation, and rational thinking to determine if the materialist or religious view is the right one. Science, in the ordinary sense, has already determined that the materialist view is the “right one”.  I can only conclude further that what he means by “right one” is the opposing views of whether or not the universe has some greater purpose.

This is a type of fallacy of reification or anthropomorphic fallacy. Having a purpose is an abstraction. All that we have been able to observe about the universe shows that it operates as a series of events, and treating the universe as if it has a “purpose” erroneously attributes intention to these events, unless we can establish that the universe in fact has a purpose. We have not established this - thus assuming that the universe has a purpose, and then assuming that some entity had to give the universe this purpose, and then following that concluding that a god had to give the universe a purpose - is a string of logic based on a fallacious initial premise. Thus, we have a problem. We (humans) generally behave as though we have a purpose – a cognitive awareness of linking cause and effect in order to achieve a goal. We cannot assume the universe is working to achieve a goal, and many errors in thinking can be attributed to this assumption.

Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so and-so,' or, 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such -and such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is.

Science also works by observation and rational thinking.

And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science--and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes--something of a different kind-this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind,' then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, 'Why is there a universe?' 'Why does it go on as it does?' 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as they were?

I have already answered the question. Quite simply, asking what purpose and meaning the universe has is reification – a fallacy. This is likely to be quite an unsatisfactory answer for most people. So in a way, Lewis is correct. Science can’t answer questions as to the plan and purpose of the universe, because we have observed no such purpose –we have only observed events. Asking “why” presupposes that there is some type of purpose which we might glean from inquiry. Asking science to answer the question as to the plan and purpose to the universe is like asking me how much money I have in my wallet after I've told you I do not own a wallet.

What science tells us is that we give our own lives purpose and meaning and that there is no ultimate plan or purpose.  Why bother give our lives purpose and meaning? The simplest answer is, "because we can".

Ref:  Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: Chapter 3.1

In this chapter, Lewis makes a distinction between physical laws by which material objects operate and moral laws by which humans tend to operate. He comes to the conclusion that these differences are such that it defies simple “natural” explanation and requires, instead, that something “above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behaviour, and yet quite definitely real--a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us”.

Lewis begins by saying that objects behave according to certain laws – a rock will fall due to the Law of Gravity, and a tree will grow and be shaped by the environment due to physical laws. When we say that a stone is the “wrong shape”, we do not mean that a stone can be blamed for being the shape that it is because we understand the processes that gave the stone its shape.  A rock shaped for our purposes obeyed the same laws as a rock unsuited for our purposes.

In this way, a “Law” means, “an observation of what things always do”. I.E. a rock always obeys gravity. Lewis says that this is different from the “Moral Law” as people do not always obey moral laws. Lewis believes this is unnatural.

    The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave.

Lewis says this, and while I agree that the “Moral Law” is not the same as a Law of Gravitation”, that does not mean that the moral law is not a fact about how humans behave. I believe that this distinction Lewis makes between some laws being “natural” and morality being “unnatural” is entirely arbitrary. Human interactions, thoughts and ideas are incredibly complex and there is no reason to assume that this complexity is somehow unnatural simply because it is different from the “Law of Gravity”. Lewis is essentially pointing out that physical laws and moral laws are different from one another, and that this difference must mean that the more complicated moral law is unnatural.

Let us compare a simpler law with the Law of Gravity. Let’s pretend that in my home city of St. Louis, it is illegal to own tomatoes. It is possible for me to own tomatoes, but I ought not to own tomatoes. Perhaps I really enjoy tomatoes and feel I would greatly benefit from owning some, but feel that for the greater benefit of society, I should refrain from owning them. My ability to act in a manner which is not entirely selfish is, according to Lewis, unnatural and thus requires explanation:

And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, not that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behaveAnd that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, not that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be.”

No, it is not the same as these facts, but that does not meant that it is not a fact that human as a species survive because they are capable and driven to behave unselfishly. If all humans suddenly decided to behave completely selfishly tomorrow, one can imagine that our species would not last very long – just like if a species of beetle all decided to fly into the mouths of dogs, the species of beetle would not last long, either.

We don’t behave in the way we do in order to survive – rather, we survive because we behave in the way we do.

This seems to be such a common thread in the way Christian apologists think - making the assumption that the way the universe operates is a goal rather than an effect. To put it in a simpler, far more absurd way – it is like marveling at how well the legs were designed perfectly for the fitting of pants, or marveling at how the face is shaped just so to accommodate a pair of glasses.  The reason Lewis needs to postulate something beyond reality to explain the moral behavior of humans is due to the fact that he sees our species as an end product – he sees our legs as being perfectly designed for pants, and tries to explain how something extraordinary must be posited to explain how our legs got that way. There is no reason to assume that our social morals are not naturally what we do, that the ever increasing complexity of our social morals is a product of fitting into the environment that we were handed.

Reference: Mere christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: Preface.2

This is part 2 of our critique of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

Near the end of the preface, Lewis says something so important that I feel the need to reprint it in its entirety:

Far deeper objections may be felt - and have been expressed - against my use of the word Christian to mean one who accepts the common doctrines of Christianity. People ask: 'Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian?': or 'May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who do?' Now this objection is in one sense very right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every available quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without disaster, use language as these objectors want us to use it. I will try to make this clear by the history of another, and very much less important, word.

The word gentleman 'originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone 'a gentleman' you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not 'a gentleman' you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - 'Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?' They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man 'a gentleman' in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is 'a gentleman' becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A 'nice' meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.

Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say 'deepening', the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word. In the first place, Christians themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men's hearts. We' cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word. As for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the refined sense. It will become in their mouths simply a term of praise. In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts xi. 26) to 'the disciples', to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being extended to those who in some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were 'far closer to the spirit of Christ' than the less satisfactory of the disciples. The point is not a theological or moral one. It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

Thank you, C.S. Lewis. Here we have a Christian who is actually refusing to commit the No True Scotsman fallacy. I think that more clarification is in order. Instead of calling someone a ‘bad Christian’ rather than ‘not a Christian’, let’s call him a ‘bad person’ instead. In this sense, Christians can be ‘bad persons’ or ‘good persons’. Christians can follow the moral teachings of contemporary Christianity, Biblical Christianity (anyone who thinks contemporary Christianity is the same as Biblical Christianity needs to objectively read the Bible), they can be great people or terrible criminals. To say that anyone who is a ‘bad person’ is not a ‘True Christian®’ is essentially to equate ‘True Christian®’ with ‘good person’. There are atheists who are immoral, evil jerks. There are atheists who are ethical and nice. It would be ridiculous of me to claim that a person calling themselves an atheist but behaved immorally is not a ‘True Atheist’. Similarly, it would be ridiculous of me to claim that a person calling themselves a Christian but not selling all of their possessions (as Jesus commanded) is not a ‘True Christian®’. Really, I can hardly state this better than Lewis does, except for my minor clarification. Being a Christian, according to objective reality and Christian doctrine, does not require that one be always good, always noble, incapable of making mistakes, and always believing in the Christian god. Saying that someone is not a"True Christian®" if they do something you do not like shuts down rational conversation about the topic, because it gives someone a scapegoat such that they do not need to defend the atrocities committed by professing Christians. I cannot defend the behavior of an atheist by claiming "an atheist would never do that", so nor should a Christian (or any member of any other religion or group) be able do the same.

Ref: Mere Christianity Online

Ray on Occasional Days: 8:7 and we're DONE!

This is it. It's official. This is the last bit of Ray's book, so this will be the last "Ray a day"/"Ray on Occasional Days".  I must say, Ray really goes out with a bang. Read on. This was originally printed on Ray's blog, so I'll quote the whole thing:

Hello. My name is “Unreasonable.” I am a very proud demon. I love to hate, and I live for lust. I am extremely prejudiced. Come too close, and I will hiss out my venom. I don’t fear God or man, and I live in the House of Atheist.

If you want to enter my house, know that I control who and what gets in, and I'm in complete control of what comes out. Try knocking to see if I will open the door. Before you even try, let me tell you that I despise truth and will not let it enter . . . unless I think it’s in my best interests.

Take the subject of bats. The Bible says that bats are "birds," probably because they have wings and fly. That’s ridiculous. Bats are not birds. Now if science had said that having wings and flying makes them a form of bird, then that makes sense. In fact, it makes perfect sense.

How about Cain and his wife? Where did she come from? They say he married a sister. I won’t even come to the door on that. It's moronic. However, if science said that we trace our human ancestry back to one individual, then that truth is welcome, because it makes sense.

I can look directly at this vast, intricate creation and say that it’s not proof that there is a Creator. I need give no explanation. Such talk flies in the face of reason and common logic, but I don’t care.

There is a reason I don’t like truth. It’s because it carries light, and I don’t like light . . . unless I can control it. There is a room inside my house that I like to keep dark. Very dark. It is what I call an "adult" fantasy room. You know what I mean. That room keeps the residents here, and it keeps me in control.

I like to call evil good, and good evil. I do this because I hate absolutes, because absolutes speak of truth.

Each time I am unreasonable, I fortify my house.

I love living in the House of Atheist with my other demon friends. That's because we are very welcome here. When the resident is seized by my master and taken to his permanent place, I will just move on and find another house. There are plenty out there.

Actually, I know that everything the Bible says is true. The Word of God makes me tremble. In the face of what I have said, that makes no sense. I know that . . . I'm just being Unreasonable.

Part of me just wants to let this sit here. Essentially, I think it speaks for itself. Alas, the last nail of the coffin must be hammered in. I really wanted you guys to read that without breaking it up. Now we can go through it bit by bit.

Hello. My name is “Unreasonable.” I am a very proud demon. I love to hate, and I live for lust. I am extremely prejudiced. Come too close, and I will hiss out my venom. I don’t fear God or man, and I live in the House of Atheist.

Ohai! Unreasonable means something like ‘inconsistent with reason, logic, or common sense”. Sure, I would not disagree that atheists reject common sense, but I have no idea what hate and lust have to do with atheism or unreasonableness. Unless Ray is just trying to throw in as many negative-sounding words as he can to describe the target of his bigotry.

If you want to enter my house, know that I control who and what gets in, and I'm in complete control of what comes out. Try knocking to see if I will open the door. Before you even try, let me tell you that I despise truth and will not let it enter . . . unless I think it’s in my best interests.

So this demon “Unreasonable” has this house called the “House of Atheist” where I guess the atheists go. Got it.

This is coming from a guy who continually goes on about how much he cares about atheists. If I said this about my mother, would you think I cared for her? It is so interesting how people like Ray can claim to care about someone while at the same time denigrating them. This type of writing is patently irresponsible – by creating a strawman of “atheists” as evil, vile people, publishing it in a book that millions can purchase and read, Ray is doing nothing more than perpetuating hatred for an entire group of people who, to my knowledge, are just as moral and ethical (often more moral and ethical) than theists. Imagine, for a moment, that these words were written about gays, or woman, or blacks, or Catholics.  Imagine if, “House of Atheist” was instead, “cathedral”. The bigotry is oozing out Rays ears.

Take the subject of bats. The Bible says that bats are "birds," probably because they have wings and fly. That’s ridiculous. Bats are not birds. Now if science had said that having wings and flying makes them a form of bird, then that makes sense. In fact, it makes perfect sense.

It is easy to take lame examples of Bible contradictions that non-theists don’t care about, show how silly they are, and then proclaim that therefore non-theists are absurd. I don’t care that the Bible labels bats as birds. The Bible labels bats as birds because the Bible is not a science book. It also says you can breed animals in front of spotted sticks to create spotted animals. This is demonstrably false. If the Bible is divine, it should not contain demonstrably false information. Of course, once you have magic on your side, you can beg your way out of any question. Maybe back before there was a lot of sin, you could breed animals next to spotted sticks to produce spotted animals! Maybe back then, the laws of physics operated differently!

The point that people make when they point out inconsistencies in the Bible is this: if the Bible is supposed to be completely, absolutely perfect, then it should contain no errors. If it contains errors, then it is not perfect. This would not be a problem if people did not claim the Bible was inerrant in the first place. Pointing out consistencies is a way of showing someone how absurd it is to say that a book is inerrant.

It’s fascinating when apologists try to do the same thing to, say, Origin of Species, as if pointing out an error in the book will falsify evolution. We don’t think Origin is perfect, so pointing out an error will likely lead us to say, “Yup. And?” It just doesn’t have the same power, because no claims of inerrancy were made.

How about Cain and his wife? Where did she come from? They say he married a sister. I won’t even come to the door on that. It's moronic. However, if science said that we trace our human ancestry back to one individual, then that truth is welcome, because it makes sense.

Cain and his wife is a very legitimate criticism of the morality of the Bible and the story of creation. So are criticisms of Abraham Solomon having 700 wives and 300 concubines while being praised by the Christian god repeatedly. As an outsider, I ask myself why we might want to teach our children these stories, along with other stories in the Bible which promote sexism, racism, genocide, etc.

‘Science’ does not say things. Scientists makes observations, use reason and logic to develop mechanism for how those observations came to be, experiment, and come to conclusions. Scientists do not posit that our ancestry can be traced back to one individual. Biblical creationism does, however, so I find it quite interesting that Ray uses this as an example. If our observations, rational thinking and experimentation led us to conclude that we did arise from a single individual, then of course I would accept that. Our observations/rational thinking/experimentation do not come to this conclusion, and so nor do I.

This is what being open-minded means – allowing your conclusions to be amenable to evidence. When I am in a disagreement over someone about some objective trust, I like to ask them what evidence they would need in order for them to change their mind. If they respond by telling me nothing can change their mind, then our conversation is over. Their mind is closed.

I can look directly at this vast, intricate creation and say that it’s not proof that there is a Creator. I need give no explanation. Such talk flies in the face of reason and common logic, but I don’t care.

Saying that creation proves there is a creator is begging the question, or using circular logic, which flies in the face of reason and common logic. Circular reasoning is one of the first logical fallacies people tend to learn about. If you assume your conclusion in your premise, you can prove anything. For example: I can look at this vast whorl of a universe designed by processes not guided by an intelligent force and say it is proof that the universe was not created. This is an absurd argument because it presupposes in the premise what I am attempting to conclude. As far as explanations go, plenty of those have been given. Plenty of explanations have been given to Ray himself, so I do not understand how he can miss them.

There is a reason I don’t like truth. It’s because it carries light, and I don’t like light . . . unless I can control it. There is a room inside my house that I like to keep dark. Very dark. It is what I call an "adult" fantasy room. You know what I mean. That room keeps the residents here, and it keeps me in control.

Here are some more examples of Ray’s bigotry toward atheists – claiming we hate ‘light’ (an obvious metaphor for ‘good stuff’) and love ‘dark’ (blatantly a metaphor for sexual depravity).

I like to call evil good, and good evil. I do this because I hate absolutes, because absolutes speak of truth.

What does “I like to call evil good, and good evil” have to do with absolutes? I can’t speak for all atheists, but I am no moral relativist Most Comfortian Christians are moral relativists, even as they decry moral relativism.

Moral relativism is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/or universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances. Christians do this all the time to explain why they do not follow the Bible with regard to behaviors like stoning disobedient children or not eating shellfish. There was a reason for the law then, or for that culture, or for those individual people, but not now.  Or, it is perfectly just for god to order individuals to hack off 200 foreskins, but it’s not okay for me to hack off 200 foreskins. This is the definition of moral relativism!

It is interesting that Christians cling to this idea of moral absolutism, because moral absolutism in their mind implies a moral lawgiver, which implies their god. Yet they are moral relativists, and so is their holy book.

Each time I am unreasonable, I fortify my house.

So whenever the demon Unreasonable is unreasonable, he makes the House of Atheist stronger.  Ray sounds like the demon of bigotry, again.

I love living in the House of Atheist with my other demon friends. That's because we are very welcome here. When the resident is seized by my master and taken to his permanent place, I will just move on and find another house. There are plenty out there.

The “resident” I guess is an atheist? Is the “master” in this metaphor a god, or Satan?

Actually, I know that everything the Bible says is true. The Word of God makes me tremble. In the face of what I have said, that makes no sense. I know that . . . I'm just being Unreasonable.

If everything in the Bible is true, then your god is a jackass.

Thanks Ray. It was a good ride. I really wish you would stop reinforcing the fact that atheists are the most hated minority in the US, though. It's irresponsible and disgusting.

Insufficient Christianity: Preface.1

It's time.

We're thoroughly reviewed one Christian apologetic book, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think, by Ray Comfort, in our Ray a Day series. Doing this was like picking a fight with an injured sparrow. We're ready for something more substantial, so we've got our eyes set on obliterating Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. This time, you guys can follow along easily, as the entire text is available online - I'll keep a link to it at the bottom of all of our posts.

We'll be critiquing this book in real time - Flimsy read it years ago, but I've never read it. If you feel like you'd like to write a guest post on a particular chunk of text, let me know. Otherwise, we might shout out to guest posters again, after we start getting into the meat of it.

Onward!

Lewis opens his preface by defining what he means by "Mere Christianity". What he means by this is Christianity with all of its denominations and spectral beliefs stripped away, leaving only the core of Christianity. He tells his reader that he will not try to convert anyone to his position, talk about the various disputes within Christianity, or give his reader guidance as to which Christian denomination they should choose.

Interestingly, he says that "Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son". I suppose if the intent of the church is to bring people into Christianity, this is quite true - discussing divisions is not likely to cause people to want to become Christians.

Lewis mentions that some controversies between Christians need to be handled delicately, because when you bring up certain controversies, many Christians feel that the "honor of his mother or his beloved is at stake. It is very difficult to dissent from them that you will not appear to them a cad as well as a heretic."

Here, we come across my first disagreement with Lewis. While I absolutely agree that some Christians get very defensive when their faith is questioned, or further, believe that questioning their faith is treading on sacred grounds, and that it should not be done. It should be obvious that I disagree with this point. I understand that faith is very important to a great many people. I understand it makes people uncomfortable when their cherished beliefs are brought under scrutiny. At times, I feel bad for making people question what they hold so dear.

But why should I? when people disagree with me, I take that as a sign that they respect me (assuming they disagree with me in a productive way. I am not likely to think someone respects me if they say, "you're a complete idiot!" or something similar. I am speaking of constructive, well-intentioned disagreement). If someone were to hear me make a proclamation that they believed was factually incorrect, but chose to say nothing rather than disagree, what does that say about them? I suppose among other things it could say that the time is inappropriate, or perhaps they are intimidated by me - and perhaps they do not think it is worth taking the time to correct me.

Similarly, when I am speaking to a theist, if I disagree with them, this actually means that I respect them enough to take the time to do so.

When I address Christianity in general, however, it is not because I respect Christianity. It is because Christianity relies on a system of thought that, when applied elsewhere, can have consequences, such as undermining science or oppressing others.

You'll notice on this blog that I don't write critically about conspiracy theories or cryptozoology. In fact, I don't write about these topics at all. I don't really think they have nearly the measurable negative impact on our society as religion and alternative medicine, and there are others out there who are more qualified than I am at addressing such issues.

My point is that anything that has a measurable impact on society should be scrutinized.  This is especially true for ideologies that tell you you are wrong or bad for such scrutiny. What are you hiding? When Flimsy was a child, he feared for his eternal soul because he dared question the Christian god. If you need to instill in children a sense of paralyzing fear at the things inside their own heads to keep them tucked into their belief system, what does that say about your belief system? Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away (Philip K Dick). I think that people in general should learn to accept criticism of their sacred cows.

Anyhow, I think that these supposed trivialities are at times not trivialities at all. Christians are want to disagree on even the bare or "mere" points of Christianity - for example, an individual who believes works are not important to salvation vs. an individual who believes works and faith are important to salvation. So here we have a Christian saying that these points do not matter, but other Christians say they do matter. This rather makes the entire operation suspect to an objective observer, so it is no wonder that Lewis cautions his readers about bringing up these difference in the presence of the potentially-converted.

As before, you may notice that my writing gets a little tangential. I am not doing this intentionally but at the same time I am not avoiding it either. I rather liken these blog posts to commentary and critique, along with whatever juice pours out of my headroast.

Online Mere Christianity Here

Ray on Occasional Days: 8.3

We're in the final throes of Ray's book, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think, in the section entiled, "Further Food For Thought".

What Ray says in this section can also be found here, so I feel it is appropriate to reprint the whole thing:

Do you like to snuggle up in a warm bed on a cold night? Do you have a favorite position for going to sleep? Have you ever woken from a nightmare, and taken about ten minutes to shake off a feeling of terror?

Has your whole body suddenly "jumped" because you thought you were taking a step, just before you dropped off to sleep?

Do you get annoyed when someone asks you personal questions, or do you feel a sense of identification, because you have had these experiences?

I hope you do identify with me. The reason for this is that it's my knowledge that you are just like me that drives me to try reach you with the gospel.

Whether you like it or not, you are like me. You have many of the same loves, fears, desires and concerns. You, like me, want to enjoy the pleasures of this life. No one in his right mind wants to be unhappy, and you therefore instinctively don't want to die. Everything within you pulls back from the experience of death. It's the ultimate root-cannel for which there is no pain-killer outside of conversion to Jesus Christ.

So, if you don't know the Lord, ask yourself some personal questions about me. What is my motive for pleading with you like this? I don't get paid for having a blog. I don't sell advertising on it. I have never asked for your money, nor do I want it. Christianity doesn't do anything for my ego. Neither is my motive to get you to join a church or a religion. It's simply a deep concern for your eternal welfare. Please, repent and trust the Savior before death seizes on you, and it's too late.

Of course we're alike. We're both human beings. There is a very good reason we're so alike. Humans evolved as a population of animals to do the things that we do. It's no wonder we are so similar.

Ray is  right that we don't usually want to die. We fear death. If, as a species, we did not fear death or have an insatiable urge to survive, then we probably would not survive. Death is the ultimate root canal for which there is no painkiller, and the sentence should end right there. there is no compelling proof that Jesus ever existed. there is no compelling proof that your god exists. If your god did exist, he would be a vile entity and I would not worship him or pretend he is the most amazing entity alive because I fear death and want to survive it. I would rather die and join the army of Satan than follow that character. In a religion where one's biggest enemy is one's god, oneself, and one's own inability to follow impossible rules, it boggles my mind how people can love their god so much; how they can see it as a pillar of perfection while it supposedly orchestrates and carries out the vilest acts imaginable. I really don't understand, and the more I immerse myself in Christianity, the less I understand it.

People hate knowing that one day they will die. It's hard to imagine that one day your brain and heart will stop, and your body will decay. It's hard to imagine that the building you are in will one day crumble. Your city will one day crumble. The earth will one day be uninhabitable by any living creature. Humans as a species will die out, and the universe will die a slow, aching death.

Knowledge of one's own mortality is a powerful, scary thing. As an outsider, religion and god look to me like a way to see noneternal things as eternal. Gods are eternal, souls are eternal - they remain when everything else passes away.

Think of a sandcastle some children (perhaps your own children) have just built on a beach. Their sandcastle is beautiful and magnificent, yet the sun is setting and the tide is rolling in. Most people would be compelled to "immortalize" the image of this sandcastle - to photograph it, to draw it, to at least take it in and let the image of it burn into their memory. We want to keep it but we know we cannot, so we make an image of it.

The sandcasle is worth building, even if it is washed away and no images are made of it.

Mere Christianity

Flimsy and I have decided to read and decimate the classic book Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis.

Luckily for you guys the entire text is available online here.  We have found some short refutations, but nothing of the depth that we achieved when we responded to Ray Comfort's book. There is also this study guide, written by a guy who wrote a book called C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea. Again, there is a serious lack of depth with regard to the study of this book, which is considered by many Christians to be a pillar of apologetics.

Much like our Ray a Day series, we'll be deconstructing Mere Christianity in thorough blog posts. We've already chatted with each other for hours over the first few pages, so you can expect us to beat dead horses as usual.

Ray on Occasional Days: 8.2

For today's decimation of Ray Comfort's book, we're going to look at a little story Ray tells his readers. He tells the story of a friend of his who is going overseas to visit New Zealand, but New Zealand officials deny him entry into the country because he has a previous jail record. The guy is nice, a "Genuine Christian" but the rules of the country bar entry to former criminals. He says that even though he was angry at this New Zealand has the right to make rules about who can and cannot enter their country.

Heaven apparently is a lot like this. Lawbreakers are not allowed in, but if you believe in Jesus and become a Christian, your criminal record is erased and you become a new person.

I'm glad the justice system we have does not work like this - people should pay equally for their crimes. I hate to be crude but I completely understand why so many criminals in prison convert to Christianity - they may not have their crimes washed away in this life, but they can have them washed away in the afterlife.

It is interesting that Ray shrugs his shoulders and says, "well, that's okay. NZ has the right to have rules". What if the rule was that if you were a criminal NZ officials locked you up on a floating cage and let seagulls consume your flesh until your body fed the fishies in addition to not allowing you into the country? Would Comfort shrug then? I hope that illustrates how much this analogy doesn't apply.

Moving on, Ray makes one more unfalsifiable appeal: he says that becoming a Christian is like this:

If I look at a heater and believe the heater is hot,  I have an intellectual belief. But if I say to myself, "I wonder if it really is hot" and reach out and grip the bar, the second my flesh burns, I stop believing it's hot. I now know it's hot. I have moved out of the realm of belief into the realm of experience.

That's what happens the moment you are born again (when you become a Christian). You will move out of the realm of "belief" into the realm of "personal experience." A Christian is not someone who has a "belief," but someone who has a relationship with the living God. You come to know him.

(P.S. you can read this text for yourself here.)

This would be a great analogy if there were independent, objective verification of the phenomenon known as the Christian god. What if we were to add to this analogy that other people touched the heater and were not burned - in fact they felt no heat at all? How about if we had a group of people who once were burned by the heater, but could now put their hands all over it without feeling any heat? What if instruments used to measure heat registered the heat of the heater as being right around room temperature, while true believers in the heater continued to burn their hands while simultaneously receiving no actual, physical burns?

We would think that the people with burning hands but no evidence of burning were insane.

Unless they insisted that they respect the fact that they were experiencing terrible burns, or got angry at us for denying their experience. In that case we'd be forced to say it gently, "we think there is the chance there could be another explanation..."

I know this may be hard to understand but experience by itself does not equal knowing. If you believe something will happen but have not experienced it and then you experience it, you've moved from belief with non-experience to belief accompanied by experience.  One might consider this a form of knowledge, but said knowledge should still be subject to revision. If you hear voices in the room, but no one else hears those same voices, you might be right to conclude that they are a product of your own neurons and not due to actual voices.

Ray's analogy can once again be used to prove just about any supernatural belief one wants to prove. If belief+experience = knowing, then I know that the universe is entirely materialistic and guided by natural, rather than supernatural processes. A crystal healer knows that crystals balance the qi and heal cancer. A UFO abductee knows he's been abducted by aliens and somehow infused with alien sperm. These people don't have beliefs - they know.

The best part about learning to deconstruct arguments is that one can learn how to argue by learning how not to argue.

Ray on Occasional Days: 8.1

You might have noticed that Ray a Day has become something more like Ray on Occasional Days. I figure you won't mind so much, as you survived without it for almost a month.

Moving on to the conclusion of Ray Comfort's book, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can't Make Him Think, Ray posits a thought experiment:

Imagine he is offering you a choice of these gifts:

1. The original Mona Lisa.
2. A new car.
3. A million bucks.
4. A parachute.

Which do you pick? Here's some additional information - you have to jump out of an airplane, flying high.  Obviously, you'll choose the parachute because none of those other things will keep you from falling to your death.

Apparently, this is analogous to which religion you should choose among:

1. Hinduism
2. Buddhism
3. Islam
4. Christianity

Here's some additional information: One day we will die. Just like in the airplane scenario, you know what the law gravity will do to you if you jump. Similarly, you know about the moral law (you know, the one that tells us that the Christian god's rotten behavior means he is extra perfect, while our good behavior means nothing because we're filthy sinners) and how to use it to make a choice when you die. You fear god's law. You know about the ten commandments. The Bible is true, and you know you're going to be judged one day. So which religion do you choose?

Ray goes though each of the four religions and explains why none of those other religions are True®:

Hinduism: Those people believe in reincarnation, which is like "when you jump out of the plane, you'll get sucked back in as a different passenger"

Buddhism: They don't believe in any god! They believe life and death are an illusion which is like saying "I'm not really here, and there's no such thing as the law of gravity"

Islam: Those guys believe that doing things, rather than believing things, will get you a ticket to the afterlife, like "jumping out of a plane, and believing that flapping your arms is going to counter the law of gravity"

Christianity of course, is totally different, because Jesus gave you a merciful and awesome parachute. Christianity is the only religion that fits. therefore Christianity is obviously the best one.

Pardon me if I get a little snarky here - but no shit, Sherlock! This is a very complicated and yet still unimpressive way to create a giant circular argument, where Comfort's premise (that Christianity is the One True Religion®) is the same as his conclusion (that Christianity is the One True Religion®).

You could literally use this thought experiment to conclude that any religion or belief system is true.  Example:

We know that bald men are going to be creampied for eternity in the everlasting cock of our God, Oneeye, unless they grow hair or get a wig before they die.  So which religion do you choose?

1. Christianity
2. Hinduism
3. Buddhism
4. Oneeyeism

Christianity:  believes you have to believe in Jesus. That's like believing gravity will just work for you.

Hinduism: Those people believe in reincarnation, which is like "when you jump out of the plane, you'll get sucked back in as a different passenger"

Buddhism: They don't believe in any god! They believe life and death are an illusion which is like saying "I'm not really here, and there's no such thing as the law of gravity"

Oneeyeism is the right religion, because Oneeye gives you a loving and merciful parachute if you'll just grow your hair or wear a wig.

 Here's a little secret: if your argument can be broken down into its component parts and applied in a similar situation, but if in that situation your argument completely breaks down or can prove anything, then that means there is something wrong with your argument. A Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist could use this same analogy to show that their religions lead to the "parachute" while the others do not - A Muslim, for example, could say that Christianity is like jumping out of an airplane and believing that you'll be saved, whereas Islam is like actually putting the parachute on. The entire analogy rests on the presumption that Christianity is true.

Comfort goes on to tell us how awesome Jesus is for dying for our sins, and says that in the airplane situation, the individual handing us the parachute is the one whom we will find the most credible. I suppose this is supposed to mean that we should find him credible, but again, any other religion could say the same thing about adherents of their religion.

Of course, Comfort has abjectly failed to demonstrate that Christianity is the One True Religion®, where as it is actually demonstrable that a parachute is preferable to a car when one is jumping out of an airplane, assuming one wants to live. Obviously, if Comfort's particular version of Christianity is true then these other religions will fail at allowing you to obtain your salvation. Here is the argument, broken down even more simplistically:

1. Religion X is true.
2. Your have to follow religion X to obtain salvation.
3. You want salvation.
4. There are other religions which are not religion X.
5. These other religions will not lead to salvation according to religion X.
Therefore
Religion X is true.

Or perhaps even simpler:

X = Christianity is true
Y = all non-Christian religions are false

If X, then Y
Y
Therefore X

--Which is a shining example of the formal fallacy known as Affirming the Consequent. Dude, how many fallacies can you wrap into one thought experiment?

Ray a Day: 7.6

Today, as we near the end of our painful dissection of You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think by Ray Comfort, Ray's angry skeptic asks why Jesus had to die to pay our debt to god, given that Jesus and the Christian god are one and the same. Ray responds by saying that god is inseparable from moral law, since both his god and his god's law are perfect, holy, just and good.  So the ten commandments is issued directly from the character of his god, and said law is written in stone.

He asks us to:

Think of it like this. A man has viciously raped and murdered six young girls. He is not insane... the judges wrath will be in direct proportion to his goodness. If he is a good judge, he will be unspeakably furious at that wicked man ... God's wrath is in direct proportion to his goodness...

Oh. So the Christian god is supposed to be unfathomably wrathful, because he is also unfathomably good. I get it. So when his god goes around generally being the most hateful character in all of existence, this actually demonstrates his holy perfection! We're supposed to look at all of this hate and understand that his god's wrath is only so incredibly immoral and wrathful because he is actually absolutely perfect. I don't know if I need to explain how bizarre this is - I think it stands on its own.

Fury is not the mark of a "good judge". The mark of a good judge, I think, it the ability to consistently, logically and objectively apply the law to individuals. Fury is entirely unnecessary. In Ray's worldview, the better the judge, the more fury he should have at minor crimes - with his god being the most perfect judge of all, who flips out and gives people maximal punishment for the most minor of crimes, or for arbitrary behaviors said judge has labeled as crimes. In other words, the more horrible his god is, the more he demonstrates his perfection.

Wow, the implications of that line of thinking.

Ray goes on, saying that the judge himself came down and paid the fine himself, which demonstrates the justice of a holy god and the love of a merciful god, and we can't understand how awesome this is until we humble our hearts.

I don't know how humbling my heart will make me understand this thing. To be, this god character Christians love so much has a totally arbitrary and nonsensical thought process. If it actually made sense, it would make sense to me whether I believed in this god or not. Humbling one's heart is not an objective way to get at truth.

Last, Ray relates to his reader a story of meeting up with two rollerblading atheists on the street, and convincing them to understand his god's perfect judgment.  He relates his story about these two atheists not being able to answer where cows came from.

Just because you think you have all the answers does not mean that you do. I would much rather say, "I don't know" then make something up that sounds good. Really, it's okay not to know.

And that, my friends, IS THE END OF THE BOOK, except for the 15-page conclusion, which has more goodness in it for us to go over.

Ray a Day: 7.5

Today we get to talk about cute kittens! Ray's angry skeptic points out that if the flood actually happened, then God drowned all of the kittens. Here's my favorite line, "Kittens, Ray. He drowned jillions of kittens - and you worship him.

Ray asks his questioner why he is so upset, and says that since he is an atheist, he believes that no one made those kittens, that being an atheist means that life has no rhyme or reason, and that there are no moral absolutes. If there are no moral absolutes, Ray says, then his god didn't do anything wrong.

He goes on to ask is the questioner is angry at veterinarians for killing kittens, and says that if his god made the kittens, then his god has the right to kill said kittens - besides, kittens have to die in order for there not to be jillions of kittens overpopulating the streets.

Last, he says that if someone believes in evolution, then evolution kills all kittens, so we should all lighten up.

First of all, I and every other atheist I know would strongly disagree that there is no "rhyme or reason" to life and no moral absolutes. Why is it that Christians like Ray insist that atheists believe there are no moral absolutes? I find this especially hilarious because Christians who believe that the Bible is completely true are necessarily moral relativists, even as they flail about, insisting that moral relativism is evil.

1. In the Old Testament culture, it was morally just to stone blasphemers.
2. in our modern culture, it is not morally just to stone blasphemers.

If you believe that it was just for blasphemers to be killed in the OT, and you think it is unjust now, then you, my friends, are a moral relativist, holding that morality is relative to culture or time.

I hold the position that there are rational, objective moral absolutes - of Secular Humanism. I believe that the ethical moral system of secular humanism is morally right, regardless of culture or time. Whether one lives in 6000 B.C.E, 2009 A.D., England, Israel, or wherever. This is moral absolutism - the position that morality is the same, regardless of culture or time.

Now then, here is the problem. Because I hold the position that there are moral absolutes, and Ray believes in moral relativism, he believes it it okay for his god to kill jillions of kittens. He believes his god did nothing wrong, because his god is incapable of doing wrong. I am going to go out on a limb and assume that Ray thinks it is immoral for me to drown a jillion kittens. This is also moral relativism:

1. It's perfectly moral for god to drown a jillion kittens
2. it's not perfectly moral for me to drown a jillion kittens.

So, Ray thinks that if you're an atheist, life is meaningless and there are no moral absolutes, so his god was right to drown a jillion kittens. If you're Ray, you think your god was right to drown a jillion kittens, because whatever god does is right.

Ray does on to say that veterinarians kill lots of kittens, so he asks why we're not out picketing veterinary offices.

Perhaps Ray does not see the difference between torturing 99.999999999999997% of humanity by drowning them, and putting kittens to sleep due to their illness or overpopulation problems. Surely though, there is a difference between an entity torturing another entity, and an entity ending the life of another entity in a humane way.

If we are to lighten up about Ray worshiping a god who kills kittens (almost all of life on earth), then I suppose we should lighten up about people who, say, drown their infant children in toilet water. After all, that kid would have died one day anyway, right?By drowning that kid, mom gave him a one-way ticket to heaven, right?

WRONG.

I do not respect, nor worship, any entity that supposedly tortures other living creatures. The problem is that this particular god Ray worships tortures other living creatures, and he calls this god perfect, perfectly just and perfectly loving. Then, he berates atheists for having no moral absolutes and just being able to justify doing whatever pleases them.

Also, I have yet to hear an appropriate justification for why an entity that creates another entity has the right to do whatever he pleases with his created entity, including torture, drown or destroy it.  Why? 

Just because kittens have to die in order to prevent overpopulation does not make it right to drown a jillion kittens. Overpopulation is not a justification for drowning kittens. People have to die too in order to prevent overpopulation of people, but that is absolutely not a justification to drown people.

"evolution" does not kill kittens. Even if one were to make that argument, that does not mean it is right to kill something just because some other process kills something.

So, lighten up, I will not. Torture of living creatures by a sentient morally-aware conscious being is not something anyone should "lighten up" about, and I am simply flabbergasted that Ray would suggest such a thing. Honestly, I am glad that the world is not populated by people who think like him - as he believes torture is morally permissable and that we should ligthen up because it's perfectly okay for the character he bases his moral convictions on to torture living things.

Ray a Day: 7.4

We're back to doing Ray a Day's, aren't you happy?

For those of you who've just started reading this blog in the last month and a half, Your fearless bloggers Flimsy and I have been using bits of Ray Comfort's book, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can't Make Him Think" as a springboard for blog posts. We've actually gone through almost the entire book at this point.

Today's gem is a little letterbox on page 115 (which was also published here) that reads:

A loving Christian brother just emailed me and said, “Man-o-man. There are some bitter, furious, Christian hatin' bloggers out there!!!” I told him that he is seeing comparatively nice ones. They know that I delete anything with blasphemy or cussing. He’s right though. Some of the atheists that are part of this blog are pretty nasty. So, I have decided to return a bit of the fire (in love, of course).

There are some bitter, Christian hating bloggers out there, but there are probably equal or more atheist-hating bloggers. Some people are just angry, and that's fine. Anger on it's own is amoral. Sometimes anger is justified.


When people are part of a group that is hated and oppressed, vilified for being immoral when morality is incredibly important to them, told to shut up for suggesting that people can be good without believing in god, and bombarded with viewpoints they don't agree with on a near-daily basis. it tends to make those people angry. I think that when Flimsy and I personally express anger on this blog, it is justified.

My new theory is that perhaps atheists evolved from the chicken, because they not only have chicken characteristics--a head, eyes, mouth, skin, neck, heart, earlobes and legs (homology structures), but they also have the chicken’s tendencies--they are chicken livered. They hang around Christians like annoying little bugs hang around light, trying to inject their poison whenever they can.

I don't understand why "chicken tendencies" are described as hanging around with Christians like bugs, trying to inject poison. I don't think chickens hang around people like bugs and inject poison. I recall that earlier in Ray's book, he told his readers that atheists only like to hang out with other atheists so they can reinforce their own beliefs. Which is it?

If you are an atheist, I hope I’m ruffling your feathers. I want to get under your skin and ask why you don’t have the courage to even whisper to Muslims what you keep shouting at Christians. Prove me wrong. Get onto a Muslim website and tell them that you don’t believe their god exists. Do your little “I don’t believe in Zeus” thing. Tell them they believe a myth. Make sure you use the word "fairytale." Talk about Mohammed as you do Jesus (use your usual lower case for Mohammed). Do your “I don’t believe in the flying spaghetti monster” thing. Tell them that you believe that they weren’t made by (a) god, but that they evolved from primates (that will go down well).

This really doesn't get under my skin. Not addressing Muslims has nothing to do with cowardice or fear. I live in the United states, where Christianity has more of a direct effect on me than Islam. Muslim's aren't trying to get creationism taught in the schools in my country, for one. I've only encountered a few Muslims in my life. I haven't read the Quran. If I were approached by a Muslim who wanted to engage in a conversation about our differing beliefs, I'd be happy to do so. If I lived in a Muslim country, Islam would be my main focus.

I could say the same thing about Mr. Comfort. How come you haven't addressed Buddhists? Why don't you go tell those guys that you believe they will go to hell instead of being reincarnated? Further, why don't you have the courage to whisper to Muslims what you shout at atheists? Prove me wrong - go start a Muslim Central blog, where you do your "Muslim's deny Jesus so they can be moral free agents" thing. Tell them you think Allah is a false idol.

Explain that you think they are blind simpletons to believe the way they do, and that even though there is a creation, you don't see any evidence that there is a Creator. Let them know that you think that it's intelligent to believe the way you do. You may as well explain that even though you don't believe in God's existence, you use His name as a cuss word, because you think it's worthless. Also, let them know in no uncertain terms that you believe that the Koran is full of mistakes (give some examples), and that their mosques are full of hypocrites.

I think that the reason people use your god's name as a "cuss word" has nothing to do with their subjective feeling of worthiness. I think it has more to do with social upbringing.  I'm not even sure what Ray means by this. By cuss word, do you mean saying "god damn it"?

Profanity is a really interesting subject for me, and I'd really like to study it from a neurological point of view. What parts of people's brains light up when they read expletives, or say them, or hear them? How does that compare to expletives from other countries, or regular words spoken as if they were an expletive? But we're getting off topic.

You wouldn’t dare, because you are chicken-livered. You know that they are not like Christians. Despite the “anonymity” of your little chicken coop, they would come after you to lop off your head. And when they find you, you would fall on your knees and be praying to God for help, quicker than I can move a fly swat . . . and I'm pretty quick. So, think about what you are doing, and think about how much you value your life. Then think about what we are telling you. Think.

You sir, are a bigot, both toward atheists and Muslims. You're seriously saying that Muslims are so hateful that if someone says something negative about their religion on a message board, they will hunt you down and kill you. Wow.

See, part of the reason that SOME Muslims express hatred toward Americans is because of people like you. When you're bigoted towards a whole group of people or a whole religion, that tends to happen. You express hatred toward them, they express hatred toward you, in a vicious cycle of stupidity.

Hey I know - Maybe those hateful Muslims aren't "true Muslims" because no true Muslim would hurt anyone.

Faith Infiltration: WEC Origins Seminar Pt. 4.3

Guess what? Flimsy and I are finished with our review of Dr. Harrub’s Truth About Origins seminar! This is our last post, unless something entertaining happens, like we get comments that are worth expanding into an entire blog post, Dr. Harrub actually bothers to show up here, etc.

Soon, we’ll be back to the good old Ray a Day posts. When we finish that, we’re going to move on to another book to explore – probably something with a little more substance. Ray’s publisher is also sending me a new book to read – The Atheist Bible. Plus I’ve had a copy of Secularism and Postsecularism for months, and have not had a chance to give my thoughts on those books either.  

So before we end our segment on Truth About Origins, I’d like to revisit Dr. Harrub’s idea that the Quran isn’t inspired, while the Bible is inspired. He said at the beginning of his B.s. (That’s Bible study, guys) that there is a difference between the works of Shakespeare, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, and the Bible. He told his audience that if he could prove the Bible was inspired, it would make it stand out among these books as The Truth®.  He went on to fail miserably at proving the Bible was inspired by his god.

Here is how he dismissed the others: Shakespeare is mean as a work of fiction, so that’s obviously not inspired. The Book of Mormon was written by a liar, and the Quran has too many contradictions and failed prophesies to be inspired.

It’s so interesting how people like Dr. Harrub can easily point out the flaws in other holy books, yet are blind to the flaws of their own holy book. He literally dismissed the entire Quran in one single sentence. He made this dismissal right after telling his audience that evolution is false because if you put a seed of corn on a shelf for 75 years, it won’t grow into a fern when you stick it in the ground.

So, I hope that you readers have enjoyed our thorough review. I also hope I haven’t come across as undeservedly disrespectful of people or ideas that differ from my own. Thanks, Dr. Harrub and the West End Church of Christ for giving me yet another reason to use my headsludge to dispel misconceptions. It was a fun month.

The God Virus: Darrel Ray Interview

Awhile back, I promised that I'd be interviewing Darrel W. Ray, who wrote The God Virus: How Religion Infects our Lives and Culture.

My original review of the book can be found here.  Enjoy!

 

1. In your chapter on guilt, you talk about the guilt instilled by the church regarding masturbation. I think that certain religions attempt to make people feel guilty about the absolutely healthy activity of masturbation, because most people have a very powerful instinctual urge to masturbate. How can we get someone bound by religion to see this from an objective standpoint? How can we convince them that forcing yourself to refrain from masturbation can lead to negative consequences?


Religion puts a huge amount of time and resources into the guilt channel, but especially the sexual guilt channel because it is so irresistible.  Religion is not trying to stop masturbation, sex before marriage, masturbation in marriage, etc. It is trying to create a guilt cycle in a person which then binds the person closer and closer to the religion.  It defies logic, because there is nothing logical about guilt that was learned/taught when we are too young to have rational defenses against it.  As a result, it is very difficult for intelligent and otherwise rational religious people to see and understand how they were programmed.  In my work as a psychologist, I have found that it is extremely difficult for people to understand and change their childhood programming.  They simply cannot see how much religion played in programming them to feel this type of guilt.  How to show them? I think they have to come to some understanding of other ways that religion has manipulated them or their family.  Once they can acknowledge some level of manipulation, they may be able to see other areas as well.  Sex is probably one of the last places they will be able to see and understand in themselves.  I certainly would not start there, if I were working with someone.

2. You mentioned in your book that Hawaiians had rather unregulated sexual contact, being sex-positive to the point that they were known to engage in coitus in front of their children. In  America , I can barely talk about kissing my boyfriend’s kneecaps on my blog without disturbing people. What are some ways you think we can work to make our culture more sex-positive?


We can talk about it out loud.  We can be more forthright about our sexuality.  I don't try and shock people when I do my presentations, but I do not shy away from using language that celebrates sexuality and gives people permission to think differently.  I did a presentation recently where 5 students from a local fundamentalist college attended.  I intentionally made clear and unambiguous references to masturbation and sex before marriage as good and desirable things.  Needless to say their mouths dropped open, but I noticed that they stayed a half-hour after to talk and ask questions.  I try to talk about sex in a totally matter of fact way, just like I might talk about any other topic.  I try and normalize it in my presentations and conversations.  This takes away the power of fear and guilt that is so automatic in religious people.  They are not used to someone talking so naturally about a taboo topic.  The more we normalize it, the less we give their view of sex respect by avoiding it or pussy footing around it, the more it challenges their world view.  Tip toeing around sex gives it power and perpetuates the myths surrounding it.  Listen to the power religious people give it in their conversation.  Why should be buy into their world view.  I have no respect for their fears and guilt and don't intend to cow tow to the viral programming that they carry with them from childhood.  In essence, I want to say in my actions and casual conversation, "Get a life, sex is part of living and good sex is part of good living. Your god created you with a huge sexual desire, yet he hates you to use it?  Sounds sadistic to me! Is your god kinky?"

 3. Whenever I mention to someone who is religious all of the very obvious ways in which religious morality has changed, they sometimes continue to insist that it hasn’t. Religionists also often say that their morality is absolute, even when you point out exactly how relative it actually is. How can we show people who are religious that the morality of their religion ebbs and flows with the morality of the culture?

For one, they probably won't listen to any kind of reason, because logic is not the answer.  We could list a host of ways that religion changed dramatically in just the last century, but that is not the point.  Religion has nothing to do with logic.  It is an infection of the mind that turns off very specific cognitive and perceptual functions.  If you want to help someone see their world differently, you must use their world view in new ways.  I recently wrote an article on this technique.

    4. Why do you think the myth that religion leads to decreased crime continues to propagate, despite the fact that statistical analysis across the board has shown that this is not the case?

The idea of a mental infection explains this exquisitely.  Data and statistics mean nothing to a mind that cannot see it.  Religionists are programmed to believe that a man rose from the dead, wine becomes blood during communion, prayer can heal cancer, etc.  Part of that deep programming is that religion makes people good or better.  It is a faith statement that is not open to challenge by the data.  People see confirming evidence all around them and ignore the discomfirming evidence.  An interesting example is the beatification process of the Catholic church.  The criteria for Sainthood in the Catholic Church does not require that a saint be a good person with high ethical standards.  It only requires that the candidate have  been exemplary in upholding the church.  This allows some pretty questionable characters to become saints as we are seeing in the beatification of Pope Pius XII who undoubtedly cooperated with the Nazis in the Holocaust, yet he is on the fast track to sainthood.  There are a lot of saints that killed, tortured, and otherwise harmed people in the name of the church.

We can also look at what is criminal in one generation, is not in the next based on the dominant group's view what is criminal. Dominant groups will have the upper hand in staying out of prison, while those in the non-dominant group will be more likely to be criminalized.


   5. How can we discuss the differences in IQ between believers and non-believers without sounding like we’re insulting the intelligence of people who believe?

I don't know how you can do that.  The virus programs people to be immediately defensive when the viral programming is challenged.  At the same time, most people believe they are above average in intelligence regardless of objective measures to the contrary.  Half of the population has to be below 50%, but experiments over the years show that 80% or more of people believe they are above average and 20 believe they are average.  No one thinks they are below average.  In other words, its not just religion but the whole self concept issue.  There is a lot of evidence that those who are most religious are on the whole, less intelligent, but we always have to remember that the bell curve covers the full spectrum in the religious and non-religious.  It is just skewed higher for the non-religious.  There are very intelligent religious people but there are a lot more less intelligent religious people than non-religious.

 6. A lot of people find the title of your book, “The God Virus” to be offensive, including some atheists.  Is there a way to reconcile this?

Yes, I have encountered that. I don't really care.  The metaphor works, so I don't feel the least bit defensive about it.  If they read the book they will see how appropriate the title is.

   7. What do you think your book says about religion that anthropology of religion, sociology of religion, and neuroscience does not say about religion?

Having studied these disciplines most of my life, none seemed to provide an overarching theory of religion as a natural phenomenon.  When I read Dawkins essay, "Viruses of the Mind" I instantly saw how well the virus metaphor ties sociology, neuroscience and anthropology together into a unifying theory.  The God Virus makes the observations of each of these disciplines more understandable than any of them standing alone.

8. People who are religious often say that religion has the upper hand because it is not constantly changing, whereas science is constantly changing. Can you comment on this?

If religion were not constantly changing women would be silent and wear head covering in church.  Women would not be able to choose their husband and divorce would be unheard of.  If religion never changes, then Martin Luther would never have posted his 95 theses and John Calvin would not have preached against the Catholic church and John Wesley would have been a priest.  Science and religion are both changing, the difference is that science has a self correcting mechanism where religion only has a cultural adapting mechanism.  No priest or minister ever tested the Trinity to see if it is true.  The Mormon Church preached that blacks were inferior and ineligible to hold office until the culture shifted under their feet.  Then they changed in a decade or less.  The story can be repeated for the Southern Baptist church regarding slavery, Catholics regarding capitol punishment (remember the inquisition), and much more.


   9. Near the end of your book, I liked what you said about scientific descriptions all being false at some level. To some people who believe in god, this might be a means by which to say that science is false at the “god level”. Can you comment on that?

When the religionists find a way to test the god hypothesis, I will listen to them.  Until then, I am happy to test evolutionary theory, quantum physics, theory of relativity, the theory of gravity and all that is available to study and understand in nature.  In the mean time, my Flying Spaghetti Monster can beat up your Yahweh and Allah.


10. What kind of impact do you think that the idea that “salvation is by faith, not works” has on society?

The concept was Martin Luther's main contribution to the religious debate and the idea undermined the foundational principles of the Catholic monopoly in the 16th century.  It in essence, individualized religion in new ways.  It reduced corporate control from the Catholic church.  It was a new religious paradigm, albeit just as crazy.  It was a direct challenge to the Catholic God Virus.  The subsequent division allowed brave people of the enlightenment to question both Catholic and Protestant viruses.  The result was the beginning of secularism.  In a round-about answer to your question, the unintended consequence of "salvation by faith" was that it allowed the roots of secularism to take hold in the cracks between the Catholic and Protestant viruses.

11. If you could pick one group of people as the greatest target audience for your book, which group would it be?

I think the people who are on the edge of religion are a key group. They know at some level that it is a ridiculous proposition, but don't have a map to help them escape.  People who are already non-theists find the book very useful as a model for talking to religious people, but those who are on the edge need a path.  I have discovered this inadvertently as I speak around the country.  I have had many people tell me that the book made a huge difference in their ability to make the final break with religion.  That is also why I started the Recovering from Religion organization.  People often stay in religion to get their social needs met but they also have to endure the infection of religion to stay.  Recovering from Religion is designed to help people find a path to escape religion and get their normal human social needs met.

A big thanks goes out to Darrel Ray for taking the time to answer my questions!

Ray a Day: 7:3

So today's angry skeptic asks Ray a common question. He asks, "Can God create a rock so big he cannot lift it?"

Ray doesn't actually answer the question at all, other than saying that yes, some things are not possible for god to do, like sin or lie. He then goes on to say that his god is a perfect judge and that if we trust in Jesus, god will lift up the massive stone of sin hanging over our heads.

Okay so here is what I think of this whole big rock business. I think that it's an irrelevant question because it is asking if an entity can do something self-contradictory. Is "the ability to do something self-contradictory" included in the definition of omnipotence? If so, then omnipotence is illogical. But I think that when we include this as part of the definition of impotence, we're creating a strawman version of omnipotence.  In this way, it seems to me that we're no better than when someone says, "an atheist is someone who believes nothing created everything". Only we're saying, "A Christian is someone who believes his or her particular brand of god is so powerful it has the power to do self-contradictory things."

Obviously, the logic goes like this:

P. X is defined as an all-powerful entity.
Question. Can x create a rock so powerful X cannot lift it?

1. If X can create a rock that is so big X cannot lift it
2. X is not all-powerful, because X cannot life the rock X just created.

1. If X cannot create a rock so big X cannot lift it.
2. X is not all-powerful, because X cannot create a rock so big he cannot lift it.

When you break this down into what the argument is really asking, it is asking this: Can an all-powerful entity do something that it cannot do? Can this all-powerful entity do contradictory things? A similar question would be to ask if someone's god can create a round square.

Infinite power is a logical impossibility, because infinity itself is an abstraction. Christians generally say that their god is omnipotent, but they also say that there are some things their god cannot do - such as "violate his nature". So generally, I think they are speaking in hyperbole, where "omnipotent" really means something closer to, "the most powerful thing". I could be wrong though, as I am obviously not a Christian, but I generally think that Christians and other theists over the age of thirteen have heard this paradox a thousand times.  Proving that any given god is not infinitely omnipotent doesn't really prove that that god does not exist.

On the other hand, if a theist insists that their god is infinitely ompotent and said omnipotence surpasses logic (such as, for example, if their answer to the god paradox is that he will create a rock so big he cannot lift it, but then he will lift it) then you may as well end your conversation right then because any god that is defined as an entity which does not follow the laws of logic cannot be defined or spoken about in any meaningful way whatsoever. If any indifidual definition of god includes the trumping of logic, then that definition is totally nonsensical and pretty meaningless.

Book Review: The God Virus

A few weeks ago I attended what amounted to a seminar by Darrel W. Ray, author of The God Virus: How Religion Infects our Lives and Culture.

In The God Virus, the author uses the metaphor of religion as a virus to explain how religious ideas pass from individual to individual and infiltrate society.

The idea of ideas or systems of ideas as "viruses" was first described by Richard Dawkins, who coined the term "meme" to mean a "postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, gets transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena". They are analogous to genes (hence the similarity in spelling and pronunciation), in that they are said to self-replicate and respond to selective pressures. In this book, the author explains religion through this viral/meme metaphor.

The author first explains exactly how religion can be appropriately viewed using the viral metaphor, and then uses this metaphor throughout the book, explaining how different religions survive and dominate others, and how some of the strategies religion uses to survive and propagate are very similar to actual, biological viruses. He explains that religious conversion can affect individuals on the personality level, taking over critical thinking and causing an individual to be "immune" to other religions by being able to point out the flaws in other religions while simultaneously being unable to see the flaws in their own religion. The author speaks of the importance of "vectors" (priests, ministers, etc) in propagating religious ideas and how religious people and organizations will protect those "vectors" even in the case of abuse or other crimes.

In the second chapter, the author explains the types of strategies the "god virus" uses to survive and spread, and how advanced religions are more effective than other religions, which is why they continue to survive and replicate. The author says that one of the tools to fight the "god virus" is science and critical thinking education, which is something that religion tends to rally against, especially if the science concerns ideas that seem counter to religious belief, I.E. Evolution.

The third chapter deals with how religion infects and persuades groups and political structures as well as individuals, and underlines religion's influence on public and civil culture. The fourth is about guilt and shame and how religion uses mixed messages to create a cycle of guilt in which the religion reduces feelings of guilt by promising an elimination of it, yet individuals continue to feel guilty and return to religion to have their guilt temporarily suppressed. The author gives a long list of some of the conflicting messages in religion, such as:

*God loves you, but he will send you to hell if you do not do exactly what he says.

*God loves you, but you were born unclean and can never be clean without god.

*Allah loves you and created women as beautiful creatures that you are forbidden to enjoy, except in marriage and behind closed doors.

Similarly, the fifth chapter deals with sex, and religion's attempt to control sex by creating a sex-negative environment. He mentions that even though religion uses positive terminology such as "focus on the family" really the message of "focus on the family" is a message of focusing on the rules and tenets of religion, which cause feelings of guilt and negativity towards sex. The function of this is not to create happy, dynamic family structures, but to propagate religion.

Chapter six is particularly interesting, as the subject is morality and how even though religionists insist that morality is objective and defined in concrete terms by their god, morality is an ever-changing product of culture in which the only way a given religion can survive is by adopting and changing its morality to fit in with the culture enough to continue to propagate. People who are religionists find it difficult to see this changing morality and believe they are more moral than others, and this blinds them to real-world data which shows that religionists are nor more or less moral than atheists. The author specifically shows how various studies such as studies on divorce and prison populations how that religion has little effect on morality and even that non-theists may be slightly more moral.

Chapter seven is about American Evangelism and how it has spread to the point where mega-churches are dotting the US landscape chapter 8 explains why some people are drawn into religion and others are not, and the role that intelligence and personality plays in religiosity. The second to last two chapters deal with unbinding oneself from religion and breaking free of "the virus", especially in deprogramming ourselves of the ideas that have been taught to us since an early age.

The last chapter concerns the difference between science and religion: in short, science has error-correction mechanisms and thus builds up a continuity of knowledge based on previous work, and this knowledge can be objectively tested. Religion, on the other hand, does not have these errors and instead has built-in mechanisms to change with the cultural climate. Because science is so powerful, many religions have adopted scientific language while simultaneously decrying scientific methods.

I found the structure of the book to be well-organized and accessible to individuals who are not well-voiced in formal argumentation. Rather than approach the god problem from a logical or hypothesis perspective A la Victor Stenger's God: the Failed Hypothesis, it approaches the problem of religion's impact on the individual and society. Thus, while it is aimed at non-theists, those who believe in god but are opposed to religion (and no, I don't mean evangelical Christians who insist they aren't religious because they really have a "relationship" with god - those people are just being deceptive) such as my friend Alien, who is a spiritualist or my friend Tim, who is "Christian" but perfectly comfortable at our local atheists meetup in St. Louis. It may not be so appealing to people who are intensely literal or who take the metaphor of the god virus as an argument rather than as a mechanism or metaphor for explanation. It is also important to note that other ideas act as "mind viruses" as well (like empiricism!), but that the religion virus acts in a particular way that is unlike other "mind viruses" - the particulars of which are outlined in the book. I think that individuals who do consider themselves religious might be offended at the negative connotations of the word "virus", and so I urge religionists who might come across this book to consider what I have said above about other ideas spreading like viruses as well. One could say that atheism is a type of mind virus, and my feathers would not be ruffled. I think that it is very accessible to people who are capable of stepping outside of religion and looking at it objectively. I think that the book could have also been titled "the religion virus" without much harm.

Now I  have an announcement: keep on the lookout - I'm interviewing Darrel W. Ray in a few days, and I'll be posting the interview here!

Ray a Day: 7.2

So today in Ray's book we have an angry skeptic asserting that since Jesus told his disciples to up and take a donkey from a villager, and if the villager protests to simply tell him that Jesus needs it and take it anyway, that this is the definition of stealing.  The skeptic is probably referring to this:

When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the disciples, saying, "Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, 'Why are you untying it?' you shall say this: 'The Lord has need of it.'" So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. And as they were untying the colt, its owners said to them, "Why are you untying the colt?" And they said, "The Lord has need of it." And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. (Luke 19:29-34)

Okay so, these dudes come up to your donkey and go to take it, and you ask them what's up, and they tell you it's for the lord, and... who knows what happened after that, but I guess the owner said, "Oh, okay!"

The simplest explanation is that Jesus wasn't stealing a donkey because the owner gave it to his disciples once they explained why they needed it. Big deal.

However Comfort does not explain it like this, and instead does something that fails in an epic way. He says that Jesus didn't steal the donkey because Jesus was god, and god made the donkey. The owner was just holding it for him, but he really owned everything because he made everything.

This "explanation" would work for any act Jesus committed. If he came down to earth and made himself a bed out of the stretched and tanned skins of sixty-five newborn male infants, brutally tortured every woman who came across his path, stole bread from starving families and ensured that his followers would facilitate the spread of HIV in the name of religion (oh.. wait....), according to Comfort he would still be morally perfect because he owned and created those babies, women, families, etc. So now, we've got a problem: Jesus's actions have absolutely nothing to do with his status as being morally perfect, because he is morally perfect regardless of his actions due to being defined as perfect. Comfort could have explained the donkey story easily, but instead he chose to explain it in a way that makes his worldview look dangerous and obscene, not to mention logically bankrupt. Comfort says this (that Jesus owned the donkey) is hard for atheists to swallow. It's hard for us to swallow because you're doing this again:

 

Comfort goes on to "explain" the second moral problem with Jesus, which occurs when he apparently disobeys his parents. He's talking about this:

And when he was twelve years old, they went up according to custom. And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it, but supposing him to be in the group they went a day’s journey, but then they began to search for him among their relatives and acquaintances, and when they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem, searching for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when his parents saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, "Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress." And he said to them, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?" (Luke 2:42-49)

Comfort says that this is not an example of Jesus disobeying his parents, but an example of bad parenting. Apparently Mary and Joseph were irresponsible for not making sure that the son of god "went up according to custom".

So.. Jesus knew that his pack was leaving, but he deliberately did not go with his parents and instead stayed on Jerusalem, and his parents had to search for him, but since Jesus is morally perfect, he must have been doing the right thing. Once again, Jesus' actions have no bearing on his status as morally perfect. If he had kicked his mom in the teeth, Comfort would say she deserved it. I've mentioned before how this thinking is dangerous here, here, here and here.

The third problem is when Jesus apparently lost his temper when he cleared the temple. Ray says that this wasn't anybody loosing their temper, this was premeditated because Jesus took the time to make a whip. Here is the whole bit:

The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.  In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, "Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade." (John 2:13-16)

So Jesus came into a temple and noting the money changers he made a whip and then drove them all out. I don't really get why it being "premeditated" means that Jesus didn't lose his temper. After all, people are often known to do this - say, for example, that a woman realizes their husband is cheating on her out at the local bar. So she drives home, grabs a knife, drives back and slashes his tires. Premeditated? Check. Moral? Probably not. but apparently as long as one does something in a premeditated fashion, one is not losing one's temper - especially if it's Jesus. Also, since he made those money changers and owned them, he can do whatever he wants, right?

In the end all I can say is... who cares if Jesus stole a donkey, spat on his parents, and overturned some tables? I mean sure, the overturning of the tables pretty much guaranteed that he'd be crucified, but this is some pretty minor stuff to quibble over. Jesus is a million times more moral compared to the Christian god anyway - and they are supposed to be the same entity. Both are apparently morally perfect. Huh? Just write that stuff out of the next version of the Bible or something. 

Ray a Day: 5:10

So, today Ray's book gave me another dose of atheophobia, and an interesting subject: prayer.

In Ray's book, an angry skeptic mentions that he prayed to god when he was a believer but god never answered. Ray responds by touting the same nonsense he's repeated several times about the difference between "believers" and "Christians". He says:

Every sane human being is a "believer" in God's existence. Some people pretend he doesn't exist (atheists) but they know He does. I know what an atheist knows because God's word tells me that he has given light to every man.

He goes on to say that believers have prayed to his model of god and gotten no response because believers have to do what his god wants before his god will answer them. There is some sort of appropriate procedure to follow. Said procedure is repenting and trusting in Jesus.

Comfort then gives his reader a common parable about his god - concerning prayers, his god always responds, and the response is either "yes", "no" or "wait".

I have covered this nonargument about atheists knowing there is a god several times over, so I'll not repeat myself. There is no compelling evidence for Comfort's god, so no, I do not "know" that his god exists. I could say that comfort is merely pretending that his god exists so that he can feel good about his special place in the universe, but I do not wish to stoop to his level of pandering. I could say that he is just pretending that Thor does not exist, so that he does not have to be held accountable when Thor's gigantic godly hammer comes crashing down. As amusing as that would be, we don't have any compelling evidence for Thor's existence, either.

I also don't need to show you, my dear reader, how silly the "yes/no/wait" prayer argument is because someone else has already done so fairly well, in the form of a youtube clip by GIIVideo:

Ray a Day - 5:8

Well, we're in the last 30 pages of Ray Comfort's book, "You can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think: Answers to Questions From Angry Skeptics".

Today, Comfort's Angry Skeptic says:

Welcome to a dangerous new era - the Unlightenment - in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They're everywhere - reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about "chakras" and "healing energies", praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We've got to respect their beliefs, apparently. ... Why should your outmoded codswallop be treated with anything other than the contemptuous mockery it deserves?

 I looked up this quote on Comfort's blog and noted something interesting - it is a quote by Charlie Brooker, from an article published in The Guardian. The blog commenter (or "angry skeptic", if you will) made it clear that he was quoting someone else, by clearly citing who he was quoting.  Comfort takes this quote and though he obvously knows from the original comment that this quote was authored by Charlie Brooker, he fails to cite the original author of this comment in his book.

I am not nearly this dishonest, so I will give credit where credit is due. The text above is from a column in the guardian. The entire column can be found here.  Charlie Brooker has been writing for tv and media for decades and has written several books.

I am fairly sure that Comfort could get sued for using quotes from an article written in the guardian without crediting the author. I do not think that it matters that the quote came from his blog comments (He can use his blog comments due to fair use laws) because the commenter was quoting from someone else, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, Comfort says that he agrees with Brooker. He agrees that we're surrounded by crazy people who'll believe anything. He says that he and Kirk Cameron once snuck a hidden camera into a psychic store, but they got kicked out because their "questions cut too close to the bone". He thinks healing energy and imaginary gods, seeing mary in a cheese sandwitch is all a bunch of bunk.

So far, we're with him, right? But what does he have up his sleeve? Oh, he says we should "go one step furthur and say to stop all this nonsense and to love and serve the Living God". He says that he's going to make a prediction, and that his prediction is this: his blog will make us mad, and when we read that we'll decide we aren't mad, and will then get confused about how to respond.

You see, to an atheist, or to someone incredulous, there isn't much difference between healing energy and non Comfortian Christian gods or comfort's particular brand of god. There is no more evidence for his god than for any of these other things. Why is it that Comfort can so easily dismiss the claims of other religions but is incapable of applying the same logic to his own? What is the difference between a "false god" and thw apparently "true god" Comfort believes in? Why is it so easy to dismiss other gods as foolish, but you can't let go of your own using the exact same tools you used to dismantle the others? I'll never understand this.

I am going to guess that Comfort and Cameron got kicked out of the psychic store maybe cause they... had a camera on business property. I don't really know, as I can't find any verification that this took place aside from in Ray's book - but since he seems to be a master heckler, I am going to go out on a limb and guess that he may have been heckling and creating a schene.

Oh and, Comfort's prediction was incorrect. This does not make me mad. It makes me think. When you're an outsider to religion, people's different religious beliefs sort of blur into a fuzzy spectrum (The Religion Spectrum). People who have beliefs that do not infringe on the believers' ability to function in daily life, are ethical, moral and do not undermine science or take away my rights don't particularly bother me, even if they are a fairly far cry from reality. To me, the only difference in the Christian and Muslim god, for example, are the behaviors of their believers and some minor specific beliefs. They both fall squarely in the categoy of "mythology".

Ray a Day - 5:7

So, today's Ray a Day is about Mahatma Gandhi.  A skeptic recites the commonly heard quote of Gandhi's, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.  Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."  Comfort's response is that no one is like Jesus.  He challenges us to try and live one single day like Jesus, being completely perfect.

Well, for one, it seems obvious to me that Jesus Christ was not perfect.  I should make clear, I do think that Jesus was an excellent moral teacher for his time.  Even by the Bible's own standards, however, Jesus failed:  saying that we must all hate our mother and father in Luke 14:26.  In John 4:2, he blatantly insults his mother, Mary.  The Bible makes it clear that any failed prediction conclusively proves that a person claiming to give prophecy is a fake, yet in Matthew, Chapters 16, 24, and 26, Jesus claims that his return will happen very soon, within the lives of the people he was speaking to (these predictions are repeated in Mark 13 and Luke 21).  By humanistic morality, such as my own, Jesus fails as well.  He ranted frequently about hell.  I strongly object to the concept of a person who so thoroughly approves of the idea of hell being morally perfect.  He was also racist.  Was the rest of his culture racist?  Definitely.  Do I consider him a terrible person based entirely on his relatively mind racism?  Not at all.  I do, however, think that it firmly establishes Jesus, at least as he is portrayed in the Gospels, as being considerably less than "morally perfect."  (Verses in question are Mark 7:24-30.)

Concerning Gandhi, Comfort goes on to say that it seems that Gandhi did not accept Jesus as his savior, and so is burning in hell, and certainly was not perfect in word, thought and deed, like good 'ol Jesus.  Now, it should be obvious that the skeptic was not claiming in any way that Gandhi was perfect, he was simply using a well-known quote to illustrate that while Jesus was an admirable moral teacher on some issues, a great many of his followers are not (pay close attention to this part, Ray!).  Many followers of Jesus are overbearing, judgemental, dishonest people who hide behind an air of self-righteousness.  If folks like Comfort don't want to give people a bad impression of their religion, then it wouldn't hurt to actually take some of Jesus' advice. He might start by actually apropriately and honestly answering the point of a question instead of simply dodging it while adding a sprinkle of ad hominem.  Ghandi's point was that even though people claim that they are following the teachings of Jesus, they are very unlike Jesus or his teachings.


Oh yeah and - happy Jewish zombie day! Today's the day the dead people crawled out of their graves and walked around Jerusalem, but no one noticed except Matthew (who wasn't even there).

Ray a Day 5:5

Today Ray's angry skeptic says that if he (or she) ever becomes a believer, he might believe in deism like Antony Flew, but he (she?) would never believe in the Christian god - as a reason, the skeptic says "I could never worship a god that could quote possibly be torturing Anne Frank"

For those of you out of the loop, Anne Frank is an adorable girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp when she was fifteen. Here diary was discovered and published posthumusly. Isn't she absolutely adorable? Too bad, because this cute adorable face is suffering eternal torment in hell because she didn't think correctly, according to Comfortian Christianity.

Ray says, "It seems that this skeptic is willing to believe in a God who created all things, but he's not willing to believe in a God who is a God of Justice. ... imagine that perhaps Anne heard the Gospel from those with whom she was captive in Nazi Germany, and as a Jew she embraced the Jewish Messiah. then our skeptic friend will therefore end up in hell, when he could have instead ended up in heaven with Anne Frank"

He's missing the whole point. The problem is not that the skeptic has a particular problem with a just god, the problem is that the skeptic is using the evidence of the Christian god's supposed actions and behaviors and coming to the conclusion that the Christian god is an unjust god. What comfort is doing here is asserting that the skeptic does not like justice, when in fact the opposite is true - the fact that he sees justice as a positive force is precisely the reason he rejects the christian god. Comfort, on the other hand, thinks that his god is defines as "a just being", and so no matter what this god does, it is a just god. It can do things that we would consider horrible, but it is still just, simply because it says so.

I've said this before in a different way, but it is worth repeating. here goes:

There are two ways (there are possibly more, but two for the sake of this argument) to decide that something/someone/some action is just:

1. Look at any given entity X and observe it's characteristics and determine the status of its justice based on those observed characteristics and a working definition of the word "justice". In this case, justice is determined based on experience I.E. a given entity is just because we have observed that is fits the definition of "just".

2. Define a given entity X as just, and define any action any given entity X does as just, in which case no observable characteristics will change its status as a just thing. In this case, a given entity is just in spite of any flaws one might encounter - those flaws are dismissed as not actually being flaws, because the given entity has already been defined as just. This is using an a priori definition and is independent of experience, I.E. A given entity is just because it is just.

The problem occurs when we do both in the same argument - by create a working definition of a word (in this case, justice) and then applying it to entity X, but then defining entity X as justice. Then even when entity X does things that are counter to our prior definition of justice, we simply say that entity X is just, and so even if it looks as thought entity X is being unjust, entity X is not being unjust, because that's impossible. Make sense? No. It doesn't.

The first way of deciding that something is just fits in with our observational model of the world - observe, experiment, and think about what has been observed and experimented on. The second way has nothing to do with our observed world. The first way is rational, and the second is not.

Imagine, if you will, that I think Flimsy is perfectly just. If I think he is just based on my observation and experience - if he always behaves in a morally right way based on ethics, rationality, law, fairness, natural law, equity, etc - then his justness is subject to change say, if he decides to kill my dog to punish me because I blinked at him the wrong way. If he does something unjust, then I will question whether he is a just person. If he repeatedly acts in an unjust manner, I will decide that he is not just.

If I think he is just because he is just and he defines justness, then his actions do not matter, as his justice is not based on my observation and experience and not subject to change. He can do whatever he wants and because he is perfect justice, whatever he wants to do is the just thing to do. He did the right thing. I am the one to blame.

If he holds out his hands and says, "in my right hand is a blue bead. In my left hand is a red bead. I am freely giving you the choice to take whichever you want, because I love you and care about you and want you to have free will" and I choose the red bead, and he says, "Um no. If you don't choose the blue bead, I am going to beat you to within an inch of your life, rape you, kill your pets, cut out your eyes, and set you on fire. But I love you, so I want it to be your choice. No really. Choose whichever you want".

If I tell my parents that my perfectly just boyfriend gave me this choice, what are they going to think? They are going to think it is appropriate for me to get as far away from him as possible. They are not going to think, "wow, that guy really knows how to follow Biblical moral principals!"

This type of reasoning is, frankly, dangerous.

Of course, there is also a third type of belief concerning Justice and god - a lot of people believe god is perfectly just and does not do unjust things, so whenever an unjust thing is attributed to god's doing, the believer chooses to believe that those attributing an unjust behavior to god are just wrong. A similar situation might be if a friend of mine told me that Flimsy had robbed a bank - I would not believe that individual, because I don't believe that is something Flimsy would do. If I saw Flimsy arrive in his car with a bag of cash while being pursued by the police, I would have ample evidence to change my mind. Since the only behaviors I can attribute to a person's god are those attributes the person tells me their god happens to have, I can only look at an individual's god as a character, and decided based on that god's actions if their particular version of god fits the definition of a just god. 

Also, how does pretending Anne Frank is in heaven by pretending she accepted Jesus helpful? The point is that Anne Frank was a good girl who suffered terribly in a concentration camp and died, and it does not seem just to inflict maximal punishment by eternal torment in hell because she happened to be born in an environment and under circumstances which did not give her the opportunity to repent and accept Jesus as her savior.

Let's take a break, ye of little attention span...:







That was fun! Moving on...

He then goes on to quote himself from another book he wrote called The Evidence Bible. He talks about a televangelist who claims to believe that all of the people who died on the Holocaust went to heaven. He says we should really think about the implications of this statement: His statement limits the salvation of Jews to those who died in the Holocaust:

If the slaughtered Jews made it into heaven, did the many Gypsies who died in the Holocaust obtain salvation? ... Perhaps he was saying that the death of Jesus on the Cross covered all of humanity, and that we will all be saved ... this means that salvation will also come to Hitler and the Nazis who killed the Jews. ... Such a statement would have brought the scorn of his Jewish host, and of the world whose compassion has definite limits. If pressed, he probably didn't mean that only the Jews in the caps went to heaven, because that smacks of racism. He was likely saying that those who died were saved because they died in such tragic circumstances. ... So is there another way to heaven - death in a Nazi concentration camp? Or is Salvation limited to German camps? If their salvation came because of the grim circumstances surrounding their death, does a Jew therefore enter heaven after suffering for hours before dying in a car wreck...if he was killed by a drunk driver who happened to be German?

 Okay. First of all, this whole idea of suffering being the entrance into heaven is a derailment of the topic - it reminds me of this terrible debate I saw once in which the atheist (who I feel lost the debate, sadly enough) asked his opponent exactly where Jesus went after he descended onto heaven - space? But he can't breathe up there! He would have burned up in the atmosphere!

No, the televangalist is not saying that suffering is the key to heaven - he is saying that it is not ethical to torture people (for eternity.) who don't believe in Jesus while they are alive and the people who do believe in Jesus are the ones killing them. Because it's not ethical, God would not do that, since god does not do unethical things. Therefore, God did not punish the Jews for not believing in Jesus. He believes the third way mentioned above - he uses a working definition of justice, and sees if his god fits that definition. If he does not, then he determines that his god did not do the thing that did not fit the definition of "just". Ray believes God is just in the second way - no matter what his god does, it's the just thing to do.

More? More!

Comfort says:

I'm a little weary of hearing atheists parrot their popular and old phrase about "God torturing His Children". presumably speaking of God sending sinners to hell. God will not "torture" anyone. He will give them "justice". A criminal may believe that his being thrown into a cold prison because he viciously raped three teenage girls, is torture. The judge rather knows better. He calls it "justice".

 Guess what.  I am more than a little weary of hearing Christians parrot their popular and old phrase about "hell being perfect justice". Hell, as described by the Bible, is torture, and that's the point. The point is not to teach people a lesson so that they will stop being bastards, the point is to make them suffer eternally in maximal, conscious, irreversible punishment. The point is not justice, the point is suffering. A criminal is thrown into prison because prison is a place to:

1. Put people who are a danger to society.
2. Put people so that they may be reformed and then re-enter society.

The point of prison is not eternal, irreversible conscious torment. You simply cannot compare prison to hell and then claim that hell is mere justice, just like prison. Hell is torture. Ray is basically saying "Oh no.. god doesn't torture people, he only tortures them, but we call it justice because that sounds more fair." Yes, and I didn't rape that little girl, we had consensual sex.

Grah! There is so much for me to write about in this one blog post. I'm not even done yet. Comfort goes on. He says that sinner will be damned "from all that is good in a prison called hell. ... So they will get what the Bible calls "Equity". Equity, according to the dictionary, is, "the quality of being fair or impartial; fairness, impartiality; the equity of Solomon." ... In other words, equity is doing that which is right, fair and just". Sinners are not God's children. The Bible makes that clear. We are not his children until we are washed away from our sins by the grace of God, and are born of his spirit through the new birth of John 3:1-5.

Hey look, Ray has cited another source without referencing it or crediting the source. Of course though, if he wants to cite five paragraphs of himself, does reference it. What's up with that? Here is the definition of Equity, from Dictionary.com (see what I did there?)

Equity (n)
1. the quality of being fair or impartial; fairness; impartiality: the equity of Solomon.

So what Ray is saying here is that because The Bible says that people will get equity, and equity according to the dictionary means fair and impartial, that means that his god is fair and impartial. Also, apparently no human is the child of Comfort's god until they repent, accept Jesus, and get born again. In other words, God does not give a shit about Anne Frank. Even though he created her. Since we can't be Comfort's god's children until we do the Jesus thing, and since Comfort's god apparently considered Anne Frank to be a worthless sinner whose perfect and just outcome was maximal, infinite, irreversible punishment, what then is the impetus to care about, say for example, unborn babies? Unborn babies, according to Comfort, cannot possibly be his god's children.

Isn't it fun to follow a premise to its logical conclusion?

Ray a Day: 5:2

Today's questioner asks Ray how we know we've got the right god.

Ray says that this is a good question, and goes on to explain a few of the other gods (the Mormon, Aztec, new age) and even throws in "evolution as a god - "You could make evolution your god, and give it praise for creating everything through (super)natural selection". I shouldn't have to point out that evolution is a process, and so saying that you could make evolution your god is about as bizarre as saying you could make economics your god.

Here is how, Ray says, you can know you've got the right god.

-you have guilt.
-the ten commandments says stuff.
-the conscience produces guilt about not following the ten commandments.
-this guilt is a product of our impending judgment.
-It's true whether your believe it or not.
-the Bible says Jesus suffered to take away your sins and guilt.
-The Bible promises you won't feel guilty anymore if you repent and trust Jesus.
-Then, we won't feel guilty for anything - lust, adultery, etc.
-No other religion can wipe away the guilt you feel for doing bad stuff.
-all those false religions still have sacrifices through prayer, doing good works, etc.
-Not Christianity! Once we trust Jesus and repent, we're literally not guilty anymore of doing bad things.
-This is so simple a child could understand it. "Obey the gospel, and guilt is replaced by absolute assurance of everlasting life"

Without writing out the whole paragraph, this is literally what Ray is saying. I hope that any Christians reading this realize that Comfort it making a mockery of your religion. People should feel guilty for not doing good works, because doing good works is the ethical thing to do. I cannot believe that Comfort continually mocks and berates atheists for being the scum of the earth while simultaneously claiming that his savior will wash away all of his crimes and he will no longer have to feel guilty for committing any of them.

On top of this did Comfort really even answer the question? The right god is apparently the one that makes all of your guilt for doing bad things wash away. Honestly, I don't understand this. Comfort claims that atheists reject god so that they can do whatever they want without feeling guilty, but his version of Christianity seems to imbue the exact same sentiments that he rails against. What is to stop someone from committing adultery and then saying, "It's okay! It's no big deal! I accept Jesus, so I don't feel guilty for betraying my wife. God will forgive me!" The only "argument" he has to fall back on, then, is the argument that if you're a "True Christian", then you'll never do bad things. I am going to go out on a limb and assume that Ray considers himself a "True Christian" yet he admits that he has broken every one of the ten commandments - he says this is okay, because Jesus will forgive poor little sinful Ray Comfort (p55). Apparently atheists are terrible scum because they are "moral free agents", but with all guilt for immorality washed away, Comfortian Christians are more morally free than atheists - believe in Jesus and if you hurt society, you don't have to feel guilty because you are forgiven. Be an atheist, and if you hurt society you feel guilty because you've gone against social morals. This form of moral extremism is dangerous to society and I can't understand why Comfort is advocating it.

If you're forgiven for doing bad things, and your god allows you to feel no guilt at all for doing bad things, what is the impetus to stop doing those bad things? I'd personally rather people follow a god that makes people feel appropriately guilty for harming others. Lack of feelings of guilt for doing bad is a classic sign of sociopathy.

Ray Comfort's morality scares me. It offends my ethics. If a subjective feeling of guiltlessness at one's moral crimes is how one finds the right god, I hope that no one finds the right god.

Ray a Day Guest Post: Augustine79

Here is a guest post by Augustine79, our resident ethical Catholic!

In Ray Comfort’s book, You can lead and Atheist to Evidence but You Can’t Make Him Think, he proposes that Christian theology purports that human moral action does not lead one to salvation. In other words, God does not care about right living with a pure conscience, as long as a human being believes in Christ. My intention here is to expose, to the best of my ability, accurate Christian teaching that flows from human reason, from scripture, and sacred tradition.

Logically, if God is just then it would follow that the deeds of His creation would be taken into account depending on upon whether their actions are immoral or moral. Otherwise, humanity would have absolutely no intrinsic value and goodness, insofar as it can be known either through reason or divine Revelation, would mean nothing.

Before I refute Ray’s uncompassionate, heart-wrenching view of God, here is the actual excerpt I will be contesting:

“All manmade religions still offer sacrifices. That’s the altar upon which they are built – the sacrifice of prayer, of giving money, of giving time, doing good works, of doing penance, of fasting, etc. They have to sacrifice, because they still have guilt, because the conscience demands a continual sacrifice. Not so with Christianity. The guilt is removed because the sacrifice was accepted. Completely. And our guilt is dismissed through simple repentance and faith in Jesus.”

Most of the audience who reads this passage would be quite bewildered by these clearly contradictory statement to Christian living. The Bible explicitly states that good works are organically linked to faith as a part of the equation of infused salvation. Ray subscribes to Sola Fide, or faith alone; bringing one to salvation. Ray, and many fundamentalists hold this view based on Romans 4. However, St. Paul never used this term, and furthermore exposed that justification by faith is something you have you do as well as believe. The only place in the Bible where ‘faith alone’ is used is in the Epistle of James. This passage also proves that salvation involves right action. ““What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can such faith save him? …You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only…? For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” (James 2:14, 24, 26)

In addition to this, the sacrament of Baptism is known in scripture and tradition to remove original sin. However, Ray would view this as a human work, therefore no grace would be infused within the individual. It is arrogant for Ray to assume that he is saved for eternity based solely on belief, and moral works are superfluous.

Here are excerpts from catholic.com providing scriptural and traditional evidence that this notion supported by most fundamentalist protestants is one hundred percent plain wrong.

“Scripture teaches that one’s final salvation depends on the state of the soul at death. As Jesus himself tells us, "He who endures to the end will be saved" (Matt. 24:13; cf. 25:31–46). One who dies in the state of friendship with God (the state of grace) will go to heaven. The one who dies in a state of enmity and rebellion against God (the state of mortal sin) will go to hell.

For many Fundamentalists and Evangelicals it makes no difference—as far as salvation is concerned—how you live or end your life. You can heed the altar call at church, announce that you’ve accepted Jesus as your personal Savior, and, so long as you really believe it, you’re set. From that point on there is nothing you can do, no sin you can commit, no matter how heinous, that will forfeit your salvation. You can’t undo your salvation, even if you wanted to.”

“Regarding the issue of whether Christians have an "absolute" assurance of salvation, regardless of their actions, consider this warning Paul gave: "See then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off" (Rom. 11:22; see also Heb. 10:26–29, 2 Pet. 2:20–21).”

“One can be confident of one’s present salvation. This is one of the chief reasons why God gave us the sacraments—to provide visible assurances that he is invisibly providing us with his grace. And one can be confident that one has not thrown away that grace by simply examining one’s life and seeing whether one has committed mortal sin. Indeed, the tests that John sets forth in his first epistle to help us know whether we are abiding in grace are, in essence, tests of whether we are dwelling in grave sin. For example, "By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother" (1 John 3:10), "If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen" (1 John 4:20), "For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome" (1 John 5:3).”

“Likewise, by looking at the course of one’s life in grace and the resolution of one’s heart to keep following God, one can also have an assurance of future salvation. It is this Paul speaks of when he writes to the Philippians and says, "And I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ" (Phil. 1:6). This is not a promise for all Christians, or even necessarily all in the church at Philippi, but it is a confidence that the Philippian Christians in general would make it. The basis of this is their spiritual performance to date, and Paul feels a need to explain to them that there is a basis for his confidence in them. Thus he says, immediately, "It is right for me to feel thus about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel" (1:7). The fact that the Philippians performed spiritually by assisting Paul in his imprisonment and ministry showed that their hearts were with God and that it could be expected that they, at least in general, would persevere and remain with God.”

It is important for theists and atheists/skeptics alike to know this simply because most people receive incorrect information regarding Christian doctrine, and are consequently turned off from organized religion altogether. Its astounding and appalling that Ray dismisses sacrifices that are inherently part of Christian living. Prayer, fasting, charity, and putting yourselves before others are all integral to the Christian faith. Christianity is not only about saving yourself, but spreading peace throughout our world through humble servitude. St. Augustine stressed in his grandiose work, The City of God, that Christians are on this earth to improve upon the temporal world by serving the interests of society in general through the enhancement of social ethics and morality.

Ray a Day Guest Post: Tom

May I introduce to you, Mr. Tom!

This segment of Ray's book opens with our atheist asking,

I would like to ask you a couple of relevant question pertaining to the "sacrifice" of Jesus and its purpose. Please logically explain why an omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent God would need to sacrifice Himself(as Jesus) to Himself(God) in order to forgive man of sins against Him(God)? The entire premise seems totally absurd."

     When I read this, I was looking forward to read how Ray was going to justify this "sacrifice", and hopefully understand this for as I've been wondering this myself. Now, the first part of his reply, on the surface at least, appears to be agreeing with our atheist, by saying "I appreciate the way you said that the sacrifice of the Cross seems absurd. It does." Did anyone else catch that? If read quick, it appears as though he is agreeing with our atheist's saying that the sacrifice seems absurd, while in reality, he isn't.

Instead, he goes on to one of his little stories to try to explain his point of view, in a very similar manner to the one he used back in Ray a Day 3:1.

He starts it out with "Imagine if I said to you, 'I just sold my house, my car, and used all my savings to pay a fine for you.'" And then, in the very next paragraph, he rewords his whole story to take it from making no logical sense, to making even less sense, by making it sound like the person with the fine has really messed up, with the fine coming from numerous violations that just mount one on top of the other. And now, out comes the use of verses from the bible to try to support his point. Here, I actually did something that I haven't done in a while, got out a bible and looked them up, so that I could see exactly what he was referencing.

He claims that we don't know that we've broken God's law and are in trouble. And, just for good measure, he tries to put down atheists by saying that are in a "drunken atheistic stupor" before continuing to say that we have ignored our conscience while rushing to sin. Last time I checked, paying attention to your conscience and being an atheist, or any religious preference for that matter, are mutually exclusive. From here, he goes on to describe how god is "all knowing", and how our "behavior" has made him angry at us.

At this point, he is referencing verse after verse to support his point, and so far they are in support of his point.

Now, he decides to show how as you lie to people that are more important, the punishment goes up. That's something that I've known since I was little, and most other people also know.

And now, a demonstration of Ray's logic, just to prepare you.




We're back, and Ray is going on about how sacrifice doesn't work to reconcile your "sin", and how the Aztecs would conduct human sacrifices to appease the gods when they felt that they had angered them, and then says that "any sacrifice we make is an abomination to God."

Here, I must contradict Ray, by also quoting verse. If you look to Leviticus 1:1 to 7:18, it not only outlines how to make sacrifices and offerings, but also how to atone for one's sins and transgressions as well. If god were so against sacrifices, why then would he have told Moses the process, in detail, for conducting sacrifices and offerings? The only part of what Ray said regarding sacrifice that agrees with this part of the Bible is that human sacrifice isn't acceptable, and is an abomination.

Then, he goes back to trying to explain how Jesus' dying on the cross was a sacrifice to save everyone from sin, after saying himself that all sacrifices are an abomination. And what's he do, quote another verse. Here he introduces a rather interesting irony. Jesus was actually god on earth, but of the three verses he referred to, one actually says it, one implies it, and one is barely even related to what he is trying to say. Now, if Jesus was god, then how is sacrificing him actually a sacrifice? Going back to his story, it would be like the one who was going to pay the fine for you being the one that it was paid to. Doesn't look like much of a sacrifice if you ask me.

Ray is trying to claim that the fact that Jesus was sacrificed on the cross was too save us from death by mentioning that he was raised from the dead. This, when looked at from a scientific standpoint, and knowing what happens when someone is crucified, would be impossible. When someone is crucified, from the angle that they hang at on the cross, their lungs will start to fill with fluid. They also have a hard time breathing, and the only way to get a deep breath is to pull their body up with their arms, which from the location of the spikes, creates excruciating pain. Those two things together, along with exposure, combine to kill the victim. And, once dead, your body immediately begins to decay, and the brain is the first thing to be affected functionally, while the digestive tract is where the main decay begins at. This would make his rising from the dead impossible, and based scientific fact regarding what happens after you die, the biggest hoax in human history.

He's tries to use this to show why giving money to charities, praying, and other self sacrifice won't help you when it comes to sins. If you look at the fact that when the bible was originally written, livestock was the measure of your wealth and social status, then this actually makes very little sense. If you were to update the instructions on how to make a sacrifice according to what is written in Leviticus to modern terms, you would literally give money to the church, for the priest to sacrifice for you, to atone for your sins.

He proposes that the whole reason that god sacrificed Jesus as atonement for our sins is that it would be out of his character to just forgive us. Now, if it were out of his character to forgive us, then why would he have Jesus die for our sins as a sacrifice, after providing everything needed? If his character isn't one of forgiveness, and he were bound to his character, then why would he go out of his way and give us a means to forgive those sins? It just doesn't add up. Only for him to say that if we don't repent, we'll pay the price. Now, if you don't believe in a heaven, hell, or afterlife, then what price could he be talking about? There has yet to be any solid scientific proof that heaven, hell, or any other afterlife exist that I've seen, so how would we pay for not repenting? By dying, which everything that is living is bound to do at some point.

Ray finishes up by claiming that he has proven his point, which he has danced around as carefully as he could. He failed to logically explain the "sacrifice" of Jesus. Nowhere did he say or explain how it makes any sense to make a sacrifice to yourself, and still have it count as a sacrifice.

He closes this section up by saying "For the message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God," only to throw in a post script saying that if it still seems absurd to read that quote through to figure out why it seems absurd.

From reading this, he seems to only like the parts of the Bible that he can use to support his opinion, and to pretend that the others don't exist. And the whole while, when asked a question that needs a logical explanation, to dance around it and provide no real answer to the question. If I were to base my religious decisions off of Ray Comfort, I would be looking more at anything other than Christianity.

This has been Tom doing my guest Ray A Day post. Hope you all have also seen the lack of true logic that Ray uses. Thank you Ziztur for this opportunity.

Ray a Day: 4:3

Today's angry skeptics asks Ray:

the Bible itself is presumed to be the Word of God written down by inspired men simpl