Does God Care for You and Me?

Instinctively I have to, or want to, say "Yes, certainly God cares for me and everyone else (at least if he exists)". But why should I be so confident in that? Perhaps is it my background: growing up in a Christian family and inheriting that assumption. Not all religions would teach that about God. If Christian doctrine is a sufficient reason for you believing something, then no need to read further. But if like me you want something more, then join me in asking this question:

Is there any actual evidence that God cares for people in general, or Christians in particular?

I remember from my church-going days a proof given periodically by preachers of this. After preaching on God's care for his followers, the preacher would ask a question like this: "Is there anyone here who God has not provided for when you were in desperate need?" And of course no one raises a hand. Wow -- surely most people have been in some sort of great need during their lives, and if God provided for them then that's a 100% batting average on God's part. What more could you ask for?

There are a number of problems with this demonstration, and here is the big one that made me a bit uncomfortable even in much church-days. Say someone was in desperate need and God didn't provide. Well, he would die. And clearly there have been many Christians in desperate need of healing or something else to keep them alive, but didn't get it and died. By asking this question to the living members of his congregation, the preacher has effectively excluded anyone who could convincingly say "No, God didn't provide for me and I died." So if you exclude the nays, then it is not too surprising you will get 100% yeas.

The classic demonstration from nature that God must care for us is attributed to Jesus. Consider Luke 12:22-24: And [Jesus] said to his disciples, "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!" Granted, we are more valuable than ravens. And granted, I have not seen any dead ravens. I am not sure it follows that God feeds them in their need. If so the population of ravens would have exceeded all other birds by now. Rather it seems more likely that ravens die of starvation or thirst when food or water are scarce just like other animals. That puts a pretty big hole in the argument that God cares for us by analogy to ravens.

Instead of discovering evidence that God cares for those in need, the opposite seems to be the case. There is so much needless suffering in this world, and so many untimely deaths. Here I am not addressing the problem of suffering; I just want to find some positive evidence that God cares for those in need. Anecdotes of good coming out of times of desperate need are encouraging, but have to be balanced by the innumerable times desperate need leads to tragic death. So I am at a loss in finding evidence that God cares for you and me.

Two Faces of Christianity

There are two conflicting sides of Christianity that I see in our culture. Let me call these the Utopian side and the Militant side. Both of these are found and justified in many passages of the New Testament. And yet they present divergent, if not diametrically opposite, views of what Christianity means.

The Utopian Christian loves his neighbor (and everyone in the world) as much as himself. He has compassion on the poor and downtrodden and sacrifices his well-being for theirs. He rejoices in affliction and even afflicts himself with fasting and other hardships. He does not judge or condemn others. He gives to whoever asks from him. He is a pacifist who will not strike back or retaliate when slapped on the face. He loves his enemy, will not speak evil of him behind his back, and prays for his well-being.

The Militant Christian, on the other hand, sees this world as a spiritual battle ground. What is important is whether people are going to heaven or hell, not their physical condition or whether they are fed or content. Evil spiritual forces are impinging on good and must be fought. People must be pulled out of the jaws of hell. Whatever means that accomplish this are justified even if they harm people. Evil is defined as what contravenes the revealed will of God (i.e. Bible). Condemnation of immorality is a staple, especially anything to do with sex or sexual orientation that isn't sanctioned in the Bible.

If something saves lives or pulls people out of poverty or helps the downtrodden or leads to greater happiness, the utopian Christian is likely to support it. These factors, however, are not particularly relevant to the militant Christian. Things for him are judged on an absolute moral scale, rather than on a harm/benefit scale. The militant Christian attacks policies that could be seen as condoning immoral behavior, even if they could literally save thousands of lives. This includes attacking sex education and providing condoms to poor nations to protect them from the spread of HIV. A similar reasoning leads to attacking same-sex marriages -- it doesn't matter whether or not it could lead to happier people. All that matters is that it contravenes what they see as God's ideal for the world. Other similar ideals by some Christians include banning contraception use including condoms, (even though contraception undoubtedly protects millions of unwanted children from coming into the world), and banning suicide and euthanasia even for terminally ill people in great pain. The merits of each of these could be debated on a harm/help basis, but this is irrelevant to the militant Christian who sees everything through a black-white, moral-immoral lens.

Freedom of belief and religion are certainly not ideals of the militant Christian. If a belief system (or religion) is going to lead people astray and into eternal torture in hell, why should that be legal or tolerated? The militant Christian has few qualms in leveraging the state's powers to further the spread of the gospel and halt the spread of other "nefarious" beliefs.

I have just described the extremes of these views. Both can surely find plenty of support in the Bible. And Christians hold a whole spectrum of beliefs spanning these two extremes. But what I find sad is that the second of these faces seems to be winning. While modern Christians still pay lip service to the utopian ideals espoused by Jesus, in practice they have ditched them as ineffective. I presume they judge it less effective to live a selfless life, than to rail judgments against all the evils they see and lobby politicians to fight their cause. Turning on the radio or scanning the blogsphere or listening to sermons, it is the shouts of Christian soldiers that are drowning out the quiet voices of their utopian brethren.

Guilt: a reason to believe?

Why should one believe in Christianity? What evidence can one present to the skeptic or doubter or even the believer? Miracles are a popular one, but most have never seen one. Thinking back over the evangelism I have done and observed, the guilt argument is one of the most effective at making converts. Here is how it goes:

We are all sinners and guilty of breaking God's universal moral law. The evidence for this is the guilt we feel -- surely no one will deny that we each suffer from feelings of guilt at times in our lives. Hence we are each aware of being transgressors of God's law. Now the wages of sin are death, but the free gift of God is eternal life. One simply believes and repents and one will be forgiven one's sins. Moreover, this is right way to overcome our guilt.

I certainly believed this line of reasoning for many years. A favorite anecdote in sermons is that of a non-believer being driven by his or her overwhelming feeling of guilt to the forgiveness of Christ. What makes this powerful is that guilt is real, undeniable, and impacts everyone. If it is evidence for Christianity, then indeed one should pay attention.

But is it really evidence for Christianity? Is the argument sound? As I Christian I did not really think to question it; I knew what I wanted to believe and since it supported my beliefs I was happy to include it in my reasons for belief. Now, however, I only want reasons that hold water, and I fear this one does not. Here are the problems I see with it.

First, is it really evidence of a God-instilled moral code? As described in the Wikipedia article, "Guilt is an affective state in which one experiences conflict at having done something that one believes one should not have done." So guilt is evidence of internal conflict, of failing to meet one's own expectations. This conflict need not be between one's actions and God's laws. Rather, our moral expectations of ourselves can easily have purely natural sources. That is, guilt and feelings of right and wrong need not originate in God but are simply a component of our evolution as social beings. (I won't argue that here, but here is a post makes that case: http://www.steelcityskeptics.net/2008/09/08/secular-morality/.)

So guilt need not require the existence of a God-given universal moral code. But is it nevertheless a side-affect of this moral code, and so still useful evidence? The problem with this is the huge variability in guilty feelings, both between different people and in response to similar actions by the same person. Some people are highly sensitive to feelings of guilt; a minor infraction will send them into the depths of guilt. Others are impervious to guilt. While others may commit great crimes without guilt and then have great guilt for a small action. A measure with such variability is a poor indicator of a universal constant or a universal moral code.

A reponse to this is that those who willfully sin sear their consciences and lose their feelings of guillt. But is that really a satisfactory explanation for the variability of guilt? It does not explain why some feel guilt for certain small infractions but not other major ones. Nor does it explain why some are hypersensitive to guilt. It may be that some people can reduce their feelings of guilt through repeated efforts, but a better explanation for its variability among people is that just as physical and emotional attributes vary between people due to genetic and nurturing differences, in the same way sensitivity to guilt will vary.

As a final note, I wonder if it is true that Christianity offers an "answer" to guilt. Rather, from my observations of others and myself, it tends to enhance guilt, particularly in the case of small, inconsequential harms. I can say that from personal experience: as a child of about 5 I once stole a key from my grandfather's desk and then denied it to him when directly asked. I lost the key and so never returned it, but guilt from this sin stayed with me for many years and reoccurred most strongly during revival sermons. I wondered if that sin was the reason God didn't give me the gift of tongues, and other such blessings. Even though I many times asked Jesus to forgive that sin, the guilt from it did not go away. I never told anyone about it but finally, desperate to overcome the guilt, at the age of 15 or so I wrote a letter to my grandparents admitting and apologizing for my grievous sin against them. Then, in a letter to my whole family(!), they added a couple lines addressed to me thanking me for my admission. I think it was the annoyance that they would do that to me that finally overcame my guilt. But now that I look back at the experience, I think it was Christianity that harmed me by nurturing and feeding my guilt and keeping it in my mind as a possible reason that God may be witholding blessings from me when the guilt should have dissipated long before.

So to conclude, I do not believe that our feelings of guilt imply the existence of a God-given law. Rather guilt an important component in the interactions between social beings enabling others to forgive and so overcome wrongs. But guilt is also a useful tool for religions, both for making converts by offering people a way to overcome it, and then in keeping followers in repentance and submission by actually nurturing and spreading guilt.

Apologetics, Anecdotes and Aspersions

I agreed to read Ravi Zacharias's book "Can Man Live Without God" because of a deal with my Mom. She would read Dan Barker's book "godless" (see my review) if I would read this book. Another motivation of mine was that I remember listening to a talk by Zacharias when in college and being impressed. But back then I was a Christian. So I wanted to see what I still thought of him. Also, it has been a while since I have read an apologetics book, and this would be a good chance to reassess the Christian apologetics literature.


While Zacharias is certainly eloquent and makes moving speeches and tells powerful anecdotes, he makes almost no arguments. He just states his positions and relies on the implications of his anecdotes to support them. Perhaps this is effective at convincing most people who rely on emotional appeal rather than reasons for belief. I can see why his books are popular among Christians; those who share his beliefs don't need or want arguments, and they would rather have emotional anecdotes. Compare that to Dan Barker's book "godless" which is full of arguments -- one may disagree with inferences or assumptions in them, but at least Barker provides a reasoned basis for his positions.

I was a bit preturbed to find Zacharias using the term: "antitheist" for atheist. I suppose this is because the term atheist has lost most of its perjorative sense. Right from the beginning this illustrates how he intends to convince his reader of his points: use rhetoric, imagery and other tricks to make his opponents look bad. But in reply to his use of the term "antitheist", consider this distinction: There are hundreds or thousands of gods that people past and present believe in. A monotheist rejects belief in all but one of them. An atheist rejects belief in one additional god. So far so good. Hence it is strange that rejecting 100% versus 99% of gods should make one an "anti" something. Rather Zacharias is simply using it as part of his arsensal of attacks on atheists.



Zacharias loves to find examples of well-known atheists who make outrageous claims or do something outrageous, and then lump all the other atheists in the same box as them. The problem is that atheists are as varied as theists. There are probably as many different ethical systems among atheists are there are among theists. His strategy of telling with relish an anecdote of Stalin pulling feathers out of a live chicken implying that atheists have no basis for morality is like me finding something nasty or brutish taught by some religion (say burning slaves to the sun-god) and implying that all theists (Christians included) are heartless slaves of their gods. Zacharias loves to use Nietzsche as a kicking bag for all of atheism. The problem is two-fold. First he takes Nietzsche's aphorisms far too literally. Second, Nietzsche is not a general representative of atheism; I'm sure far many atheists disagree with much of what Nietzsche proposes.



Zacharias summarizes one of his main claims (pg 32): "Antitheism provides every reason to be immoral and is bereft of any objective point of reference with which to condemn any choice". Contrary to this, and plenty of similar claims (and aspersions), it *is* possible to have an ethical system without need to rely on a deity's wrath or reward. Perhaps Zacharias does not read ethics? For example, Peter Singer provides an ethical framework in his book "Practical Ethics". Also Barker, in his book "godless", describes how he went from assumptions similar to Zacharias's to realizing that an ethical system that truly values humans is one that is based on human needs and characteristics, rather than those of a deity.



My biggest disappointment with the book was Chapter 12 "Getting to the Truth". Here is Zacharias's opportunity to argue constructively for how we can find the truth and distinguish truth from falsehood. There are a lot of falsehoods out there, and people could surely use some good instruction on how to discriminate between what is true and false. Here are Zacharias's 3 tests: (1) logical consistency, (2) empirical adequacy, and (3) experimental relevance. After stating these, Zacharias then goes on to ignore (2) and (3) and relies only on (1). Granted, logical consistency is an important identifier of falsehood. But most real-life falsehoods we encounter are logically consistent (or vague enough to it is hard to show them inconsistent). So how is someone to determine from the myriad claims out there (that aren't clearly logically inconsistent) which ones to trust and which ones to reject? Zacharias gives us no help. The answer lies in a field that Zacharias almost completely ignores (except for a few derogatory comments he makes about evolution). It is found in science. The scientific method is our best tool for acquiring knowledge about the world. It consists of three components that work together: (1) observation, (2) hypothesis creation and (3) hypotheses testing. And there are three main tests for hypotheses, these are: (i) logical consistency, (ii) accuracy (how well the hypotheses describe the observations), and (iii) parsimony (how succinct the hypotheses are). Together these methods and tests are extremely powerful tools for discovering truth about the world. One could wish that Zacharias had applied them to the problem at hand.


There are plenty of other points in his book that I would dispute. The main issues, though, are how one can find the truth, and how one seeks to illuminate the truth to others. Apart from insisting on logical consistency, Zacharias seems quite confused on how to find the truth. He certainly does not make a reasoned case that Christianity is true. There are many strong counter-arguments to his case for Christianity that he ignores (such as those found in Barker's book). Furthermore his method for illuminating truth to others is quite deceptive: he discredits viewpoints by recounting examples of extreme followers, by making broad, unsupported attacks on atheism with the aim of nurturing fear amongst Christians of the rise of amoral atheists, and by using anecdotes as justifications or proofs.


On the other hand, perhaps the problem is that I am not his target audience. These are the very tactics used every Sunday by pastors in countless churches to sustain the faith of their congregations and keep followers from venturing beyond the safe havens of the Christian religion. Certainly these tactics have power to retain followers in the faith. Ravi Zacharias is simply one of those pastors who has put his preaching into print. Considering that the prime use of a book like this is to provide arsenal to pastors for apologetic sermons, I think a more appropriate title for his book is: "Anecdotes of foolish, deluded and nasty atheists."

godless

I just finished reading the book "godless" by Dan Barker, and was extremely impressed. Here is my review of his book.

Barker grew up smack in the middle of the evangelical movement. From a young age he was an enthusiastic follower of Christ and leader in evangelism to the unsaved. He lead missionary trips to Mexico, he wrote songs and plays that were published and widely distributed by Manna Music, he was ordained as a minister, he spoke in tongues, and so on. But after 19 years in the ministry he started to reevaluate his beliefs. And he came to the conclusion that what he believed in, had faith in, simply was not true. That lead to his rejecting his belief in God and a major realignment of his life. But it did not change the central core which was seeking to know the truth and tell others about it. Rather, one could say this change was simply a large step forward in this goal: he determined that his beliefs were in error and he corrected them and continued on. Of course this did not happen overnight, and in the first part of this book is an engaging account of his life as a Christian and his change in direction.

A consequence of his deep involvement in Christian ministry is a deep understanding and respect for Christians. This is in contrast to some of the other recent books on atheism by Dawkins and others that are dismissive of Christian beliefs. Here is someone who understands and experienced Christianity from the inside and the knows the reasons why Christians believe and nevertheless has rejected those beliefs. In this book he provides a clear and compelling account for why he does not believe the Christian message.

In the second portion of the book he challenges some frequent assumptions of the Bible and Christianity. In the chapter is titled "The Bible and Morality," he argues that the Bible is not a good moral guide. In the Bible things aren't inherrently right or wrong; rather it is whatever the strongest person around says is right must be right. The strongest person happens to be God, so what ever he is feeling like at the moment is right, even if that includes killing or raping prisoners, sacrificing your son or daughter, or plenty of other horrific things he did or told his followers to do. In the Bible morality relies on authority, namely: might makes right. Humans have no right to be treated fairly or with respect; whatever God decrees goes. One can start to understand with this basis for morality all kinds of horrific acts could be done with the belief that they are God-decreed. And God's moral decrees in the Bible are no better than moral precepts found in other societies. The 10 commandments do not give much useful guidance. Two examples: "Do not make a graven image" does not give moral guidanace. "Do not kill" as an unqualified commandment is not very helpful: are there no exceptions like in self defense? And Barker argues that "kill" is the better translation than "murder". But even if we take it as a prohibition on murder, it is not an improvement on laws that plenty of pagan societies developed on their own. Moreover, it is undercut by the actions of God himself who frequently and somewhat arbitrarily killed people for minor offenses or ordered his followers to kill them.

Jesus himself had many moral failings. One significant example is that he never spoke out against slavery. Rather, from the use of it in his parables and teaching, it seems that he approved of it. Imagine how much untold misery over 2000 years perpetrated through human bondage could have been eliminated if Jesus, or Paul for that matter, had condemned slavery. His moral exhortations contain plenty of things that aren't wise or moral (and are not followed by most Christians today) such as: Don't make any plans for the future (Matthew 6:34), Don't save any money (Matthew 6:19-20), Marrying a divorced woman is committing adultery (Matthew 5:32), Hate your family (Luke 14:26), and so on.

Rather than requiring an external source to direct us in morality and provide punishment, Barker claims that Atheists have a better source for morality, namely nature itself. "Morality implies avoiding or minimizing harm." The morality of actions is determined based on their effect on humans. Actions are evil because of the harm they cause, rather than because they break a command in a book or because the offend a diety. True morality does not consist in obedience or subservience to an authority, but in rationally choosing actions that benefit rather than harm humans. God is not needed or even helpful in this endeavor.

He addresses a common Christian argument from C.S. Lewis who said of Jesus: either he is "Lunatic, Liar or Lord." I have always been unhappy with this simplistic trichotomy, and Barker adds on a much more likely fourth alternative: "Legend". That is, much of what we have in the Bible regarding Jesus is really legend. He illustrates this with the ressurection stories of which there are 5 accounts in the New Testament. The earliest account written during the lifetime of Jesus followers is by Paul (I Corinthians 15) in 55 AD. This account is understandable as a purely spiritual resurrection. The next account is by Mark, 70 AD, 40 years after Jesus' death and after almost all adults alive in 30 AD would be dead. Accepting that the last 12 verses are a later addition, Mark has no resurrection appearances at all, only a young man saying "he is risen" with perhaps a spiritual interpretation possible. The later accounts written 50 or more years after the event start including physical body appearances of Jesus and other fantastic happenings. The interesting thing is that the earliest accounts have the fewest fantastic or miraculous elements and the later the account the more miraculous elements are included in the stories; a good sign of a developing legend. Additional evidence that it is a developing legend is that the accounts contain many irreconcilable events; it is not possible to create a single account of what happened after Jesus died that includes all the details of all the accounts as they contradict each other. The problem is that Christians today refuse to consider it a legend. Rather they take the oldest accounts, written well into the second or third generation after Jesus, and claim those are the very things that his followers believed right after his death.

In my opinion this is an ideal book for a Christian wishing to critically examine his or her beliefs. I know from personal experience that this type of critique is very difficult to do from inside the faith. But for those Christians who value knowing truth over any particular set of beliefs, here is a book that will challenge them in assessing their own beliefs and reasons for belief.

My Great Ponzi Scheme

I just had a great idea for an unbeatable Ponzi scheme. Offer a reward of infinite riches, everlasting life and an enduring relationship. Tell people that it is a free gift; all they have to do is accept it. Once they join, get people actively involved and emotionally attached. Encourage them to build relationships with other members, and to volunteer their time. Encourage them to give a portion of their income. Use their money and their efforts to grow the scheme. As necessary make use of additional tools like guilt to ensure people are participating. If people lose their sense of urgency or feel too burdened by their participation or are drifting away, give them some perspective: a little temporary pain now is nothing compared to the everlasting torment that is in store for all those who are not in the scheme.

Most Ponzi schemes have fatal flaws that eventually cause them to fail. Either they are exposed as frauds or at some point their growth tapers off and outlays exceed their income and they collapse. This scheme avoids both of these failure modes: it is impossible to disprove its key claim of reward after death, and so it cannot be shown to be a fraud. In addition, this major outlay never actually has to be made to participants (until they are dead), and so it will never run out of resources. At the same time as avoiding typical failure modes, this scheme can do what Ponzi schemes do best: leverage the income and effort of current participants to bring in new participants. I imagine this scheme could last thousands of years.

Freedom and Gay Marriage

Most people love to advertise their support for freedom. But what galls me is when people support freedom in their words but deny it in their actions and in their voting. It is easy for us to see this hypocrisy in totalitarian regimes, but it occurs frequently in our own society. The following is a contemporary example that has been bothering me for a few years.

We hear our politicians talk about spreading freedom to other countries in one breathe, and then in the next breath we hear them advocate that we deny freedom for gays to marry. "Denying gay marriage" is an abstract term to most people, so it helps to think more specifically. What would you say if the government did not permit you to marry the person you chose? Surely that would be severe curtailment of your freedom. In the same way denying gays the right to marry is a severe restriction on their freedom.

We outlaw certain actions that cause harm to others, such as stealing. But the harm has to be real. For example, a general discomfort with interracial marriage is not a sufficient harm to justify denying people the right to marry outside their race. So what specific and real harm does gay marriage cause that would be enough to deny them the right to marry? If a gay couple living next door to you got married, how would that harm you specifically? Would that harm your marriage? If not, then what business do we have telling gays they are not permitted to marry?

Some Thoughts and Sites

I haven't posted in a long time. Guess it is because I haven't had any burning thoughts on God and truth. But I have found some cool web sites, so here are a couple:

Yesterday Randy Pausch, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, died of Pancreatic Cancer (see here). It is a tragic loss: he has a family with three young children, and is in the midst of making great contributions academically. He gave his "Last Lecture" last year. There is a quote I especially like from it: “I have experienced a deathbed conversion. I just bought a Macintosh.” Having heard numerous stories of death-bed conversions to faith during my growing up in a Christian environment, it is such a relief to see someone not clinging to religion and empty promises of salvation, even when he is confronting the end of his life.

The Japanese Zen monks have a long history of death-bed statements in the form of Haiku poems, which fairly often include self-deprecating humor. Hoffmann's book on Japanese Death Poems is a classic that I enjoy reading. Here's a one by Gaki (1927):

One spot, alone,
left glowing in the dark:
my snotty nose.


I went to an event called "Drinking Skeptically" the other evening -- and enjoyed meeting various similar minded people. There is a site with a calendar of local events (in Pittsburgh) called Steelcityskeptics.net

A site I wandered onto and enjoyed a lot is Atheist Girls. They have some good tales to tell on their experiences with and without religion.

Another site I enjoy perusing is: Atheist Ethicist when I feel like commentary on recent political or ethical debates.

Does the Atonement Make Sense?

Atonement is an explanation for how God can forgive sins. It is often presented as penal substitution: Christ took the punishment that we deserve as sinners when he died on the cross. He payed the debt we owe to God for our sins. Thus God is free to forgive our sins and still satisfy the blood requirements of justice.

Here is the problem: say person B commits a horrible crime against person A (for example, say he kills all of person's A's family). Naturally when B is caught, A wants him punished for his crime. Then person C says: I'll take the punishment instead of person B, so you can let B go free. So person C is executed instead of person B and justice is statisfied, is it? Is justice really blind to who it punishes? Even if person A decides to forgive person B and gives up his demand for punishment of B, what is accomplished by person C being executed in B's place? Or consider this, person A says: you can let B go and execute me instead of him.

What a strange idea of justice: a crime is committed and someone has to die for it. But it does not matter who dies: either the ciminal or an innocent, willing substitute, even the victim or the judge. Atonement lies at the heart of Christianity, and yet when examined closely one must ask: What is moral, good or just about this teaching? Why can't God, like us, simply unconditionally forgive?

I wonder what I would have thought about Julia Sweeney?

I recently listened to Julia Sweeney's monologue: Letting Go of God, and I loved it. She eloquently describes many of the same struggles that I have had and how she resolved them. She is both genuine and entertaining and at the same. She describes growing up in a Christian household and earnestly seeking God but in the end finding that the God of Christianity is not there. That summarizes my experience, and perhaps that is why I liked her monologue so much.

But I wonder, if I could go back 14 years and listen to that CD then, what would I have thought? At that time I was a strong evangelical believer. Would I have been critical or dismissive of her story? From my current vantage point I can't determine what my reaction would have been. So much has changed in my life.

Perhaps one way I could get insight into this question is to see the reaction of others who are evangelical believers. Anyone who has listened to her monologue, please feel free to tell me your reactions on the comments to this post.

Are Honesty and Faith at Odds?

Honesty can describe one's interactions with others, but at an even more basic level, honesty is a description of how one informs oneself. Many people deceive others, but I suspect more people deceive themselves. Willing self-deception is what I am here referring to as dishonesty. The opposite of this, honesty, is playing straight with one's self. That is, seeking to be informed by truth and not comforting lies.

Now some things are certainly true, while others certainly false, but many have various levels of likelihood of being true. A form of self deception is to convince oneself that something is certainly true or certainly false when the evidence for either is far from conclusive. A helpful way to think of it is in probabilities: we ought to assess the probability that a claim is true conditioned on the evidence available to us. Unfortunately humans are poor probabilistic or Bayesian reasoners. Nevertheless we can at least make qualitative estimates such as: given the evidence, certain claims are much more likely to be true than others, and so on. Honesty then requires a careful assessment, including gathering and analysis of evidence, for all the claims one wants to make or to believe. Honesty requires discounting irrelevant factors and prejudices one has grown up. Honesty does not allow one to believe something simply because one wants to or it makes one feel better. Honesty can be a painful process.

Now let me contrast this with faith. Unfortunately there are many competing definitions for faith, but here I will focus on the following aspect. Faith involves the choice to believe something firmly and without wavering irrespective of potential new evidences or analyses. Faith demands a binary answer: yes I believe with all my heart and I will never swerve, or not I don't. Not all religions are like this, but many are including evangelical Christianity. While these religions may provide some "evidences" in favor of themselves, these evidences are in no way conclusive; at most they show plausibility. But nevertheless the religions encourage and even demand certainty in their veracity. For example, certain religions or "faiths" demand that one accept that "the Bible is the inspired Word of God." Now the evidence for this is very patchy, if it exists at all. With careful consideration of internal and external evidences one might conclude that certain parts are likely to be from God and other parts are very unlikely to be. But religious faith will have no patience with a conclusion like this: it demands all or nothing, faith or disbelief, no conditional beliefs. But this is contrary to an honest assessment which cannot declare certainty when evidence is weak and cannot discount potential new evidences changing one's belief. Thus to accept the demands of certain faith one must eschew uncertainties, discount contrary evidences and discard honesty.

A person of faith might reply: faith claims demand action based on either an acceptance of or rejection of the claim, and so one is forced to make a binary choice of belief or unbelief. Here's the confusion: it is between belief and action. One may well have to make a binary choice of action, but it can be in the face of acknowledged uncertainty in belief. For example: suppose your friend said he would meet you at 5pm at the coffee shop. Your action is binary: you either go there to meet him at 5 or you don't. But your belief need not be binary. You might think there is a good chance he will be delayed due to traffic and so won't be there at 5, but nevertheless you may still go there at 5 just in case he makes it. Honesty in belief takes uncertainties into account rather than deny them.

So why do so many people choose faith over honesty? While faith sometimes results in physical hardships, it more than compensates by giving one a certainty and an inner confidence. It does not need careful analysis and is easily avilable to all. It builds bonds between individuals and fosters a community of likeminded. But what is the cost of all these gains? By closing the door to tentative beliefs conditioned on available evidence, faith devalues truth. What is important is no longer the truth, but rather that one believes unconditionally.

Is the Incarnation a RPG?

Lots of people claim to believe in the idea of divine incarnation. But few, I believe, have much idea of what that really means. Here's my proposal: The incarnation is God's version of a Role Playing Game (RPG). He creates or selects a character which he inhabits just like you would in a virtual-reality RPG. Then he uses his selected human body to play with the other characters. He feels bad for the other characters when they are hungry and gives them food, helps them move up to higher levels and even sacrifices his character for them. But unlike everyone else who is stuck in his or her human body, God has just temporarily chosen his body, and he can dispose of it whenever he likes or bring it back to life if it dies.

It makes one wonder: is it really a big deal if someone operating at a higher level has more powers, can do miracles or even chooses to sacrifice his character others? I could do miracles and sacrifice my character for lesser beings in World of Warcraft. I may even be able to raise characters back to life. But please don't worship me.

Three Sources of Darkness

Light and darkness are themes used throughout the Bible. Light refers to truth, instruction, good, etc., whereas darkness refers to blindness, ignorance, deception, death, evil, etc. Such broad meanings are confusing, so in this article I will restrict the meaning of darkness to blindness to truth including deception and ignorance. Now Christians preach against the darkness of the world and offer a light to eliminate darkness. This is the central message of the gospels. But is it true? Is the world really dark in the sense of blindness to truth, and is the light they offer really a way to remove darkness? Here I will examine the relationship of the three central pillars of Christianity (and other religions) to truth. These pillars are: revelation, authority and faith.

Revelation: This is the claimed foundation for Christianity, and yet it suffers from three fatal flaws:

1. We can never show that any revelation is actually from God as opposed to some other non-physical entity, see: Can we know if a message is from God?


2. We cannot distinguish between voices and visions generated by the receiver's mind and those generated by some external entity (be it God or other). Even the hearer or seer can never be sure a claimed revelation is actually a revelation and not his imagination.


3. Finally, there is no truth test for revelation that deals with spiritual or non-physical beings, see: What do miracles prove? This is precisely the area where revelation should be useful, and yet there is no way to distinguish its claims from empty claims. The evidences people use to demonstrate revelation are no better than those used by fortune tellers and psychics; if one statement that he/she makes turns out to be true, that validates the rest of what he/she says, and of course dubious, ambiguous and false statements are ignored.

Hence, claiming with certainty that a revelation is from God and preaching it to others as true is then either an act of self deception, or a decision to deceive others or both. The reliance on revelation is like consulting an astrologer. What could be a greater source of darkness than that?

Authority: Christians must rely on mediated revelation, that is, revelation that came through someone else usually long ago. How is one to know which of the millions of claimed revelations to trust? That is where authority comes in. Authority is ascribed to certain books and these are regarded as "true revelations". Authority allows all kinds of bold claims to be made about the revelation and how to interpret it. Authority cannot be questioned but must be obeyed. It provides a skeleton to religion on which all its practices and rituals and teachings hang. Preachers speak with authority, especially when quoting passages of the Bible. Followers seek refuge in authority as it gives them something certain to hold on to. But what is the relationship between authority and truth? None. Actually quite the opposite. Authority acts to keep truth hidden. By denying questioning, doubting and testing of alternate ways it is denying people the means for finding truth. Basing a statement of fact on authority is an empty sham; it means there is no basis for the statement. (It is very different from quoting an "authority" whereby one is really citing the evidence gathered by that person and not saying something is true simply because that person says it is true.) Where does authority come from? Its advocates claim it comes from God. But there is no evidence for this, only authoritative claims that this is so. Thus divine authority is circular. It is a means to make bold claims with no basis for them. Is it possible to find a greater source of darkness than this?

Faith: The final ingredient needed on top of revelation and authority is faith. Faith enables people to accept revelation and authority with certainty and without question. It gives people confidence and comfort in their beliefs. It works by sidestepping critical analysis of the evidence and instead directly accepts revelation and authority. But it is more than just believing something more strongly than warranted by the evidence; it is a state of mind in which one chooses to not to question or doubt the particular revelation or authority. It is the glue that holds religion together. And it is also the glue that shuts people’s eyes. It keeps people from inquiry and honestly testing the truth claims of revelation and authority. It is hard enough to critically analyze the revelation and authority one has grown up with or lived with, and it is near to impossible when one has faith in them. Faith surely equals if not surpasses revelation and authority as a source of darkness.

So Christianity is right that much of the world lies in darkness. However the sources are not what Christians claim they are. The darkness is not that people believe the wrong doctrines or worship false gods; these are outcomes of darkness. The darkness is the reliance on false means for obtaining truth, namely: Revelation, Authority and Faith. These hide rather than reveal truth. When Christianity converts followers from other religions it is replacing one form of darkness with another one.

I claim that there is much more light in the world than Christianity admits. The scientific method of inquiry is capable of lifting us out of darkness. It does this by building explanatory hypotheses, evaluating them based on the evidence, and obtaining various levels of certainty according to the available evidence. In addition philosophy can shine light onto the realm of morality, see: Is morality subjective or objective? Ethical questions can be addressed based on our knowledge of humankind, rather than on commandments given in God’s name. The tragedy is that when Christianity seeks to relegate the scientific method to the sidelines and claims that revelation, authority and faith ought to be the central focus of one’s life, it is replacing light with darkness.

Truth and Faith

At the bottom of Christianity there are some subtleties that belong to the Orient. Above all, it knows that it is a matter of complete indifference whether something is true, while it is of the utmost importance whether it is believed to be true. Truth and the faith that something is true: two completely separate realms of interest--almost diametrically opposite realms--they are reached by utterly different paths. Having knowledge of this--that is almost the definition of the wise man in the Orient: the Brahmins understand this; Plato understands this; and so does every student of esoteric wisdom. If, for example, it makes men happy to believe that they have been redeemed from sin, it is not necessary, as a condition for this, that man is, in fact, sinful, but merely that he feels sinful. And if faith is quite needed above all, then reason, knowledge, and inquiry must be discredited: the way to truth becomes the forbidden way. -- Nietzsche "The Antichrist"

From my observation, in so far as faith is strong, it obstructs inquiry into truth. It speaks with certainty on matters about which reason and evidence have little to say. And when opposed by reason and evidence it rejects these. It permits no serious doubting or questioning. It gives people what they want: confidence that they know the truth, all the while hiding from them the errors of their beliefs. Faith is a spider that catches even the strongest and most intelligent in its web. And what is most subtle is that they are not even aware that they are caught.

Can we know if a message is from God?

Many people have claimed and continue to claim to have all sorts messages from God, but are they justified in making these claims? Let's say one takes the existence of spiritual or non-physical beings seriously and avoids making simplistic assumptions about them. Given this starting point, what can we say about messages that purport to be from a particular non-physical being such as God?

I will start by considering how we know the sources of messages in the physical world. If you claim you have a message from your friend, then you are claiming that the message is not from anyone else. But how can you be sure someone else didn't send it to you? Here are four general methods:

1. You have observational evidence. For example, your friend gave it to you in person or confirmed it by talking on the phone. You know it is him since you can discriminate his appearance or voice characteristics from those of other people.
   
2. The letter has his signature on it. This can confirm that he wrote it if you can discriminate his signature from other people's signatures and also from attempts at forging it.
   
3. The letter is written in his style that no one else has and that cannot easily be imitated.
   
4. The content of the letter contains knowledge that only he (and possibly you) has. You need to know that only he has this knowledge.

So, do these methods apply to knowing if a message is from God? Let's assume that non-physical beings exist (somehow) and can communicate (somehow) with the physical world. Indeed, Christianity has a plethora of these non-physical beings, sometimes called spirits, including all sorts of angels, demons, and gods (if one takes the Old Testament literally). But a priori we can't restrict ourselves to only the non-physical beings in the Christian Bible, perhaps there are innumerable others of all kinds and abilities. To avoid having the name of the being distract our analysis let us denote the set of non-physical beings as G = {G_0, G_1, G_2, ..., G_n}, where G_0 denotes the Christian God, and G_i(i>0) denotes the other non-physical beings, and n is large and could be infinite. Now say you get a message that purports to be from God, that is G_0. How can you tell it is from G_0 and not G_i(i>0)? Can the methods listed above enable you to tell if it is?

1. The problem with the first method is that non-physical beings don't have any particular appearance or voice characteristics. At most one sees or hears a vision. But what is to distinguish a vision provided by G_0 from a vision from some other non-physical being, G_i(i>0)? Presumably there are other non-physical beings that could create just as good visions that also claim to be from God even though they are from some other G_i. It seems that appearance is not going to work to tell if it is from God.
2. What about some sort of God-signature in the message? This is probably the most common means of justifying a message from God, and the signature most Christians accept is a "work of power", or more simply a miracle. But is a miracle sufficient as a God-signature? First there is the problem of showing that it actually is a miracle in some way caused by a non-physical being, but let's assume this can be done. But is it only God that does miracles, of the potentially innumerable other non-physical entities? Surely there could be many G_i(i>0) beings that can do powerful miracles. Ah, the trick that is used here is to assume that everything has one of two sources: either God or the devil. So then once one has a miracle one has only a two-class problem: either it is a God-signature or a devil-signature, and this is potentially feasible to determine if the devil is not very intelligent. But why only two sources and why dismiss all the other sources, G_i(i>0)? This dichotomization is a masterful sleight-of-hand. It is saying that none of the other spiritual beings are intelligent or independent enought to operate on their own or to fool humans. That is definitely not taking the non-physical realm seriously, and can be thrown out as an unjustified assumption. Another objection (from the Calvinists) is to claim that every being acts at the direction of God, and God would not want us to be deceived and so he wouldn't let us be confused by messages from many other G_i's. But even if one accepts the premise that all beings act at God's direction, the conclusion is surely false as it would imply that no human is going to deceive you either. So we are stuck with not having any signature to determine if the message is from God.
3. What about style as a way to identify the sender? It can work to some extent for distinguishing human messages, as we know the range of styles people have and can sometimes identify unusual aspects of a particular person's style. But that's the rub; what styles do other non-physical beings have in their communications? How can we say a particular style is God's style and not the style of some other G_i? Christian teaching in this focuses on the dichotomized problem: distinguishing God's message from Satan's, but as I argued above this is a false dichotomy as it excludes most of the problem. Alternatively, one claims that it is from God if it is compatible with previous revelation (namely the Bible). But this fails for two reasons: we need to know that the previous revelation was from God which assumes we have solved the problem, and also it assumes the non-physical beings aren't intelligent enough to fool us with messages in the style of previous revelations. Thus style is not going to be a useful discriminant for knowing if the message is from God.
4. What about the fourth method: the message contains some knowledge that only God has? The classic example of this is future predictions or prophecies. There are a host of problems with prophecies including: showing that they occurred before the event (as much prophetic literature was actually written after the event but slyly claimed to be written before), and showing that the prediction isn't simply a good-guess or lucky fluke, and showing that the prophecy isn't so vague or general so as to have many fulfillments. And indeed all the prophecies I have seen in the Bible suffer from one or more of these problems. But let's assume we can get a genuine future prediction that comes true and wasn't a fluke. Is that a sufficient way to know that whatever message came with it is from God? Well, if non-physical beings are not constrained by space they won't be constrained by time either. Space and time are part of the same physical reality "space-time" that governs physical things, but not non-physical things. So presumably there are other non-physical beings, G_i(i>0), that have access to events anywhere and at any time and so could also be the source of future predictions or prophecies.

My conclusion is that the only way we can be confident in the source of messages from non-physical beings is to assume that they are all, apart from God, less intelligent than humans and so unable to fool us. However, if one really believes in non-physical beings, then one should surely take them seriously and acknowledge that there may be many of them, that they may be far more intelligent than humans, and that they may intentionally deceive us. As I have argued here, none of our usual method for identifying sources of messages works with intelligent non-physical beings. Thus since our knowledge of them is limited to what they choose to tell us, and who they say they are may not be true, we have no way of identifying the actual source (God or some other G_i) of any particular message.

Life is Beautiful and Short

When I step back from the hustle of urgent deadlines, I see the sun gliding through the sky. Plants are growing. Creatures are swarming. Waves are breaking, and foam is tossed onto the rocks. I know it won't last forever. The sun will set on all I see and know. But I am satisfied to be here and now for this thin slice of space-time.

Inescapable Bias?

I have observed in myself a bias towards those with whom I share a commonality. In particular I am thinking of political and religious contexts. For example, when I hear of a politician accused of being unethical, I have noticed my reaction varying depending on whether he shares my political views or not. If he shares my views, I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt, whereas if he has views I strongly dislike then I find myself more sceptical of him. Now I know this reaction is not rational, as the politician's ethical conduct is not going to be better or worse if he shares by views, so I find my reaction curious. It is a trusting of, and a partiality towards, the in-group contrasted with a suspicion towards the out-group.

Now I believe this kind of reaction is very common currently and historically. It is a good excesize to search for it in your own reactions to different people. Can you find yourself putting greater trust in someone simply because he/she has a commonality with you such as the same race, gender, ethnicity, language, nationality, home-town, religion, political-orientation, or some such thing? These in-group preferences are not rational in the sense of truth-serving, and in some cases have lead to all kinds of nasty behaviors such as to slavery when applied racially or ethnically. So I see this bias towards the in-group as an evil that we have to struggle against.

Addressing religion, I believe there is a more insiduous working of this bias that I have observed in myself and others. In various churches that I have been a member, I found myself putting great trust in the leadership and doctrines of the church. I would put significant weight on the particular leader's interpretation of the bible, or his views on divisive issues like homosexuality or the role of women. But why did I put so much weight on the views of my church as opposed to the multitude of other views of other churches many of which are even better considered? Somehow I absorbed the idea that my church was special and had a special corner on the truth. This applies not only between churches, but between religions. I put far greater trust in the teachings of my religion and its holy book, than any of the other religions and their books. But why, if a priori there is no reason that one religion or revelation should have greater insights or be more likely to be true than others? Well, that was the role of the evangelist; to sell Christianity as having a corner on the truth that no other religion has. Indeed the salesmanship worked on me and I believed for a long time that Christianity and the Bible had a hold on the truth. And this was self-reinforcing as I would naturally trust the claims of Christianity and the Biblical writers as I considered them part of the in-group. In fact it took many years of struggle to escape from this in-group allegiance I had. Now that I can look back from the outside, I see that I was sadly deceived in part by this tendency to trust the in-group. Indeed, I see many deceived in the same way I was and I don't know how or if they will escape. But at least from my experience I know there is hope and a way out for those who seek.

Humanism

I have started reading about humanism. A good summary is the Humanist Manifesto III. It is interesting how it is diametrically opposed to much of what I learned growing up in a Christian household. Humanism, as its name implies, has a very positive outlook on humankind, whereas Christianity takse the opposite approach: as fallen creatures we are essentially evil and can do no good unless enabled to do so by God. (Depending on one's brand of Christianity this is emphasized to a greater or lesser degree.) So which attitude is right?

Everyone would agree that humans can do much evil; that is evident by looking current or historical events. But as humans are we condemned to committing evil? Humanists are the optimists and say: No, we are capable, given the right philosophy, of doing great good and living good and productive lives. Christianity is the pessimist in this regard: due to Adam and Eve eating the fruit we are lost in a vicious circle of evil begetting more evil. Only God's intervention can enable us to do good.

Is there any way to decide between these competing claims that good is a result of human motivation or only as a result of divine intervention? Unfortunately there is no way to determine if any action was caused by divine intervention. Good (and evil) actions can be done as a result in a belief in God, but a belief in God is much different than God actually intervening. So a choice between these isn't going to be made on physical evidence (although a choice might be made on a lack of evidence for supernatural intervention).

So it seems to me that a lot depends on a choice in attitude. It is either:

• I can live a good life on my own and will strive to do this, or


• I can't live a good life on my own. I will need to rely on God and he will make me good.

Which of these will be more successful in living a good life? I don't think it is the second. While it might seem attractive by its apparent modesty, I think it is a false modesty. By denying our ability at the outset it instills defeatist attitude. While it is true that none of us is perfect, that doesn't mean we can't be good, despite Christian claims to the contrary.

I believe the first option will lead to a better life. By pursuing the very things that make us human: rationality, creativity, compassion and love, we can live a good life. The good life is thus the fulfillment of being a human. Surely that is worth striving to achieve.

The Gods of the Bible

Christianity has developed a very strongly monotheistic world view. God is immaterial spirit, omnipotent, all-knowing, the creator of everything else, and so on. We have all this baggage in mind whenever we read the word "God" or "Lord" in the Bible. Unfortunately this prevents us from seeing the God that is actually revealed in the Bible. I've been reading the book: "Is it God's Word" by Joseph Wheless, and he brings up a lot of things that are brushed under the carpet in regular Christianity. While he has a negative view of Christianity, nevertheless he makes many points that Christians should consider before concluding that they have the right view of the Bible and its revelation. In this post I will bring together and summarize some of his points about the God we find in the Bible. To see a much fuller analysis, read Joseph Wheless "Is It God's Word" (available from Amazon) pgs. 75-80, and 201-235.


The first thing that is often brushed asside is that the Hebrews recognized a pantheon of gods, similar to the Greek gods. Each tribe or people had its own god or gods. The Hebrews had their own god, Yahweh, who demanded that the Hebrews worship him alone and not any of the other gods. The terms El, Elohe, Elohim used to denote god or gods (with no special capitalization) are applied to Yahweh and to the other gods. Many, many times the Old Testament writers recognize these other gods. Here are just a few examples:

• Genesis 31:30-34. Laban had caught up to Jacob and demanded of him: "But why did you steal my gods?" Jacob replied "But if you find anyone who has your gods, he shall not live" although he didn't know that Rachel had taken the gods. [Here we have Jacob recognizing Laban's gods]


• Exodus 20:3 (The first commandment): You shall have no gods before me. [The gods of other nations are recognized, and the same in the next 2 quotes]


• Exodus 31:14 Do not worship any other god, for the LORD (Yahweh), whose name is Jealous, is a jealous god.


• Exodus 23:24-25 Do not bow down before their gods or worship them or follow their practices. You must demolish them and break their sacred stones to pieces. Worship the LORD (Yahweh) your god...


• Deut. 10:17 For the LORD (Yahweh) your god is god of gods and lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, [Yahweh is the chief god, like Zeus]


• 1 Sam 5:2-3 Then they carried the ark into Dagon's temple and set it beside Dagon. When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the LORD (Yahweh). [Here is one of a number of competitions between Yahweh and the other gods showing that Yahweh is greater, but in so doing recognizing the other gods.]

And there are a multitude of other passages similar to these where the Hebrew god, Yahweh, is one of the gods, albeit a possessive one that demands that the Hebrews do not worship any of the other gods.

Wheless points out that one of the reasons that God (god) being one of the gods is often missed by modern readers is an intentional mistranslation of the reference for the Hebrew god. This God/god has his own name just like the other gods (Chemos, Dagon etc.) have names. He reveals it to Moses in

• Exodus 6:2-3: God (Elohim) also said to Moses, "I am Yahweh (the LORD). I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El-Shaddai (God Almighty), but by my name Yahweh (the LORD) I did not make myself known to them.

Thus God has a proper name, Yahweh, like your name or my name, that distinguishes him from the other gods. God is refered to as Yahweh some 6000 times in the Old Testament. But translators are uncomfortable with God having a name like the other tribal gods and so the translate it: "the Lord" or "the LORD". But this is wrong. The word "Adonai" means lord and is used to address Yahweh as well as human masters. So this mistranslation of the Hebrew god's name, Yahweh, into "the LORD" makes it easy for us to read all our baggage belonging to the concept of God into the Old Testament references of Yahweh. Reread the scripture quotes above and see how replacing "the LORD" for "Yahweh" changes the implication. We can see more clearly the polytheistic world view of the ancient Hebrews.

Now Yahweh is a god with very human qualities. He could be heard walking around in the garden (Gen 3:8). He sits on a throne, not just figuratively but literally as seen by various prophets. He has sons who take for themselves daughters of men and have children, (Gen 6:2). He comes down to earth in human form many times including to speak with Moses Exodus 33:11 Yahweh ("the LORD") would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend, and also to meet the other leaders of Israel: Exodus 24:9-11 Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear as the sky itself. But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank. This is despite what John claims in John 1:18 No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known. Clearly John is uncomfortable with the Hebrew concept of a god that can be seen. But nevertheless lots of prophets claim to have seen God including

• Daniel 7:9 "...the Ancient of Days took his seat. His clothing was as white as snow; the hair of his head was white like wool...",


• Isaiah 6:1 I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple,


• Job 42:5 My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you


• Amos 9:1 I saw the Lord standing by the altar...

And like the Greek gods, Yahweh dwells in particular locations; wherever the ark travels he travels. He is a god of war, as quoted by Joshua 10:11 As they fled before Israel ... Yahweh (the LORD) hurled large hailstones down on them from the sky. And when the Israelites were fleeing Pharoh's army Moses tells them: Exodus 14:14 Yahweh (the LORD) will fight for you. And indeed in v. 24 the LORD looked down from the pillar of fire and cloud at the Egyptian army and threw it into confusion.

Then there is the creation story in Genesis 1. Here it is not just Yahweh doing the creating, it is the assembly of gods creating the world. It starts

• Gen 1:1 In the begining Elohim (the gods) created the heaven and the earth."

The plural, Elohim, is used. To see that this refers to an assembly of gods look at:

• Gen 1:26 Then Elohim (gods) said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness...
• Gen 3:22 And the LORD God (Yahweh-Elohim) said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.

So man has become like one of the gods, as pointed out by Yahweh to the assembly of other gods.

It is interesting how we smile when we think of the pantheon of Greek gods and their escapades with humans. We never think that the bible contains similar stories, and yet if we are willing to read what is written in it and don't force a harmonization with much later monotheistic dogma, then indeed we find many stories of gods and men. It is the forced harmonization with church dogmas and Greek philosophy that blinds us to the vivid polytheistic stories of the Hebrews.

Does God Fear Human Greatness?

The story of the Tower of Babel is quite revealing; not so much as a historical document, but for its insight into God's perspective. Here's a summary of the story from Genesis 11:1-9:

The people of the earth were establishing a city and proposed using new technology (bricks and tar) to build a skyscraper to unite them and make a name for themselves. This is similar motivation for today's skycrapers, although brick and tar won't make a very tall tower. But then God came down to earth to take a look and said: "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." And so God used a nasty trick of confusing their communication to scuttle their plans.

But why, if God is so great, should he be worried about a tower that is a hundredth of the height of modern skycrapers? Clearly it is not just the tower, but the whole idea of human cooperation and progress that he doesn't like. But what is wrong with cooperation and progress? Surely those aren't bad. So it has got to be the greatness humans achieve through cooperation and progress that has God worried. Human progress and greatness threaten God, and so God knocks us off the ladder.

Perhaps it is like this. One child with an infinite number of Lego sets sees another child with just one lego set starting to build himself a tower. The first feels threatened and knocks down the second child's tower.

Is God Just?

Christians always protray God as being a just judge. But on what basis do they claim God is just? I think primarily it is because they want it to be so; "If God is the ultimate judge, well he better be just." Or if he is not just, then he is not perfect and surely God had better be perfect. At least since the ancient Greeks people have created an ideal of perfection which is ascribed to God. And to Christians perfection includes justice, and so God must be just.

But does this ideal actually correspond to reality? One can mathematically describe a perfect circle, but that does not mean there are any in reality. To decide if this ideal is true, we need evidence. What would make good evidence for God's justice is debateable, but there is one thing that Christians will definitely accept: the Bible. What does the Bible indicate about God's justice?

But before going to the Bible, let me lay the groundwork for my argument. To show that someone is just is hard. Let's take a judge as an example. It would entail going through all (or a very wide sampling) of his cases and confirming that they were justly decided. But to show that a judge is unjust, one simply needs a few examples of unjust decisions. For example, if we found a judge accepting bribes by his clients who he gives favorable decisions to, well we would conclude he is not just, even without going through all his other cases.

We can do an analogous examination of God's judgements that we find in the Bible. For many we do not have enough information to determine whether they are just or not, or it may not be easy to determine from our vantage point. But there is a class of judgements which I believe we can clearly judge as being unjust. This class involves punishing one person for a crime committed by someone else.

What could be more unjust than being punished for someone else's crime? Surely an inherent aspect of justice is that one is punished according to one's crime, which does not happen when one is being punished for someone else's crime. Let me motivate this with two examples. Consider someone steals a car, but the judge sends his neighbor to jail as punishment. Surely that is an injustice, and one would not excuse a judge who did that intentionally and knowingly. Another example of injustice is group punishment. I remember a teacher in school punishing our whole class for making too much noise when it was just a subset of the class that was talking, and certainly not me. Group punishments might be an effective way to control his class but they are not just punishments as some people are punished for the actions of others.

Now on to the Bible. Certainly the writers of various Psalms and the book of Isaiah ascribe justice to God. Such claims are easy to make in the abstract, but are they actually true? To decide that, let's look at some of God's judgements.

Here are three examples, from many possible ones in the Bible, where God punishes or promises to punish someone for the sins of another. The first is God promising to punish children for the sins of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Moses has gone up to meet God, and then God appears to him. Exodus 34:5-7: Then the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the LORD. 6 And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."

The important thing to note is that it is not just that children suffer the evil consequences of the sins of their parents. Rather, God says that he [actively] punishes children for the sins of their fathers. Tell me, how can that be just? If that is just, does justice have any meaning?

Now here is another example. Pharaoh won't let the Israelites leave Egypt, so God's final punishment on him is not just a punishment on him only but on everyone in Egypt, recorded in Exodus 11:4-6: 4 So Moses said, "This is what the LORD says: 'About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. 5 Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. 6 There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt—worse than there has ever been or ever will be again. Is that just, to kill the firstborn of the slave girl because of Pharaoh's sins? What did she do wrong that God is punishing her? Clearly he is punishing her for Pharaoh's sin.

My final example is recorded in 2 Samuel 24. It starts: 1 Again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, "Go and take a census of Israel and Judah." David takes the census, but then apparently that was a great sin: 10 David was conscience-stricken after he had counted the fighting men, and he said to the LORD, "I have sinned greatly in what I have done. Now, O LORD, I beg you, take away the guilt of your servant. I have done a very foolish thing." God's answer is to let him choose his punishment (or actually the punishment on Israel) which turns out to be a plague: 15 So the LORD sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the end of the time designated, and seventy thousand of the people from Dan to Beersheba died. So God kills 70,000 people as punishment for David's sin. How can that be just? It is not hard to find many more similar examples in the Bible. It seems to me that speaking of God's justice is a form of double-talk. If any one else killed 70,000 people to punish David for his sin, we would call it a grave injustice, but when God does it, Christians call it justice.

There are some potential replies to this argument. One is that sometimes justice entails incidental suffering on others. For example, if a father is sent to prison for his crime, then his family suffers. But note that this incidental suffering is quite distinct from active punishment; if the whole family were sent to prison for the crime of the father we would call that unjust. The examples I listed involved active punishment of the innocent, and not just incidental suffering.

Another reply is that since God gave us life, he can take it away without being unjust. But this reply goes too far. It says justice makes no contraints on God at all with regard to his creation, and so he can do anything at all to us while still being just. That is, saying "God is just" is saying nothing about how God acts towards us. If we are nothing but clay in the hands of a potter, let's scrap the whole pretence of justice; when did clay ever claim to be wronged or demand justice? But actually I think this reply fails for another reason: if one gives someone a gift, one no longer has a right to take it back. So if God has given us life, he does not have a right to take it back whenever he feels like it.

My conclusion is that God, as we see portrayed in the Bible, is not just. Read and see, you will find plenty more examples of God punishing some people for the crimes of other people. Furthermore, if God is not just in this world, why should we think that he will be just in the next? I think Christians have to either give up their cherished ideals of God or else give up the Bible. They can't both be right.

My Great Fear

My great fear is to be passionate for a cause that turns out to be a fraud. That is, I fear pouring my energies into achieving a goal that I later find out to be empty and false. I'm not saying that everything I am passionate for must be guaranteed to work out or succeed. I can still be passionate for social or political goals in so far as they bring good. No, what I fear is dedicating my life to a cause that is based on deception. The reason for that fear is that that describes a large portion of my life so far.

Until my mid to late twenties, my life had been dedicated to the cause of Christ; that is furthering the message of redemption, salvation and a future life in heaven, and seeking to overcome the opposites: sin, death and hell. I fervently believed the key claims of Christianity and was eager that others would be similarly enlightened. I admired those who died for the faith, and those who spread the gospel message to the unsaved. I read the Bible through at least once a year and actively participated in Christian events.

But now I see that it is a great fraud. I feel betrayed by others and by my own credulity. Looking back I see myself as deluded and unwilling to see the problems with my belief. How did I manage to blind myself to the truth for so long?

That is not to say there aren't many good teachings in Christianity, and that its followers don't do many good things. I have benefited in many ways by the good aspects of Christianity; by friendships, by support of other followers, by helpful guidance and similar things. All that, however, does not mean that its core claims are true. Rather now I see that the core teachings about God, the afterlife, the incarnation, the spiritual world, and obtaining truth through faith and inspiration are baseless.

This blog is in part an exploration into reasons why I have concluded the message is not true. What if I had continued to believe and spread the gospel message until I was 50 and then found out it was a fraud? What if I had brought up my children to believe in a false message? I can thank God (in a figurative sense) that I avoided that. But I know many good people who are blithely pursuing a fraud. Why don't all Christians give some heed to the possibility that they may be being deceived? Perhaps this blog will help some to come closer to the truth. Perhaps it is also an atonement for my holding onto those beliefs so ardently for so long. Also I hope it will be an exploration into what are the alternatives going forward.

Freedom from Certitude

What is it like to lose one's faith? That is an interesting question and one I have asked myself as I look back on my experience. There are a lot of aspects to it including gains and losses. In this post I want to describe one of my chief gains.

The main benefit I feel is one of intellectual freedom: freedom to pursue the evidence where ever it leads. There is no need to claim I know the truth if I'm unsure. There is no rush, no deadline, no evil consequences for doubt.

This contrasts sharply with what I felt as a Christian. My attitude was that not only were my central beliefs true, but they had to be true. While I may not have sufficient evidence at the moment, or I may encounter contrary evidence, I was certain that after all was said and done my beliefs would be vindicated.

This attitude of certitude is fostered and encouraged in evangelical circles, and at first blush does not sound so bad. It enables people to express themselves with great confidence. People say things like "God wants you to do such and such," or "If you don't believe this message you're going to hell." But now as I look back on this, I see this attitude of certitude in religious things as very harmful.

Firstly, very bold statements are made about things which to which we have no access to verify. The usual justification is that: if is says so in the Bible it must be so. This is a very strong dogma that is relied on extensively by preachers and missionaries as it allows them to speak with authority. But what is the justification for this? The Bible doesn't itself claim to have no errors, and even if it did that would be circular reasoning to use it to justify itself. The various arguments about divine inspiration fail to demonstrate this dogma; we simply cannot know who was inspired and what inspiration would imply about their words. For example, if God inspired fallible humans, it could be that even their inspired sayings or writings could have errors. Why not? There are lots of reasons for doubting the infallibility of the Bible, but I won't go into that now. Ultimately Christians seem to simply accept the dogma "on faith" and then apply it. Thus they begin their path of certitude.

Here are some of the unfortuate implications of this venture into certitude. It is like one is trying to solve a problem in a textbook, but one has looked up the answer in the back. So it doesn't really matter how one solves it, as long as one's explanation looks superficially okay (enough to fool the examiner) and gets the correct answer. There is an enormous temptation to jump to the conclusions that one "knows" must be right. One doesn't have to justify all the steps one takes or consider all the alternatives before one gives a definative answer. This is the route taken by appologetics books: they start from the answer, find plausible reasons for it and dismiss anything that doesn't agree with it.

Another unfortunate consequence is that evidence is devalued, both positive and negative. I realize that my attitude was that whatever evidence I found had got to support Christianity if it is properly interpreted. Conversely negative evidence must be apparent only and break down when properly understood. I could say that because I had already "seen the answer." Hence there is a tendency among Christians to be uncritical of evidence used to support one's beliefs and to disregard negative evidence. For example, I remember someone bringing up the problem of God ordering masacres in the Old Testament and asking how that was compatible with God being good. I didn't find it hard to simply claim that God was not bound by the constraints that bind us. I started with the assumption that my beliefs about God and his goodness must be true, and so any negative evidence like this must be wrong and so there was no need to treat it seriously. Only now do I see how careless I was towards knowing the truth.

Another common consequence of religious or biblical certitude is young-earth creationism, or the slightly more subtle old-earth but still anti-evolution beliefs. We know the answer in the Bible: the earth was created 6000 years ago, and all humans are decended from Adam and Eve who were created from dust and a rib, and so evolution must be wrong. It doesn't really matter what the evidence is, the scientific establishment must be wrong in its understanding. Christians don't need to study the evidence; as long as they find some appealing reasons why evolution can't be right in the creationist literature, they are happy to accept it. That is how I was when I was applying to universities. I remember being asked in an interview if science obviated the need for religion, and to counter this I pulled out a "fact" that disproved evolution (in this case it was that the dust on the moon was only a couple inches deep and if it were billions of years old it would be much deeper -- a long before disproven reasoning that was still being published by creationist literature). Or I could have used the complexity of the eye to "disprove" evolution without the need to study the genetic and other evidences for how the eye has evolved.

The field of ethics is often short-circuited by certitude. People start with quotes from the Bible, (often ones that confirm their own prejudices) and then don't feel the need to reason why these should be morally binding on us. For example, the gay marriage debate is skewed by people who base their views on ancient views enshrined in the Bible. Is it really harmful to anyone else if gays can marry each other? How will it harm your marriage? Isn't that better than their not marrying?

My main problem with this type of certitude of faith is that it is an intellectual cocoon. One lives in a protected environment where one can disregard anything that would upset one's beliefs. And there is no need for real justification of one's beliefs; one can simply quote a verse or two from the Bible and it is settled. It is a comfortable place to live: away from the moral and epistemological uncertainties of this world. I see my loss of faith as an emergence from this cocoon into the wide world of truth seeking.

Superstition and Prayer

As an educated Christian I was always somewhat proud that I wasn't superstitious. I thought it was silly to avoid the number 13, fear seeing black cats, or read the astrology section of the newspaper. Of course I didn't think any of my own beliefs were superstitious, like my belief in prayer. But was I right? Is belief in prayer superstitious?

The following, I think, is the essence of a superstition: one discovers or hears from others of a pattern (perhaps from a single event like something bad happened after someone saw a black cat), then one extrapolates it (bad things are likely to happen after seeing black cats); any occurrences that support this reinforce the belief, but any counter examples or contrary evidence is discounted. The last point is key to what makes it superstitious or irrational; the believer wants to believe, will find some positive examples and will ignore any negative examples. And humans are very good and finding patterns in a chaotic world, but are not good at determining which are statistically significant. And so many of us are superstitious.

In general it is not possible to logically disprove most superstitions; at most one could say there is no reason or evidence to believe them (not meaning that bad things never happen after seeing black cats, but that statistically bad things don't happen more or less often after seeing them). That is unconvincing to the superstitious who will doggedly point to some positive examples that prove the superstition to him. Since negative examples don't rule out his belief conclusively, he ignores them.

Superstition sounds very silly, but what about belief in prayer? Why do people believe in prayer? In part because they have been taught it by people they respect and heard of fabulous "answers to prayer". Also people are sure to point to examples when they prayed for something and miraculously the prayer was answered. But are these answers to prayer statistically significant; namely does prayer actually make a difference in the likelihood of positive or "miraculous" things happening? That is a hard question to answer, especially from anecdotal evidence which invariably reports the positive and leaves out the negative examples. The best study on this, a multi-year, double-blind, prayer-for-healing test funded by the Templeton Foundation obtained statistical evidence on this and concluded that prayer did not make a difference. But for the believer that is irrelevant. He will point to positive examples of answered prayers. When asked about prayers that weren't answered he will say either: I continue to ask for it, or else God answered "No". So in his mind there is no space for negative evidence. And this is exactly the same as a superstition.

So my conclusion is that belief in prayer that allows no mechanism for being shown false is just like the multitude of superstitions that beset mankind. Let me ask the reader: if you believe in prayer, what possible evidence would you accept that could disprove it?

Is Morality Subjective or Objective?

People have quite differing views on whether morality is purely subjective or an objective reality. And if is is objective then does it get that from God? In this essay I will examine to what extent morality is objective and what is the source of this objectivity. The book I found most helpful in thinking through these ideas is George Smith's "Atheism", and a good many of the ideas here are from his analysis of ethics.

I will use morality synonymously with ethics which is a study of human values and how humans ought to act. There are two aspects to ethics: a descriptive component that answers: "What are human values?" and a normative part that addresses: "How should humans act?" I will consider each of these.

The question: "What are human values?" can be answered by looking at the facts and evidence. Humans have physical and psychological needs and desires and these can be found through scientific analysis. For example, maintaining life is an important value of living things, evidenced by how ardently living things seek to survive. Determining the whole range of values is difficult and constrained by our limited knowledge of the human mind and body. Nevertheless, our current limited knowledge doesn't mean it can't be studied scientifically which it surely can. Hence the descriptive component of ethics is the science of an objective reality.

A reason why many think descriptive ethics is subjective is that it is difficult to consciously know one's own values let alone others' values, and moreover these values may differ to some extent between people. Addressing the second point first: the similarities between humans far outweighs the differences. We all have similar physical and mental needs. But there are differences and these differences can also be analyzed scientifically, and hence are simply part of the objective reality ethics seeks to describe. Back to the first point that it is difficult to know our values. But this is actually one of the key reasons why ethics is important as it helps us become consciously aware of our values, and it is not an objection to the objectivity of ethics.

One can ask what is the most basic value for living things. I think it is one's well-being. It is a somewhat vague term, and it includes life and happiness. We each seek our own well-being, even if what it means may differ to some extent between individuals. We have other values too which may be subsets of this or even in conflict with well-being, and descriptive ethics will seek to determine and categorize these.

The second component of ethics is the normative part: "How should we act?". It is expressed at a conditional statement: One ought to act in such and such a way so as to achieve one's values. For example: one ought to love one's spouse as this improves one's well-being, or another example: one ought not to lie as this damages one's credibility. Expressed this way with a goal, ethical or moral claims can be analyzed scientifically; what are the actions that people should do to achieve their values? Similarly medicine is a goal-directed normative science: the doctor ought to give the patient the medicine, so as to save his life.

Ethics deals not only with individuals and their values which may have internal conflicts, but also with groups of individuals whose values may conflict with each other. Ethics must weigh the values of someone wanting to walk on a plot of land with the owner wanting to keep people out and so determine the rightness and wrongness of trespassing. Another consideration is that other people's well-being is often in one's own interest. For example, one is much happier when one's spouse is happy, and his/her well-being is linked to one's own; that is another reason for loving one's spouse. Thus ethics determines guidelines of conduct that enable people to achieve individually and corporately their values.

One response is that ethics ought not to be goal directed, but rather a duty. But with no goal to achieve it becomes empty. Even Christian ethics is often expressed as goal directed as illustrated by this conversation: "Don't lie." "Why?" "Because God says not to." "But why obey God?" "Because it will make him happy or because you'll go to heaven and escape hell" Namely the goal is to seek God's well-being or human well-being, albeit in the afterlife. On the other hand, ethics simply as a duty with no goal is divorced from human welfare and hence arbitrary.

Another objection is the claim that weighting differing values and interests to make an assessment of the morality of an action is a subjective process. It is true that it can be difficult to weigh the interests of freedom of expression against the interests of a copyright holder not to have his work borrowed (or is it plagiarized?). But many fields dealing with objective reality have this difficulty; whenever heterogeneous data are modeled this problem emerges (for example in modeling the motion of particles both time errors and distance errors have to be minimized but how does one choose the relative weighting of these?). There is some arbitrariness in assigning weights, but this can be reduced by assuming that all humans are due equal consideration and so my need for safety has the same value as your need for safety. Some arbitrariness or subjectivity remains in comparing disparate values, but I suspect this is not so great as we all share similar physical and psychological needs and hence have comparable ideas of well-being and hence right and wrong.

In both aspects then, the descriptive and the normative, ethics is primarily an objective reality. In some cases normative ethics may require relative weighting of disparate values to this extent relies on agreed-on weights. It is here that some arbitrariness or subjectivity enters. There remain hard, unanswered questions raised in ethics, but by learning more about humans needs and values and how these can best be fulfilled, ethics will make progress. There is no need to refer to "God" in relation to an objective morality. Actually including God doesn't change the nature of ethics. It only detracts from the consideration we give to human values.

No place for truth seeking

One of the things that I have come to understand is that Christianity does not have a place for truth seekers. This realization was gradual and painful. As a devoted Christian for many years, I thought I believed the truth. But when I eventually began to struggle in my faith and with issues such as I've described in this blog, I needed to know that I was believing the truth. But what I found, when I opened my eyes to it, was a Christian culture that was hostile to truth seeking.

This hostility to truth seeking has itself become a cause for me to distrust the truthfulness of the message. Truth need have no fear of open, honest and critical inquiry. It is falsehood and error that have need to stifle inquiry lest they be exposed. I have always wondered what is the essence of a cult? That is, what is the chief factor that enables the perpetuation of destructive behaviors of these groups? Now I think that essence is a hostility to open and honest truth seeking. Encuraging honest truth seeking would surely bring an end to any cult. On the other hand, innoculating members to truth seeking is the surest way to ensure they don't stray. It is unfortunate then that evangelical Christianity shares this trait with cults. Here are some ways that I've experienced this hostility in my time as an evangelical Christian:

I have listened to innumerable sermons, but now I realize that they are of little help for truth seekers. The goals of sermons are to convert the lost, to build the faith of the believers and instruct them on the path of righteousness. Anything that supports these goals is fair game, but on the other hand nothing that could hurt these goals will be related. This creates a strong bias in sermons preventing an honest evaluation of evidence (that is, negative evidence will never be considered or related). The greatness and benefits of faith and of Christianity are generously given. These are contrasted to the harms and evils of all other beliefs. The general method for establishing the truth of something is to use a combination of authority and anecdote. The ultimate authority relied on is the Bible, although sometimes a preacher will use a bit of his own authority. Finding a verse or chapter that supports a claim is the way to prove something. Then illustrating it with an anecdote or personal story, especially a miraculous story, firmly grounds it in the minds of the congregation. This is all effective in propagating a belief system, but does not help in looking for errors in that belief system and so is not really concerned with truth seeking.

But I cannot accept authority and rhetoric as means to finding truth. These are used more often to hide than to reveal truth. If sermons were about spreading truth, why don't people in congregations challenge a preacher if he makes a false or misleading claim? (And I have heard many false and misleading claims in sermons.) Why do evangelical preachers always dismiss or ignore historical critical analysis of the bible? For instance there is very good evidence that many of the Biblical books are much younger than traditionally thought and not written by the traditional authors. This includes very strong Biblical evidence that the Mosaic law was written centuries after Moses and was unknown to the old prophets like Samuel. Why did I never hear this ever at church, even though it is very relevant to understanding the Old Testament Law? The reason, I have concluded, relates directly to the goals of sermons which do not include expanding knowledge and understanding of the congregation and rather are much closer to indoctrination. By not expanding knowledge and understanding, preachers are actually being hostile to truth seeking.

Next, I have found that doubt is regarded as the enemy of faith and so is expunged from Christian circles. Someone who doubts or questions too much is looked at with fear and resentment "Is he still a Christian? Why can't he just believe?" people mutter amongst themselves. "Go read your Bible and pray" is the usual advice. I have learned that even the patient Christian cousellor eventually gives up addressing the doubts and rebukes the person for his doubts; in the words of James "But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind." The ideal for the Christian is to accept the gospel message on faith and cast asside doubts. The truth seeker, however, will have honest doubts and want to know the basis for belief. If there isn't a good basis, then he is not going to claim certainty.

The church is a community. Unfortunately the basis of that community is not a shared desire to know the truth, but rather a shared faith (which in practice means a shared belief in a set of doctrines). There is great pressure to maintain the common beliefs, or at least to maintain appearance of belief. If someone admits he doesn't think one of the core beliefs is true, such as the doctrine of the incarnation or that Jesus rose from the dead, then he risks losing his place in the community. He is viewed as a pagan and is no longer a true member. Christians fear that he has lost his moral basis. They pray for his salvation and try to persuade him of his error. Relationships that were once deep are now strained to the breaking. All this because someone was honest and forthright with what he sees is true and false. There is something wrong with a religion that elevates faith above truth.

What does the Christian do when he comes to some doctrine or teaching that doesn't make sense (like the Trinity or the incarnation) or is very dubious (like various miracle stories such as the one in Matthew where the dead saints rose and came into the city)? He simply accepts it based on authority of the Bible or church. In the case where things don't make sense, he claims it is beyond his comprehension, but nevertheless he still believes it even though he doesn't know what exactly he is believing. Why doesn't the Christian consider the possibility that there was a fabrication in the account or an error in the doctrine? It is because that will expose the fragility of using authority as a basis for truth; if the authority is wrong in one thing, perhaps it is wrong in another, and there is no way for us to know. That is a scary thought and so questioning authority is not allowed.

If one looks for truth in apologetics books, one will be sorely disappointed. These books are aimed at answering the question: "How can I justify my belief to myself and others?" This is very different from trying to answer the question "What is the truth?" as the former question knows the answer and just wants convincing. Witnesses and claims that support the faith are given great weight by apologists, but those that don't are attacked in various ways: like being ungodly, leading to immorality, blinded, etc. The problem is that faith is not ultimately based on reason. And so instead, the appologist seeks to extol the virtues of faith and expose the vices of everything contrary. That does not help an honest seeker.

But the greatest cudgle held above the truth seeker is the threat of hell. He better not go so far as to lose his faith, because an eternity of torment awaits him in that eventuality. Ultimately, your reasons for belief and their validity don't matter, all that matters is that you are saved. It took me many years to overcome the fear of hell. But in the end I couldn't believe something just to save my skin from the flames, I had to honestly be convinced it was true. Also I could not believe that God would send someone to hell for for honestly seeking the truth. So I escaped the mind-control, but only after years of agonizing.

Ethnic cleansing and sex slaves

There is almost universal condemnation of the Holocaust (at least in the Western world). We consider it such a horrific crime to systematically wipe out an ethnic group like the Jews or the gypsies that there is almost no one who will seek to justify it (at least publically)

However there are similar crimes described in the Bible that people rather than condemning actually approve of. Consider the following story in Numbers 25 and 31. As a bit of background, Moses had fled to Midian from Egypt and stayed there many years, married a Midianite. His father-in-law, Jethro, was a Midianite priest. But none of this seems to matter. Here is Numbers 25:

1While Israel remained at Shittim, the people began to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab.
2For they invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods.
3So Israel joined themselves to Baal of Peor, and the LORD was angry against Israel.
4The LORD said to Moses, "Take all the leaders of the people and execute them in broad daylight before the LORD, so that the fierce anger of the LORD may turn away from Israel."
5So Moses said to the judges of Israel, "Each of you slay his men who have joined themselves to Baal of Peor."
6Then behold, one of the sons of Israel came and brought to his relatives a Midianite woman, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of all the congregation of the sons of Israel, while they were weeping at the doorway of the tent of meeting.
7When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he arose from the midst of the congregation and took a spear in his hand,
8and he went after the man of Israel into the tent and pierced both of them through, the man of Israel and the woman, through the body. So the plague on the sons of Israel was checked.
9Those who died by the plague were 24,000.
The Zeal of Phinehas 10Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,
11"Phinehas the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has turned away My wrath from the sons of Israel in that he was jealous with My jealousy among them, so that I did not destroy the sons of Israel in My jealousy.
12"Therefore say, 'Behold, I give him My covenant of peace;
13and it shall be for him and his descendants after him, a covenant of a perpetual priesthood, because he was jealous for his God and made atonement for the sons of Israel.'"
14Now the name of the slain man of Israel who was slain with the Midianite woman, was Zimri the son of Salu, a leader of a father's household among the Simeonites.
15The name of the Midianite woman who was slain was Cozbi the daughter of Zur, who was head of the people of a father's household in Midian.
16Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,
17"Be hostile to the Midianites and strike them;
18for they have been hostile to you with their tricks, with which they have deceived you in the affair of Peor and in the affair of Cozbi, the daughter of the leader of Midian, their sister who was slain on the day of the plague because of Peor."

[The story breaks and then continues in Numbers 31:]

1Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,
2"Take full vengeance for the sons of Israel on the Midianites; afterward you will be gathered to your people."
3Moses spoke to the people, saying, "Arm men from among you for the war, that they may go against Midian to execute the LORD'S vengeance on Midian.
4"A thousand from each tribe of all the tribes of Israel you shall send to the war."
5So there were furnished from the thousands of Israel, a thousand from each tribe, twelve thousand armed for war.
6Moses sent them, a thousand from each tribe, to the war, and Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, to the war with them, and the holy vessels and the trumpets for the alarm in his hand.
7So they made war against Midian, just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed every male.
8They killed the kings of Midian along with the rest of their slain: Evi and Rekem and Zur and Hur and Reba, the five kings of Midian; they also killed Balaam the son of Beor with the sword.
9The sons of Israel captured the women of Midian and their little ones; and all their cattle and all their flocks and all their goods they plundered.
10Then they burned all their cities where they lived and all their camps with fire.
11They took all the spoil and all the prey, both of man and of beast.
12They brought the captives and the prey and the spoil to Moses, and to Eleazar the priest and to the congregation of the sons of Israel, to the camp at the plains of Moab, which are by the Jordan opposite Jericho.
13Moses and Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the congregation went out to meet them outside the camp.
14Moses was angry with the officers of the army, the captains of thousands and the captains of hundreds, who had come from service in the war.
15And Moses said to them, "Have you spared all the women?
16"Behold, these caused the sons of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, so the plague was among the congregation of the LORD.
17"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately.
18"But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.
19"And you, camp outside the camp seven days; whoever has killed any person and whoever has touched any slain, purify yourselves, you and your captives, on the third day and on the seventh day.
20"You shall purify for yourselves every garment and every article of leather and all the work of goats' hair, and all articles of wood."
21Then Eleazar the priest said to the men of war who had gone to battle, "This is the statute of the law which the LORD has commanded Moses:
22only the gold and the silver, the bronze, the iron, the tin and the lead,
23everything that can stand the fire, you shall pass through the fire, and it shall be clean, but it shall be purified with water for impurity. But whatever cannot stand the fire you shall pass through the water.
24"And you shall wash your clothes on the seventh day and be clean, and afterward you may enter the camp."
25Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,
26"You and Eleazar the priest and the heads of the fathers' households of the congregation take a count of the booty that was captured, both of man and of animal;
27and divide the booty between the warriors who went out to battle and all the congregation.
28"Levy a tax for the LORD from the men of war who went out to battle, one in five hundred of the persons and of the cattle and of the donkeys and of the sheep;
29take it from their half and give it to Eleazar the priest, as an offering to the LORD.
30"From the sons of Israel's half, you shall take one drawn out of every fifty of the persons, of the cattle, of the donkeys and of the sheep, from all the animals, and give them to the Levites who keep charge of the tabernacle of the LORD."
31Moses and Eleazar the priest did just as the LORD had commanded Moses.
32Now the booty that remained from the spoil which the men of war had plundered was 675,000 sheep,
33and 72,000 cattle,
34and 61,000 donkeys,
35and of human beings, of the women who had not known man intimately, all the persons were 32,000.
36The half, the portion of those who went out to war, was as follows: the number of sheep was 337,500,
37and the LORD'S levy of the sheep was 675;
38and the cattle were 36,000, from which the LORD'S levy was 72;
39and the donkeys were 30,500, from which the LORD'S levy was 61;
40and the human beings were 16,000, from whom the LORD'S levy was 32 persons.
41Moses gave the levy which was the LORD'S offering to Eleazar the priest, just as the LORD had commanded Moses.
42As for the sons of Israel's half, which Moses separated from the men who had gone to war--
43now the congregation's half was 337,500 sheep,
44and 36,000 cattle,
45and 30,500 donkeys,
46and the human beings were 16,000--
47and from the sons of Israel's half, Moses took one drawn out of every fifty, both of man and of animals, and gave them to the Levites, who kept charge of the tabernacle of the LORD, just as the LORD had commanded Moses.

So a whole tribe or ethnic group was wiped out by the Israelites on the orders of God. What was their crime? Some of them invited the Israelites to come and worship their gods with them. Should anyone, let alone children, be killed for that? What I find most apalling is Moses' reaction when the soldiers brought back the captives (after killing all the men): "Have you spared all the women? ... Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves." And then he goes on to tell them how to be cerimonially clean. There is not a thought to the lives of the children or the families that already lost their husband and father. What is God's reaction? It is to tell them how to divide the booty and captured women "who have not known man intimately". Eleazar the priest gets 32 virgin women for his own pleasure.

Any way I look at it, this is a horrific crime. There is not much difference between this and the Holocaust; the magnitude is somewhat smaller, but this was more effective in wiping out a people-group. And yet ask a Christian if he approves of it and what will he say? I'm almost sure he'll find some way to justify it! But if he approves of this, then it is hypocritical of him to find fault with someone who approves of the Holocaust.

So why is it that Christians will approve of the slaughtering and enslaving of the Midianites? It is because it is approved by the Bible. If they are to condemn this action of God revealed in the Bible, then either the Bible has errors in its portrayal of God or God is imperfect. Neither of these things is palletable to Christians. So instead he will cling to the Bible, and try to ignore the crimes contained in it and approved by it.

The way I escaped from this, and indeed I used to feel the actions of Israelites in killing the Cananites was justified, was by getting some distance from the Bible. I used to read it every day and finish once a year. But with such an attachment it is almost impossible to see or admit its faults. What is necessary is to stop, get some distance by not reading the Bible for 3 months, and by reading some critical literature on it. For example, read Joseph Wheless "Is it God's Word" (available on amazon.com. While I don't agree with all his points, he does make many good points about the Bible). If someone simply wants to maintain his beliefs, then he should not seek, but if someone pursues truth as the pearl of great worth, then he will give sober consideration to opposing arguments.

The Difficulty in Finding Truth

Many people from all different religions and non-religions want to believe in the truth, and many believe they have found it. The problem is: these beliefs conflict with each other in numerous ways, including in what they think about God or gods, the supernatural, what happens to people after they die, who God's prophets really were, who really is speaking from God and so forth. Because the beliefs conflict, and because the truth cannot be inconsistent, a great many (if not most or all) of the beliefs are false, and hence a great many people are deluded. How can this be?

I do not think it is because Satan has deluded the masses (which is what I heard when growing up). That is surely a copout. What evidence is there that Satan deludes anyone? What is the mechanism by which he does this? If this is possible, how do you know that Satan hasn't deluded you?

It seems to me that this must have something to do with our tendency as humans to develop loyalties to a particular cause or group. Once we develop this loyalty it is very hard for us to crically evaluate claims of the group. Rather we tend to give it the benefit of the doubt, often to a very high degree. Just consider the crazy things done by members of small cults on the orders of their spiritual leader; once they develop a loyalty to the group or leader it is very hard for them to objectively see the teachings and see how crazy they are. Of course none of us would consider himself deluded by a cult, but nevertheless we have the same human nature and the same processes could be biasing us in favor of our beliefs. To illustrate this, consider how strongly many people feel about their political party, even though the parties are often not very different from each other. It is easy for a Republican to see the mistakes and foolishness in the Democratic party, and similarly it is easy for a Democrat to see the mistakes and foolishness in the Republican party. The strange thing is that while they can see their opponents errors clearly, they are usually blind to their own party's failings. It is this inability to critique one's own beliefs that leads people astray. It is not good for political parties, but more importantly for this discussion, it leads to people being over-confident in the truth of the teachings of their religion.

To conclude, my explanation for why many people who want to know the truth end up following a particular religion or ideology that is filled with errors is that they develop a loyalty and attachment that makes is very hard for them to be properly critical of its teachings.

Does God's Goodness Matter?

In my first post of this blog I argued that God, as presented in the Bible, is not good due to his many evil actions. I have not heard any good arguments countering this. But an important question is: why does it matter if he is or isn't good?

The reason it is important is that if Christianity is true, then at the very least its claims must be interally consistent. Truth cannot contradict itself, but falsehood can and often does. Now a chief claim of Christianity on which it recommends itself to the world is that God is good and he loves people. Evangelists proclaim his goodness to the heathen telling them to seek his forgiveness. When Christians meet together they worship and praise God for his goodness. But how can this be? Haven't they read the Bible which clearly witnesses many of God's evil actions? Aren't they concerned about this major inconsistency? Is truth of no value?

The Way We Want The World

Often disagreements about the world are really disagreements about the way we want the world to be. Consider the following questions:

• Morality: Is morality absolute? What should our morality be?


• Origins: Were we created by God? How and when?


• Afterlife: Is there a heaven and a hell?


• Supernatural: Is there a hidden supernatural world that can affect our lives?

These are difficult questions, and yet many people confidently assert affirmative answers to these questions. Why can people make these assertions so confidently. It is not due to physical evidence or logical necessity. Neither of these lead to these conclusions, at least not definatively. I think the reason people have these strong beliefs is that they want the world to be a certain way and so believe it is that way. They want things to be always right or wrong, and so assume morality must be absolute. They want their lives to have a personal cause and so choose to believe they were created by God. They want hope for heaven after death and hell to punish evildoers. They want to affect the world through prayer and so believe they can via influencing the supernatural.

Letting our hopes and desires swing our beliefs about the world is a strong form of bias and so is likely to lead to false conclusions. If we want to discover truth, then we need to step outside of our wants and judge the world based purely on the evidence. Yet humans have a natural tendency to bias their beliefs based on their wants. I acknowledge that is hard to eliminate this bias in questions about the world that affect our well-being, yet truth seekers must seek to be unbiased.

Is there a Supernatural Explanation?

I can understand naturalism and its process of explanation. However, many people are unhappy with it and seek supernatural explanations of events. But what is a supernatural explanation? When should one believe in one? Does it really explain anything?

Consider the case of a person with late-stage cancer. He is prayed over and then he recovers and his cancer goes into remission. Is that a supernatural or a natural healing? What does supernatural healing mean?

First one could define natural healing. This could be the body's immune system managing to isolate and kill the cancer cells, or a medical procedure where an instrument is used to remove the tumor or some other physically describable process. A supernatural healing, by definition, cannot be only this. During some stage of the healing there must be something that happens that does not follow the normal laws of physics. At some instant some molecules realign in a way that they never could under normal conditions requiring a force beyond anything in the known universe. For this reason we call it supernatural.

While many people believe in supernatural explanations, I presume most would agree that almost all events (>99.999%) are natural. That is, given an event, our presumption should be that it is natural unless there is strong reason to suspect it is not. So what is a good reason to suspect a supernatural explanation? Back to the late-state cancer example. Most people with late-stage cancer die because of it. Occasionally some people's bodies unexpectedly manage to recover for some natural cause like the immune system winning. Now many people with late stage cancer are earnestly prayed for, but despite this most of them die (otherwise it wouldn't be such a deadly killer). Sometimes someone with late stage cancer is prayed for and then he recovers. Being prayed for and then being healed is a very unlikely event and so one might say it is evidence of a supernatural healing. But this ignores all the negative cases of people being prayed for and not being healed. If there are occasional unexpected natural recoveries, then one would expect that sometimes these would occur after someone is prayed for, especially if they are prayed for for a long time. So positive answers to prayers aren't good reason to believe in supernatural explanations, if there are many negative answers to prayers that go unnoticed.

Perhaps evidence for the supernatural is when an individual has great healing power. If so then we ought to take Benny Hinn seriously; at least his followers would point to his many great healing miracles (see his web page for examples). Others would be more sceptical suspecting that there are many people who aren't healed and wonder if the healings don't have natural explanations despite the claims. Well, then one could point to Jesus; he surely had many great miracles. But here we only have the testimony of his followers and they are unlikely to record failed miracle attempts, and in the one case where this is hinted at, (Mark 6:5-6 "He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith."), the explanation given was lack of faith. That is a convenient explanation for any healer when he fails to heal. Unfortunately we don't have any measure for what percent of people were healed or how effective the healings were. Without those negative data we can't declare the healings that worked as evidence for the supernatural.

Then what about miracles that can't have natural explanations. Many religions have examples of these. But the high likelihood of events having natural explanations should cause one to have great suspicion of these events and consider possible natural explanations like the stories were embelished by the followers or recorders. I think David Hume's argument is that the latter is much more probable than the events actually happening as told.

Nevertheless, say there is a well established event that can't have a natural cause and so we say its cause was supernatural. What are we gaining by calling it supernatural? Aren't we simply saying that we can't understand how the event could have happened given our model of the natural universe? Of course people like to anthropomorphize the spiritual world; fill it with human-like demons and angels, gods and goddesses, or a human-like God. People preach all kinds of things about the supernatural, but isn't this far more likely to be wild speculation than true knowledge. How could anyone know what the supernatural actually contains? Perhaps he feels it, senses it, has a vision of it; in my opinion all ways of "knowing" that are very suseptible to self delusion and fulfilling what one wants to believe. No matter what someone's character, it seems pretty easy to be deluded about something one does not have a direct method of sensing. So I think we are stuck being ignorant about the supernatural.

Here are my conclusions. First almost all events are natural, and so this should be our default assumption unless there are strong reasons to believe otherwise. But it is very hard specify reasons to believe something is supernatural. An event being improbable is insufficient to rule out natural explanations, as many natural events are improbable. Now even if one can show an event is supernatural, all that one is saying is that one cannot understand the event in terms of natural causes, and this is not really an explanation.

True Christianity is Not a Religion ... but Scientific Materialism Is

Many times I have heard the claim by evangelical Christians that "true Christianity" is not a religion but rather a "relationship with God." The argument goes something like this: "Religion is a human concept by which people try to reach to God through various rituals or good works. However the message we preach is that God did all the work himself and now wants a relationship with you. Since this salvation is God-dependent it is not a religion". Clearly a key goal of this argument is to distinguish "true Christianity" from the thousand and one other religions that have similar-sounding claims on individuals.

In other discussions, I hear the claim that Scientific Materialism is the "religion of this age." It is a religion because it is believed on faith and it largely affects one's interpretation of the world. The goal of this argument is to throw back on the naturalist the same criticism he makes of the person who believes in the supernatural: it is all a faith belief.

It is interesting how Christians are so happy to redifine the word "religion" in different ways in different contexts so that it applies exactly to their enemies. These two definitions are clearly inconsistent: if Scientific Materialism is a religion because it is dependent on faith in unproven assumptions, then surely "true Christianity" also is a religion. So why not just use a dictionary definition. Here are a couple from Webster's dictionary and Chamber's dictionary:

Religion [Merriam-Websters]
Etymology: Middle English religioun, from Latin religion-, religio supernatural constraint, sanction, religious practice, perhaps from religare to restrain, tie back
1 a : the state of a religious (a nun in her 20th year of religion) b (1) : the service and worship of God or the supernatural (2) : commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith

Religion (noun) [Chambers]
1: a belief in, or the worship of, a god or gods.
2: a particular system of belief or worship, such as Christianity or Judaism.
3: colloq anything to which one is totally devoted and which rules one's life • mountaineering is his religion.
4: the monastic way of life.
ETYMOLOGY: 12c: French, from Latin religio bond or obligation, etc, from ligare to bind.

So religion is a broad term. It clearly applies to "true Christianity" whatever relationship with God is implied. It is not required that religions believe that people work their way to heaven. Denying this is being deceitful, although I have seen worse forms of deceit in making converts.

Does religion apply to scientific materialism? By this I assume what is meant is a rejection of the supernatural. Surely this can include all kinds of beliefs, certainty, lack of certainty, devotion or lack of it, atheism or agnosticism or even deism -- basically just about anything. To call this a religion is again a misapplication of the word religion. In justifying the claim, Christians might point to a devoted camp of naturalists who act with religious zeal. I don't think it applies to these either, but even if it did, that does not mean people in general who reject the supernatural have a religion.

The term religion should be used honestly and it should clairify the issues. Unfortunately the way some Christians use it is often the opposite: it is both dishonest and it is used to muddy the issues in the debate with naturalists.

Reason, Faith and Truth Seeking

What is demanded of an honest truth seeker? Must he be rational? May he be a person of faith? I seek to understand these questions in this post. To answer them requires an analysis of what it means to be rational including having rational beliefs and acting rationally. Then I consider to what extent faith may be rational, and ask if it is compatible with truth seeking.

Belief is often posed as a binary option: Do you believe this claim, yes or no? That is: Are you certain the claim is true or certain it is false? But clearly these are not the only options. One can be unsure, and actually one's level of uncertainty could be anywhere in the range between certainty that it is false to certainty that it is true. Hence the question that should really be posed is: What is your level of belief in this claim?

Given then that we have belief levels about all sorts of things, how are rational beliefs distinguished from irrational ones? I assume what we mean by a rational belief is one that carefully considers all the evidence and produces an optimal prediction of the truth or falsehood of a claim given this evidence. Given uncertainties, the pridiction will be a probability (or a range of probabilities) of the truth of the claim. A useful example is that of weather prediction. One can be certain of the weather at the moment by looking outside. But it is harder to know what the weather tomorrow will be. So, for example, a rational belief might consider the season and recent weather etc. and conclude there is a 75% chance of rain tomorrow. To pose the question: do you believe it will it rain or not tomorrow creates creates a false dichotomy, as being certain it will rain or not without very strong evidence is irrational. Of course sometimes it may be difficult to determine what the evidence supports, or two people may have different sets of evidence available to them and so may rationally have two different levels of belief.

An irrational belief is one that ignores the evidence so does not optimally predict the truth or falsehood of a claim. Again this is not an all-or-nothing description. There are levels of irrationality depending on how much or little one considers the evidence.

I conclude that truth seeking is the process of building rational beliefs about the world, and includes the search for evidence as well as the analysis of it.

Now the rationality of actions, unlike beliefs, must be judged based on the goals of the individual. A rational action is one which, given the circumstances, best achieves the goals of the person. This says nothing about whether the action is good or bad, only how effective it is at achieving its goal given current knowledge, capabilities and constraints. Actions result from a complicated mix of beliefs, goals and values.

Now an interesting question is: can it be rational to be irrational? Let me put it another way: Can one rationally choose to have irrational beliefs? This is not possible for someone whose primary goal is to know the truth, and for most other cases, too, false beliefs lead to suboptimal choices and hence it is much better to have rational beliefs. But here is an example where I think irrational beliefs can lead to a better outcome and hence would be rational to hold. One can choose to believe with certainty that one's team will win the competition even though it is predicted to be an even match. Here the irrational belief in winning can help inspire one to play better and increase the chance of winning, and hence better achieves one's goal to win than would a purely factual analysis.

Now what about faith; is it rational or irrational? The first problem is that faith is a nebulous term with many meanings. Here I will consider a couple aspects of faith and their potential for being rational. Sometimes faith is considered an action. One might choose to follow Christ, or follow the church teachings. Is this rational? It depends what one's goal is in doing this. Some reasons might be: to escape persecution, to live a better or happier life, to get to heaven and avoid hell. If having faith best achieves these goals, then it is rational, if not then it is irrational (to some level).

Another aspect of faith is belief. Are the beliefs involved in faith rational in that they are most likely true given the evidence? First it is clear that the evidences for the chief faith claims are weak. This I conclude for a number of reasons including: (1) if the evidences were strong it would not be called faith (2) in general the claims aren't scientifically testable and so lack the type of evidence used by science, (3) the evidences are strongly disputed by many people, and (4) because I have looked at many of the evidences myself and concluded they are weak. However a common factor for many faiths is that, despite the evidences for their chief claims being weak, their followers are encouraged to be certain that their beliefs are true and act as if there were no chance that they could be mistaken. A host of techniques are used to build faith including encouraging active involvement in worship and prayer and bible reading and at the same time warning of the dangers of doubt and falling away. These emotional actions may sway people, but the problem is that the raw evidences are rarely critically examined and the claims evaluated on these. And having certainty despite weak evidence is a clear case of irrational belief. Hence this type of faith is irrational.

I have concluded that a truth seeker ought to seek evidences for claims and rationally assess their truth. Also, in so far as faith fosters irrational beliefs and unsupported absolute certainty, a truth seeker will be going astray by holding onto it. Faith beliefs are for those seeking other goals besides truth such as assurance and comfort. But there remain rational reasons for faith actions, such as following Christ's teachings to be a better person.

Losing My Faith

As long as I can remember, I have wanted to understand how the world around me works. My faith was an important part of that; it was not just for my comfort or pleasure (although it brought these), but more importantly it enabled me to understand the unseen parts of this world and the next. The Bible revealed much that I could not obtain elsewhere. I believed the Christian message about my sin, God's forgiveness and gaining salvation through Jesus. I read my Bible daily, went to church and fellowship and small-group meetings. I was strongly involved in evangelism and sought to bring my friends and others into a right understanding of God and the world and their need for forgiveness so they could gain salvation too.

There were two significant events and a few lines of thought that lead to a crumbling of this faith. The first event was a discussion over dinner with two people I had met from the International Church of Christ: a sect of Christianity that thinks it is the true church. We were discussing our faiths. Tim, the more experienced of the two, was a strong believer and active in his church and spreading the faith. There was a lot I had in common with him, and to some extent I saw myself in him. But we had some disagreements. He took some passages in the New Testament about making disciples as implying we had to be actively evangelizing every day, otherwise our faith was void. We discussed it in length and I tried to show Tim that his belief was ludicrous. But he was absolutely convinced that his interpretation was correct and that those of us who disagreed were wrong and going to hell. And that is how our discussion ended, with no progress. As I thought back over our discussion I was amazed that someone who seemed so reasonable and strong in faith was so confident in a belief that was so obviously false. The disturbing question it raised for me was this: might I be like Tim, confident in beliefs that if I were more objective I would see were clearly false? I concluded that confidence in a belief is not good evidence that it is true. Rather such confidence, where evidence is weak such as in spiritual things and knowing God's will and as often showed by Christian leaders, is most likely a mask for ignorance.

The second event was actually a semester long course on creation and evolution that I taught to the youth at a Southern Baptist church I attended. I wanted it to be as fair a presentation of all the evidence and views involved, so I did a lot of research into the creation-evolution debate. Whether evolution is true or not, I didn’t know. What surprised me, though, were the arguments used by Christian organizations to counter evolution. Arguments like: the decay of the earth’s magnetic field indicates that the earth can’t be older than 10 thousand years old. This and a number of the other arguments (which I had learned when I was young) had long since been shown to be false, and yet they were still being printed without disclaimers and included in curricula for students. How could Christians, who were claiming to be spreading the truth, be using falsehoods to achieve this goal? Perhaps what was more important than truth of the message, was simply convincing people of the message. This, of course, is not restricted to the creation-evolution debate. There are many beliefs Christians seek to convince others of; but are Christians scrupulous to use only truthful arguments for these? I began to wonder if that were so. As I thought back over various evangelism efforts I was familiar with, I realized indeed making converts was the goal, and the truth of the message or the arguments did not matter. Even the Biblical authors are guilty of this. There are numerous times in the New Testament where anyone who disagrees with and disbelieves the author is labeled an evildoer and described in horrible language (for example Romans 1:18-32). Clearly there are many morally good unbelievers who reject the gospel message (I'm not saying they are perfect), but it is convenient and rhetorically powerful to ignore this fact. This is another example of truth being discarded for the sake of making converts. Should I really have faith in a message that is so casual about truth?

Ask a Christian why he believes, and he will have a reason, especially if he is involved in evangelism. But are these reasons for faith really reasons for the truth of the belief? Of course I can’t evaluate all the reasons here, but the surprising thing is that most of the reasons most people give aren’t actually reasons for the truth of the message. For example, people believe because they were healed from something when they prayed, or because faith gives them great joy and hope and peace, or because they at last feel forgiveness, or because they want to go to heaven in the afterlife, and so forth. But none of these speak to the truth of the belief. One can be miraculously healed without the gospel message being true (see my post: What do miracles prove?), one can gain great joy, hope, peace and forgiveness simply through having a belief, without the belief being true, and one can be confident that one is going to heaven without that being true. What I found as I thought more carefully, listen to sermons, read apologetics books and read the arguments in the Bible, was that despite finding many “reasons” for faith, there are very few reasons or evidence for the truth of the gospel message. But I only want to believe a message if it is true.

My last line of reasoning is probably the most important for me, and one that I have considered on and off for a number of years. Christianity depends on divine authority for its message which it proclaims with with no uncertainty. The natural question this poses is: How can one know if a message is from God? The common answer is: Find it in the Bible. But that just pushes the question back one step: How do we know the Bible is a divine message to us? That’s a hard question, and it compels a similarly difficult question: How did the original writers or prophets know that their message was from God? Say one of the prophets heard a voice; How is he to know if it is from God? Or maybe he saw an angel; Does that mean that what he heard was from God? Who knows what spiritual things exist outside our experience; if one of them appears and claims to be from God, why should we believe it? How can one we sure that it is speaking the truth or that it is trying to deceive the prophet? (The simple tests sometimes proposed assume these creatures are idiots -- one must assume they are at least as smart and knowledgeable as any human and so could easily deceive any human.) In addition, how can anyone who hears the prophet know that he got his message from God? One might say, well if he does signs and wonders then one should believe. But if there are powers out there, then it could be any power doing the signs and wonders. Another answer is: One knows through spiritual insight. That is to say, one feels it is from God so it is from God, or equivalently one feels it is true so it is true. That is a statement of ultimate subjectivity and not surprisingly there is a plethora of contradictory feelings as to what is from God. Luckily the scientific approach has moved us beyond that dead end of pure subjectivity. Another answer is: Listen to what Jesus said. But if Jesus was a human, he would have similar difficulties as we in determining what the divine message was – just like we can’t know for sure, he wouldn’t know for sure. Doing great works and rising from the dead aren’t a demonstration that he was right in his message. So we are stuck, unable to be sure of anything about the spiritual world that lies outside our realm of experience. Nevertheless there are religions that claim to know all about the spiritual world without a shadow of a doubt. It seems clear to me that there is a lot of bluffing and deception going on.

The conclusion that I have drawn is that while Christianity claims to speak the truth with divine inspiration, the evidence for this is completely lacking. None of the reasons or evidences I have seen proposed actually justify it. Moreover, the confidence in which the message is stated actually counts against its likelihood, since the speakers refuse to accept the inherent uncertainty in any such pronouncement. Indeed there is plenty of evidence of Christianity from the begining being more concerned about making and keeping converts than preserving the truth. My goal is to find the truth, and if I am to be honest in that search I have to move on from my faith in infallible claims of divine pronouncements.

Choosing Hell

When confronted with the problem of why a loving God would send people to eternal torture in hell, some (perhaps the more squeamish) Christians who want to believe in both hell and God's love have a way out. Here it is. People themselves choose where they want to go. Either they choose to be with God or to reject God. If they choose to love God, then they get to be with him in heaven. If they reject God, then he withdraws himself from them including all that he is such as love, goodness, peace etc. What is left is hell, and so they are getting what they chose. Who would say that it is unfair when someone hates all things good, that these should be taken away from him?

Here's the problem with this reasoning. It assumes that loving the Christian-defined God is the same as loving all things good. But surely it is possible for someone to pursue truth, goodness, humility, caring, love of others, and the rest of the virtues, but without believing in the Christian God. Moreover, that person could have carefully considered all the evidence, and honestly concluded that the supernatural claims of the Christian revelation are false. It would actually be dishonest for him to believe, when he sees the sum of evidence pointing against belief. Or perhaps that person looked carefully at the actions of the Christian God including his ordering the slaughter of the Cananite children and his bloody masacres in the book of Revelation and concluded the Christian God is not good or caring towards the majority of humans (see: Is God Good?). Who would blame him for not choosing to love and worship the Christian God? But has he chosen heaven or hell? Christian dogma would have him going to hell, and yet he is much closer to knowing goodness than many Christians.

If choosing to think for oneself and to search for and follow the evidence wherever it leads is equivalent to choosing hell, what choice do I have? If I am to be honest in my pursuit of truth I'll have to risk it.

Doctrine as Fact?

I find it curious that many Christians respond to my questions about faith by informing me of Christian doctrines and stating them as fact. For example, saying "God loves you", or "God sent his son to die for your sins," and so on. But the question I have is not what Christian doctrines are, I know those better than most, but whether or not they are true.

So for example, I want to know: Does God actually love everyone? Just stating the doctrine that he does is not an answer, since how do you know that doctrine is true? Quoting a verse from the Bible ("For God so loved the world...") is a better start, but not a full answer either. There are two responses that still need to be addressed. First, is that statement compatible with other evidence we have both in the Bible and elsewhere? It is not hard to find some strong evidence against this in the Bible itself. God must have hated the Canaanites and their children as he ordered their massacre a number of times (see my post: Is God Good?). Can it be loving to take away everything someone has and then kill him, even if afterwards you might make it up to him in the afterlife? Surely that is not love. Then there is plenty of pointless suffering the the world that God could easily prevent if he really loved people (although this could lead to a long discussion).

The second response to the quote from the Bible that God loves people, is how did the author of the text know that and could he be mistaken? The author is stating his belief or opinion. Maybe he is wrong? To convince us he needs to argue his case and show us evidence. One reply to this is to say: No, it is God speaking authoritatively through the Biblical author and so he can't be wrong. But how do we know that? Because it is another Christian doctrine? That's not good enough as it needs stand on its own merits and evidence. Another reply is to say that the Gospel writer does give us evidence that God loves us: God sent Jesus to die for our sins and save us. That is progress, as now evidence is being considered rather than a doctrine being assumed. But how strong is the evidence? What is God saving us from? Presumeably from the punishment he has in store for us, but if he really loved us he could simply forgive us (see my post: God wants a relationship with you). Or maybe the love was expressed by a willing loss: a father losing his son to death is a terrible loss, and God willingly suffered a similar loss. But did he? Actually he got his son right back three days after he died. So what is the loss? The analogy breaks down here. Or maybe the love was Jesus' willingness to suffer for us. But consider an infinite being taking on a body for 30 years and suffering badly for a couple days at the end. That suffering is not much compared to the other suffering we see in the world. Many others were crucified, and many others suffered worse and longer drawn out tortures and death. That does not seem to be much of a sacrifice for an infinite being. So the evidence for love is kind of weak. Moreover, if God put us in this sinful world and in hopelessly sinful bodies, then surely he has a responsibility to help us get out of our fix?

My point is that I don't want to simply hear doctrines stated as if they were self-evidently true. Ask yourself, is it really true? Why do you believe it? What is the evidence on which you base your belief? (And authority is not evidence.) Does the evidence have holes or contradictions? Is there counter evidence? Also look out for self deception: are you believing it just because you want to or it makes you feel good or gives you hope?

Another response I hear is: "God's knowledge is higher than ours; we can't understand stand his love now, but we will after we die". But what I am trying to determine is if those claims about God are accurate or not. Just accepting them is an abdication of one's intelligence. Surely the key value of our intelligence is in guiding what we believe. If something may or may not be true, then before believing it one should at least make sure that it does not contain self-contradictions, and be aware of what evidence there is for and against it, and then make reasoned a choice to believe or not. Say I told you "Stalin really loved his people, we just can't understand his love", I think you would not suspend your judgement in rejecting that even though you can't undetstand Stalin's mind or fathom the reasons for all his actions. So our decisions of what to believe won't be perfect, but nevertheless we have no choice but to make judgements based on the limited information we have and our assessment of it.

We are stuck here on this planet with a host of religious and faith claims presented to us. We have to decide what to believe. Simply accepting doctrines will get us nowhere; which ones ought we to accept? If we arbitrarily choose some, then there is a very high chance we are falling into error. Rather, let's be guided by the evidence we can find and by our analysis of it.

Evolution of my Thoughts on Evolution

The creation / evolution debate is alive and well in the United States. My experience of it is illustrative of the current issues, so let me recount it.

I grew up in a protestant evangelical Christian household. My parents disliked evolution saying things like Darwin invented it to avoid the moral requirements of a creator. I had access to plenty of creation science literature which was filled with "evidence" against an old earth and evolution. When I started college I recall that my roommate asked me if I believed in a literal 7-day creation, and I said I did. During university days I learned some about cosmology and the Big Bang theory, and so I started seeking interpretations of the creation story which were compatible with an old Universe -- such as perhaps the days of creation were long periods of time. I still didn't consider evolution of humans as compatible with my faith.

The first time I really worked through the issues was when I taught a one-semester course on evolution and creation to the teenager class at the church I went to. For that I did a lot of reading on the creation/evolution debate and I sought to present both sides of the argument. In addition to library material, I sent off for materials from the Institute for Creation Research. My findings are summarized below:

• Evolution is not a finished theory yet; there are still plenty of holes and things are are not explained yet. But contrary to various creation science claims, that does not mean it is false, just incomplete.
  
• The evidence for an old earth (~4 billion years old) is overwhelming. Claiming that it is only 6000 years old is like claiming that the sun revolves around the earth. How anyone who looks at the evidence can deny an old earth and actually teach their children that is beyond me.
• What surprised me most was that creationists continued to use arguments against and old earth and against evolution that were known to be false. (Things like extrapolating the recent decay of the earth's magnetic field backwards and concluding that the earth can be at most 10,000 years old -- ignoring the fact that now there is plenty of evidence of the earth's magentic field flipping polarity multiple times). I was shocked that Christians who professed to be seeking the truth, and were commanded not to lie, would be so misleading and deceitful to children. Their arguments against evolution are filled with a multitude of misrepresentations. I suppose what matters to them is the end-product: that people's belief in the Bible is strengthened, even if it takes untruths to accomplish this.

Since that time I have continued to consider the evidence for evolution. The more I read, the stronger the case becomes that all of life is decended from a common ancestor. In particular the genetic evidence for this seems compelling.

So if the case for evolution is so strong, why are Christians (especially evangelical ones) so reluctant to accept it? Here are the reasons I see:

• There is a strong focus on the Bible as the ultimate authority for one's faith. The bible is what sets evangelical Christian beliefs apart from other beliefs. This entails taking it as literally as possible, otherwise one can take all sorts of liberties with the text. For example, if Adam and Eve aren't our literal ancestors as Paul thought, then maybe his condemnation of homosexual activity is also mistaken. Without a strong literal interpretation it is much harder to split the world into good and bad, black and white.
• Some basic theological teachings depend on a literal Adam and Eve as our ancestors. In particular the doctrine that Paul taught that sin entered the world through Adam's disobedience and is inherited by us. Then Jesus is the second Adam who brings forgiveness of our sins through his death and resurrection. If Adam wasn't a literal person or our literal ancestor (as evolution implies), then Paul was mistaken, and perhaps he was also mistaken about Jesus having a literal resurrection? If there isn't original sin, maybe people of other faiths aren't going to hell, and maybe Christians aren't going to heaven? A host of difficult questions ensues, and there isn't an unambiguous authority to answer them. Perhaps that is why the Catholic church isn't so worried about evolution, because it still maintains that the church has this unambiguous authority on matters of faith.
  
• Evolution raises questions about what makes humans and animals different. In particular it casts doubt on humans have a non-physical spirit or soul that lasts after they die. This brings into doubt basic Christian doctrines on an afterlife.
  

So for Christians and the church what seems to matter most is authority, as this is crucial to maintaining their faith and its distinction from other faiths. For me what matters most is truth. I am not willing to sacrifice truth for authority or even for faith. For protestants who look to the Bible as the basis of their faith, accepting evolution entails developing a much more liberal faith. What exactly this is faith is I'm not sure, and I would like to consider this more.

Worship only God

The Bible demands that we worship God, and only God. The first and second commandments are:

• You shall have no other gods before me.
• You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.
  

Worshiping other gods is punishable by death. The kings who killed prophets of other gods are lauded for their zeal for the Lord. God punished by death those who failed to consult him or properly respect him.

Say it is true; God is the only one worthy of our worship and those who worship other gods are foolish. Does that mean it is right for God to demand our worship on pain of death? If someone foolishly worships a fake god, is that threatening to God? Why can't he just laugh at that man's foolishness? If someone wants to choose a different god, why not just let him? My only explanation for this defensiveness on God's part is that he feels threatened by people following other gods. But it is kind of surprising that an infinite God would feel threatened by mere mortals. That is the kind of behavior Imight expect from an autocrat fearful of possible usurpers.

I'm not sure what to conclude. If indeed God is not satisfied unless everyone worships him and he punishes those who don't, then the Christian God must be insecure and vindictive. How can I honestly worship someone like that?

Do Religion and Truth Mix?

There are many religions and belief systems out there competing for followers. Many claim to be uniquely true and that other beliefs are mistaken. Obviously they cannot all be true, and for those that claim to be uniquely true, at most one can be true. Many very smart people are ardent followers of these conflicting belief systems, and if at most one is true, then a very large number of people are deluded in their beliefs. Hence I conclude that knowing the truth must be difficult and require careful searching.

Now if I am to choose a belief system, I want it to be true. However there isn’t an objective way to prove the truth of any of the systems. Hence at the least I will demand that my belief system value the truth, recognize the difficulty in finding it, and encourage its followers to be honest truth-seekers. Without these characteristics, I would have very little confidence that the belief system is true.

With this goal in mind, I will examine Christianity, and in particular evangelical Protestantism, as that is the system I am most familiar with. Many other religions share similar characteristics, and in a future post it would be interesting to compare them with this consideration in mind. The following are the characteristics relevant to knowing the truth that I’ve identified:

1. The chief source of knowledge of the Christianity is revelation through individuals by God. This is how the main tenets of belief are acquired including how the bible was created. Unfortunately, there is no way for others who weren’t the direct receivers to test whether or not the message was directly from God. Actually even the individuals who got the original revelation cannot know for sure that it was from God (perhaps the voice they heard had some other source). Various tests like consistency with other revelation, miracles, prophecy, good works etc. all fail to confirm the divine origin (as all these could have other explanations). Ultimately one must simply accept the claim by the prophets, writers or canonizers to their divine authority. This secret method of obtaining truth without an independent observer concerns me.
2. Empirical testing of the chief claims of Christianity is not possible. These claims include the characteristics of God, a future judgment, reward in heaven or punishment in hell, and so forth. Empirical validation is crucial in many fields as it gives an objective evaluation of the claims, but there is no such objective means for testing truth in Christianity. This is another reason for concern.
3. Signs and miracles have been used, and continue to be used, as validation of the teachings. Unfortunately, as I argued in a previous post, at most these demonstrate power, not the truth of views expressed by the miracle workers. It is disturbing to me that these are assumed in the bible and by others as proof of the correctness of the messages. This I think makes its truth questionable.
4. There is no way to disprove the faith or its claims. At first, this seems to be a strength, but in science if one proposes a theory that cannot be disproved, then it is considered an empty theory that gives no useful information. While Christianity makes many statements about the world, they are all sufficiently vague so not to be testable or about entities or events that cannot be accessed. Let me ask: what statement could one test that if false would disprove Christianity. This inherent vagueness and multiplicity of meaning of statements is makes me wonder about the truthfulness of Christianity.
5. A host of doctrines is assumed as priors that cannot be questioned. These doctrines can be quite elaborate and must be accepted without any test. They include doctrines on God’s existence, his character and how he relates to people. Some doctrines are questioned by use of the bible, but this relies on other doctrines of the scripture and its interpretation. I think honest truth-seeking would start with minimal assumptions, and rest all these claims about God and the bible on gathered evidence. Hence rather than doctrines one would have observations and deductions – and these could surely be analyzed and improved as knowledge grows. Christians typically strongly object to proposals like this which might “water down” the message. However, if truth is important, rather than certainty, then making observations and deductions will get one there rather than defining doctrines.
6. If one asks on what basis one should believe, the answer is: “Accept the claims on faith.” A common line of advice is: “Pray that God would convince you of the truth of the message, and then if you are convinced, this confidence itself is itself evidence of the truth of the message.” That is, confidence in one’s belief is crucial to being a follower. I can see how this is useful for motivating followers, but confidence is a strange test: surely one could easily be confident in something false or have faith in a falsehood. Faith and confidence are not a good test for truth, and I suspect could easily lead people away from truth.
7. Invariably deep questioning, careful criticism, and doubting are discouraged by Christianity. At best these are things one must get over in order to develop in one’s faith. But it is strange that any true system would fear or discourage these. In science these are encouraged, and from these new and better ideas emerge. I can see how falsehood would fear these things, but truth should have no fear of probing analysis.
8. An enormous carrot is held up for those who maintain the faith: eternal joys in heaven, and a brutal stick held over those who would disbelieve: eternal punishment in hell. Is it really possible to fairly assess the truth of one’s beliefs if one fears going to hell by making a mistaken conclusion from the evidence? I have experienced the fear of hell as I questioned aspects of my faith and for a while it kept me back from my inquiries. But in the end I decided that I would pursue truth foremost, and let God do what he likes to me. I find it hard to believe a true system would use these kind of measures to maintain believers.
9. Followers focus on converting the unbelievers and seekers, and on maintaining their own faith. There is no open discussion on the truth or falsehood of their own beliefs. If truth is difficult to achieve, then surely people should be spending much more time analyzing the bases of their own beliefs than trying to convince others to believe the same.
10. One typically joins a community of believers. This is a major strength of a religion: one gains company, friends, supporters etc. That is, so long as one maintains the faith. If one openly rejects the faith, then one loses one’s standing and ones ability to participate. This is another major stick held up against those who might disbelieve. I think this is unfortunate as it discourages independent criticism.

My conclusion is Christianity has few hallmarks of a system that values truth. It has an over confidence on how easy truth can be determined and that it must be true. Its key claims are not testable and it uses miracles and other spurious means for assuring its followers of its truth. Finally, it actively discourages thoughtful criticism through various means including threats of eternal punishment.

Faith or Freedom?

I find it interesting listening to politicians advocating a greater role for faith in the running of our country, from faith-based charity groups, to prayer in schools and the government, and simultaneously claiming to protect individual freedoms. Are these goals of spreading faith and increasing freedom compatible or do they clash? Plenty of groups advocate their faiths as the solution to our problems. But the strength of secularism and the separation of church and state in this country has kept this in check. It is not, however, too hard to find societies where faith is central to the running of the country. There are many countries that openly proclaim this. But has their pillar of faith been a solution to their problems? Surely is opposite is true; when faith-based groups gain power they invariably use their faith as a means of repression and elimination of individual freedoms. Naturally they ask why they should permit people to do things that are contrary to their principles? So the rules and regulations they create, governing what one can read, watch, say and believe, are for the moral good of the individual and country. Consider how many countries still ban speaking out against the official concept of God (i.e.. blasphemy) and reward this speech with a death penalty.

Christian groups are likely to reply that the problem is not that faith is supreme, but that the wrong faith is supreme. That is, if the Christian faith were in charge all would be better. But is it true that if the Christian religion were enshrined in our constitution and governing our every action, we be a better and freer nation? We might be better in the same way as the mullahs perceive their countries are better because of their state faith. They point to lower divorce, lower crime etc. in their countries to show how their faith improves their countries, but if so surely at an enormous cost of individual freedom. I propose that with Christianity in charge we would also have a similar loss of freedom. The key reason is that religious faiths (at least the monotheistic ones) have a pessimistic view of human beings: we're lost, we're evil, we're unable to do anything really good on our own, etc. Giving lost, sinful creatures freedom would lead to evil triumphing, and so true freedom would be a terrible state of affairs.

Instead the ideal Christian state is an authoritarian one in which God is in control and we all submit to him and obey his commands. That is how heaven will be in any case. On this earth realizing that goal is difficult as God doesn't seem to take actions on his own. Nevertheless the ideals of authority, submission and worship of that authority pervades Christianity. So as a result numerous people from the pope down on to individual pastors are eager to claim God's authority and decry any behavior that is displeasing to God. If they had political power they would surely use it to restrict any actions displeasing to God. Consider all the recent vitriol directed against gay marriage based on it being displeasing to God. Great efforts are being exerted by born again Christians to create a political ban of it. They reason: why should someone have freedom to do what God disapproves (even when it harms no one else)? I dread to imagine the growth of social control and the loss of freedoms if political power becomes subject to God's authority as determined by voting Christians.

Perhaps a classic argument formulated by Saint Paul claims that people in their natural state are slaves to sin and the Christian faith offers them freedom from that. The idea is that sin is an addiction, and faith in God releases one from that and so enables one to live in freedom. There are big flaws in this claim however. It is true that addictions or compulsive behaviors effectively limit our freedom, but unfortunately these aren't solved by faith in God. I think what Paul is talking about is an ideal of a sinless life that he has, and that he is unable to achieve it as a non-Christian. But it is pretty big leap to say that not being able to achieve an ideal, or that one makes mistakes, is equivalent to being enslaved. (Especially when the ideal is somewhat suspect.) In addition, how is the Christian free if he is still unable to achieve this ideal, and actually is no better at achieving it than the rest of mankind? But the main problem with Paul's argument is his concept of freedom. Consider this illustration. One lives in a totalitarian state. One is free to do whatever one likes so long as one submits to the ruler and obeys all his commands. Is that freedom or the opposite? That is the kind of freedom Christians advocate: so long as you submit to God, worship him and obey all his commands you are free to do whatever you like. If you reject this offer of "freedom" then the fury of hell awaits you. So you are not even free to say no.

If religion-inspired pessimism about the human state is the enemy of freedom, what is its promoter? Surely it is the optimism of humanism. Humanism believes we can conquer our downtrodden state of affairs and build a better world. We each should be set free to pursue and realize our individual and corporate potential. This may be tempered with a condition that we not harm others in our pursuit, but surely the greatest gain for everyone to be free to do as he wishes. It is this trust and optimism in human nature that is the basis for the freedoms given to us by our constitution.

Not surprisingly many religions show great distain for humanism. But hand in hand with this they show distain for freedom. So I think the choice for our country is pretty clear: faith or freedom.