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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:31
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I don't know how to begin this, or even what exactly I'm trying to say, but I've noticed a lot of posts attacking Christianity on the grounds that it consists of a supposedly loving God damning people to eternal suffering for their errors. That isn't technically a strawman, because strawmen are usually erected by their attackers, and the idea is pretty much common belief in many Christian churches today. It just happens to be a completely inaccurate and absurd common belief. No, this isn't another Orthodoxy-is-Great post, because there are people in just about every branch of the faith who have a halfway reasonable idea of how redemption is supposed to actually work. The more popular delusions are simply the result of several centuries of increasing theological ignorance.
So far as I can tell, there are two popular but nonsensical views of salvation. The first is popular among evangelicals like Chick and seems to be based on the concept of salvation through faith. Under this system, Heaven is something like a divine mob protection scheme, or a gang membership. Come judgment day, Jesus is going to bust the cap of damnation in the collective rears of humanity, with the exception of his designated holy homeys, who signed up to be part of his crew, took the membership oath, and support the group by giving cash to guys on TV with bad suits and excessive hair-gel. Provided you are on the ok list, all your sins are redeemed. Aside from not making a lick of sense, this whole scheme is very reminiscent of the Mark of the Beast, and makes you wonder how exactly the road to salvation is supposed to be as hard as the Book of Matthew makes it out to be. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to spout some babble about accepting Jesus as his personal savior and get in on the outfit. Um, no.
Then there's the even more popular works-based fallacy seen in Dante's Inferno(I really hate that book!), in which the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto an income-tax form. Come Judgment Day, God will measure each man's sins, make deductions for every sacrament he has taken part in, give credits for helping old ladies cross the street, and add all the numbers up and see if the balance is positive or negative. Thankfully, we can all clean up our credit history via confession. I don't know why exactly the king of glory who knows the hearts of men is required to add up numbers like a calculator to determine their worth, and if so why he was so harsh on the Pharisees for showing good fiscal sense.
They are both popular conceptions of heaven, and both pretty much completely wrong. The classical Christian sense of virtue is a measure of how the actions of human beings change their hearts for better or worse over the long run, not a matter of physical consequences or legalistic obedience. The people in Hell aren't supposed to be the guys who didn't quite make the grade. They're the folks whose behavior in life gradually turned them into something that wasn't really human at all. The proud, the vain, the selfish, the cruel, people more concerned with being better than those around them than with being in a good way at all. The damned are those who freely chose to become thin parodies of what they were and ought to have been. That's why the Gospels say, "I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink..." rather than, "you didn't give enough food, you were stingy with your water, you only visited the sick three times in your whole life..." It's not the actions themselves that are important, it's why you do them and what they make you into. Apparently all the Pharisee-whooping passages didn't make that clear enough.
Hopefully this will at least lower the ignorant comments for a little while. Anybody else have anything to add?
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Lincoln
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Thanks for your post Elok. I think that pretty much sums it up. Hell will be full of religious folks who do as the Pharisees did.
Mt:23:12: And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.
Mt:23:13: But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
Mt:23:14: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
Mt:23:15: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.
Mt:23:16: Woe unto you, ye blind guides...
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Dr Strangelove
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The kingdom of heaven is made up of peacemakers, mourners, the merciful, the poor in spirit, the persecuted and those who stuck by their guns despite persecution. Thus sayeth Matthew 5.
Did anyone see the movie "What Dreams May Come"? The movie portrays heaven as a sort of persistance of a person's best dreams. The main character wakes up inside a beautifuul landscape he had once painted. He later meets up with his young daughter, who had died tragically, inside a colorful pop-up which he had given her before she died. He meets the people he once knew in life in personae they chose for themselves after death. His wife, who committed suicide after their children's deaths, is imprisoned in a chaotic dungeon fashioned by her own tortured soul. Eventually he is able to free her.
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Lincoln
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I personally do not accept the "believe in God" thing the way it is often presented in modern churches. The first requirement is that we repent. The fact that there are so many "Christians" today that live worse lives than the people they are trying to convert shows that the present day gospel is not the same one that Jesus preached. Jesus said to the Jews who thought they were some chosen seed of Abraham: "If Abraham were your father you would do the works of Abraham." Claiming to be a Christian and a "believer" is not necessarily the same as actually being one.
"Repent and believe the gospel" is the message, not believe and get a free life insurance policy and ticket to live like the devil.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:31
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quote:
Originally posted by Boshko
Very eloquent Elok, the best piece of Christian apologism I've come across on the internet in quite some time. However you've still got the problem of everyone who's not Christian being:
which is a bit hard to stomach. |
Thank you. Thing is, that's legalistic, and that's exactly my point. We don't know everything about the afterlife, but the Christians who know what they're talking about agree that God isn't going to check off on a list like a bouncer at a nightclub. There isn't one thing that WILL send you to heaven or hell, traditionally, except blasphemy against the holy spirit, which Christ says will not be forgiven in this age or the age to come. And blasphemers against the holy spirit are not just non-believers, but those who knowingly vilify the name of god, namely the kind of "evangelical atheists" who fit the symptoms I named like a glove. People who say there is no proof that God exists but mean that whether there is one or not (and they may very well suspect deep inside that there is), they will not believe in Him because they want to see the world exactly as they wish it to be, not as it really is. You can see this in the very phrase, "there is no scientific evidence that God exists," which is a pretty clear-cut tautology but still gets uttered on a regular basis. "A system of reasoning used to explain the workings of the world without resorting to the supernatural can find no proof of the supernatural." Now that's just genius. Any fool could see that, if God did exist, He would be anything but a controlled variable, and uniformitarianism would be nothing but a guess.
"Then why did he make the world so that it looks like it developed without Him," right? Why do computer programmers not write in a code that corresponds exactly to plain English? The same reason: the ability to be easily understood by those who make use of it was not a priority in the design. If knowing that God exists is supposed to make it easier for us to be better people, Christianity claims otherwise: Adam was God's best friend and had everything he wanted or could ever want and still screwed it up. Note also that, no matter how the universe was constructed, it would not be readily explicable because it would be the only thing we knew, and you can't fully understand anything when you have no basis for comparison. And yes, God can make anything, but a system without limitations isn't a system, it's a mess. Wanting a world that works like ours but is easily understood is a bit like wanting a world where people are also tuna-fish sandwiches and the Earth can orbit around the moon if it feels like it.
Considering that we are discussing an ostensibly omniscient being, the argument is especially ludicrous, because it puts us in the position of more or less totally ignorant people criticizing an expert on the subject, like a Mongolian horse-herder telling Rommel how to move his troops effectively, or a child yelling at Daddy for trying to kill Mommy with his pelvis after he walks in on them at night. We're trying to evaluate a situation that we are not capable of understanding here.
I always felt that you can never prove or disprove the divine, but I only recently realized why. Thank you, Mere Christianity, for the inspiration.
Okay, so I went off on a gigundo tangent. The point I was originally making is that it's not theoretical acknowledgement that matters, it's a lucid soul. Note that Christ didn't say He wouldn't forgive the blasphemers, only that they would not be forgiven. I think it's because you have to want forgiveness before you receive it. There's the catch.
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Lorizael
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The Cult Wins
Sep 2001
time: 00:31
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To respond to your tangent, Elok, smarter atheists and agnostics don't make that claim. Instead they say, "There is nothing to suggest that a supernatural being exists or that a supernatural being needs to exist." And this is quite true.
One could argue that the universe needs some sort of creating force in order for it to have come into existence, but this is not necessarily correct. The origin of the universe naturally has to be a supernatural source, and anything supernatural would not have to follow the laws of the universe.
In other words, the logic of this universe stating that everything needs a cause would not immediately be applicable to the supernatural, because we do not know that the supernatural has the same laws of logic as our universe.
So the universe doesn't need a creating force. But, of course, there's no reason to think that it doesn't. There's no reason to think that the supernatural doesn't follow the same laws of logic. It's just that we can't really make assumptions about the supernatural, so I don't see how anyone could base their entire life off a belief that really has nothing going for it.
And, even if the universe does have some sort of supernatural origin, we don't know that this supernatural origin is a divine sentient entity, let alone the Christian God.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:31
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You have a point, bud. I posted this thread defensively, so to speak, because I was tired of the ignorant sneering. I'm not expecting anyone to convert because of what I say, only to stop fighting me on grounds that don't exist.
As for my personal belief, well, that's a matter of sheer opinion. True, I was raised Orthodox, but so were my brothers and they're heathen today. Hopefully nobody is going to suggest that I am just a fool or haven't given the matter enough thought.  My belief is based on observations of humanity, not any God. I've seen the way we treat each other, it doesn't make sense to me, and neither does the statement, "nobody's perfect." I always wonder WHY it isn't perfect. Most of the wrongs we do have no positive results in the long term, but we do them anyway, and always with a tendency to overlook what is shown in retrospect to be obvious. Our explanations don't make sense, our truths aren't true, and the only thing conventional wisdom tells us about it is that we want to screw our mothers. About seven milennia of human civilization has led to the same bunch of nasty creeps as before. Even if perfection is impossible I don't see how it hurts to try. If religion is a human invention then the "religious atrocities" so frequently cited is just one common human tendency manifesting itself in another, so far as I am concerned.
Long story short, I am inclined to believe, based on the general orderliness and trends of human perversity, in the existence of a devil. The fact that we have survived the madness for so long-literally time out of memory-indicates to me that the devil is kept from winning by something. Now, there is no empirical evidence here, only hunches and guesswork. In my experience, however, hunches and guesswork are the essence of life. Most of the decisions I make are a leap and a wish with nowhere near enough information to base them on. It's all I know how to do, and perhaps more importantly, all I really can do. I go with Christianity specifically because it's what I was taught, I've never encountered a real or valid objection to it, and I can only do the best I can, to meet a tautology with a (semi-)tautology. That's about it.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:31
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Well, I'm gonna assume that you're responding to someone other than me, Sava, but I don't think it's faith or works. Faith is only necessary insofar as Christianity is the most accurate map to the destination you want; I think it was Buddha who said that his teachings were only the raft used to carry people to the shore. I agree with that, but would like to add that my religion isn't a raft, it's a yacht. Maybe you'll get there with your raft, but the idea of faith is that there's a better way to go.
Works, on the other hand, encounters the fact that your actions are not the essence of who you are. In talking of an omniscient God who can read your deepest thoughts like a book, it doesn't make sense to define it in terms of what you do within a given period of time. Doesn't fit with those Christian religions who believe in salvation for the sincerely repentant at their deathbed either. When all information is available to be seen, the best measurement of the heart would be the heart itself, the soul as it is made or lost by years of thought and habit. You cannot change what you have done, and who but God is to say that somebody "got off too easy"? Not your works, not your faith, not your contributions to Reverend Hal's Pomade fund, but you yourself, at the core, are to be judged. Well, sez me.
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24-09-2003 03:15
ACK!
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