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Why Are Evangelicals So In Your Face About Jesus?

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love to tell the story

Non-Evangelical Christians and non-Christians alike often have a hard time understanding why Evangelicals are so pushy about their religious beliefs. Never content to live and let live, Evangelicals are determined to witness to and evangelize every person they can. Through verbal confrontation, sermons, radio, television, billboards, tracts, books, and blog posts and comments, Evangelicals are determined to verbally assault every person they deem a sinner. Evangelicals send missionaries all over the world in an attempt to infuse and subjugate cultures with their brand of Christianity.  Indeed, any Christian group that is not Evangelical is viewed with suspicion. Some Evangelicals even go so far as to brand certain sects likes the Mormons, Catholics, and Jehovah’s Witnesses as non-Christian.

Why are Evangelicals so bold and combative concerning their beliefs? To answer this, you need to understand how Evangelicals view the world, God, and the human race. Here’s a list of cardinal Evangelical beliefs. It is not exhaustive by any means, but everyone who calls themselves an Evangelical believes these things:

  • There is one God, the triune God of the Bible. ALL other gods are false gods.
  • Everyone is born into the world a sinner. They do not become sinners, they are sinners. Thanks to Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden, everyone born after them has come into the world speaking blasphemies and lies  According to the Evangelical, everyone is born hating God. From birth, they are at variance with God.
  • Jesus Christ, the virgin born son of God,the sinless God-Man, came to the earth 2,000 years ago to voluntarily die on the cross as payment to God the Father for everyone’s sin; that is unless you  are a Calvinist, then Jesus only died for a few people. Three days after he died Jesus Christ, by his own power, rose again from the dead. A short while later, Jesus ascended back to heaven and he has remained there ever since. Some day, Jesus will return to earth to judge the dead and the living.
  • The only way sinners’ sins can be forgiven is for those sinners to put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. Salvation is in Jesus alone.
  • Hell is a real place. When sinners die they go to one of two places: heaven or hell. If people have accepted the salvation offered by Jesus they go to heaven when they die. Every person who doesn’t accept the salvation offered by Jesus, regardless of whether he or she has ever heard of Jesus and his salvation offer, will go to hell at death. In hell (the lake of fire) sinners will be tortured and punished by God for all eternity because they refused or didn’t know about the salvation offered by Jesus. Bottom line? Every person ever born, every person living now, falls into one of two categories: saved or lost. Each of us is headed for heaven or hell when we die. There is no neutral ground, no fence sitting when it comes to Jesus and salvation.
  • The Bible commands every Evangelical Christian to take the message of salvation through Jesus to the ends of the earth. It’s the duty and calling of all Evangelicals to witness to and evangelize everyone they can. With a supernatural message and empowerment by a supernatural God, Evangelicals are confident that the salvation that Jesus offers is the one thing that everyone needs, and it is more important than eating, drinking or life itself.
  • Since there is only one true God, one salvation plan, death is certain and hell is real, the Evangelical Christian is driven to make sure no one dies without hearing about Jesus and his super-duper, limited-time-offer,  salvation plan. When Evangelicals stands before God at the judgment bar they want to be able to say, I warned them Lord. I told them Lord. I did all I could do to keep them out of hell Lord.

Every Evangelical Christian is duty bound to be a witness for Jesus. Fortunately for the non-Christian, Evangelicals are not very good Christians. Those who actually take seriously the God-given command to be a witness unto the ends of the earth make up a small minority of Evangelical church goers.  For all their talk about the Bible, most Evangelicals ignore its plain teaching about evangelism. They read and ignore verses such as:

And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen. Matthew 28:18-20

And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. Mark 16:15-18

For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things! Romans 10:13-15

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. Acts 1:8

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. Isaiah 6:8

The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise. Proverbs 11:30

Most Evangelicals never verbalize their faith to anyone, and when they do, most often, they distort the gospel (salvation) message. Ask 100 Evangelicals to, in a detailed way, explain the cardinal Christian doctrines I mentioned above, and I guarantee you most of them can’t do it. Outside of the cute clichés they regurgitate, most Evangelicals are every bit as ignorant about Christian doctrine as non-Christians. They may know they are against abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, Barack Obama, and Harry Potter, but their lack of basic Bible knowledge is appalling and it reflects the shallowness of much of the preaching in America and the willingness of most Christians to be content with knowing little about their religion.

A small percentage of Evangelicals take seriously the teachings of the Bible and the aforementioned commands to evangelize the world. It is these Evangelicals who tend to dominate the public square.  Committed Evangelicals know how to get the word out. They are well organized and they have mastered the art of public communication on the TV, radio, internet, and the public street corner. They are 100% convinced that God has given them a message that he wants them to tell to every non-Christian. Not only does God want them to tell every non-Christian the good news once, but he wants them to tell it over and over and over again.  It is important that non-Christians understand this. There is nothing we can do to change the mind or the action of Evangelical zealots. They are motivated by what they believe is a higher calling, and until someone punches a hole in their certainty there is no hope for them.

How Jack Chick Views Climatologists

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chick the flood
The World According to Jack Chick.

Jack Chick is a fundamentalist Christian cartoonist. If you spent any significant time in the Evangelical church, you’ve heard about “Chick tracts”. In the 1980s, the Baptist church I pastored in Somerset Ohio handed out thousands of This Was Your Life tracts, Chick’s most famous tract. If you want a cartoon representation of the crazy thinking of many Evangelicals, just read a Chick tract.

According to Wikipedia, Jack Chick has sold over 750 million tracts. One such tract is the gem titled Global Warming. Enjoy!chick climate

chick climate 2

Note

Using  5 cents as the cost of one tract, Chick has made $37,500,000 from the sale of his tracts. Tracts currently sell for 16 cents each. Bulk orders of 1,000 or more tracts receive a 15-25% discount. Orders of 10,000 or more of a single tract receive a 50% discount.  Chick also sells books, tee shirts, DVDS, and comics. While little is known about the 91-year-old reclusive Jack Chick, it’s clear that he has made a nice living preying on the fears and ignorance of Christian fundamentalists.

Complete list of merchandise available from Jack Chick.

Should a Christian Preacher Turned Atheist Stop Using His Public Speaking Skills?

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preacherShould a Christian-preacher-turned atheist-stop using his public speaking skills? Before this question can be answered, perhaps we should ascertain whether the person in question actually has public speaking skills. I’ve heard more than a few preachers over the years who were horrible public speakers. Their sermons were poorly crafted and their speaking skills ranged from incoherent to monotonous. Personally, I don’t know how some people listen to this kind of preaching year after year. Perhaps this is their purgatory.

I always prided myself in preaching well-crafted sermons. I worked hard in the study to produce the best sermon possible. I spent hours and days preparing my sermons. My goal was to preach in such a way that people would not only hear me but be moved to make a decision. The goal of every sermon was to force people to choose. Neutrality was never an option. Choose YOU this day whom YOU will serve, the Bible says. Even now, the most powerful speeches are the ones that demand something of listeners.

When I preached I was animated and passionate. In my early years, I moved around a good bit, but as I got older my movement lessened. Over time, I developed a style, a methodology of preaching. Generally, people found my style pleasing and my voice easy to listen to. I wasn’t a raging, fire-breathing, pulpit pounding, aisle running Pentecostal, but neither was I a droning, lifeless Methodist. (sorry for the stereotypes)

Words are powerful tools. Coupled with the methodology of preaching, words have the ability to move people and motivate them to do great things. However, words also have the power to manipulate and control. Numerous readers of this blog can testify to how the words of their pastor were used to sway, exploit, shame and abuse.

Any preacher worth his salt knows the power his words have over others Preachers know that the right word at the right time can elicit a certain response. They know what words can trigger an emotional response. Yes, preaching is supposed to be about knowledge and instruction, but mere knowledge will never cause a people to rise to the occasion and go to  war with Satan, the world, Democrats, secularism, and atheists. Great orators know how to stir people to do that which they might not normally do. Therein lies their power, and that power, when used wrongly, can hurt people or cause them to do things that are harmful, not only to themselves, but to others.

So what is a person such as myself to do? I preached my first sermon at age 15 and my last sermon at age 48 I spent 34 years telling people, thus saith the Lord. I have given thousands of sermons, having preached through most of the books in the Bible. Preaching is very much a part of who and what I am.

As a preacher-turned-atheist, I find myself in uncharted waters. I still have a passion for public speaking. I know I could be good at teaching most anything. I suspect, knowing my skill-set, that people would find me engaging and easy to listen to. As most any former parishioner of mine will attest, my ability to hold a crowd’s attention was never a problem. Oh, I had plenty of problems and shortcomings, but when in the pulpit I was at my best.

I miss preaching. I miss the personal interaction with people. I miss seeing my words move, challenge, and motivate people. As most ex-preachers will tell you, preaching was not the reason they left the ministry or deconverted. It was the stuff outside the pulpit; endless meetings, personal squabbles, or financial struggles that caused the most stress and angst.

In 2012, Pentecostal-preacher-turned-atheist, Jerry DeWitt, delivered a powerful speech at the American Atheist Convention. His speech, dare I say sermon, was given using the preaching skills that had served him well as a Pentecostal preacher.

Dan Fincke, a friend of mine who blogs at Camels with Hammers, wrote a lengthy post  about Dewitt’s message and his speaking skills and style. Dan thoughtfully raised some issues that former preachers like Dewitt and I need to consider carefully:

So, as Richard Wade watched this former evangelical go so far as to present the narrative of his turn to atheism in the precise idiom of a Pentecostal preacher, he turned to me and said, “You were right!” It made the dynamic so clear.

So—is this a good thing? I think in most ways it is, but I have a reservation. There is nothing wrong with a narrative in which “once I was blind but now I see”. This has always been a part of secularism. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on the “light of reason” was coopted, for example, by Descartes from St. Augustine. We need to reclaim some of the emotionally resonant metaphorical terrain that is part of our linguistic and cultural means of expressing certain kinds of experiences. Just because a certain emotionally powerful form of personal narrative was cultivated in evangelical circles does not mean it cannot have genuine parallels among apostates. We are not just ripping them off or somehow remaining Christians. But sometimes we do remain evangelicals, only now atheistic kinds. The apostate’s narrative often just has some basic formal similarities that make it true to co-opt similar categories to evangelicals when conceiving of and narrating what is happening within oneself.

But what about the Pentecostal delivery? I can imagine some atheists with what I like to call “religious PTSD” rejecting it out of hand for its “triggering” connotations that remind them of the shameless charlatans who pioneered, and up through today still, exploit those techniques to manipulate people into falsehoods and religiously based moral corruption. But the vast majority of the auditorium seemed happy to play along with DeWitt and to really enjoy the experiment. He got a hearty standing ovation from a good portion of the room when he was done and was one of the day’s leaders for applause lines for sure.

But the Pentecostal style might also simply look so well practiced and formulaic and manipulative that it is the equivalent of a shameless Hallmark card or a schmaltzy movie providing cheap emotional triggers using the easiest and least respectable methods in the book for pushing people’s buttons.

I think that if the emotional button pushing is a way to make an end-run around reason, that is corrupt and despicable. But if it is to package and deliver rational truths and moral ideals of rationalism to people in a way that will properly align their emotions to what is actually true and ethical, then ultimately I am not convinced there’s anything dishonest or manipulative about that. I am open to arguments though….

…As I also explained to Richard the morning before seeing DeWitt, I have preachers’ rhetorical skills and yet for the most part I assiduously avoid them in my classrooms, and instead work with my students dialectically and put the stress on the development of their own reasoning skills. Occasionally, I will get on a roll about something I’m passionate about and reach back to make a rhetorically boosted little speech. But even then I hold back on going quite to preacher levels. And if I do, it’s tempered and not exploitative.

There are two reasons for my hesitation. One is purely technical. I once picked up the interesting advice that if you can do something exceptionally well you should do it only selectively, so as not to diminish its impact. In general you should only put as much rhetorical push into an idea as it needs and save your force for when it’s really needed, always calibrating force applied precisely to what is necessary at every level.

But the more morally serious and germane reason I hesitate to go into preacher mode is that it can be downright anti-dialectical and counter-productive to cultivating an atmosphere of rationalism and habits of careful reasoning. Preaching, rather than just teaching or guiding through questions, runs the risk of inherently training and reinforcing the audience’s infamous preexisting susceptibilities to falling for passions and pretty words at the expense of rational thought. Even if you convince them of your point with your bluster and poetry, you do not train them in careful critical thinking in the process, and so you have not guaranteed they have learned to think for themselves, so much as to simply think like you. And you may have just contributed to their ever ongoing habituation throughout the culture in being led by irrationalistic appeals rather than rational ones. This is not just a pitfall of the parts of our movement that dance with religious forms but also the ones which dance with dubious political rhetorical tactics too.

I’m not sure if it is the case that the preacher’s style is always mutually exclusive with training in critical thinking. Clearly a major part of why it’s so dangerous in actual religions is because it is explicitly coupled with injunctions to just have faith and with countless dubious appeals to unjustified authorities. Can a rationalism which explicitly denounces such things be compatible with some fiery preaching? Can one preach successfully against authoritarianism and faith or is there an implicit bogus appeal to faith in the ungrounded authority of the speaker that is structurally there every time a teacher takes recourse to the tactics of the preacher?

Dan waves the red flag of warning and rightly so. Preaching, particularly certain styles of preaching, can be used to manipulate and control. Dan wisely warns about making an end-run around reason. Far too often preaching is nothing more than the reinforcing of this we believe and we shall not be moved from this we believe.

As a preacher turned atheist, I cannot turn off the speaking skills I used to ply my trade for 34 years. They are very much a part of who I am. The best I can do is be mindful of the power of the skills I have and make sure I use them in such a way that people are not only moved but instructed. I need to be aware of the power I have to manipulate people with my words. Self-awareness of this fact will keep me from falling back into using the tricks of the preaching trade to elicit the desired response from those listening to me.

That said, I want to put in a plug for passionate, pointed, challenging public speaking. Quite frankly, the atheist and humanist movement needs a bit of life pumped into it. I have listened to many speeches, lectures, seminars, and debates that people told me were wonderful. Well-known atheists and humanists, aren’t they great? Uh, no. B-o-r-i-n-g. Dry. Monotonous. Some  atheist and humanist speakers would be better off if they stuck to doing  what they do best: writing books and magazine articles. Leave the public speaking to those who do it well. If they are unwilling to do so, then they need to go back to school and take a few speech classes.

The atheist and humanist movement needs people who have the ability to passionately move people to action. I would rather suffer a bit with Jerry Dewitt’s preaching style (and I am not a fan of the Pentecostal style of preaching), than listen to a well-educated, boring man WOW me right into an afternoon nap. We are in a battle against religious zealots and theocrats, and we need speakers who can stir and motivate people to action.

Some atheists and humanists naïvely believe that knowledge is all that matters. Like Joe Friday, they think if they just give people the facts they will see the error of their way. Don’t get me wrong, knowledge is important; it’s essential. Way too many people becomeatheists out of anger or disappointment with the Christian church. Just like the Christian zealot, the atheist should know why he believes what he does. Or as the Bible says, the atheist should be ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within them. But, at the same time, we should not divorce our beliefs from our emotions. Some things matter, and if they matter, our emotions should be stirred, motivating us to act accordingly.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians, wrote about being a voice heard above all others. There is so much clamoring for truth these days. Who do people turn to? Those who stir them; those who speak to them. As atheists and humanists we must not disconnect our intellect from our emotions. If we believe we have the answer to what ails our universe, then we must be passionate about it, and that passion ought to come out in our public speaking. Yes, people need to hear what we have to say, but they also need to feel it.

Ice Cream: What Evangelical, Progressive, and Liberal Christianity Have in Common

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ice cream flavorsOne of the common complaints Christian critics throw my way is that I paint with too broad a brush. When I disparage or critique Christianity, my critics get upset because I’m lumping all Christians together. I should be more specific when I write about Christianity, they say. I’m not sure what they expect me to do. Should I every time I use the word Christian, modify the word so everyone knows what domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species of Christian I’m talking about? Sorry, but there’s not enough time in the day to do so. Besides, Christianity is not as divided as the warring parties would have you believe. It’s easy to assume, as we watch the internecine warfare between Baptists and Catholics and Calvinists and Arminians and Evangelicals and Progressives, that they have nothing in common. However, the differences are not as big as they appear to be.

For example, progressive Christians tend to think of Evangelicals as fundamentalist crazies and Evangelicals tend to view progressives as weak-kneed, jello-on-a-stick compromisers of the teachings of the Bible. Listen to both parties talk and it is easy to conclude that they are polar opposites of one another. However, once the peripheral issues causing their disagreement are set aside, it’s easy to then see that the Evangelical and progressive Christian have a lot in common. Let me prove my contention.

The Evangelical follows a path that looks something like this:

  • The Bible is the inspired Word of God. It is truth.
  • The Christian God is the one, true God.
  • Jesus is divine.
  • Jesus is the son of God.
  • Jesus came to earth and was born of a virgin.
  • Jesus worked miracles while on earth.
  • Humans are sinners in need of salvation and forgiveness,
  • Jesus died on the cross to atone for humanity’s sin.
  • Jesus resurrected from the dead three days later.
  • Jesus ascended back to heaven and will some day return to earth.
  • Jesus offers salvation and the forgiveness of sin to all who will put their faith in him.
  • Those who accept this offer go to heaven when they die.
  • Those who don’t accept this offer go to hell when they die

The progressive Christian follows a path that looks something like this:

  • The Bible is, to some degree, inspired and contains truth.
  • The Christian God is the one, true God
  • Jesus is divine.
  • Jesus is the son of God.
  • Jesus came to earth and may or may not have been born of a virgin.
  • Jesus worked miracles while on earth.
  • Humans are sinners in need of salvation and forgiveness,
  • Jesus died on the cross to atone for humanity’s sin.
  • Jesus resurrected from the dead three days later.
  • Jesus ascended back to heaven and will some day return to earth.
  • Jesus offers salvation and the forgiveness of sin to all who will put their faith in him.
  • Those who accept this offer go to heaven when they die.
  • Those who don’t accept this offer might go to hell when they die or they might be annihilated.

As you can see, the Evangelical and the progressive Christian have a lot in common. These two parties tend to fuss and fight over the nature of the Bible, whether the virgin birth was necessary, whether Christianity is exclusive, and whether non-Christians go to hell when they die. Apart from these things, they are kissing cousins.

What adds to the confusion is that many Christians think fundamentalism and Evangelicalism are not the same. As I made clear in the post, Are Evangelicals Fundamentalists?, all Evangelicals are theological fundamentalists and most of them are also social fundamentalists. Press an Evangelical who objects to being called a fundamentalist about his beliefs and he will eventually show his true colors. Fine, an Evangelical may often say. At least I’m not a legalist like other Evangelicals, so that means I’m not really a fundamentalist. I smile at this point and say, are you sure about that? Are you sure you aren’t, to some degree, a social fundamentalist?  Here’s what I had to say about this issue in Are Evangelicals Fundamentalists?:

Social fundamentalism focuses on the conduct, lifestyle, and social engagement of the Christian. An Evangelical looks at the rules, standards, and negativity of an IFB church that proudly claims the fundamentalist moniker and says, SEE I am NOT a Fundamentalist. I don’t believe in legalism (demanding a Christian live a certain way). I believe in grace and I leave it to God to change how a person lives.

This sounds good, doesn’t it? However, when you start to poke around a bit, you will find that almost every Evangelical is a social fundamentalist. The only difference between Evangelicals is to what degree they are. This can be quickly proved by asking people who think they are a non-fundamentalist Evangelicals a few questions. Questions like:

  • Can a practicing homosexual be a Christian?
  • Can a homosexual man be a deacon or pastor in your church?
  • Can a same-sex couple work in the nursery together?
  • Do think it is OK for unmarried heterosexuals to engage in sexual activity?
  • Can a cohabiting heterosexual couple be a member of your church?
  • Do you think it is morally right for a woman to wear a skimpy outfit to church?
  • Is it ever right to have an abortion?
  • Do you think smoking marijuana is OK?
  • Do you think it OK for your pastor to smoke cigars and drink alcohol at the local bar?
  • Is it OK for someone, in the privacy of their home, to become inebriated?

By asking these questions, and a number of other ones, you will quickly find out that non-fundamentalist Evangelicals are social fundamentalists after all. They may jeer and laugh at the crazy, extreme rules and standards of the IFB church, but they too have their own set of non-negotiable social standards. They, like their IFB brethren, are social fundamentalists.

I am sure some Evangelicals will be sure to argue that their social fundamentalism, like their theological fundamentalism, come straight from the Bible. Of course, ALL Evangelicals think their beliefs come straight from the Bible. The IFB pastor has a proof-text for everything he preaches against, as does the I-am-NOT-a fundamentalist-Evangelical-pastor. Both believe the Bible is truth, an inspired, inerrant, supernatural text. The only difference between them is their interpretation of the Bible.

No Evangelicals yet have successfully challenged my contention that they are fundamentalist. What often confuses the matter is progressive and liberal Christians who, out of fear or complacency, still affiliate with the Evangelical church. While I recognize such people exist, they are Evangelical in name only.

What complicates matters further is those who are to the left of progressive Christianity, those who are commonly called liberals. Liberals are quite hard to pin down belief-wise. They often despise Evangelicalism and even take issue with certain aspects of progressive Christianity, yet when pressed about their own beliefs, their interlocutors find out that nailing down liberal beliefs are like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.  There seems to be no theological hill they’re willing to die on, no belief, save that Jesus is their Lord and Savior, they aren’t willing to jettison if called on to do so. Those who have been riding Bruce’s crazy train for a long time might remember a frequent commenter by the name of Grace. She was a liberal Episcopalian. While she said she accepted the ecumenical creeds as statements of her faith, there was little, belief-wise, that she held dear. It was frustrating to interact with Grace because it was almost impossible to find common ground with her. God is love, Grace would say, and I’d reply, explain this so-called God of love to me in light of this same God destroying the entire human race, save eight, with a flood.  From my perspective, the notion of a God of love that wipes everyone off the face of the earth makes no sense. In Grace’s mind, making sense wasn’t important. All that mattered is that God is love.

From an intellectual perspective, I can understand Evangelicalism. Beliefs are clearly defined. But, with the liberal Christian, it seems that all they have as the cornerstone of their belief is the notion that God is love and Jesus is the personification of that love. Certainly I’m being simplistic, but I’d love for some liberal Christians to explain to me exactly what beliefs matter to them. What  beliefs are nonnegotiable? Every liberal I know thinks the Bible is a book of great stories and metaphors, yet they hold on tight to the notion that Jesus is who Christianity says he is and he is their savior. The liberal throws away the Old Testament and paints Paul as a misogynistic control freak. Book after book is relegated to the dung pile of human ignorance. All that is left is a selection of writings from the gospels and maybe the book of Acts. While liberals love to appeal to antiquity for support of their supposedly enlightened view, I’ve yet to stumble across this view in the writings of the early church fathers. Liberals, with one foot firmly planted in the modern world and its repudiation of much of what Evangelicals hold dear, want to hang on to Jesus, so they grab for beliefs they can hold on to and still be considered Christian.

To the liberal Christian I ask:

  • Is belief in the Christian God important?
  • Is everyone a sinner?
  • Does everyone need the forgiveness of sins and salvation?
  • Is Jesus in any way divine?
  • Was Jesus’s death necessary?
  • Did Jesus resurrect from the dead?
  • Where is Jesus now?
  • Is there a heaven? a hell? What determines who goes where after death?
  • Do all roads lead to heaven?

These are questions that many liberals prefer not to answer or think they are unimportant. In their minds, it’s all about Jesus. They are, in many ways, no different from some Evangelicals who say, Christianity is a relationship, not a religion. To the liberal, Jesus, along with the communal aspects of the church, is very important. Everything else is just noise.

Here’s what I think about the matter. Many liberal Christians are actually universalists, agnostics, or atheists. They like the idea of church, of belonging to a congregation. Everyone would agree that religion in general gives people a sense of purpose, meaning, and connection. It is this that really matters to the liberal.

When I take a step back and look at the broad expanse called Christianity, I see diversity. But, when I peel away all the issues that make Christianity diverse, I’m left with one thing: Jesus. Evangelicals, progressive, liberals, and everything in between, all love and worship Jesus. And where does this belief in Jesus originate? In the pages of the Bible. Without the Bible, there would be no Jesus or Christianity. While Evangelicals, progressives, and liberals bitterly snipe at each other over the nature and authority of the Bible, all agree that the Jesus they love and worship is found within its pages. And once this fact is admitted, then all of them are in the position to understand why I, and others like me, are not Christian. Whatever my backstory might be, the foundation of my unbelief is the Bible. Every Christian-turned-atheist I know says the same. We all have stories we can tell about our experiences as Christians, but at the end of the day, our deconversion rests on our belief that the Bible narrative is not true, that Jesus is not who Christians claim he is, and that the Christian God is just one of many Gods humans have created.

It’s taken me 2,000 words to say this. Please forgive me for not distinguishing between all the flavors of Christian ice cream. When I look at the ice cream case, I see all sorts of flavors, but they all have one thing in common; they are ALL ice cream. So it is with Christianity. While I find the various theological squabbles entertaining and fodder for blog posts, when I peel away all the beliefs that make the various sects and believers unique, I’m left with one truth: all Christians put their faith and trust in Jesus and worships him. I’m not inclined to spend much time making sure every post I write about Christianity says exactly which flavor I’m talking about. If it’s evident that I’m not talking about your flavor of Christianity, by all means ignore what I’ve said. In time, I will get around to your flavor, and then I’m sure you’ll complain that I don’t understand or that I am misrepresenting your version of the faith once delivered to the saints.

Notes

Roman Catholicism also have fundamentalist, progressive, and liberal wings.

Yes, I am aware that there are as many shades of Christianity as there wall color chips in the paint department at the local Lowe’s. That said, every Christian falls somewhere along the line between Evangelical and liberal.

[signoff]

Evangelical Christianity is the Only Rational Worldview, says Dan Phillips

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closed minded christianity

Dan Phillips, a frequent contributor to the fundamentalist Christian blog Pyromaniacs and pastor of Copperfield Bible Church in Houston, Texas, thinks Evangelical Christianity is the only rational worldview. Phillips had this to say about this supposed rationality:

A Mormon friend, in passing, remarked that religion is not rational, so he didn’t expect it to make sense. It’s a matter of faith, not reason.

You might think, “Right: Mormon. I don’t expect rationality, either.” Hang on.

He went on to give an example—but the example was not how a human could become a god, or how there could be only one god and many at the same time, or how God can keep changing His mind about things, or how two equally-inspired books could contradict each other. His example was the virgin birth. I said there was nothing irrational about the virgin birth, and the conversation simply moved on elsewhere…

…But was he right? Is religion irrational? “Religion,” maybe. Christianity, no…

….Perhaps definitions are part of the problem. There is a world of difference between rational and rationalism. The latter is a philosophy, a worldview that asserts that man can know truth by the use of his unaided reason. The former merely means that something is in accord with reason, it doesn’t violate fundamental canons of thinking such as the law of non-contradiction.

Is Christianity rational?…

…But are some of our faith-tenets irrational? Two that I hear cited specifically are the Trinity, and the Virgin Birth.

The second example is just plain silly. I have never understood how this can be an issue to anyone who believes Genesis 1:1, and thus grants the premise of a God who created everything out of nothing. It’s like saying, “Everything out of nothing? Sure! But make an existing egg alive without a sperm? No way!” Canons of rational thought are not even stretched, let alone violated, by the fact of the Creator and Ruler thus operating within His creation.

How about the Trinity? Surely the doctrine that God is three and one is not rational?…

…The Trinity is the Biblical teaching that there is but one God (Deuteronomy 6:4), and that this one God is Father (2 Peter 1:17), Son (John 1:1), and Spirit (Acts 5:3-4). The simplest way I have been able to understand and express the truth is that God is one in one way, and three in another. Or, we could say that God is one “what” (i.e. one as to His essence), and three “who’s” (i.e. three as to His persons).

Now, do we understand the Trinity exhaustively? Of course not! How exactly does God manage being what He is? We don’t really need to know, since we’ll never need to be God. Nor should the finite expect to understand the infinite exhaustively. It is as C. S. Lewis says:

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about. (Mere Christianity [Macmillan: 1960], p. 145.)

But we know enough to love Him, to worship Him, and to discern truth from error. And we know enough to know that there is nothing irrational about the doctrine.

Is Christianity rational? I daresay it’s the only worldview, ultimately, that is.

christian worldviewIt’s not hard to spot Phillips’ presupposition: the Bible is true and all discussions about what is rational must begin with the Bible. However, for those of us who do not accept the Bible as truth, the authority of the Bible has no relevance. The evidence that demands a verdict is that which can be observed, tested, and verified.

Are there things in the Bible that are not reasonable to believe? Are there things that a rational person would have a hard time accepting as factual? Phillips gives two examples of beliefs that some people, even Christians, consider irrational (lacking a rational explanation). His two examples are cardinal Christian doctrines: the virgin birth and the Trinity.

What evidence do we have, outside of the Christian Bible, that the virgin birth is a rational, reasonable belief? Is there any medical proof for a virgin becoming pregnant without having her egg fertilized by the sperm of a man? Is there any record anywhere, outside of the Bible, that a virgin has ever given birth to a child? Of course not. Belief in the virgin birth is not a rational belief. Believing that a virgin can have a child requires Evangelicals to have faith. They must be willing to blindly accept that the Evangelical God is capable of impregnating a young virgin so she can give birth to a God/Man.

Many Christians wisely reject the notion that Jesus was born of a virgin. It’s Evangelicals who stubbornly dig their heels in on this issue. For them, the text of the Bible is deified, and when this happens reason goes out the window. This is the kind of thinking that gives us young earth creationism and a host of other rational mind defying beliefs. Believing the Evangelical God miraculously impregnated an unwed Jewish teenager runs contrary to everything the Evangelical and the atheist know to be true. To suggest, as Phillips does, that the virgin birth is rational because the Bible says it is, is not an reasoned argument; it’s blind, irrational faith.

Phillips also uses the Trinity as an example of a Christian doctrine that is reasonable. Once again, Phillips’ Evangelical interpretation of the Bible becomes the arbiter of what is rational. For the atheist, the argument for the reasonableness of Trinitarianism is not important. Three in one, one in three, one in one, it matters not. The only question that matters for the skeptic and the atheist is whether there is sufficient evidence for the existence of the Evangelical God, or any other God for that matter.

The atheist, based on the available evidence, concludes that the Christian God does not exist. The Christian has the same evidence as the atheist, but rejects it, and by faith believes that the Evangelical God of the Bible really exists. Contrary to what Phillips says, Christianity is all about faith, and that faith, many times, is quite irrational. (1)

I know Phillips doesn’t  mean for his post to be a complete and full defense of the rationality of Christianity, but there are many other illustrations of rational irrationality he could have used. How about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead? All of the evidence, apart from the Bible, points to a reality we all know to be true; people die and they don’t come back from the dead. There’s nothing in the natural, observable world that suggests that the dead come back to life. Again, believing otherwise requires faith in what the Bible says about the resurrection of Jesus.

Here’s another “rational”  Evangelical Christian belief: Jesus walking through walls. According to the Bible, after his resurrection from the dead, Jesus walked through walls. This is a claim that any of us can test in about 10 seconds. Stand up, go to the nearest wall, and try to walk through it.  How did it work out for you? Were you able to walk through the wall, without doing damage to yourself or the wall? Silly, I know, but this is another example of a Bible truth that requires faith to believe. No one, Jesus included, can walk through a solid wall.

I found the C.S. Lewis quote about the difficulty of believing the Christian narrative to be quite interesting. I heard this line of thinking many times when I was a pastor. The essence of the argument is this:

If Christianity is a man-made religion, do you think its makers would have included the irrational, bat-shit crazy stuff found in the Bible? The crazy stuff is proof that what the Bible says is true.

Here’s the problem with this argument. Phillips mocks the Mormons several times in his post, but if I judge Mormonism by the standard set by C.S. Lewis, I would have to conclude that Mormonism is factual. Who has more crazy beliefs than Mormonism, right? OK, maybe Scientology is worse and Mormonism comes in a close second

Phillips enters this discussion with his mind made up. Christianity is the truth and Mormonism is just another man-made, heretical religion. After all, everyone knows Christianity is a not religion.  At least Phillips didn’t trot out the “Christianity is a relationship” line.

What do you think of Phillips’ closing line:

Is Christianity rational? I daresay it’s the only worldview, ultimately, that is.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

(1) I am not suggesting that a person can’t look at the natural world and reasonably conclude that there is a deity or a higher power. However, it is a huge jump from the deistic view that a God of some sort created the world to that creator being the Evangelical God of the Bible. There is a gigantic chasm between these two and the bridge that spans that chasm is called faith.  I am amazed at how readily Christians chuck faith in hopes of trying to “prove” that Christianity is reasonable. They diminish their religion when they do so.

Ken Ham Warns Atheists Are Out to Steal Children and Eat Them Too

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Ken Ham

Eat them, metaphorically speaking, with BBQ sauce.

In 2012,  Ken Ham, a young earth creationist, snake oil salesman, and the CEO of Answers in Genesis, warned his followers about the dangers of secularism and atheism:

… Christians today are hungry to be equipped with the resources to fight the battle before us in this increasingly secular culture, where God’s Word is being attacked on nearly every front.

I love teaching children. Once again, as we’ve seen across the country at similar conferences, we were able to reach hundreds of children and young people who attended the special school assembly programs in Florida.

I want to remind you that our theme at AiG for the next two years is “Standing Our Ground, Rescuing Our Kids” as we focus on rescuing them from this present evil age.

Recently, I coauthored an article for the AiG website about Arizona State University Professor Lawrence Krauss. He has now posted videos accusing Christians who teach their children about creation of committing “child abuse.” He even accuses those who teach their children about hell of committing “child abuse.”

Lawrence Krauss is an atheist, and he is an atheist on a mission right now to capture your kids for the anti-God religion of atheism. Think about it—he wants you to hand your kids over to him so he can try to brainwash children into believing they are just animals and that they are not made in the image of God. He wants them to be taught when you die, you rot—and that’s it! In essence, he wants your kids to be captured for the devil.

You know, I often think about why people such as Krauss are so aggressive in preaching their anti-God message of meaninglessness, purposelessness, and hopelessness. We we know that in Romans 1 we are told such people know that God is real, so they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” And it’s even more than that. They want the focus on them—it is a self-centeredness. They want you to think they are a god! They have succumbed to the devil’s temptation in Genesis 3:5—they want to be like God—they want to be a god!

Such God-haters like Lawrence Krauss and others usually go ballistic when they hear of AiG teaching kids about Genesis. And they just hate me teaching children the truth about science, origins, and how to think correctly about such matters.

This past Monday in Florida, I taught young children for an hour and a half, covering topics like dinosaurs, fossils, the Flood, creation, evolution, the gospel and much more. I showed them how the history recorded in the Bible explains dinosaurs and that observational science confirms the Bible’s history. Secularists hate me teaching children to think correctly about origins as I help them understand what God taught Job in Job 38:4. God asked Job if he was there when God made the earth. But of course, he wasn’t—and that’s the point. When it comes to origins, no human was there to see the earth come into existence! But God has always been there. Evolutionists were not there to see the supposed millions of years of evolution. So I love to teach the kids to ask the question, “Were you there?” when someone talks about millions of years. The kids get it! The atheists don’t want to get it because they don’t want to give up the starting point for their worldview—i.e., that fallible man determines truth.

I taught the high school students how to understand science in relation to the origins issue by showing them the difference between beliefs about the past and knowledge gained by observation, which enables us to build technology.

Recently, Dr. Krauss made the false statement that evolution is the basis of biology and the basis of technology. Absurd nonsense! I made sure I taught the students how to think correctly about such issues. Then I gave them answers to many of the questions skeptics will use to try to make them doubt God’s Word—questions like these: Who made God? How did Noah fit the animals on the Ark? Isn’t natural selection evolution? What about Carbon dating?…

Evangelicals like Ham love a good conspiracy theory. They believe we are living in the last days and Jesus could return to earth at any moment.  (Though I suspect Ham secretly hopes Jesus doesn’t return before he open his Noah’s Ark Amusement Park.) They also believe the world will become increasingly more sinful the closer we get to the return of Jesus. The rise of secularism and atheism is proof to people like Ham that we are living in the last days.

Ken Ham, and millions of other Evangelicals, believe they are called by God to stand against Satan and his lies. In their eyes, secularism, atheism, humanism, evolution, acceptance of homosexuality, and legalized abortion are Satanic lies that must be exposed and defeated.

Ham is right about one thing; America is becoming more secular. He is also right that the battle for the future of America will be fought in our public schools and universities. Make no mistake about it, secularists, humanists, and atheists believe the kind of Christianity Ham peddles is intellectually harmful and retards the thinking of young people.

And so we fight. No longer do secularists, humanists, and atheists hide in the shadows, fearing the wrath of Christian America. We can sense the tide is turning, and so does Ken Ham.

Secularists, humanists, and atheists use reason and facts to show  young people a better way. They show that there is no need to appeal to myth or religious superstition to explain and understand the world. Science is revealing a universe to us that is amazing and wondrous, but it is also showing that the religious narratives of the past 1,800 years are no longer credible explanations for the world we live in.

Ham does his best to disparage secularists, humanists, and atheists. According to Ham:

  • We preach a message of hopelessness
  • We preach a message of meaninglessness
  • We preach a message of purposelessness
  • We know God exists but suppress it
  • We are self-centered, it is all about us

Only with his last point does Ham get it right. Secularists, humanists, and atheists plead guilty to being human-centered (though that is not the ONLY focus we have).  We know that focusing on prayer, God, or pronouncements from ancient religious texts will do little to improve the world. In fact, such beliefs might actually cause great harm (Many of the people who deny global climate change do so for religious reasons.)

Ham and his devoted disciples are infuriated that people like Lawrence Krauss say teaching children creationism is child abuse. However, let’s consider for a moment whether Krauss’s claim is true. If creationism is religious fiction, then teaching children it is true is a lie. From the time they can walk and talk, Evangelical Christian children are taught all sorts of lies from the Bible. How can this not have a negative effect on children? (Especially since belief in the creation myth is carried into adult life.)

Teaching children the earth is 6,020 years old, that God killed with a flood every human being save eight a few thousand years ago, and that anyone who does not accept the Evangelical version of the Christian God will be tortured by  God in hell for eternity, is quite harmful to the intellectual development of children.

The waiting rooms of mental health professionals are filled with people who have had their sense of self-worth damaged or destroyed by Christian teachings like original sin. Being told you are wicked, that you can be oppressed or possessed by Satan, and that God holds absolute power of your life, does not make for a healthy mind.

So, to Ken Ham, I say this: Yes we are coming for your children.  We don’t actually want to dine on fat Christian sucklings, but we do hope to expose them as they get older to the wide, wondrous universe we live in. We hope to teach them to think critically and not to accept something as fact just because a preacher declares from the pulpit  God says __________________.

I am not anti-Christian or anti-religion. I am, however, anti-ignorance. I think parents hurt their children when they keep them from ALL the knowledge available about the universe and their place in it.

Why Baptists Refuse to Believe I Once was a Christian

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saved or lost

My story poses a real problem for Baptists.  According to Baptist soteriology (doctrines pertaining to salvation), once nonbelievers are saved (born again, becomes a Christian), they can never lose their salvation. This belief is called once saved always saved, eternal security, or the perseverance/preservation of the saints.

All Baptists, except Free-will Baptists, believe that once a person is saved there is nothing a Christian can do nothing to lose his or her salvation. John 10:28, 29 says:

And I (Jesus) give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.  My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.

This is why some Baptists believe I am still saved. No matter what I do, Jesus will never disown me. No matter how much I blaspheme God, Jesus will never leave me or forsake me. It is like getting  married without having any provision for divorce. Once married, you are married for life. No matter what the husband or wife does, be it adultery or physical abuse, their marriage cannot be dissolved. So it is for me. No matter what  I say or do, I am still saved. God might chastise me or even kill me, but there is nothing I can do to get God to let me out of my eternal life contract.

Of course, this kind of thinking is silly and some Baptists realize this, leading them to take a different approach to my life. Instead of once-saved-always-saved, they say I never was saved.  According to them, I never really put my faith and trust in Jesus Christ. While I may have outwardly given evidence that I was saved, inwardly I knew that I really wasn’t. I was a faker, a pretender, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. My becoming an atheist is proof to them that I never really was a Christian. In their mind, I always was an atheist.

In a post titled, The Logical Consequences of You Never were a Christian, I wrote:

People who believe a Christian can not fall from grace are forced to dismiss me as a life-long deceptive servant of Satan. For 36 years I deceived every Christian, every church member, every pastor, every evangelist, every Christian college professor I came in contact with; and most of all I deceived my entire Christian family.

No one, over a span of 36 years, ever said “I think Bruce Gerencser is not a Christian.”  Think about this for a moment. Think of the deception necessary to pull this off.

  • I preached thousands of sermons…all preached in the power of the flesh.
  • I  prayed thousands of prayers, none of which was ever heard by God.
  • Hundreds of people who made professions of faith did so after hearing the preaching of a deceiver, a follower of Satan.
  • Hundreds of people who were baptized by me were immersed by a charlatan;  a man who rejected the  vows confessed during a baptism.
  • I counseled hundreds of people over the years. Every person I counseled received counsel from a false prophet.
  • Every moment spent in private prayer, every moment spent in devoted study of the Word of God, all the time spent in devotion to the living Christ was spent as a person no better than Judas.

The truth is, Baptists (along with Evangelicals who eschew the Baptist label but have a similar soteriology) are in bondage to their theology. To admit I once was a Christian means that their belief about eternal security is false. Instead of admitting that I once was a Christian, keepers of the Book of Life  scour my life looking for defects in my story. They then exploit these defects to show I really never was a Christian.

Years ago, I was co-pastor of Community Baptist Church in Elmendorf, Texas. When we moved to Texas, another family, Larry and Linda Johnson,who were members of the church I pastored in Ohio, moved with us. Every person joining Community Baptist had to give a credible testimony of faith in Jesus Christ. Larry told his salvation story to  Pat Horner, my fellow pastor.  Pat became alarmed over what Larry told him. Larry used language to describe his faith that most Baptists didn’t use. He talked more about God than he did Jesus. Pat took this as evidence  Larry might not really know Jesus. I assured him this was not the case. Larry was a good man who took matters of faith seriously.

So it is with some Baptists who read this blog. Instead of accepting my story at face value, they look for things in my story that don’t line up with their own experience. They then conclude I never really was saved. They go to great lengths to deconstruct my life, poking and prodding, looking for anything that will invalidate my claim of once being a Christian. And guess what? They always find what they are looking for.

When people are committed to upholding certain theological belief at all costs, they end up thinking and saying things that are silly. So it is when people say I never was saved or that I am still saved. The only way anyone can judge the validity of a person’s life is by how he lives. I told parishioners countless times over the years, we give evidence of faith in Christ by how we live not by what we say we believe. This fact seems to be forgotten by my critics. Look at my life as a Christian and as a pastor.  What in my conduct and lifestyle remotely suggests I was not saved? If I wasn’t a Christian then it is fair to ask if anyone is.

Part of the problem is that I am willing to talk about my failures as a Christian and as a pastor.  I am willing to admit that I sinned, that I did things considered wrong by most Baptists. These confessions are taken as proof that I never was saved. Evidently, the perfection standard applies only to Jesus and Bruce Gerencser. None of the people I pastored or the men I considered colleagues in the ministry was perfect.  Because they are still professing Christian means they are judged by a different standard than I am. They are allowed to be sinful, yet saved, but I am not.

Thousands of people read this blog. Many readers are former Evangelicals. If I asked them what was the one thing that Christians said that offended them the most they would likely say, Christians who dismiss my past life by saying I never was a Christian. Sadly, many Christians fail to see, or don’t care, how offensive such a line of thinking is.

Put the shoe on the other foot. Suppose atheists began going through a Christian’s life with a fine tooth comb, pointing out discrepancies or contradictions in his life story. Imagine being told, it is evident you never really were saved. I suspect they would be quite offended by such a statement.

Here’s what I know…I once was saved and now I’m not.

Understanding What it Means to Be True to Yourself

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guest-post

Guest Post by Paul Sunstone.

My mother, who was a Christian, intentionally raised my brothers and me as agnostics.

You see, mom had a theory: Questions such as whether God exists, whether Jesus is our lord and savior, whether there is a heaven and hell — all such questions were far too important to be decided by little boys according to her. Hence, she strictly forbid us reaching any conclusions about religious matters until we were able to reason as adults. As a consequence, I grew up resisting — for the most part — the temptation to arrive at any firm conclusions regarding religion.

Of course, it is almost impossible to grow up in a society that is 80% Christian without unconsciously adopting many of the views and assumptions of your Christian friends and neighbors. Looking back, I think I adopted so many Christian views and assumptions that I might have been fairly labeled a Christian in all but a handful of ways.

For instance: I neither believed in nor disbelieved in god, but — like any good Christian — I thought the question of god’s existence was crucially important. More over, the god I neither believed in nor disbelieved in was very much like the God of the Christians. In those and in a hundred other ways, I was more or less a Christian — without being aware of myself as such.

Consequently, I can look back now and see how I have spent a lot of my life freeing myself from Christianity. And one way I’ve freed myself from Christianity is by freeing myself from the Christian notion of self-sacrifice.

Growing up, I was taught that a good person was, among other things, self-sacrificing and even self-effacing; that he or she not only did what was beneficial to others, but did it for little or no reward of any kind. Unfortunately, that was one of the things about Christianity that I took to heart. And for so long as I took it to heart, I could not understand what it meant to be true to myself.

The notion of being true to myself sounded suspicious to me. If you were busy being true to yourself, weren’t you by necessity neglecting other people? The people you should be sacrificing yourself for? Being true to yourself just didn’t make much sense to me, so I never really investigated it.

When I finally did get around to examining the idea — which was not until mid-life — I discovered that it had a lot more going for it than I had imagined. As I learned how to apply it, I found it gave me a richer sense of purpose and meaning than I had suspected it would.

I think an important key to understanding what it means to be true to yourself is to grasp that our beliefs are not what we most need to be true to. Of course, beliefs are of crucial importance in Christianity. After all, whether you spend eternity in heaven or hell largely seems to depend on your beliefs. But that prejudice can be misleading for beliefs are of much less importance to being true to oneself. Beliefs come and go. If we make a reasonable effort to have true beliefs, then we are almost certainly required to change and update our beliefs as we gather new information. For that and other reasons, it is risky to make them paramount.

I am of the opinion that, instead of focusing on what we believe — and then trying to be true to those beliefs — we should focus more on our talents. And then try to turn those talents into socially responsible skills. In my experience, that brings the richest and most lasting sense of meaning and purpose.

There’s a saying (often mistakenly attributed to Aristotle) that goes something like this: “At the crossroads where your talents and skills meet the needs of the world, there lies your well-being or happiness”. To illustrate, imagine someone with a talent or gift for music. By turning that talent into musical skills, he or she is being true to themselves. Then, by using their skills to meet the needs of the world for music, they increase their chances of finding some measure of happiness. Yet, in my experience, even if they do not meet the needs of the world, even if they keep their music to themselves, they are likely to find happiness and a sense of well-being simply in turning their talent into skills.

I do not hold Christianity entirely responsible for my not having discovered the rewards of being true to myself until mid-life. I think there were other factors involved as well. But I believe Christianity — at least to the extent it made me suspicious of being true to myself — impeded my progress in that direction.

There have been several other ways in which I believe my life has improved as I’ve freed myself from the Christian ideas and assumptions I unwittingly adopted while growing up. But that is by no means to say I think of Christianity as an evil that must be abolished. Rather, it’s just that in my own case I have discovered — time and again — that it is a poor fit for me.

It’s in the Bible:The Original CSI

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david barton
David Barton, theocrat and liar for Jesus

If you watch any of the CSI TV programs you know how important DNA evidence is. What you may not know is that using DNA evidence can be found in the Bible.

Christian theocrat David Barton believes that the earliest use of DNA evidence is found in the story of Cain and Abel:

Biblically, the death penalty could not be applied unless there were at least two eyewitnesses to the incident. Circumstantial evidence, even when strong, is not the equivalent of multiple eyewitnesses and therefore does not meet the Biblical standard. Interestingly, however, the Bible long ago acknowledged a specific eyewitness that only in recent decades has become recognized in Americans courts.

Recall the account of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel from Genesis 4:8-10. When God asked Cain where his brother was and Cain lied, God specifically confronted him with the declaration: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground” (v. 10). Blood cries out? Blood has a voice? How can that be? We now know that DNA has a voice – that it serves as an eyewitness to specific crimes, just as when it cried out to God about Abel’s death. This voice therefore Biblically qualifies as one of the “two or three eyewitnesses” needed to secure the death penalty in a capital crime.

This is another reminder that you can make the Bible say anything. Thoughtful Christians should be embarrassed by this kind of thinking, but I suspect Barton’s revelation will be seized upon as a-n-o-t-h-e-r proof that the Bible is an accurate, up-to-date, infallible science textbook.

Why I Have a Man Crush on Neil deGrasse Tyson

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neil-degrasse-tyson-scientifically-literate

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is my favorite scientist. He’s an affable man with a unique ability to communicate complex science in a way that the non-science trained person (me) can understand what he is talking about. I thoroughly enjoyed the first episode of COSMOS, especially the part where deGrasse Tyson uses the calendar year to explain the history of the universe. I thought, what a wonderful, easy way to explain the history of the universe.

In March 2014, Neil deGrasse Tyson (NDT) sat down for an interview with Bill Moyers (BM), another man I greatly admire.  The interview is quite long. The complete interview transcript can be found on Alternet. What piqued my interest is what deGrasse Tyson said about science, myth, and religious faith:

BM: So when a child sings, or used to sing, I don’t think they do anymore, “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are,” it’s not twinkling. Something powerful, dramatic, and dynamic is happening to it. Right?

NDT: Well, yes, and we call that twinkling. So yeah, there’s starlight coming billions of, or millions of light years, well it depends on if it’s a galaxy, well, hundreds of thousands of light years across space, and it’s a perfect point of light as it hits our atmosphere, turbulence in the atmosphere jiggled the image, and it renders the star twinkling.

And by the way, planets are brighter than stars typically, like Jupiter and Venus. Venus has been in the evening skies lately. And if you go, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are,” and you, I want, you want to wish upon the star, most people are wishing on planets. That’s why their wishes don’t come true. Because the planets are the first stars to come out at night.

BM: Don’t you sometimes feel sad about breaking all these myths apart?

NDT: No, no, because I think it’s, some myths are, deserve to be broken apart. The, out of respect for the human intellect. That, no, when you’re writhing on the ground and froth is coming out of your mouth, you’re having an epileptic seizure. You have not been invaded by the devil. We got this one figured out, okay? I mean, discovery moves on. So, I don’t mind the power of myth and magic. But take it to the next frontier and apply it there. Don’t apply it in places where we’ve long passed what we already know is going on.

BM: Do you give people who make this case, that that was the beginning and that there had to be something that provoked the beginning, do you give them an A at least for trying to reconcile faith and reason?

NDT: I don’t think they’re reconcilable.

BM: What do you mean?

NDT: Well, so let me say that differently. All efforts that have been invested by brilliant people of the past have failed at that exercise. They just fail. And so I don’t, the track record is so poor that going forward, I have essentially zero confidence, near zero confidence, that there will be fruitful things to emerge from the effort to reconcile them. So, for example, if you knew nothing about science, and you read, say, the Bible, the Old Testament, which in Genesis, is an account of nature, that’s what that is, and I said to you, give me your description of the natural world based only on this, you would say the world was created in six days, and that stars are just little points of light much lesser than the sun. And that in fact, they can fall out of the sky, right, because that’s what happens during the Revelation.

You know, one of the signs that the second coming, is that the stars will fall out of the sky and land on Earth. To even write that means you don’t know what those things are. You have no concept of what the actual universe is. So everybody who tried to make proclamations about the physical universe based on Bible passages got the wrong answer.

So what happened was, when science discovers things, and you want to stay religious, or you want to continue to believe that the Bible is unerring, what you would do is you would say, “Well, let me go back to the Bible and reinterpret it.” Then you’d say things like, “Oh, well they didn’t really mean that literally. They meant that figuratively.”

So, this whole sort of reinterpretation of the, how figurative the poetic passages of the Bible are came after science showed that this is not how things unfolded. And so the educated religious people are perfectly fine with that. It’s the fundamentalists who want to say that the Bible is the literally, literal truth of God, that and want to see the Bible as a science textbook, who are knocking on the science doors of the schools, trying to put that content in the science room. Enlightened religious people are not behaving that way. So saying that science is cool, we’re good with that, and use the Bible for, to get your spiritual enlightenment and your emotional fulfillment.

BM: I have known serious religious people, not fundamentalists, who were scared when Carl Sagan opened his series with the words—Carl Sagan, from “Cosmos”: The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. I mean, that scared them, because they interpret that to mean, then if this is it, there’s nothing else. No God and no life after.

NDT: For religious people, many people say, “Well, God is within you,” or God, the, there are ways that people have shaped this, rather than, God is an old, grey-bearded man in the clouds. So if God is within you, what, I’m sure Carl would say, in you in your mind. In your mind, and we can measure the neurosynaptic firings when you have a religious experience.

We can tell you where that’s happening, when it’s happening, what you’re feeling like at the time. So your mind of course is still within the cosmos.

BM: But do you have any sympathy for people who seem to feel, only feel safe in the vastness of the universe you describe in your show if they can infer a personal God who makes it more hospitable to them, cares for them?

NDT: In this, what we tell ourselves is a free country, which means you should have freedom of thought, I don’t care what you think. I just don’t. Go think whatever you want. Go ahead. Think that there’s one God, two Gods, ten Gods, or no Gods. That is what it means to live in a free country. The problem arises is if you have a religious philosophy that is not based on objective realities that you then want to put in a science classroom. Then I’m going to stand there and say, “No, I’m not going to allow you in the science classroom.” I’m not telling you what to think, I’m just telling you in the science class, “You’re not doing science. This is not science. Keep it out.” That’s where I, that’s when I stand up. Otherwise, go ahead. I’m not telling you how to think.

BM: I think you must realize that some people are going to go to your show at the planetarium and they’re going to say, “Ah-hah! Those scientists have discovered God. Because God,” dark matter, “is what holds this universe together.”

NDT: So is that a question?

BM: It’s a statement. You know, you know they’re going to say that—

NDT: So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there’s a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot. Newton even said it. He had his laws of gravity and motion and he was explaining the moon and the planets, he was there. He doesn’t mention God for any of that. And then he gets to the limits of what his equations can calculate. So, I don’t, can’t quite figure this out. Maybe God steps in and makes it right every now and then. That’s where he invoked God.

And Ptolemy, he bet on the wrong horse, but he was a brilliant guy. He formulated the geocentric universe, with Earth in the middle. This is where we got epicycles and all this machinations of the heavens. But it was still a mystery to him. He looked up and uttered the following words, “when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies,” these are the planets going through retrograde and back, the mysteries of the Earth, “when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.”

What he did was invoke, he didn’t invoke Zeus to account for the rock that he’s standing on or the air he’s breathing. It was this point of mystery. And in gets invoked God. This, over time, has been described by philosophers as the God of the gaps. If that’s how you, if that’s where you’re going to put your God in this world, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

If that’s how you’re going to invoke God. If God is the mystery of the universe, these mysteries, we’re tackling these mysteries one by one. If you’re going to stay religious at the end of the conversation, God has to mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread. So to the person who says, “Maybe dark matter is God,” if the only reason why you’re saying it is because it’s a mystery, then get ready to have that undone.

You’re the man, Neil!