Another Question for Biblical Skeptics
What do you think we have hard evidence for with respect to the life of Jesus? The crucifixion? The teaching ministry? The existence of Jesus?
Why don't they just come here legally?
Why don't they just come here legally? Here's why. From the Arizona Republic.
There also are limits based on a person's country of origin. Under U.S. immigration law, the total number of immigrant visas made available to natives of any single foreign nation shall not exceed 7 percent of the total number of visas issued. That limit can make it tough for immigrants from countries such as Mexico, where the number of people who want to come here greatly exceeds the number of people that the law allows.
The estimated wait time for family members to legally bring their relatives into the United States from Mexico ranges from six to 17 years, according to a May study by the non-profit, nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy. It is nearly impossible for a Mexican, especially someone without a college degree or special skills, to immigrate to the United States legally without a family member or employer petitioning on his behalf.
There also are limits based on a person's country of origin. Under U.S. immigration law, the total number of immigrant visas made available to natives of any single foreign nation shall not exceed 7 percent of the total number of visas issued. That limit can make it tough for immigrants from countries such as Mexico, where the number of people who want to come here greatly exceeds the number of people that the law allows.
The estimated wait time for family members to legally bring their relatives into the United States from Mexico ranges from six to 17 years, according to a May study by the non-profit, nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy. It is nearly impossible for a Mexican, especially someone without a college degree or special skills, to immigrate to the United States legally without a family member or employer petitioning on his behalf.
Were the Gospels Novels? Were the Writers Guilty of Plagiarism?
Steven, you never seem to have answered Bob Prokop's comment, which he has made over and over, that the novel genre didn't exist in the first century.
Second, your use of the word plagiarism is highly anachronistic. At the present time, we are concerned about intellectual property rights, and so we have copyright laws and plagiarism regulations. But in that time, there was no such thing. If I have to grade someone's paper, then I need to know what in the paper is the writer's own idea, and what came from sources. But Luke, for example, isn't writing his gospel for a grade, and he's not trying to take royalties away from Mark. And although some people have made claims on his behalf as a historian, he's not trying to compete with Thucydides. He's trying to get the story out that he believes to be true.
In our century, we are accustomed to reading books in which the writer learns a lot of factual details so as to provide a realistic setting for the work, but the work itself is a work of fiction. So, if you were going to write a novel about someone who was going around, say, the Far East committing crimes, getting arrested, and escaping, then you might, to make the story realistic, go to the various places in the Far East, and visit the police headquarters and court buildings to find out what their police and court procedures might have been, to put in your story. You would find out how they do things in Bangkok, in Rangoon, in Hanoi, and in Ho Chi Minh City, in New Delhi, in Mumbai, in Singapore, and in Lhasa. Of course, if you were doing this today, you'd have the benefits of planes, trains, and automobiles, none of which existed for poor old Luke.
So, if the Gospel of Luke and Acts were both novels, how did he research his novel? In the words of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.
Second, your use of the word plagiarism is highly anachronistic. At the present time, we are concerned about intellectual property rights, and so we have copyright laws and plagiarism regulations. But in that time, there was no such thing. If I have to grade someone's paper, then I need to know what in the paper is the writer's own idea, and what came from sources. But Luke, for example, isn't writing his gospel for a grade, and he's not trying to take royalties away from Mark. And although some people have made claims on his behalf as a historian, he's not trying to compete with Thucydides. He's trying to get the story out that he believes to be true.
In our century, we are accustomed to reading books in which the writer learns a lot of factual details so as to provide a realistic setting for the work, but the work itself is a work of fiction. So, if you were going to write a novel about someone who was going around, say, the Far East committing crimes, getting arrested, and escaping, then you might, to make the story realistic, go to the various places in the Far East, and visit the police headquarters and court buildings to find out what their police and court procedures might have been, to put in your story. You would find out how they do things in Bangkok, in Rangoon, in Hanoi, and in Ho Chi Minh City, in New Delhi, in Mumbai, in Singapore, and in Lhasa. Of course, if you were doing this today, you'd have the benefits of planes, trains, and automobiles, none of which existed for poor old Luke.
So, if the Gospel of Luke and Acts were both novels, how did he research his novel? In the words of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.
Determinism and the case of Jamie Bulger
HT: Sarah Kramer.
Is there a universal, common-sense, belief in free will?
What the argument doesn't mention, of course, is whether this belief in free will can be construed in compatibilist terms. I don't think it captures the underlying intuition, myself.
Just so you know, I am not claiming that this disproves Calvinism.
Is there a universal, common-sense, belief in free will?
What the argument doesn't mention, of course, is whether this belief in free will can be construed in compatibilist terms. I don't think it captures the underlying intuition, myself.
Just so you know, I am not claiming that this disproves Calvinism.
A question for biblical skeptics
Suppose, surviving from ancient times, we found four manuscripts about the life and teachings of Rabbi Hillel. These works were all written within, oh, say, 70 years of the main events of Hillel's life. They are similar in a number of ways, although each written from a somewhat different perspective, with some differences of detail. They are all written by people who were clearly from the School of Hillel, by people who wanted others to accept the teachings of Hillel. However, they claim no miracles at all. Manuscript evidence shows goes back into antiquity and assures us that what we have today is very close to the original autographs.
Would we say "Gosh, we really do know a lot about Hillel here. There are a lot of things we can be reasonably sure of about him, especially where the accounts coincide." Or would we say "Just propaganda. We need some independent sources, from people who weren't from the School of Hillel. Then we'd have some real information."
It's hard to imagine the Bart Ehrmans and Rudlof Bultmanns of the world being so skeptical if the Gospels were about a non-miracle-working Hillel, rather than a miracle-working Jesus.
Would we say "Gosh, we really do know a lot about Hillel here. There are a lot of things we can be reasonably sure of about him, especially where the accounts coincide." Or would we say "Just propaganda. We need some independent sources, from people who weren't from the School of Hillel. Then we'd have some real information."
It's hard to imagine the Bart Ehrmans and Rudlof Bultmanns of the world being so skeptical if the Gospels were about a non-miracle-working Hillel, rather than a miracle-working Jesus.
Are illegal immigrants acting immorally?
People like Governor Brewer often say that we are a nation of laws, and that is why we must make a strong stand enforcing our immigration laws. Are people who insist on a strong stand against illegal immigration gratuitously assuming that persons who enter the country illegally are acting immorally? If the only way to support your family was to enter another country illegally, wouldn't you have a moral obligation to break the law, since you have a moral obligation to support your family which trumps your obligation to obey the law?
I'm not drawing any strong conclusions from this, necessarily. Recognition of this is compatible with strong enforcement strategies such as SB 1070. But I don't even hear this point mentioned or acknowledged by defenders of strong enforcement.
I'm not drawing any strong conclusions from this, necessarily. Recognition of this is compatible with strong enforcement strategies such as SB 1070. But I don't even hear this point mentioned or acknowledged by defenders of strong enforcement.
Reply to Hallquist on historical evidence
My claim is that there is more to explain for Christianity than for Mormonism or Islam. Unlike Craig or McDowell, I don’t say that the only rational conclusion is that Christianity is true. The “verdict” that the evidence demands depends on your antecedent probability. Still, I think you have some facts that are more likely to have occurred if Christianity is true than if Christianity is not true.
A critical point is that Luke, who also wrote his gospel and Acts, (both of which contain miracle claims throughout) has been shown to be exceedingly accurate about governmental systems before whom Paul appeared. This may seem trivial, but it makes it implausible that a long time passed between Paul’s journey’s and Luke’s writing. And his is not the first gospel written, Mark’s was. Maybe the miracles didn’t happen, but the journeys almost certainly did. So you have it written down within a third of a century of the crucifixion, if that.
You don’t have maybe one or two central miracles claimed, (the Qu’ran or the gold plates) you have a lot of them, and they are placed in public places. And there is no argument against them saying “We never heard of this guy.” In fact, the early Jewish anti-Christian polemic attempts to explain an empty tomb, not deny it. You have people engaging in very high-risk behavior on behalf of this upstart Jewish cult. You have them meeting on a day not the Sabbath, you have them saying the Jewish God was incarnate, and you have them getting martyred at least as far back as James the brother of Jesus (if not the stoning of Stephen–do skeptics think that that was fiction?). Something has happened to these people, and all I am claiming is that it takes a lot more explaining to figure that out than to explain the growth of the Mormon church.
I had someone on my site, Ken Pulliam, agree with me that the case for Christianity is better than the case for Islam or Mormonism historically, but that he found it more reasonable to suppose that Christianity was also not true.
So I guess I differ from Craig and McDowell in that I set the bar a whole lot lower for myself than they do. But I think I did clear it (or perhaps, can do so with a bit more explanation).
A critical point is that Luke, who also wrote his gospel and Acts, (both of which contain miracle claims throughout) has been shown to be exceedingly accurate about governmental systems before whom Paul appeared. This may seem trivial, but it makes it implausible that a long time passed between Paul’s journey’s and Luke’s writing. And his is not the first gospel written, Mark’s was. Maybe the miracles didn’t happen, but the journeys almost certainly did. So you have it written down within a third of a century of the crucifixion, if that.
You don’t have maybe one or two central miracles claimed, (the Qu’ran or the gold plates) you have a lot of them, and they are placed in public places. And there is no argument against them saying “We never heard of this guy.” In fact, the early Jewish anti-Christian polemic attempts to explain an empty tomb, not deny it. You have people engaging in very high-risk behavior on behalf of this upstart Jewish cult. You have them meeting on a day not the Sabbath, you have them saying the Jewish God was incarnate, and you have them getting martyred at least as far back as James the brother of Jesus (if not the stoning of Stephen–do skeptics think that that was fiction?). Something has happened to these people, and all I am claiming is that it takes a lot more explaining to figure that out than to explain the growth of the Mormon church.
I had someone on my site, Ken Pulliam, agree with me that the case for Christianity is better than the case for Islam or Mormonism historically, but that he found it more reasonable to suppose that Christianity was also not true.
So I guess I differ from Craig and McDowell in that I set the bar a whole lot lower for myself than they do. But I think I did clear it (or perhaps, can do so with a bit more explanation).
AND NOW A MESSAGE FROM YOUR TAXICAB DRIVER ABOUT PAYING WITH PLASTIC
OKAY, FOLKS. I'LL GET RIGHT TO THE POINT. DESPITE WHAT YOU SEE IN THOSE GODDAMN VISA COMMERCIALS WHERE THE CAB DRIVER SMILES BECAUSE HE'S SO DAMNED HAPPY TO BE PAID WITH A CREDIT CARD, I CAN ASSURE YOU THIS IS BULLSHIT. WE CAB DRIVERS HATE BEING PAID IN ANYTHING BUT CASH. IF YOU ARE WONDERING WHY THIS IS, READ FURTHER.
First thing is, hacking a cab is a CASH BUSINESS!
All our expenses have to be paid in cash. Gasoline, lunch. oil changes, maintenance, tow trucks (God forbid) and emergency repairs CANNOT BE PAID FOR WITH THAT FUCKING SLIP OF PAPER YOU SIGN.
Well then, turn it in at the cab company for cash, you say.
Ho, ho, ho. If a driver turns in a credit slip, and he has fees due the company in the next few days, they apply the money to the fees. If the fees are less than the amount of the credit card slips, they write him a check at the end of the week. This does him no good if he has to pay for a brake job right NOW.
Speaking of fees, the cab company charges a 5% (or more) processing fee to the drivers, and this applies to the entire amount including the tip. It is to them just another way to screw us over.
Next thing is, you say "convenience"? Convenience, my ass.
It really chaps my ass when some airhead takes a cab ride to some busy club downtown, and with all the hurly-burly outside the club and valets and cops yelling move, move; pulls out a goddamn card that I have to zip , get signed and then run through the computer. I can make change for ten fares in the time it takes to process your piece-of-shit plastic. Time is money. Thanks a pantload for wasting mine.
"Plastic money" is an insidious threat to liberty. Really.
First thing, EVERY TIME you pay with plastic, there is a permanent record made somewhere of where you just were and what you just did. Wonder why you get all that junk mail? Now you know.
Second, not having to actually see the money you are spending divorces you from reality. That's what a lot of merchants count on. The bank loves it too, because it rolls up those fees. And all this encouragement to use credit/debit cards is aimed at eventually replacing hard currency with plastic. Once that happens the government will be able to determine exactly what everyone has, where they got it, from whom; as well as how much money you have, and to the penny. Feel good about that? (If the answer is "yes" then you are a fucking IDIOT)
Oh, and you minority folks who say "Here mah credicks card" and hand me a debit card: You are not fooling anybody. It's a debit card.
So everybody, stop with the giving cab drivers plastic. We want MONEY. Pay with MONEY. Got it? MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY.
First thing is, hacking a cab is a CASH BUSINESS!
All our expenses have to be paid in cash. Gasoline, lunch. oil changes, maintenance, tow trucks (God forbid) and emergency repairs CANNOT BE PAID FOR WITH THAT FUCKING SLIP OF PAPER YOU SIGN.
Well then, turn it in at the cab company for cash, you say.
Ho, ho, ho. If a driver turns in a credit slip, and he has fees due the company in the next few days, they apply the money to the fees. If the fees are less than the amount of the credit card slips, they write him a check at the end of the week. This does him no good if he has to pay for a brake job right NOW.
Speaking of fees, the cab company charges a 5% (or more) processing fee to the drivers, and this applies to the entire amount including the tip. It is to them just another way to screw us over.
Next thing is, you say "convenience"? Convenience, my ass.
It really chaps my ass when some airhead takes a cab ride to some busy club downtown, and with all the hurly-burly outside the club and valets and cops yelling move, move; pulls out a goddamn card that I have to zip , get signed and then run through the computer. I can make change for ten fares in the time it takes to process your piece-of-shit plastic. Time is money. Thanks a pantload for wasting mine.
"Plastic money" is an insidious threat to liberty. Really.
First thing, EVERY TIME you pay with plastic, there is a permanent record made somewhere of where you just were and what you just did. Wonder why you get all that junk mail? Now you know.
Second, not having to actually see the money you are spending divorces you from reality. That's what a lot of merchants count on. The bank loves it too, because it rolls up those fees. And all this encouragement to use credit/debit cards is aimed at eventually replacing hard currency with plastic. Once that happens the government will be able to determine exactly what everyone has, where they got it, from whom; as well as how much money you have, and to the penny. Feel good about that? (If the answer is "yes" then you are a fucking IDIOT)
Oh, and you minority folks who say "Here mah credicks card" and hand me a debit card: You are not fooling anybody. It's a debit card.
So everybody, stop with the giving cab drivers plastic. We want MONEY. Pay with MONEY. Got it? MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY.
What does "I have a right to my belief" mean?
What does the "right to believe something" amount to? Does it simply means that some powerful people, like the government for example, or the Spanish Inquisition if it were still around, have an obligation not to use force to make me believe something? I am not sure much of anybody is in the business of taking that kind of a right away, anyway, so to say that sort of thing almost seem trivial.
If it means more than that, then what does it mean? Does it implicitly involve a refusal to reason, and to consider the views of one's opponents seriously? If I think you are making a serious mistake, (and if belief or unbelief in God is a mistake, it's a serious mistake), don;t I have the right to try to convince you of the error of your ways, at least until you tell me to go away?
Is the attempt to provide reasons for rejecting a belief you currently have an example of trying to shove your beliefs down someone's throat? Perhaps what "I have a right to my belief" means is that we have an obligation to desist from debating a subject if we are asked to desist. Perhaps the "right to believe what I believe" is an article of conversational decorum.
What does not follow is that no belief is more justified than any other. It does not mean that there aren't well-supported and defensible beliefs and poorly supported and indefensible beliefs.
If it means more than that, then what does it mean? Does it implicitly involve a refusal to reason, and to consider the views of one's opponents seriously? If I think you are making a serious mistake, (and if belief or unbelief in God is a mistake, it's a serious mistake), don;t I have the right to try to convince you of the error of your ways, at least until you tell me to go away?
Is the attempt to provide reasons for rejecting a belief you currently have an example of trying to shove your beliefs down someone's throat? Perhaps what "I have a right to my belief" means is that we have an obligation to desist from debating a subject if we are asked to desist. Perhaps the "right to believe what I believe" is an article of conversational decorum.
What does not follow is that no belief is more justified than any other. It does not mean that there aren't well-supported and defensible beliefs and poorly supported and indefensible beliefs.
A Ray of Sunshine in a lousy season
The Diamondbacks' Edwin Jackson throws a no-hitter.
The Diamondbacks are the only Phoenix-area franchise to win it all, staging the famous Rally Against Rivera in 2001, concluding with Luis Gonzalez' bloop single against the New York Yankees.
The Diamondbacks are the only Phoenix-area franchise to win it all, staging the famous Rally Against Rivera in 2001, concluding with Luis Gonzalez' bloop single against the New York Yankees.
Steve Lovell comments on the Outsider Test for Faith
SL: I followed some links on your recent thread to do some reading on this. I find myself very much in agreement with your approach. Loftus wants to restrict the test to only religious matters, but this seems completely arbitrary. Moral beliefs would surely fail this test too. Or would they (I have chapter 3 of the Abolition of Man in mind)? If they wouldn’t we have a first premise of the moral argument.
Like you I also think it’s very unclear what the test really is and that Loftus seems to have a pre-theoretic commitment to the outcome. Unfortunately for Loftus I think he’s on very dodgy ground historically and sociologically. I assume he thinks atheism survives such a test? But atheists make up a very narrow slice of the population both currently and historically. If Loftus had been born 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, 2000 years ago ... or in another culture etc, etc. Being such a narrow subset of the global-historical population it seems much more likely that these atheistic beliefs are a product of cultural oddities. Theistic views have flourished in many cultures in many epochs, and therefore don’t seem especially tied to cultural mores.
Now what I do think is that our normal idea of knowledge is that it should be something which “tracks” the truth; It should be in some way sensitive to the facts. (I think these ways of putting it are Nozik’s.) The outsider test doesn’t provide a reason to think belief is not sensitive to the facts ... the basis of our beliefs would be different / non-existent were the central tenets of Christianity false, and then we wouldn’t hold the belief. This is the line I take when I defend the AfD from the genetic fallacy. If God didn’t exist, we wouldn’t desire him, and wouldn’t believe in him. That is true and relevant even if we don’t reason from the desire to God, but the desire is merely an occasion for the belief. At least, if we accept some appropriate form of reliabilism/proper-function account.
A rational system of belief must be able to account for the existence of its adherents in a way that positively relates the truth and the belief. Similarly it must be able to account for the existence of its detractors without requiring such a positive relation to the content of their beliefs. The OTF brings attention to the possibility that this positive relationship may not exist. Fine. We can doubt that, but when we investigate the relevant evidence, it looks good to us ... what else are we being asked to do?
Only my first thoughts. If I have any more, I’ll let you know.
Like you I also think it’s very unclear what the test really is and that Loftus seems to have a pre-theoretic commitment to the outcome. Unfortunately for Loftus I think he’s on very dodgy ground historically and sociologically. I assume he thinks atheism survives such a test? But atheists make up a very narrow slice of the population both currently and historically. If Loftus had been born 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, 2000 years ago ... or in another culture etc, etc. Being such a narrow subset of the global-historical population it seems much more likely that these atheistic beliefs are a product of cultural oddities. Theistic views have flourished in many cultures in many epochs, and therefore don’t seem especially tied to cultural mores.
Now what I do think is that our normal idea of knowledge is that it should be something which “tracks” the truth; It should be in some way sensitive to the facts. (I think these ways of putting it are Nozik’s.) The outsider test doesn’t provide a reason to think belief is not sensitive to the facts ... the basis of our beliefs would be different / non-existent were the central tenets of Christianity false, and then we wouldn’t hold the belief. This is the line I take when I defend the AfD from the genetic fallacy. If God didn’t exist, we wouldn’t desire him, and wouldn’t believe in him. That is true and relevant even if we don’t reason from the desire to God, but the desire is merely an occasion for the belief. At least, if we accept some appropriate form of reliabilism/proper-function account.
A rational system of belief must be able to account for the existence of its adherents in a way that positively relates the truth and the belief. Similarly it must be able to account for the existence of its detractors without requiring such a positive relation to the content of their beliefs. The OTF brings attention to the possibility that this positive relationship may not exist. Fine. We can doubt that, but when we investigate the relevant evidence, it looks good to us ... what else are we being asked to do?
Only my first thoughts. If I have any more, I’ll let you know.
More on comparing the evidence for Christianity to other religions
For starters, there seems to be a lot of archaeological confirmation of, especially, some of the details in the book of Acts. Whoever wrote it knew precisely what forms of government were in place when Paul was supposed to have gotten to those cities. So that really places the author of the text close to the time and place of the events, because actually, those forms of government changed from time to time.
The reported events took place in public and involved leading figures of the time like Pontius Pilate. The Book of Mormon is about things that happened centuries before in the Americas, and archaeology is an embarrassment to Mormonism, but mostly helpful to Christianity. http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/11/teresa-nielsen-haydens-critique-of.html
You have several people writing the accounts of the whole thing, as opposed to just one persons statements. You have evidence of people engaging in extremely risky behavior to support these beliefs.
The events are more public, there is considerable more archaeological support, and you also find people taking martyrdom risks almost from the beginning and making fundamental changes to a time-honored religion based on what happened to Jesus.
And you find a lot of failed attempts to explain it all away. I mean, what's up with all these swoon theories, and theft theories, and wrong tomb theories, etc. You don't find that in Islam.
So even if you reject Christianity, I think it puts up more difficulties for the skeptic than does the founding of Islam or the founding of Mormonism. These are just a few things off the top of my head, but I think they suffice for my purpose.
The reported events took place in public and involved leading figures of the time like Pontius Pilate. The Book of Mormon is about things that happened centuries before in the Americas, and archaeology is an embarrassment to Mormonism, but mostly helpful to Christianity. http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/11/teresa-nielsen-haydens-critique-of.html
You have several people writing the accounts of the whole thing, as opposed to just one persons statements. You have evidence of people engaging in extremely risky behavior to support these beliefs.
The events are more public, there is considerable more archaeological support, and you also find people taking martyrdom risks almost from the beginning and making fundamental changes to a time-honored religion based on what happened to Jesus.
And you find a lot of failed attempts to explain it all away. I mean, what's up with all these swoon theories, and theft theories, and wrong tomb theories, etc. You don't find that in Islam.
So even if you reject Christianity, I think it puts up more difficulties for the skeptic than does the founding of Islam or the founding of Mormonism. These are just a few things off the top of my head, but I think they suffice for my purpose.
A review of Adam Barkmans "C. S. Lewis and Philosophy as a Way of Life"
C. S. Lewis’s work is certainly varied, from children’s fantasy fiction, to science fiction, to scholarly writings in English literature, to Christian apologetics, and of course this is only the beginning. Most of this work has philosophical relevance to a greater or lesser extent. While some attention has been paid to Lewis as a philosopher in recent years, in general I would have to say that, for the most part, Lewis has been neglected even by Christian philosophers.
Some of Lewis’s critics would attribute this to the fact that while Lewis was capable of powerful rhetoric, the philosophical thinking underlying his writings is shallow, superficial, and prone to fallacy. Such is the verdict of John Beversluis’s C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Now, Beversluis apparently considers the Christian theism that Lewis defends to be in error. But other philosophers who indeed embrace Lewis’s overall philosophical perspective often find him difficult to bring into contemporary philosophical debate. This is partly because Lewis’s writings are not typically written for an audience of philosophers, and also because philosophical style and terminology is subject to change. A professional philosophical culture has developed in the Anglo-American world that was not present when Lewis was getting his philosophical training, and Lewis didn’t consider it has calling to address that culture. This makes Lewis something of a misfit from the point of view of present-day philosophy. He is, I believe, closer to what we today would call analytic philosophy than he is to Continental philosophy, and yet his work doesn’t fit the framework of contemporary analytic philosophy either.
People who want to make use of Lewis’s work in the context of contemporary philosophy have to do a certain amount of translating. Lewis’s argument from reason, for example, today meets with objections based on cognitive science, or supervenience theory, or functionalism, or eliminativism, all concepts that Lewis would not have known about in his time. Hence, in my work defending the argument, Lewis provides the basic idea and the starting point, but I have to develop the argument to make it responsive to current philosophical developments.
Some critical readers of Lewis’s apologetics focus on certain sharply-worded passages which seem to make Christian apologetics look easy, indeed easier than it really is. Yet an acquaintance with Lewis’s overall work leaves us firmly convinced that his convictions were reached at the end of a long, hard process. That process seems indeed to have been a process of long philosophical reflection. While philosophers such as myself have concentrated on bringing Lewis’s arguments into play in contemporary philosophy, Adam Barkman has taken a different path, and that path primarily involves tracing out Lewis’s philosophical journey, and trying to understand the philosophical positions he takes through the lens of that journey.
The first step in that process is to replace a narrowly professional conception of philosophy with the idea of philosophy as a way of life. It is this concept of philosophy that Plato would have understood, as opposed to the idea that a philosopher is someone who has a job with a philosophy department and delivers papers to APA meetings on a regular basis.
Barkman’s second step is to trace out Lewis’s philosophical journey leading up to his conversion to Christianity, a conversion he frequently described as an almost purely philosophical conversion. We now have access to a comprehensive set of Lewis letters, and other biographical material that Lewis scholars of previous generations could only dream about, and Barkman makes good use of them to reconstruct this story. Barkman claims that Lewis’s own account of his conversion story in Surprised by Joy actually downplays the philosophical content of his conversion for the sake of his audience. (I should note that, in spite of this, you can see Lewis’s philosophical wheels turning even in that book. For example, in Lewis’s account of his rejection of what he there calls Realism we see the biographical basis of his Argument from Reason). The starting point for Barkman’s study is from an account of Lewis’s own development found in his preface to Pilgrim’s Regress, he offers an account of the philosophical content of the stages of his conversion:
'On the intellectual side my own progress had been from 'popular realism' to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity.1
However, Barkman finds this summary somewhat incomplete. “Popular realism” has to be identified as a metaphysical materialism. Barkman also identifies a “metaphysical dualist” phase in 1918 which is left out of this account. Third, a distinction has to be drawn between Lucretian materialism and Stoical materialism. When Lewis became an idealist, he oscillated between subjective idealism and absolute idealism, identifying only absolute idealism with pantheism. In fact, he thinks there were seven stages on Lewis’s way: Lucretian Materialism, Pseudo-Manichean Dualism, Stoical Materialism, Subjective Idealism, Absolute Idealism, Theism, and Neoplatonic Christianity.
At this point it pays to pause and consider how different the philosophical climate is today than it was in this time. Many debates in philosophy or religion are conducted between people who accept some version of materialism and those who accept some kind of theism, and idealisms of whatever sort are not currently on the map. When Lewis rejected materialism, he became, not a theist, but an idealist, and then after that found reasons for becoming a theist.
Once the template of these various positions is laid out, he proceeds to use them to trace Lewis’s development as it concerns various ideas, such as heavenly desire, myth, culture, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. The insights he provides from a chronological perspective are worthwhile certainly. Sometimes, he defends Lewis’s central claims, such as when he defends the argument from desire. And sometimes, he is critical, as when he discusses the so-called “trilemma” argument, where he takes the view that the argument is at best very incomplete, since it merely assumes that Jesus made claims to his own divinity.
The book is long, (611 pages) and it takes work to get something out of it. But it will reward those who study it carefully.
1 C. S. Lewis, the preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, in C. S. Lewis: Selected Books (Short Edition) (1933 reprint; London, Harper Collins, 2002), 5.
Some of Lewis’s critics would attribute this to the fact that while Lewis was capable of powerful rhetoric, the philosophical thinking underlying his writings is shallow, superficial, and prone to fallacy. Such is the verdict of John Beversluis’s C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Now, Beversluis apparently considers the Christian theism that Lewis defends to be in error. But other philosophers who indeed embrace Lewis’s overall philosophical perspective often find him difficult to bring into contemporary philosophical debate. This is partly because Lewis’s writings are not typically written for an audience of philosophers, and also because philosophical style and terminology is subject to change. A professional philosophical culture has developed in the Anglo-American world that was not present when Lewis was getting his philosophical training, and Lewis didn’t consider it has calling to address that culture. This makes Lewis something of a misfit from the point of view of present-day philosophy. He is, I believe, closer to what we today would call analytic philosophy than he is to Continental philosophy, and yet his work doesn’t fit the framework of contemporary analytic philosophy either.
People who want to make use of Lewis’s work in the context of contemporary philosophy have to do a certain amount of translating. Lewis’s argument from reason, for example, today meets with objections based on cognitive science, or supervenience theory, or functionalism, or eliminativism, all concepts that Lewis would not have known about in his time. Hence, in my work defending the argument, Lewis provides the basic idea and the starting point, but I have to develop the argument to make it responsive to current philosophical developments.
Some critical readers of Lewis’s apologetics focus on certain sharply-worded passages which seem to make Christian apologetics look easy, indeed easier than it really is. Yet an acquaintance with Lewis’s overall work leaves us firmly convinced that his convictions were reached at the end of a long, hard process. That process seems indeed to have been a process of long philosophical reflection. While philosophers such as myself have concentrated on bringing Lewis’s arguments into play in contemporary philosophy, Adam Barkman has taken a different path, and that path primarily involves tracing out Lewis’s philosophical journey, and trying to understand the philosophical positions he takes through the lens of that journey.
The first step in that process is to replace a narrowly professional conception of philosophy with the idea of philosophy as a way of life. It is this concept of philosophy that Plato would have understood, as opposed to the idea that a philosopher is someone who has a job with a philosophy department and delivers papers to APA meetings on a regular basis.
Barkman’s second step is to trace out Lewis’s philosophical journey leading up to his conversion to Christianity, a conversion he frequently described as an almost purely philosophical conversion. We now have access to a comprehensive set of Lewis letters, and other biographical material that Lewis scholars of previous generations could only dream about, and Barkman makes good use of them to reconstruct this story. Barkman claims that Lewis’s own account of his conversion story in Surprised by Joy actually downplays the philosophical content of his conversion for the sake of his audience. (I should note that, in spite of this, you can see Lewis’s philosophical wheels turning even in that book. For example, in Lewis’s account of his rejection of what he there calls Realism we see the biographical basis of his Argument from Reason). The starting point for Barkman’s study is from an account of Lewis’s own development found in his preface to Pilgrim’s Regress, he offers an account of the philosophical content of the stages of his conversion:
'On the intellectual side my own progress had been from 'popular realism' to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity.1
However, Barkman finds this summary somewhat incomplete. “Popular realism” has to be identified as a metaphysical materialism. Barkman also identifies a “metaphysical dualist” phase in 1918 which is left out of this account. Third, a distinction has to be drawn between Lucretian materialism and Stoical materialism. When Lewis became an idealist, he oscillated between subjective idealism and absolute idealism, identifying only absolute idealism with pantheism. In fact, he thinks there were seven stages on Lewis’s way: Lucretian Materialism, Pseudo-Manichean Dualism, Stoical Materialism, Subjective Idealism, Absolute Idealism, Theism, and Neoplatonic Christianity.
At this point it pays to pause and consider how different the philosophical climate is today than it was in this time. Many debates in philosophy or religion are conducted between people who accept some version of materialism and those who accept some kind of theism, and idealisms of whatever sort are not currently on the map. When Lewis rejected materialism, he became, not a theist, but an idealist, and then after that found reasons for becoming a theist.
Once the template of these various positions is laid out, he proceeds to use them to trace Lewis’s development as it concerns various ideas, such as heavenly desire, myth, culture, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. The insights he provides from a chronological perspective are worthwhile certainly. Sometimes, he defends Lewis’s central claims, such as when he defends the argument from desire. And sometimes, he is critical, as when he discusses the so-called “trilemma” argument, where he takes the view that the argument is at best very incomplete, since it merely assumes that Jesus made claims to his own divinity.
The book is long, (611 pages) and it takes work to get something out of it. But it will reward those who study it carefully.
1 C. S. Lewis, the preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, in C. S. Lewis: Selected Books (Short Edition) (1933 reprint; London, Harper Collins, 2002), 5.
Some More Notes on the Outsider Test
It might surprise some people to know that I actually bring up the Outsider Test when I am teaching classes, especially when I run across people who are fideists. I also bring up the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the same context. If it is a way of helping us to reflect on our beliefs, to not believe them arbitrarily, to see if they really can stand up to a rational test or not, then the OTF is fine.
However, I think the wayLoftus uses the test is slanted against religious beliefs in an arbitrary way. First, I think there are limits on the extent to which we can expect intellectual neutrality or objectivity from people. I don't think we can just throw away our priors and be neutral, nor do I think we should.
For example, I really do think that Christianity has an evidence base that other religions don't have, such as Mormonism or Islam. There are things that make me skeptical of those religions which are not present in the case of Christianity. In other words, if Christianity was a delusion, I think the case against it is a lot trickier to make than the case against other revealed religions. (Eastern religions typically don't make the kinds of divine revelation claims that Christianity does). If I thought that Christianity was in the same shape as those other religions, it would cause some cognitive dissonance.
I also don't think that the step from noticing a sociological influence to doubting the belief in question is as easy as John makes it out to be. In a way, this kind of reminds me of adolescents who think they are being nonconformists and really independent thinkers when their ideas differ from those of their parents. Of course, what they don't notice is how much their beliefs and attitudes conform to the people they care about most, their peers. The academic community puts a huge amount of intellectual peer pressure on religious belief in general and Christianity in particular. You escape one set of sociological influences when you reject your religious beliefs, but you become subject to all sorts of other sociological influences.
C. S. Lewis once called materialism a "boy's philosophy," and in my book I said I cringed when he said it. But I think that nonbelief as a certain adolescent appeal to a lot of people.
However, I think the wayLoftus uses the test is slanted against religious beliefs in an arbitrary way. First, I think there are limits on the extent to which we can expect intellectual neutrality or objectivity from people. I don't think we can just throw away our priors and be neutral, nor do I think we should.
For example, I really do think that Christianity has an evidence base that other religions don't have, such as Mormonism or Islam. There are things that make me skeptical of those religions which are not present in the case of Christianity. In other words, if Christianity was a delusion, I think the case against it is a lot trickier to make than the case against other revealed religions. (Eastern religions typically don't make the kinds of divine revelation claims that Christianity does). If I thought that Christianity was in the same shape as those other religions, it would cause some cognitive dissonance.
I also don't think that the step from noticing a sociological influence to doubting the belief in question is as easy as John makes it out to be. In a way, this kind of reminds me of adolescents who think they are being nonconformists and really independent thinkers when their ideas differ from those of their parents. Of course, what they don't notice is how much their beliefs and attitudes conform to the people they care about most, their peers. The academic community puts a huge amount of intellectual peer pressure on religious belief in general and Christianity in particular. You escape one set of sociological influences when you reject your religious beliefs, but you become subject to all sorts of other sociological influences.
C. S. Lewis once called materialism a "boy's philosophy," and in my book I said I cringed when he said it. But I think that nonbelief as a certain adolescent appeal to a lot of people.
Why the founding of Christianity is far more difficult to explain than Mormonism or Islam
I talked about this in an earlier thread. With Islam, you have to take Muhammad's word for it that he was touched by an angel. Same with Mormonism and Joseph Smith. With Christianity, you have a pre-crucifixion story where Jesus is supposed to have performed miracles in public. Did these miracles happen? The disciples, at least, are convinced by them, and that's why we find them dropping their nets and following. You also have Jesus making remarkable claims about himself. Trilemma considerations come into play here. Even if there are possible alternatives to liar, lunatic, or Lord, are the plausible ones? Then, you have the death and resurrection events, again, a public execution, and a resurrection claimed to have been seen by lots of people. Hallucination? Theft? Swoon? Wrong tomb? Evil twin? What happened? And then you have such things as the preaching of Peter and the missionary journeys of Paul. With the missionary journeys you have a story of a series of encounters with government officials in those localities, and at least the facts about local government have been verified by archaeology. So what was Paul doing that got him hauled up before government officials on a regular basis? Just preaching peace and love, brother? The Book of Acts says that there were miracles at this stage, too. And then he appeals to Caesar, when failure to do so would have gotten him released?
If you can understand the psychology of Muhammad or Joseph Smith, and that seems easy to do, more so for Smith than for Muhammad, then you can see how those religions started. With the founding of Christianity you have a long public history involving lots of kinds of people. There are no far-fetched theories designed to avoid the conclusion that Smith and Muhammad were true prophets.
In Islam and in Mormonism, you have those religions forming a government around their leaders. Muhammad goes military, and the Mormons move out to Utah and set up territorial government run their way. Christianity expands with no help from the government until 313 and Constantine.
So I think the founding of Christianity is far more difficult to explain than Mormonism or Islam.
If you can understand the psychology of Muhammad or Joseph Smith, and that seems easy to do, more so for Smith than for Muhammad, then you can see how those religions started. With the founding of Christianity you have a long public history involving lots of kinds of people. There are no far-fetched theories designed to avoid the conclusion that Smith and Muhammad were true prophets.
In Islam and in Mormonism, you have those religions forming a government around their leaders. Muhammad goes military, and the Mormons move out to Utah and set up territorial government run their way. Christianity expands with no help from the government until 313 and Constantine.
So I think the founding of Christianity is far more difficult to explain than Mormonism or Islam.
The Number One NBA Franchise
Here's an article by a sportswriter which, I expect, will be banned in Boston.
Getting the skeptical story straight
Of course one can deny the truth of Christianity without having a good theory as to how the movement started. One can appeal to the improbability of the resurrection story itself, and using broadly Humean reasons, maintain that even though you don't know what did happen, it couldn't have been a resurrection. Even if you were a theist, you could dodge the conclusion that Jesus was resurrected. That wasn't my point.
My point was that skeptics seem to lack a story about the founding of Christianity that makes sense. I said that if they had one, it would make Christianity seem less You had swoon theories, theft theories, hallucination theories, going to the wrong tomb, etc. In fact, skeptics in the 19th Century actually attacked one another's naturalistic theories of the origin of Christianity. Skeptics about the founding of Christianity still have pretty widespread disagreements as to how it all happened. One plausible story from the skeptical side has yet to emerge. That, to me, is an interesting fact that supports, but of course does not strictly prove that Christianity is true.
Anyone who believes a world-view has to live with some difficulties. This is a difficulty for every world-view except Christianity.
My point was that skeptics seem to lack a story about the founding of Christianity that makes sense. I said that if they had one, it would make Christianity seem less You had swoon theories, theft theories, hallucination theories, going to the wrong tomb, etc. In fact, skeptics in the 19th Century actually attacked one another's naturalistic theories of the origin of Christianity. Skeptics about the founding of Christianity still have pretty widespread disagreements as to how it all happened. One plausible story from the skeptical side has yet to emerge. That, to me, is an interesting fact that supports, but of course does not strictly prove that Christianity is true.
Anyone who believes a world-view has to live with some difficulties. This is a difficulty for every world-view except Christianity.
Thick and Clear Religions
A redated post.
From C. S. Lewis's essay "Christian Apologetics, " found in God in the Dock.
“I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. (Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies. Real Paganism is dead. All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.) There isn’t really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may [reverently] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear’. By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The Clear religion of the Brahmin hermit in the jungle and the Thick religion of the neighbouring temple go on side by side. The Brahmin hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshipper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.”
From C. S. Lewis's essay "Christian Apologetics, " found in God in the Dock.
“I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. (Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies. Real Paganism is dead. All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.) There isn’t really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may [reverently] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear’. By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The Clear religion of the Brahmin hermit in the jungle and the Thick religion of the neighbouring temple go on side by side. The Brahmin hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshipper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be Clear: I have to be Thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.”
The Skeptical Viewpoint
What books would I recommend that reflect the perspective of religious skepticism?
1. Bertrand Russell's "Why I am Not a Christian," in Why I am Not a Christian and other essays. Actually the whole volume is helpful.
2. Russell's "The Value of Free Thought," in Understanding History.
3. J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism.
4. Antony Flew ed. New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Contains the famous Falsification Challenge.
5. David Hume, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion."
6. David Hume, "Of Miracles," from "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
7. Keith M. Parsons, "God and the Burden of Proof" (Prometheus, 1989).
8. Keith M. Parsons, "Why I am Not a Christian," published originally by the Atlanta Freethought Society but available here.
9. Keith M. Parsons, "Seven Common Misconceptions about Atheism,"
10. Louise Antony, ed. Philosophers without Gods, (Oxford University Press).
1. Bertrand Russell's "Why I am Not a Christian," in Why I am Not a Christian and other essays. Actually the whole volume is helpful.
2. Russell's "The Value of Free Thought," in Understanding History.
3. J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism.
4. Antony Flew ed. New Essays in Philosophical Theology. Contains the famous Falsification Challenge.
5. David Hume, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion."
6. David Hume, "Of Miracles," from "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
7. Keith M. Parsons, "God and the Burden of Proof" (Prometheus, 1989).
8. Keith M. Parsons, "Why I am Not a Christian," published originally by the Atlanta Freethought Society but available here.
9. Keith M. Parsons, "Seven Common Misconceptions about Atheism,"
10. Louise Antony, ed. Philosophers without Gods, (Oxford University Press).
Does evolutionary biology give us a case against racism?
I don't know that Darwin's theory really provides a case against racism. Darwin himself wrote:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. [2]
But, on the other hand, most people in Darwin's time thought blacks were inferior, including Lincoln. And the guy who wrote "All men are created equal, and were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights," owned slaves.
Did C. S. Lewis take the Outsider Test?
"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." – Surprised by Joy
I don't know about you, but I'd say he passed with flying colors.
I don't know about you, but I'd say he passed with flying colors.
A modest proposal to start the gay marriage debate
Perhaps the first question to ask in the gay marriage debate is this: Why is the government in the marriage business at all? Why does it care? Couldn't we just privatize marriage, just like the Republicans wanted to do with Social Security? Then whatever religious or non-religious groups want to recognize or not recognize will be a matter to be determined by those groups, and the state backs out and minds its own business. Southern Baptists will require heterosexuality, the Metropolitan Community Church will marry the gay couples, and the government stays out of it.
Why are all the naturalistic explanations of the founding of Christianity such nonstarters?
I'm not going to make confident assertions about what would change my mind. There are too many factors. But I can tell you something that would, in my eyes, decrease the probability that Christianity is true.
One thing that would hurt the probability of Christianity for me would be if skeptics could come up with a halfway convincing story about how Christianity arose. Swoon theory? Come on. Jesus stripped on 100 pounds of grave clothes, pushed that gigantic stone out of the way, and put a flying tackle on the Roman guard, after being left for dead because of a crucifixion? Hallucination theory? Lots of problems. The disciples stole the body? Why? So they could get martyred for something they knew was false. Legendary development? Why does Luke know so much about all the city governments in the Mediterranean world? Jesus never even existed? How come nobody has come up with the theory that Socrates never existed? Jesus' evil twin took over after he was crucified? Getting desperate aren't we?
Of course, I know all about the Humean argument that anything's better than accepting a resurrection. Yes, rationally, one could be a skeptic about the supernatural origin of Christianity while admitting that there isn't much out there in the way of naturalistic explanations of the founding of Christianity. But why do all those theories have such ghastly problems?
One thing that would hurt the probability of Christianity for me would be if skeptics could come up with a halfway convincing story about how Christianity arose. Swoon theory? Come on. Jesus stripped on 100 pounds of grave clothes, pushed that gigantic stone out of the way, and put a flying tackle on the Roman guard, after being left for dead because of a crucifixion? Hallucination theory? Lots of problems. The disciples stole the body? Why? So they could get martyred for something they knew was false. Legendary development? Why does Luke know so much about all the city governments in the Mediterranean world? Jesus never even existed? How come nobody has come up with the theory that Socrates never existed? Jesus' evil twin took over after he was crucified? Getting desperate aren't we?
Of course, I know all about the Humean argument that anything's better than accepting a resurrection. Yes, rationally, one could be a skeptic about the supernatural origin of Christianity while admitting that there isn't much out there in the way of naturalistic explanations of the founding of Christianity. But why do all those theories have such ghastly problems?
Prohibition, moral obligation, and immigration reform
Would a "Prohibition argument" be relevant to the amount of immigration we should permit? Here's what I mean. Many people could argue the downside of alcholic beverages, as every woman who has been beaten by a drunken husband can attest, as every mother whose son was killed by a drunk driver can attest. Yet the illegality of alcoholic beverages did more harm than good, and most historians would say we rightly repealed Prohibition. We tried to prohibit something that couldn't rationally be prevented by legal prohibitions.
The restrictiveness of our quotas concerning immigration may be helping to cause a problem with illegal immigration. Prohibition empowered the Capone gang, the attractiveness of illegal immigration empowers the coyotes and drug cartels. Somehow, the situation in which we find ourselves makes breaking the immigration law desirable and attractive.
Jan Brewer likes to remind us all that we are a nation of laws. Of course we are. But the rule of law doesn't even guarantee that all violations of the law are morally impermissible. It could be argued that if someone comes across the border and does so intending to work for a living, pay taxes, and apart from the immigration law, to abide by the law, they may be doing what is at once illegal and morally obligatory. Unless you accept a moral theory that says it is always morally wrong to disobey the law, you have to consider this possibility. That is, we have a prima facie obligation to obey the law, but we also have an obligation to care for our families which may transcend the obligation to obey the law, and in the case of some illegal immigrants, they might have done what is illegal but morally obligatory. (Brewer thinks they're mostly here to run drugs and commit violent crimes, but what is the hard evidence for this claim? Why are they all in front of Home Depot looking for work, if they can get their money through crime?)
You know the old Emerson and Thoreau story? Thoreau went to jail for not paying taxes that would support what he took to be the unjust Mexican War. Emerson asked "Henry, what are you doing in there?" Thoreau answered "Waldo, what are you doing out there?"
The restrictiveness of our quotas concerning immigration may be helping to cause a problem with illegal immigration. Prohibition empowered the Capone gang, the attractiveness of illegal immigration empowers the coyotes and drug cartels. Somehow, the situation in which we find ourselves makes breaking the immigration law desirable and attractive.
Jan Brewer likes to remind us all that we are a nation of laws. Of course we are. But the rule of law doesn't even guarantee that all violations of the law are morally impermissible. It could be argued that if someone comes across the border and does so intending to work for a living, pay taxes, and apart from the immigration law, to abide by the law, they may be doing what is at once illegal and morally obligatory. Unless you accept a moral theory that says it is always morally wrong to disobey the law, you have to consider this possibility. That is, we have a prima facie obligation to obey the law, but we also have an obligation to care for our families which may transcend the obligation to obey the law, and in the case of some illegal immigrants, they might have done what is illegal but morally obligatory. (Brewer thinks they're mostly here to run drugs and commit violent crimes, but what is the hard evidence for this claim? Why are they all in front of Home Depot looking for work, if they can get their money through crime?)
You know the old Emerson and Thoreau story? Thoreau went to jail for not paying taxes that would support what he took to be the unjust Mexican War. Emerson asked "Henry, what are you doing in there?" Thoreau answered "Waldo, what are you doing out there?"
Reply to Loftus on faith and evidence
John Loftus wrote: What would proof look like to an outsider?
I have already said what would convince me Christianity is true.
Now YOU be reasonable. What would proof look like for you to reject your adopted faith due to the accidents of birth? I was reasonable in that link. Be reasonable with us.
I don't think accident of birth carries a whole lot of weight here. I'm a Bayesian subjectivist: we come into our thinking lives with a set of antecedent probabilities, and we adjust them as the evidence allows.
It is an accident of birth that I grew up in a Methodist family, but it is equally an accident of history (unless God was in on it), that I encountered good, strong, defenders of Christianity who took the relation of faith and intellect seriously, who took my questions with the utmost seriousness, and showed a kind of intellectual integrity that I thought was often lacking in the sort of glib unbelief I encountered in the academic community.
If my reading of Bertrand Russell had not convinced me of the value of free thought (though maybe not quite as he defined it), how would my thoughts be different today? If Russell had made more of an effort to understand the Christian beliefs he attacked, how would my beliefs be different today? If Craig Bustrin from my home church in Phoenix had not introduced me to the writings of C. S. Lewis, how would my beliefs be different today? If Bob Prokop (an occasional commentator here) and the late Joe Sheffer had not talked me through my period of disaffection as an undergraduate with Campus-Crusade style literalism while remaining a profoundly orthodox Christian, how would my beliefs be different today? If Keith Parsons had not moved in to the same house with me when I was in seminary and challenged me from a skeptical standpoint, how would by beliefs be different today? I don't know, and neither do you.
Your own experience with Christianity and with Christian thinkers was different from mine, but it is just as laden with historical accident as mine was.
I am trying to counter a simplistic picture in which believers all believe "on faith" (even if they have apologetic pretensions) and unbelievers, quite rationally, are waiting for PROOF which is not forthcoming. I would like to substitute a different picture for this one, one in which we enter with intellectual predispositions which we cannot fully avoid, but which we can and must modify in response to the evidence. It's called critical rationalism, and it is to be contrasted with fideism and strong rationalism.
In the original post I was responding to people who make heavy weather out of the fact that religious believers don't have PROOF for their position, by asking what proof would look like if we had it.
At the same time, changes in belief are cumulative, and big paradigm shifts need big evidential shifts in a various areas of thought. That is just how life is when we think. If you read the life of serious converts and de-converts, you don't find ONE BIG THING that PROVES Christianity, or atheism, or what have you. It's always a lot of things.
Chesterton wrote:
But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth. It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.
I have already said what would convince me Christianity is true.
Now YOU be reasonable. What would proof look like for you to reject your adopted faith due to the accidents of birth? I was reasonable in that link. Be reasonable with us.
I don't think accident of birth carries a whole lot of weight here. I'm a Bayesian subjectivist: we come into our thinking lives with a set of antecedent probabilities, and we adjust them as the evidence allows.
It is an accident of birth that I grew up in a Methodist family, but it is equally an accident of history (unless God was in on it), that I encountered good, strong, defenders of Christianity who took the relation of faith and intellect seriously, who took my questions with the utmost seriousness, and showed a kind of intellectual integrity that I thought was often lacking in the sort of glib unbelief I encountered in the academic community.
If my reading of Bertrand Russell had not convinced me of the value of free thought (though maybe not quite as he defined it), how would my thoughts be different today? If Russell had made more of an effort to understand the Christian beliefs he attacked, how would my beliefs be different today? If Craig Bustrin from my home church in Phoenix had not introduced me to the writings of C. S. Lewis, how would my beliefs be different today? If Bob Prokop (an occasional commentator here) and the late Joe Sheffer had not talked me through my period of disaffection as an undergraduate with Campus-Crusade style literalism while remaining a profoundly orthodox Christian, how would my beliefs be different today? If Keith Parsons had not moved in to the same house with me when I was in seminary and challenged me from a skeptical standpoint, how would by beliefs be different today? I don't know, and neither do you.
Your own experience with Christianity and with Christian thinkers was different from mine, but it is just as laden with historical accident as mine was.
I am trying to counter a simplistic picture in which believers all believe "on faith" (even if they have apologetic pretensions) and unbelievers, quite rationally, are waiting for PROOF which is not forthcoming. I would like to substitute a different picture for this one, one in which we enter with intellectual predispositions which we cannot fully avoid, but which we can and must modify in response to the evidence. It's called critical rationalism, and it is to be contrasted with fideism and strong rationalism.
In the original post I was responding to people who make heavy weather out of the fact that religious believers don't have PROOF for their position, by asking what proof would look like if we had it.
At the same time, changes in belief are cumulative, and big paradigm shifts need big evidential shifts in a various areas of thought. That is just how life is when we think. If you read the life of serious converts and de-converts, you don't find ONE BIG THING that PROVES Christianity, or atheism, or what have you. It's always a lot of things.
Chesterton wrote:
But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth. It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.
The Jewish Scholar Pinchas Lapide accepts the Resurrection
A redated post.
Can one accept the Resurrection of Christ without accepting the Lordship of Christ? Apparently this is the position of Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide.
This is sort of a companion post to the Heather from Glendale post, where someone far less sophisticated accepts, or appears to accept the resurrection of Christ while declining to be a Christian.
Can one accept the Resurrection of Christ without accepting the Lordship of Christ? Apparently this is the position of Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide.
This is sort of a companion post to the Heather from Glendale post, where someone far less sophisticated accepts, or appears to accept the resurrection of Christ while declining to be a Christian.
Bobby Fischer to be exhumed
For the purpose of a paternity investigation. I suppose they won't be lending his brain out the lab to study what makes someone a chess genius.
Simon Tolkien on the death penalty
Simon Tolkien is J. R. R.'s grandson. He might have used a quote from his grandfather, which I have always thought relevant to the question of the death penalty:
"Many who live deserve death, and many who die deserve life, can you give it to them? Then be not to quick to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for you own safety, not even the wise see all ends." -J.R.R Tolkien
"Many who live deserve death, and many who die deserve life, can you give it to them? Then be not to quick to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for you own safety, not even the wise see all ends." -J.R.R Tolkien
Arizona SB 1070: A Legal Nightmare
Two immigration attorneys agree that this law will overwhelm the court system with lawsuits.
This law is popular with conservatives. But I always thought conservatives hated judicial activism and "the trial lawyers." The trial lawyers are going to have a field day with this one.
Every law raises some issues which are going to be open to interpretation, and which have to be settled by the courts. This law was written in a deliberately ambiguous way, which in my view is irresponsible.
FAIR (the organization that wrote the law) also has attorneys who file lawsuits. Gee, do I detect a pattern?
This law is popular with conservatives. But I always thought conservatives hated judicial activism and "the trial lawyers." The trial lawyers are going to have a field day with this one.
Every law raises some issues which are going to be open to interpretation, and which have to be settled by the courts. This law was written in a deliberately ambiguous way, which in my view is irresponsible.
FAIR (the organization that wrote the law) also has attorneys who file lawsuits. Gee, do I detect a pattern?
Heather from Glendale, CA that is
A redated post.
A lot of debate on this site is between people of one world-view and those of another. People like Keith Parsons have a naturalistic world-view, people like myself have a Christian theistic world-view. We tend to think that this is the great debate of our culture. But is it? There seem to be a lot of people in our culture today who seem to make no effort to develop a consistent world-view, and grab from here, there, and everywhere to meet their needs until next Friday night. How many of you run into people like this, say, in undergraduate classrooms? This is from an essay entitled Babel Undone by Richard Mouw.
This syndrome was brought home to me in a poignant manner a while back when I was a guest on a radio talk show. It was during a time when two major newsmagazines had just run feature articles about "the historical Jesus," and the host was quite eager to discuss the topic. My fellow guest was a church leader of liberal bent, and he expressed strong skepticism about the reliability of the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus—an assessment with which I strongly disagreed. When we opened the discussion to questions from our listening audience, one of our callers was a young woman who was identified as Heather from Glendale. "I’m not what you would call, like, a Christian," Heather began. "Actually, right now I am sort of into—you know, witchcraft and stuff like that? But I agree with the guy from Fuller Seminary. I’m just shocked that someone would, like, say that Jesus wasn’t really raised from the dead!"
Now this has to be Glendale CA, not its namesake in AZ, where no one (I hope) is that confused. This sort of thing, of course, often leaves us philosophers, atheist or Christian, tearing our hair out. Is there something that the Richard Dawkinses and William Lane Craigs of the world have in common (wow!) which is being lost be the culture at large?
A lot of debate on this site is between people of one world-view and those of another. People like Keith Parsons have a naturalistic world-view, people like myself have a Christian theistic world-view. We tend to think that this is the great debate of our culture. But is it? There seem to be a lot of people in our culture today who seem to make no effort to develop a consistent world-view, and grab from here, there, and everywhere to meet their needs until next Friday night. How many of you run into people like this, say, in undergraduate classrooms? This is from an essay entitled Babel Undone by Richard Mouw.
This syndrome was brought home to me in a poignant manner a while back when I was a guest on a radio talk show. It was during a time when two major newsmagazines had just run feature articles about "the historical Jesus," and the host was quite eager to discuss the topic. My fellow guest was a church leader of liberal bent, and he expressed strong skepticism about the reliability of the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus—an assessment with which I strongly disagreed. When we opened the discussion to questions from our listening audience, one of our callers was a young woman who was identified as Heather from Glendale. "I’m not what you would call, like, a Christian," Heather began. "Actually, right now I am sort of into—you know, witchcraft and stuff like that? But I agree with the guy from Fuller Seminary. I’m just shocked that someone would, like, say that Jesus wasn’t really raised from the dead!"
Now this has to be Glendale CA, not its namesake in AZ, where no one (I hope) is that confused. This sort of thing, of course, often leaves us philosophers, atheist or Christian, tearing our hair out. Is there something that the Richard Dawkinses and William Lane Craigs of the world have in common (wow!) which is being lost be the culture at large?
The Celtics take the lead
The Lakers, in the last game, looked like a one-man team. If this continues, then no matter how well Kobe plays, there will be another championship banner hanging from the rafters in Boston.
Anybody know why is sell-tics and not kel-tics?
Anybody know why is sell-tics and not kel-tics?
Four objections to same-sex marriage
Objection 1: Same-sex marriage violates biblical standards for marriage.
Reply: The problem with Bible verses is that our society is supposed to be a society for everyone regardless of religion, so while the Bible might give religious people a reason not to have same-sex marriages, it doesn't really offer a reason why the secular government might not have other reasons for sanctioning same sex unions for governmental purposes. You have to keep in mind that many heterosexual marriages fail to meet biblical standards, see especially Luke 16: 18. Is the government wrong to allow marriages which were initiated in an adulterous affair? Legally, if you have an affair with the Playboy centerfold, then file for divorce, you can marry the centerfold legally. Biblically, that's not marriage, it's adultery. So, if you want to impose biblical standards on the government, you can't logically stop with homosexuals, you have to de-legitimize all adulterous marriages.
Objection 2: Same-sex relationships are morally unacceptable.
Reply: The state is concerned about what relationships to recognize when, say, end-of-life decisions are made. Should these be made by a lifelong gay partner, or should other family members who were less close to the terminally ill person have the say in what end-of-life decisions this person should have made on his behalf? That the state sanctions a marriage does not imply that the state morally approves that marriage, for the reason cited above.
Objection 3: Same-sex relationships do not produce children.
Reply: Should couples who intend to be childless be allowed to marry? Should women long past menopause be allowed to marry? These marriages will produce no children.
Objection 4: Legalized same-sex marriage will lead to the legalization of every other kind of relationship, including man-boy love relationships.
Reply: Slippery slope arguments are considered a fallacy. Just because we could go further in legitimizing relationships doesn't mean that we should. In the case of relationships with children, the children are thought not to be consenting partners. So we have a principled reason for rejecting, say, a man-boy relationship while accepting same-sex relationships so long as they are consensual.
These are just some things that can be said against the typical arguments against state-sanctioned same-sex marriage. (Church-sanctioned same-sex marriage is another matter). Are there better arguments against SSM?
Reply: The problem with Bible verses is that our society is supposed to be a society for everyone regardless of religion, so while the Bible might give religious people a reason not to have same-sex marriages, it doesn't really offer a reason why the secular government might not have other reasons for sanctioning same sex unions for governmental purposes. You have to keep in mind that many heterosexual marriages fail to meet biblical standards, see especially Luke 16: 18. Is the government wrong to allow marriages which were initiated in an adulterous affair? Legally, if you have an affair with the Playboy centerfold, then file for divorce, you can marry the centerfold legally. Biblically, that's not marriage, it's adultery. So, if you want to impose biblical standards on the government, you can't logically stop with homosexuals, you have to de-legitimize all adulterous marriages.
Objection 2: Same-sex relationships are morally unacceptable.
Reply: The state is concerned about what relationships to recognize when, say, end-of-life decisions are made. Should these be made by a lifelong gay partner, or should other family members who were less close to the terminally ill person have the say in what end-of-life decisions this person should have made on his behalf? That the state sanctions a marriage does not imply that the state morally approves that marriage, for the reason cited above.
Objection 3: Same-sex relationships do not produce children.
Reply: Should couples who intend to be childless be allowed to marry? Should women long past menopause be allowed to marry? These marriages will produce no children.
Objection 4: Legalized same-sex marriage will lead to the legalization of every other kind of relationship, including man-boy love relationships.
Reply: Slippery slope arguments are considered a fallacy. Just because we could go further in legitimizing relationships doesn't mean that we should. In the case of relationships with children, the children are thought not to be consenting partners. So we have a principled reason for rejecting, say, a man-boy relationship while accepting same-sex relationships so long as they are consensual.
These are just some things that can be said against the typical arguments against state-sanctioned same-sex marriage. (Church-sanctioned same-sex marriage is another matter). Are there better arguments against SSM?
SB 1070 is chasing law-abiding citizens out of the state
"The immigration law creates a difficult situation for both legal and illegal residents," said Jay Butler, director of realty studies at Arizona State University. "Some illegal residents may have planned on leaving the Valley anyway because they can't find jobs. But I have talked to young Hispanics who are residents and so are their parents and grandparents. And those Hispanics plan on moving to other states because they don't want to be perceived as second-class citizens."
I'm going to keep appealing to the documentary 9500 Liberty until somebody watches it and tells me what is wrong with it. In that documentary, it was indicated that Prince William County suffered a lot of collateral damage, especially where the foreclosure rate was concerned, which increased at a rate far in excess of the other counties in Virginia. Foreclosures were already a problem in Arizona, and I am convinced it will get worse thanks to the new law.
I'm going to keep appealing to the documentary 9500 Liberty until somebody watches it and tells me what is wrong with it. In that documentary, it was indicated that Prince William County suffered a lot of collateral damage, especially where the foreclosure rate was concerned, which increased at a rate far in excess of the other counties in Virginia. Foreclosures were already a problem in Arizona, and I am convinced it will get worse thanks to the new law.
Witnessing for Peace--The Cross Contextualized
One of the joys of this past Spring Semester has been the number of professors and courses that have invited us to reflect upon past and anticipated experiences in light of the cross. Below is what I wrote regarding Palestinian liberation theology and the cross, especially from Bishop Munib Younan's book, Witnessing in Jerusalem, as well as in the light of my own experiences in the Holy Land.
Bibliography
Introduction
The situation in the Holy Land seems bleak at best these days. For the residents on all sides, life is a daily roller coaster ride. Hopes for peace rise at the prospect of each negotiation and are then crushed by violence. The people want to have hope. It is a land that should be a place of hope considering the biblical events that unfolded there. Luther’s words in the Heidelberg Disputation still speak today to those who are willing to hear in that volatile place:
20. He deserves to be called a theologian… who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.
21. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is. (Luther 2005, 49)
As a Christian witness, Bishop Munib Younan’s liberation theology has the theology of the cross at its heart, that of witness, of martyria.
A History Lesson
Most tourists in the Holy Land do not know of, let alone appreciate the legacy of 2,000 years of Christian history in this land, particularly in Jerusalem. Bishop Munib Younan, the bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL), is often asked when he and his family became Christians. The assumption is that they had to have been either Jewish or Muslim. The first part of his book is educates us about those who have been a continual presence in the Jerusalem and elsewhere as the living stones. As James Bailey noted, “[Younan] shares his own family story as part of a larger focus on the church as ‘witnesses’ (martyrs) for peace, both past and present” (Bailey 2004, 406) .
Martyria: Key Dimension of a Theology of the Cross
The concept of witness/martyria is the driving force of Younan’s liberation theology of the cross. Martyria, being a witness is from the Greek. BDAG fleshes this out as, “attestation of character or behavior, testimony…which the Christians, or certain Christians (Christian martyrs, prophets) possess” (BDAG, Bible Works 8). This is also the root of the English word, martyr. Giving truthful, loving witness can lead to martyrdom. One’s obedience to God may lead to death, as it did with Christ.
Witness is central to the theology of the cross. One witnesses to the truth as seen through the lens of the cross. In a theology of the cross type witness, we “call the thing what it actually is” (Luther, 49) . This enables us to name injustice no matter who is the perpetrator or victim. We can name the oppression of peoples. We may name the Israeli occupation as occupation and at the same time condemn violent responses to it. The theology of the cross invites us to own and name our demonization of “the other.”
Trialogue
Trialogue is a word that Bishop Younan has coined. Dialogue is not enough given the participants involved. Christian Arabs, Muslim Arabs, and Israelis all need to be involved as equal participants. Each has different expectations of the other. Each has different customs and beliefs. There is economic and power disparity as well. To put all of this aside to talk, listen, and really hear one another is a powerful process.
Ministry Situation Where Theme Informs Ministry
Holy Land
Ministry in the Holy Land looked very different from any other type of ministry in which I had participated. Much of what I learned there still informs my vision of ministry. I am grateful that these lessons and that time in my life have been affirmed by the church.
There is an additional challenge to the ministry of witness in Palestine compared with that of Latin America or South Africa. Three world religions are involved in the conflict. There are layers of culture, language, customs that are indigenous to each. Given the varying contexts in that place, you are bound to offend someone somewhere, no matter how unintentional.
The witness of the presence of Christians in the Land is tremendous. As I lived and worked there, our very presence made a difference. We could provide a safe haven for those needing to have some quiet away from the storms that beat down upon them. I would like to make a shameless plug for a recent book by my friend and team leader in Bethlehem, David Teeter. The book is A Stone’s Throw from Bethlehem. It is the story not only of him and his wife Willow, but our (my former husband, children, and myself) story as well. I will happily tell you sometime the story of my son’s lunch box being blown up by the Israelis.
The witness of Christians tends to be either conversion or conversation. Younan suggests that the ministry of presence is a “third way” of bearing witness. This is not passive, but active. Its very motivation is to witness to the truth. While speaking at Luther Seminary, Younan said:
Christians live for others and live without fear. Christians bring a different ethos…informed by a theology of grace and a theology of the cross.
Living and speaking grace in a world of retribution is a radical act. So is witness under the cross, witness done for the sake of God and neighbor, not for the sake of reward. This ethos, marked by both the death of Jesus and his resurrection, will produce solidarity with the victims of injustice while, at the same time, giving power to speak and work against the same injustice. (Gaiser 2002)
Principles for Ministry Today
The principles outlined for communication and reconciliation in Bishop Younan’s book are applicable to every context. We experience encounters with those we consider “the other.” To live the life of a theologian of the cross means that we call a thing what it is: prejudice, suspicion, annoyance, and then live the cruciform life of service to “the other.” Applications of trialogue can be brought to bear upon such relationships.
An example in a future ministry context could be a church council meeting. It seems there is often at least one person that is negative, difficult, not on board with God’s leading. Here we can bear witness to God’s truth, engage the one in dialogue, and work for reconciliation. I have been a part of some very contentious church council meetings because someone was so adamant on getting their way.
There is plenty of conflict within the ELCA today. Demonized caricatures of inhospitality and homophobia come from one side while the other lobs accusations of heresy and apostasy. As in one of the closing sessions of the 2009 Churchwide, Assembly Bishop Hanson urged us to gather at the foot of the cross with those we disagree with. It is through the lens of the cross we can view and engage one another, realizing we are all saints and sinners in need of God’s grace.
Conclusion
The situation in the Holy Land seems bleak at best these days. For the residents on all sides, life is a daily roller coaster ride. Hopes for peace rise at the prospect of each negotiation and are then crushed by violence. The people want to have hope. Luther’s words in the Heidelberg Disputation still speak today to those who are willing to hear in that volatile place:
20. He deserves to be called a theologian… who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.
21. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is. (Luther 2005, 49)
We may wonder, “…who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross?” (Luther, 49) . Who will be a theologian of the cross rather than “A theologian of glory [who] calls evil good and good evil?” (Luther, 49) . God calls each of us to this prophetic ministry in our various contexts. For the Holy Land, that witness or martyria is the first step. This must be followed by trialogue and peace education that may lead to reconciliation. Younan summarizes the situation thus, “… the process of reconciliation may be long and painful…but it is feasible, if we believe in a living, reconciling God who can make the seemingly impossible possible” (Younan, Witnessing for Peace: In Jerusalem and the World 2003, 124-125) .
Awad, Sami. God's Politics. May 5, 2010. http://blog.sojo.net/ (accessed May 6, 2010).
Bailey, James L. "Witnessing for Peace: In Jerusalem and the World." Currents in Theology and Mission, no. 5 (2004): 406-407.
Beiler, Ryan Rodrick. Culture Watch. April 14, 2010. http://blog.sojo.net/category/culture-watch/ (accessed April 14, 2010).
Gaiser, Frederick J. "Learning from Bishop Younan." Word and World, June 2002: 219-220.
Luther, Martin. Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings. Second. Edited by William R. Russell. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2005.
Matzat, Don. "A Theology of Glory and a Theology of the Cross." Issues, Etc. issuesetc.org (accessed April 22, 2010).
Sabbab, Patriarch Michel, Archbishop Swerios Malki Mourad, Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal, and Bishop Munib Younan. "Palestinian Church Leaders' Statement on Christian Zionism." Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal (Edinburgh Universtiy Press) 5, no. 2 (November 2006): 211-215.
Trueman, Carl R. "Luther's Theology of the Cross." New Horizons, October 2005.
Waskow, Rabbi Arthur. "Enough Jawboning: A Bold but Hopeful Proposal for Middle East Peace." 04/12/10. Washington, District of Columbia: Sojourner, April 12, 2010.
Younan, Munib. "The Future of Palestinian Christianity and Prospects for Justice, Peace, and Reconciliation." Currents in Theology and Mission, no. 5 (2007): 338-350.
—. Witnessing for Peace: In Jerusalem and the World. Edited by Fred Strickert. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003.
Pictures from Google Images.
What would proof look like if we had it
Could one ask an atheist, "What would proof look like if you had it?" Anything that you used as proof could be doubted, couldn't it, if you were really bound and determined not to believe. Water into wine? A good magic trick. Walking on water? He knows where the stones are. Loaves and fishes? The catering truck is parked where you can't see it. Resurrection from the dead? A hallucination, or maybe we only thought he was dead. Maybe the stars in the sky should spell out "TURN OR BURN!! ATHEISTS REPENT BEFORE I COME BACK AND IT'S TOO LATE."
Thanks once again, Keith Parsons, for that one.
Thanks once again, Keith Parsons, for that one.
On Kant's Moral Argument
Kant doesn't say that in order to be moral, you have to be religious. He is someone who thinks that other sorts of rational arguments about God don't decide the question either way (first cause arguments, arguments from evil, etc.) So, on his view, we are left with a choice of believing the world to contain a God, of believing in free will or not , and in believing that humans survive death.
On earth as we know it, virtue and happiness are not proportional. Virtuous people are sometimes miserable, nasty people are sometimes happy. (Think of all the murder cases which are never solved.)
Religious world-views presume the existence of a universe in which there is a future life in which happiness is apportioned according to virtue. Whether it is through a last judgment, or through a law of karma that puts you back on this earth either in good shape or in bad shape depending on your deeds, good prevails and evil fails, eventually.
Or you can accept a naturalistic world-view in which there is no mechanism for balancing the cosmic scales of justice. If wrong triumphs in the course of a lifetime, which is certainly seems to, then the story ends, people die, and feed the worms with no recompense for injustice. Hitler and Mother Teresa are in the same condition. They are dead.
The Kantian argument here strikes me as a distant cousin to Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's wager, you are looking at your own prospects, and "betting" on the world-view that pays off better. (Pascal, like Kant, was addressing the undecided. If your belief system is like that of Richard Dawkins, making yourself believe for either Pascalian or Kantian reasons is not an issue). The difference between the Kantian wager and the Pascalian is that you are "betting" on the world-view that will give you the most moral encouragement. You are not just betting on your own self-interest,, as you are in Pascal's Wager. Kant doesn't assume that you can't be moral without God. Pure practical reason tells you what is right and wrong, according to Kant. However, Kant maintains that you since can't settle the question of God any other way, you ought to choose based on the moral encouragement provided by each world-view.
Sometimes being moral is hard. In fact, all actions with moral worth are, according to Kant, done from duty as opposed to being done in accordance with duty, which means that when you do those actions, your inclinations or emotions are pulling you the other way. In other words, perfoming actions of moral worth, like breaking up, is hard to do. Is it more conducive to making the hard moral decisions we have to make to believe that there is no cosmic justice, or to believe that there is cosmic justice. Kant thinks the choice is a no-brainer, practical reason enjoins us to view the world as cosmically just, and therefore to accept the doctrines of God, freedom, and immortality.
On earth as we know it, virtue and happiness are not proportional. Virtuous people are sometimes miserable, nasty people are sometimes happy. (Think of all the murder cases which are never solved.)
Religious world-views presume the existence of a universe in which there is a future life in which happiness is apportioned according to virtue. Whether it is through a last judgment, or through a law of karma that puts you back on this earth either in good shape or in bad shape depending on your deeds, good prevails and evil fails, eventually.
Or you can accept a naturalistic world-view in which there is no mechanism for balancing the cosmic scales of justice. If wrong triumphs in the course of a lifetime, which is certainly seems to, then the story ends, people die, and feed the worms with no recompense for injustice. Hitler and Mother Teresa are in the same condition. They are dead.
The Kantian argument here strikes me as a distant cousin to Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's wager, you are looking at your own prospects, and "betting" on the world-view that pays off better. (Pascal, like Kant, was addressing the undecided. If your belief system is like that of Richard Dawkins, making yourself believe for either Pascalian or Kantian reasons is not an issue). The difference between the Kantian wager and the Pascalian is that you are "betting" on the world-view that will give you the most moral encouragement. You are not just betting on your own self-interest,, as you are in Pascal's Wager. Kant doesn't assume that you can't be moral without God. Pure practical reason tells you what is right and wrong, according to Kant. However, Kant maintains that you since can't settle the question of God any other way, you ought to choose based on the moral encouragement provided by each world-view.
Sometimes being moral is hard. In fact, all actions with moral worth are, according to Kant, done from duty as opposed to being done in accordance with duty, which means that when you do those actions, your inclinations or emotions are pulling you the other way. In other words, perfoming actions of moral worth, like breaking up, is hard to do. Is it more conducive to making the hard moral decisions we have to make to believe that there is no cosmic justice, or to believe that there is cosmic justice. Kant thinks the choice is a no-brainer, practical reason enjoins us to view the world as cosmically just, and therefore to accept the doctrines of God, freedom, and immortality.
NEW COCKTAIL INVENTED IN HONOR OF HELEN THOMAS
WE AT THE ALEXANDRIA DAILY POOP ANNOUNCE THE INVENTION OF A NEW COCKTAIL IN HONOR OF HELEN THOMAS, the "veteran whitehouse reporter" who recently said that the Jews should "get the hell out" of Israel and go back to Poland and Germany. Why there she did not say, but from her tone presumably it was so the job begun in the 1930s could be finished.
So we announce the cocktail we call "The Screwy Old Bitch": Pour two shots of vodka over ice in a tall glass and serve.
You see, it's basically a Screwdriver without any juice. (Juice, Jews,.....Get it? Forget it.)
So we announce the cocktail we call "The Screwy Old Bitch": Pour two shots of vodka over ice in a tall glass and serve.
You see, it's basically a Screwdriver without any juice. (Juice, Jews,.....Get it? Forget it.)
Some confusions about truth and religion
A redated post.
I think I am seeing people fall into some common confusions about objectivity, subjectivity, absolute truth, provability, and faith.
First, something can be absolutely true without it being provably true. Let's take the Jack the Ripper murders in England during the last century. There is an absolute truth about who committed those murders. There was an individual or group of individuals who killed those girls. However, we can't figure out who the perpetrator was. There are still books being written about it today to try to solve the murders. It's unprovable by us, and we probably never will know, yet there is someone who committed those murders.
With respect to the question of God, there have been attempts to prove that God exists and attempts to prove that God does not exist. I have studies these arguments, and I happen to think that neither side has such a stong case that every reasonable person ought to be convinced. However, there are reasons to believe and reasons to disbelieve, and I think that the claim that God does exist has stronger support than the claim that God does not exist. However, if we define God as an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, then either God exists or God does not exist, and if God does exist, then the people that believe that God exists are correct, and the people that do not believe that God exists are mistaken. On the other hand, if God does not exist, then the people who believe that God does not exist are correct, and the people who believe that God does not exist are mistaken. The idea that if you truly believe in God, then God exists for you, but if you don't believe in God, God does not exist for you, is nonsense. God is not Tinkerbell, the fairy in Peter Pan who continues to exist so long as people believe in fairies.
With respect to religion, there are plenty of claims made by these religions which have to be either true or false, and about which it is possible to be correct or mistaken. (I like saying correct or mistaken better than saying right or wrong, simply because I don't want to make any moral judgments concerning the people, but I only want to talk about whether they believe, or fail to believe, the truth).
Judaism claims that there "The Lord your God, the Lord is one." So if atheism or polytheism is true, then Judaism is in error.
Christianity claims that Jesus was resurrected by God from the dead. He was either resurrected or he was not resurrected. Paul says if he wasn't resurrected, the Christians, of all people are most to be pitied.
Islam claims that Muhammad is the final prophet of Allah and that the revelation he presented is the final, perfect revelation of Allah. They've either got that right or they don't.
Hinduism says that we are all on a cycle of birth and rebirth, and that I am the reincarnation of a person who lived and died before I was born. I either was, or I wasn't.
Buddhism says my sufferings are caused by cravings, and if I stop craving, I will stop suffering. That is either true or false.
Atheists say that God does not exist. They either have that right, or they have it wrong.
Etc., Etc. Etc.
To believe that one's beliefs in the area of religion are true and those that contradict it are false is not to be dogmatic are intolerant. It is simply to understand what it is to have a belief. A belief is something you think to be true. And to believe that something is true is to believe that the contradictory is false. If I say "I believe in Christianity, but I don't believe that its claims are absolutely true" is not to be tolerant, it is to contradict oneself.
Faith is not belief in the absence of evidence, although perhaps it requires the absence of overwhelming evidence.
C. S. Lewis: I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in.
I think I am seeing people fall into some common confusions about objectivity, subjectivity, absolute truth, provability, and faith.
First, something can be absolutely true without it being provably true. Let's take the Jack the Ripper murders in England during the last century. There is an absolute truth about who committed those murders. There was an individual or group of individuals who killed those girls. However, we can't figure out who the perpetrator was. There are still books being written about it today to try to solve the murders. It's unprovable by us, and we probably never will know, yet there is someone who committed those murders.
With respect to the question of God, there have been attempts to prove that God exists and attempts to prove that God does not exist. I have studies these arguments, and I happen to think that neither side has such a stong case that every reasonable person ought to be convinced. However, there are reasons to believe and reasons to disbelieve, and I think that the claim that God does exist has stronger support than the claim that God does not exist. However, if we define God as an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, then either God exists or God does not exist, and if God does exist, then the people that believe that God exists are correct, and the people that do not believe that God exists are mistaken. On the other hand, if God does not exist, then the people who believe that God does not exist are correct, and the people who believe that God does not exist are mistaken. The idea that if you truly believe in God, then God exists for you, but if you don't believe in God, God does not exist for you, is nonsense. God is not Tinkerbell, the fairy in Peter Pan who continues to exist so long as people believe in fairies.
With respect to religion, there are plenty of claims made by these religions which have to be either true or false, and about which it is possible to be correct or mistaken. (I like saying correct or mistaken better than saying right or wrong, simply because I don't want to make any moral judgments concerning the people, but I only want to talk about whether they believe, or fail to believe, the truth).
Judaism claims that there "The Lord your God, the Lord is one." So if atheism or polytheism is true, then Judaism is in error.
Christianity claims that Jesus was resurrected by God from the dead. He was either resurrected or he was not resurrected. Paul says if he wasn't resurrected, the Christians, of all people are most to be pitied.
Islam claims that Muhammad is the final prophet of Allah and that the revelation he presented is the final, perfect revelation of Allah. They've either got that right or they don't.
Hinduism says that we are all on a cycle of birth and rebirth, and that I am the reincarnation of a person who lived and died before I was born. I either was, or I wasn't.
Buddhism says my sufferings are caused by cravings, and if I stop craving, I will stop suffering. That is either true or false.
Atheists say that God does not exist. They either have that right, or they have it wrong.
Etc., Etc. Etc.
To believe that one's beliefs in the area of religion are true and those that contradict it are false is not to be dogmatic are intolerant. It is simply to understand what it is to have a belief. A belief is something you think to be true. And to believe that something is true is to believe that the contradictory is false. If I say "I believe in Christianity, but I don't believe that its claims are absolutely true" is not to be tolerant, it is to contradict oneself.
Faith is not belief in the absence of evidence, although perhaps it requires the absence of overwhelming evidence.
C. S. Lewis: I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in.
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