Arguments
Some common arguments against Christianity
I’m not sure that ‘argument’ is the right term to use for some of the quips, slogans and intellectual stink bombs and smoke screens that I’m trying to counter in this chapter, but let’s try to be polite. I have been accused of being one sided, and of course I am. That’s what happens in a debate where two sides disagree. Each protagonist argues his side. This is my response to the other side’s one sidedness. These reflections are necessarily incomplete, as mentioned elsewhere I am one man acting alone. On one level this site is an extension of blog posts I might make elsewhere that I can direct interested protagonists to for a fuller discussion than is possible on a message board.
I will consider ‘Who made God?’ the role of religion in wars, ‘The Inquisition’, whether all religions lead to God, does religion divide? the idea of Christianity as just one more ‘dying and reviving god’ myth, and the late Christopher Hitchens’ famous conundrum which his brother Peter said in a live radio discussion between the two was ‘a duff question’. I agree, vey duff indeed as I will explain.
Jesus and his apostles told followers that they should expect misrepresentation, abuse, persecution and slander, even martyrdom, but ought to return blessing for cursing and not respond tooaggressively against real or perceived insults, even physical violence and deprivation of property. So when people call us Christians stupid, deluded, liars, idiots, cretins, science deniers, flat earthers, tantamount to child, abusers, ignorant, bigoted, Nazis, holocaust deniers, ‘suckered by a man in a dress’ and all the rest- and all these insults are in routine use-we ought not to respond in like manner. Jesus even said (arguably using hyperbole) that we would be in danger of hell fire just for calling someone a fool. However, God calls atheists fools (1) and a rich materialist who had given no thought to his eternal destiny (2) a fool. Paul wrote‘Proclaiming themselves wise, they became fools’ (Romans 1:22). So according to Jesus there is such a thing as folly and such people as fools and it matters. The Bible tells us to deal with our own folly first, then maybe we can help others escape theirs. I forget who said that a Christian sharing his faith was like one beggar telling another where food and shelter was to be had. Probably C S Lewis.
Wisdom builds her house, Folly with her own hands tears it down
Folly is not OK, it’s better to embrace wisdom instead. That’s a primary theme of the Book of Proverbs in the Bible; see especially the first 4 chapters which are a hymn of praise to Wisdom and a warning against her opposite, Folly. We have neglected this precious and tested ancient source of wisdom and incidentally great poetry (e.g. ‘Wisdom builds her house, folly with her own hands tears it down.’) at our great cost. In that compilation of general wisdom that surely contributed to the unlikely survival of the Jews in their scatterings and persecutions, readers are advised to ‘Answer a fool according to his folly’(3). And there is no getting away from it, some of the arguments and accusations that are frequently employed against God, religious faith in general and Christianity in particular are just foolish, revealing more about the person who asks them than the issue under discussion. So many times I make a serious point or ask an important question in a YouTube discussion, only to get crass insults, baseless slanders and gross misrepresentation in reply. The tragedy is that people so often get away with saying daft things without reasonable correction. These essays are written for their benefit, and for embattled Christians who need a little ammunition.
I will consider a few of the more common examples of ignorant and silly anti-Christian comments in popular use today, and add to them as I have opportunity. If you use foolish arguments against Biblical Christianity, I hope this will make you think. If you find them used against you, I hope this will help you respond. The wise man, Proverbs tells us, will thank you for pointing out his error to him and grow wiser still, but ‘Fools despise wisdom and correction.’(4)Poisoning the wells of debate by responding to reasoned arguments with insults and distractions is common, it can be seen as a Satanic tactic to prevent people becoming enlightened to the truth that is in Christ.Proverbs tells us that it is difficult to separate a fool from his folly, and he’s unlikely to thank you for trying, but let’s see if we can give it a go.
‘Who made God?’
This is a fair question-for a 4 year old. The fact that adults, including self important TV atheists, can ask it without shame, even as if it was some kind of knockdown killer punch, is an indictment of the low standard of contemporary learning, thought and debate. It also confirms my theory that where religion is being discussed, people feel it’s OK to use a much lower standard of logic than in other areas of discussion. Let’s examine this childish question and what’s behind it.
The simple answer to the 4 year old asking ‘Who made God?’ is that God is the unique and inexplicable eternal being who has always existed without beginning or end. Of course they will say that they don’t understand this: that’s OK, neither does anyone else. As with gravity, which we can measure but do not understand, or the search for the fabled Higgs boson, since when did our failure to understand a complex truth invalidate if? It is an important part of the child’s education to discover that some things can’t be understood because of our various limitations. God, theist believers assert, is the ultimate Uncreated First Cause and exists outside of time. However, the materialist cannot accept this because of their faith position which insists that matter, energy and the laws of physics are all that have ever existed. In their philosophy, if you can’t put something in a test tube or reduce it to a mathematical formula it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. However, they are being inconsistent here, since they uphold hypotheses and multiply entities which are less testable and credible than God as their original prime mover and great maker. Let me explain.
Whoever you are, YOU believe in an Uncreated First Cause. And I can easily prove it.
The reason why it is so foolish for anyone to object ON PRINCIPLE to the idea that ‘God has always existed, since He is an eternal being’ is that they demonstrably believe in an original entity and uncreated first cause, as a result of which everything else subsequently came into being. There must be a first cause or else we have infinite regress, which is a logical impossibility.
The idea of infinite regression goes something like this. If God was created by some other being, then this created God is less than his creator. We then have to ask the question ‘Who created the being that created this lesser being we call God?’Then we have to ask who created, THAT being, and so on forever. The obvious nonsense of this is illustrated by an anecdote about a lady who said she believed the world rested on the back of a giant turtle. When asked what the turtle rested on she said ‘another turtle’. Asked what that rested on, she said ‘Its turtles all the way down.’ All the way down to what? And what do we mean by ‘down’ anyway? The idea of ‘down’ supposes direction if not gravity, that had to have been created or already existed too.
The idea of infinite regression is clearly absurd. People who ask ‘Who made God?’ are trying to link the absurdity of infinite regression with the idea of a created, or evolved, God who is not therefore the Uncreated First Cause. They hope to thereby associate a patently absurd idea together with the idea of God, making faith in God seem absurd. But they are the ones being absurd, as a created God is a god made of straw, not the God of the Bible. Fail. Since infinite regression is logically impossible, there has to be an Uncreated First Cause which by whatever processes gave rise to all else including mind.
Human minds evidently exist. How did they come to exist? Is it more probably that mind emerged from mind or mindlessness?
Fundamental absurdities (e.g. a dry liquid) cannot exist
Another absurd question is ‘Can God make a rock so is that He could not lift it.’ The answer to which is no, because the idea of a rock too big for God to move is absurd. To the simpleton who then says ‘Got you! You admitted there is something God can’t do!’ the reply is that God cannot be that which He is not, for that would be a fundamental contradiction, like a dry liquid. A rock so big that God cannot lift it is an inherent contradiction which cannot therefore exist. A kilogram of iron can be made into a cube or a sphere, but cannot be both a cube and a sphere at once. Some things are not possible.
The only logical alternative to infinite regression is a First Cause which was not itself created but exists in and of itself. Everything thatbegins to exist must have a cause, but what of something or Someone that exists eternally? This is not a very difficult philosophical concept to get your mind around, even if the thing itself is beyond our limited human experience. So the idea of God as the first cause is not by definition any more absurd than the alternative of a materialist uncreated first cause, for example whatever preceded the supposed big bang, matter, energy, the laws of physics etc.
This is a binary situation, only one or the other possibility can be true, and this remains so however much you complexify, obfuscate and hurl insults. Even if you bring in untestable quasi-metaphysical notions like multiverses, or the possibility of some state of existence which is neither energy nor matter, we can’t get away from the question‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Since we began to exist, and since everything that begins to exist must have a cause, there must have been either a material or a non material original entity which subsequently led to everything else. We have to decide on the best evidence available whether it is more probable that this entity had a mind or not. And we must not exclude evidence we don’t like because it points to conclusions we’d rather avoid.
Was the First Cause mindless or Mind?
Given that the cosmos and we ourselves exist (5), then either the cosmos or whatever preceded it was an uncreated first cause. So the materialist atheist and the Christian do not differ over whether or not there was an initial Something for which we cannot account from which all else arose. The key difference is whether the first cause had a mind or was mindless. This now gets interesting, especially if we want to go with the empirical evidence based on what we can observe about mind, meaning and intelligence.
If the first cause was mindless, as atheists have no choice but to believe, then mind itself must have arisen from raw matter and energy by undirected processes. In other words, matter gave rise to mind by a mindless process. Nothing like this has ever been observed. There is no realistic theoretical scenario, let alone empirical evidence, to account for it. It is only accepted because the alternative is a Mind incomparably greater than ours who made us and to whom we are therefore accountable. We often respond to scary thoughts by denial or changing the subject. On the other hand, we have ample direct experience of order arising from minds.
For a trivial example of order arising from a mind, the bowl of bacon and egg fried rice I just fixed myself for breakfast. Simple a dish though this was, there is no record of any such thing cooking itself. We also have plenty of evidence of chaos arising from mindlessness, for example, the working area and washing up bowl full of mess from last night’s cooking. Don’t worry; I have a mind to clear it and do the washing up later. The computer I am writing this on and the Kindle or other device you are reading it on are better examples of order arising from designing minds and the hands and tools that they drive. Like civilisations, computers and their software are hard to make, easy to wreck.
How then did mind and order arise from mindless chaos? Simple, atheist philosophers imagined it, having ruled out the only alternative by their fundamentalist philosophical materialism.
Since there is no known example in any area of human study of mind (or its product, meaningful information) arising from non-mind, which seems the most likely first cause-one that had consciousness and intelligence, or one that did not? It must be one or the other. Since we know that order routinely arises from the actions of power directed by intelligence, the balance of probability veers heavily towards our inevitable uncreated first cause having a mind. Stephen Meyer in his book ‘Signature in the Cell’ puts the mathematical evidence for DNA having been designed. We might as well call this original mind God, and from that starting point go looking for more clues of the kind that we might expect from a supernatural superior being. This is the conclusion the majority of the human race have always made from the available evidence, and still do today. See Romans 1 vs 20 (6)
Multiverse ‘Theory’ is a fantasy and a cop out
So, we all accept an inexplicable first cause which ‘just is’, whether or not we have thought about it very much, and even if it’s a pretty vague idea amounting to no more that ‘The Big Bang’ or that we are one of several jillion ‘multiverses’. The idea of multiverses is a cop-out which rests on zero point nothing to the power of zilch evidence. Its just a smoke screen to obscure the problems (for determined materialists) of the many remarkable cosmological constants (10) such as gravity, atomic forces etc which demonstrate that the universe, and in particular the Earth, is very precisely fine tuned for carbon based life. A reasonable person would conclude that this fine tuning pointed to a designer. Instead of allowing this, materialists multiply untestable hypotheses (violating Occam’s Razor) to avoid conclusions which are suggested by the facts. This is the very thing they accuse people they describe as ‘faith heads’ and ‘fundamentalists’ of doing.
So, enough ‘Who made God?’ already. If you use this cliché it will only make you look as if you haven’t thought it through. I suggest you do think it through and follow the evidence where it leads.
‘All religions say different things. They can’t all be true so probably none of them are true.’
I heard this assertion referred to on ‘Prayer for the day’ on Radio 4 this morning a I edit (4th September 2013). But it is evidently is illogical. It is theoretically possible for one religion, or indeed the answer to any question, to be true and all the others by varying degrees less true in as much as they diverge from the Truth. I find it depressing that educated people can make such lazy, dumb assertions or be persuaded by them. Its like saying‘There cannot be any such thing as a true truth: I swear this is true.’or ‘Some truth claims have been shown to be fase, therefore all truth claims are false’.In recent arguemnt I have had on YouTube about the Syrian war, when drawing atention to facts about global Islamic jhadism, many respondents have effectively said ‘Because Christians have been violent in the past, e.g. the Crusades and Inquisition, you may not say anything about Islamic violence today’.I don’t follow this line of reasoning. Even if we accept at face value all the baggage about the Crusades and Inquisition (and I don’t) then how is this relevant to the clear and present threat to global security from Islam? Its a crazy distraction tactic. One can only assume these posters are Christisity hating atheists who think to themselves ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’.anyway….
The Bible says (6), (7) and (8), that God has spoken to men in various ways, but most perfectly through Jesus. As C S Lewis shows in ‘Mere Christianity’ and the index to ‘The Abolition of Man’, there is a core of shared ethical and spiritual belief that runs across nearly all world religions, which he calls ‘good dreams’ and ‘The Tao’ that God sent men in pre-and non-Christian societies. These include the idea of a Great Maker who is creator, lawgiver and judge, ideas about respect of parents, restraints on sexual behaviour and property ownership, future reward of good behaviour and punishment of bad, the need of sacrifice to atone for sin and much else. I assert as a main theme of these essays that Britain is heading for a calamitous social and economic collapse probably resulting in Islamisation because we have rejected these values and can’t manage for long without them.
The fact that we humans get it wrong to varying degrees cannot mean that there is necessarily no real religious truth, or that we cannot find it if we look in the right way and in the right place. Think, if there was one true religion and a bad devil who didn’t want you to find it, what would Satan do? He’d attack the true religion with slander, heresy, moles (deeply placed enemies who plot, divide, destabilise and corrupt secretly from within) and he would also stir up loads of false religions-some of which, like poisoned bait, would look superficially attractive- and get them fighting and cursing each other in the way that was most disadvantageous to the discovery of real truth. And all of this would be reported and commented on in the most biased way possible. Is this not what we find?
‘All religions are equally paths to God’
This logical absurdity was also asserted on the radio this Setember morning. That’s like saying all roads will take you to Hay on Wye. Maybe they will, if you take the correct turns when you come to the ends of them, but I assure you that if you leave Birmingham and keep heading east, north or south you will never get to Hay on Wye other than by circumnavigating the globe. Try it and see if you have the time on your hands. To say that all religions are equally good is as illogical as saying that they are all equally bad, it’s an assertion based on no empirical or historical evidence or sound theory. People say this sort of thing who would never advance such sloppy thinking in any other area of life. I would not trust my car to a motor mechanic who believed such ‘all answers are in a very real sense correct’ nonsense.
The Pagan connection: The Golden Bough
There is a rather interesting 1922 book by Sir James Frazer, a Fellow of the Royal Society, called ‘The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion’. I mention it as The Golden Bough remains a highly influential source of subtly anti-Christian ideas and beliefs: although not that many people today have read it, a lot of people have picked up ideas from it by osmosis. Some of these ideas were flung out at the dinner party in question and I have heard them often elsewhere so I thought I’d devote a couple of paragraphs. ‘The Golden Bough’is one of those seminal books like ‘Origin of Species’ that many key opinion leaders have picked up ideas from and subtly injected those ideas into the culture, but few people have actually read.
A lot of the content is description of various global pagan religions with an emphasis on festivals, rituals and the idea of a dying and resurrecting god, which obviously Christianity is asserted to have borrowed. I have explained elsewhere why this view is not supported by evidence. Frazer seeks to establish the connection, for example by citing the now very well known facts that Christmas was not celebrated by the early church and that 25th December is the date of the old Roman festival of the rebirth of the invincible sun, the winter solstice (*). I remember 40 years ago seeing a young Irish Catholic woman visibly upset when she was informed that 25th December was not our Lord’s actual birthday but the date of an old winter festival celebrating the passing of the shortest day of the year. Incidentally, this is a vital concept in Christian apologetics-we need to get our facts straight and avoid fighting the wrong battles!
(*) PS Knowing this, I still celebrate the Nativity of our Lord on 25th December, but I hold it lightly. As part of our family celebrations as well as singing of our Saviour’s birth in and out of church, we eat and drink with loved ones, exchange inexpensive presents and give a sum of money commensurate with our spend on festivities to deserving charities in the name of Jesus. I also enjoy a seasonal rest and time of reflection after a year of hard work, and yes, I share the joy of all men, including pagans, that the days are getting lighter from now on. I do not believe this is any more pagan than enjoying a sunrise, going ice skating or visiting an art exhibition. The precise date of the birth at Bethlehem is of limited significance, the fact of it is immeasurably worth celebrating.
Frazer’s main argument, although writing in 1922 he was very careful not to state it too explicitly, is that Christianity is just another of the dozens of superstitions about a dying and resurrecting deity, many of which are connected with growing crops, particularly corn. Think of the song ‘John Barleycorn.’ Christianity happens to have become, so the assertion goes, the most successful of such myths, but that’s all it is. The Golden Bough chronicles numerous pagan religions from all over the world and the whole of recorded human history, describing various rituals connected with sowing and harvesting corn ‘the bread of life’, some involving the sacrifice of a specially chosen person, in many cases their body being cut up and perhaps consumed. Clearly, the question of a parallel with Christ’s sacrifice and the rite of Holy Communion is raised.
Frazer’s intention is obvious-to smear Christianity as a man made myth by association with these primitive superstitions. Like most of the other carefully crafted misrepresentations I have sought to address here, it’s easy to make but quite time consuming to refute. Most of Frazer’s argument consists of describing numerous pagan cults from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece etc to more recent savage practices found in Africa, Central America, Scandinavia and elsewhere. He invites the reader to assume that Christianity is simply one more of these corn god cults which as he puts it owed their similarity to the well meaning but misguided attempts by humans to try to make sense of the mysteries of the universe.
But however successful Frazer is as a chronicler of pagan religious beliefs and practices, when we get down to the specifics of Christianity, we find that his understanding varies from superficial to profoundly mistaken. For example, on page 361 ofThe Golden Bough under the title ‘Oriental religions in the West’ he brackets Jesus with Buddha and writes
‘…an instructive parallel might be drawn between the history of Christianity and the history of Buddhism. Both systems were in their origin essentially ethical reforms born of the generous ardour, the lofty aspirations, the tender compassion of their noble Founders , two of those beautiful spirits who appear at rare intervals on earth like beings come from a better world to support our weak and erring nature. Both preached moral virtue as the means of accomplishing what they regarded as the supreme object of life, the eternal salvation of the individual soul, though by a curious antithesis the one sought that salvation in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from suffering, in annihilation. But the austere ideas of sanctity which they inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties but to the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently renounced the ties of the family and the state in order to work out their own salvation in the still seclusion of the cloister………p 362 ‘…For it should never be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or folly of the vast majority of mankind, whorefused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.’
(my bold-SH)
I am not misrepresenting or ‘quote mining’ here, these are Frazer’s thoughtfully chosen words. He compared Jesus with Buddha, of course ignoring the unique evidence from prophecy that attaches to Jesus and to no other founder of a world religion. He represents Jesus as a preacher of ‘moral virtue’ while ignoring his claim to be the unique Son of God and the whole ‘Lamb of God’ strand of his mission, discussed elsewhere in these essays. He gives him equal status with Buddha who may have been, like Confucius, Bahaullah and many others, a teacher of decent morals but was in no way a peer of Christ. I don’t have time to discuss Buddha or Buddhism at length here, but I was quite into Zen in my late teens and know a little of it. Buddha does not compare on any level with Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus was NOT an ethical reformer or a moral teacher
The idea that Jesus was essentially an ‘ethical reformer’ preaching ‘moral virtue’ is quite off the mark. He emphasised that he upheld the Law of Moses, he said he had come to fulfil it and ‘…to give his life as a ransom for many.’ (Matthew ch 20 vss 17-28). This was not ‘ethical reform’but the supernatural fulfilment of the Isaiah and other Messianic prophecies which I consider in a later chapter.
And what’s this about ‘glorification of celibacy’? Sir Fames Frazer FRS has clearly read very widely about world paganism (although I gather most of his information about global paganism came from Christian missionaries!), but if he can assert that celibacy was a feature of the early church, or as he appears to state here a condition of salvation, I can only wonder if he has read the New Testament at all! We read specifically in the NT that church leaders should ordinarily be married and good fathers, see 1 Timothy chapter 3. I have written in another essay of the unbiblical nature of the Roman Catholic celibate priesthood.
Poverty is not a virtue in Old or New Testament religion either. Charity yes and avoidance of selfish ambition and the love of riches, but not poverty as a goal. I am against the unbiblical ‘prosperity gospel’ but recognise that there is a clear strand of Biblical teaching that promises modest wealth as a normal consequence of godly living including hard work and thrift. God may bless the humble poor and judge the undeserving rich, but poverty is nowhere seen as an aspirational state in Judaism or Christianity, even if it is in Buddhism. Frazer reveals in this passage that however much an expert he might be on his special subject of the pagan practices of primitive societies like the original Native Americans or the ancient cults of Balder, Osiris and Mithras, he doesn’t know quack about the basics of New Testament Christianity. I could (and have) said the same about some present day Fellows of the Royal Society!
Is religion a sociological phenomenon or is sociology an anti-religious pseudoscience?
Frazer certainly draws our attention to some significant and interesting facts that should be thought through rather than peremptorily dismissed or ignored, but the conclusions he invites his readers to draw are very much matters of interpretation. He seems to have bought into the secular humanist evolutionary view of religion as a sociological phenomenon. I will admit that some of his data about pre-Christian nature worship religions do support that view, but he does not appear to have properly considered the evidence about the unique features of the Judaeo-Christian tradition which I have discussed here. See the essays on prophecy, Israel and ‘sense and nonsense about evidence’.
C S Lewis was a serious student of global pagan myths, especially the Norse myths including that of Balder and the ‘Golden Bough’ which as Frazer tells us was mistletoe. He considered the same body of evidence, and certainly studied The Golden Bough as he wrote about it, but reached different conclusions. He asserted (not all Christians see it this way, some are offended by the suggestion) that the story of Jesus did in fact have emotionally satisfying and heroic qualities which overlap with some popular myths, but this could be explained by God sending pre-Christian cultures ‘good dreams’ which would prepare them for the true Gospel in due time. He further observed that the historical and other facts about Christianity set it on a completely different level from all the other stories which involved atoning sacrifice and a dying and resurrecting god. Where are the prior prophecies, prepared peoples and specific times and dates concerning any of those other tales? Can anyone give us the time and place of Adonis or Osiris’s birth, either’s god/man’s ancestral lineage, or the location where either was killed?
Frazer’s attempt to throw Christianity into the same bag as the dozens of pagan nature religions which can reasonably deserve the epithet ‘superstitious mumbo jumbo’ is superficially attractive, but fails. Christians assert that since God knew we would be subject to ‘the futile ways inherited from our fathers’ (1 Peter ch 1 vs 18) including all this ‘And man made god in his own image.’ stuff, He sealed the true religion with many evidences, including the unique and remarkable history of Israel, multiple fulfilled prophecies, the Law of Moses and the miraculous deeds and resurrection of Jesus. The evidence is there if we check it out. It appears that Sir James Frazer was selective in his appraisal of the evidence, he clearly got some very basic things about Christianity completely wrong as I show above in his own words. Most likely like Charles Darwin (see later essays) he began with his conclusion and then selected and assembled the evidence accordingly.
At the very least, the honest sceptic considering Frazer’s assertions about Christianity being one among many made up story about dying and rising gods needs to ask how it became so enduring and successful. Where are the cults of Mithras, Balder, Osiris, Attis and Adonis today?
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‘Religion is the main cause of war in the world…name a war that hasn’t been caused by religion?’
Yes, I really came across that last assertion recently on an internet forum. I of course replied by asking about the role of religion in the many wars in Africa during the latter half of the 20th century or world war 1, world war 2, the Korean war, Vietnam war, and several others and asked what role religion played in causing any of them. The above conflicts were fought for various reasons including competition for resources, rebellion against colonial rule, nationalistic pride, tribal or racial hatreds, political philosophies, demagoguery, simple theft, the military-industrial complex and because, frankly, some people get a thrill from war. Could there even be a devil behind the scenes who stirs men up against each other? Take a look at this example from the recent Libyan civil war (9). None of the wars I mention above were conspicuously caused by religion of any kind.
Some conflicts clearly have had a Christian religious element, for example the long conflict in Ireland, which sadly seems to be flaring up again to some extent. But any claim that even this deplorable conflict was mainly religious is blown away by examination of the facts. The primary cause of conflict was the wrongful theft of land and usurpation of government centuries ago by the British State, combined with tribal hatreds. Catholic and Protestant cultural identity were mainly badges, markers of ‘us and them’. The fighting was not over transubstantiation, veneration of Mary, means of church government, baptism, Thomas Aquinas versus John Calvin or the New Birth. The Irish Republican movement of recent years is heavily into Marxism and has been condemned by the Catholic hierarchy, even if the occasional priest has been involved in gun running. They have had some interesting links with international terror organisations including the PLO and Gaddafi’s Libya, who gave them explosives they used to kill hundreds of people. Irish republican murder gangs are not the sort of people who are known to say prayers before they place car bombs or while they torture their victims. It makes more sense to view Irish Republicans as international revolutionaries or ideed National Socialists (check the IRA/Hitler link) than any sub species of Christian.
Likewise the Protestant ‘Loyalists’ are people of Scottish descent who nurse an age old sense of superiority against the indigenous Irish from whom they are racially and culturally different. Few things in life are ever pure and simple. Nobody from the New Testament writers onwards denies the reality of some Christians behaving unchristianly (to our shame), but to place the whole blame for a political and tribal conflict with deep and complex historical and cultural roots on different strains of Christianity is ignorance, misrepresentation and prejudice. Christ taught us to love our enemies.
I will say it again, shame, shame, shame on Christians-including me- for all our failures to live up to Christ’s teaching and example, but no way can you pin more than a fraction of the Irish conflict on to even perversions of Christianity. You can argue that, bestial as The Troubles were, the recent record of Muslim terror is far worse. The total dead in 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland was around 3,000 (including terrorists who were blown up by their own bombs or killed in exchanges of fire with security forces). This is around the same number of deaths over thirty years as Muslim terrorists calling out their god’s name killed without warning on one day, September 11th 2001. At least 500 non combatants, including Christians at their prayers in church on Christmas Day, have been reported killed by Muslim bombers and gunmen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria just in the 2 months I have been writing this. Not all religions are the same. Do the math.
Does Christianity prevent and reduce the cruelty of war?
There is a strong case to be made that the primarily tribal and political conflict in Ulster was less bloody than it might have been due to the restraining effect of residual Christian belief on both sides and the influence of non belligerent Protestants and Catholics who hated violence and worked against it, including by very courageously passing information to the security forces to save lives. Compare this for example with the 1915 genocide of Christian Armenians by Turkish Muslims in which over a million died. It’s still against the law to discuss or write about this in Turkey, which is in NATO and seems likely to be allowed to join the EU in the next decade. Compare that with the endless British hand wringing over our essentially peacekeeping role in Ireland. Call me any names you like, but do check the facts. By the way, I do know that British soldiers killed 13 unarmed protestors (or were they rioters? its so hard to be objective about such events years later when the story has been overwritten by protagonists. IRA/Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness has refused to deny claims that he was there with a machine gun that day or that he fired it at the army, possibly provoking return fire) on Bloody Sunday. We don’t hear so much about, for example, the 11 people who were deliberately killed by an IRA bomb while at their prayers on Remembrance Day at Enniskillen. The Ulster conflict if at all carefully examined provides little evidence that Christianity even at its worst causes war.
Most religious war is Islamic in origin
Religious war historically has been mostly invading Islamic jihadist armies trying to conquer the world, as Muhammad’s teaching and example encouraged. That was the ultimate cause of the Crusades and much of today’s violence. Check thehttp://www.jihadwatch.org/ and the Religion of Peace web sites which chronicle worldwide acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims on a day by day basis. I appreciate that some readers will be highly offended by my drawing attention to this, especially as so many hundreds more Muslims come to live in my country every day, but if facts themselves offend, I’m sorry but I can’t help it. I’m sure you can find some inoffensive facts if you look for them. There is a strong argument that Crusade was primarily a defensive response to Jihad and that if Jihad had not been resisted, Eurpoe would have been Islamicised a tousand years ago, with incalculable efects on world history. The possiblity needs to be explored at least, currently Islamists and other enemies of the west have the ‘Crusades’ propaganda all their way.
But while it can’t be denied that some wars have been fought in the name of Christianity, it has been a very small minority of all the wars that have happened. In such wars, Protestant Christians have usually been the victims of State Catholicism. And Christians have very likely (although this can’t be proved) prevented or ameliorated many conflicts. One thing that is undeniable is that you cannot possibly make any case for an aggressive war from the teaching and example of Jesus. Quite the reverse. He said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God’ read this in context in Matthew chapters 5-7.
So, please, if blaming ‘religion’ for wars, kindly observe the following logical decencies
1) Specify which religion you are talking about. Vague generalities will not do.
2) Specify which particular war you are talking about.
3) If asserting that a specific conflict was caused by Christians, please try to be objective about other contributing elements to the war, as per the example of Ireland where we see that colonialism, land ownership, gangsterism (i.e. smuggling, bank robbery, extortion and drug dealing etc), economics, equality under the law, revenge, tribalism, Marxist politics and plain psychopathy were also involved. Medical science researchers must allow for confounding and contributing factors, they are not allowed to simply jump to a conclusion because it suits their prior conclusion or prejudices.
4) Set the worst possible examples of wars and violence even allegedly caused by Christianity including Catholicism against the wars and violence perpetrated by Islam and secularist governments. All war is highly undesirable, although a defensive war to prevent a worse evil may be justifiable, but all things being equal 1,000 deaths are ten times worse than 100 deaths which are 100 times worse than 1 death. Do the math.
What about ‘The Inquisition’?
This question usually reveals a poorly informed questioner. In the bitterest irony, he might even be wearing a T shirt with the image of that bloodthirsty communist psychopath Che Guevara, a deadly and enthusiastic inquisitor in his own right. When once asked about giving some of his intended victims a trial he is said to have responded ‘Shoot them today. We can put them on trial tomorrow.’
The word ‘Inquisition’ carries a lot of baggage, false history, and implicitly ignores or denies many other important related questions about intolerance and enforced orthodoxy of belief. Lets get some facts.
The correct response to anyone who attacks Christianity by asking ‘What about the Inquisition?’ is to respond ‘Which one?‘Usually they will be referring to the Spanish Inquisition, and usually they will know almost zero historical facts about it. Suggest they Google it, there is a useful Wikipedia article (10). The Spanish Inquisition lasted over several centuries in several countries and executed fewer than 5,000 people (at a time when execution was a common penalty for a wide range of crimes down to petty theft), less than a tenth of those who were tried. There were several possible outcomes from an Inquisition trial, acquittal, a fine or reprimand, imprisonment, exile or in extreme cases, death. It is then worth mentioning some of the other far worse inquisitions which secular governments carried out during the 20th century.
The Spanish Inquisition spanned several countries and three centuries. It was a state and church collaboration and was about putting down dissent. Dissent could lead to revolt, with all the problems that created, not just for the ruling classes and the priests but also for ordinary people. Has the Arab Spring, in which already twenty times more people have died in Syria alone over the last 2 years than the whole Spanish Inquisition killed in three centuries, been an unmixed blessing? Will it leave all those countries and their neighbours better off? We’ll have a better idea in 20 years, but already Coptic Christians and secularists in Egypt are living in fear of the new hard line Muslim government that is developing.
Given the human condition, every society, every state that has ever existed has needed to watch out for and put down organised movements which wanted to take over the state for their own ends, and sometimes people get hurt. That is not to justify the Spanish Inquisition, let alone to say that dissent or even open rebellion is always wrong, but to get some sense of context and balance into the bigoted anti-Christian propaganda that people routinely make of the Spanish Inquisition. States of all kinds have always watched out for and controlled, and sometimes executed, people who sowed disorder. This harshness needs to be set against the terrible price of anarchy and civil war. Given the human condition, the rule of law needs eyes, ears and teeth. Once again, I am not justifying the Spanish Inquisition, just asking for a sense of perspective and fair comparison with other states. Anyone who wishes to assert that the Spanish Inquisition was uniquely evil and/or that this evil arose from Christianity needs to make their case with facts not slogans.
5,000 dead over three centuries is trivial compared to the Pol Pot Inquisition that took place during my adult life. He and his secular humanist Marxist revolutionaries were responsible for some 2,000,000 deaths during their 2 year reign of terror. That’s 2 Spanish Inquisitions a week for 2 years. The atheist Pol Pot was a Paris educated intellectual. His victims did not receive trials or have the opportunity to save themselves by recanting or going into exile, as generally happened in the Spanish Inquisition. Unlike the Spanish Inquisitors, he was not restrained by any fear of God or his own coming judgment. Could he have killed all those people (obviously he didn’t kill them all personally, he was the figurehead of a system, but the point remains) if he believed in a God who sent impenitent murderers to hell? I think not. This atheist who would claim to be a man of science with his co-believers were responsible for many more deaths that all the inquisitions which had even the most tenuous connection with the Christian religion during the whole of known history.
‘Christian’ versus secularist inquisitions-different orders of magnitude
Consider the various inquisitions held in the 20th century under Hitler, Stalin, Mao and numerous other Christ rejecting rulers. I would have far preferred to be a Protestant ‘heretic’ under Torquemada than any kind of intellectual or educated person, let alone a Christian, under the mass murdering atheist inquisitor Pol Pot. His intellectual successors are imprisoning, torturing and murdering Christians for their faith in North Korea today.
I read an article in National Geographic looking at the killing fields of Cambodia. In one museum there was a huge pile of skulls, many showing the death wounds caused by men’s and women’s and boys and girl’s heads being smashed in with machetes or shovels. Pol Pot’s men were instructed to beat people to death to save bullets. There was a sign in a detention centre for prisoners telling victims not to waste time during interrogation by denying what they were charged with or they-would be beaten more severely with the electric lash. I repeat, the secularist Pol Pot was educated at a Paris university and this happened during my adult lifetime.
Listening to or reading the excuses that atheists make about the Pol Pot inquisition is disgusting, and I am talking about many internet discussions I have been involved in. Apparently, for them, the fact that as each victim was murdered, Pot’s henchmen and slaves did not (as far as we know-most of the witnesses are either dead or perpetrators) pronounce some form of words like ‘ I am killing you in the name of atheism’means it doesn’t count. Make your own mind up whether this is a fair objection or extreme special pleading, and try to be sure of both your facts and the conclusions that can be drawn from them. Decide whether it is just-or just propaganda- to make more fuss about 5,000 religiously motivated killings several centuries ago or 2,000,000 philosophically motivated killings done a few decades ago. And that’s just one of the 20thcentury’s atheist mass murderers, who comes in third after Stalin and Mao (Hitler was probabaly best classified as a pagan or deist rather than an atheist. Claims that he was a Christian would be laughable if they were not so sick). All four men were Darwinists.
What about the wars of religion?
If we go further back in history than the blood-soaked twentieth century, yes there have been terrible wars of religion between Catholic and Protestant sides. These wars raged in France and Germany particularly over several centuries. There was a Catholic/Protestant element in the English civil war, although there was much more to it than that. I am not going to deny that sometimes Christians deny Christ by going against his teaching and example. But were these wars of religion fought entirely due to differences in belief, or were there other causative factors like greed, lust for power, necessary self defence against a clear and present danger however caused, wounded pride, blood feuds, factionalism, tribalism, political intrigues and other curses of the sinful human condition?
And as one piece of feminist graffiti I recall cited in Private Eye some years ago said ‘Men must like wars, or else they wouldn’t keep having them.’ How true.
The idea that if we had compulsory atheism (as tried by peace loving humanitarians like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Leonid Brezhnev whose unprovoked invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 has a LOT to answer for to this day, Enver Hoxha etc) then there would be global peace as de-religionised men would have nothing to fight over is so tragically ignorant of the facts it would make me laugh if it didn’t make me cry out in pain and despair.
‘What causes war?’ WE do!!!
As the apostle James wrote, ‘What causes wars and fighting amongst you? You want and you do not have, so you steal.’(11) A character in one of Tom Clancy’s books said ‘War is armed robbery writ large.’ Base desires like theft, envy, anger and greed have always been the biggest motive for war. And also the desire to extend your own tribe or culture against the other person’s (how very Darwinian!) God says ‘you shall not steal…you shall not kill…you shall not move your neighbour’s ancient landmark’. How exactly does this teaching inspire men to go to war against each other? The idea that religion per se, let alone biblical Christianity (which is the only religion I have any intention of defending) causes war is unhistorical, unscientific, and unfair to the point of being libellous. It is not slightly mistaken, it is the polar opposite of the truth. And yet it is perhaps the quickest cliché to the tongue of every person who is feeling challenged by the Gospel and does not want to hear about God’s demands on their life. And since it only takes a couple of seconds to make the assertion but a long discussion and lots of facts to refute it, it remains a useful weapon in the hands of any agencies who don’t want you to come to Christ.
Role of the Catholic Church in religious wars
The Catholic Church is the largest Christian denomination, although some Protestants deny that it is a Christian church at all. I cannot agree with them, but it is clear that many of its core teachings diverge considerably from Biblical Christianity. The Protestant/Catholic divide is a vile suppurating cancer on the face of religion, but, and I hate to have to write this as I know how it will be presented, the division is mainly the Catholic Church’s fault for teaching false doctrine and refusing to be corrected on it. Martin Luther wanted to REFORM the church, not split it. The split came about because the necessary reforms were wrongfully refused by those in power. I’ve written a bit more about this in another chapter. Having said that, there are plenty of divisions in Protestantism too, even within denominations. There are divisions and divisions. My wife and I disagree about lots of things; for goodness’s sake, I can’t even make my own mind up a lot of the time! We need to learn to disagree peacefully and humble ourselves in the search for truth.
I have got to say this so I might as well come right out with it. On any fair reading of history, the Catholic Church, or rather the Roman church/state power entity, was the main cause of the wars of religion in Europe. However, history is always disputed. Each side has its own version. See the brilliant Kurosawa film ‘Rashomon’ (12) for a clever look at how we come to different conclusions depending on who’s telling the story.
I attended Roman Catholic primary and secondary schools, and at each I was taught a false version of history which exaggerated Protestant abuses against Catholics and completely ignored and denied the far greater abuses perpetrated by the Catholic Church against Protestants. This culpable and systematic miseducation was a disgrace. I do not say that there is no error in the opposite direction, but knowing from first hand as I do that various people groups tend to teach a version of history that reinforces their own committed beliefs was a powerful lesson which has stayed with me. I have come across the same thing elsewhere and I believe we are being systematically lied to in a big way about several major issues. That’s why I’m writing.
It is a fact of history that Catholics have usually persecuted Protestants when they have been in a power sharing relationship with the state in countries where there was a Protestant minority. Yes, it has happened the other way around but less often and with less ferocity. Even in Northern Ireland where the horrible combination of freemasonry and Scots/Irish Calvinism (don’t ask me how they combine the two) plus unfair distribution of property over centuries has led to the repulsive Orange Order (13) most of the actual killing has been done by the ‘Catholic’ nationalist/republican side. However, beware of my bias. It makes you angry when you realise you have been systematically fed untruth and distortions, but as Jesus said ‘be angry, but do not sin.’ One distortion does not excuse an equal distortion in the opposite direction. If George Orwell could write, as he did in ‘Homage to Catalonia’, an autobiographical account of his part in the Spanish Civil War, that readers should beware of bias in all writing about that war, including his own, then lesser writers should do the same.
Logically, if you see other people are biased, look to your own bias
We must all assume that we are both biased, and misled by other people’s bias. Recognising that is the first step towards objectivity and fairness to others. Beware the person who says ‘You are biased but I am truly objective. Your beliefs are based on wishful thinking, prejudice and superstition but mine are based on facts, research and science.’ And if I sound as if I am saying that kind of thing, then please check the facts for yourself. But do so realising that everyone is biased, including the people you most respect.
Since the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, about which much has been written elsewhere, there has been what some would call an unholy cohabitation between church and state. The Church of Rome as a global power arguably goes back to this time. A full consideration of the whole church/state power axis at which Rome has been the heart would require a lifetime’s study and a book of 500,000 words, and would still be disputed, so please excuse my brevity. I am more interested in getting people to examine their prejudices, think outside the box and do their own research than trying to force feed them my conclusions.
Prior to Constantine’s establishment of Christianity as a state religion, believers tended to be persecuted, sometimes very severely, by the ruling power, whether Jewish, Roman, or other pagans. When the church joined with the state, there was clearly a mutual benefit. The church got exclusive faith rights and protection, the state got spiritual legitimacy and stronger control of its subjects. Where there is power, money and control, there will be opportunity for rapacious and ambitious people who enjoy controlling others. We are often warned in the New Testament against using religion as a means of financial gain. That warning would not be there if there was no danger of falling into such a trap. And the Catholic Church fell right into it. Corrupt practices like selling supposed saint’s relics and the sale of indulgences (e.g. taking money for special prayers to guarantee dead loved ones would spend less time in purgatory) are legendary. Vast sums were spent on ornate church jewellery, and other practices which are nothing to do with the New Testament heart religion of Jesus of Nazareth. Of course the mediaeval Catholic Church sponsored some great art and music, as well as establishing schools, colleges and hospitals. It wasn’t all bad.
A complacent and corrupt Catholic church eventually made the Protestant Reformation necessary. The Reformation was about many things, but at its heart was the idea of devout people being able to read the Bible for themselves and a sweeping away of the accretion of unbiblical if not pagan additions to the simple Gospel message. These additions included the veneration of relics (alleged bits and pieces of saints), the unbiblical idea of a separate, let alone celibate, priesthood, purgatory and prayers for the dead, and worship of Mary as ‘The Queen of Heaven’ (14). At its best, the Reformation was about sweeping away all these unbiblical accretions and returning to a simple Biblical Christianity based on faith in Christ alone.
Believe it or not, the Catholic power was unwilling to accept this challenge to its hegemony! After all, if men and women can come to God directly through Christ as revealed in the Bible, they don’t need to pay and obey the priests. The pope, cardinal, bishops and priests and the rulers with whom they were in a mutually beneficial power and control relationship didn’t like this challenge to their exclusive franchise on religion, hence the Spanish and related Inquisitions and various wars of religion. I’m asserting that most of these wars, in as far as they were religious at all and not about land, money, pride, trade routes, militarism, tribalism etc, were mainly about the Catholic power trying to stamp out a rival form of Christianity that was more authentic than itself. Protectionism and jealousy if you like. That is exactly what we would expect if false teachers had secretly crept into the church to corrupt it from within, false leaders were milking religion for money, and if some courageous and inspired men and women tried to put things right. That is exactly what Jesus and the Apostles predicted would happen. That is exactly what Satan would do (15)
Obviously that’s a short outline sketch of a big subject, but this is only an essay flagging up common populist misrepresentations. You can do in-depth research as well as I. But AGAIN beware of bias, your own, mine and everyone else’s’. And remember William Tyndale, tortured and burned to death for translating the Bible into plain English so that everyone could read it. What was that about?
Religion divides people
Yes of course it does. And so does gender, ethnicity, intelligence, age, language, income, politics, musical taste, housing, cultural and dietary preferences, morality, honesty and a whole host of other things-including ANY truth claim. All you need to divide people is a lie or misdeed and at least one person who won’t stand for it. True religion must inevitably divide people in a wicked world. Jesus warned his disciples that if they sought to follow him, the world would hate them. In some of his hardest words, he said he had come to bring division, even within families. This is sad. Of course there would be no division if everyone became a sincere, true, humble, penitent follower of Jesus.
My own experiences of losing friends and alienating people though my profession of biblical Protestant faith are too painful and personal to be set down here. If this book sells, it may lose me more friends, maybe even my medical career if the Dawkinist thought police make much more progress. We need an English Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom of thought, speech and belief NOW! Suffice it to say that it was comforting to read the words of Jesus who told us to expect to lose friends for following him, but that he would more than make it up to us. However, I have reached a point in my life when I have to go with what I honestly believe to be the truth. I solemnly affirm that I will change my mind about anything and everything if I am proved wrong by sound evidence. Meanwhile, if I am sure I can see the truth on any matter, I am divided from someone who can’t or won’t see it, and either one of us must change or we must remain divided. Let us disagree, if we must, peacefully but I cannot see my way to sacrificing permanent truth for temporary peace.
How many wars has Christianity prevented?
I would like to ask a question that is rarely put, even if it is unanswerable. How many wars, struggles and fights from regional conflicts to pub fights and dinner party rows have been PREVENTED by Christians who were following Christ’s teachings and example? Of course it’s an impossible, question to answer quantitatively. How do you evaluate a war that did not take place? How can you possibly know ‘what would have happened if…?’ However, it is theoretically possible and I would argue reasonably likely that where a significant number of committed concerned Christians have been in positions of influence or power in the right place and the right time, they may have prevented (certainly if they were living for Jesus they would havetriedto prevent) conflicts that would otherwise have gone ahead, and brought others to a swifter and less bad conclusion. This would be consistent with the teachings of Jesus who said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.’ Certainly, if you go to the worst places in the world, you will almost always find Christian workers there, putting their lives on the line for Christ, doing good as he did. Not so many in Somalia or other Islamic countries where Christian aid workers are targeted for assassination.
Christopher Hitchens’ conundrum
The well known atheist and Marxist writer Christopher Hitchens (not to be confused with his brother Peter) used to make much of a question he come up with, which goes something like this.
‘Can you tell me of any good deed which could be done by a religious believer but not but an atheist?’
I know that Christopher H was quite pleased with himself for coming out with this gem, I heard him talking about it on the radio, saying how when he came up with one day he phoned his mate Richard Dawkins pleased as Punch! He had been on a book tour asking it of every religious spokesperson he met in debate and really seemed to think it was a knockdown killer argument.
What a pathetic epitaph for someone who fancied himself a great thinker.
This is about as bright as the ‘could God make a rock so big He couldn’t lift it’quip. Firstly we have to address the question‘What do we mean by good?’ As Christopher’s’ brother Peter says, a man who once burned his Bible and was a revolutionary Marxist but then converted to Christianity, atheists need either to borrow their ideas about good and evil from religion, or admit there are no moral absolutes so we may do as we please. But assuming we settle on an idea of good something like the moral teachings of Moses and Jesus, what then of Chris’ conundrum?
Let’s narrow it down to altruistic giving of money to a charity helping poor people in a distant country, people we will never meet and who can’t pay us back. A charity perhaps like The Leprosy Mission, The Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund, Christian Aid, Compassion, or one of the many, many other Church based charities run, staffed and supported by Christians in this country. I mention the above charities since I personally support them because of my faith. Could an atheist give money to them? Of course he could, but does he? And if so, how much and how often? Hitchens’ conundrum is not a real question at all, it’s is a word game designed so that only one answer is possible, one that resolves nothing and leaves us no wiser.
If we believe that altruistic giving to relieve the sufferings of widows and orphans and famine victims etc is good (and I believe it is, because Jesus said so), then it ought to be of some interest to measure what kind of people give the most. Immediately we have difficulty collecting and verifying data, not least because Jesus told us to give to charity quietly and without making a fuss to impress men. I mention my personal giving not to justify myself but to argue a case. Christians I know generally do give generously, we’re certainly supposed to as a primary faith obligation.
Of course there are many worthy charities like Medecins sans Frontieres which are supported by people of various faiths (including myself) and none. However, a Google on Christian + charity will bring up many web sites. Charitable giving, like sexual faithfulness in marriage, hard honest work and truthfulness, are central to Christian faith. That doesn’t mean all Christians always perform those things or than no others do, that would be a stupid thing to say, but as C S Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, it does mean that anyone who really has determined to live the Christian life will be living a better life than if he or she had not, give or take some self righteous priggishness (of which I have certainly been guilty).
If Christopher Hitchens was interested in investigating the theme of good behaviour as determined by people’s beliefs, then instead of trying to rival his mate Dawkins as a crafter of easily parroted simplistic slogans he should have done some research not into what people COULD do but what they REALLY do. Potential is one thing, performance is another. That would be the scientific approach, measure something, don’t just concoct quips and trick questions. I mention elsewhere the large amount of published research evidence that faithful monogamous marriage produces better measurable outcomes. That is the kind of measurement that is meaningful, not vacuous discussions about what people ‘could’ do. And of course the people who reject Christianity anyway are unswayed by such evidence as they have already made up their minds.
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In summary, a lot of propaganda slogans disguised as enquiry and historical facts (and the above is only a sample) are used to slander and misrepresent Christianity and help persuade people the world would be better off if we were all atheists, like Joe Stalin or Chairman Mao. A lot of this, as discussed above, is unexamined garbage which, if swallowed, will lead to us being very badly misinformed and misdirected about perhaps the most important set of decisions that face us, affecting not just our life here but, if Jesus was right, our eternal destiny.
If there was a bad devil that hated you and had a miserable plan for you, how would he behave? I think he would encourage useful fools to pump out daft slogans like ‘Who made God?’ etc.
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(1) Psalm 14 vs 1 “The fool says to himself, ‘There is no God.’ “. Since the psalms were written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, this is evidence that there is nothing ‘New’ about the New Atheism.
(2) Luke 12 vss 10-21 a rich man boasted of his wealth and made great plans for all that he was going to do but God said to him ‘You fool! This night your soul is required of you, so what will happen to all your goods and plans?’Read it, it’s a tale for today and for each of us.
(3) Proverbs ch 26 vs 4, 5 ‘Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you become like him.
Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he become wise in his own eyes.’ This is a fascinating balanced couplet which far from being contradictory shows us that getting it right can be tricky and we need to be alert to opposite errors and think carefully in each situation to find where true wisdom and correct action lie. The Proverbs can guide us but it’s not painting by numbers, we have to think and discern. I believe that the training in this kind of wisdom that the Jewish people have practiced over the millennia has amongst other things helped them to be so successful. The wisdom in Proverbs has been tested and proved, it has helped the Jews survive the severest adversity. Looks like evidence to me.
(4) Proverbs ch 1 vs 7 ‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, fools despise wisdom and instruction’
(5) Some freaky thinkers will even deny that we humans exist, perhaps citing some obscure form of Buddhism or the film ‘The Matrix’. Well, even if they are going to argue that we are only illusions in the dreams of the Great Turtle or whatever, then they are still positing some kind of entity, some form of ‘Life, but not as we know it’ of whose thought we are but ethereal projections as the First Cause. Whichever way you possibly attempt to configure the argument, there has to have been a First Cause. Why could it not be God? Remember Occam’s Razor.
(6) Romans ch 1 vs 20 ‘ …ever since the beginning of the world,(God’s)eternal power and deity have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made, so that they(men who deny God)have no excuse.’
(7) Acts ch 17 vss 16-34, including ‘…Men of Athens, I perceive that you are very religious…I noticed many objects of your worship and also an altar with the inscription ‘to an unknown god’. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.’
(8) Hebrews ch 1 vss1-2 The writer to the Hebrews begins his narrative by saying that God has spoken to men ‘In many and various ways’ over history but now has finally spoken through His Son. Orthodox Christian teaching is that God has indeed spoken to men in various ways, and His message has been variously watered down, misunderstood and misinterpreted to greater and lesser degrees, as it is to this day, but that the fullness of God’s word comes to us in Jesus of Nazareth. See also Hebrews ch 11 vs 6 which suggests that, somehow, God will reward those who try to seek Him from whatever background.
(9) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16051349 this disturbing account of mass killing and ethnic cleansing illustrates man’s inhumanity to man due to various motives combined with our debased nature, without any question of a religious cause arising.
(10) The cosmological constants include gravity and several other forces of nature which exist at a very precise level, either side of which life as we know it would not be possible. Gravity is perhaps the simplest to understand. If gravity was a little bit weaker, the earth would lose its atmosphere and organic life could not possibly survive anywhere in the universe. If it was a bit weaker still, the earth itself could not exist as it would just drift apart in space. However, if gravity was any stronger we would not be able to walk upright and all kinds of other things that make life possible wouldn’t happen. That’s just gravity, there are many other ‘Goldilocks’ things about the basic laws of physics including the forces which hold atoms together that have to be ‘not too big/small/hot/cold/light/heavy etc but just right’ a full discussion of which is beyond the scope of this book. The odds of any of these cosmological constants, let alone all of them, being ‘just right’ by accident are ridiculously low. The response of atheists to this? Simple outright denial (see Romans 1 verse 20 again), and the invention of fantastickal evidence-free theories about multiverses which cannot be tested (and so are philosophy rather than science). But, for them, the multiverses theory, or whatever replaces it next year, must be true due to their determination not to believe in God however strongly the evidence points to Design. Anything, ANYTHING but God and His Christ.
(11) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
(12) James ch 4 vss 1-2
(13) http://www.christian-restoration.com/fmasonry/orange.htm
(14) Rashomonis a classic black and white film in Japanese with subtitles. It tellsthe story of a murder and rape in flashback with a narration (acted out in the film) by each of the various protagonists and witnesses, one after another. Each tells the story differently and at the end of the film the viewer is left wondering what really happened. And were the storytellers lying or genuinely misremembering? There is a sequence a bit like this, perhaps a homage, in the thriller ‘The Usual Suspects’ to which I have referred elsewhere in these essays, which is also told in flashback by a man who may or may not be telling the truth. Getting to the real truth is rarely easy- recognising this, and that we are all biased, are necessary first steps. So is realising that there are those who for their own purposes don’t want us to know the truth.
(15) http://www.barr-family.com/godsword/queen.htm This is a useful factual reference for the blasphemous pagan term ‘Queen of Heaven’ I do not necessarily endorse anything else in this site or links and I don’t mean to needlessly offend Catholics, but it was quite a shock to me after nearly 2 decades hearing Mary the mother of Jesus referred to in church as‘The Queen of Heaven’ to realise this was a pagan term, cursed in the Bible. No wonder the Catholic hierarchy has always discouraged independent Bible study.
(16) 1 Timothy ch 4 vs 1. ‘The Spirit expressly says that in the last days some will depart from true faith giving heed to deceptive spirits and doctrines of demons.’ Many other biblical prophecies predict that the Church would become corrupted from within and persecuted from without. Regrettably, this has happened exactly as foretold. Divisions in the Church make it much harder for believers to live the Christian life, harder to preach the message, and confusing outsiders. Exactly as Satan, if he exists and hates and fears the true church as the only threat to his ambitions, would have intended.