The Christian Vision

 A little while ago, during a talk in our congregation, the speaker made the comment:

"The Christian vision is not anti joy; it is not anti material; it is anti idolatry".

I thought this was a great way of setting out not 'Christianity', not 'Christian faith/teaching/belief, etc' but a phrase with more contemporary accessibility: the 'Christian vision".

This makes it accessible, IMO and a less alien invitation to discussion.

The Christian vision in its grand scheme is the resolution of mankind's/humanities existential dislocation; our alienation from self, each other and the final platform of basic reality: the Creator who is and who speaks.

Lack of this resolution has significant indication in the grasping for 'identity' that seems to obsesses the less connected in society; but the internally referenced 'identity' is the most fragile means of address there is.

After all if the locus of the real, the true, is merely oneself, how fragile! 

When a sceptic challenges a biblical account.

One such decided to challenge the flood account.

My thoughts on the matter.

When a skeptic challenges the flood in terms of 'cruelty', the first question to them has to be: "who's worldview are you using here? Yours or mine?"

The answer is always interesting.

If theirs, then inquire what theirs is: most likely some version of materialism/naturalism, or, rarely, some form of pagan 'impersonal god' In either case, what's wrong with the flood? The usual critique of value agnostic worldviews arises.

How do they establish any value judgement that is not merely their personal preference with no relevance to anyone else, and no meaningful grounding.

If 'yours'; that is they think they have spotted a flaw in the Christian/biblical worldview, then ask them to get it right; to fully acknowledge the world view; of particular importance here is that death by flood would be speedy, and babies, before they had done right or wrong would be guarded against perdition (you have to leave Calvin outside the house for this).

Most detractors fail to understand how seriously we take the futurity of all mankind: either reconciled and in God's family, or purposely estranged from God, rejecting him.

Apart from that the narrator of the video sets out some helpful observations. 

And remember for any challenge of biblical accounts; check their underlying framework or worldview, then ask for their defence of that before getting on to their supposed critique

"Why is it an issue for you?" is an easy starting point for the probe. 

Words to use and points of departure.

In the formal addresses given in congregational gatherings (what we irrelevantly call 'sermons' in church 'services') the speaker can take the opportunity to give tips on personal evangelism and apologetics.

Here are three recent examples I've heard, with excellent springing-points for steering the conversation.

1 - This morning in our assembly the speaker, discussing Luke 16:19, etc. (the rich man and Lazarus) and 1 Timothy 6:17 commented, inter alia, "the Christian vision is not anti-joy or anti-material. It is anti-idolatry".

2 -  A dinner talk recently attended had the speaker sketch the rich man of the above parable (a type of fable) as one "living his best life" or "he doing him" to adopt a modern trope. But it can only end in dissolution, in death, and achieve nothing! And how does one know it is their 'best life'. It is simply unremarkable to seek self! The talk was entitled "The paradox of being true to yourself".

3 - I wrote about this one a while ago. The talk was on Luke 13:1-5. The often missed point here..no, in my hearing the perpetually missed point, is that Yeshua explains the so-called "problem of evil/suffering".

This is only a problem for non-believers, which is rarely explored with any rhetorical power: the disjunct between desire and experience show there is a problem, a big problem brought by our alienation from our Creator. It shows us the consequential state of the cosmos and who we are, prompting the only resolution of repentance (and commitment to our Creator in Yeshua -- who is the Creator incarnate).

Each of these can be used to steer a conversation and used as a springboard for some conversational evangelism: connecting the gospel with the fruitless conceptions of the world most cultures engender. 

Three types of religion

When we start to consider 'world-views' we can be met immediately with the falsehood that "all religions are the same"

 

Clouser in "The Myth of Religious Neutrality" goes a way to identifying how this is an inadequate analysis, even at the most superficial level, but Westphal is even more helpful. 

Westphal presents an interesting taxonomy of religions in his book "God, Guilt  and Death" that shows that they very much are not, on their own terms, the same as each other.

Mr AI summarizes it below

"AI Overview

              

In his book God, Guilt, and Death, philosopher Merold Westphal categorizes religious sensibilities into three main classes to explain human responses to finitude: exilic, mimetic, and covenantal religion. These are structural classes of religious thought rather than rigid historical traditions.

1. Exilic Religion

Core View: Takes life in the material world to be an exile from the soul's true home.

Salvation: The process of returning to that spiritual home.

Key Focus: The divide between the transcendent/spiritual and the physical world, often viewing the latter as fallen or a place of alienation.

2. Mimetic Religion

Core View: Views life as normatively controlled by a right, harmonious relationship with nature.

Salvation: Achieved by rehearsing or participating in the origins and depths of nature, often guided by myth and ritual.

Key Focus: Cosmic order, cyclical time, and living in accordance with the rhythms of the natural universe.

3. Covenantal Religion

Core View: Adds a historical dimension to the cosmological focus of mimetic religion.

Salvation: Finds ultimate meaning in historical interactions between the divine and humanity, giving specific historical context to human guilt, death, and redemption.

Key Focus: Time as linear, historical responsibility, and moral obligations to a personal, active deity.

While Westphal uses these three categories to describe the phenomenology of religion, he also famously explored the Phenomenology of religion broadly, and examined how modern critiques of religion can function as a tool for Religious Belief.

If you are exploring Westphal's work, I [Mr AI] can:

Detail how these categories apply to specific traditions (e.g., how Christianity blends these elements).

Summarize his concepts of faith and reason.

Provide an overview of his views on the hermeneutics of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud).

Let me know which of these you'd like to focus on! "

[end of AI]

 

Some people are faced with contention about the 'rightness' of seeking to persuade others to change religion.

Two thoughts on this:

Firstly it raises an interesting question of moral epistemology and the possible source of 'rights' along with the basis for any ethical or moral judgement, because those who would reprimand for proselytizing are themselves seeking to impose their 'religious' belief on us!

Secondly, we typically have initial evangelistic conversations that 1. seek to understand the other's belief system, and 2. seek  to explain ours. No push to 'convert at all"

Greg Koukl has two excellent books on this: "Tactics" and "Street Smarts".

 

On covenantal religions.

 

The three main ones are often said to be Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There are others of course but very small. Perhaps Zoroastrianism, for example.

Islam is interesting in this category as its conception of Allah ("the god") has mimetic characteristics.

 

Allah seems to be contained in the cosmos, has physical characteristics and seems to be physically localized. His "word" seems also to be both "Isa" (the Islamic misnamed distortion of Yeshua) and the 'eternal Quran', which itself is eternally physical on tablets in 'heaven'. This latter is strange given its occasionalist references, historical errors, physical mistakes and inclusion of late Christian pseudepigrapha .

 

How this plays out

In the idea of man and the idea of of mans relation to the world are different across the three types.

Mimetic religions have man as an integral part of the world and not substantially differentiated from it.

It is finally monastic.

Materialism/physicalism reflect this in that man is an assembly of basic particles and everything about man is founded in his material substance. Man has no more status, finally, than a rock!

Exilic religions depict man as separated from the basic IS: an impersonal undifferentiatedness. There is no innate significance to man or, it seems, the basic "IS". Man's 'object' (the worth of which fails to be established by the nature of the basic being espoused) is to be unified or undifferentiated with the basic "IS". Upon this the individual dissolves into the IS.

Against these conceptions covenental religions set man in contrast to both the material cosmos and the separate self-existent Creator: Yahweh in both Judaism and Christianity. Fundamental to man is relationships, which are real and substantial.

Man is distinguished from both other types in a combination of his substance and his dependence. While similar materially to the cosmos is differentiated by virtue of spiritual self-consciousness that is only resolved in relationship with Yahweh through his Spirit sent by the incarnate Messiah. The Genesis creation account in chapters 1-3 illuminates this.

  

 

How to teach apologetics.

This morning at the old ecclesiarium, the paid guy's talk was on Luke 13, among other things.

It was all OK as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough with a massive missed opportunity.

The passage that caught my thoughts was vss. 1-5, about the WHS disaster at Siloam where a tower collapsed killing 18 men.

The issue of the importance of repentance was picked up (oddly, as the congregation does have a Calvinistic tinge, alas) but the opportunity for a bit if apologetic training was missed. And every opportunity should  be taken to at least give people the means of fruitful discussion with others.

One of the most difficult (for most) questions non-believers put to Christians is the 'problem' of suffering in a world with a loving God. Of course most people here conceive god as a sort of fairy-godfather who should be nice to us then just get out of the way.

Yeshua puts his finger on the point: repent.

Our experience of a world where we have betrayed our imageness and turned our backs to God is a world in a spiral of death makes a point. It is not 'natural'. It is discordant with what we hope and how it should be.  So 'evil' (or for the godless 'inconvenience') is the great alarm bell that there is a cosmic fire in our world and we'd better act fast.

This is not 'condition normal' it is 'condition red -- emergency' and the only way out is to re-engage with the Creator by repentance to him (and for we post resurrection folks) belief in Christ.

Belief here means entire commitment!

God has acted and offered us the way out of this mess in the world he made for us to reflect his love in, but don't. Yet it remains our world which will be replaced by the New Creation populated by those who want out (or 'in') and are 'in Christ'.

Nothing else matters (apart from caring for the sick, the poor and the damaged, being kind and humble).

So, Yeshua is the solution of the massive and terminal 'problem' we experience. If we didn't experience it, how would we know there was a problem?

After explaining this in a kind discussion, with lots of questions. it might be apposite to ask the nonbeliever if their non-belief offers a better solution. Probably not.

 

Couses of course

One can attend endless of those ceremonial speeches that are given at church gatherings -- you may know them as that performative art-piece 'the sermon'. You know, the 20-40 minutes of words you most likely forget as soon as you leave the auditorium in which it was given.

Well, the church I am part of has stepped past this massive error in Christian discipling ('education' or training or equipping) by conducting courses for those interested in upping their skills and/or knowledge in living the Christian live.

Here are the three courses on offer this term:

1. Telling your story: how to 'give one's  testimony'.

2. Reading through John's gospel with a friend using a specific app for shared reading, and

3. Running a 'Beyond Hope' session/s for your friends or neighbours.

All good starting points.

BUT

I'm more than a little concerned at (1), not having attended it yet. I may do a report on it in a few weeks time after I have.

Most 'testimonies' are boring, unless spectacular, like Paul's, or David Wood's, inevitably self-centred if not self-serving and irrelevant.

As one apologist points out, the 'testimony' the old-time mainstay of 'witnessing' is that it is personal, and in being personal, largely sending an inherent subjective message. What we do need to be able to do is give a reason for the hope within us. 1 Peter 3:15. Peter didn't say 'give a tesimony', now, did he?

So, far better if we 'workshopped' 1 Peter 3:15 the way we would give an account for the hope we have in Christ to our friends.

Like I've written before, one needs a set of three formats for this:

1. the 'elevator' pitch. A short, punchy couple of sentences.

2. the 'coffee chat'. A longer duration set of ideas that you can weave in to a chat, and

3. the 'dinner discussion'. Here you  prepare the sort of road map for a longer discussion, with a few of the obvious by-ways, shortcuts and diversions that might spring up.

All in 'everyman' language of course. Not a theological word amongst them.

My basic approach to "Why are you (a) Christian?" is to adopt Greg Koukl's approach crossed with Francis Schaeffer's.

Christianity gives the best explanation for the 'way things are' and for the resolution of the human dilemma.

This invites two questions:

1. "What do you mean/what is 'the way things are?' ", and,

A: we all have a sense that things are not the way they should be: they are 'broken' in some way...nothing is not only perfect, but most things are not at all good.

[This relates directly to the suffering we all see and experience, the frustrations of life and its misdirections ( 'fate' as some may call it). That it is not 'natural' to us as if it was, we would not detect it, it 'just is'. If someone takes this view, they are looking at life's dilemmas and disasters with blank, impassive non-comprehension, lying to themselves that it is of no matter.]

2. "What is/do you mean by 'the human dilemma?" Schaeffer calls it the manishness of man: that man is both noble, and cruel and life is both of great sadness and great joy.

A We all know that there's something wrong, we have shortcomings and endlessly do things we don't want to do, or wish we hadn't done, and the inverse, we don't do things we want to do. We live in a world of frustration, of evil, of suffering that we deeply rebel against. Why? 

Christianity also deals with this realistically, in terms of the real world we know in two ways: our humanity is real, and our despair is real.

Christianity is direct about our personhood, its significance and its reality: it is really real!

Every other construction of the world fails to do this. Maybe not overtly, but always at least implicitly. 

1. They regard the world, and/or the dilemma as illusory, or can only be resolved by denying our nature with final anonymous absorption into the impersonal divine (or in half-baked nostrums such as Buddha's). (Westphal's 'exilic' religions, e.g. Hinduism.)
2. They regard mankind as subservient to the world, continuous with it, it being a impersonal 'force' of some sort. (Westphal's 'mimetic' religions, e.g. Paganism, in modern and ancient forms.)
3. We are integrally continuous with the material world and can only truly be described materially; our human-ness being an abstracted, if not illusory subservient phenomenon on and derivative of the material reality. Modern doctrinaire and informal atheism and agnosticism of convenience rely on this, as does hedonism. Again, reality is at base impersonal.

None of these give humanity a true grounding that is consistent with our life-world and our being in this world. None can ground personhood as a basic constituent of reality and as true: we have true and valid experiences of the world which is truly there, we can make decisions that have real and substantial consequences for both us and (usually) others, and the world is truly there and is intelligible to us. We can produce knowledge that is true knowledge and can communicate it to others with congruent effect.

The grounding of personhood, and of our real reality is only in the description of creation in Genesis 1-3:8a. Personhood is significant, enduring and personal...as is our Creator.

All other conceptions of reality fail to grant the person 'connection' with reality. The person is either ultimately absorbed into 'the one' and de-personalized, ground into dust (materialism/evolution) or a pawn of fates/destiny (most pagan and neo-pagan vague conceptions).

It is only the Genesis description of Creation that gives mankind robust and enduring identity that is directly connected to and an echo of (in the image of) the self-existing creator. 

The atheist who has no belief!

Greg Koukl and Amy Hall have a great podcast on this topic.

The topic was dealing with an atheist who clams to have 'no (particular?) world view' 

 Ask for a response to this statement, there are only three possible answers:

    1. Affirm

    2. Deny (affirms that God does not exist)

    3. Neutral/withhold (God may or may not exist: so how do you test that position?)

The statement is: "God exists!"

They lack a belief in God, because they have a belief about God: that he doesn't exist. Thus they have no belief in his existence/in him.

What does lack of belief in God mean for any objective (or actually, any) morality.

Evolution cannot provide an objective morality, or any real morality of any type as an 'ought' cannot be derived from an 'is'. Hume's guillotine. 

World View:

1. Ask what they think a 'world view' is?

2. Ask what they think reality really is.

There are three obvious options: It is illusory (an exilic religious/world view, such as Hinduism); it is self-sustaining/existent (a mimetic or pagan religious/world view, such as materialism) or that there is an independent God who defines what is really real (a 'covenental' religious/world view, that could extend to include deism, but not theistic evolution, which is more like a mimetic view). 

The issue is how does an atheist explain 1. the evident coherence of the world and our existence in it, with the 2. obvious discontent that existence in the world produces.

A belief: a mental attitude by which one holds that something is so. They can be true or false. So a belief can be false, or true.

Knowledge is a subset of belief; indeed, a true justified belief. This has to be tested.

A collection of beliefs about what is, sums to a 'world-view'. The atheist claim to no particular belief or world view, seems to seek to avoid the burden of proof and dump it on the other side, without having to answer for their beliefs intellectually.

Another tack is to ask if the person believes the underpinning reality is basically material, or basically mind.

If material: how does material produce information: the chemically carried language that governs life. How would this be the basis for any transcendental function? Functions that dominate our mental life, for instance in our constant desire to set, pursue and achieve things of 'value'. Axiology: the final dilemma for the naturalist. 

  

10 tough questions for Christians

This is based on a video interview by Sean McDowell with Doug Groothuis

It deals with 10 prominent, supposedly 'tough' questions that Christians might be asked.

These are the time stamps for the source video with some notes after each.

1-- 0:57 - How can a loving and good God allow so much evil in the world?

The 'evil' in the world; let's call it suffering, tells us what we are like, beneath the veneer of self-righteousness, pride, convenient niceness, and basic selfishness. We can break through these from time to time, usually for short periods, or with an eye to 'duty', but look at the general suffering: Our world, and we can't mange it for universal benefit. Look at the evil that people do, in their simultaneous dignity and corruption: we are people. Evil? It's what people do.

Refer to Luke 13:4: our basic response to evil is to repent. Turn from the world we shape to the world to come and its king, Christ.

Also to Romans 7:14-25.

2-- 5:49 - How can a loving God send someone to hell?

People who repudiate life with God and love their life of alienation from him will not be forced to love God against their will; their will will be 'respected'. The Bible assures us that there is ample reason in the created world to know God. In our fallen vanity we avoid this knowledge. 

3-- 11:18 - Why is God so hidden? 

Only to the obdurate. He has shown himself firstly in the creation, then in Christ, and now, with those, in the church universal and its proclamation of saving hope. 

4-- 15:18 - What about those who have never heard (of God)?

God is just, so all will be dealt with justly. 

5-- 19:12 - If Christianity is true, why is there so much abuse and damage done through the church?

Christ came to save us from who we are, with the gradual transformation this brings; and to help others to see him...also see 1 and 3 above. 

6-- 21:30 - Isn't the cross an example of divine child abuse?

The cross is the culminating demonstration of God saving us. This started in Genesis 22 where, instead of child sacrifice (and Isaac was a 'youth') God provided and guaranteed the sacrifice. The token of God provides, and man cannot 'save' himself. In the Cross, God is the sacrifice. Jesus was God, creator, taken on human flesh and limitation. So, no! 

7-- 25:43 - Is Christianity racist since the Bible was used to promote and justify slavery?

You misunderstand chattel slavery with ancient indentured service one could enter to avoid penury and death.

See Exodus 21:16 and Deut. 24:7. 

8-- 30:38 - Is Christianity homophobic and hateful towards the LGBTQ community?

Leaving aside the tendentious elephant hurling of the terms, Christ came to save we sinners. He hates all sin because it degrades our creational humanity. Any person who turns to Christ is a broken person, but is on the path of recognition of that, seeking its repair in new life aligned with our creational origin. 

9-- 35:05 - Is Christianity at war with science?

Christianity, or rather the world-view of the Bible, framed in Genesis 1-3 shows why science is possible at all. It shows we are in a real world of which we can and are called to make sense. The real enmity is between the dehumanizing doctrines of materialistic naturalism and the various colours of humanism,

10-- 39:00 - Is Christianity sexist?

No. The church often as been as it apes the corrupt culture of the fallen world, but, Galatians 3:28 sets the scene for being 'in Christ'. 

Just who's a skydaddy?

The village cynic will from time to time deploy his or her full force with the witty originality of  a moronic quip that Christians believe in a 'sky-daddy', or worship the 'flying spaghetti monster'.

Now, both make two errors.

1-They place their cardboard cutout conception of the creator-God within the cosmos, enclosed by the system of doom we are all currently caught within; that's not who the creator-God is. He is prior to and beyond this doomed system of decay and frustration which he offers rescue from.

2-The other error is that their mocking unbelief is an unbelief that has produced nothing for anyone. It rebounds on them, because their ultimate point of reference, the point that would show why our lives are truly meaningful, is dust; they start as worm dung, get reorganized into a bunch of cells made of dust, which then, shortly after, become a banal pile of dust once more. And nothing is really of value or significance.

Yet, they live as though their lives, even their puerile quip, has some real meaning.

It doesn't; on their grounds.

So: my 'sky-daddy' beats your 'dust-mammy' any day. If you don't like 'dust-mammy' substitute: dust-bug.

7 Big Questions Seminar References and Resources

This page is devoted to supplementary material for attendees of a '7 Big Questions' seminar. This is a full day seminar for churches (generally, it can also be given in two half-day sessions) to encourage and assist members in being able to think through answers to the seven most commonly asked questions of Christians.

If you have not attended a seminar, naturally, you are nevertheless welcome to use this page.

If you want to organize a seminar or inquire about hosting one, please send an e-mail to 7BQ_Seminars@email.com, with the subject line "I want to organize a seminar" otherwise it will be filtered out.

If you attended a seminar you have access to a moderated discussion group (provided through your registration e-mail address).

Thanks to 'Watcher' for allowing this page to be hosted on his blog.

God, evil and modern man

I have yet to hear a sermon or apologetic that really deals with this in terms that might make sense to modern man. Schaeffer comes closest, but he still doesn't quite do it. Nevertheless, he does touch on it in passing, in True Spirituality when he talks of sin as being the breaking of fellowship with God.

Most disquisitions on this topic do nothing to overturn the ancient pagan impression of 'good' and 'evil' as two forces in active opposition and of similar potency.

But NO!

Good and evil do not float platonically behind God, and do not have any existence except in terms of who God is.

God is good by definition, or more precisely, God is love and the properties of goodness and evil (the inversion of goodness, as hate is the inversion of love) flow from this.

Evil, sin, suffering represent the inversion of God's love, of who God is! The result from rejection of fellowship with God.

A&E were told that 'the tree' would bring them face to face with this inversion, rejection, denial of God. That is, face to face with evil, which they would thus 'know'. That is experience and understand.

Love is the disposition to benefit the other even to your disadvantage, to give priority to the other. Evil is inversion of this, to benefit oneself in denial of others.

This comes out in fragments of pride, greed, selfishness, self-centredness littered through every day. From Adam's step away from God in denying him and asserting his own values in that denial, both Adam and the creation were stranded from man's communion with God. But there was more involved. Not only was mankind stranded, but the creation as a whole was severed from its comfort with God's presence. Man as the steward, as God's vicegerent in the creation had  broken the entire creation

The great tragedy is that the creation was given to us as the stage for our communion with God, but it became the place severed from that communion and God's love and life. It's promise was death, and God warned him.

The domain as a whole was broken, subjected to loss, to decay and degradation as the creation in its entirety was dragged after the one set to govern it in love and peace.

Nevertheless, God's love is unstoppable and perseveres, as does his creature in his image as one with real choices. God in this love acted to establish the 'long stop' position and occupied it in Christ. This position enables the final defeat of death -- the great inversion of the meaning of mankind echoed thereafter in his offspring -- and our regeneration to join his kingdom finally in the New Creation.

Chance based on chance

I came across an old debate of WL Craig's on science and Christian faith.

In the debate Rosenberg completely misunderstands Christian faith, confusing it with animism at best, rather than giving the basis for a rational world view deriving from the direct rational source of creation in propositional information: God thinks of it, speaks it and it happens. What happens is directly related to the words spoken opening up the creation to propositional access.

As an intended creation, propositionally exposed to us, it is accessible to propositional inquiry: we can keep asking and exploring to find out what it is with no limits.

Schaeffer in The God Who Is There in the section on Musique Concrete reports an example of such:

"...The voice is first built up out of chance sounds, reflecting modern man's view that man who verbalizes arose by chance in a chance universe with only a future of chance ahead of him."

Chance here means irrationally, without reason, and so inexplorable and unfathomable. Finally without coherence and epistemologically void.

This is the world, finally ungrounded, the world that Rosenberg unwittingly seeks to build science upon. But his world, the world of mere material with random and informationless interactions, is only the basis for non-science, for the animism that he ironically thinks represents Christianity. Why would science want to explore anything...it's all chance; there is no rhyme or reason! 

But the Genesis creation account shows us that the creation, the cosmos is full of reason and knowledge..there to be found for man-in-God's-image. Not a stranger in the world, not an alien, but its vicegerent.

Incidentally, Rosenberg's dilemma lies at the heart of the fatal contradiction of theistic evolution: that the God who speaks, didn't in fact speak, but somehow worked into a non-speaking cosmos that denies on its own nature any system of information and 'just happens', undermining any basis for a rational epistemology.

The View from Nowhere

Thomas Nagel, a philosopher, wrote a book: The View from Nowhere, which included observations on death.

His defining observation was:

I am concerned with the adequate recognition of my eventual annihilation itself. There will be a last day, a last hour, a last minute of consciousness, and that will be it. Off the edge.

Page 225

Then I go to David Horowitz' book Radical Son. He writes of his thoughts of his parents: "...not even now that they had been returned to their primordial dust...It seemed to me a metaphor for life itself, which sets us free only to bring us relentlessly back to earth.

In his earlier years, Horowitz had been a major player in the 1960 USA student commitment to a communist revolution in the USA...on the basis of what he now terms a powerful "crypto-religion" that transformed into "..cultural Marxism, which denied the very idea of the individual and revived Marx's class as a war against racial and gender oppression."

This sought (seeks) to obliterate the individual, the only locus of suffering and the only source of personhood and its values.

Yet, if one considers that we are but dust and will return to dust, nothing about the individual as having inherent value remains.

It only exists, because we are made like God, and by God: Genesis 2:7.

A game of who's the moral monster?

Is God a moral monster for commanding the slaughter of the Canaanites?

No. It was not random 'racially' motivated slaughter, or genocide. It was a just judgement on a people so corrupt and iniquitously evil that parents gave their own babies for ritual murder in the heated statue of Moloch.

Oh, and this world does similarly: about 40 million babies murdered each year by their mothers, for convenience! And some like to think God is a moral monster?

But there's more.

If, as most people hold, a woman has the 'right' to murder her baby, what's the problem with God killing his creatures in judgement when they are as unremittingly depraved and evil as the ancient Canaanites were?

Secondly, for the materialists amongst you, death is a reordering of chemicals. How does that attract any moral value? Wherein lies your disgust at any action in a material world? It's all just atoms. Nothing to see here, folks, no real 'persons' involved, just move along now.

Or maybe you just can't live consistently with your materialism, because it's not true.

Frank Turek addresses this at https://youtu.be/zjBeR6f-NZ8

 
Willy Craig here: https://youtu.be/9FGv9aOCcyU

Dostoyevsky on Atheism

 Atheism leads to oppression The Possessed by Dostoyevsky.

Talk by Alister McGrath 2005?

Link: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/node/739 from 26:46

Kirilov speech: 'If God exists then everything is his will and I can do nothing of my own apart from his will, If there is no Gd, then everything is my will and I am bound to express my self will.'

Dost is asking what is the supreme moral authority. If there is Gd, Gd is the supreme moral authority and my actions are shaped in some way and limited by the way Gd is and the fact Gd is: I am not free to do anything I please. I am in some way beholden to behave in the way Gd wants me to do. Therefore, there are limits placed on human action.

But, if there is no Gd, or I can so persuade people, then the ultimate seat of moral authority comes to us, to me.

And as you can see, the second point he makes is if there is no Gd, I am under a moral obligation to do what I want and there is no moral authority beyond me.

The point Dost. is making in this quotation is that atheism is not liberating, that you might think that the removal of limits was liberating, but, in fact, it simply removes the limits that prevent human beings from oppressing each other.

He anticipates the rise of totalitarianism: take away Gd and you take away the limiting factor that prevents human beings oppressing each other and leads to totalitarianism.

Atheists very often take the view that there is an obvious dimension to atheism that makes it a liberator, a movement that brings people to their true achievement.

But, I want to make the point that in many ways atheism actually prevents that achievement of our destiny by making it possible to oppress each other in ways that Christianity, for example, would never allow.

Fear: the primal result of atheism

In the great land of Oz at the moment, government sees its job as keeping us locked up. The normal and fruitful operation of society is outlawed. Normal life is outlawed because the populace is scared of the SARS-CV-2 virus (the unique corona virus released from the Wuhan viral research lab in 2019).

While atheists/polytheists/pantheists espouse a great freedom in their belief, they do not escape the fear of death.

That's what we are seeing now.

We see that the underlying reflexive atheism of the populace leads to oppression.

Here's a slice of a talk by Alister McGrath 2005 (from about the 26:46 mark)

 

It springs from a passage in The Possessed by Dostoevsky

Kirilov speech: 'If Gd exists then everything is his will and I can do nothing of my own apart from his will, If there is no Gd, then everything is my will and I am bound to express my self will.'

Dost is asking what is the supreme moral authority. If there is Gd, Gd is the supreme moral authority and my actions are shaped in some way and limited by the way Gd is and the fact Gd is: I am not free to do anything I please. I am in some way beholden to behave in the way Gd wants me to do. Therefore, there are limits placed on human action.

But, if there is no Gd, or I can so persuade people, then the ultimate seat of moral authority comes to us, to me.

And as you can see, the second point he makes is if there is no Gd, I am under a moral obligation to do what I want and there is no moral authority beyond me. [This is less a moral obligation, more a moral inevitability - Ed.]

The point Dost. is making in this quotation is that atheism is not liberating, that you might think that the removal of limits was liberating, but, in fact, it simply removes the limits that prevent human beings from oppressing each other.

He anticipates the rise of totalitarianism: take away Gd and you take away the limiting factor that prevents human beings oppressing each other and leads to totalitarianism.

Atheists very often take the view that there is an obvious dimension to atheism that makes it a liberator, a movement that brings people to their true achievement.

But, I want to make the point that in many ways atheism actually prevents that achievement of our destiny by making it possible to oppress each other in ways that Christianity, for example, would never allow.

 

BTW, I think I recall in an essay by Pannenberg, that I read decades ago, the observation that 'all fear is fear of death'. I've not been able to find the quote in recent years.

How to check out a church

If you want to check out a church, seek responses to these quotes:

a.     The Humanist Richard Kilty asks if evolution and religion are reconcilable, complementary or both. He answers by expressing that, “We are not dealing on this amorphous level, instead we want to know about the antithesis of man in evolution and man in Christianity. And we do have an anti-thesis: Acceptance of evolution precludes the fundamentals of Christianity, to wit, Garden, Adam and Eve, Fall, Redeemer, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. Acceptance of evolution requires the concatenation: fish-amphibians-reptiles-mammals-apeman-man with all transformations occurring naturally. This dichotomy is irreconcilable.”

b.    Kilty goes on to conclude with acute insight that the two are not reconcilable, that a child taught evolutionary concepts (including long ages), will have his belief in God disturbed: “How subversive is evolutionary theory to Church dogma.”

c.     Another atheist looks at the long ages supposedly expressed in the fossil record, and concludes, quite logically, that as this indicates death on a high order, a loving God cannot exist: “We astute rationalists have no qualms regards the predation of primeval organisms as having commenced as dire necessity well over one billion years ago or more under the most inhospitable of prevailing conditions...The fossil record bares no record of lenity throughout the bulk of an estimated 70 kilometres[sic] deep accumulation of sediments in the whole of the visible fossils geological sequence...benevolence has no place in the realms of reality or survival of the fittest.”

5 basic questions

What would be the 5 basic questions of Christian faith?

1. Does God exist?

2. Is God good?

3. Can one trust the Bible?

4. Did Jesus resurrect?

5. Doesn't science disprove the Bible?

Others have a different number '5': what is the gospel?

I think that property flows from number 4 in a fulsome response and avoids the critical question of this post-secular age: that 'science' disproves the Bible, A question that is often put, despite a trend where people seem to be losing confidence in science as the Christian consensus evaporates, to be replaced by a pagan monism. Monism has no place for science because it cannot conceptualise a rational cosmos.

Nevertheless, people grab for 'science' as the fire hose to put out Christianity. When they say 'science' they really mean the neo-Darwin evolutionary synthesis. It has to be dealt with, as it forms a significant part of most children's schooling and underpins the vacuous manipulation of 'critical' 'theory' (which is neither critical nor a theory -- its a political ploy).

They are the first five questions that your church's debating society should tackle.

You don't have a debating society in your church? Sheesh. How do you practice giving an account of the hope that you have?

Atheism is too simple.

Chris Mitchell, in his reflections on C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, Lecture 2: Christian Belief Part 1, mentioned that Lewis' criticism of Atheism was that it is 'too simple'.

Too simple.

An excellent summary of atheism's view that all of our life and experience and the cosmos we are in 'just is'. And that's it.

The human condition, the greatness of the human soul, and its great failings. Well, they just are. That is. The earthworm view of life, to borrow Ellis Potter's term about people 'who don't know much about art, but they know what they like.'

For a few books more

All good.

Books to stimulate a new Christian to orient themselves to the Biblical description of reality.

Here they are:

The Dawkins Proof by Barns

Taking aspects of Dawkins' book The God Delusion and uses them to provide evidence for God that Dawkins must rely on to prosecute parts of his argument. Irritatingly quotes from the AV, for some reason. NASB would be far better.

Evidence for Creation by de Rosa

A brief but sufficient survey of the basic evidence for Special Creation.

Six-Day Creation by Burney

Examination of the defined duration fiat creation of the Bible. Another irritation, he adopts the tedious Puritan authorial habit of enumerating points in ordinals (firstly.....sixthly.... ninthly...), when the modern pattern of simply numbering paragraphs would suffice.

World Winding Down by Wieland

Overview of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its application to information theory.

Did God Use Evolution? by Gitt

Another tedious presentation, yet with good content from a largely scientific point of view. He doesn't really deal with the theological reasons very well, although he does touch on them relevantly.

Foolish Faith by Judah Etinger

An apologetics summary covering origins, the Bible and faith.