I've heard about this Spencer guy before. A friend of mine ran across his website some months ago and told me he'd found an interesting guy. Basically, he characterized Spencer as an atheist waiting to happen, but that he's invested so much of his life (and employment) in Christianity that the chances of such are slim to nil. (We atheists who used to be Christians are always on the lookout for these kinds, sort of like firemen scanning the windows of a burning building for people who need a ladder.) But I had forgotten about this, and was intrigued to stumble again across this self-styled "Internet Monk."
Spencer has some excellent points. Here's an excerpt:
The speaker say[s] that you need Jesus more than he says anything else. Over and over. We need Jesus. If you are awake to what's going on, you know that it's likely to prove true that anything and everything will be said until you finally admit you need Jesus. Does this seem like trying to get you to "break?" Yes.
There is, behind this appeal, a kind of crass sales pitch that really can make you angry. It's like being told by the guy in your living room that you need a vacuum cleaner or Tupperware. You can't help but feel that your "need" is really about this guy's need to be right, or to make the sale. What you "need" is hardly his business, especially standing up there without really knowing you at all.
It must be insulting to constantly be told you need Jesus by someone who doesn't know you. Even if you DO need Jesus, how about getting to know me at least as well as a telemarketer?
Well, I don't know that I'd call it "insulting," exactly, but it's incredibly inept, which I think is what Spencer is getting at anyway.
See, the whole theological structure of Christianity is entirely self-contained. You can tell me all day long that I need Jesus, but the whole point of Jesus is that he died for my sins, and the only way I would believe I was a sinner is if I was already a theist of some kind (because sin makes no sense unless it's about the relationship between a creator and its creations), and I would probably have to be a Christian specifically for that to have any kind of effect on me. In other words, trying to "save" me by throwing Jesus at me isn't going to work. Mostly, it's just going to make me laugh at how little you understand your own religion. The whole thing is circular. It's the Christian religion that makes me a sinner, and the Christian religion that saves me. Out here in the real world, we'd call that a confidence scam, or at least a conflict of interest.
Christians don't seem to understand that we who are wholly outside--the atheists, the post-Christians, the full-on unbelievers--are not like your ordinary, garden variety "Christian nation" sinners, who basically buy the Christian cosmology and "worldview," but have consciously rebelled against it. We real outsiders are operating on a whole other plane of existence where Christianity is hopelessly ineffective. But I've gone too far with that metaphor, because Christians and atheists do in fact operate within the exact same universe, strangely enough. One could never tell by the way they talk.
For further reading on this topic, see some of my previous posts: Being Human vs. Being Christian, Chronos & Chiros, The Christian Man's Burden, No Faith for Atheists, and Answers to Questions.
5 comments:
Hey theomorph, found your blog via What If I Stumble. How ya doin'? Anyway, just wanted to comment on this post (duh).
I agree with the futility of arguing salvation to someone who doesn't believe in God, and therefore, sin.
I'm curious what your thoughts are as to conscience; whether you believe that it's merely the conditioning we've received in our upbringing, or whether we are or are not born with an innate sense of right and wrong.
I see you've commented on this a little in at least one other post, so if you'd rather just point me to a post, that's fine.
Nice blog, by the way!
It's complicated, subtle, and not something that lends itself to explanation in a world where the discourse is dominated by the Christian conceptual paradigm, but the short answer would be, No, I don't believe there is an innate sense of "right" and "wrong."
I do believe each individual has an innate sense of approval. For instance, if someone were to harm one of my loved ones, I would have a strong sense of disapproval--this is not something I want to happen; it is a shock to my desires and my ability to control my circumstances. But I don't think that translates into the universal abstract of "wrongness."
That's easy to see, I think, when you look at how people treat each other. Maybe John does something that harms Mary, and Mary naturally disapproves of John's behavior. But meanwhile, John is operating according to his own view of the world, and the fact that his actions have also had an adverse affect on Mary may not matter to him. Was it "wrong" for him to behave as he did? Mary says yes, John says no. How do you arbitrate? We face that kind of perceptional conflict all the time, which is why the judiciary exists. Ultimately, what often happens is that the approval and perception of the person who feels "wronged" is imposed on the person who has committed the affront, and by way of empathy and sympathy for the person who has become the "victim," the community comes to see that process as "justice," and that process becomes the basis for forming a "universal" principle of what is "right" or "wrong": Should someone behave the way John behaved, we are going to decide that situation in a similar manner. Hence we build up a sense of precedence in our society that's based on our sympathy with victims, and that develops into a traditional ethic which is passed on through upbringing.
Unfortunately, every part of that is going to lead to another question, and a longer and longer discourse. What do I mean by "loved ones"? Whence this "love"? What is "disapproval"? Why do I have "desires"? What do I want to "control"? Where does this "sympathy" come from? Why does sympathy for victims take precedence over sympathy for offenders? Is there some functional reason for this?
That "Christian conceptual paradigm" I mentioned above doesn't get much beyond the surface level. It assumes that things like "right," "wrong," and "love" are basically what they mean within the sphere of our language (i.e., the words are just defined by other words, which in turn are defined by other words, and it is very difficult to start grounding these things in reality, because they're abstract concepts, and not referents to tangible things like "a tree" or "a ball"). There is no push within most Christian views of ethics and morality (that I have seen) to look more deeply into these terms and see what they really mean on a basic, functional, and non-linguistic level. Put another way, human behavior existed long before the language came around to describing it, but we are not used to considering our behavior outside the abstract linguistic categories that were created before people got around to thinking more deeply about them. There is this nice word called "love," but if you think very hard about what love actually is, it becomes apparent that it's really an incredibly vague, catch-all kind of term that doesn't seem to mean much of anything useful. There are these words called "right" and "wrong," but when you try to find the referents that correspond with these linguistic constructions, what do you find? However, instead of trying to do that, most people would rather just think of the words within the already abstracted realm of the language itself. They're just playing word games, in my opinion, defining and redefining terms, pushing symbols around and so on. I'm not into that. Language games are for witty novelists, not for people who want to do serious reflection on human behavior.
Again, to put it another way, humans are these extraordinarily complex creatures whose behaviors are governed by factors no one yet fully understands (and might not ever), but we talk about ourselves using these linguistic categories that are huge simplifications. Ultimately, everything comes from the experience of the individual, and the language is just a way for individuals to pretend they can consolidate their experiences. So we make these universal categories like "right" and "wrong" and use them to describe what are really individualized responses to a multiplicity of circumstances.
There are certainly responses that are similar for most or all people: For instance, most of us bond with other people in a variety of relationship types, and most of us experience a similar feeling when those relationships are betrayed. If someone I consider to be a friend does something I consider to be un-friend-like, I'm not going to have a response we would label "positive." The similarity and consistency of human experiences and responses can develop into tradition, and that becomes our "universal" categories of "right" or "wrong." What does any of that mean at the basic biological, neurological level, though?
In short, I am skeptical of the perhaps overly simplistic way that our language categorizes our behaviors. "Right" and "wrong" exist as categories in our culture and in our language and in our daily lives, but I'm not so sure they have much reality beyond that. They certainly stem from real, shared experiences, but they also represent a polar distillation of a much broader spectrum of what humans actually experience. I.e., some people are easily offended while others are not, and our individual senses of approval or disapproval can fall along a whole range of levels.
Sorry if that's a little obscure and esoteric. I think this subject is far more difficult that most people are willing to admit.
Hey, thanks for your reply. Man, that was a post in and of itself!
I have a question not entirely related to this post, but I couldn't find an e-mail address for you so I will just ask it here.
I'm be interested in reading what you think of the resurrection of Jesus. I see that most of your arguments against Christianity (or theism, in general, for that matter) have to do primarily with internal reasons. One of the main reasons I am a Christian, however, is because I cannot explain away the resurrection. I've heard all of the theories, and frankly, they're weak.
Anyway, if you have time I'd love to see a post on that. And no, this isn't some sort of bait where I think I know where you're going and have nifty follow-up questions. You can rest assured I'm not trying to "convert" you. I just think you raise good questions for believers like me, and I like what you have to say. It makes me think more about my faith, and that's a good thing.
Joe: it sounds as if the "alternatives" you've heard about include Jesus not really dying, going into a coma, disciples stealing the body, or somesuch.
However, maybe the resurrection didn't happen at all. The only stories that describe it are the gospels (including non-bible). It's possible (to give one possibility) that the resurrection never happened at all, and that the stories are all made up - Jesus was just killed and entombed, and the rest is fiction. This one alternative seems more likely to me than a resurrection (it's much simpler), and I'm sure you can think of more.
Yeah. I think it's also quite possible that Jesus didn't even exist, or that if he did his life was so embellished by layers of gospel writers that looking for an archaeological record of this guy based on what's written in the gospel would just send us barking up all the wrong trees. Christians never seem to have a problem with the fact that the earliest writings in the New Testament were those of Paul, who never even claimed to have met Jesus! Jesus as "the historical Jesus" doesn't show up until decades after he supposedly lived. It strikes me as odd that a God orchestrating this major shift in his relations with the humans would have managed to bungle things so badly. Why couldn't he swing a little more documentation? Say, a single primary source from during the life of Jesus?
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