Church: Pope was wrong … Come again?

The Catholic Church has now apparently distanced itself from a recent claim of Pope Francis that even atheists, as long as they are good people, can receive salvation and get to heaven.

The Rev. Thomas Rosica made the following statement:

All salvation comes from Christ, the Head, through the Church which is his body. Hence they cannot be saved who, knowing the Church as founded by Christ and necessary for salvation, would refuse to enter her or remain in her. … (Pope Francis) is first and foremost a seasoned pastor and preacher who has much experience in reaching people. His words are not spoken in the context of a theological faculty or academy nor in interreligious dialogue or debate.

Notice the part in italics. It doesn’t appear the church actually submitted a wholecloth retraction of Francis’ statement about nonbelievers entering heaven. They seem to have conceded that possibility in theory, even if leaders within the church vehemently disagree with Francis’ statement. The part that trips them up is the fact that atheists would not willingly enter heaven even if they could, and thus, in that regard, they can’t be saved. This seems like a technicality to me, but in any case, also at issue here is the church’s doctrine of papal infallibility.

The pope, as you might recall, gets his inspiration from God, according to the church and sits in a position of infallibility originally promised to Peter in the New Testament. This is the entire basis for the position of the pope in the first place. It’s right there in the Catholic Encyclopedia (as quoted from the “First dogmatic constitution on the Church of Christ,” July 1870):

The Vatican Council has defined as “a divinely revealed dogma” that “the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra — that is, when in the exercise of his office as pastor and teacher of all Christians he defines, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church — is, by reason of the Divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer wished His Church to be endowed in defining doctrines of faith and morals …

  • The pontiff must teach in his public and official capacity as pastor and doctor of all Christians, not merely in his private capacity as a theologian, preacher or allocutionist, nor in his capacity as a temporal prince or as a mere ordinary of the Diocese of Rome. It must be clear that he speaks as spiritual head of the Church universal.

One could argue that declaring who can and cannot enter heaven does not fall under “defining doctrines of faith and morals,” but if the church argues that the pope is not divinely inspired and is not actually equal to or above some ivory tower theologian, then what is the pope but a puppet? Second, what if God, if we assume he exists for a second, actually stopped being a jealous and immature father, cruelly demanding both love and fear, and decided to be more progressive for a change, inviting nonbelievers into heaven if they wanted to come and if not, no hard feelings. What if that was the profound message Francis was delivering?

Further, and a more indemnifying point, if the pope is not getting his words directly from heaven and from the lips of God himself, then he is just another mortal with no special connection to heaven whatsoever and inspired, not by God, but by his own humanity. That, to me, is a beautiful thing but a ruinous thought for a church that has built a centuries-long legacy on betting that it had a singular grasp on both knowledge and the divine will.

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Apologist Eric Hovind’s arguments torched by 6th-grader

In this video, Christian apologist Eric Hovind not only fails to answer a simple question from a middle schooler, but used a weak bit of logic in the process:

Essentially, Hovind argued that humans beings can’t know anything without God, and it is only through revelation that we can know for certainty that God exists, and presumably that 2+2=4. And it is only because Hovind is so certain God exists that he must self-evidently be right. I’m glad he cleared that up for us all.

The sixth-grader in this video — I believe is name is Chad Dehler — skewered Hovind on these claims. If you can’t hear the exchange, here is what was said at the 1:01 minute mark:

Chad: So if I don’t know everything in the world then I don’t know you exists?

Hovind: Unless you have revelation from somebody who does know everything, and that somebody that does know everything is God.

Chad: So that means if I don’t know everything that means that I don’t know that God exists.

Hovind’s camp later posted a follow up video claiming Chad didn’t fully understand Hovind’s argument. Of course, the follow up video did not actually elaborate on Hovind’s argument nor did it address the initial question about evidence for God. It merely included some additional video that suggested that Chad’s father, a former believer, might not be 100 percent certain that God does not exist. And this was supposed to be the “gotcha moment” for Hovind, when no prominent atheist anywhere, from Stephen Hawkins to Richard Dawkins, has ever said to my knowledge they were 100 percent certain that God does not exist to the final degree. Yet, it is believers who, without a shred of proof and a shoddy book to boot, admit of the certainty of their claims.

Here is the full debate between Hovind and Chad’s father, Bernie Dehler:

Salvation for atheists?

Continuing the policy of pretty much making up things as they go along, the Catholic Church, under the leadership of Pope Francis, skipped 2,000 years of Christian tradition, which holds that only believers in Jesus get to have redemption and eternal life, and proclaimed that even atheists can get into heaven so long as they are good. So much for John 3:16, “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life,” nearly the entire book of Revelation, and well, free will, since I doubt that even nonbelievers who also happen to be “good” — that would be almost all of them — would not want to be dragged into heaven and forced to sing praises to God for eternity. That, to them, would be hell.

Here is the pope:

The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart, do good and do not do evil. All of us. “But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.” Yes, he can … The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the blood of Christ, all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone “Father, the atheists?” Even the atheists. Everyone! We must meet one another doing good. “But I don’t believe, Father. I am an atheist!” But do good: we will meet one another there.

Stephen Colbert, a Catholic himself, opined on the pope’s declaration in a recent edition of The Colbert Report:

Christians who believe in evolution

This is in response to a comment I received from Rich Flowers a couple days ago regarding a post about young earth creationists. Flowers writes:

It’s so easy to demagogue and ridicule the young earthers. Why don’t you come after us mainstream Christians who believe that much of the Bible is reconcileable (sic) with science? That God created evolution?

In the first place, I think it’s a stretch to suggest that belief in God-inspired evolution is kosher among mainstream Christians. For support of this, see my post on an official Darwin Day and the general pushback in the United States against giving Charles Darwin the recognition he deserves, particularly given the number anti-science, young earth lawmakers sitting on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, and indeed, in Washington generally. For instance, here is the anti-science Georgia Rep. Paul Broun:

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.

It’s a sham that this guy is in anyway remotely associated with the word science, much less is a member of a committee to that end.

And then, there is this data from Gallup in 2010, suggesting that four in every 10 Americans, not just Christians, believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago. Consider the following table:

Credit: Gallup

Credit: Gallup

This shows that among believers who attend church frequently, 60 percent believe in the young earth proposition, while only 31 percent of people in the same group think evolution was guided by God. Not surprisingly, 31 percent of people who rarely or never go to church believe in an evolutionary process independent of any god. So, the link between “mainstream Christians” and a theory about God-guided evolution is far from concrete.

That said, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the following are true: the Bible, Christianity and evolution. What are the implications? The argument from Christianity on how these are compatible may go something like this: the Bible claims that for God, a day is like 1,000 years, so an indeterminate amount of time could have passed between the six individual days of creation, allowing the millions of years necessary for human evolution to take place. Further, in Genesis 1:24, God doesn’t appear to just speak the animals and plants into existence, but says “let the earth bring forth” the animals, which seems to partly suggest that some other process may have been at play in the creation of biological life. Of course, that theory is shot down when we consider man’s creation, since the Bible is clear that God breathed life into man “out of dust.”

But we can go further. Evolution holds that man and every other modern species developed by slow degrees through the process of natural selection from simpler forms. The Bible, on the other hand, tells the narrative that man, although he fell in the garden, is the exalted species above other animals and can achieve redemption and eternal life if he believes in Jesus. Man is also the only species with a soul. Notwithstanding the fact that the concept of a “soul” has no basis in science, since everything that makes us who we are, along with all of our memories, are products of the brain and genetics. Christianity also maintains that man is eternal, with some people spending eternity in hell and some in heaven. There is also no basis in science to believe this is true either. When we die, we lose consciousness and our brains simply shut off. There have, of course, been reports of near death experiences, but there is strong reason to believe that these are hallucinatory in nature ((Britton, Willoughby B. and Richard R. Bootzin. “Near-Death Experiences and the Temporal Lobe.” Psychological Science. Vol. 15, No. 4, April 2004, 254-258.)), largely a result of lack of oxygen to the brain.

Let’s ignore these details and still maintain that man evolved by God’s plan. At what point in the human evolutionary process did God arbitrarily decide to confer a soul on the species? Five million years ago? Two million? One hundred thousand? Three thousand?

Finally, Flowers said in the above quote that he thinks that “much of the Bible” rights with science, but of course, how can one dismiss certain parts of the Bible that may not right with science (i.e. the existence of sorcerers) and accept other parts. Either the Bible is infallible and inspired by God or there are certain parts of it we can’t trust. And if there are certain parts we can’t trust, how can we trust any of it? It is here that Christians will roll out the Holy Spirit for what believers call “divine discernment.” Well, if we’re talking about Christianity reconciling with science, we might want to reconsider a spirit who has the unique capacity to transmit information to the brains of millions of humans at once.

In any case, here are some more details we can’t trust from the Bible:

  • In Genesis 1:11, plants are ludicrously made on the third day before there was any light.
  • In Exodus 9:24, a bunch of Egyptians are killed by fire raining down from the sky. Some versions soften the language to say “lightning,” but the KJV lists it as hail and fire.
  • Leviticus 11:13: Bats are not birds.
  • Human don’t live, and never have, to be 100s of years old. Some suggest that this was a translation miscue. If so, chalk that up to another way in which this all-powerful God allowed his one and only written communication with humans to get garbled.
  • There is no evidence that there was ever any firmament encompassing the earth, as written in the KJV. Even the ancient Greeks knew that. Again, later versions of the Bible have softened this language to make it sound less fraudulent.

I could go on and and on (Here’s more), but believers must ask how they work out which parts of the Bible to believe as authentically coming from God and which parts may have been errors made by man. Yet, if the Bible is supposed to be inspired directly by God, why does it contain these errors in the first place? Certainly an all-powerful God would have been capable of making a book perfectly reconcilable to science, even if his ancient scribes didn’t understand what they were writing. Surely, they didn’t understand the logistics of a burning bush or fire raining down from the sky. Why would it have been a stretch to preempt Darwin and mention evolution or even germ theory or string theory?

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Equal parts sad and pathetic

This nonsense no doubt goes on in Christian private schools all over the nation, but I felt the need to write about this here because it involves my home state of South Carolina. The images below show an actual test given to fourth-graders at Blue Ridge Christian Academy in Greenville, S.C., which is about an hour drive north of where I grew up. Consequently, in college at Clemson University, I participated in a point-counterpoint debate in a student newspaper in which I defended public school education versus private schools. I was a Christian at the time, but even then, I recognized that private schools, unfortunately, provide a certain level of “shelter” from the real world, whereas public school students learn to interact with people of all backgrounds, and they get more of a well-rounded and less biased education.

These captures, from Blue Ridge Christian Academy, speak for themselves:

test1

test2

If this is not overt and immoral indoctrination of children, I don’t know what is. The “history book” of the universe is the Bible? Seriously? I could go point by point on each of these questions in this “quiz” and show how they are all terribly wrong in every single degree, but I think question 15 gets at the basic problem. Was the average size of a dinosaur a sheep? Nope. And far from it. But do believers teach their kids to be unquestioning and un-inquisitive sheep? Yep. And that is immoral, sad, pathetic and a pitiful record for the human species.

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GOP’s Hispanic crisis

It’s not a good sign for the future of your party when the GOP’s “Hispanic outreach director” has had enough of his own party’s dim view of immigrants and immigration. A little more than a year ago, Pablo Pantoja was tabbed as the guy to reach out to Hispanic voters on behalf of the Republican Party.

Pantoja is not just calling it quits on the job, but on the party. He announced this week that he was switching parties, writing in an email:

Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.

It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others.

Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them.

Studies geared towards making – human beings – viewed as less because of their immigrant status to outright unacceptable claims, are at the center of the immigration debate. Without going too deep on everything surrounding immigration today, the more resounding example this past week was reported by several media outlets.

A researcher included as part of a past dissertation his theory that “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ.” The researcher reinforces these views by saying “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.” (Here is some more information on what Pantoja was referencing).

Although the organization distanced themselves from those assertions, other immigration-related research is still padded with the same racist and eugenics-based innuendo. Some Republican leaders have blandly (if at all) denied and distanced themselves from this but it doesn’t take away from the culture within the ranks of intolerance. The pseudo-apologies appear to be a quick fix to deep-rooted issues in the Republican Party in hopes that it will soon pass and be forgotten.

The complete disregard of those who are in disadvantage is also palpable. …

Of course, this switch should not surprise anyone within the GOP; if it does they are even more out of touch than I thought. The party has been anti-immigrant and in some ways, anti-color, for so long now that attempts by Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, John McCain and others to send the message that the GOP is now more Hispanic friendly probably falls on deaf ears at this point. Much too little and much too late.

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Influence of progressive thought

P.Z. Myers whiffed on that Atheism Plus foolishness, but nonbelief should be about celebrating our similarities, right? That said, I couldn’t agree more with what P.Z. Myers wrote about Minnesota’s recent vote to OK gay marriage.

Gov. Mark Dayton wrote:

In my heart, I grieve on both sides. Because I know what it’s like to be alone and I know what it is like to have somebody close to you and love you. But I grieve inside because I feel we are opening the doors to Sodom and Gomorra. And in the end, God is going to be the judge,” said Nelson, of Blaine, tears running down her cheeks.

Aww, he grieves on both sides. How compassionate. He apparently doesn’t shed too many tears, however, since priestly exhortations against sodomy by fiat trump any loneliness folks might feel from the lack of a mate, straight or otherwise. In the end an all-loving, peaceful, war-loving God — depending on which part of the Bible you read — with his fire and brimstone, will be the judge.

How moving.

Myers concludes his remarks about Dayton:

I would bottle your tears and perhaps dot a little on my wrists every morning — Eau de Schadenfreude. Or perhaps I would drink them like a rich bitter wine, and laugh. Those aren’t tears of sorrow, but of nasty cruel bigotry — you didn’t get your way, you weren’t allowed to demean other citizens of this state in the way you wanted, and now you get to weep in frustration, while I have no sympathy.

And to compare the happy men and women who can now aspire to share equally in love and marriage with evil, wicked horrible people from your book of lies, to tell yourself they are damned and will be destroyed…well, I’ll dance an especially happy spiteful dance on your broken dreams of oppression, lady.

Conservatives and religious types just need to swallow this conclusion hook, line and sinker because it’s reality: in regard to equal rights – particularly gay and civil rights – as San Francisco goes, so goes the nation. Resist this trend all you want but believe you me, whatever is now acceptable in California, the Pacific Northwest and New England, will one day be acceptable in the entire nation, the South included, and no matter how long it takes, resistance to this fact is futile.

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