Tag Archives: faith
Pesky facts
Turns out they are no problem for folks like Joel Osteen. Faith: Giving people license to believing literally anything about anything for thousands of years.
Don’t let the facts fool you. When you believe, all things are possible. Choose faith in spite of the facts.
— Joel Osteen (@JoelOsteen) December 14, 2014
Agnosticism in America
Not too many surprises here:
California, the Northwest and Northeast are the most irreligious parts of the nation, while the Southeast is the most religious. Of course, the correlation between poverty with religion is well-documented in the world, and with a few exceptions like parts of California, this trend holds at the state level inside the U.S. I would venture to say the same can be said for dichotomies like religion/academic performance and religion/social justice.
Comfort in God
The writer over The Devil is in Dem Books blog recently offered some salient points about what it would take nonbelievers to believe in God. Many of us nonbelievers agree that, for starters, we would like to see an amputee’s arm grow back. After contemplating it further, he thought to flip the question on his Christian interlocutors and ask:
Do you believe that God could ever forsake you? What would that look like? Can you describe for me any scenario at all which would constitute God forsaking you? (bold in the original post)
Different Christians would likely answer this in different ways, depending on the denomination. “Once-saved-always-saved” Southern Baptists would probably say that as long as the person remains faithful to Christ, God will never abandon them, while other Christians would say that blasphemy is a bad enough offense to get the celestial ban-hammer. Still others might say that if a believer ventures far enough into sin and depravity — however that’s defined — there is a point at which (that point never being defined either) God will remove his protective hand and allow the person to go her own way. This latter notion crops up periodically whenever a major disaster hits a place like Haiti or Louisiana. Some evangelicals, like the late Jerry Falwell, will claim that God has abandoned a whole group of people similar to Sodom and Gomorrah. In some Christian circles, such an abandonment can take place on the personal level.
One of the points with which the blogger closes is given that God’s will and omnibenevolence is infallible, he could, in theory, abandon a Christian independent of any action the believer might take simply because that’s his will. Thus, all actions by God can be excused:
All criticisms of the character of the Christian God have been categorically disallowed because your starting point asserts that all he does must be good, must be loving. Since that is your starting point, your frame of reference, absolutely anything and everything which happens must be interpreted as God being faithful to those whom he loves. No matter how awful the situation, it’s God being good to you. Devastating hurricane? God is good. Child has cancer? God is good. Spouse dies in a car wreck? God is good. Minister molests several church members? People are bad but God is good. Congratulations, you have constructed a framework that necessarily precludes any criticism of God. He cannot be unfaithful to you. You have logically disallowed it.
I have thought about this problem often, and this, I think, provides yet another powerful argument against the kind of omniscient, all-loving God of the Bible. If God is the author of morality, and whatever his whims command can be categorically praised as “good,” no matter how heinous they may appear to us, then pretty much anything goes, and Christians are left worshiping a god who, if he in indeed in control, has willed that children suffer and die from bone cancer and millions perish in hurricanes and floods.
Thus, from a nonbeliever’s perspective, it’s disconcerting to hear about people taking comfort in God’s will for their lives and their family’s lives, when his “will” may include nearly unbearable suffering for some members of the family and abundant luck and fortune for others. The blogger rightly called the notion of God being faithful a “meaningless phrase:”
It really should bring little or no comfort when you think about it. Just ask the character of Job from the Old Testament. This concept of God was built in just such a way that no matter what happens, God is above reproach.
Read more here: The Devil is in Dem Books: Why God Cannot Forsake You.
Kirk Cameron: Perpetual floater
A friend of mine, who ironically happens to be a nonbeliever, recently interviewed Christian apologist and charlatan Kirk Cameron for The Mountaineer newspaper in Haywood County, N.C. Cameron is going to be appearing in Franklin, N.C., to promote his anti-gay program, “Love Worth Fighting For.”
In the story, Cameron describes how he came to be a Christian and now calls himself a “recovering atheist,” according to the story:
As a teenager, Cameron starred as the goofy and loveable Mike Seaver on the sitcom “Growing Pains” from 1985-1992 alongside Alan Thicke and Leonardo DiCaprio. But it was his on-screen girlfriend Chelsea Noble that perhaps influenced his life for years to come.
Noble and Cameron have been married now for more than 20 years and have six children. In an interview with The Mountaineer, Cameron said he had labeled himself as a “recovering atheist,” as his Christian faith developed when he was older.
“I lost my faith in atheism when I was 18,” he said. “I had a personal shift in my life that made a big difference (meeting Noble) and I’m thankful for God giving me a new direction to move in.
This account of how he became a Christian just screams someone who has never had a single independent thought in his life. He developed a relationship with his on-screen girlfriend, and he “converted” to her religion at 18 years old. I put “converted” in quotes because I doubt very seriously that he was ever a strong atheist to begin with, possibly someone who had never given much thought to religion, but certainly not an atheist who purposefully rejected religion. He simply became a Christian because he liked her and adopted her worldview. What a weak-kneed, lazy approach to such an important question. I wonder what it’s like to just float through life and to make up your mind at such a young age to follow something blindly for no other reason than another human being claimed it was true.
I once followed Christianity without giving it much thought as a teenager and young man, obviously, but here’s the difference: Unlike Cameron, I didn’t make a choice to follow Christianity. It was all I knew, and like many, no other options existed at the time. Such is the stultifying life in evangelical America. It was only when I discovered a larger world through my own studies and an examination of the evidence that I made a conscious decision to reject religion, a conscious decision to reject faith, not embrace it.
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:
The folly of religion
Hitchens vs. Alister McGrath
Biblical tautology
One Nation Under God?
Now that the kinks are straightened out, here are some of my thoughts about the 120th anniversary of the Pledge of Allegiance and the United States as a Christian nation:
Now if only I could clean up the rambling. I think I botched “recite” and invented a word called “roboticism.” Ahh, the price of a writer by trade going unscripted on camera …
Referenced links: