Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Defining God.
The other night my good lady wife returned from meeting with friends to say that one of our mutual friends wanted to get together with me "to debate religion." She went on to say further that he was going to "brush up" on some things, because he was sure that he "could prove that God exists to me."
*Sigh*
This is a friend, so when the time comes and he feels properly girded for battle, I'll have him over. We'll grill some steaks, open some beers, and talk. And the first thing I am going to ask him is to "Define: God."
Because I will want to establish just which of the many battles we are going to have - it's been my experience that getting this one issue out of the way up front simplifies all that follows. Is it the God of little children, the simple Sky Daddy who lives up above us and makes the ponies run? Is it the background 'Prime Mover' of theologians, who is only found in the deep and abiding love we feel but cannot prove? Is it the vengeful God who hates fags and wants women to be subservient to men, and men subservient to their local Shaman?
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Or is it the Omnicient and Omnipotent God who nonetheless allows us free will and eternal damnation, a la C.S. Lewis?
I've read Mere Christianity, over 20 years ago when another friend was trying to save me from my atheist inclinations. And I've read other bits and pieces of Lewis in the time since, as I come across it as an argument for a "Thinking Man's" or "Atheist's" Christianity (Lewis was an atheist himself into his mid 20s, converting to Christianity at the behest of JRR Tolkien - about the only thing I've ever held against Tolkien). And this is the gist of the arguments that Lewis makes: we cannot understand God, because He is so far beyond us, yet we must be obedient servants because He is God. All those problems with evil and pain in the world? It's our fault - a manifestation of free will. We just don't understand - can't understand - the 'higher purpose' of pain and suffering randomly inflicted on both the faithful and the heathens, but really it all makes sense to God.
Sound like nonsense? It is. Lewis was a brilliant man, but he used his brilliance to argue for conclusions he already had set in mind, rather than legitimate investigations into religious quandries. This is why he is regarded as a Christian Apologist. The quote that got me to thinking about Lewis most recently was this one, from his book The Problem of Pain:
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
Got that? Unless you believe in God's glory, you are a lunatic. Because he's God, you see. And just as it is impossible to look directly at the sun, you cannot look directly at God. It even says so in the Bible, in case you have any doubts.
This post has already run long, so I will not attempt to further illustrate Lewis's apologia, nor to refute his arguments. Wiser and more learned people than I have done so, and with a little effort on your part you can Google plenty of material demonstrating that.
But it does bring me around to the starting point. Lewis is a classic case of a Christian apologist claiming that we simply cannot fully understand a being so far above us as God is, that it would be akin to asking a virus to "understand" Stephen Hawking's mathematics on the problem of information transfer at the event horizon of a black hole. And in so defining God this way, he hopes to put us in our place.
Me, I simply ask what need does Stephen Hawking have of demanding that a virus worship him?
Jim Downey
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bring plenty of beer
I have one very close friend that is very religious even though he knows almost nothing about his own religion. We have had many long, usually drunken, conversations about religion and politics. To no surprise we differ there as well. During a particularly heated discussion he brought out the whole it's only acceptable to insult christians line and how I would never be comfortable saying such things to a muslim. To which I blurted out a line that I think was quite perfect to bring us back to reality. I said,"no I'm comfortable saying these things because your my friend."
And the reality is I have asked many questions of my few muslim friends. I live in a small town and there isn't a great deal of diversity. But over the years I've been friends with a couple of muslims and I asked them many questions about their faith. As they were not nearly as close of friends as the person I mention before I was much more careful not to be insulting, and was mostly just learning about their religion and culture rather than questioning why they believe.
Anyway have fun, and say friends, thats really my only advice, oh and the beer I also recommend lots of beer, but I recommend that even without the heavy conversation. BTW, I love the site.
Beer As Social Lubrication
Heh. Beer is always good to lubricate and act as a shock absorber in those types of conversations.
I have a really great friend - well, my best friend, really - who was raised Mormon like I was (his mom was Mormon), but then went Catholic because his dad was a Catholic.
Needless to say he's one of those guys who imagines that he is a very deeply spiritual and religious man. I don't believe for a second that it's because he is a deeply spiritual and religious man - because let me tell you, I've seen this guy in all his profane, drunken glory, as well as stone cold sober just being a great guy with nary a whiff of religion anywhere to be found.
(An aside: I have a hypothesis that putting on religious airs for your fellow tribe members is a bit like a male peacock displaying his plumage. "Look at me! Look at how pious and holy I am! Have sex with me, desirable females (and males)!" What do you think?)
In any case, he and I have had some wonderful drunken campfire-side conversations about the existence of God, the meaning of life, morality, sex, women, Mormonism and how it has affected us, etc.
I agree that staying friends is the most important part. It is my opinion that good friends, really good friends, are a rare and precious commodity that should be treasured. So, early on in our fledgling conversations I made it crystal clear to him that although I love talking about these subjects (insert an eye-roll from Mrs. Inscrutable at this point in oblique reference to my more than five-year-long "hobby" with UTI - hehehe...), I would back off with no hard feelings if he ever felt like he was cornered or threatened - metaphorically speaking, of course.
It has worked well over the years. He still calls himself a "Catholic" even though he doesn't attend Mass, can't recite a single catechism, and calls the Pope a "Nazi bastard". What he really is is sort of a vague deist who believes in a warm and fuzzy protective god thing that makes everybody happy after they die. That's where his arguments all come from - fear of death. He just loves living too much, and the thought of dying scares the shit out of him.
Oh, we still have the occasional drunken conversation about life, the universe, and everything, but lately it's ended with him and I just staring up into the fog of stars on a clear night out here in the boonies away from the light pollution of the city and agreeing with each other that living life with good friends at your side is about zillion times more fun than without. ;)
A Better Man Than I
You're a better man than I, Gunga Din. I always answer inquiries such as those with the same statement, "No! The discussion will most likely only frustrate and anger you and it will certainly bore me." I admire your patience and would like to see you post how the discussion went.
My (too long) two bits
Apologies for the length of what follows:
I myself get along with just about everybody except the total goddy nutcases. But I find it hard to be CLOSE to people who wear their religion outwardly. Got some friends from my high school days, 35 years ago, who are still friends, but we only talk once or twice a year, and then not about anything deep. My CLOSE friends are all (both) atheists.
I think I would be disturbed by a close friend or family member being religious. But IF they came to me to honestly get my views on the thing, I think I could explain to them just about anything they asked. And I think that eventually I'd suck them over in my direction.
If you talk to this friend, don't think you're going to convince him in one sitting. It takes a while to turn around decades of faith. The one thing you don't want to do, if you really want to get through to him, is set up the discussion as a pissing contest, even a low-level one. Once it turns into a dominance struggle, that aspect of it will move to the fore, and nothing else will get through.
If you've ever gotten into a "discussion" with a serious godder (someone online, for instance, in a chat room or on a discussion board), you know there are a lot of tricks they use so they can walk away feeling they’ve won. Such as changing the subject the instant you’re about to make an important point – you’re talking about the holes in Genesis, and he switches to talking about evolution; you’re talking about evolution, and he changes to the origin of the Universe; you’re talking about the origin of the Universe and he sidetracks you to how people who don’t believe in the Bible can’t possibly be moral.
If you find your friend using one or more of those tricks, it's probably best to just shut the thing down and talk about football. Because the use of those tricks is a statement that he doesn't want to discuss, he wants to Win. If you want to keep him as a friend, either let him win or change the subject.
There are ways you can go at the discussion sideways. Rather than make the talk a “God doesn’t exist/yes he DOES” confrontation, plant doubts in his mind about what he’s been taught/told by focusing on one tiny aspect of it: Talk about morality, for instance, about being good, and where that comes from.
Take a specific instance of being good, something non-controversial -- I like to use the example of opening doors for old people -- and get him to recognize that people of other faiths, and no faith at all, are capable of doing this good thing.
You open doors for old people because you know it’s the nice thing to do, and not because you’ve been commanded to do it by a god. If you look into it, there are at least a handful of good REASONS for opening doors for old people. For instance:
1. Because it’s good to help those less strong than ourselves – it costs you almost nothing but means so much to the person you do it for.
2. Because it’s a win-win: It gives you a good feeling to know you’re helping someone, and it gives them a good feeling that someone cares enough to offer help.
3. Because if you help maintain the tradition of young people opening doors for elders, you yourself will probably someday benefit.
4. Because generous acts help maintain an overall friendly atmosphere in your society, which benefits everybody. If you help some elderly person, likely someone else will follow your example and help your own grandparents or parents.
5. Because compassion feels good, and even though the beneficiary of the act may be a total stranger, the act itself makes you a better person for yourself and your family.
If you were devoutly religious and you found out tomorrow that your god didn’t exist, the reasons for opening the doors would still be there in your mind. You wouldn’t suddenly feel free to rape and rob these old women and men instead of opening doors for them.
If this is true, morality, at least as far as door opening, doesn’t come from religion. At all. It doesn’t come from the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, or any other holy book. If you can find equally understandable REASONS for any other point of morality, the argument holds true. Compassion and caring don’t disappear the second God does.
And ... for some glaringly obvious recent points of morality (let gay people have equal protection of the marriage laws, let women in Islamic societies walk around with their faces uncovered if they want to, let atheist boys join the Boy Scouts), it’s actually easier to be fair and moral if you’re NOT devoutly religious.
In fact, in my view, it’s much easier to understand morality if you’re NOT religious. (But I wouldn’t bring this up in a first talk with an open-minded religious friend.) I’ve met religious people who didn’t have the least idea about what morality was or where it came from, because they’d literally never thought about it, at all, ever. Anybody capable of asking “If there’s no God, then why not just rape and rob people?” has no tiniest idea about what morality is, or where it comes from. You can only be so crippled by an unreasoning belief system that tells you flatly “Morality is what God tells you to do.”
... Although it probably works out in practice as something like “Morality is what your mom tells you your priest tells you the Holy Mother Church tells you God tells you to do. A sequence of authority figures simply giving out orders, rather than any sort of reasoned exploration happening in any individual mind along the way. Which results in a herd of non-thinkers being trained to simply adore and obey. Great for the Vatican, or the Republican Party, or Microsoft, or Wal-Mart, or Marlboro, or the local tattoo parlor, or the Reverend Jesse Jackson ... but lousy for all those individual minds, and lousy for the future of any society in which they form a majority.
Anyway ... just some thoughts.
But I don't know anything about football...
Hank, all good strategies for talking with some general random person who wants to chat about their faith in an airport or something.
But this is a friend. He knows me, has seen how I go through the world for 15 years or so now. I'll let my character 'speak for itself' in terms of my morals & ethics - all of which he has witnessed on good days and bad days, in situations which would test anyone's 'faith'.
He's not a Godder, just someone of a Midwestern-nominal faith who has likely assumed that I shared that for all these years (I don't usually just bring up the subject, as I've said before). Now, having seen some of my writing here and elsewhere, he's just trying to come to terms with this dichotomy - his thought that morals spring from his nominal God, versus my behaviour in the time he has known and respected me. As much as anything, I bet he just needs to try and reconcile the two thoughts. Remember, I didn't initiate this (potential) conversation, and feel no obligation to convince him of the necessity of becoming an atheist.
It's funny - I view my atheism like I view self-defense. Yes, in this forum and others I will be outspoken in my opinion that humanity would be better off to give up belief in Big Magic JuJu Guy. But for the most part in my daily life I just go about my business. If someone attacks me, I am capable of defending myself, generally with the minimum level of force necessary. However, I am about as likely to challenge someone's religious beliefs in the normal course of affairs as I am to pull out a gun and start waving it around (which is to say, I won't do it, for those who haven't been paying attention to the other discussions). I honestly don't care what other people believe, so long as they don't try and impinge on my life or government with their beliefs.
And besides, I know almost nothing about football, or any other commercial sport.
Jim Downey
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Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Actually, you seem to understand plenty Mr. Lewis
I always hate that sort of argument. We can't understand god. But we understand that it exists, there is only 1 of them and it is male.
--
"Ponies are atheists, you know, technically."
- Me
It's interesting...
The quote that started me on this a few days ago was sent by a friend, from Emily Dickinson:
That understated observation that people don't really know what they're talking about in regards to God got me thinking about this topic a day or so before I heard about this friend wanting to talk with me. So it all came together this way...
Jim Downey
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Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Me too.
Heh. It's gotten to where I just ask "How can you possibly know that? If God is unknowable, where did you get this fact?"
I know godders get most of their stuff from some authority (book or priest or cultural story), but one of the most amazing aspects of religious people to me is their probably-unconscious but total willingness to just make up shit on the spot to fill a hole you've pointed out.
"So what's with this business of God sending two bears to tear apart 42 children, just for making fun of an old man's bald head?"
"Well, but he was one of God's Prophets, and maybe they weren't really Christian children, but were, like, demons or something. And it was more a metaphor than anything, prolly. It's, like, saying that it's bad to make fun of God's messengers. Or, no, like God's word! That's it! It's a sin to mock God's Word! That's what it means!"
And then they do that “slide away from the question ” thingie:
"So ... we're not supposed to take it literally? God didn't really send two she-bears to tear apart 42 children?"
"No, it's the literal truth. It's just that it's a metaphor instead of a real event."
"Wha ...? Wait, let me get this straight. Were there two real bears and 42 real children, and did they really get torn apart for making fun of this bald guy?"
"Well, you have to realize, these were primitive people. So the Bible gives us stories that we can more easily understand. These stories illustrate God's will."
"Okay, back to these bears. Do you know what I'm talking about? Big hairy things, claws, great big teeth? Ursus horribilis? Were there two real bears?"
"See, there's your problem. You just don't seem to get the idea of a metaphor. I've already explained that. You can’t just take one passage out of context and say it’s a lie. You have to read the Bible as a whole in order to understand it."
And on and on. Argh.
Good Luck....
I have had a couple of those types of debates with friends and family members - the kind where the antagonism and aggression are (usually) curbed because of personal relationships. Both times the end of the discussion was the same; both apologized that they couldn't change my mind, reaffirmed their own personal faith, and handed me a Watchtower-style book in the hopes that it would change my mind.
In my experience, most of these situations are not about a real debate; it is about someone who wants to convert you, not to have a real discussion. I hope yours is a real debate, and I would love to know the outcome.
xtians use the "We mere
xtians use the "We mere mortals cannot understand god's purpose" argument when they are stuck in NMMNG's swamp. Yet they are certain god wants them to control women's lives, hang the ten commandments in every building and tent on the planet, teach our children garbage instead of science, and drive an SUV. You would have a more intelligent debate with a fence post. Enjoy but be careful. Religion is a powerful thing.
God is beyond our understanding
If I were you I would lead your friend to argue the point that god is beyond our understanding. But, after you reach that point, remind him that since god is unknowable to us, that every single belief or idea anyone has about god is completely worthless.
Tell him that because god is beyond our understanding, we don't know if the bible is true or false, if god is good or evil, or even if we physically exist. Remind him that at that point, you may as well be two viruses discussing Hawking.
I always try to get them to the point
where they commit themselves to this notion, i.e., that god is beyond our understanding. In other words, once you've reached that point, you know that you have exhausted their supply of what they consider logical responses.
At this point, I am able to shut them up and dismiss god by stating that if god expects me to have faith in something for which he did not give me the capacity to understand, nor did he give me the capacity for faith, then I am clearly nothing more than an example for him so that believers can look on and laugh as I burn in hell. So, don't tell me he loves me.
A few clever ones will jump in to say that there is always a chance, right up to the moment of actual death, that I could change and that the timing is all in god's plans anyway. Of course, that opens the door for me to say, "In that case, I can continue living my life exactly the way I want and not worry one little jot what anyone else's moral principles say, knowing that god decides the time and place for my conversion. What if I am knocked unconscious and into a coma before I die and can't respond? And, once again, haven't you just invalidated your statement about god giving us freewill?"
"No. You have a choice to make at that point whether to accept him."
Then, I circle back to the earlier arguments about freewill and capacities (accept him or burn in hell? that's not freewill AND the capacity thing noted above - which will have been detailed a bit more, earlier in the argument, by saying that even if god presented himself before me and said "I am god" I would laugh in whatever's face and ask it from what part of the cosmos it originated and can I go for a ride) at which point they're usually too burnt out to be coherent and: a) condemn you; b) tell you that god loves you anyway; c) explain that I am too calloused, angry, and closed-minded; and/or, d) walk away.
Sue me for the rant but I have been at this for thirty years (started when I was ostensibly a believer and trying to make heads or tails of what this belief meant and where it came from and whether it made any sense - Sunday migraines combined with consistent vomiting in the car on the way to the fundie church in Oakland, CA, to which I was dragged put paid to any internal divisions I felt).
Theology
I don't claim to know much about theology but the more I am exposed to it, the shallower and more content-free it seems to me. It seems like one huge exercise in question-begging. That's why I get annoyed when people say you can't criticize religion unless you have an intimate knowledge of the finer points of theology. Theology is a house of cards built on a swamp. It may be the most elaborate and byzantine house of cards ever built, but one good blast of logic and objective thinking will send it crashing down.
- No More Mr. Nice Guy!