What evidence do you have from the natural world, and why do you think the scriptures come from God?
What do you do if the scriptures contradict your conscience? what do you do when the sciptures contradict the natural world? What do you do when the scriptures contradict each other?
And how do you know which scriptures are the the legit ones and which ones aren’t?
Great thread. This approach of explaining why you believe what you do, rather than our usual approach of explaining why those who believe differently are wrong, stupid and liars, seems much more productive in the fight against ignorance.
I’m disconcerted by the similarity between ITR Champion’s context and rationale for being a Christian and mine for being an atheist. Not sure whether to be troubled or encouraged!
I’d be interested in hearing how the theists balance their thoughts about their religion in terms of reason, emotion and faith. There must be a contrast with atheism in this respect - since (most?) atheists are explicitly trying to base their ‘belief’ on purely rational grounds, trying to exclude emotion and ‘faith’.
Obviously, theism requires at least a compratmentalization of reason, if not a complete rejection. It can’t be arrived at BY reason.
I think we all compartmentalize in matters of faith. For instance, I know a number of strongly committed atheists who believe deeply that the universe and all in it is meaningless, a chance evolution, showing order at this time that will eventually revert to chaos. Yet they put this aside and love their families, even as they maintain that it is probably just a chemical reaction evolved over eons as a means of reproducing our species. Go humans! Perhaps that is part of what it means to be human–that our intellect tells us one thing, but our experiences smack up against it. And we shrug our shoulders and say “What the heck, I’m going with experience. It’s real.”
What experiences smack against intellect?
Also, what is a “committed atheist?” How can an absence of belief be a “commitment” to anything?
An example of what I learn about God from the natural world - (if there is a) God who created it, He is rather ruthless in allowing living beings to experience the consequences of their actions. (if there is a) God who created it, he has a wondrous sense of beauty and interconnectedness.
My abbreviated viewpoint: I think scriptures are the accurately transmitted record of God’s interaction with one particular people group. That is what the writers thought when they wrote them and what those who selected them and authenticated them thought.
As such they reveal many aspects of His character–His love and mercy and his justice and wrath. Frankly, one of the reasons I believe they are accurately transmitted is because of some of the horribly uncomfortable things they contain. Things that I, with my limited perspective, would rather not have to deal with. I mean, come on, who wants to have to defend a god who killed off a bunch of innocent Egyptian children just to get his so-called people out of slavery? Makes me cringe…
In this area I accept the general traditions and history of the church. It’s never been an area of great struggle for me. I know others who wrestle with this and pick and choose. I have minimal knowledge or contact with the holy writings of other faiths–I suspect God has revealed himself through other broken mirrors. But the law and prophets, the gospels, letters and revelation are the best source I know of for coming face to face with the living God.
To deny the apparent contradictions would be foolish. At least for me, it can’t be done. So I’ll answer what I do: I pray for more light and insight. I stand firm in my faith that God knows what he’s up to. Perhaps a story will explain it. When I would take my kids to the doctor and they’d get a shot, from their perspective it made absolutely no sense. I mean it freaking hurt. And there was no discernable reason. So they screamed and struggled. But I had more knowledge and I knew it was in their long term best interest. On the large scale, so very much of everything makes absolutely no sense. But I have neither the knowledge or the perspective in space or time to be the judge. I can scream, I can struggle, or I can trust. In any case, I am not in charge. And accepting the worldview that there is a God who is in charge helps me make sense out of things.
May not be the best way to deal, but it works for me.
Actually your summary in the second paragraph is spot on. I grew up with a certain moral framework and up to the start of college I accepted it without question. Then, as I went through college and grad school I began to notice more and more instances of tension between what I was raised with and the actually reality I was living with. This is exactly correct.
However, another lesson I got from direct experience was simply that morality entered into fewer discussions in the secular framework than it did in the Christian (or any religious) framework. You mention that if someone takes a class on ethics or philosophy they’ll still hear a lot about morality, which is true. But one might ask: how many students take any class on ethics or philosophy these days? How many take multiple such classes? And how many take them seriously?
My case, though, followed the old cliche that the most important things aren’t learned in class. One controversy I remember from my college days involved a group of students who wanted to found “PornHMC”, a club devoted to pornography. They claimed that the college should provide funding for their porn collections, that they should be allowed to show it publicly, and so forth. There was little real argument in favor the club as such, but what they basically said was that since the college provided funding for all sorts of other clubs it ought to provide funding for this one as well. The main opposition was brought by some female students and professors who argued that it would make them feel uncomfortable, but as they didn’t have much influence the first group got most of what they wanted. I found myself rather agreeing that PornHMC was a bad idea and that raunch culture in general made a lot of people uncomfortable and couldn’t understand why so few folks on campus couldn’t see it. But at some point someone brought up the following quote from C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:
This struck me as a very reasonable thing to say even if the language was old-fashioned. What I didn’t understand then was that it was discussing the ethics involved at a higher level. Most people were onyl discussing whose desires should win: the desires of some students to have free porn or the desire of other students to feel comfortable. But the Christian perspective instead looks at whether a particular desire is actually morally right in the first place, a question not even addressed by the others.
Jesus, that’s a stupid fucking analogy. Why people are so impressed by CS Lewis I’ll never understand. I notice he also doesn’t offer any explanation as to why watching a strip-tease is unethical.
Maybe because the stripper objectified; reduced to a piece of meat?
Say, a nice mutton chop with a side of bacon.
I like him because I think he writes extremely well and tells good stories. I agree with you that the strip-tease argument that Lewis puts forward is flawed. I’ve read “Mere Christianity” a piece at a time and while I find it an enjoyable read I think that you are correct that most of his arguments are pretty weak. To me the book is like a display cake full of glitz and frosting, that when you cut is made of Styrofoam. I think the Screwtape Letters is a much better book.
Well, I’m still an atheist, but I will admit that having my life saved twice in four years by the Franciscan Health System has given me something to chew on 
I was raised in a Christian home, but since according to some all children are born atheists, I think I can share my story. My story is not one of dramatically coming to God, but rather a process of being slowly drawn in. The other thing about my story is that I did not grow up in the US. I grew up in Australia, which is a much more secular country. Here, the assumption is generally that people are non-religious unless proven otherwise. Even just going to church puts me in the minority amoungst my peers, and pretty much always has. So if anything the societal pressure for me has been pressure away from religion, not towards it.
When I was young my parents took me to church, on the basis that going to church was what the family did, and I was too young to be left alone in the house. Generally the churches that my parents went to (we moved house a few times) were middle of the road churches that were filled with older people. For myself as a child this made church very boring, because there was a lot of adult stuff like sitting and listening, and not much fun stuff for children. So I didn’t like going to church when I was little.
When I got a little older, and was able to be left alone at home, I stopped going to church. Basically I just refused to go and my parents didn’t want to force me. I did go occaisonally out of a sense of obligation to them, or because sometimes they bribed me. At this point though it wasn’t so much that I was an atheist, more like an apatheist. I was apathetic to the existence of God. All I really knew was that church was boring and I didn’t want to go.
Then when I was about 14 my parents moved house again, and we started going to a church that actually had some young people my age. So I started going along more often because it was less boring. I also started to form friendships with the other kids there, so that going to church started to be about seeing my friends.
At this time I believed in God in a general sense. I might have always believed in God, even in my apatheist days, but now I can’t be sure. Two of the reasons that I had (although I wouldn’t have called them this at the time, obviously) was the moral argument, and the argument from contingency. The moral argument because I could not see how morality could have any meaning in an atheistic universe. Morality is really about what should be, and requires that the universe have some purpose. If the universe was just existed, then there is no particular way that the universe should be, and therefore there is no way to judge between the rightness/wrongness of different actions. It’s not that I thought that people who didn’t believe in God were immoral, or that they even really acted all that badly. Simply that on atheism morality is a meaningless concept. Therefore where non-religious people talked of morality or made moral distinctions thet were simply being inconsistent with their own worldviews.
The argument from contingency was basically framed in the sense of “where did the universe come from?”. I was never a “young-earth” creationist, so it was never for me about biological life. It was really the question “why should anything exist rather than nothing at all?” I thought that the universe had come into existence at some point (that is what they taught us at school, with the big bang), therefore something needed to be there to cause it to come into existence. That to me was obviously God. Probably my take on these arguments was not teribly sophisticated, as I was still a child after all.
Then when I was 16, I moved into actually identifying myself as a Christian. Part of that was intellectual, but again part of it was relational. I had been on some Christian camps and met other young people who I thought were cool and that I wanted to be like them. I think also the way Christians related to each other really impressed me. Christians seemed to be more caring of each other generally than just average kids at school. That is not to say that there were no jerks in Christian circles, or that Christians were in some way perfect. It was more that the average of Christian behaviour seemed more kind and considerate than the average of secular behaviour. This probably impressed me because I was not really “popular” in school. I had my own friendship group, but we were all nerdy science/computer types who were down a few rungs on the food chain, and we knew it. Also, none of my school friends were serious Christians. A few came from church families, but they themselves weren’t really church people. My friends from church were in different year levels or in different year levels, so that made it hard for us to hang out.
The intellectual argument that convinced me to take Christianity seriously was the resurrection of Jesus. Looking at the gospels as at least historical (ie: not inspired) accounts, I could see no better explaination of all of the facts than Jesus really did rise from the dead. Sure there were a lot of “ad-hoc” theories that could explain bits of it, but the only comprehensive theory in terms of explanatory power was the theory that Jesus did rise from the dead. Of course that had all sorts of implications, that Jesus was God and that Christianity was essentially true.
I expect that the atheists here will scoff at this, but about this time I also started experiencing something of the presence of God in my life. It is hard to explain, but God become much more real to me. Instead of God being “out there”, God began to feel much more close to me. I could feel the influence of God in my life, and also I could see God at work in the other Christians around me. This for me is my own personal experience of God. I don’t expect anyone to believe in God based on this, nor do I want to say that if you do what I did you will experience the same stuff that I have. I merely mention it because the thread is about why theists think the way they do, and for me this is an important part of my story and one of the reasons that I think Christianity is true.
By the end of high school, even though I had identified as a Christian for a few years, I still didn’t have a good handle on Christian theology or what Christians actually believed. Part of this was because in my church there wasn’t a lot of systematic teaching of Christian thought. After high school I went to university, where I joined the “evangelical” Christian club on campus. These are a group of Christians that take the same attitude to the bible and to Christianity that they do to the rest of their studies. Christians sometimes get portrayed as “anti-intellectual”, but there was nothing anti-intellectual about these Christians. Again because Christianity was in the minority (especially true at university) then they had to be engaged with the intellectual culture around them and present Christianity to that culture.
Hanging out with these guys taught me a lot not just about Christian beliefs, but also about practical Christian living. Because I had moved out of home to go to university, it was a big time of reflection and deciding for myself what I actually believed. It also convinced me that Christianity is a consistent, coherent and livable view of the world. Although I think I already had faith, they added to that faith knowledge and in doing so helped my faith to grow even more.
Now today I am still a Christian and involved in a local church. While I was raised by Christian parents, if anything I think I am more conservative theologically than my parents are. I didn’t just adopt the same beliefs as my parents, nor was I “brainwashed” or “indoctinated” into Christianity. In terms of atheism, to be honest I don’t think atheism is very likely. If someone could show me conclusivly that Christianity was false, then I would probably still believe in God, just in a non-Christian sense. I like exposing myself to people giving other points of view, and trying to work out how other people think. Nothing that I have seen of atheism has really made me think that atheism may be a more likely option.
Calculon.
In defense of Lewis:
Mere Christianity is meant to be an introduction into Christian thinking, not some sort of systematic exposition. From memory the text originally came from radio lectures that he gave, and then adapted into a book. The main point that he is trying to get across is that there is something wrong with the “worldly” view of sex. Although the worldly view if sex is that it is just another appetite to be fulfilled, like eating, there are clear differnces between the way people view sex and the way people view eating. Therefore the worldly view of sex is not consistent. This is true irrespective of whether stripping is unethical or not. I think you are not impressed by Lewis simply because you don’t understand him.
Given the time and place that he was writing in, the majority opinion was that stripping was unethical / immoral. That is still a reasonably common view even today. For Lewis to provide a case for the unethical nature of stripping is simply not needed because most of his intended audience would agree with him anyway.
Calculon.
As a Buddhist, I feel completely left out by all these Theist/Atheist threads. I don’t fit neatly into either category. 
That’s the most pathetic garbage I’ve ever heard, which is to be expected coming from a theist.
I bet he doesn’t say that to his doctors when he falls ill and goes to a hospital for treatment.
What an ignorant idiot.
You do, everyone does.
There are only two options:
One is to refuse to accept baseless claims on the existence of supernatural entities, and the other is to stay neutral or accept them, which would make them a theist.
Buddhism is a conceptual world-philosophy, not a religion per-se, so the absence of a definite divine entity that rules everything may not make it a strong candidate for theism, but Buddhists also have a choice as to whether they accept superstition (also known as religion) or reality.
Well, a philosophy class was required to transfer from community college to a UC here in California, but I take your point. I personally believe it is incumbent upon parents to teach morality to their children. I do wish there were more non-religious resources available.
This is one of the many things that I liked about being in a religion. The community, the common ethical standard, the support network. I wish there something similar was as easy to find for atheists. I have been tempted to join something UU, but I would feel too hypocritical.
Secular morality does not consider whether something is abhorrent in the eyes of god. Of course, it is hard to argue that sexual explicitness is in and of itself a “sin” when there is such material right in the Bible. Both religious and secular morality should be more focused on the source and effect of the porn. As a secularist, I am concerned about effects of certain types of porn (ones that focus on demeaning women, for example) and the creation of others (I will not consume traditional porn as I am aware of how dehumanizing the industry has been).
One of my problems with religion in general has always been how schizo the morality can be. How can anyone read the story of Onan as God banning masturbation? How can the LDS church think God wanted blacks kept for decades and then change his mind? How can the man who is now the Pope explicitly say that the church should punish those who turn in priests for abusing children worse than the priests doing the abusing?
The biggest problem with using that argument is that the reason people want to watch a strip show is largely religious. The nudity taboo in Christianity (and many other religions) has sexualized the naked form. A strip tease would be boring for someone from a culture that normally went around in nothing but a loin cloth. The most extreme example was probably the Shakers. They were a celibate cult, but they were obsessed with sex to the point that young children were not allowed to pass each other in the hallway for fear of touching. If such a taboo still existed, I bet someone would be making money letting men walk down dark hallways passing fully clothed women. Such is the way the human mind works.
There are two points to this. Firstly, I don’t think the human mind wroks quite in the way that you think it is. I think the the naked form became sexualised because the naked form is sexual. Otherwise you are in the position of saying that humans are not inherently sexual creatures, and that sexuality is really just an invention of religion. I think this is both unlikely, and evidentially lacking. If this were true one would expect to see societies were sexuality was not a big deal. AFAIK no such society has ever existed. Even pagan societies had lots of rules and taboos around sex. Sexual desire is innate in humans, and so every society has created their own laws and customs to regulate that innate sexuality.
Secondly, your objection to C. S. Lewis argument was addressed by him. He considered that one possible reason that people were enthralled by strip shows was that sexual desire was repressed in society. He rejected this idea based on the fact that the England that he was writing to did not seem to be sexually repressed. In fact since the pill people have been getting more sex than ever, and yet the prevalence and acceptability of strip clubs has only increased. If your theory was correct the opposite should be observed. Your theory also implies that the people who are consumers of the sex industry are people who are not getting regular normal sexual interactions. This is also not true. Married men and men in relationships also go to strip clubs, prostitutes, ect. What this says is that the problem is not with lack of sex, but with the view of sex and sexuality in society generally.
I think that sexuality is a natural and God given part of the human experience, but like all desires needs to be expressed in an appropriate ways. Christianity is not against sex, merely the destructive expression of sexual desire. I agree that in places where normal sexual desire is not allowed to be expressed, such as perhaps Saudi Arabia, then weird things may develop. I just don’t see any evidence that this is the explaination for the pre-occupation of people in sex in the West, and nor did C. S. Lewis.
Calculon.
pedescribe has asked me to explain what the difference is between ‘ethical vs. unethical’ and ‘sin vs. virtue’. I think the answer is implicit in this debate we’re having. ‘Ethical’ and ‘unethical’ are words for evaluating actions according to their effects. ‘Sin’ and ‘virtue’, by contrast, don’t apply only to actions, but also provide ways of evaluating people. In other words, when I think about what sort of person I wish to become, thinking about resisting sin and installing virtue gives me a much broader basis to plan on than thinking about whether some particular action is ethical or unethical. While the word “sin” is mostly used in religious contexts, the concept that we need a way to evaluate the sort of person we are is not exclusive to religion. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all agreed that there was a moral imperative to supress bodily desires such as hunger and sex and replace them with a focus on higher goals such as wisdom. They needed no religious basis for doing so. Today, however, a typical student getting a secular education reads little, if any, of those three.
Aristotle wrote about ethics and what distinguishes ethical and unethical choices. However, he knew that no one can make good ethical choices dependably without a basis for doing so. Consequently he taught that we must cultivate in our own selves a higher nature. Once we do that, correct choices will flow from us naturally and dependably. This is a very practical approach based on knowledge of human nature. Humans don’t make ethical choices most of the time; instead we just go on autopilot. A man who uses pornography will probably use it thousands of times in his life. He’s not going to stop and consider the ethical side each time he does so. Or, similarly, a person who goes shopping doesn’t evaluate whether each purchase is good for the human race in terms the economic system that made the product and its justice or lack thereof; he or she just buys without thinking about it. That’s why “source and effect” morality isn’t good enough. Unless we address the nature of the human beings involved and how each individual can improve his or her nature, we don’t get improved morality.
Martin Gardner wrote the “Mathematical Games” section for Scientific American for decades. Hardly an idiot.