PZ Myers. 2005 Jan 21. Here's an atheistical virtue for you. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/heres_an_atheistical_virtue_for_you/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 01.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Friday, January 21, 2005
Here's an atheistical virtue for you
Rage and fury has gripped this tsunami-hit tiny Hindu village in India’s southern Tamil Nadu after a group of Christian missionaries allegedly refused them aid for not agreeing to follow their religion.
[...] Jubilant at seeing the relief trucks loaded with food, clothes and the much-needed medicines the villagers, many of who have not had a square meal in days, were shocked when the nuns asked them to convert before distributing biscuits and water.
Heated arguments broke out as the locals forcibly tried to stop the relief trucks from leaving. The missionaries, who rushed into their cars on seeing television reporters and the cameras refusing to comment on the incident and managed to leave the village.
Disappointed and shocked into disbelief the hapless villagers still await aid.
“Many NGOs (volunteer groups) are extending help to us but there in our village the NGO, which was till now helping us is now asking us to follow the Christian religion. We are staunch followers of Hindu religion and refused their request. And after that these people with their aid materials are leaving the village without distributing that to us,” Rajni Kumar, a villager said.
Now here's why Christianity needs us atheists to be more vocal. Not because we're better, or that we'd never do such a ghastly selfish thing, but because we're all sitting here scowling and cocking an eyebrow at the evangelicals, and making them blush with a little well-deserved shame. And then they get up off their butts and tell their pastor that they shouldn't do that, because it makes them look bad to the heathens.
(via Stupid Evil Bastard)
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If it's true, outrage is in order. However, it sounds a little suspicious to me. The details are a little sparse. Were the "missionaries" Indian christians or Western? As you know there is some anti-christian sentiment in Southeast Asia. There is also some intolerance among the native christian population. A fellow grad student from India told me the predominantly christian population of his home town refused to let his hindu family cremate his father's remains because it violated their beliefs. This story is not inconceivable, but I would wait for some confirmation before accepting it as true.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 11:51 AM
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You'd think they would realise that conversions made by desperate people threatened with not being helped if they don't would hardly be pleasing in the eyes of God, and certainly would be of dubious longevity.
#: Posted by tim gueguen on 01/21 at 11:51 AM
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The missionaries' behavior is inexcusable. There has been some tension in Tamil Nadu between Hindus and Christian evangelists; if memory serves the government recently banned (then unbanned, when the ruling party changed) Christian conversions. Regardless, this is disgusting.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 11:58 AM
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Let's also please note the last line of the article, which was not quoted:
"The incident is an exception to concerted charity in a catastrophe that has left no one untouched."
To be fair, Christians (and others, of course) are doing a lot of good in the region.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 12:02 PM -
Every day in the good old USA people are asked to pray before they receive their soup kitchen meal and a roof over their head. Some prefer to stay outside instead. Wont the flock get into heaven for feeding heathens? Is there a finite space in heaven? Are they willing to tolerate bums, but only if they are believers?
If one steps back and thinks about it, why does (especially Protestant) Christianity feel the need to recruit. Apparently a one on one relationship with the puppetmaster is possible, so what is the point of churches and pastors and recruiting. I am sure they have a lovely circular argument for this, but in reality it is just a social group with bylaws interpreted from an ancient master text. You have to follow the rules to be part of the group. Personal relationship with the lord, my ass.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 12:08 PM -
G-Do: Thanks for including the last line of the story (insert atheist saying, "Curses, foiled again! here). Christian charity organizations still do a lot of good deeds around the world in spite of occasional idiocy and abuse.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 12:28 PM
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Tim said,
Conversions made by desperate people threatened with not being helped if they don’t would hardly be pleasing in the eyes of God...
Exactly. This is a primary source of confusion for me.
When people are forced to worship Jesus, it is obvious to the missionaries (and God) that the new "former heathens" are simply just "going through the motions." As Tim mentioned, they are clearly doing it just for the food, health care, etc.
Then, the Christians "reward" them by giving them food, and inviting them to God's infinite party in Heaven.
What?!?!
Literally, they're letting fake Christians into heaven! One doesn't even have to really believe anymore! Just say the words, move your arms around a bunch, say "we love Jesus", and that's that.
Two groups of people that God doesn't want in Heaven:
1) Fake Christians
2) Christians who force other human beings to LIE about believing in Jesus.
(Actually, it seems that Christian #2 is also a fake Christian)
Well, it's too bad that the fake Christians are going to rot in the ground like the rest of us, instead of going to Hell with the rest of us.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 12:46 PM -
Obviously, this is just an isolated case, but it's striking that it exists. As far as I know, there are no NGOs conditioning giving aid on, say, abolishing the caste system or treating women equally, let alone abandoning their religion. Muslim fundamentalist organizations have been spearheading charity efforts following disasters in predominantly Muslim areas, and I haven't heard of them requiring people to become fundamentalists in order to receive aid.
This is not just evil, but also stupid from the point of view of a Christian fundamentalist who wants these people to convert - attacking their tradition directly won't work, but helping them till they convert voluntarily will. So maybe from a cynical point secularists should be glad these fundamentalists are so blunt.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 12:47 PM -
The fact these were nuns who did this would be my first hint that this is probably not an evangelical group.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 12:48 PM
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Jeebus: There was a book written late last century titled The Six Bad Popes. You might find the story interesting—how a concentration of sustained corruption destroyed the Papist domination of Europe.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 12:56 PM
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Assuming that the report is true, these are not Christians. They may wear the "clothes" of Christianity and lay claim to the name, but they fail the most basic test: Do they follow the teachings of their founder? They do not. (Ref: The parable of the "Good Samaritan" and the associated question "who is my neighbor?")
It's ironic that atheists can understand that everyone is their neighbor far better than members of a religion that explicitly teaches that. -
Assuming that the report is true, these are not Christians. They may wear the “clothes” of Christianity and lay claim to the name, but they fail the most basic test: Do they follow the teachings of their founder? They do not. (Ref: The parable of the “Good Samaritan” and the associated question “who is my neighbor?”)
This is a No True Scotsman fallacy - you're defining "Christian" in a way that makes it obvious that "No true Christian requires starving people to convert before giving them aid."
I can define "Christian" to mean, "Anyone who participates in a violent crusade to convert people to Christianity" and then note how all Christians are violent.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 01:12 PM -
Hope you're all listening to Science Friday on NPR. If not, you can get it from the archives later. An excellent guest just identified his hope as that "science and religion will have a dialog, but not a constructive one."
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 01:20 PM
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Everyone is still proceeding on the assumption that the story is legitimate. I see no good reason to believe it, especially if the "missionaries" are from out-of-country. This story is especially suspicious in light of reports that another SE Asian nation was considering preventing outside christian charities from providing aid because they wanted to protect their own religion (buddhist, not hindu). The apparent source of the story is Asian News International. I have no idea how reliable this source is.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 01:44 PM
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The only thing I've found that casts doubt on the credibility of ANI is this story about a woman giving birth to a frog, a common urban legend that is biologically impossible. But even here they qualify their statements with "reportedly" and "According to Ananova, the Iranian daily Etemaad claims..." which they don't in the missionaries-deny-aid story.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 01:56 PM
- The NPR thing just ended. Steven Weinberg called Creationists "idiots" on air, and told a woman caller who said that she came to ID through logic to go back and revisit her logical steps. It was great! The other guests were just as good. It was a pleasure to listen. Can someone get a transcript and post it on a blog? Please?
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Mark: I, too, am waiting for the other shoe to drop. If I find this story elsewhere online, I will surely report it (the claim that there were cameras and reporters present suggests that if we do hear about it from someone else, it will be soon).
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 02:06 PM
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I hesitate to invoke Eddie Izzard again but really....
"Cake or death?"#: Posted by on 01/21 at 02:06 PM -
Also, with regards to the question of "who is the final authority on who decides what a 'true Christian' is?" I'm going to repeat the answer I was given when I was a church-going youth.
Christ.
And he's keeping his mouth shut.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 02:12 PM -
Actually, given the behavior of at least some affiliates of western Christian "charity" organization in Indonesia, I think it's entirely reasonable for the Southeast Asian countries to not want them there right now.
Bottom line for me is if you want to be thought of as a charitable organization, you patch people up, you feed 'em, you keep 'em healthy, and you leave their brains alone. Otherwise, you're just a missionary (and I don't mean that in a good sense) bribing people to hear your pitch.#: Posted by paperwight on 01/21 at 02:30 PM -
See also:
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_050113tracts.shtml
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_050115mission.shtml
... can't claim I know much of who or what 'The Anvil Trust' is, however.
See also the ATS' press release with regard to the initiative described in the former story:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050112/daw038_1.html -
I am having some problems with these "news" sources. I have no doubt there are some idiots who are using this natural disaster to spread their particularly distasteful version of religion to people who want food instead, but the only traditional news source reports I have heard were about the possible rejection of aid from christian organizations for fear of just this type of behavior. I can't remember whether it was Indonesia (I think not) or Sri Lanka (probably, since I think the reports talked about protection of hinduism). In any event, I would still very much like to get a confirmation. I noticed the 16 Jan. date on the original report --the only one I can find is:
http://in.news.yahoo.com/050116/139/2j1rp.html#: Posted by on 01/21 at 02:43 PM -
See also:
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2005/s1282067.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7535-2005Jan13.html -
This is a No True Scotsman fallacy - you’re defining “Christian” in a way that makes it obvious that “No true Christian requires starving people to convert before giving them aid.”
I can define “Christian” to mean, “Anyone who participates in a violent crusade to convert people to Christianity” and then note how all Christians are violent.
You certainly can define "Christian" that way if you so choose, but that won't make it correct. Your definition is the equivalent of defining "biologist" to include an ID supporter. The No True Scotsman fallacy only applies when there is criterion to define what a "true Scotsman" is. There are criteria for defining what a biologist is, and they don't include ID. I think that one necessary criterion for defining a "true" adherent to a religion or philosophy is following the basic tenets of that philosophy or religion.
Q: If we call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
A: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. -
The No True Scotsman fallacy only applies when there is criterion to define what a “true Scotsman” is.
Ooops... should proofread bettter. That should read "... when there is no criterion to define..." -
There are criteria for defining what a biologist is, and they don’t include ID.
But a biologist isn't defined as "evolutionist." There's a definition, and an empirical observation that no biologist is a creationist. That's like observing that all Scottish nationals have their porridge without sugar. What you say is like defining a Scotsman as "someone who doesn't put sugar in his porridge." With Christianity, the Council of Nicea defined it and as far as I can tell these aid-denying missionaries are Christians by that definition.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 03:23 PM -
With Christianity, the Council of Nicea defined it...
... as did Ambrose Bierce:
CHRISTIAN, n. -- One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
... in, naturally enough, The Devil's Dictionary. -
But a biologist isn’t defined as “evolutionist.”
While I would agree that being an "evolutionist" is not a sufficient criterion, I would argue that it is a necessary criterion to being a biologist. There have been numerous postings on this blog and others refuting the notion that you can do biology without employing the theory of evolution.
BTW: I just chased down the output document from the Council of Nicea (aka "The Nicene Creed") and I couldn't find advocacy for the position you attribute to Christians. The reference to the Council of Nicea is a bit of a red herring in any case, since its purpose was to resolve a particular issue that was splitting the church at the time, resulting in a statement that resolves that issue. If we want to get into quoting early church sources, we could go to the Heidelberg Catechism, or, appropriately, the Scots Confession.
My original point was this: There are people who have taken on the "name" of what is otherwise a gentle and inclusive religion/philosophy and turned it to their own selfish ends -- in complete contravention of the religion's original teachings. The same has happened with Islam, Hinduism and many other religions. And certainly, nobody would ever do that with biology. /sarcasm (unless their initials were GWB) -
ArtK, So we would agree that Bush is not a Christian?
There is no standards body for Christianity, and the bylaws in the ancient text are subject to widely varying interpretation. Why else are there thousands of denominations?#: Posted by on 01/21 at 03:54 PM -
ArtK, for the most part, the history of the christian church is one of people who have taken the name of a gentle and inclusive person and turned a church based on it to their own selfish ends. My view of Jesus is that he was struggling against the church establishment of his day. My view of christianity is that his struggle failed, and his name was co-opted by a new church establishment with faults as bad as or worse than the ones he struggled against.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 04:07 PM
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ArtK, So we would agree that Bush is not a Christian?
Absolutely. I can't think of anything in the New Testament that condones the slaughter of innocent lives.
You are correct that the ancient texts are subject to many interpretations, but "love thy neighbor as thyself" is pretty clear, and the definition of "neighbor" is also very clear. Many of the sources of schism aren't even the result of fuzzy specifications -- many are nit-picky issues of church governance.
I just think that it's unfair to millions of good people, to tar them with the same brush as some very bad people, simply through a one-word label. -
ArtK, for the most part, the history of the christian church is one of people who have taken the name of a gentle and inclusive person and turned a church based on it to their own selfish ends.
I don't disagree with you at all on this, nor do I entirely disagree with your conclusions. It's one of the tragic flaws of religion in general that it is susceptible to that kind of co-option.
The problem I have is when things are generalized under the heading of "the christian church" or with an implicit all before "Christians." As was noted by others, there are many denominations and, frankly, some of them have nothing more in common than the one word. Lumping all of these people together (and condemning them for the acts of some) is sloppy thinking -- it's no better than lumping all atheists as a like group, when all they really share is one single concept. -
I agree with you on that ArtK. There are good people who are christians and bad people who call themselves christians. And there are churches that follow the teachings of Jesus and churches that call themselves christian who do not.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 04:28 PM
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Absolutely. I can’t think of anything in the New Testament that condones the slaughter of innocent lives.
Christians also believe in the Old Testament, which does.
My view of Jesus is that he was struggling against the church establishment of his day. My view of christianity is that his struggle failed, and his name was co-opted by a new church establishment with faults as bad as or worse than the ones he struggled against.
My view of Jesus is that assuming he existed, he was a lunatic who happened to also be a reformer who put greater emphasis on commandments about behavior towards other people, such as "Honor your father and mother," than on commandments about behavior toward god, such as "Honor the Sabbath."
While I would agree that being an “evolutionist” is not a sufficient criterion, I would argue that it is a necessary criterion to being a biologist. There have been numerous postings on this blog and others refuting the notion that you can do biology without employing the theory of evolution.
This is empirical, not definitional. Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution, I know, but you can employ evolution while believing in creationism - but in fact no biologist does. That's something you find out by observing the real world and fitting your theory to the data rather than ignoring data that doesn't fit your theory via tautological definitions.
I just think that it’s unfair to millions of good people, to tar them with the same brush as some very bad people, simply through a one-word label.
We're all members of one race. Do you object to being called human because Hitler was human?
BTW: I just chased down the output document from the Council of Nicea (aka “The Nicene Creed”) and I couldn’t find advocacy for the position you attribute to Christians.
To my knowledge, conventional definitions of what Christianity is require generic belief in the Christian Bible, and do include people like Martin Luther, Pius XII, and Augustine. If you want to abandon conventional definitions, then let's define "intelligent" to mean "thinking that Alon Levy is always right," and then find out that all intelligent people agree with me. Or do you also think that "Osama is not a real Muslim," "Stalin was not a real communist," "evangelists don't murder and Randall Terry is not a real evangelist," and "Hitler and Mussolini were not real fascists, because fascism is peaceful"?#: Posted by on 01/21 at 04:29 PM -
ArtK,
Agreed; now those good people need to improve their marketing because the bad one's have coopted their name and sullied their image. It used to be fairly easy to tell who was good, but then the Salvation Army declared that gay people cant volunteer for them. This kind of self righteous judgementalism has caused me to direct my support elsewhere. I am tired of trying to figure out who the good Christians are and who the bad one's are. The good one's need to tell me, because the bad one's are drowning them out.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 04:34 PM -
I am tired of trying to figure out who the good Christians are and who the bad one’s are. The good one’s need to tell me, because the bad one’s are drowning them out.
Not only that... When I debate with a communist, I expect him to a) denounce the crimes of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and other communist tyrants, b) acknowledge that most of their atrocities were motiavated by communism, and c) explain why his brand of communism doesn't lead to such atrocities. The same standard should apply to Christians and Muslims.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 04:39 PM -
<object to being called human because Hitler was human?</blockquote>
Only if you use "human" as a perjorative because of Hitler. -
Alon,
The communists I have known (I did attend U Oregon after all), would have agreed with a, said that b is because of power, not necessarily communism, and c that we now call it 'Economic Democracy' to avoid b and encourage citizen participation. Short version is that communism was a front for a coup, which like religion has a strong philosophical story which propped the mess up for several decades.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 04:51 PM -
If science is what scientists do, the Christianity is what Christians do.
As far as I'm concerned, anybody who calls himself a Christian is a Christian. Life is too short to try to sort out the dueling beliefs that that group holds.
They frequently murder each other over the differences; only a fool would insert himself in that dispute.
I suppose we could agree that some Christians are moral and do good works, and that some are immoral and do bad works.
The question lurking behind this discussion, I think, is whether the institution of Christianity is, on balance, pro-good or pro-evil.
Since you have to help millions and millions of little old ladies across the street to balance out burning one at the stake, I'd argue that Christianity is generally bad.
Of rather more interest, given current events, is the statement of the Indonesian Moslems that Christian (or presumably any other infidel kind) proselytizing would be resisted.
The government backed down, a little, after that; but we can take the original statement as the genuine sentiment or belief of the religion.
This has implications for Muslims in, eg, the United States of America.
They claim, as we all do, freedom of (or from) religion, but we know they mean that as a one-way street.
They are free to recruit, and powerless, in the United States for now, to prevent others from recruiting them.
But they've stated their goal: eventually we're all Muslims.
Appeasers from the Left and the Right ought to be worrying a lot more about that than about an aberrant group of Christians in India. Hinduism is a big enough boy to protect itself against Christians. It has not been so successful against Muslims, has it?
You're next.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 05:24 PM -
Science is not atheistic; secularism is. Advocating religious and moral values is not, as liberals contend, unscientific.
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In the final analysis, the urge toward atheism or agnosticism does not arise from science itself. A substantial number of scientists are and, in the past have been, atheists or agnostics. But nothing in science itself necessitates either atheism or agnosticism.
What produces atheism or agnosticism is a hubristic presumption that the ability to describe and to name parts and processes found in nature confers upon the examiner the god-like power fully to understand and to control the processes of nature. This is not a modern, scientific mindset, but a reversion to primitive savagery. American Indians and African tribes believed that knowing the name of a bird or animal gave them a sort of kinship with and control over that creature.
Secularists are simply succumbing to and repeating Adam’s and Eve’s yielding to the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. That led God to toss the pair out of the Garden of Eden. Secularists are saying, in effect, “You can’t fire me! I quit!” They are voluntarily exiling themselves from the only path back to Eden, albeit an Eden in Heaven, outside our limited realm of earthly existence.
This is more understandable if we look at the history of events that produced atheism and agnosticism. The first of these, atheism, is as old as mankind. The second term, agnosticism, no doubt existed conceptually, but the word itself is attributed to Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s acerbic champion in the latter part of the 19th century.
Protagoras, an early sophist (the equivalent of today’s liberals) before Plato’s time, doesn’t use the term agnostic, but voices the concept to justify pursuit of self-centered, hedonistic conduct. Man, said Protagoras, has no way of knowing whether God exists or not. What we can know is our own desires for money, power, and sensual gratification. From this arises a moral relativism in which each person decides for himself what constitutes acceptable conduct.
Fast forward to the 16th and 17th centuries, when Europe was torn to pieces by the emergence of national states in the modern mold, as independent Medieval cities and small principalities were swept up into larger entities that became the nations of Western Europe. The crucible in which this bloody process took place was the Reformation and the struggle of northern European rulers to assert both political and religious independence from the Papacy and the Catholic Church. It was essentially a series of political power struggles, but intellectuals blamed it on religion.
Simultaneously, modern science and mathematics flowered dramatically. It was the age of Descartes, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, when the basis of modern scientific techniques was laid, along with the mathematics to describe and to predict natural phenomena.
In England this produced no major contortions or bloodshed of the sort that harassed the Continent, because Henry VIII already had severed his rule from the Papacy and declared himself head of the Church of England. But in France, the autocratic rule of the Bourbon kings and the close identification of Roman Catholicism with political rule led the French Revolutionary philosophers to a profound hatred of religion. Social justice, they believed, required abolition of spiritual religion and its catechism of morality. Humanity, they believed, could never find Freedom (as an abstract concept independent of day-to-day reality) until religion had been abolished and replaced by human Reason alone.
Thus, from the middle of the 18th century through today, the intellectuals (not the scientists) became by definition atheists. It was not the progress of science that caused this presumption, but purely political and economic factors, viewed through a badly flawed lens.
The apparent, though utterly false, link of science and atheism occurred because the French intellectuals sought to misapply to economic and political problems the newly perceived, scientific laws of the physical realm of nature that Galileo and Newton had described. The intellectuals believed they, being so intelligent and well informed, would be able to follow in Newton’s footsteps and discover laws that regulated human social and political conduct, just as Newton’s equations predicted the movements of the planets.
They then made the leap described above: if they could describe and name historical trends from the past, surely this meant that there were underlying forces controlling the flow of history, forces that could be reduced to description under The Immutable Law of History, as Auguste Comte called it. Like primitive savages, they presumed that describing and naming past historical trends gave them power over current events and the capacity to foretell the necessary path of human social and political development. As the French say, voilà socialism!
From this intellectual confusion arose the idea of Progress, which was to capture the imagination of intellectuals and well-meaning, but ill-informed people in all ranks of society. American secularists no longer worship the concept of Progress overtly, but their arrogant dismissal of God rests on the same unstable foundation of sand as the presumptions of the French Revolutionary Philosophers, whose worship of the Goddess of Reason gave us the Reign of Terror and Napoleon’s military conquest of Europe, Lenin’s and Stalin’s liquidation of tens of millions of innocents, and Hitler’s Holocaust.
Self-styled intellectuals today equate spiritual religion and morality with ignorance and oppression, just as their secular forebears of the French Revolution did. Arbitrary judicial decisions creating “rights” to abortion or same-sex marriage are Progress. Opposition to Progress is red-state ignorance.
Because they fancy themselves scientific, despite the endless string of social disasters like The Great Society, liberal-socialists condemn teaching anything in our schools other than atheistic socialism as unscientific.
Thomas#: Posted by on 01/21 at 05:32 PM -
More on Judeo-Christian Values...
Dennis Prager writes a marvelous summary of reasons why Reason alone is insufficient.
Those who do not believe that moral values must come from the Bible or be based upon God's moral instruction argue that they have a better source for values: human reason.
In fact, the era that began the modern Western assault on Judeo-Christian values is known as the Age of Reason. That age ushered in the modern secular era, a time when the men of "the Enlightenment" hoped they would be liberated from the superstitious shackles of religious faith and rely on reason alone. Reason, without God or the Bible, would guide them into an age of unprecedented moral greatness.
As it happened, the era following the decline of religion in Europe led not to unprecedented moral greatness, but to unprecedented cruelty, superstition, mass murder and genocide. But believers in reason without God remain unfazed. Secularists have ignored the vast amount of evidence showing that evil on a grand scale follows the decline of Judeo-Christian religion.
There are four primary problems with reason divorced from God as a guide to morality.
The first is that reason is amoral. Reason is only a tool and, therefore, can just as easily argue for evil as for good. If you want to achieve good, reason is immensely helpful; if you want to do evil, reason is immensely helpful. But reason alone cannot determine which you choose. It is sometimes rational to do what is wrong and sometimes rational to do what is right.
It is sheer nonsense -- nonsense believed by the godless -- that reason always suggests the good. Mother Teresa devoted her life to feeding and clothing the dying in Calcutta. Was this decision derived entirely from reason? To argue that it was derived from reason alone is to argue that every person whose actions are guided by reason will engage in similar self-sacrifice, and that anyone who doesn't live a Mother Teresa-like life is acting irrationally.
Did those non-Jews in Europe who risked their lives to save a Jew during the Holocaust act on the dictates of reason? In a lifetime of studying those rescuers' motives, I have never come across a single instance of an individual who saved Jews because of reason. In fact, it was irrational for any non-Jews to risk their lives to save Jews.
Another example of reason's incapacity to lead to moral conclusions: On virtually any vexing moral question, there is no such a thing as a [missing] purely rational viewpoint. What is the purely rational view on the morality of abortion? Of public nudity? Of the value of an animal versus that of a human? Of the war in Iraq? Of capital punishment for murder? On any of these issues, reason alone can argue effectively for almost any position. Therefore, what determines anyone's moral views are, among other things, his values -- and values are beyond reason alone (though one should be able to rationally explain and defend those values). If you value the human fetus, most abortions are immoral; if you only value the woman's view of the value of the fetus, all abortions are moral.
The second problem with reason alone as a moral guide is that we are incapable of morally functioning on the basis of reason alone. Our passions, psychology, values, beliefs, emotions and experiences all influence the ways in which even the most rational person determines what is moral and whether to act on it.
Third, the belief in reason alone is itself based on an irrational belief -- that people are basically good. You have to believe that people are basically good in order to believe that human reason will necessarily lead to moral conclusions.
Fourth, even when reason does lead to a moral conclusion, it in no way compels acting on that conclusion. Let's return to the example of the non-Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe. Imagine that a Jewish family knocks on his door, asking to be hidden. Imagine further that on rational grounds alone (though I cannot think of any), the non-Jew decides that the moral thing to do is hide the Jews. Will he act on this decision at the risk of his life? Not if reason alone guides him. People don't risk their lives for strangers on the basis of reason. They do so on the basis of faith -- faith in something that far transcends reason alone.
Does all this mean that reason is useless? God forbid. Reason and rational thought are among the hallmarks of humanity's potential greatness. But alone, reason is largely worthless in the greatest quest of all -- making human beings kinder and more decent. To accomplish that, God, a divinely revealed manual and reason are all necessary. And even then there are no guarantees.
But if you want a quick evaluation of where godless reason leads, look at the irrationality and moral confusion that permeate the embodiment of reason without God -- your local university.
#: Posted by on 01/21 at 06:15 PM -
... or it could be hubris to 'know' how it all works even though you have no evidence to support your belief beyond the belief itself. It is not hubris to question and test, repeat. Curiosity and thirst for knowledge would be a better term. Apparently to you that thirst for knowledge is a bad thing, so ignorance is bliss.
BTW, I taught computer, business, social studies and mathematics classes and never once had the occasion to bring up their atheistic socialist roots.
My apologies to all for briefly feeding the troll.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 06:24 PM -
If science is what scientists do, the[n] Christianity is what Christians do.
That would be true, if your premise were true, but it isn't. You've got the right words, but have them in the wrong order.
Science is not what a scientist does. A scientist is someone who does science. By your definition, Intelligent Design is science because the people who do it call themselves scientists. Or, that chiropractic is medicine because it is practiced by people called doctors.
You can call a tail a leg, but that doesn't make it a leg. -
Art, the trope that 'science is what scientists do' is common coin among historians and philosophers of science, somewhat tongue in cheek.
Your confusion about ID is because, I must suppose, you do not understand that IDers do NOT do science. Putting on white lab coat and asserting that 'there's not a cough in a carload' of Chesterfields does not make that research.
It's all crap.
Similarly, if Thomas is going to argue philosophically, he needs to understand epistemology. Scientists are not Platonists, as IDers are.
The knowledge Adam and Eve thought to gain from the Tree of Knowledge was not the knowledge of observation and experience. It was the gnosis of secret causes, the knowledge that the Universe must be a certain way because that is the way that fits my -- by which I mean, your -- superstition.
Scientific knowledge is gained with more diligence than plucking off an apricot and biting into it.
Whether decent behavior can be derived from experience, as I think it can be, is irrelevant to either your or Prager's argument, because you have assumed the fact that needs to be proven -- that Judeo-Christian morality is superior, or even desirable.
I have a son. If your god ordered me to sacrifice him, I'd spit in His eye, because my son means more to me than your imaginary god.
Judeo-Christian morality is, on close examination, inhuman and disgusting. We reject much of it because of that.
I am willing to bet that you have defied the clear teaching of Jesus by not giving away all your material wealth and abandoning your family.
You'll burn in hell for that, unless Jesus was just funnin'.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 07:09 PM -
From a lengthy discussion of 'No true Scotsman' at IIDB:
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=85208
... from which, by far my favourite comment is:
"Och aye. This no-true-Scoatsman fallacy is a thing for ye Yanks an' sassenachs, d'ye ken. No Scoatsman ever commits the no-true-Scoatsman fallacy.
"What's that ye say? Angus McSporran committed the no-true-Scoatsman fallacy just last Wednesday?
"Well clearly then, he isna a true Scoatsman. Och aye. D'ye ken."
-- see http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=1591538#post1591538 -
Your confusion about ID is because, I must suppose, you do not understand that IDers do NOT do science.
Umm... you really need to learn to read. I have not expressed any confusion about ID -- I know that what they are doing is not science. I was making an analogy to your 'trope'. It may be something bandied about "tongue in cheek" by historians or philosophers of science, but I don't know many scientists who would agree with it. I also can't think of any linguist or rhetorician who would agree with it, either.
I am willing to bet that you have defied the clear teaching of Jesus by not giving away all your material wealth and abandoning your family.
I never claimed to be a Christian myself -- good, bad or indifferent, so whether I follow Jesus' teachings to the letter is far beside the point (and bordering on an ad hominem to boot.) While you make many valid points about Christianity, I find, however, your blanket condemnation of all Christians to be as biased and poorly reasoned as any Christian condemning all atheists as being immoral. - Like the song says, "And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love. They will know we are Christians by our love."
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Desert Donkey,
concerning your #5 comment:
If one steps back and thinks about it, why does (especially Protestant) Christianity feel the need to recruit. Apparently a one on one relationship with the puppetmaster is possible, so what is the point of churches and pastors and recruiting. I am sure they have a lovely circular argument for this, but in reality it is just a social group with bylaws interpreted from an ancient master text.
From my experience quite a few years of forced indoctrination, I offer three answers:
1. Simply, the comment in one of the Gospel's, Matthew I think, we Jesus, after the, um, "resurrection," tells his followers to go tell the story (Nevermind his conspicuously brief appearances between the "resurrection" and his magic ascent into heaven.
2. Two, proselytizing answers a problematic question CHristianity, carried out to its logical extreme, must deal with - the "better off dead" question: If this world is infinitely damned, and conversion gets you to the perfect Heaven, it therefore becomes a prescription for instant, post-conversion suicide.
3. Finally, given the cultural context of the most evangelical factions of CHristianity, it makes economic sense to run a church like a business, and converts = tithes = money. This, admittedly, doesn't have much to do with anything we know about Jesus. BUt that's a different story altogether . . . .
Jamie#: Posted by on 01/21 at 11:22 PM -
Re: by "prescription for suicide" I mean that converting the dirty, nonbelieving mud people is the only reason they have to stay hear on Earth and wallow in genetically-based, original sin.
And regarding my 3rd point, I remember a bible class in Kingergarten that told us that the more people you converted in your life, the bigger the "mansion" you got to live in in "Heaven." It's also telling that up there the streets are paved in gold. Gotta wonder how to reconcile voluntarily poverty on Earth for eternal greed in the afterlife. . .
Jamie#: Posted by on 01/21 at 11:40 PM -
Appeasers from the Left and the Right ought to be worrying a lot more about that than about an aberrant group of Christians in India. Hinduism is a big enough boy to protect itself against Christians. It has not been so successful against Muslims, has it?
Actually, it has. Hindu nationalists are sure that Islam is a real threat to their country and that unless fanatical Hinduism counters it, it will destroy them, which is complete hogwash.
Anyway, I don't think it's very relevant here. There's an annoying tendency of neocons to counter everything showing that Christianity is bad with "Islam is worse" and of left-wing radicals to counter everything showing that Islam is bad with "Christianity is worse." It's a red herring.
Now, Thomas, where do I start...
Fast forward to the 16th and 17th centuries, when Europe was torn to pieces by the emergence of national states in the modern mold, as independent Medieval cities and small principalities were swept up into larger entities that became the nations of Western Europe. The crucible in which this bloody process took place was the Reformation and the struggle of northern European rulers to assert both political and religious independence from the Papacy and the Catholic Church. It was essentially a series of political power struggles, but intellectuals blamed it on religion
The Thirty Years' War was fought exactly for religion. Don't try weaseling out of it the way communists try to say that communist atrocities are not "true communism."
The first is that reason is amoral. Reason is only a tool and, therefore, can just as easily argue for evil as for good.
Ditto god, judging by, oh, Hitler, Martin Luther, Pius XII, the Crusades... What you're missing is that liberalism doesn't base its morality solely on "reason." Reason is a tool to promote the basic value of humanism.
It is sheer nonsense — nonsense believed by the godless — that reason always suggests the good. Mother Teresa devoted her life to feeding and clothing the dying in Calcutta. Was this decision derived entirely from reason? To argue that it was derived from reason alone is to argue that every person whose actions are guided by reason will engage in similar self-sacrifice, and that anyone who doesn’t live a Mother Teresa-like life is acting irrationally.
Mother Teresa worshipped suffering and believed that being wretched poor was good for you. So much for the morality of the religious... and anyway, just because there's a religious person who's good (MLK is a good example) doesn't mean humanism is bad. Look at all the NGOs helping people struggling with the tsunami. They do it to help people, not because god said so.
Another example of reason’s incapacity to lead to moral conclusions: On virtually any vexing moral question, there is no such a thing as a [missing] purely rational viewpoint. What is the purely rational view on the morality of abortion? Of public nudity? Of the value of an animal versus that of a human? Of the war in Iraq? Of capital punishment for murder?
If you are a humanist, then by applying reason you'll get consistent answers - and indeed, most liberals have consistent views on all of these issues. On the other hand, scripture contradicts itself and is very vague, so you get liberal Protestants, Catholics, and conservative Protestants who will give you different answers to these questions.
Third, the belief in reason alone is itself based on an irrational belief — that people are basically good. You have to believe that people are basically good in order to believe that human reason will necessarily lead to moral conclusions.
No, not really. You can be a cynic and still think reason is a good thing in theory. How to put it into practice is different, but liberalism answered that definitively when it backed the social spending programs of the 1930s. As for the moral dimension, the liberal idea that you shouldn't tell people what to do for their own good is not based on any irrational belief, but for people who are more liberal on defining people's good as what they define as best for themselves except when it hurts others, and for libertarians on the more pragmatic idea that if the government can tell you what to do in bed for "morality," it'll inevitably drift to a 1984-style state.
Fourth, even when reason does lead to a moral conclusion, it in no way compels acting on that conclusion. Let’s return to the example of the non-Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe. Imagine that a Jewish family knocks on his door, asking to be hidden. Imagine further that on rational grounds alone (though I cannot think of any), the non-Jew decides that the moral thing to do is hide the Jews. Will he act on this decision at the risk of his life? Not if reason alone guides him. People don’t risk their lives for strangers on the basis of reason. They do so on the basis of faith — faith in something that far transcends reason alone.
It's interesting that you bring WW2 up here, because all the Christians hid in their churches and went silent as the Nazis did what they did, whereas the liberals and the communists resisted. The French resisters who were tortured to death but did not tell their interrogators anything did so not because they believed they'd go to Heaven but because they believed that freeing France from the Nazis was a goal worthy of dying for. Many of the people who hid Jews in WW2 did so because of pure humanism, despite what your theory says. Inside Germany, all the churches were silent, protesting only when Hitler directly interfered with them, while the socialists and the communists tried to bring down the regime.#: Posted by on 01/21 at 11:57 PM -
Alon, let's see: Muslims v. Hindus in the 16th c. Muslims conquer Hindus.
Muslims v. Hindus in 1947. Muslims kick Hindu butt, make off with about a third of the country.
Since then, Kashmir, India manages to keep Muslim army out, but Muslims chase most Hindus out of province. Hindus left holding nearly empty husk.
Militart Hinduism is a very, very late reaction to several things, among them Muslim aggression.
Exactly my point about American (and other western) appeasement.
By the way, I don't count myself as a 'neocon.' But when somebody says he wants to destroy me, I tend to take him at face value.#: Posted by on 01/22 at 12:36 AM -
This is all very interesting (can you tell I'm being ironic?), but has anyone heard anything more about the alleged incident that started this discussion?
#: Posted by on 01/22 at 12:38 AM
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Mark: no.
Harry: what happened in 1947 is more complicated than you think. Gandhi's rhetoric was very religious, and appealed to Hindu values using Hindu terms. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was originally a secular liberal whose pro-Indian independence rhetoric involved little to no religion. Worried that India would become a Hindu nation in which the Muslim minority would be oppressed, he began to play the religious-schism card, and eventually the only solution to the problem was partition. Hindus deserve as much blame for that as Muslims: both sides burned, murdered, and looted; the Indian government seized Hyderabad because it had a Hindu majority but a Muslim ruler, but invaded Kashmir because its ruler was a Hindu but with a Muslim majority.
Right now, India would be able to march on Pakistan if only the latter didn't have nuclear weapons, and yet the BJP insists that militant Islam is somehow a threat to the country.
It's the same with the West and Islam - 9/11 was a gnat biting the USA, but sensational media reporting turned the paper tiger that was Al Qaida into a menace. When someone says he wants to kill me, I first check his capability for doing so, and numerical data tells me that if I were an American I should be more worried about traffic accidents than about terrorism by an order of magnitude. But as with the tsunami, regularly occurring fatal events generate less news than extraordinary fatal events even if they kill tens of times as many people.#: Posted by on 01/22 at 07:41 AM -
So, Alon, you prove my general point. (By the way, I know the history, I didn't come here to write a book.) A moderate, liberal Muslim -- the kind Bush is now betting our farm on -- gets in a political bind, and where does Jinnah turn?
Well, not to democracy, toleration and modernism, that's for sure. Where have we seen that before? Oh yeah, last week in Aceh.
The capability of Muslims to hurt us is limited by the blast and radiation effects of the atomic bomb. I don't worry that the English are going to set one off in New York City. Can you say the same about the Muslims?#: Posted by on 01/22 at 04:24 PM -
A moderate, liberal Muslim — the kind Bush is now betting our farm on — gets in a political bind, and where does Jinnah turn?
To a gamble that would hopefully get the new Indian state to be more tolerant of Muslims. That gamble went wrong, and Jinnah got stuck with nationalism, but it took time before Pakistan degenerated to military rule.
The capability of Muslims to hurt us is limited by the blast and radiation effects of the atomic bomb. I don’t worry that the English are going to set one off in New York City. Can you say the same about the Muslims?
Yes, judging by the fact that they haven't already. They don't have the ability to develop an atomic bomb themselves, and the stories about stray ex-Soviet nukes selling for ten million dollars are myths. And even if they do get a hold of a nuke, its effects will be limited by its yield, which will be in the low tens of kilotons or else they won't be able to deliver it, and the shadow the buildings will cast. They'll have to fly to break a hundred thousand dead, and that is, remember, purely hypothetical and with a very low chance of occurring, whereas forty thousand dead Americans every year because of traffic accidents are real.#: Posted by on 01/23 at 02:42 AM