"[Rodney] Stark, [author of The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success,] a professor of social sciences at Baylor University, is
absolutely correct in his rare identification that a commitment to
reason was the fundamental cause of the spectacular progress achieved in
the West and nowhere else. But he is profoundly mistaken in ascribing
the basis of that commitment to Christianity." The Objective Standard
Ayn Rand, when asked by Playboy Magazine, "Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?", answered
"Qua religion, no -- in the sense of blind belief, belief
unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions
of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it
is the negation of reason."
In ascribing the victory of reason to that which is inimical to reason is ludicrous. Even Thomas Aquinas, the most rational of Christian theologians, was led to some irrational conclusions as a result of his faith.
Some heroic thinkers have tried to reconcile them. "[John] Locke emphasizes the
reasonableness of faith to such an extent that a religious doctrine’s
irrationality—conflict with itself or with known facts—is a sign that
it is unsound." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
This alone would seem to indicate that reason wins out where faith is irrational; and where faith is rational, it must be reason, not faith, even when it involves matters traditionally ascribed to religion.
Someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more
The Christian religion demands "sacrifice", obedience to the "commandments" given through a supernatural entity to its adherents, and a "selflessness" which was given the name--by the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte--of "altruism."
It is not metaphysically natural for men to operate in a psychological structure-of-mind that commits them to these things. Yet, this is also the structure-of-mind we are being groomed to live by under the Obama administration.
As Michelle O explained, "The truth is, [ ] someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more." James LewisAmerican Thinker
Sacrifice has become the purview of the government.
First, "sacrifice" must necessarily mean giving up something of greater value for something of lesser value, else it could not be sacrificial. For example, to give a tithing to your church is not a sacrifice if you think the work of the church is worth your money. It is only when you think your money could be used better elsewhere, but you are psychologically coerced by the culture of the church to give your money to them, that this act would be a sacrifice.
If we are expected to sacrifice part of our pie to someone who wants a piece of the pie that is not his/hers, we are expected to acquiesce. We are mandated by the Federal government to be our brother's keeper. This gives us little or no personal fiscal resources with which to protect ourselves. Now we must count on the government to take from our neighbors in order to give to us, after taking from us to give to another neighbor.
Second, commandments are impossible to follow to the letter and in spirit, one-hundred percent of the time. Commandments were made to be broken--so that Christians would have a "cross" of their own to bear. Such "crosses" are called by many names, one of which is the "original sin" of being "only" a human who cannot be perfect, but needs salvation.
In order to follow the commandments one-hundred percent of the time would take sacrifices that mere humans are not prepared to make. To "love thy neighbor as thy self" even when every thing your neighbor believes in and stands for would destroy every thing you believe in and everything you stand for--most certainly is impossible for mere humans to accomplish. Tell me how an American can love Osama bin Laden as he loves himself.
Ask yourself what kind of God would command you to love bin Laden. What God would ask that you altruistically not kill a man who is raping your wife? The New King James Version changed "thou shalt not kill" to "“You shall not murder", yet since the time of King James or before it was "kill." Manslaughter which is killing, however, is not murder. But it is killing. Manslaughter is often accidental, so the only reason the NKJV does not say "You shall not commit manslaughter" is because sometimes it isn't done on purpose; but you still go to prison for it.
What God would "visit the iniquity of the fathers on the children"?
I had a conversation with a group of men a few years ago, and one man who had been a failure all his life at nearly everything he tried, said with an air of resignation that he had "sacrificed his whole life."
At that moment it was not clear just what he meant. Someone who knew him much better than I challenged him.
"You have not!" said the man. "You don't know what it means to sacrifice, or you would have been successful by now."
The first man replied, "You are wrong. It is because I sacrificed that I failed. I sacrificed a good job with a good employer for the whim of starting up my own business when I had no aptitude for business. I sacrificed my marriage for a one-night stand. I sacrificed my health by getting drunk every night before going home, and it put me in the hospital with cirrhosis of the liver. I sacrificed my college education when I quit because the leftist teaching of the university pissed me off. One liberal philosophy teacher actually said I would grow out of the beliefs I had at the time. The problem is, I never outgrew those beliefs. I believe in them more strongly than I did then. But I sacrificed them, too, by not living up to them."
"Well," said the second man, "that isn't what I meant by 'sacrifice.' I mean you didn't try hard enough by giving up the things that would have made you a success."
"And I still say you're wrong," said the first man. "If I had given up what was necessary to be successful, that wouldn't have been sacrificing anything, it would only have been paying the proper price for the things I valued. Instead, I paid too little, and the sacrifice was getting nothing at all in return for what I did pay.
"The ultimate payment is my failure. All those years that I had a good job, all those years that I had wonderful wife are water under the bridge. I didn't do anything to put them in the bank. I robbed the bank. And now here I sit without any retirement, living from food stamps, taking temporary jobs because with my work history I can't get anything else considering the hard economic times we're in.
"Do you see what I'm saying?" he asked. We could all hear the regret in his voice, the self-judgment, and the recognition that he had finally learned the meaning of the word "sacrifice."
"If I had not done the wrong things, if I had not fallen short of doing what needed to be done at all the important moments in my life, I wouldn't feel as if I just want to cry over spilt milk right now. There wouldn't be any spilt milk. I'd have a refrigerator full of it, instead of a pocket full of food stamps.
"Do you understand me now? I didn't pay enough for the things I wanted. That was the sacrifice--losing the things I had because I didn't want to pay the piper what he was worth. The things I wanted were worth more than I was willing to pay. That is sacrificial. I sacrificed myself by being cheap."div align="justify">If the life you want is more important than love, it's no sacrifice. If living anywhere with the one you love is more important, THAT is no sacrifice.
Sacrifice means to give up what is more valuable for what is less; otherwise the word has no moral meaning.
On this basis I argue that Jesus' death was no "sacrifice" because the saving of souls was more important than one man's life. But there is another aspect: Jesus is believed by many to be God himself incarnate, meaning he knew he couldn't die anyway, so giving up his carnate life on the cross turns out to be a big cosmic joke played on humanity--it was no sacrifice, it was sleight of hand.
Yet, the Catholic church takes this stance:
"On account of the remarkable and unique coincidence of the priest, victim, and acceptor of the sacrifice, a first question arises as to whether Christ was victim and priest according to His Divine or according to His humannature. On the basis of the dogma of the hypostatic union the only answer is: although the God-Man or the Logos Himself was at once both priest and victim, He was both, not according to His Divine nature, but through the function of His humanity." [emphasis added] Catholic Encyclopedia
This means that it is even important for the Church to sacrifice the "dogma of the hypostatic union" of Jesus being God himself--for the lesser value of Jesus being a man.
It means nothing if God was sacrificed. God cannot die. Jesus was said to have been dead for three days before he was bodily taken to heaven. This dogma is necessary to convince us that upon death we no longer must bear the burden of being "just a man," but will, as did Jesus, be ressurected into a union of hypostasis with God. In other words, to achieve this blessed union we must live the sacrifice of being mere mortals first.
It is not a sacrifice to be mortal, to be man, to be animal.
"I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction." Ayn Rand; Anthem [emphasis added]
If your marriage is more important to you than a fling with someone you discover and have a passion for, it is no sacrifice to forego the fling.
Into the boundary
Of each married man
Sweet deceit comes calling
And negativity lands
Cold cold heart
Hard done by you
Some things look better baby
Just passing through
And it's no sacrifice
Just a simple word
It's two hearts living
In two separate worlds
Elton John
The "sweet deceit" of giving up a piece of your pie so that others can have what is yours is the deceit of Christian brotherhood transformed into social policy. So, why does everyone ask if we are willing to sacrifice this or that, for this or that?
The Christian right-wing-ness in President Bush caused him to put Judeo/Christian religion ahead of science and the cures for many diseases and biological defects, by banning the use of the reproduction of stem cells.
There may be no science that proves the human soul begins when life begins at conception, and there are epistemic arguments for saying the soul begins at birth. But the religious limitations placed on stem cell reproduction is being thwarted by men's testicles. That is something Mr. Bush can do nothing about, unless Christians wish to being arguing that the soul exists in each half of the human connection, i.e., in the sperm and in the egg.
Studies showed scientific potential using "spermatogonial cells" from the testicles of mice. "The new study used cells taken from biopsied tissue from 22 different men undergoing various medical treatments. The men ranged in age from 17 to 81. Researchers found that after a few weeks of growth, the cells could differentiate into various types of cells just like those taken from embryos," said the Associated Press.
However, some scientists, saying the idea is promising, also said testicle cells are not a reason to give up on research on embryonic stem cells.
"It's exciting. We could do it for males; that leaves women without as easy a method," said stem cell scientist George Daley of Children's Hospital in Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He was not part of the new research, said the AP.
This is great news for disease and genetic researchers all over the globe. But I have a problem when religion outweighs the secularity of our laws. Our Founders may have been superb theologians and great believers in the Deist God; but they knew the danger of allowing religion to dictate the terms of our laws.
The Deists were Naturalists, which is why Thomas Jefferson got away with writing that "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" were the basis for human equality; they allow us to assume among the powers of the earth our separateness from each other and our equal stations in life. He did not write "God" alone, and indeed there is anecdotal evidence that Benjamin Franklin might have had a hand in encouraging that turn of words.
The use of the words "Nature's God" allows each man and woman his/her own understanding of the nature of existence, including the total non-belief in the supernatural, if that is the decision one comes to; but invoking the "Laws of Nature" gets right to the heart of the naturalism of the Deists, indeed, right to the heart of any naturalist.
Christians and all religions of supernaturalism deny that only the the laws of nature exist devoid of a supreme being. Deists as supernaturalists believe, in the same moment as they believe there is a God, that that same God endowed Man with Reason and endowed the world with immutable laws, and that together those laws and Man's reason are all that can be counted on. God may have created the world, but after that he was strictly a hands-off kind of Creator. All the answers to the questions of the world are to be found in Reason, including the questions and answers on the meditations of faith. Faith itself, however, is a matter for the soul.
It is not of that reason, in other word it is not reasonable, to assume that a soul can exist before the tabula rasa has any empirically-generated material ofmind by which such a thing as the soul can exist. The soul is not supernatural; it is part of the nature of Man's being, as much as his toenails or his liver--or his mind.
But mind is the product of sensory impressions retained by the brain; and soul is the emotional content, the structure of the metaphysical meaning of those retained impressions. "Nature's God" is to the description of the contents of each human's individualistic beliefs regarding the questions and the rational answers of existence, what "soul" is to the emotional content regarding the nature of existence.
"Every time we walk along a beach," wrote the naturalist Loren Eiseley, "some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.”
"Ancient urge" is not what I would call the emotional content of man's soul, but the soul is as old as man himself, so it is indeed ancient. But this emotional content is ostensive in its nature; in other words, it is the description in emotional terms that only that which we call a soul can point at using our volition of the faculty of consciousness.
How many times have you heard it said, "What I felt can't be described in words?" What was felt and indescribably in words was ostensive. My Webster's defines "ostensive" as "directly pointing out," as one can only point to the sky or the ocean to "point out" what is the color blue. Without pointing, the color comes down to the scientific description of the wavelength of the color. Without feeling the soul, its nature comes down, like the description of a wavelength, to the reductive, deterministic science that declares all things in consciousness to be merely the firing of neurons, and chemical and electrical operations of the physiology of the body.
The soul is much more than reductive descriptions of the scientific evidence of how the body works. In order for the "ancient urge" to awaken, it must be struck by empirical impressions. A human born without sensory awareness can never gain consciousness, because without things about which to be conscious, it cannot exist. To exist without things to be conscious of is contradictory of the definition of the word. That much does not not contradict reductionism.
The soul is the emotional content of consciousness, and as such it cannot exist until the mind has gained enough sensory impressions to create one. This can only begin at birth, and it may be almost immediate. It would not contain much at that point, but the volition of the soul cannot begin begin before birth, before the trauma of birth awakens the brain to the content of sensory knowledge. It is the volition of the soul that upsets the apple cart of reductionism.
Right-wing fundamental Judeo/Christians are fighting the wrong enemy when they fight science as a whole. It is only this idea of reductionism, of the idea that man is nothing but the contents of his physiology producing a "belief" in the existence of the soul, that the fundamentalists must fight. Many scientists who believe the soul begins at birth, not at conception, believe in God and the soul, not in reductionism. These scientists are not the enemy of Christians; many of them are Christians.
To believe that such an object as the soul, created by sensory impressions and emotionally judged by the nature of each man's metaphysics, is immutable while believing the physical body that created it is not, (Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,) to believe that the soul is transcendental and that it is placed or created or somehow infused into the fertilized egg at the very moment the sperm enters it, is the stuff of religion. And that stuff of religion contradicts the non-deterministic, non-reductionistic laws of nature that define the means of the creation of the soul.
If there be a God, He caused its creation in birth, not in conception.
To post Comments click hereTesticular Stem Cells Thwart Religion to Determine Law Note:I will be the featured speaker at the Center For Inquiry (CFI) meeting, October 16, 2008, in Portage, Michigan. The topic is "Atheism as a 'Religion' Protected by Courts According to the Establishment Clause" CEC
September 18, 2008 – 11:29 am by sntjohnny. Filed under Blog, General.
Recently an atheist stumbled upon my site and in the course of corresponding with him I have discovered that our different points of view aside, he is a gentleman that I can have a conversation with. His site is called The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism and he recently put up a post responding to a post on my own blog on the distinction between ‘natural’ revelation and ’special’ revelation. Normally I try to direct correspondents to my discussion forum but in this case, an atheist who has actually announced that I am a rational thinker, I must make an exception!
The reader has all the information in the links above to follow this exchange, if they like. In my blog entry I indicated that many atheists won’t be convinced by anything less than their own ‘Road to Damascus’ experience. Mr. Clark responds:
"I should say not. Atheists don’t believe such revelations are possible, because the cause of them does not exist. Any person who could possibly be looking for a 'revealed' revelation would be a fence-sitting agnostic. By definition, an atheist knows there is no god, in the sense that all the resolutions of logic one has in one’s mind is what he “knows.” This is sometimes called “justified true belief,” as opposed to “unjustified.” The justification comes from the soundness of the argument.
"Theists 'know' God exists. Atheists 'know' he does not. Each of them has found the soundness, the justification, within his own logic that to doubt it would be to doubt his own mind. To go looking for a revelation implies that one knows nothing either way, and perhaps has no beliefs one way or the other."
I think Mr. Clark is here engaged in an unnecessary discussion on what constitutes an ‘atheist.’ As he most certainly knows, there are different ‘kinds’ of atheists, including what we construe in technical terms as ‘weak’ and ’strong’ atheists. I am aware that ’strong’ atheists often think of ‘weak’ atheists as actually being agnostics. Other atheists are ‘negative’ atheists, asserting that they don’t have a belief that there isn’t a God, but rather simply a lack of belief. My problem as an apologist is that these issues are largely an internal matter among atheists but each atheist insists on telling me what atheism absolutely is! It is hard to see how this internicene conflict will end: unlike Christianity which in theory at least has a static set of documents to limit how the term can be stretched, ‘atheism’ reduces, ultimately, to each individual atheist’s perception of atheism.
Perhaps the hang up is my phrase ‘looking for.’ I freely admit that many atheists are not ‘looking for revelation’ which I think is actually the problem. Mr. Clark is resting his disbelief on the ’soundness of the argument’ but I maintain that a single contrary fact is enough to put an argument to bed. Quantum indeterminancy has undermined many of the deterministic arguments of the previous centuries, for example. This would require a long conversation with Mr. Clark to flesh out but let me just say that its difficult to imagine how God could possibly meet the burden of demonstration many atheists expect him to fulfill if they would immediately discount the evidence if it was actually provided.
I have now laid out a lot of assertions that would require several nights over several beers to defend but if this is already getting long.
Moving on: "One thing I’m beginning to admire about sntjohnny is that he seems to have an understanding of naturalism that is better than that of many naturalists. But his understanding of naturalists themselves isn’t as discerning. No naturalist who is also atheist has any justified true belief in either kind of revelation. The naturalist who believes in 'natural' revelation is not an atheist. The person who believes in 'revealed' revelations is not a naturalist."
Well, obviously the naturalist wouldn’t see the natural order as revelation about God. This is not the language that I would use if my only audience were philosophical naturalists, but my audience is wider than that. The phrase ‘revelation’ can still be rehabilitated, though, because if one wants to get to the bottom of just what reality is all about, than they are going to have to rely on more than just introspection. They’ll have to open their eyes and let the universe around them ‘tell’ them about itself. You cannot deduce the law of gravity. For that you must drop an object and allow it to ‘reveal’ its speed as it rushes to the earth.
So, when we ‘open our eyes’ to let reality speak for itself, what conclusions do we draw? I maintain that we rely on the conclusions that others have drawn for most of the conclusions that we ourselves draw. In other words, most of what we think we know we only know because others have revealed it to us. Sifting through ‘revelation’ is not foreign to our experience. Now, what if the question at hand is whether or not there is more to physical reality? Here, I maintain that logical argumentation, one way or another, has limited value. Ideally, whatever is the ‘more’ would have to reveal itself to us to learn anything truly interesting.
Atheists may not be looking for evidence of revelation but my contention is that they ought to be, and that they ought to do so without prejudging the issue, because that would be circular reasoning.
It is really not a very controversial position. The most efficient way of finding out if I like coffee or not is for me to tell you (I do). It is no good presuming before the investigation that I can’t possibly like coffee, so revelation to the contrary must be summarily dismissed. Similarly, if the question is whether or not there are extraterrestial entities out there, then clearly our best chance of finding out is if they’ve made efforts to reveal their presense to us (or Sagan’s “Contact” and the SETI project are ridiculous). They understand that the only good way to find out is in fact to go looking for revelation. If they believed already, on argument alone, that extraterrestial entities didn’t exist, and then set up SETI, any data they received would be discounted because of their prior conclusion. Of course, if SETI knew that there were not extraterrestial entities one supposes they wouldn’t even bother looking.
Those examples are not that much different than the question of God. The differences would be where and how we’d look for the revelation, just as one looks for extraterrestial revelation differently than one looks for revelation about one’s drinking preferences. As long as one has a plausible reason for looking in the first place then it is perfectly reasonable to ‘look.’ The presence of a billion and a half people who believe that God actually came to earth at one time is certainly a plausible reason to examine the claim. Decide that the claim is false, if you like, but I insist that concluding it is false because you already know such things can’t happen because you already know there isn’t a God is just not reasonable.
Thank you, Rev. Anthony Horvath, "sntjohnny," for the "back-and-forth" nature of our discussion. This is what human discussion is supposed to be. You, and I, and our readers, know that there are those out there in the world who could not have a dialectic.
sntjohnny and I have agreed to keep this discussion going until we reach what each of us considers a good ending. It may happen every 10 days to two week, more or less, give or take, as we see fit. I will always be certain to link the threads together for you, as he did at the top of his piece.
Check out http://sntjohnny.com/front/ and discover the wonderful world of rational Christianity. Now THAT is a "breath of fresh air." CEC
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"SIR, the commencement at Manchester of a movement for a national education not under the control or management of either established or non-established clergy [ ] is not merely a good thing, but [ ] a thing destined to succeed...The promoters doubtless thought no less, but they probably did not expect so early a recognition of their prospects.
"If this is only a change in words and means nothing it deserves no better name than that of deception ; if it does mean anything, if by unsectarian is to be understood something different from secular education, the broad principle of religious freedom which was to be the foundation of this great educational movement is abandoned.
"There is not a better defined word in the English language. Secular is whatever has reference to this life. Secular instruction is instruction respecting the concerns of this life. Secular subjects therefore are all subjects except religion. All the arts and sciences are secular knowledge. To say that secular means irreligious implies that all the arts and sciences are irreligious, and is very like saying that all professions except that of the law are illegal. There is a difference between irreligious and not religious, however it may suit the purposes of many persons to confound it.
"To know the laws of the physical world, the properties of their own bodies and minds, the past history of their species, is as much a benefit to the Jew, the Mussulman, the Deist, the Atheist, as to the orthodox churchman ; and it is as iniquitous to withhold it from them. Education provided by the public must be education for all, and to be education for all it must be purely secular education.
"I cannot help remarking how much less confidence professed Christians appear to have in the truth and power of their principles than infidels generally have in theirs. Disbelievers in Christianity almost always hail the advance of public intelligence as favourable to them ; the more informed and exercised a mind is, the more likely they account it to adopt their opinions : but I cannot find a trace of similar confidence in most of the professedly religious. If they hold their belief with the same full assurance as the others their disbelief, surely infidels and the children of infidels are those to whom, even more than to any others, they would be eager to give all instruction which could render their minds more capable of pursuing and recognizing truth."
