From: Douglas P. Wilson (dp-wilson@shaw.ca)
Date: Sun May 05 2002 - 04:45:39 MDT
I wish people would stop attacking Christianity on rational,
philosophical, or scientific grounds, and I especially wish people would
refrain from attacking it on ad hominem grounds.
Jesus, if he existed, might indeed have been as unsavoury a character as
the Hermit said, but a lot of well-documented great thinkers were pretty
lousy guys, whose only redeeming feature was a little bit of true wisdom.
For his times, Jesus seems to have had quite a lot of wisdom, though he
didn't hold a monopoly on it.
If you want to attack religion, any religion, then you have to do it for
reasons the religious will accept. Otherwise you are just "preaching to
the converted".
"Blasphemy" is my favourite approach. Assume there is a God, a real
Supreme Being, the Creator of this universe -- the one that is at least 13
billion light years across. Assume all that, and never challenge those
assumptions, whether you believe them or not, because unless you do so,
the only people who will listen and think about what you preach will be
those already converted.
But many religious people will listen, under those assumptions, and the
approach that seems most effective with them begins with religious horror
stories, then accuses those who repeat them of blasphemy.
My favourite example of the "Blasphemy Approach" (or "Blasphemy Argument")
is this. A few years ago some very religious Jewish person (who must
surely have been insane) went into a Palestinian mosque with a machine gun
and shot a lot of people who were engaged in the worship of Allah, whom
the Jews also worship, under a different name.
That was shocking, but every society has some dangerously insane people in
it, and until social technology or some other magic bullet , so to speak,
changes human society a lot more than it has changed in the past century,
such events will continue to occur.
What is really shocking, almost unbelievable, is what happened later.
Quite a large number of apparently sane Jewish people came and laid
flowers on the grave of that mass murderer, and spoke of him as some kind
of hero, stating that what he did was God's will. Now THAT is blasphemy,
and I trust that all sensible Jews understand why.
It is a terrible, terrible insult to their God, a terrible, evil lie they
are saying about their own Supreme Being, when they say that the Creator
of the whole universe would want somebody to go into a mosque and
machine-gun the people inside. It's blasphemy, and should not be
tolerated by anyone who claims to believe in God, under any name.
OK, that's my pet example. Read Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw for
other examples.
Another favourite of mine is the children of the people of Egypt.
Because one man, the Pharaoh, was rather stubborn, God, with the willing
participation of Moses and Aaron, is supposed to have visited terrible
plagues upon the Egyptians.
Hey, hello, religious guys, what are you thinking? Are you thinking at
all? Those people were not at fault, the crime or sin was only that of
their monarch, and a great many of those Egyptian people were innocent
young children, who surely did not deserve the boils and stuff.
But my point is not that this story is a myth but that those who repeat it
in solemn readings, chants, sermons, and so on are being blasphemous --
saying something terrible about the very God they are supposedly
worshipping.
If there is a Supreme Being, a Creator, who made this Universe and all
life in it, a truly omniscient, omnipotent, and BENEVOLENT God, then it is
certain that He would never have tortured innocent Egyptian children.
Those who say He did are guilty of blasphemy and do not deserve to be
treated as religious leaders, priests, rabbis, or other ministers of
religion.
What does the Blasphemy Approach (the name I prefer, since I want to
approach people, not argue with them) accomplish? Well it opens a very
large crack in the pseudo-intellectual armour of those who believe (or
think they believe) that the Jewish scriptures or :Christian Bible is the
Literal Word of God. I think it is blasphemy to claim that those
Scriptures are the Word of a Supreme Being.
The sins and crimes described in favourable terms in the Bible, and
therefore tolerated, condoned, often praised, and sometimes used as an
excuse for slavery or for Draconian laws, cannot possibly be something any
benevolent God wanted to happen. It is blasphemy to claim He did, and it
is still blasphemy even when merely quoted or read from the Scriptures.
I could say much more about this, but I'm sure you get the point. The
Bible is not "the Word of God", it was written by mere human beings. It
is something memetic, something that reproduces itself, a kind of virus,
and if the number of copies purchased and the number of languages it has
been translated into is any measure, it is the most successful virus in
human history, even more successful than the relatively benign viruses
known as C and Unix.
I am sorry for highlighting only Jewish or Christian examples here. I
have read the Koran, in translation, just as I have read the Bible, in
translation, but I just don't know enough about it to choose a good
Islamic example.
The best Islamic example I can come up with is the blasphemous claim that
Allah, the Supreme Being, the Islamic God, Creator of the Universe, really
wanted Mohammed to go out raiding caravans, hurting innocent people and
stealing from them, killing many of them -- maybe Mohammed actually did
that, and maybe not. I don't know which. But regardless of the facts,
I think it's kinda blasphemous to say the Supreme Being wanted it to
happen. (If I have garbled the historical record here, I am sorry --
please tell me what mistakes I have made).
I am sure there are good examples from other religions, but I must plead
ignorance. Contribute some and I may put them up on a web page about all
this.
dpw
http://www.SocialTechnology.Org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Sep 25 2002 - 13:28:46 MDT