Whole Reason

One could cer­tainly find peo­ple who con­sider them­selves athe­ists who are athe­ist for any of those rea­sons, but I think one could make a sim­i­lar list for Chris­tians (and other reli­gious persons):

1. You were “Chris­t­ian in the first place”. (ie. raised that way, either explic­itly or implic­itly)
2. You made an emo­tional deci­sion to become Chris­t­ian dur­ing a dark time in your life.
3. You had a super­fi­cial or weak com­mit­ment to another reli­gion or to skep­ti­cism that was not based on intel­lect and heart. (for exam­ple, you hadn’t really thought very hard about it and some­one came along with a seem­ingly impres­sive argu­ment, or you didn’t have much in the way of emo­tional ties to your cur­rent view­point then went to a church ser­vice and fell in love with the rit­ual and music)
4. You never had a chance to hon­estly ques­tion your faith in your prior reli­gion, or your com­mit­ment to skep­ti­cism, and you will come back to your orig­i­nal view even­tu­ally after the nov­elty of Chris­tian­ity has worn off.
5. You rea­soned that Chris­t­ian faith was reasonable.

I’m sure most Chris­tians would pref­er­en­tially cite the last item (even in cases where some of the oth­ers might also apply), while skep­tics would prob­a­bly point to the first four as being more com­mon. In my opin­ion both of these views are some­what correct.

It seems to me that any major con­ver­sion expe­ri­ence, whether it’s reli­gious to skep­tic or vice versa, is likely to involve two things: a trig­ger­ing event or dis­cov­ery which causes a shift in per­spec­tive, and a slower process of reeval­u­a­tion of one’s rea­son­ing about the world in light of that shift in per­spec­tive. Any thought­ful per­son who con­fi­dently holds a par­tic­u­lar opin­ion about the nature of the world will have spent quite a bit of time rea­son­ing in order to con­vince him or her­self that that opin­ion is rea­son­able, even if he or she may have ini­tially been set on the path of that rea­son­ing by an event which on its own would not be suf­fi­cient to prove the truth of the opin­ion. So while the ini­tial con­ver­sion “event” might be one of the first four items on the list, for a thought­ful per­son the effects of that event will per­sist because of the last item.

If one is solely inter­ested in con­vert­ing peo­ple, then it is prob­a­bly very help­ful to try to under­stand what gen­er­ates those shifts in per­spec­tive, in order to learn how to facil­i­tate them in oth­ers so as to give those oth­ers an oppor­tu­nity to develop a rea­soned com­mit­ment to the view­point you want them to adopt. How­ever, if one is instead try­ing to decide which per­spec­tive is a more reli­able guide to devel­op­ing a “cor­rect” view of the uni­verse (ie. a view more likely to result in true pre­dic­tions about future events), then the only real recourse is to com­pare the best rea­son­ing avail­able on both sides, with the under­stand­ing that the rea­son­ing of the aver­age Chris­t­ian or the aver­age skep­tic might not pass this test. (And of course one should really not be com­par­ing Chris­tian­ity to only skep­ti­cism, but also to all the uncount­ably many other reli­gions that are out there as well.) As a ran­dom drive-by com­menter I don’t know which of these two angles you’re more inter­ested in inves­ti­gat­ing at the moment, but good luck to you either way.

Anna,

Those are good. I would rephrase them this way. “You are a Chris­t­ian because:”

1. You were raised that way, and have never seri­ously con­sid­ered any other view­point, nor seri­ously ques­tioned your faith.

2. You made an emo­tional deci­sion to become Chris­t­ian dur­ing a dark time in your life (no change — said perfectly!)

3. Your con­ver­sion was based on the first good argu­ment you heard, and you came from a posi­tion of weak ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ment — again, you may have never seri­ously con­sid­ered any other viewpoint.

4. You are caught up in the nov­elty of your new Chris­t­ian world view mostly because it is dif­fer­ent, and will leave it when the nov­elty wears off (is that correct?)

5. Rea­son and expe­ri­ence have led you to your con­clu­sion that Chris­tian­ity is true.

Did I get those right? i will com­ment on the rest of your com­ment in my next com­ment :D

In my opin­ion, many (most?) are athe­ists because of a com­bi­na­tion of #2 and #5 — that is, due to the abuses of reli­gion, they have retreated from any­thing that is not empir­i­cal, see­ing empiri­cism as the only sure and safe way to explore reality.

Being unable to empir­i­cally PROVE God’s exis­tence, they pre­fer to live with­out faith because they don’t trust any of their other fac­ul­ties to help them know the truth (con­science, com­mu­nion, intuition).

Rather than engag­ing in a rela­tion­ship of trust with the wis­dom and pres­ence of another (God or the Bible), they pre­fer to live within the lim­its of their own intel­lect and abil­ity to con­firm truth.

I know that is a lit­tle pejo­ra­tive, but I don’t exactly mean it to be. I am try­ing to express the idea that I think that intel­lec­tual mate­ri­al­ism and athe­ism are safe but lim­ited ways of liv­ing. Faith (trust) allows you to live beyond your abil­ity to under­stand or imme­di­ately val­i­date, and ben­e­fit form the wis­dom of oth­ers, includ­ing God.

» Anne: Any thought­ful per­son who con­fi­dently holds a par­tic­u­lar opin­ion about the nature of the world will have spent quite a bit of time rea­son­ing in order to con­vince him or her­self that that opin­ion is rea­son­able, even if he or she may have ini­tially been set on the path of that rea­son­ing by an event which on its own would not be suf­fi­cient to prove the truth of the opinion.

Sorry, I spelled your name incor­rectly last time. The dif­fer­ence here, I think, is that, with Chris­tian­ity, while intel­lec­tual argu­ments may clear the way for faith, most peo­ple make a faith com­mit­ment NOT upon ini­tial intel­lec­tual con­vic­tion, but upon a heart con­vic­tion (intu­ition, con­science) and an expe­ri­ence of the Divine upon the heart.

Intel­lec­tual devel­op­ment usu­ally FOLLOWS Chris­t­ian con­ver­sion, and what is foun­da­tional is not an intel­lec­tual deci­sion, but an expe­ri­ence of a heart-conviction of truth and expe­ri­enced relationship/peace that begins the journey.

Such emo­tional foun­da­tions and begin­nings can cer­tainly be mis­lead­ing and gone back upon when rea­son comes to bear, and I under­stand why an atheist/unbeliever would be skep­ti­cal of this order of oper­a­tions, so to speak.

But Chris­tian­ity is first and pri­mar­ily a faith of the heart, of per­sonal con­vic­tion of guilt and truth, and of God’s love. As the scrip­tures say, it is ‘the good­ness of God that leads you to repen­tance,’ (Romans 2:4) — that is, it is not first a head thing, but a heart thing.

Yeah, your rephras­ings are of course bet­ter than my orig­i­nals. I just worded them the way I did to con­nect them to your ini­tial list.

In any case, I’m a lit­tle star­tled to see you claim that as a point of pride the fact that Chris­tian­ity goes beyond what can be intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fied. Would you find it respectable, much less admirable, if I went beyond what can be intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fied in order to ben­e­fit from what I believed to be the “wis­dom” of Allah, Bud­dha, Athena, aliens, fairies, or Santa Claus, and to engage in a rela­tion­ship of trust with their pres­ence? Peo­ple have in the past and con­tinue in the present to believe they have deeply mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships with all of these enti­ties and more, yet adult Chris­tians will for the most part think it’s any­where from sim­ply wrong to totally silly to make the leap from find­ing these beliefs sat­is­fy­ing and mean­ing­ful to con­sid­er­ing them to be true. It seems to me that there’s kind of a dou­ble stan­dard here — reli­gious peo­ple are will­ing to sus­pend dis­be­lief for their own god myth, but only for that myth and no other. One would think that such a dis­crep­ancy might demand, you know, intel­lec­tual justification.

I think an apt com­par­i­son here might be to the act of falling in love with another human being. I love my part­ner, and allow­ing myself to fall in love with him was an act of the heart, an act of trust, although I did of course weigh care­fully whether the emo­tional attach­ment I felt towards him was worth hav­ing to deal with cer­tain dif­fi­cul­ties I knew would inevitably arise. And despite the fact that we have indeed had to deal with those dif­fi­cul­ties and many oth­ers, I believe that it’s been more than worth­while to have made that leap.

Of course, it would be near-impossible for me to con­struct a com­pletely log­i­cal expla­na­tion for *why* I find our rela­tion­ship so sat­is­fy­ing and valu­able, or to explain what about my part­ner made me will­ing to com­mit myself to him. I can point to indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics of his that I like, but if some­one asked me to explain his total value in purely empir­i­cal terms I might be hard pressed, not to men­tion that I’d feel that they were kind of miss­ing the point. So on that level, it makes sense to me to argue in favor of a will­ing­ness to make emo­tional com­mit­ments even in the absence of solid empir­i­cal justification.

On the other hand, the com­mit­ment I have made to my part­ner is, I think, dif­fer­ent from a com­mit­ment to a deity in sev­eral impor­tant ways, not the least of which is that I have pretty good empir­i­cal rea­son to believe that my part­ner actu­ally does exist, even though it’s more chal­leng­ing to jus­tify pre­cisely why com­mit­ting to him was the right thing to do. More­over, I under­stand that the right­ness of this com­mit­ment is not a uni­ver­sal thing — even though I think he’s a very good per­son, I don’t claim that every­one else could or should love him and com­mit to him the same way I do and have. I don’t even claim that every­one else should like or respect him, or that they should con­sider it rea­son­able for me to love him, pro­vided they leave us alone to live our lives the way we see fit (within reason).

The point of this com­par­i­son is that the rea­son athe­ists think reli­gion needs intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is not that we’re unwill­ing to make emo­tional com­mit­ments with­out com­plete intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. It’s that we’re unwill­ing to make fac­tual claims about the nature of the uni­verse with­out intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, and we’re unwill­ing to make uni­ver­sal claims about what emo­tional com­mit­ments other peo­ple should engage in with­out intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. More­over, we’re also unwill­ing to let pub­lic pol­icy be guided by ideas that don’t have solid intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. In other words, peo­ple are wel­come to believe what­ever kooky made-up things they want if it makes them happy, but they shouldn’t expect the rest of us to have much respect for their kooky beliefs, they shouldn’t expect the rest of us to be will­ing to fol­low them down the rab­bit hole, and they *should* accept that the kooky, made-up parts of their beliefs ought to have no role in deter­min­ing pub­lic policy.

So if you proudly admit that Chris­tian­ity is not com­pletely intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fi­able, you’re of course wel­come to go ahead and believe in it any­way. But you have to rec­og­nize that things that aren’t com­pletely intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fi­able can’t rea­son­ably be advanced as oblig­a­tory for oth­ers to adopt or even respect. You also have to accept that you can’t argue some­body into falling in love with your reli­gion, and that falling in love with it is the only way you can expect them to become com­mit­ted to it. And you need to see that when other peo­ple don’t con­vert to your reli­gion it’s not because they don’t have the courage to fall in love, it’s because your reli­gion just really isn’t their type.

» ANNE: I’m a lit­tle star­tled to see you claim that as a point of pride the fact that Chris­tian­ity goes beyond what can be intel­lec­tu­ally justified.

I think that per­haps this is star­tling to some­one who dis­trusts their spir­i­tual fac­ul­ties for the safety of intel­lect alone — it’s like a per­son who has never used their ears and is star­tled to think that some­one would think some­thing is real when they hear it but don’t see it.

When you say ‘beyond what can be intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fied,’ I hear two things. If you mean ‘beyond what intel­lect and rea­son can grasp or eval­u­ate,’ I would agree — just as cos­mic rays were at one time unmea­sur­able and unsens­able, yet real, I am say­ing that the real­ity of God and spir­i­tual things are cur­rently that way UNLESS you find new ways to asses them.

Emmanuel Kant made an excel­lent argu­ment about this, dis­cussing the LIMITS of rea­son, and the log­i­cal limit that rea­son can not jus­tify it’s own ver­ity because that would be cir­cu­lar (I may be mis­un­der­stand­ing, but I think that’s it).

The point is, liv­ing by one’s lim­ited logic and rea­son alone is safe, but lim­ited. If we take a prin­ci­pled approach to also using con­science, intu­ition, and com­mu­nion when research­ing spir­i­tual things (moral­ity and God), we can reduce the risk of error and learn more than mere empiri­cism can teach us. We do not reject empiri­cism, we merely use it as a pri­mary (but not soli­tary) tool in our arse­nal of truth seeking.

» ANNE: Would you find it respectable, much less admirable, if I went beyond what can be intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fied in order to ben­e­fit from what I believed to be the “wis­dom” of Allah, Bud­dha, Athena, aliens, fairies, or Santa Claus, and to engage in a rela­tion­ship of trust with their presence?.…One would think that such a dis­crep­ancy might demand, you know, intel­lec­tual justification.

If you failed to use rea­son to dis­crim­i­nate between these sources, I would find is less than admirable. As I dis­cussed in Pascal’s Wager — Part II: debunk­ing the ‘all reli­gions are equally improb­a­ble’ ruse, not all claims at divine truth are equal.

In that post, plus Pascal’s Wager — Part III: Eval­u­at­ing the gods, I believe that I made an intel­lec­tual argu­ment for my spe­cial plead­ing for Chris­tian­ity, and to a lesser extent, Bud­dhism. BTW, Bud­dhists don’t really believe that they have a rela­tion­ship w/ Buddha.

» ANNE: I think an apt com­par­i­son here might be to the act of falling in love with another human being.

That is the per­fect anal­ogy, which is why the Bible stresses that a *rela­tion­ship* with God is true spir­i­tu­al­ity — or as Jesus said

And this is eter­nal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. (John 17:3)

And this is why I dis­cussed that for most Chris­tians, they believe not pri­marly because their intel­lect told them so (though intel­lec­tual argu­ments may have led them to stop dis­be­liev­ing), but because they quite lit­er­ally fall in love after real­iz­ing that they ARE loved and are miss­ing out on the most impor­tant rela­tion­ship they could have.

» ANNE: On the other hand, the com­mit­ment I have made to my part­ner is, I think, dif­fer­ent from a com­mit­ment to a deity in sev­eral impor­tant ways, not the least of which is that I have pretty good empir­i­cal rea­son to believe that my part­ner actu­ally does exist,

I think that this is the dif­fer­ence between hav­ing faith and hav­ing direct empir­i­cal evi­dence. Faith in God is not ask­ing you to believe *despite* evi­dence, but *in leiu of* direct empir­i­cal evi­dence. While there are a slew of sec­ondary rea­sons to believe in the God of the Bible (wis­dom, ethics, his­tor­i­cal, archeao­log­i­cal, and per­haps most impor­tantly, philo­soph­i­cal), faith in God cer­tainly IS dif­fer­ent from a rela­tion­ship w/ a flesh and blood mortal.

» ANNE: The point of this com­par­i­son is that the rea­son athe­ists think reli­gion needs intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is not that we’re unwill­ing to make emo­tional com­mit­ments with­out com­plete intel­lec­tual justification.

I would say that there IS intel­lec­tual jus­ti­fi­ca­tion (good philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments), but no EMPIRICAL evi­dence out­side of the his­tor­i­cal and archeao­log­i­cal sup­port for the Bible.

» ANNE: In other words, peo­ple are wel­come to believe what­ever kooky made-up things they want if it makes them happy, but they shouldn’t expect the rest of us to have much respect for their kooky beliefs,

I kind of dis­agree. As in wrote in my Pascal’s Wager arti­cles, if some spir­i­tual sys­tems are harm­ful (like those that den­i­grate women or vio­late human rights), we have a duty to con­front them, even if they make some peo­ple ‘happy.’ Some reli­gions ARE kook­ier than others.

» ANNE: they *should* accept that the kooky, made-up parts of their beliefs ought to have no role in deter­min­ing pub­lic policy.

This is a lit­tle ambigu­ous, and again, could mean two things, but I think I largely agree. As I have long argued, appeals to reli­gious author­ity may be used in sway­ing pub­lic opin­ion (such as MLK did), but in pub­lic pol­icy debates, we need to appeal to com­mon ethics.

So for exam­ple, in the abor­tion debate, I would not say “because the bible says so,” but rather, I would appeal to the con­sti­tu­tional “right to life,” and argue that life and per­son­hood begin at some sci­en­tif­i­cally rea­son­able point (like heart­beat) (cf. c-ral.org

How­ever, since all leg­is­la­tion is in some part eth­i­cal and moral in nature, it is per­fectly legit­i­mate for me to want to have the law sup­port what I think to be moral — things such as do not kill, do not steal, do not lie. And of course, reli­gious laws have no place in pub­lic pol­icy (like wear­ing head-coverings, for instance). So if you mean that I should not bring my eth­i­cal and moral con­vic­tions to bear upon pub­lic pol­icy, I would say that’s not true — as long as my moral con­vic­tions have to do with the ethics of being humane, not reli­gious observance.

» ANNE: So if you proudly admit that Chris­tian­ity is not com­pletely intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fi­able, you’re of course wel­come to go ahead and believe in it anyway.

I am not say­ing that. I am say­ing that, as much as spir­i­tual things can be deter­mined by logic and rea­son, Chris­tian­ity stands head and shoul­ders above the oth­ers. How­ever, if you mean that rea­son and logic alone can lead you to the knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of God, I would say that you are liv­ing within your own vast limits.

» ANNE: But you have to rec­og­nize that things that aren’t com­pletely intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fi­able can’t rea­son­ably be advanced as oblig­a­tory for oth­ers to adopt or even respect.

I admit that, which is why I must also respect people’s right to NOT beleive, even though they have no way to empir­i­cally prove God’s non-existence.

» ANNE: You also have to accept that you can’t argue some­body into falling in love with your reli­gion, and that falling in love with it is the only way you can expect them to become com­mit­ted to it.

I agree, although I would add that mak­ing intel­lec­tual argu­ments for faith CAN ELIMINATE erro­neous bar­ri­ers to faith that peo­ple have. This is the thrust of Paul’s instruc­tion to use log­i­cal argu­ment (rather than force) as part of spread­ing the faith:

For the weapons of our war­fare are not car­nal but mighty in God for pulling down strong­holds, cast­ing down argu­ments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowl­edge of God (2 Corinthi­ans 10:4–5).

It is also impor­tant that we develop our intel­lect as peo­ple of faith — here’s just a cou­ple rel­e­vant scrip­tures:

See to it that no one takes you cap­tive through phi­los­o­phy and empty decep­tion, accord­ing to the tra­di­tion of men, accord­ing to the ele­men­tary prin­ci­ples of the world, rather than accord­ing to Christ.(Colossians 2:8)

Proverbs 4:7
Wis­dom is the prin­ci­pal thing; There­fore get wis­dom. And in all your get­ting, get understanding.

Proverbs 16:16
How much bet­ter to get wis­dom than gold! And to get under­stand­ing is to be cho­sen rather than silver.

» ANNE: And you need to see that when other peo­ple don’t con­vert to your reli­gion it’s not because they don’t have the courage to fall in love, it’s because your reli­gion just really isn’t their type.

I am not endeav­or­ing to con­vert peo­ple to reli­gion, but to truth. If I am cor­rect, than those that dis­be­lieve are actu­ally reject­ing TRUTH, not reli­gion. How­ever, if my prac­tice is not one of truth, but of mere out­ward obser­vances, I would expect that oth­ers would reject it as ‘not for them.’

Thanks for commenting!

One more thing about the empir­i­cal real­ity of a human part­ner and a rela­tion­ship w/ God.

See this defin­i­tive pas­sage on faith, and how FAITH (not blind faith, see The Atheist’s Car­i­ca­ture of Faith) replaces direct evi­dence in the divine rela­tion­ship:

Hebrews 11:1
Now faith is the sub­stance of things hoped for, the evi­dence of things not seen.

Regard­ing blind faith, please also see
What is a Fun­da­men­tal­ist Christian?

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to respond, but I feel like you’ve done a bit of a Gish Gal­lop on me here, say­ing so many things that are so wrong that it takes longer to refute them than it does to state them in the first place. So I think I’m going to skip the details and sim­ply hit on the four big points where you seem to be confused.

The first point is in regard to the sup­posed “evi­dence” in favor of Chris­t­ian reli­gious beliefs. You seem to believe that athe­ists just wave their hands and say, “Oh, all reli­gions are equally stu­pid,” with­out hav­ing exam­ined them indi­vid­u­ally, and that we have there­fore missed the spe­cial unique right­ness of Chris­tian­ity. In fact, it is pre­cisely by exam­in­ing dif­fer­ent sys­tems of mythol­ogy indi­vid­u­ally, care­fully, and sym­pa­thet­i­cally that one becomes aware of how sim­i­lar Chris­tian­ity is to all the rest, in terms of its his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment, the ways in which it is defended by believ­ers, the qual­ity of the “evi­dence” in its favor, and so forth. Chris­tians have dif­fi­culty rec­og­niz­ing these sim­i­lar­i­ties because Chris­tians are immersed every day in Chris­t­ian assump­tions, and it is very dif­fi­cult to see from such a per­spec­tive that one is accept­ing truth claims on behalf of one’s own reli­gion that one would find absurd and unsub­stan­ti­ated if they were made on behalf of another.

It would be aside from the point to go into the details of the telling sim­i­lar­i­ties between Chris­tian­ity and other reli­gions just now. The writ­ings of Joseph Camp­bell might be a rea­son­able start­ing point if you want to learn more about this. But the bot­tom line is that any demon­stra­tion that Chris­tian­ity is actu­ally uniquely supe­rior needs to be based on an informed and sym­pa­thetic analy­sis of other reli­gions, and on a clear-eyed read­ing of his­tory, not just a cutesy Pascal’s Wager chart. And absent absolutely com­pelling argu­ments in favor of Chris­tian­ity (which Chris­tian­ity exactly, by the way?) there’s no real rea­son that an athe­ist should bother to give it any par­tic­u­lar notice in the midst of the vast mob of other silly, poorly-substantiated things that peo­ple have shown them­selves per­fectly will­ing to devote their lives to throught human his­tory. Chris­tian­ity needs to *earn* the stand­ing required for any­thing more than off-handed dis­missal as just as silly as all the rest; it has no right to demand such stand­ing a pri­ori. And in the opin­ion of many athe­ists, Chris­tian­ity just hasn’t dis­tin­guished itself well enough to demon­strate that it’s any­thing spe­cial, which is why we feel per­fectly sat­is­fied to leave it in the, “They’re all equally stu­pid,” pile.

The sec­ond point is in regard to “spir­i­tual fac­ul­ties” and the evi­dence of things unseen. I would really like to know what in the world a spir­i­tual fac­ulty is, and how you jus­tify com­par­ing such things to real senses like sight, hear­ing, touch, taste, smell, and pro­pri­o­cep­tion. You talk about some­one who has never used their ears being star­tled that some­one would think some­thing is real when they hear it but don’t see it, yet the per­son who hears could hook up a micro­phone to an acoustic analy­sis pro­gram on a com­puter and demon­strate to the per­son who doesn’t that things that aren’t vis­i­ble can affect the read­outs on the com­puter. Some­one who thinks invis­i­ble par­ti­cles called cos­mic rays exist can build a bub­ble cham­ber and show the rest of the world that some­thing is def­i­nitely com­ing from the sky and affect­ing the vapors in the cham­ber. What demon­stra­tion can you make to me that the things you “sense” with these sup­posed “spir­i­tual fac­ul­ties” have any effects what­so­ever on the real world?

More­over, typ­i­cally peo­ple who do have a par­tic­u­lar sense will be able to agree rea­son­ably well on what that sense tells them. If I see a chair stand­ing across the room from me, I can turn to another sighted friend and expect that that friend will agree with me (unless one or both of us have recently used hal­lu­cino­genic drugs). I could also turn to a blind friend and ask that friend to go over and touch the object and again, that friend would agree that it is a chair. But with their sup­posed “spir­i­tual fac­ul­ties”, dif­fer­ent peo­ple expe­ri­ence vastly dif­fer­ent and con­tra­dic­tory reli­gious sen­sa­tions. Some “sense” the pres­ence of the Chris­t­ian god, while oth­ers find Allah, or benev­o­lent aliens, or the one­ness of all things. And peo­ple are told by their sup­posed “moral sense” to do things that my “moral sense” tells me are abhor­rent, like fly­ing air­planes into build­ings and pre­vent­ing gay peo­ple from gain­ing legal recog­ni­tion for their fam­i­lies. So this whole “spir­i­tual fac­ul­ties” thing seems to me more like a bogus way for reli­gious peo­ple to try to ele­vate their per­sonal intu­itions about how the uni­verse should work to some kind of uni­ver­sal laws than it does like a gen­uine sense. I’m just not buy­ing it.

The third point is related to this issue of faith. If Chris­tian­ity was truly thor­oughly intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fied it wouldn’t require any kind of spe­cial “faith” to believe in it, such that “faith” would be touted as a Chris­t­ian virtue. Nobody goes around being proud of their “faith” that the Earth is a roughly spher­i­cal world orbit­ing the sun which orbits the cen­ter of the Milky Way and so on. Nobody touts their “faith” in the exis­tence of elec­trons, or the fact of evo­lu­tion. Nobody talks about the impor­tance of their “faith” in the exis­tence of George Wash­ing­ton. We have giant heap­ing stacks of evi­dence which is acces­si­ble to any­one who wants to exam­ine it and which is most con­sis­tent with a uni­verse in which these propo­si­tions are true, such that to refuse to accept them as the best expla­na­tion of that evi­dence would be rather per­verse. The evi­dence for Chris­tian­ity is nowhere near this qual­ity. If it was, the sto­ries in the Bible would be stud­ied as his­tory and archae­ol­ogy, the hows and whys of mir­a­cles would be stud­ied as sci­ence, and believ­ing in their truth would just be a mat­ter of con­fi­dence in the work­ings of the sci­en­tific and his­tor­i­cal processes. Instead rep­utable aca­d­e­mics study Chris­t­ian sto­ries and mir­a­cles as mythol­ogy, and belief in the Chris­t­ian story is (proudly) an act of faith. How is this con­sis­tent with some­thing which is, as you say, not mere reli­gion, but Capital-T-Truth?

The fourth and final point is the silli­ness of your asser­tion that peo­ple choose athe­ism because it’s “safe”. When I finally real­ized that my reli­gious faith wasn’t ten­able any more and that I had no hon­est choice but to become an athe­ist it scared the crap out of me. I felt like I was jump­ing off a cliff and hop­ing to sprout wings on the way down. For­tu­nately it seems to have worked out okay for me, but let me assure you that if safety was my pri­mary con­cern this is *not* the way I would’ve gone. Safety would have been stick­ing with what I knew, with a sys­tem that told me the “right” way to act and assured me that I would be rewarded if I obeyed the rules. Safety was def­i­nitely not con­sis­tent with strik­ing out into the unknown, hav­ing to fig­ure out every­thing for myself, and hav­ing no way of know­ing whether it would turn out all right in the end. In a soci­ety where the vast major­ity of peo­ple are reli­gious and despise athe­ism, and where there is lit­tle or no guid­ance on how to live suc­cess­fully as an athe­ist, choos­ing athe­ism is any­thing but safe.

1. Sim­i­lar­ity and unique­ness of Xian­ity to other religions

» ANNE: You seem to believe that athe­ists just wave their hands and say, “Oh, all reli­gions are equally stu­pid,” with­out hav­ing exam­ined them indi­vid­u­ally, and that we have there­fore missed the spe­cial unique right­ness of Chris­tian­ity. In fact, it is pre­cisely by exam­in­ing dif­fer­ent sys­tems of mythol­ogy indi­vid­u­ally, care­fully, and sym­pa­thet­i­cally that one becomes aware of how sim­i­lar Chris­tian­ity is to all the rest

Well, I think it is telling that, while you deny that athe­ists engage in uncrit­i­cal group dis­missal of reli­gions, you con­tinue on to do just that, dis­cussing xianity’s sim­i­lar­ity to other religions.

While you are cor­rect that many Chris­tians fail to do this analy­sis regard­ing his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment of reli­gions, that does not address the con­tention that Chris­tian­ity (and to a lesser extent Bud­dhism) is still quan­ti­ta­tively and qual­i­ta­tively supe­rior to other faiths in his­tor­i­cal accu­racy, amount of his­tor­i­cal data, not to men­tion it’s unequaled pos­i­tive and huge impact in the for­ma­tion of West­ern cul­ture. The fact that xian­ity is the pri­mary source of hos­pi­tals, Uni­ver­si­ties, sup­port for and birth of mod­ern sci­ence, and abo­li­tion and the gen­eral valu­ing of human life is more than significant.

» The writ­ings of Joseph Camp­bell might be a rea­son­able start­ing point if you want to learn more about this.

I enjoyed the Power of Myth very much, and liked his writ­ing on these items. How­ever, despite the uni­ver­sal appeal and sim­i­lar­i­ties of myth across ide­o­log­i­cal and reli­gious sys­tems, Chris­tian­ity goes beyond myth and makes his­tor­i­cal claims. These are what makes Chris­tian­ity unique and pow­er­ful — it demands the belief in REAL his­tor­i­cal events, not just reli­gious con­cepts or meaning-making myths, even if it also func­tions that way.

» not just a cutesy Pascal’s Wager chart.

As I stated, that was just a mockup, an exam­ple that I stated could be ques­tioned, and exam­ined, and proven if some­one took the time. But the actual point I was mak­ing was that such an analy­sis COULD be done, and that some reli­gions and ide­olo­gies can be rejected prima facie because they are patently infe­rior. Again, the point is that such an eval­u­a­tion can not PROVE the truth of reli­gious claims, but it can ELIMINATE pretenders.

The athe­ist tac­tic to com­pare the Bib­li­cal Jesus to the FSM is the type of idiocy I was address­ing. The FSM can eas­ily be dis­missed as rel­a­tively false and worth­less, while other ide­olo­gies can not.

» Chris­tian­ity needs to *earn* the stand­ing required for any­thing more than off-handed dis­missal as just as silly as all the rest; it has no right to demand such stand­ing a priori.

I agree, and many authors have under­taken that task. See:
How Chris­tian­ity changed the world by Alvin Schmidt
The bib­li­cal ori­gins of science

2. What are spir­i­tual faculties?

» ANNE: . I would really like to know what in the world a spir­i­tual fac­ulty is, and how you jus­tify com­par­ing such things to real senses like sight, hear­ing, touch, taste, smell, and proprioception.

You are right, I did not elab­o­rate on that, and I should — I meant to get to that as part of my series The Tri­par­tite Makeup of Man.

But sim­ply, the three pro­posed func­tions of the Spirit are

a. Con­science — the ‘organ’ (metaphor­i­cally speak­ing) of moral per­cep­tion, includ­ing our sense of right/wrong, and guilt

b. Intu­tion — the organ of truth per­cep­tion, some­times called “our gut.” There is a sense in which we rec­og­nize truth, even if emo­tion­ally or intel­lec­tu­ally, we have ini­tial bar­ri­ers to cer­tain ideas. It is a type of ‘know­ing’ that goes beyond mere under­stand­ing. It is the means by which we rec­og­nize moral and eth­i­cal truths before we even think about them consicously.

c. Com­mu­nion — this is the organ of spir­i­tual fel­low­ship — it is a deeper com­mu­nion with peo­ple and God than phys­i­cal or emo­tional ties. It is place at our core where we com­mune with the Divine or peo­ple beyond under­stand­ing. It is a type of join­ing that goes beyond the phys­i­cal and emotional.

Most of us are rel­a­tive new­bies at using these fac­ul­ties, hav­ing been bound by empir­i­cal­ism or turned away from such by peo­ple who don’t tem­per the use of these fac­ul­ties with their other fac­ul­ties of intel­lect and sense expe­ri­ence. The sub­jec­tive nature of these makes them eas­ier to abuse and mis­un­der­stand, but that does not make them unreal. Along these lines, you might also enjoy The Wes­leyan Quad­ran­gle, which dis­cusses the rela­tion­ships between Faith and Scrip­ture, Rea­son, and Expe­ri­ence. Not exactly related, but engages the prin­ci­ple that nei­ther faith nor rea­son are depend­able on their own.

» ANNE: You talk about some­one who has never used their ears being star­tled that some­one would think some­thing is real when they hear it but don’t see it, yet the per­son who hears could hook up a micro­phone to an acoustic analy­sis pro­gram on a com­puter and demon­strate to the per­son who doesn’t that things that aren’t vis­i­ble can affect the read­outs on the computer.

It was an anal­ogy, and as you know, all analo­gies are imper­fect. I under­stand your point, there is a dif­fer­ence between two empir­i­cally ver­i­fi­able senses and spir­i­tual ‘senses.’ Nev­er­the­less, I hope that my anal­ogy helps you under­stand my point.

Again, years ago, no one would have been able to mea­sure or believe that cos­mic rays were real. Now we CAN indi­rectly mea­sure them (with instru­ments). Rel­a­tiv­ity opened up a whole new world to us beyond our pre­vi­ous per­cep­tion. Quan­tum physics is reveal­ing a whole NEW realm which may have new rules. Who is to say that my pro­posed ‘spir­i­tual’ fac­ul­ties might one day be measurable. ;)

» ANNE: More­over, typ­i­cally peo­ple who do have a par­tic­u­lar sense will be able to agree rea­son­ably well on what that sense tells them.

The prob­lem with eth­i­cal, moral, and spir­i­tual real­i­ties is that, though objec­tive morals may exist, peo­ple will dis­agree on even the most foun­da­tional of them (for exam­ple, all men are cre­ated equal). These types of truths are harder to pin down, and yet, as the founders sug­gested, peo­ple of sound judge­ment and good will would see the ‘self-evident’ nature of cer­tain things.

The Bible teaches that we are cor­rupted by self-interest, sin, and a world sys­tem that teaches us val­ues in con­tra­dic­tion to the spritual king­dom — i.e., we are ‘blind’ until we ‘see’.

But again, mat­ters of faith require the use of spir­i­tual senses, not just empiri­cism. I’m not sure why, but it works that way. You can use empiri­cism to exam­ine the his­toric­ity, the inter­nal con­sis­tency, and the value of scrip­ture. But rea­son must even­tu­ally give way to faith if you want to please God, for “with­out faith, it is impos­si­ble to please God.”

Hebrews 11:6
But with­out faith it is impos­si­ble to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who dili­gently seek Him.

Or as I like to say:

Before faith comes, rea­son is king. After faith comes, rea­son is servant.

3. If we need faith, we are not intel­lec­tu­ally justified

» ANNE: If Chris­tian­ity was truly thor­oughly intel­lec­tu­ally jus­ti­fied it wouldn’t require any kind of spe­cial “faith” to believe in it, such that “faith” would be touted as a Chris­t­ian virtue.

As I said, there are lim­its to rea­son, as Emmanuel Kant dis­cusses in his great work on the topic. Just because our lim­ited under­stand­ing and sci­ence can not fully grasp or under­stand the infi­nite does not make it unten­able or unreal.

» Nobody talks about the impor­tance of their “faith” in the exis­tence of George Washington.

Actu­ally, that is all you have regard­ing his­tor­i­cal fig­ures — you can’t empir­i­cally con­firm that GW existed, you have to trust some­one else’s tes­ti­mony. That’s what the Bible asks.

Except it asks for a dif­fer­ent kind of faith — one that involves not just belief that God IS, but one that involves PLACING your trust, that is, your life, in His hands. As scrip­tures say, “even the demons believe that God is real, but that does not save them from the judge­ment to come!” (my paraphrase).

The impor­tance of faith in Christ is that it SAVES you from some­thing now and later. It trans­forms your soul. It goes beyond mere intel­lect and engages you in a liv­ing rela­tion­ship with God. Faith in GW could do no such thing.

» ANNE: The evi­dence for Chris­tian­ity is nowhere near this quality.

Most who say that have not looked at the evi­dence, but have merely sat at the feet of the Richard Dawkins of this world and taken their word for it. Many, many peo­ple who have actu­ally set out to exam­ine the evi­dence, even in order to debunk xian­ity, have con­verted because the evi­dence is over­whelm­ing. But sal­va­tion still requires faith that goes beyond the pal­try intellect.

» ANNE: If it was, the sto­ries in the Bible would be stud­ied as his­tory and archaeology…Instead rep­utable aca­d­e­mics study Chris­t­ian sto­ries and mir­a­cles as mythology

Anne, I think you are WAAAAY out of your depth here. The amount of Bib­li­cal Archae­ol­ogy is tremen­dous, and over­whelm­ingly con­firms the breadth and depth of the Bible, down to minute details. If you are truly inter­ested, just google Bib­li­cal Archae­ol­ogy. Then spend a few weeks pour­ing over the gobs of information.

4. Is athe­ism merely a safety mech­a­nism to pro­tect peo­ple from the vagaries of faith?

» ANNE: The fourth and final point is the silli­ness of your asser­tion that peo­ple choose athe­ism because it’s “safe”. When I finally real­ized that my reli­gious faith wasn’t ten­able any more and that I had no hon­est choice but to become an athe­ist it scared the crap out of me.

I did not mean to say that leav­ing faith is easy, nor becom­ing an athe­ist is easy, nor is deal­ing with people’s neg­a­tive per­cep­tions of athe­ists. But STAYING an athe­ist is by all means ‘safe’ in my view because it hun­kers down in the lim­ited, safe world of empiri­cism, and fails to ven­ture out into the spir­i­tual world, for many rea­sons. It may be con­ve­nient to not go out where abuses and sub­jec­tivism can make fools of you (like in love), but the real­ity of God is worth the risk as is the real­ity of human love.

» ANNE: Safety was def­i­nitely not con­sis­tent with strik­ing out into the unknown, hav­ing to fig­ure out every­thing for myself, and hav­ing no way of know­ing whether it would turn out all right in the end.

Hav­ing left my faith and returned to faith many years later, I under­stand the fear and trauma of such a jour­ney of ‘trust­ing no one, save my own per­cep­tion.’ How­ever, faith is about learn­ing whom you CAN trust, and then trust­ing again.

This is the topic of my first book, which your input is help­ful for. Again, thank you for tak­ing time to post, please do as much as you care to (or not). If you can stand it, I’d love to have somone like you review my man­u­script when it is ready. I’ll announce it in about 8 months. Thanks.

you for­got the rea­son i most often encounter — peo­ple decon­vert from Chris­tian­ity because they want to sin and so they have to get rid of God so they don’t feel guilty about sin­ning all the time.

there is no such thing as sin­cere unbe­lief. all unbe­lief is inten­tional self-deception aris­ing from rebellion.

i think this is a very good one for apolo­get­ics rea­sons. it makes God seem very just in con­demn­ing unbe­lief. it makes peo­ple afraid to ques­tion or doubt (because they would only do that if they were evil). and it rein­forces ingroup bias (non-Christians are will­ful, evil and rebel­lious and Chris­tians are hum­ble, obe­di­ent and good).

oh yeah… and it also keeps Chris­tians from look­ing at alter­na­tive view­points, because it insists that there are no respectable alter­na­tive view­points, only pathetic jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for evil.

> Chris­tian­ity (and to a lesser extent Bud­dhism) is still quan­ti­ta­tively and qual­i­ta­tively supe­rior to other faiths in…

Bud­dhism isn’t the major point of con­tention here, so I’m going to ignore it for the moment, but other than that let me go point by point…

> his­tor­i­cal accu­racy, amount of his­tor­i­cal data

No. See, for exam­ple, Robert Price, Hec­tor Ava­los, Rene Salm, and an infini­tude of others.

> not to men­tion it’s unequaled pos­i­tive and huge impact in the for­ma­tion of West­ern culture.

Oh, you mean the parts where dis­senters got excom­mu­ni­cated and burned and dis­sent­ing views were black­listed? The great parts of West­ern cul­ture are due to the peo­ple who real­ized that we need to use *sec­u­lar* rea­son­ing to avoid trick­ing our­selves into think­ing some­thing is true because it matches what we already believe, and to have *sec­u­lar* gov­ern­ment so that no one reli­gious group can stomp on every­one else. Yes, many of these peo­ple were nom­i­nally or actu­ally one form of Chris­t­ian or another, but only because *every­body* was Chris­t­ian, and typ­i­cally the ones who gen­uinely advanced the cause of civ­i­liza­tion were far from the Chris­t­ian mainstream.

> The fact that xian­ity is the pri­mary source of hospitals

Only 13% of com­mu­nity hos­pi­tals in the US, com­pris­ing 18% of hos­pi­tal beds, have some reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. I can’t speak too much to other coun­tries, but I’d note that those coun­tries with bet­ter med­ical care than the US (Canada and West­ern Europe) are even more over­whelm­ingly sec­u­lar, and indeed often have the gov­ern­ment as the pri­mary admin­is­tra­tor of health­care. In some less devel­oped coun­tries it may be true that reli­gious insti­tu­tions (not nec­es­sar­ily Chris­t­ian) are more dom­i­nant in the health care mar­ket, but that’s more a sign that the sec­u­lar insti­tu­tions in those coun­tries have failed than a sign that reli­gion is great.

> Uni­ver­si­ties

Almost none of the great uni­ver­si­ties are explic­itly sec­tar­ian these days, and those which do main­tain a sec­tar­ian affil­i­a­tion strongly down­play it. Con­versely, those schools that are strongly sec­tar­ian tend to be very low-ranked indeed and unbal­anced in their cur­ricu­lum. If you want an excel­lent and bal­anced edu­ca­tion, you go to a sec­u­lar uni­ver­sity, not to Bob Jones. Many uni­ver­si­ties did *begin* as sec­tar­ian orga­ni­za­tions, but only because they were intended for edu­cat­ing priests and min­is­ters, who needed to know at least a lit­tle bit more about their reli­gion than their con­gre­ga­tions did. As the pur­pose of the uni­ver­si­ties expanded into realms that were actu­ally use­ful, the reli­gious ele­ments tended to wither away.

> sup­port for and birth of mod­ern science,

Only to the degree that the Catholic Church, back in the day, was the only insti­tu­tion that had the money and the where­withal to edu­cate any­body enough that they could become a sci­en­tist. Well, them and the wealthy nobil­ity (like the Medicis). When the con­clu­sions of those sci­en­tists ran con­trary to reli­gious dogma, prob­lems quickly arose. The growth of tech­no­log­i­cal and sci­en­tific knowl­edge only really began to accel­er­ate when the sec­u­lar world became capa­ble of sup­port­ing sci­en­tific stud­ies and tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment. Surely you recall the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion? Also, if you want to be cred­it­ing Chris­tian­ity for sci­ence, where’s the love for Islam? They pretty much invented math over there, and for quite a while all Euro­pean Chris­tians did was trans­late Islamic works and go, “Golly, I wish we’d thought of that.” And then there were the ancient (pagan) Greeks, upon whom early Chris­t­ian sci­en­tists also leaned heavily.

> and abolition

“Slaves, obey your mas­ters.” Remem­ber that one? They spent an awful lot of time read­ing that verse in South­ern churches. Chris­tian­ity was used to jus­tify both sides of the slav­ery debate (includ­ing the “we’re sav­ing their benighted souls, who cares what hap­pens to their bod­ies” line of rea­son­ing), and those Chris­tians who opposed slav­ery were def­i­nitely not mem­bers of the Chris­t­ian main­stream; some abo­li­tion­ists were barely Chris­t­ian, or even reli­gious, at all. See Susan Jacoby’s book “Free­thinkers: A His­tory of Amer­i­can Sec­u­lar­ism”. In that book, she also dis­cusses the reli­gious con­text of the 20th cen­tury black civil rights move­ment, which you men­tioned in an ear­lier post, and debunks the notion that Chris­tian­ity was nec­es­sary to the movement.

> and the gen­eral valu­ing of human life is more than significant.

Actu­ally, there is a strong thread through­out the his­tory of Chris­tian­ity of valu­ing the “sal­va­tion” of “souls” more strongly than the sal­va­tion of lives. One mod­ern exam­ple of this is the Catholic Church’s strong anti-condom stand in Africa. Actual liv­ing human women could be saved from con­tract­ing AIDS, a deadly dis­ease for those who can’t afford the treat­ments, by the use of con­doms dur­ing mar­i­tal sex. But the Church prefers pro­tect­ing those women’s “souls” from the “sin” of con­dom use to encour­ag­ing them and their hus­bands to take a fairly sim­ple and straight­for­ward mea­sure which would sig­nif­i­cantly reduce chances of trans­mis­sion. (The ABC pro­grams have worked remark­ably well in places that have tried them, but the C has been well estab­lished as an essen­tial component.)

The Catholic Church also excom­mu­ni­cated all of the adults involved in obtain­ing an abor­tion for a 9-year-old girl who was preg­nant with twins due to rape by her step­fa­ther, even though she would have been gravely endan­gered by con­tin­u­ing the preg­nancy. In this case poten­tial future lives were val­ued above the actual exist­ing life of a young and vul­ner­a­ble child. And the list goes on.

> I enjoyed the Power of Myth very much, and liked his writ­ing on these items. How­ever, despite the uni­ver­sal appeal and sim­i­lar­i­ties of myth across ide­o­log­i­cal and reli­gious sys­tems, Chris­tian­ity goes beyond myth and makes his­tor­i­cal claims.

Well, yes, but the thing that you’re miss­ing is that those his­tor­i­cal claims them­selves seem to have strong ties to reli­gious and his­tor­i­cal claims made by other reli­gions which devel­oped in the same geo­graphic area around the same time. the story of Mithras is the one most com­monly cited, but there are oth­ers. The ideas that were syn­the­sized to become Chris­tian­ity seem to have just been part of the zeit­geist in that place, and were not unique to Chris­tian­ity or the Chris­t­ian story.

> These are what makes Chris­tian­ity unique and pow­er­ful — it demands the belief in REAL his­tor­i­cal events, not just reli­gious con­cepts or meaning-making myths, even if it also func­tions that way.

The demand for belief in “real” his­tor­i­cal events whose real­ity is in actu­al­ity very poorly sub­stan­ti­ated is pre­cisely one of the major weak­nesses of Chris­tian­ity. Besides, Islam makes the same demand for belief in “real” his­tor­i­cal events, as do Judaism, Mor­monism, and many oth­ers, so this is not even a unique thing about Chris­tian­ity. (Well, actu­ally, Judaism is less into the belief aspect, and is more con­cerned about prac­tice, but the belief is used to jus­tify the practice.)

> some reli­gions and ide­olo­gies can be rejected prima facie because they are patently inferior

My point is that the grounds on which you chose to eval­u­ate reli­gions, the beliefs you chose to eval­u­ate, and the facts on which you based your eval­u­a­tion are non­sen­si­cal. Super­man? Seri­ously? Mor­monism is a much bet­ter com­par­i­son. Just like Chris­tian­ity, it’s based on a series of writ­ings which are essen­tially fan­fic for an ear­lier exist­ing reli­gion, writ­ten by some­body who didn’t really know the details of the ear­lier reli­gion or of other related his­tory all that well. The dif­fer­ence is that the ori­gins of Mor­monism were recent enough that we actu­ally still have a decent amount of very clear his­tor­i­cal data avail­able about the times in which it was formed, so it’s easy for any­one with a lick of sense to see the gap­ing holes in the story. And yet mil­lions of peo­ple all over the world are com­pletely com­mit­ted to it.

The only rea­son Chris­tian­ity gets away with hid­ing its head in the sand about its own lack of his­tor­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is that its ori­gins are suf­fi­ciently ancient that any his­tor­i­cal analy­sis is nec­es­sar­ily sub­tle and involves a great deal of infer­ence across gaps in knowl­edge. So it’s very easy for a Chris­t­ian to say, “Look, we’ve got these four super­fi­cially sim­i­lar [but actu­ally mutally con­tra­dic­tory when you pay atten­tion] ver­sions of the Jesus story, a pass­ing ref­er­ence to our story in some Roman chron­i­cle [which tex­tual analy­sis sug­gests was inserted by a later writer], and some mod­ern places [which were renamed or oth­er­wise messed with by the Cru­saders] with the same names as places in our holy book. It must be true!”

> I agree, and many authors have under­taken that task. See:
> How Chris­tian­ity changed the world by Alvin Schmidt

As I’ve said before, very lit­tle if any of the credit for the state of the mod­ern world, and a lot of the dis­credit, goes to Chris­tian­ity. (Con­sider James Carroll’s book _Constantine’s Sword_ for another exam­ple of dis­credit.) But I’ll also note here that even if Chris­tian­ity *could* be cred­ited with cer­tain pos­i­tive effects, that doesn’t mean that the beliefs it’s based on are *true*. It just means they were use­ful in the par­tic­u­lar time and place they arose in. For exam­ple, the tra­di­tional farm­ing sys­tems in Papua New Guinea worked *incred­i­bly* well (to the degree that the intro­duc­tion of mod­ern tech­niques was dis­as­trous), because the tra­di­tional tech­niques had been evolved over the ages to be per­fectly adapted to the cli­mate there. But the belief sys­tem used to jus­tify these tech­niques was nev­er­the­less com­pletely bogus.

> The bib­li­cal ori­gins of science

Any book that rounds pi to three and acts as if the earth is a flat disc with a dome of sky over it and a load of water trapped above the sky is not a book I’m going to turn to look­ing for sci­en­tific insight. The authors of the book were a bunch of nomadic goatherders, and I bet they knew a lot about goatherd­ing (not that the book has much in the way of insights about *that* either), and appar­ently they knew some­thing about poetry. But sci­ence, not so much.

> It was an anal­ogy, and as you know, all analo­gies are imper­fect. I under­stand your point, there is a dif­fer­ence between two empir­i­cally ver­i­fi­able senses and spir­i­tual ‘senses.’ Nev­er­the­less, I hope that my anal­ogy helps you under­stand my point.

Only in the sense that it’s con­vinced me that you really don’t know what you’re talk­ing about here. Look, if some­body came up to you and said, “I think that there are invis­i­ble par­ti­cles stream­ing down from the sky upon us all the time. I have no evi­dence for this and no inten­tion of try­ing to fig­ure out how to gather this evi­dence, but you should believe me any­way. Oh, also, your immor­tal soul is on the line here,” would you believe them or would you think they were a nut­ter? You’ve got no evi­dence for these sup­posed spir­i­tual fac­ul­ties and no research pro­gram ded­i­cated to fig­ur­ing out how to gather evi­dence for them, yet you want every­body else to believe they exist and can give us mean­ing­ful infor­ma­tion about the uni­verse. Why shouldn’t I think you’re a nutter?

> The Bible teaches that we are cor­rupted by self-interest, sin, and a world sys­tem that teaches us val­ues in con­tra­dic­tion to the spritual king­dom — i.e., we are ‘blind’ until we ‘see’.

I take it that you’re propos­ing that this cor­rup­tion by self-interest, sin, and so forth is the rea­son that not everybody’s moral senses agree. So, great. You’ve pro­posed a mech­a­nism to explain the dis­agree­ment, now tell me how I can fig­ure out whose moral sense is wack and whose is sound. If we go back to my chair anal­ogy, and my friend and I dis­agree on the pres­ence of the chair, I could pro­pose that this dis­agree­ment is caused by the fact that one of us has dropped acid, and we could go get blood and urine tests to see if that was the case. Or, alter­nately, we could wait a cou­ple days until we’re sure we’re both clean and go back and look again and see if we agree this time. Or we could walk around the chair a lit­tle bit and see if one of us was just con­fused by a per­spec­tive issue. And so on and so forth. So I’ve got a pretty solid process to test for a cor­rupted visual sense. What anal­o­gous test can one do to detect a cor­rupted moral sense?

> But rea­son must even­tu­ally give way to faith if you want to please God, for “with­out faith, it is impos­si­ble to please God.”

I do not think your god exists. Why should I be con­cerned about pleas­ing an entity I do not think exists? Are you wor­ried about pleas­ing Athena?

> As I said, there are lim­its to rea­son, as Emmanuel Kant dis­cusses in his great work on the topic. Just because our lim­ited under­stand­ing and sci­ence can not fully grasp or under­stand the infi­nite does not make it unten­able or unreal.

Con­versely, the lim­its of rea­son do not jus­tify just mak­ing stuff up to fill the giant empty realms where you don’t/can’t know what’s going on. All the lim­its of rea­son jus­tify doing is say­ing, “Gee, I don’t know. Oh well, I’ll go worry about the stuff I *can* know instead.”

> Actu­ally, that is all you have regard­ing his­tor­i­cal fig­ures — you can’t empir­i­cally con­firm that GW existed, you have to trust some­one else’s testimony.

Actu­ally, for Wash­ing­ton we have zil­lions of mutu­ally con­firm­ing sets of his­tor­i­cal arti­facts (includ­ing writ­ings in his own hand and writ­ings directed to him by oth­ers, his corpse, paint­ings of him by con­tem­po­raries, archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence from bat­tles he was reputed to have led, etc.), and zil­lions of mutu­ally con­firm­ing his­tor­i­cal tes­ti­monies from con­tem­po­rary authors from many coun­tries whose own exis­tence is also well-confirmed. For Jesus we have a few sketchy texts of uncer­tain prove­nance whose authors were almost cer­tainly pseu­do­ny­mous, wrote well after his sup­posed death, prob­a­bly had no direct con­nec­tion to the sup­posed events described in their texts, and may have been his­tori­ciz­ing a leg­end (as prob­a­bly also hap­pened in the case of King Arthur). In addi­tion, we have a forged ref­er­ence in a Roman chron­i­cle and a bunch of sup­posed relics that were almost cer­tainly forged around the Cru­sader area by peo­ple look­ing to make a quick buck. Sorry, Wash­ing­ton wins by a long shot.

> Except it asks for a dif­fer­ent kind of faith — one that involves not just belief that God IS, but one that involves PLACING your trust, that is, your life, in His hands. As scrip­tures say, “even the demons believe that God is real, but that does not save them from the judge­ment to come!” (my paraphrase).

Except I *don’t* think this god of yours is real. That makes it chal­leng­ing to place my trust in it. I’m also not ter­ri­bly wor­ried about being judged by some­thing I don’t think exists. Do you live in fear of what Ma’at will find when she weighs your heart against a feather?

> Most who say that have not looked at the evi­dence, but have merely sat at the feet of the Richard Dawkins of this world and taken their word for it. Many, many peo­ple who have actu­ally set out to exam­ine the evi­dence, even in order to debunk xian­ity, have con­verted because the evi­dence is over­whelm­ing. But sal­va­tion still requires faith that goes beyond the pal­try intellect.

Okay, well, that’s fine for most peo­ple. One could say the same for most Chris­tians — they haven’t looked at they evi­dence, but have merely sat at the feet of their priests and min­is­ters and taken their word for it. And many, many peo­ple who have actu­ally set out to exam­ine the evi­dence, even in order to con­firm Chris­tian­ity, have lost their faith because the evi­dence against it is over­whelm­ing. After all, true ratio­nal­ity still requires evi­dence and argu­ments that go beyond pal­try faith.

The point of this is not what “most peo­ple” believe. The point is what views are actu­ally well enough sup­ported by evi­dence and argu­men­ta­tion to make them a rea­son­able basis for pre­dic­tions about future events. And Chris­tian­ity just ain’t.

> Anne, I think you are WAAAAY out of your depth here. The amount of Bib­li­cal Archae­ol­ogy is tremen­dous, and over­whelm­ingly con­firms the breadth and depth of the Bible, down to minute details. If you are truly inter­ested, just google Bib­li­cal Archae­ol­ogy. Then spend a few weeks pour­ing over the gobs of information.

Speak­ing of peo­ple being WAAAAY out of their depth… If you go out into the desert look­ing for Jesus, you’ll find him. I’ve read closely sev­eral of the cases in which archae­ol­ogy sup­pos­edly proves minute details of the Bible, and in each case it turns out that the archae­ol­o­gists were com­mit­ted Chris­tians before they began and as a result ignored per­fectly rea­son­able alter­na­tive expla­na­tions of the data in favor of “con­fir­ma­tory” expla­na­tions. One exam­ple I recently encoun­tered is the study of the his­tory of Nazareth. Rene Salm’s care­ful reanaly­sis of the archae­l­og­i­cal data from that city in his book _The Myth Of Nazareth: The Invented Town Of Jesus_ shows that the town almost cer­tainly did not arise until sig­nif­i­cantly after the era in which Jesus was sup­posed to have inhab­ited it. And that’s just scratch­ing the sur­face. Rep­utable mod­ern archae­ol­o­gists do not, in gen­eral, believe in the his­toric­ity of the Chris­t­ian Bible.

> But STAYING an athe­ist is by all means ‘safe’ in my view because it hun­kers down in the lim­ited, safe world of empiri­cism, and fails to ven­ture out into the spir­i­tual world, for many rea­sons. It may be con­ve­nient to not go out where abuses and sub­jec­tivism can make fools of you (like in love), but the real­ity of God is worth the risk as is the real­ity of human love.

What I’m not inter­ested in doing is going out into the world of believ­ing in com­pletely made up stuff. In addi­tion to not ven­tur­ing out into the world of Chris­tian­ity, I’m also not ven­tur­ing out into the worlds of crys­tal heal­ing and fairies and Islam and Mor­monism and home­opa­thy. On the other hand, I do spec­u­late and imag­ine things all the time. Imag­in­ing and inves­ti­gat­ing new pos­si­bil­i­ties beyond cur­rent knowl­edge is *essen­tial* to the process of sci­ence, and it’s *far* from safe, because you can end up wast­ing a lot of time going down a dead end with your imag­in­ings. The dif­fer­ence is, I know bet­ter than to actu­ally *believe* my spec­u­la­tions until I’ve got some evi­dence or rea­son­ing to back them up. There is a dis­tinc­tion between hav­ing an open mind and hav­ing a hole in your head, and in my opin­ion, Chris­tian­ity is on the “hole in your head” side of the divide.

> How­ever, faith is about learn­ing whom you CAN trust, and then trust­ing again.

I have always known who to trust, and the answer is, “Peo­ple who actu­ally exist and who rec­i­p­ro­cate kind­ness and faith­ful­ness with kind­ness and faith­ful­ness.” That doesn’t mean that some­body else, no mat­ter how kind and faith­ful, can write my code of ethics for me or tell me what makes my life worth liv­ing. Every­body, no mat­ter how trust­ing they may be, has to fig­ure these things out for them­selves. The only thing that changed for me when reli­gion went away is that I became aware of that for the first time. Before I had let the reli­gion pro­vide the answers for me, and after­wards I had to dis­cover my own answers, and to live for a time with­out answers until I’d fig­ured it out. Liv­ing with­out know­ing how or why was what was fright­en­ing. But even then I had peo­ple I could trust, and I did.

> If you can stand it, I’d love to have somone like you review my man­u­script when it is ready. I’ll announce it in about 8 months. Thanks.

I can’t promise what I’ll be able to do in 8 months, but if I am avail­able then I’ll cer­tainly con­sider it. Good luck.

PART I
———————–
» ANNE: Only 13% of com­mu­nity hos­pi­tals in the US, com­pris­ing 18% of hos­pi­tal beds

I am not refer­ring to the cur­rent, sad state of our med­ical and uni­ver­sity sys­tems. I am say­ing that the *his­tor­i­cal impact* of Chris­tian­ity includes the cre­ation of hos­pi­tals and universities.

While the his­tory of the hos­pi­tal is not entirely Chris­t­ian in ori­gin, it is pri­mar­ily so, esp. in the west. See
From Monastery to Hos­pi­tal
The Judaic-Christian Ori­gin of Nurs­ing Homes (JAMA)
Hos­pi­tals (Catholic Encyclopedia)

I can’t find the stats on it yet, but I also believe that Catholic Char­i­ties and Protes­tant mis­sions still pro­vide the major­ity of free health care around the globe.

» ANNE: Almost none of the great uni­ver­si­ties are explic­itly sec­tar­ian these days,

Again, I am talk­ing about origins.

As a case in point, all but two of the first 108 Uni­ver­si­ties in the US were founded as Chris­t­ian sem­i­nar­ies or Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing most if not all of the Ivy League Schools.

As another case in point, see Reli­gion, inno­va­tion and eco­nomic progress, which doc­u­ments the spread of lit­er­acy around the world, not as tech­nolo­gies advanced, but as Protes­tantism advanced.

» ANNE: As the pur­pose of the uni­ver­si­ties expanded into realms that were actu­ally use­ful, the reli­gious ele­ments tended to wither away.

That is an inter­est­ing assump­tion, but the debate over the rea­son for the secuar­iza­tion and lib­er­al­iza­tion of the nations’ Uni­ver­si­ties is much more than the ‘use­ful­ness’ of non-religious information.

The fact remains that our intel­lec­tual foun­da­tions rest upon the works of the peo­ple of faith who forged our ini­tial sys­tems of learn­ing. If you ignore that, you are being biased.

» ANNE: When the con­clu­sions of those sci­en­tists ran con­trary to reli­gious dogma, prob­lems quickly arose.

Actu­ally, that is a mod­ern anti-Catholic myth, esp. if you are refer­ring to Galileo. See:
The bib­li­cal ori­gins of sci­ence
The Galileo Leg­end
Debunk­ing the Galileo Myth

» ANNE: Also, if you want to be cred­it­ing Chris­tian­ity for sci­ence, where’s the love for Islam? They pretty much invented math

Not really true. No love for Islam here. See Europe’s Dark Ages and Islam’s Golden Age — two his­toric fictions?

» ANNE: “Slaves, obey your mas­ters.” Remem­ber that one?

Regard­less of what you think the Bible means when it says that (note: the same author con­demned kid­nap­ping, so per­haps you should con­sider that the slav­ery of the Bible, esp. the NT, is not what you think it is), HISTORICALLY, nei­ther greeks nor sec­u­lar­ists brought about abo­li­tion, while CHRISTIANS did.

Just because that con­flicts with your under­stand­ing of scrip­ture does not make it untrue. That is yet another con­tri­bu­tion of Chris­tian­ity which you ignore — why?

» ANNE: those Chris­tians who opposed slav­ery were def­i­nitely not mem­bers of the Chris­t­ian mainstream

Pos­si­bly so, but your con­sis­tent igno­rance of dis­tin­cly Chrisit­ian con­tri­bu­tions to west­ern great­ness is so biased it’s not funny. I will read Jacoby’s book, though, thank you.

» ANNE: Actu­ally, there is a strong thread through­out the his­tory of Chris­tian­ity of valu­ing the “sal­va­tion” of “souls” more strongly than the sal­va­tion of lives. One mod­ern exam­ple of this is the Catholic Church’s strong anti-condom stand in Africa.

You really do need to read and eval­u­ate Alvin Schmidt’s How Chris­tian­ity Changed the World, I think you are steeped in anti-religious thought rather than more objec­tive his­tor­i­cal thought.

And the con­dom thing is a red her­ring — it’s a dis­agree­ment about method, not goals, and about bal­anc­ing short term v. long term solutions.

» ANNE: The Catholic Church also excom­mu­ni­cated all of the adults involved in obtain­ing an abor­tion for a 9-year-old girl who was preg­nant with twins due to rape by her stepfather,

No one is deny­ing that the Catholic church made eggre­gious and evil mis­takes. Heck, I’m a Protes­tant, they did lots of things wrong if you ask me.

But that does not erase the HUGE pos­i­tive impact of Chris­tian­ity on west­ern culture.

PART II
———————–

» ANNE: Well, yes, but the thing that you’re miss­ing is that those his­tor­i­cal claims them­selves seem to have strong ties to reli­gious and his­tor­i­cal claims made by other reli­gions which devel­oped in the same geo­graphic area around the same time.

I am not miss­ing that at all. The Mithras ‘myth’ is an amal­go­ma­tion of var­i­ous sto­ries, and his­tor­i­cally, a really poor argument.

1. Chris­tian­ity prob­a­bly did NOT bor­row from the mys­tery and other reli­gions. See
Chris­tian­ity and the Mys­tery Reli­gions
Did Chris­tian­ity Bor­row from the Mys­tery Religions?

2. The fact that many describe sim­i­lar his­tor­i­cal events such as a uni­ver­sal flood actu­ally SUPPORTS the con­tention that these were real his­tor­i­cal events and NOT myth­i­cal. Fur­ther, these var­i­ous reports CAN be com­pared, and some can be shown to have been more or less embell­ished, more or less detailed, and more or less archae­o­log­i­cally accurate.

» ANNE: The demand for belief in “real” his­tor­i­cal events whose real­ity is in actu­al­ity very poorly sub­stan­ti­ated is pre­cisely one of the major weak­nesses of Christianity.

I’ll read the books you men­tioned, but I sus­pect that such books are merely skep­ti­cal screeds, not real his­tory. Any­one who says that the Bible is poorly sup­ported by his­tory is, in my mind, some sort of fanatic, not a true intel­lec­tual or his­to­rian. It’s like the peo­ple who sup­pose that evo­lu­tion is ‘over­whelm­ingly sup­ported by sci­ence.’ They’re just brain­washed ide­o­logues. Really, the facts are that obvious.

» ANNE: Besides, Islam makes the same demand for belief in “real” his­tor­i­cal events, as do Judaism, Mor­monism, and many oth­ers, so this is not even a unique thing about Christianity.

Absolutely, and both Judaism and Chris­tian­ity stand up very well under scrutiny, while Mor­monism has been thor­oughly debunked. In addi­tion, I’m not sure that Islam makes very many claims to his­tory that are con­tro­ver­sial (mir­a­cles aside), and the his­tory we do see is heinous — Mohamed was an insane war­lord pedophile accord­ing to the his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments. I find that entirely believ­able, but of course, I won’t there­fore put my faith in what such a crazy man had to say — his exam­ple was abom­inable, and Islamic sote­ri­ol­ogy is so infe­rior to Chris­tian­ity, why would any­one want to believe it? (See )

» ANNE: The only rea­son Chris­tian­ity gets away with hid­ing its head in the sand about its own lack of his­tor­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is that its ori­gins are suf­fi­ciently ancient that any his­tor­i­cal analy­sis is nec­es­sar­ily sub­tle and involves a great deal of infer­ence across gaps in knowledge.

Anne, that is patently false. I won’t spend time argu­ing this point, you seem com­mit­ted to that view. I think you are in biased error here, and you seem very bit­ter against Xian­ity. See:
Are the Bib­li­cal Doc­u­ments Reli­able?
Q & A on the His­tor­i­cal Reli­a­bil­ity of the Gospels: Intro­duc­tion to a Series
Can We Trust the New Tes­ta­ment as a His­tor­i­cal Document?

» ANNE: But I’ll also note here that even if Chris­tian­ity *could* be cred­ited with cer­tain pos­i­tive effects, that doesn’t mean that the beliefs it’s based on are *true*.

I do not make that argu­ment. I only take issue with the one-sided and ter­ri­bly slanted “Chris­tian­ity has done so much evil in the world” schlock.

PART III
———————–

» ANNE: Any book that rounds pi to three and acts as if the earth is a flat disc with a dome of sky over it and a load of water trapped above the sky is not a book I’m going to turn to look­ing for sci­en­tific insight.

This is a typ­i­cal mate­ri­al­ists error. The Bible is largely writ­ten as a *his­tor­i­cal* doc­u­ment, not a sci­en­tific one. That does not make its obser­va­tions regard­ing sci­en­tific items incor­rect, it only means that we must inter­pret them within their lit­er­ary type.

The bible is assumed to be his­tor­i­cally true, but it’s report­ing is phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal, not lit­eral. For exam­ple, say­ing ‘the sun rises’ is not lit­er­ally true, but the phe­nom­e­non it is describ­ing most cer­tainly did happen.

Is pi about 3? Yep. Empiri­cists (who are, iron­i­cally, being overly lit­eral in their bib­li­cal inter­pre­ta­tion when it suits them) wouldn’t even be happy with 22/7ths, I’d imagine.

Regard­ing your ‘flat disc’ or flat earth the­ory, this is a typ­i­cal mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of both the Church’s doc­trine and his­tory. Never hap­pened. See the link above about Galileo for a brief debunk­ing of such hyper­lit­er­al­ist read­ings of scrip­ture by unbe­liev­ers which were never done by the church.

BTW, regard­ing helio­cen­trism, even ter­ra­cen­trism was not ini­ti­ated by Chris­t­ian doc­trine, but by the sec­u­lar Ptole­maic scein­tists of the day — the error the church made was to ACCEPT that view as true, fol­lowed by their mis­read­ing that BACK into the scriptures.

» ANNE: The authors of the book were a bunch of nomadic goatherders,

That is typ­i­cal athe­ist non-sequitur schlock. Appeal to moder­nity. Stop embarass­ing your­self. I guess Moses was an idiot for say­ing “do not kill, do not com­mit adul­tery, do not steal.” Moral intel­li­gence is not the sole domain of the intel­li­gent — see Nazi Ger­many or Amer­i­can eugen­ics as an example.

» ANNE: Only in the sense that it’s con­vinced me that you really don’t know what you’re talk­ing about here.

Obvi­ously, you didn’t or are unwill­ing to under­stand my imper­fect anal­ogy. I proved that I under­stood your objec­tion, yet you stoop to ad hominems. Your prob­lem, as I see it, is the materialist’s prob­lem — if you can’t prove it empir­i­cally, it’ aint real.

I can see that you have a bias against faith. Your loss. But don’t kid your­self that peo­ple of faith do not engage or ben­e­fit from their intel­lects, or that you are some­how supe­rior. You are lim­it­ing your­self to your own intel­lect. “Trust no one” would be good motto.

PART IV
———————–

» ANNE: I take it that you’re propos­ing that this cor­rup­tion by self-interest, sin, and so forth is the rea­son that not everybody’s moral senses agree.

Not entirely. But that is a con­tribut­ing fac­tor — men sup­press the truth because their own hearts are evil (cf. Romans 1).

» ANNE: You’ve pro­posed a mech­a­nism to explain the dis­agree­ment, now tell me how I can fig­ure out whose moral sense is wack and whose is sound.

1. See which val­ues lead to human flour­ish­ing and pros­per­ity, and lower morbidity.

2. Observe what the exclu­sion of cer­tain val­ues cre­ates (for exam­ple, look at the world’s athe­ist regimes that crushed rel­gion — see how they all end up being mur­der­ous? Guess why?)

3. Per­son­ally and with an open mind read the sup­posed words of Jesus and decide if HE was a ‘nut­ter’ — or as C.S. Lewis argued, a lunatic, liar, or lord (See Lewis’s trilemma)

» ANNE: What anal­o­gous test can one do to detect a cor­rupted moral sense?

Beyond what is above, moral sense, again, is not merely an empir­i­cal endeavor. This is why, for instance, the US founders made this statement:

We hold these truths to be *self-evident*

It is pre­cisely because such truths are not mere empiri­cisms that an appeal to CONSCIENCE and INTUITION is made. Because such things can’t be ‘proven,’ they MUST be assumed. And while assump­tions may be eval­u­ated as to their sound­ness, they can not be proven by def­i­n­i­tion. You need to get that our you will be for­ever crip­pled by your nar­row, self-limiting hyper-materialism.

PART V
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» ANNE: I do not think your god exists. Why should I be con­cerned about pleas­ing an entity I do not think exists? Are you wor­ried about pleas­ing Athena?

I explained in the arti­cles on Pascal’s wager why it is rea­son­able to ignore Athena and the FSM, but not Christ. You seem to be engag­ing in the ‘all reli­gions are equally ridicu­lous’ ruse which is anti-intellectual and self-reinforcing for athe­ists, but poor logic.

It’s your choice if that’s how you approach real­ity and God. I think you are in error, eggre­giously so. Fore­warned is forearmed.

» ANNE: Con­versely, the lim­its of rea­son do not jus­tify just mak­ing stuff up to fill the giant empty realms where you don’t/can’t know what’s going on.

I am not doing that at all, nor am I engaged in God in the gaps rea­son­ing. I have good rea­sons to (1) trust the bible, (2) trust Christ, and (3) employ more than just my rea­son in my epistemology.

» ANNE: Actu­ally, for Wash­ing­ton we have zil­lions of mutu­ally con­firm­ing sets of his­tor­i­cal artifacts

But again, they are arti­fi­cacts. They are his­tor­i­cal evi­dence, but not empir­i­cal — you can’t see him or wit­ness him. This is such an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion, and one that is lost on most athe­ists because they are duped into such lack of abil­ity to dis­crim­i­nate by evo­lu­tion­ary think­ing, among others.

What would make Wash­ing­ton a more sure thing is eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony, and many good, early copies of it. Guess what? The Bible has more of that than ANY other his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion, and by orders of magnitude.

That is my point. You are tak­ing it on faith that those his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments and arti­facts are being cor­rectly inter­preted, are free from embell­ish­ment, copy­ing errors, etc. What makes you so sure these are more reli­able than the NT doc­u­ments, their rel­a­tive moder­nity aside?

That is my point. YOU are exer­cis­ing faith in some­one else (and rea­son­ably so), but your LACK of faith in the his­toric­ity of the Bible is not rea­soned, it’s emo­tional, in my estimation.

» ANNE: Except I *don’t* think this god of yours is real. That makes it chal­leng­ing to place my trust in it.

Absolutely. You can’t MAKE your­self believe — you are help­less to do so. How­ever, you CAN hon­estly exam­ine your biases, your motives, and your men­tal con­structs to see if they are wrongly keep­ing you FROM believing.

» ANNE: One could say the same for most Chris­tians — they haven’t looked at they evi­dence, but have merely sat at the feet of their priests and min­is­ters and taken their word for it.

That is true. I am not one of those. I left faith, and many years later, after much con­scious explo­ration, returned to a more mature faith.

» ANNE: And many, many peo­ple who have actu­ally set out to exam­ine the evi­dence, even in order to con­firm Chris­tian­ity, have lost their faith because the evi­dence against it is overwhelming.

The vast major­ity of vocal athe­ist ex-Christians I have heard (like John Lof­tus, for exam­ple) have made partly or largely emo­tional deci­sions, make many of the same spe­cious argu­ments you’ve made, and use intel­lect to but­tress their unbelief.

Sure, they may have been led to unebe­lief by their exam­i­na­tion of the data. That doesn’t make them right.

But I am say­ing that many of your argu­ments are false, spe­cious, or misinformed.

I have given you many ref­er­ences, and will check out yours.

PART VI
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» ANNE: The point of this is not what “most peo­ple” believe. The point is what views are actu­ally well enough sup­ported by evi­dence and argu­men­ta­tion to make them a rea­son­able basis for pre­dic­tions about future events. And Chris­tian­ity just ain’t.

I agree, what’s true is true despite what the major­ity may or may not believe. How­ever, your men­tion of pre­dic­tive value shows again that you are look­ing at faith as some sci­en­tific model that needs to pre­dict sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery, and that’s really not how one approaches such matters.

The rea­son to exam­ine how well Chris­tian­ity does or does not incor­po­rate his­tory is to deter­mine it’s reli­a­bil­ity, not to exam­ine it as a sci­en­tific model. BAsed on it’s reli­a­bil­ity in his­tor­i­cal mat­ters, you can then begin to exam­ine it’s exis­ten­tial claims, some­thing which ‘pre­dic­tive value’ does not really cover. You must use other skills to exam­ine these claims, which include not only logic and rea­son, but spir­i­tual fac­ul­ties, which you seem loathe to use.

» ANNE: The Myth Of Nazareth: The Invented Town Of Jesus_ shows that the town almost cer­tainly did not arise until sig­nif­i­cantly after the era in which Jesus was sup­posed to have inhab­ited it. And that’s just scratch­ing the sur­face. Rep­utable mod­ern archae­ol­o­gists do not, in gen­eral, believe in the his­toric­ity of the Chris­t­ian Bible.

I’ll check it out but I betcha she had as much of an axe to grind as those whom you think assumed Chris­tian­ity before set­ting out. Believe whom you will, I think you’re being foolish.

» ANNE: What I’m not inter­ested in doing is going out into the world of believ­ing in com­pletely made up stuff.

I don’t think you’ve shown any abil­ity to trust or act in faith, and to you, ‘made up stuff’ is only what you can directly prove or dis­prove with empiri­cism. Your lim­ited approach means that you can’t really TELL what is made up or not — to you, if it’s not empir­i­cally ver­i­fi­able, it’s made up or irrel­e­vant. Such an approach will not lead you to faith, hope, or love.

» ANNE: Imag­in­ing and inves­ti­gat­ing new pos­si­bil­i­ties beyond cur­rent knowl­edge is *essen­tial* to the process of sci­ence, and it’s *far* from safe, because you can end up wast­ing a lot of time going down a dead end with your imaginings.

Which is why lever­ag­ing the wis­dom of oth­ers (‘trust­ing’ them) can save you a lot of time. Sure, ven­tur­ing out to where NO ONE has gone means there is no one to trust in those areas, but there is much to be gained by trust­ing the Bible and pur­su­ing it.

BTW, regard­ing Rene Salm’s book The Myth of Nazareth, this one ques­tion­able vol­ume seems more of an out­lier sug­gest­ing a con­spir­acy within archae­ol­ogy sup­port­ing the exis­tence of Nazareth.

Salm’s qual­i­fi­ca­tions are hard to find — see Who the hell is Rene Salm?

You’d do bet­ter to stick to real schol­ar­ship, and at least some that seems cred­i­ble, if not objec­tive — per­haps like The His­tor­i­cal Jesus: Five Views.