Spiritual cancel
Why choose to sin when you could have what you used to have ie the state of eternal liberation? The answer is simple: I refuse to restrain my actions for the sake of a promise, a promise which might never be fulfilled. I live in this world to believe in this life, not to believe in the next.
People talk of ‘believing’ as if it is valid when it comes so easily without proof, without justification, without reasoning. Perhaps it is, because the moment you believe you believe in something, that belief becomes real to you, and so does the subject of that belief. Besides, what do we have to lose in giving out blind faith? By doing so we gain the chance of gaining eternal liberation, of going to heaven; and if, just if, those negative cynicists who turn their noses up at us are right and heaven and god don’t exist, then surely we will not make a loss too. In other words, there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain.
So says the religious follower of holy faith. To others, it’s not so easy. I am a person who wants--or, perhaps, needs-- to believe in the truth, and to do that I would need to be convinced by incontrovertible evidence. If I were to believe in gods, aliens, ghosts, draculas and other frightening things because of hearsay I would become very ashamed of myself because I would have just committed myself to a marriage of convenience in which the bride can only be, at her prettiest, a spectre of truth.
On another note, I have sometimes been told that it is not god doesn’t exist, but that I must give him a chance to appear to me. By hiding in my own room I can never know that paradise exists out there, and if I were just to stick my head out a little I would see a world beyond my imagination. Such arguments are often double-sealed but not bacteria-proofed. Their strength is based on the fact that they require the opposing party to stand on their side first before they can make their next move. Hence I must stick my head out first before I can make any comments, hence I must start believing in god before I can resume my state of disbelief—what sense is that? It is just like, say, smoking cigarettes. Suppose a smoker and non-smoker are discussing whether people should smoke or not. The smoker would always tell the non-smoker to give smoking a try, or he wouldn’t know whats so nice about smoking. And yet once the non-smoker starts smoking he gets chemically engaged and, for the most part, physiologically addicted to cigarettes. He just got kidnapped to the side of smokers when his appropriate response should have been an outright no first, followed by some research into the area. (Thereafter if he so believes that cigarettes have a net positive effect on him he can, by all means, go ahead and die) He should never have committed himself first. In any case, we may want to note that my stand on cigarettes is clear: I live in this world to believe in this life, not to get spiritual cancer and believe in the next.
People talk of ‘believing’ as if it is valid when it comes so easily without proof, without justification, without reasoning. Perhaps it is, because the moment you believe you believe in something, that belief becomes real to you, and so does the subject of that belief. Besides, what do we have to lose in giving out blind faith? By doing so we gain the chance of gaining eternal liberation, of going to heaven; and if, just if, those negative cynicists who turn their noses up at us are right and heaven and god don’t exist, then surely we will not make a loss too. In other words, there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain.
So says the religious follower of holy faith. To others, it’s not so easy. I am a person who wants--or, perhaps, needs-- to believe in the truth, and to do that I would need to be convinced by incontrovertible evidence. If I were to believe in gods, aliens, ghosts, draculas and other frightening things because of hearsay I would become very ashamed of myself because I would have just committed myself to a marriage of convenience in which the bride can only be, at her prettiest, a spectre of truth.
On another note, I have sometimes been told that it is not god doesn’t exist, but that I must give him a chance to appear to me. By hiding in my own room I can never know that paradise exists out there, and if I were just to stick my head out a little I would see a world beyond my imagination. Such arguments are often double-sealed but not bacteria-proofed. Their strength is based on the fact that they require the opposing party to stand on their side first before they can make their next move. Hence I must stick my head out first before I can make any comments, hence I must start believing in god before I can resume my state of disbelief—what sense is that? It is just like, say, smoking cigarettes. Suppose a smoker and non-smoker are discussing whether people should smoke or not. The smoker would always tell the non-smoker to give smoking a try, or he wouldn’t know whats so nice about smoking. And yet once the non-smoker starts smoking he gets chemically engaged and, for the most part, physiologically addicted to cigarettes. He just got kidnapped to the side of smokers when his appropriate response should have been an outright no first, followed by some research into the area. (Thereafter if he so believes that cigarettes have a net positive effect on him he can, by all means, go ahead and die) He should never have committed himself first. In any case, we may want to note that my stand on cigarettes is clear: I live in this world to believe in this life, not to get spiritual cancer and believe in the next.
27 Comments:
Hmm so you are actually completely convinced that God does not exist because the world should be as it is - seen from your own eyes and mind.
God is proven to exist, if that's what you are looking for and the hard evidences had been (I believe) given to you, only rejected. Do you want to wonder why there are many scientists who are Christians, around? The world is not so full of idealists and gamblers as you would choose to believe.
Do refer to the last entry on Weiwu's stagnant blog. :)
Well said.
But truth in this age is no longer B&W, so I think that truth is not a good term to use, although I understand your context.
To above commentor: Just as there are many scientists who are Christians, are you saying that scientists *are* advocates of 'absolute truth' which you seem to assume is science? Oh what about the many Christians who 1) believe selectively, choosing to believe what they only want to believe from the bible teachings and/or 2) don't know what they're believing for but it just seems to be the in thing to attend church and pretend to be immersed in sermons.
In summary, what is a Christian and what is truth?
You want evidence?
We live in a Universe of LAW & ORDER. How many of you know what that means? That means that, borrowing the example of a world renown speaker Dr. A.R. Bernard, when I see quarters scattered on the sidewalk I conclude that it was an accident. But when I see 2 stacks of quarters on the sidewalk, in order, then I know someone MUST HAVE placed them there. So similarly, the fact that we live in a Universe of law and orders tells us about an intelligence behind it, so it CANNOT have been an accident. The tide, seasons, the way the world functions is based on laws by orders that are put in place by SOMEBODY for SOME REASON. This law and order is in fact, SO RELIABLE, we can actually plant crops. We have watches.
You cannot believe God is an accident when you look at the human body, or the world! The very way you're reading this message through your eyes was a result of a series of chain of reactions caused by your body based on a law coded into you BY SOMEBODY for SOME REASON.
Tell me now that God doesn't exist, because we'd have to be a really amazing ACCIDENT to have such intelligence and ORDER in the world. Why isn't there a million different earths if it was so easy to have an accident? Tell me how an accident can have such order?
Evidence? You read about the big bang? An massive explosion of light that caused the world to be created. Why does it, I wonder, correlate with what it says about how God made the world in Genesis 'Let there be light'. You can believe that the world was created from nothing? Because that's what scientists, christian or not alike, BELIEVE. Now, don't you think it takes a degree of FAITH to believe that? Please, how can SOMETHING be created from NOTHING? HOW? You can't logically explain that, you need faith. Some things you need to take that leap of faith across what's logical to you (cos if you're so smart your life would be sweet and perfect).
You talk about how it's 'spiritual cancer' to try out something that you already know, in your opinion, doesn't work. Well, first of all, many smokers would tell you that SMOKING IS BAD. After trying it, they don't get brainwashed until they begin advocating it. No, they STILL have their INTELLIGENCE to CHOOSE and DISCERN and QUIT still. Oh the irony is, they know smoking is bad, they just can't quit because they don't CHOOSE to want to badly enough. But please, don't underestimate yourself, you don't become stupid and brainwashed just because you take a step of faith to TRY something! Not everything is toxic, trying love isn't, trying hope isn't, trying optimism isn't.
So you say that what's smart is for you to RESEARCH into something before you go ahead and try something. WELL SAID. I must really clap. Have you done the research? Please, research into every religion, every feasible philosophy and school of thought before you come into conclusions based on the LACK of knowledge which can only result in a bad decision. Then, when you are well versed in knowledge on the subject matter, and you become an authourity on it, its no longer speculation. It's not important to anyone if you don't choose to believe, because your decision to choose not to believe hasn't changed your life. Why people are so persistant is because they believe your life will actively change after you gain the knowledge to start making better choices, and what they're doing is giving you information.
So yes, what I'm saying is this: God exists. In fact, I take it one step further. Anyone who goes to research the bible will not be able to find one contradiction because the bible is based on historical fact and has a basis and truth that until today has not been discounted.
You say that you want to live for THIS life and not the next. Well, step right in! CHRISTIANS DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD TO GO TO HEAVEN. HEAVEN IS NOT OUR FINAL DESTINATION. If you read the bible, Heaven is just a holding place until God comes down to reorder human society to what he originally intended it to be. We don't believe in God JUST for personal liberation- it is what he HAS ALREADY given freely to all by Jesus' crucification on the cross. But why must you know that still? Because when you have that knowledge and believe in it, you have liberation. It is a FACT that knowledge empowers us, it liberates us. When prisoners in a jail that's unlocked KNOW that they are free, it is a different matter all together from prisoners who don't KNOW.
We believe in God because he is FACT. Fact is like gravity. You don't choose to believe whether you like gravity or not, gravity is there and is what pulls you to the earth whether you like it or not.
What is a Christian and what is truth?
A Christian believes Jesus Christ died on the cross to redeem humanity of sins that resulted from Adam. The truth is that God is real, and that his original purpose and plan for us is a life of prosperity, happiness, and intimacy with him. It is not sickness, it is not depression, it is not loneliness, it is not divorce, and it is not chaos.
Now you can take it or leave it. You know that we live in a world of ORDER, and in this world of order there are certain laws like cause and effect. It's a law, like gravity, that when you make a choice, it'll impact your world. What you don't risk, you don't get. What you don't try, you never know. Your life is composed by your choices.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
p/s: my caps aren't shouting, it's bold, but i don't know how to do it. I do think you're an amazing writer that's fair to both sides. so, since you're giving the space for it, then let's thrash it out. :)
I didnt want to resort to philosophical arguments because, as you would have pointed out, I have no authority on the matter; nor would I deny that my knowledge on the subject is depressingly limited. But you mentioned several issues which require an appropriate response in kind.
The argument from design is a mature argument which has its own mature critics. I will not bring them up here partly because I do not wish to masquerade as a well-learned person, and mainly because doing so would only mean paraphrasing pages and pages of standard academic texts which you can always read in your own diligence. Hume, Kant, Dawkins (probably the most essential in this area), Russell, take your pick.
I will, however, give you this:
Beginning from a positive assesment of nature and our place within it, the argument moves to the suggestion that only an all-powerful and benevolent being could possibly have designed the world that we know. Kant's sympathy for the argument is more religious than philosophical. For, in a sense, to argue in this way is already to engage in worship. The very premise of the argument requires us to interpret our experience in religious terms (as a 'revelation' of the goodness of the world); while the leap to the conclusion, which far outstrips anything that reason alone could sanction, is a leap of faith. That we should jump to this conclusion is a consequence of religious belief, rather than a ground for it.
- Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy.
Which of course expresses more eloquently, simply, what I was trying to say in the last paragraph of the entry.
"Tell me now that God doesn't exist, because we'd have to be a really amazing ACCIDENT to have such intelligence and ORDER in the world. Why isn't there a million different earths if it was so easy to have an accident? Tell me how an accident can have such order?"
For the first part, refer to Hawking's weak anthropic principle. For the second--"why isn't there a million different earths if it was so easy to have an accident", Bill Bryson has a summary:
Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobosy knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way--estimates range from a hundred billion or so to herpahs four hundred billion--- and the Milky Way is just one of a hundred and forty billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. In the 1960s, a professor at Cornell named Frank Drake, excited by such whopping numbers, worked out a famous equation designed to calculate the chances of advanced life existing in cosmos, based on a series of diminishing probabilities...
..[and] even with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions...
.. So even if we are not really alone, in all practical tersm we are. Carl Sagan calculated the number of probable planets in the universe at as many as ten billion trillion-- a number vastly beyond imagining. But what is equally beyond imagining is the amount of space through which they are lightly scattered. 'If we were randomly inserted into the universe,' Sagan wrote, 'the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.'
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything.
'Let there be light' is too general. Just like how horoscope prophecies in newspapers and magazines get away with it.
Yes, I need faith (your sister!) to believe that something can be created from nothing. But it is not holy faith I hold. It is more a suspend-my-disbelief faith that I hold, an unconscious kind of faith so that I would not be wondering 24/7 how the universe is created.
You see, there are people like me who believe there is, for now at least, no way to find out whether god exists or not. Hence I prefer not to commit myself to anything--you realise that I do not explicitly say god does not exist? That is not my stand, and if that was implicated anywhere then I must apologise for my lack of clarity. It is only that the balance has been tilted too far toward the believers' side, they've crossed into my grey territory and I dont like that.
Yes, I do want to live in this life and this life only, not very interested in adjourning for a holding place in the future just to come back here. And my choice is to enjoy life the way I like, which is going fine enough without going to church every sunday.
Well said.
I strongly believe that one main reason for religious worship is that the believers seek comfort in the faith that their lives are not results of mere accidents, and through religion they are able to convince themselves that there is sufficient evidence to support the belief that their existence is part of a greater scheme of things, i.e. religions satisfy their own needs to validate their own presence.
And Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is an erudite book. And KC, I just realised that I have the Chinese translated version of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (OK, this is totally random).
And Debbie, if you propose that "what you don't risk, you don't get; what you don't try, you never know", then why are you so quick to dismiss the arguments of non-believers? Why are you so certain that it is a truth that God did exist and die, when this 'truth' could very well be a manifestation of your own beliefs, i.e. your own choice to believe in Christianity, and that order is a consequence of the existence of a higher being? Why are you so positive that an attempt to look at things from a different perspective (i.e. from the view of a non-believer) would not allow you to gain wisdom or insight? If you don't try, how would you know? How would you understand that there is a different kind of wisdom other than pure religious wisdom?
Truth is subjective. Objectivity is also sometimes determined by one's subjective view of it, i.e. the definition of 'objectivity' is sometimes warped. So please don't insist that the existence of God is a fact and justify your own arguments with your faith, because all we have to do is to exclude this faith from our scope of consideration, and it is already enough to render your arguments absolutely groundless. There is a reason why science exists (just like how you would say there is a reason why Christianity exists). To yu: instead of questioning "do you want to wonder why there are many scientists who are Christians, around?", have you ever wondered why there are many Christians who are scientists around?
To debx*,
KC and Miao have done a far better job dissecting most of your argument that I could have, so I will not repeat their words. However, I am not satisfied with the answer or baseless definition you have given me of a Christian and truth as suitable terms in the debate.
"A Christian believes Jesus Christ died on the cross to redeem humanity of sins that resulted from Adam."
How many Christians call themselves Christians by this definition? By this definition, then why would Christians need to worship God and or go to church? They can just simply believe and not actively perform acts of faith, right? (That seems to be where the trend is roughly heading anyway.)
"The truth is that God is real, and that his original purpose and plan for us is a life of prosperity, happiness, and intimacy with him.
Okay, glad to hear that truth works fine that way for you. Miao has written a good post for this just above mine.
"It is not sickness, it is not depression, it is not loneliness, it is not divorce, and it is not chaos."
But it is a choice, whether you are Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jain or Pastafarian (=P) in this aspect.
"Your life is composed by your choices."
Exactly! There are people who get along fine without God or whose faith belongs to another religion. But the fact is that the Christian religion does not look very kindly upon this. It says that those who choose something (or nothing) else other than God burn in the pits of hell.
Shouting and bolding are basically the same thing. Their purpose: to gain attention. Each in a way is rude if repeated too often. Giving "shouting" another name doesn't make its message different.
And another thing about "law and order". The equations formed by the human mind is not flawless. Your "law and order" might not be abided all the times. Simply put, Murphy's law - which of course in itself is an irony, and but yet again, an interesting but true paradox.
There was a time when people believed the sun revolved around the world, and not without a good reason.
Hi all, thank you for your replies which I truly didn't expect.
To yj: Firstly, let me make this point clear and I'm sorry if I haven't already made it in my last entry- I respect your opinions. I haven't resorted to degrading anyone's personal integrity, so please, don't degrade mine when I have already specified that my capital letters are for emphasis and not shouting. Even if you feel that was my intention, I have already specified earlier that it is not. :)
Secondly, Miao, you're right that unless I have been on your side, its unfair for me to say that I'm right when I haven't tried your side. I actually have been an unbeliever, which is why I repeat and believe positively that you don't know what you don't try. Instead of looking at my beliefs in the perspective that I'm being irrational, you could also try looking at it from another point of view- my assertions come about based on research or experiences which cause me to personally believe God is real. It could swing either way, wouldn't it? I also understand that it could swing either way for you too.
Thirdly, Kenneth, you make VERY good points. I really respect the way you carry yourself in writing. Eventually your conclusion is to stick to the grey area that God may or may not be. Yes, you don't conclude that God doesn't exist, but as long as there is a chance that he does, could he? My first response to your entry is just this, that what would you lose? My reply to your second post is because I truly because a comparison of religion to smoking doesn't justify.
Fourthly, Miao, truth is not always subjective. There are things that we know for certain. What may be subjective in truth is the defering levels to the degree of truth but truth, in a general sense, does exist.
To ptal: I do believe a majority of Christians call themselves Christians because they believe Jesus Christ died on the cross for them. By this definition, Christians don't "need" to worship God or go to church. You are right about where the trend is heading, and in a strict sense of the bible, you still go to Heaven regardless if you attend Church. The reason Christians continue to do so is for many reasons. To learn, to serve, or to fellowship.
Also, I want to make it clear that the christian God doesn't condemn non-christians. The christian God is an all loving God, so that doesn't mean that as long as you don't believe in him you go to hell "just because". The reason non-believers may end up in hell is because of sin that has been passed down or based on their own life that results in them not being able to go heaven unless cleansed by the blood of Jesus, because that is the extent of the purity of God. Jesus has already died for you and me. God does not condemn you and me if we don't believe in him, because God has sent Jesus so that we wouldn't be condemned to hell. So theoretically, we go to hell because we don't believe in Jesus, not because Jesus doesn't believe in us.
So, before you attack my personal integrity I just want to clarify something: I may be wrong, and you may all be right.
But what does it matter and who benefits? Let's not get lost in an argument until the point is simply to win.
Who wins this arguement benefits no one. The only benefit to us is to find out if what we think we know is really what we think we know.
So my challenge is still open- go research into the bible, christianity, all philosophies and school of thought and if there is any inherent contradiction in the gospel I'd like to know. Because my belief is on the basis that my research has led me to the knowledge that God does exist, and he is the christian God.
God does not condemn you and me if we don't believe in him, because God has sent Jesus so that we wouldn't be condemned to hell. So theoretically, we go to hell because we don't believe in Jesus, not because Jesus doesn't believe in us.
Hi, is it just me or does this statement sound seriously self-contradictory?
Hi Miao.
In other words, humanity condemns themselves to hell, not God. People always get mistaken that God condemns non-christians. But if he really did, he wouldn't have sent Jesus Christ to die for our sins. We have condemned ourselves by our sinful nature and lifestyle, and it is by merit of our own doings and faults that we go to hell, not by mere condemnation of a whimsical God.
Pardon my inability to accept your argument.
So theoretically, we go to hell because we don't believe in Jesus, not because Jesus doesn't believe in us.
Therefore,
We don't believe in Jesus = We go to Hell.
We have condemned ourselves by our sinful nature and lifestyle, and it is by merit of our own doings and faults that we go to hell.
Therefore, by the same token,
We don't believe in Jesus = We are sinful in nature and we lead an immoral lifestyle.
We don't believe in Jesus = We are sinful in nature and we lead an immoral lifestyle.
And if the first part of the equation doesn't necessarily imply the second, then I assume it is alright for me to conclude that you are suggesting that we go to Hell because of two separate reasons: 1) We don't believe in Jesus; 2) We lead sinful lives.
So what happen to those Christians who lead sinful lives anyway?
I believe that all religions aim to lead people along the right paths, and I do not discriminate against any religion in particular. I just cannot bring myself to tolerate illogical/baseless arguments (to me at least), and you must either convince me that your argument is perfectly sound and that it is my own mistake to not have realised it right from the start (and to do so successfully you must provide really substantial evidence and have the ability to argue eloquently because I am admittedly very committed to my own judgments and principles), or else it will just remain as a fallacy to me.
Hi Miao.
First a little correction:
"We don't believe in Jesus = We go to Hell."
You've missed a few steps.
We don't go to hell simply because we don't believe in Jesus. There are many reasons why we may go to hell. Mainly, we go to hell for the very fundamental fact that every human being is inherently flawed and prone to commiting sin. Jesus holds the potential to release us from this vicious cycle.
"We don't believe in Jesus = We are sinful in nature and we lead an immoral lifestyle."
Not true. There are Buddhists and Catholics and Muslims among other religious believers who do not believe in Jesus and yet do not lead an immoral lifestyle. However, that does not mean they have not sinned before or are not viable to sinning in future. We truly are "sinful in nature" and that is the Modern Man's struggle towards leading a lifestyle that could be "immoral".
You asked VERY good questions, thank you for paying attention to what I've written. Since equations works for you, here's my answers:
Adam + Eve + Disobedience = Sin
Adam + Eve = Humanity
Humanity = Sinners
Sinners = Hell
Sinners - Sin = Salavation by Jesus
Salvation = Intimacy with God
Salvation + Sin? = Hell
Nobody, even the best christians or pastors are exempted from the possibility that they may go to hell because sin is always bound to occur for mankind which is inherently sinful.
The bible says, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander." Matthew 15:19. Another verse says, "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." Romans 3:23.
Therefore, we must constantly wash ourselves clean with the blood of Jesus Christ (by this it means repentance, asking God for forgiveness) because Jesus says, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6.
You're right, there are many christians who continue to lead sinful lives, and its no guarantee that even if they believe in Jesus Christ they will not forfeit their own salvation with a lifestyle that's ungodly. That's why the bible says "...continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling..." Phillipians 2:13. Which means you love God and fear disobeying His word.
So, in conclusion, the equation:
The ones who go to heaven = The ones who get right with God.
"Christians" is just a term which have been stained by many who claim to be so when they really aren't.
Just to end off, you said you "do not discriminate against any religion in particular." If so, I do hope you keep an open mind as being "admittedly very committed to [your] own judgments and principles" might be a stumbling block towards your understanding of my argument in the first place. However, I respect your right to be that committed to what you believe. By doing so and standing up for your beliefs, you have honoured yourself. I hope you grant me that same honour. I just want to ask you this question. Regarding all that you have read about Christianity: Is it possible? Is it possible that a man died on the cross and spilled his blood to cleanse your sins? Even if the answer is: "Perhaps 0.1%", don't deny the potential of this possibility. And neither will I deny the possibility of what you have suggested.
But tell me what a life of an unbeliever and a believer could amount to (and you would come to the decision that they are mostly the same). And then you will see that the only difference it boils down to is one choice. If you think it makes no difference, I respect that.
I leave that choice to you.
Do believing always need a proven evidence that can be seen with one's own eyes. 99% of the people in the world has probably never seen an atom with their own eyes, but they still believe that we are made up of some little particles anyway.
Hi KC, sorry for flooding your comments page but I think that the following article will be of great interest to everyone here.
Why I Am Not A Christian
by Lord Bertrand Russell,
Nobel-winning Physicist
-----
Introductory note: Russell delivered this lecture on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. Published in pamphlet form in that same year, the essay subsequently achieved new fame with Paul Edwards' edition of Russell's book, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays ... (1957).
-----
As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is "Why I Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians -- all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on -- are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.
What Is a Christian?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature -- namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is another sense, which you find in Whitaker's Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore.Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness.
But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included he belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.
The Existence of God
To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few.
The First-cause Argument
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
The Natural-law Argument
Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were, you are then faced with the question "Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?" If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it -- if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.
The Argument from Design
The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.
I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.
The Moral Arguments for Deity
Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize -- the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times.
Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up -- a line which I often thought was a very plausible one -- that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.
The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice
Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say, "After all, I only know this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also." Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance." You would say, "Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment"; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say, "Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one." Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.
Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.
The Character of Christ
I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said, "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present prime minister [Stanley Baldwin], for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.
Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged." That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away." That is a very good principle. Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.
Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.
Defects in Christ's Teaching
Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come." Then he says, "There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise.
The Moral Problem
Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.
You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.
Then Christ says, "The Son of Man shall send forth his His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He continues, "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He says again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him asHis chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.
There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever'...and Peter... saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.
The Emotional Factor
As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshiped under the name of the "Sun Child," and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says, "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into Heaven they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.
That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
How the Churches Have Retarded Progress
You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children." Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.
That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."
Fear, the Foundation of Religion
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
What We Must Do
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Electronic colophon: This electronic edition of "Why I Am Not a Christian" was first made available by Bruce MacLeod on his "Watchful Eye Russell Page." It was newly corrected (from Edwards, NY 1957) in July 1996 by John R. Lenz for the Bertrand Russell Society.
If there's anything I hope the neutral observer or unconcerned party would take away from all this, it would be a basic understanding of the text above. Thumbs up to russell.
I doubt the text would have any clear effect on the average believer though, since, as the writer himself pointed out, "the real reason why people accept religion has [nothing] to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds."
I think at the end of it all, the loyal believer will still stay on in his own field, just like how the devout non-believer would in his. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that of course. The grass ISNT greener on any one side, though the believer very often irks me by implying otherwise through his holy overtures, friendly smiles, and over-zealous singing which, incidentally, are quite apalling on occasion. Shrugs. The fence is the fence, and anyone who wishes to jump over to claim others' private property must be prepared to be labelled a most terrible sinner.
If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.
Validity in this whole argument is on absolutely no basis- Ironic then, coming from a physicist. Cause and effect can only occur within a time frame. Consider Einstein’s theory of Relativity. “Relativity teaches us that if two space-time events are separated so that they cannot be connected by any signal travelling at c or less, then different observers will disagree as to which of the two events came first. Since most physicists still believe that cause needs to precede effect, we conclude that no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light.” (This is taken from the physics website http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/13/9/3). Russell’s argument only works if God himself is in the “time” that we know of. But the bible states that only the Universe exists within the paradigm of time and that God is out of it because God created time. This means that there is no beginning or end for God and cannot possibly have a cause for God. Everything else that is in time has a beginning and thus has a cause. The Universe had a beginning and thus must have a cause, therefore cause and effect does apply to the world and cannot possibly have no cause. It is only logical to conclude we have a cause because it is proven that we have had a beginning and did not simply “exist” the way God is stated to be in the bible with no existence of time to reasonably ask questions like “how” which are all time-revolving questions. Please consider also that most physicists still believe that cause needs to precede effect thus it is a completely logical speculation and possibility that the Universe has been created by God and that God could be said to exist.
On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law ,than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance.
What I find is that while this sentence says that things can happen by chance, he goes on to contradict himself by saying:
They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was.
I don’t see how statistical averages from the laws of chance don’t mean to say something. To me, it says that “chance” isn’t “chance”. Chance has a probability too. Chance has a statistical average and cannot possibly be random if it consecutively gave out the same statistics (as with the example of the dice). It also means that “chance” doesn’t exist as much as “natural law” doesn’t exist. Which to me, just contradicts what all atheists may say that “the Universe was just chance, just an accident”. To me, what it does say that neither “chance” nor “natural law” exists means that the names humanity throw up at to describe or try to explain what we want to know are simply contradicting. In other words, we don’t know any better!
If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it -- if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver.
Russell is absolutely right in saying that God himself was subject to law which he created. A simple pattern that God gives in the bible is the pattern of relationships. There are four levels (Dr A. R. Bernard) from introduction of two individual to the gradual stages of acquaintance, friendship and finally intimacy. God’s law of relationship states that when you sin against a relationship in the stage of intimacy, you bring death to it. God himself created relationships and its necessary stages. When Adam was created, there was no introduction because Adam was created an adult, and put directly in the stage of intimacy. When Adam sinned, he is immediately put out of the Garden of Eden because God’s law will not be violated- Adam has to be put out of the Garden and the relationship of intimacy is brought death by Adam’s sin. Everywhere in the Bible you will see God’s laws and patterns and how he himself follows through with them.
It is a blatant speculation to say that 1) it is not an advantage having God as an intermediary when he has to serve his own laws and 2) that he is not the ultimate lawgiver.
1) Government officials as well as judges in our judicial courts serve out their own judgements and are subject to their own laws- it does not undermine the fact that it is an advantage of having a Judge preside over any hearing or a Government body over a nation. In fact, what it does say about a Judge and Government who are follows through with the laws they create and serve is fairness and the ultimate justice.
2) With the first point clear, it is utter conjecture that God is not the ultimate lawgiver. It does not give adequate evidence that a lawmaker who follows his own laws is not a lawgiver.
That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.
I find it uneasy how a physicist gives a parody as an analogy for his testimony of personal choice meant to convince others of the correctness of his decision. It simply has tones of sarcasm and cynicism far too obvious to remain objective. That is but my personal opinion and that aside, Darwin’s theory remains what it is- a theory. Whilst it cannot be proven that we have evolved, it is ultimately still possible that we have not and thereby Darwin’s theory that leads to the resolution that there is “no evidence of design” cannot hold ground.
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years.
This again, is conjecture. What I do agree with Russell is the truth that this world is imperfect and has far too many defects for a lifetime of perfect happiness. Well, any non-Christian will be able to point out that in the first few chapters of the Bible Adam sinned and caused the ‘perfect world’ by God to fall apart. Any Christian will be able to tell you that sin is one of the reasons the world we live in is breaking down, and also will be able to tell you that’s why God’s plan for humanity is to restore it. Why does he not do so immediately? Well, God is a god of love and you cannot love without giving choice to the one you love. Love without having chosen whom to love simply doesn’t justify the word ‘love’. God is giving humanity a choice to choose him or their sinful nature which day by day causes the world and humanity to fall apart before he comes down to restore all.
Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system.
What Russell says only goes to show his belief that humanity had a beginning and will have an end. It thereby contradicts what he says earlier about the Universe simply existing and not having a cause because if you have an effect, then there must have a cause (Please refer to second paragraph). The book of revelations in the Bible tells of the end of the world, and it is very much in line (however general, or conjectural you might want to believe) with how the world is believed to end by scientists. This to me is remarkable because the book of revelations is written way before men had the first evidential guesswork that the world will eventually end.
If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good.
Russell is inaccurate in saying that: 1)for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong and 2)it is no longer significant to say that God is good.
1) To God there is a difference between right and wrong. Right and wrong is not by God’s mere fiat but by what is right and what is good. And when God himself adheres to them (Please refer to paragraph 8) I do not see how God is autocratic by how Russell suggests with the word ‘fiat’.
2) Since point one is clear that there is a difference between right and wrong to God, thereby when Christians say goodness because it is because God forgoes what we have done wrong and redeems us through Jesus Christ. Goodness comes as a result of many repeated actions on God’s part to show that he is willing to forgive us despite what we have done wrong.
If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them.
I think Russell has just agreed with my point three paragraphs ago that right and wrong is independent of God’s fiat.
What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.
I disagree. Nations that are growing in the rate of believers in Christianity such as Korea have generations that did not counter Christianity in their early infancy. Did Russell not do research? Furthermore, I maintain my previous statements in previous entries that one may believe in God purely based on research- thereby my challenge for you to research into all school of thoughts, philosophies and religions because I sincerely believe God is a God is wisdom and he does not want Christians to believe based on mere blind faith- there is proof when you are willing to look.
In the arguments of the character of Christ and defects in his teachings…
Many of scriptural text are open for interpretation up to this day. It does not however, deny the possibility of God’s existence. Russell’s interpretations are mainly based on the conduct of other Christians and how they have interpreted the scriptures. It is erroneous to judge God and his scriptures on the basis of how Christians have responded to them. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, Christians make mistakes. Similarly, you do not judge Buddha’s good or evil on the basis of the lives of other Buddhists and how they interpret Buddhist scriptures.
A lot of Russell’s arguments on the defects of Christ’s teachings are taken out of context. Anyone who reads the gospels of Christ will see how flawed Russell’s arguments are. It’s too lengthy for me to explain all, but I’d be happy to do so at your request.
Let me end off by agreeing with Russell. “We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.” The whole conception of God is a conception derived from an intrinsic need in all of us to have hope, believe that we were meant for so much more, that we are not an accident; we have purpose and thus are worthy self-respecting human beings.
This is the last time I will comment.
What you have directed at me, there is no way I can or will convince you God is a possibility when I am outnumbered.
I just want to apologise for my outburst in the first post. Please understand why I wrote what I did. To me, its extremely unfair to compare religion to smoking with smoking's many negative connotations.
I've come to understand its impossible to have an objective discussion when you are too steep into your belief to consider the possibility of what I to say. Similarly, you have said the same things about me as though, ironically Kenneth, your grass is greener.
You know, what I say is not to win the argument with you. I really just want you to know God loves you and I'm sorry if you've felt that I had any other intentions.
Anyway, I sincerely wish you all the best in life.
Reading through the comments had been very emotional for myself, and yes, I agree with what Debx had said in her posts.
I have not got the intellectual capacity to convince you by mere words, that God loves you as much as He loves all of us, but yes, the fact is there whether you agree with me or not.
God has changed my life (and yes, I wasn't a Christian from infancy) - I have experienced what He did and this was why, despite not being able to be in full possession of intellectual arguments, I still believe.
I understand the need of you to be in full possession of what you deem is the truth before you would take the "leap of faith". How could I not, when my father, too, sees the world within his own frame of wisdom? But you are still my friend, and he is still my father and I love him even more after knowing God's love.
That being said, we are not trying to pick fights with you just because we differed in perspectives - we are saying these because we love you. And before you discredit this Christian love, please simply know that I still hope to say hi to you the next time we see each other, or talk online, or have phone conversations.
That being said, God's world is still there for you to explore and understand. Here's a little link - http://www.wbschool.org/chinesecharacters.htm
Not so much about apologetics, but just something to chew on when you have the time.
See ya ard-
Shalom
Hi Debbie,
You are right that the number of Christians around the world are increasing at an amazing rate, especially in countries like Korea and China, but before you accuse Russell of not having done any research, please take note that he gave this speech in year 1927, way before our time.
And evolution has always been taking place. You cannot argue that perhaps evolution has not taken place at all. Recently Discover reported on a certain type of fish (I've forgotten the scientific name and I'm sorry that I'm unable to correctly name its species here as I do not have the article with me currently) which lived in the B.C. era, and it was discovered that it originally did not have legs and its respiratory system could only allow it to survive in shallow waters. As a result it was unable to escape from predators in time as it could not possibly dive and swim away into the deeper waters, and it could not hunt for food as it was perpetually trapped in the shallow waters. However, as time passed, it evolved slowly into a creature with legs, and thus it was able to hunt for food on land. Evolution must have taken place, which proves that Russell is correct in saying that living things adapt to their environments. That is why we have evidence that shows primitive humans in their original ape-like shapes. I certainly do not think that we look very much like apes today.
Anyway there are many more things which I want to say (including typing some of Nietzsche's works here, quoting passages which prove that God did not invent Time, etc.) but I guess I won't, because "I've [also] come to understand its impossible to have an objective discussion when you are too steep into your belief to consider the possibility of what I [wish] to say". And one of my friends have also pointed out that the Bible, in the first place, is never to be taken literally. Thus it is inappropriate to quote the Bible because 1) As you have astutely pointed out, different people have different interpretations of the Bible, and 2) The Bible was not penned by God himself, and thus how can we ever be sure that it truly carries God's teachings?
The whole conception of God is a conception derived from an intrinsic need in all of us to have hope, believe that we were meant for so much more, that we are not an accident; we have purpose and thus are worthy self-respecting human beings.
And quoting your own words, you've agreed that God is just a conception. While I thank you for your kindness in trying to expose non-believers to God's love (no sarcasm intended), I find it more gratifying to find hope in myself and not in a higher entity whose existence even I myself am uncertain of. I find that I relate better to teachings which guide me to ignite that flame of hope in myself, not just in the faith that He (whoever the religion is trying to exalt as the true God - the sole creator of the entire universe; I'm using this word in a generic sense) does exist. Some methods work for certain people and not for others. Christianity works for you and not for me.
That being said I must say that it is nice to see someone arguing amicably and yet firmly for his own beliefs, and you should be proud of yourself for that. ^^
- Miao
And... if you would pick out the subtleties of Russell's speech, you would realise that some of the arguments you've made against him are invalid.
Anyway we should just end the debate here. To quote KC the grass isn't greener on any one side. We'll never know until we've seen the other.
- Miao
lol... whao... debate?
honestly, i do not understand y ppl have to go all out to convince others of what they believe? so what if there is prove or not? so what if u managed to convince or did not manage to convince someone of ur beliefs?
i believe tt everyone is entitled to his rights to choose his beliefs, i believe tt we all definitely have e right to speak up for what we believe in.
however, what i find amusing is tt we always confuse e freedom of speech with respect for others.
how much can u/are u allowed to express before the other party accuses u of crossing e line?
when definitions differ, ppl tend to disagree, & we all eventually end up frustrated @ how why others cannot come to understand or accept our views.
what we often fail to see is how the other party wld have felt have they said similar things abt our beliefs.
i guess eventually,debates abt beliefs will always bring us back to square 1.
just live life happy guys, have a great day ahead.
(just my 2 cents, hope nobody's offended XD )
this is really some very amusing stuff, especially the way debx seems to be so adamant with declaring the Truth of Christ. I agree with Miao, that the galaxy we live in is only a small one out of the many that actually exist. Creation might have actually started with chemical inbalances in the solar system, rather than such a solid faith in 'divine decision'. This is not to say that the super natural does not exist, it does, in parallel lives with us, but the question of a divine being that holds so much power, is truly questionable. Remember Jesus may have died on the Cross, but his crime was to declare himself as the son of Man, in that, he was sacriligiously insulting the Jews.
For all Christians I think its important that you take everything you read in the Bible with a pinch of salt. Research may affirm what was 'written' by humans a few thousand years ago, but there is nothing concrete as to confirm Christianity.
Faith is manmade.
Post a Comment
<< Home