Dear non-christian peer,
I do not know you nor your girlfriend personally, and thus it would be inappropriate for me to comment on your relationship. As the Eminem song "Like Toy Soldiers" goes, I do not want to write about "anything I know nothing about". I may not fully understand your frustration, but I see that you are hurt, and I just want to pray for you.
Reading your widely publicised letter, I see that you are particularly antagonistic when it comes to religion, particularly Christianity. After you probably did derive the name of your letter from a book by atheist Sam Harris, Letters to a Christian Nation. Now, I see that you wrote it under emotional pains, so I am in no way condemning you. However, as I read on, I see that you bring up many, many good points, but most of those points are pure misrepresentations of Christianity. Let me start point by point, as you did in your letter.
Undone by Corinthians 6:14?
When reading the Bible, one must take things into context. You picked out one line from one verse in the Bible ("Do not be equally yoked with non-believers"), and then claimed that Christians believe they will go to hell for marrying non-believers.
Now, the apostle Paul did write it, but as a guideline for relationships. It is hard for Christian and non-Christians to get into a serious (but not impossible) relationship because they have different goals. Both want to please the spouse, but for the Christian, marriage is a way to bring us in a closer relationship with God.
I am unsure if you read the whole passage, but if you did, you will realise that the Bible did not say Christian go to hell for marrying non-believers. In the Christian doctrine, people go to hell because they are sinners. That is why we need Jesus to cleanse us from our sin to enter a relationship with God.
A reason driven life
I have no real comment about this section. I applaud your determination to better yourself though the ages. Like you, I was brought up to consider evidences carefully and critically, and I emphasised with you in this aspect.
You have great questions here-- Do Christians have unquestioning loyalty to God? Is Christian faith blind faith?
I would disagree. Even Jesus questioned the Father on the cross as He was dying (Mark 15:34). Do Christians have doubt about their beliefs? I do. And every time we do, we are encouraged to real about it and settle it for ourselves. If the evidence is lacking, should we continue being Christian, or search harder?
The sciences (Bang Bang, Age of the Earth, Noah's Ark)
As an undergraduate biology student, there a lot of things here I can say "Amen!" too. However, you have to bear in mind that Creationism and Christianity are two different things (even though some proponents insist otherwise). My issues with Creationism is the same as yours. That said, you must remember that although evolution is often named to be anti-Christian, the Big Bang was once regarded to be anti-atheistic (as it implied the universe had a beginning). Atheism is not as pro-science as you think.
But you bring up a good point is this. God is described as always existing, even though no natural analogue exists. That's just it-- the Christian God is not purely natural, but also supernatural. If you insist that the natural world is all that exists, it's not a scientific statement, but rather a faith statement. Then your probability of God is zero. However if you entertain questions like, "Does meaning exists?" and "Why am I here?", you will probably find God.
So many religions, which one is true?
I agree with you on the issue of many religions to a large extent. You say maybe all religions are true in some sense or another, and they can't all be right. However, I must impose here. To say someone's religion has a touch of the truth, is only valid if you have the whole truth.
Then you go on with "If you were born in country X (Japan/India), you would be Y (Shinto/Hindu)". In philosophy, this is known as a what if hypothesis. It is another faith statement. Would it make atheism/agnosticism any less true, if it was pointed out that you are like that only because you had a certain background? What if hypothesis is an interesting concept to explore, but meaningless to follow up on.
Bible being not a good moral compass/Cherry-picking within the Bible
Again, this might sound surprising, but I do have roughly the same issues. Why did God test Abraham on Issac? Why did God have such harsh laws? Why did God approve of genocide? It's something I do not have all the answers to, yet I am reading on them.
And I am glad you get the point that the God of the New Testament is the same as the God of the Old Testament.
Just because we have issues about something does not render it invalid. You misunderstand what apologetics say about Israel in the Old Testament.The Israel of Biblical times were one nation following God's laws, to be God's representative on Earth. Thus their punishments were harsher (stoning for adultery etc). However, no one nation today can make that claim. You can't take something of the Old Testament out of context and accuse Christianity of playing double standards. Remember Jesus spared an adulterous woman from stoning in John 8. Oh, but you would not accept that, would you? However, if you read John 8 in its whole, it is exactly address the issue you made a fuss of, and that's not "cherry-picking".
By the way, your one line from Confucius can only triumph all Christianity if you accept it to be your epitome of moral perfection. But again, that is a faith statement to make.
Why did Jesus need to die? Because the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Punishment for sin is separation from God, and is not to be taken lightly. And through the Old Testament time, a sacrifice (usually a lamb) had to be used for a sin offering. So a death was necessary to cleanse us from sin. However, with Jesus's death, we no longer need to do it.
Disagreement among various sects
You say Christians differ on so many issues. I agree. However, disagreement does not render something invalid. Evolutionary biologists differ over punctuated equilibrium and systematic gradualism when it comes to the fossil record. Does that make evolution invalid. Some atheists promote a militant lifestyle (advocated by your hero, Richard Dawkins), while others are more accomodative (Michael Ruse). Does that make atheism any less valid?
(I would not consider Mormons Christians in any sense, for their perception of sin and salvation is drastically different from mainline Christianity.
Worldwide conflicts as results of religion
Religions can cause great harm, no doubt about that. However, so can science and political ideology (eg: Korean War). You have to tease out what is an excuse and a reason. For instance, if you asked the Northern Irish if they were Protestant, they would say yes. If you ask them if they go to church, they would say no, but they were from Ulster. Does mainline Christianity sound like it is involved there.
Radicalism?/Christians as good role models?
You cherry-picked a few issues to further suggest religion cause conflicts. I already covered it in the paragraph above, but your statement about scholars and religion is just wrong.
No religious scholars? Really? What about Christian scholars? Do they count?
As for scientific scholars (since I am in that field), there are definitely many of them. Francis Collins, Simon Conway Morris and Kenneth R. Miller are few of the many Christian professors of science out there.
Contradictions between Commandant 1 and 5
I was most irritated by this comment, to be honest. Just because you cannot see how you can honour God by honouring your parents does not make it invalid.
Do you know why the converts do not want to carry out the full Chinese funeral rites? Because it involves bowing and worshiping the parents, which would place their parents above God. But I think you would object to that, saying that being filial is more important than following God.
Wait a minute, first you accuse Christians of not following the Bible to the letter to be hypocrites. And when they do, you paint them as blind and in this case, unfilial. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
The problem of evil
You described natural disasters issue very well. I have no idea why God would allow such terrible things to happen. But to say that disproves the Christian God you are assuming that there is no benevolent reason why an omnipotent and good God would allow a disaster to happen.
Furthermore, the fact that you can recognise something is evil must have come from something. After all, the fact that you can call something bad and good when it comes from nature is unusual, isn't it?
Satan as an excuse?
Satan, according to the Bible is the Prince of lies. However, no where in the Bible does it pin the responsibility of sin on Satan, but rather on men.
Conclusion
When it comes to examples of bad Christians how religions can be misused, you basically ace the test. However my friend, you know little about theology/philosophy and thus it drives you to misinterpretation at times.
15 comments:
Hi, I happened to stumble upon your blog - and decided to comment about this particular post on mine. I hope you're in the mood to read, because it's rather long! (Hopefully you're also in the mood to debate - because it's a rather "debatable" article too.)
Hi, I would like to read it, but for some reason I cannot access your blog.
I am currently busy with an Olive Tree project, but if you want to debate on stuff, I will try to oblige.
Here are some rules that I adhere to when discussing stuff, and hopefully we can agree to disagree
1) Be intellectually honest. If I don't know something, I will say I don't know. I will not make up stuff to support my points
2) This debate is not about winning, it is about honesty. Hopefully you can enlighten me on some issues, and I can enlighten you too.
3) Recognise our own limits of understanding. There are stuff I understand a lot of, but many stuff I don't. So if you quiz me on on stuff beyond my scope of knowledge, I will admit my ignorance.
Thanks, and have a good week ahead!
My apologies, I no longer post on Blogger, but on Wordpress. Here is the address:
http://localatheist.wordpress.com
I must say that you write pretty well though. :)
Hi man, I read your post thoroughly, and I might take quite some time to reply. It's good though.
It also exposes some flaws in my work too. I think I gave a wrong impression that my purpose is "to counter the letter". I think all I wanted was to clear the air on some issues, and I guess I sounded more aggressive that I should have.
I'm afraid my future post my not be as good as yours (I'm a biology major), but hopefully we can clear up each other's misunderstandings.
May I also point out an issue I had:
Many of his examples are based on Christians misinterpreting the Word of God. However, the problem there does not lie with the "writer" of the word, but with the "reader". Similarly, I can throw you a basketball with a perfect pass, but if you can't catch it, then the "problem" (so to speak, though this is not an attempt to pin the blame) lies with you, and not with me. God could very well have written perfectly, but someone with a lack of understanding and a little too much arrogance/self-assurance could also very well interprete the Word wrongly. Or worse, one could know full well the truth behind the Word, and still choose to misuse it.
Furthermore, I find that many of the examples which were given had a further point which was not surfaced. While I will no doubt agree that many of the given examples were claimed by those involved to have been done "in the name of God", resulting in lots of bloodshed and heartbreak and what-nots (which of course are in themselves a seperate and very debatable issue), most (if not all) of these people did these actions in the name of a God whom I'm quite sure did not and would not condone their actions. I would venture to guess that either they did not know Him well enough, or they chose to misuse His name, though I do conceded that that might be a general statement. It is very easy to quote something deemed as right (biblically or not) to justify an action that is not necessarily right, or to seemingly lend more credibility to ones cause (for example, citing/"cherry-picking" biblical examples of slavery to justify one's stand on allowing slavery, when the bible clearly does not condone slavery). And I think a lot of these people probably did just that (again, slavery is a good example). What this sums up to (which is the further point I'm trying to get at, and I hope I've manage to give a good illustration), is that human actions do not necessarily represent a good reflection of God's character (which I believe includes many of the examples that the writer of the letter had included). After all, we believe in God, and not that we are God.
In between our understanding of His laws and the committing of our actions, also comes the choice of what to do with what we know. We can choose to follow it, ignore it, or misuse it. Our actions do not necessarily follow our beliefs all the time. Most people will usually choose a course of action that benefits them (Christians included), and these actions quite often (more than we think) go against at least some our beliefs.
As such, I don't think it would be right or justifiable to say that just because certain Christians behaved in a certain objectionable or uncondoned way, therefore it equates to the notion that God is evil/does not exist/contradicts Himself/etc. Doing so would basically equate humans with God (which sounds uncannily like atheism).
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