Theistic Personal Standards
[part 1 of 3]
I have yet to be convinced that I should lower these three basic personal standards in reference to theism. If you have a personal god, you should be able to apply personal standards. God creates man in the "image of god" and says, "I want to have a personal relationship with you." That's great. I know how personal relationships go...and you have made claims within my sphere of knowledge and expertise...and if you are truly my creator you should know exactly how that ought to be. If you don't have basic standards...such relationships are entirely meaningless and abusive. I know Christians try to say, "You got to approach God on his terms!" but of course...there are plenty of false gods out there. I can't take them all on their "terms." But if he created me coherently to know what makes a good personal relationship, then there's no reason these standards shouldn't apply. It would be like Bill Gates making a PC with a USB port, but then expecting the computer to come to him on his terms...with some other kind of connection...that'd be awfully suspicious wouldn't it? If you just ask yourself some honest questions…like what makes for an appropriate relationship…all of the sudden all these false gods are shown for what they are…either imaginary, negligent, or incompetent.
1. It is my contention obviously that there is no logical proof for God’s existence (they only amount to maybes). Fideism is by definition without evidence and is therefore random (and presuppositionalism does no better). Every argument to the better explanation is really more of an argument from ignorance that creates more problems than it solves. Any historical case for miracles is an uphill battle against the improbability of such a claim given we live in a present world where not only have we not affirmed the supernatural, but we have made much progress in disproving various bustable claims. History is not equipped to handle the epistemic weight of a miraculous claim unless God goes way out of his way to give us extraordinary evidence and I think it’s obvious that if he were going to do that, it’d be just as easy to show up at family picnics. A successful theistic lifestyle with answered prayers is difficult to distinguish from mere confirmation bias. Theists “expect” prayer studies to turn up negative for some bizarre reason. Experiential claims of mystical encounters with the divine can’t be qualified against mere delusion and emotional reactions to seductive ideas and certainly have many contradictory parallels in other belief systems.
There does not seem to be another way available to know God is real, and thus we are unable to know it’s true beyond existential desperation and credulity…and perhaps the incidence of experiential naivety. If you know you don’t know that God exists despite looking into the matter…that is in itself a disproof of the Biblical God where it is claimed it is self evidently true.
2. Obviously if you are uncertain about number one, number two is by default an equal or worse situation. No doubt the astute evangelicals will whip out a Bible verse or two putting God’s plan of salvation on the table…and somehow not notice several other evangelicals that will do the same but with different results…and not just minor differences, differences that they will make much of…differences that they will go so far as to say the devil has inspired a bad interpretation or that they are in grave danger of denying God’s grace somehow because you haven’t put Jesus on precisely the highest pedestal. And then even if we get beyond this point…probably merely by not being in a room boasting such an eclectic soteriological mess, we are still left with an ineffably generic formula that says nothing in the way of where you personally rank on the sin-o-meter. What does God specifically think of you personally? Can you trust your sinful self to make an astute evaluation? God and the Bible are coming at us from a completely different world view, one inured with the trappings of the Ancient Near East…something apologists will make much of. Pick some random Arab dictator…do you think by reading a few generic lines from a few thousand years ago you will be in the green in terms of understanding exactly how you rank to them? Where you fit into the scheme of things? Apologists will make much of the common Christian misconceptions rampant in their Christian world…all the while not recognizing the implications that God just really didn’t explain himself very well.
And even if you think whatever your pastor/priest decrees is by definition what is said in God’s stead, can you be sure two pastors of your same denomination will come to the same conclusions? Can you be sure God hasn’t disowned that half of your denomination for becoming too worldly in some sleight of hand kind of way? Can you be sure you haven’t succumbed to the world in some way that your judgment of your branch of your denomination hasn’t fallen prey to some subtle scheme of the devil? God allowed for a zillion denominations…how do you know that your “secured” branch isn’t on its way out in such approved humanly ways that every other member of every other denomination has so believed of their separation from one denomination or another? I think it should be pretty obvious that regardless of where you stand on the denomination-scape, there’s a good chance you’ve gotten things wrong...and you probably feel very strong conviction in regards to that error. (BTW, if you just think that your pastor’s advice is good enough, then what makes that any different from getting advice on your life from any elder of any belief system?)
3. And it’s not like it doesn’t matter. An eternity of damnation is on the line and Jesus said that most people are on their way there. Its no wonder since the above two criteria haven’t been met. The stakes are literally infinitely high and the world is left in ambiguity. Is that a recipe for success? I sure don’t think so. What can you do about it? What can you specifically do about it so that Jesus’ investment in you is secure? You have the general idea about doing good to others…is that enough? Have you done enough? You’ve worked yourself to death for the good of mankind? Does Jesus miraculously expect even more by faith? On Judgment day, God has his expectation of your works…did you measure up? Did you double the investment via whatever scale God was using to evaluate what he originally gave? Do you know what that original evaluation was? Did you exercise the use of his grace enough? Were you faithful enough?
You want to be married…is that some vice? Should you be a celibate? Should you join a monastery? You really don’t want to…is that your sinful nature? You are tormented between extremes…you want to take the easy way out…is that what God wants? God demands everything you have to give? Can you give it? How do you know? You ask a pastor…is he in league with the devil, just telling you what you want to hear? You keep sinning…did Jesus really mean to chop off your hand? Your foot? Was that metaphorical? Or is that interpretation some kind of compromise to avoid what God really expects? Jesus said that lusting is a thought crime. How far does that go? Are we to insert our wisdom to allow for moderation of a natural activity? Did it only apply to adultery? Can you lust after your own wife with immunity if you love her otherwise? How much intimacy before marriage is appropriate? Hugs? Kisses? Holding hands? Groping… You use modern sensibilities for the sake of your sanity…but then you remember God killed someone for picking up sticks on Sunday. Maybe God really did mean some obtuse impossible extreme and we shouldn’t use common sense… You ask a hundred pastors and average all their answers…are they all lukewarm people God hates? Can you trust them? They’re all sinners, you know. You find someone you trust…is this just some convenient worldly attachment? Have you made an idol of them? Should you give up on a sensible life and just wander the streets preaching whatever theistic nonsense happens to pass through your head hoping for God to provide manna from heaven? And the list goes on and on and on and the clarification on such extremes gets weaker and weaker and the recipe for disaster becomes more and more evident. Maybe you think no one takes things to these extremes, but I know I did when I was took Christianity seriously. I couldn't find a reason not to and it made me nuts. And I know of lots of other people that have variations on this theme. Not to mention it should be an obvious extrapolation from a mere reading of the text itself that this isn't going to bode well for everyone. Everyone settles for some interpretation or another...and you know most people aren't going to make it. How can you risk being wrong?
Most Christians must have come to some kind of false conviction in these matters because only a few will be saved. Christians reading this no doubt must think “they get it” but it seems fairly certain God isn’t going to see things our way and that false divine conviction is too easy to come by. How can you be sure you aren’t one of the complacently convicted unlucky ones?
Outro: Apologists make much of the specified information encoded in our DNA…but what about the specified information that matters? You know accountable, entirely qualified, intimately personal facts that keep you from burning in hell for all eternity? Richard Carrier once said, “If God is compassionate at all like I am, I know I would come to each one of you in person and patiently lay all the cards on the table.” He must be out of his mind because we have to accept substantially less standards in order to accommodate Christianity…and yet what he says makes perfect sense.
How I feel about this topic: Like a retard for having read the entire Bible, taking it seriously, and letting the unqualified moral extremism of it emotionally rape me again and again (you probably think I'm exagerating, don't you? tsk, tsk) to no end and being the sorry bitch that just couldn’t come to the conclusion that God didn’t really love me. I had to let it get to impossible extents before I had nothing to lose in being honest with how things really are.
Ben
Dude . . . do you think you've been through anything worse than millions of other victims of Christian hypocrites?
What separates you and I is our chosen responses to our woundings.
I'm not sure what Sword and Sacrifice's point above is all about. I think s/he missed the point of your post.
I got maybe halfway through the Bible the first attempt through before I just had to stop. I had already decided that this book wasn't true, and was of dubious utility several books back. I did not feel emotionally raped at that point, but liberated. Of course, the family fallout from my public biblical criticism was an emotional firestorm that I'd just as soon never have experienced.
Comments (3)
Dude . . . do you think you've been through anything worse than millions of other victims of Christian hypocrites?
What separates you and I is our chosen responses to our woundings.
I'm not sure what Sword and Sacrifice's point above is all about. I think s/he missed the point of your post.
I got maybe halfway through the Bible the first attempt through before I just had to stop. I had already decided that this book wasn't true, and was of dubious utility several books back. I did not feel emotionally raped at that point, but liberated. Of course, the family fallout from my public biblical criticism was an emotional firestorm that I'd just as soon never have experienced.
Well I don't claim to be the most abused person of all time, and I don’t actually have any bad blood between me and the infamous pseudo-Christian population. My experiences in various churches and with various pastors have actually been quite exemplary in terms of ordinary ethical behavior. I’ve never been a witness to the Sunday only Christians mainly because as a Lutheran, there just wasn’t anyone my age. So I didn’t suffer because of Christian hypocrisy, but rather because of Christ’s hypocrisy. Supposedly he’s a good god and yet Scripture as is can easily be seen as an accident waiting to happen. I suffered under the pressure of unqualified extremes…the ambiguity of looming harsh Scriptural realities, of its arbitrary application, the lack of divine reciprocation that would have alleviated the problem and of course the non-existent trust situation that happens when a deity’s actions are patently amorally described.
If I'd actually been tortured *for* my faith or something, surely that would have cultivated a different response. But instead I was tortured *by* the natural insecurity of Christian faith which is a completely different kind of martyrdom…one only conducive to cultivating the virtue of apostasy. Had I been able to fall back on the "truth" of Christianity despite my struggles, I would probably still fail to recognize that it wasn’t entirely my fault. As it is, I couldn't do that and thus the misshepherding of my soul became quite evident and lent to another iteration of unapologetics...certainly not my central argument, but one nonetheless especially taken into the greater context of an obviously misshepherded world and the sadistic salvatory Biblical paradigm.
So in my opinion, in all likelihood the only difference between me and you is that I didn't settle for a pretentious interpretation of various critical texts that might have taken me into clear skies more often than not. I can almost guarantee that you don’t apply a number of passages to your daily life…something my cross-referencing mind simply couldn’t avoid. The time period of my life I’m talking about was not the direct prelude to my apostasy. I gave god every benefit of the doubt, not presuming ill on his part, but still took seriously many key passages of the Bible I’d so enthusiastically read. The shear meaningless of instances and passages like I’ve recorded in “God, the Stepfather” “The Biblical Case for God’s Amorality” and even “A Biblical Case against Christian Evangelism” surely surely are not applied to most Christians’ devotional lives and that’s probably why they do much better than I did. And yet those became my rubric for understanding how God was likely to deal with me and there’s really no valid argument against it within Christian philosophy.
I didn’t consider these things deal-breaking at the time…I just recognize in hindsight I should have. I wasn’t willing to let it mean that. I just inevitably after all the damage was done gravitated away from it for less than objective doctrinal reasons. I think I just couldn’t literally abuse myself any more with it than I already had. This “worked” but inevitably left me to fall into the same trap even more deeply later which *was* a direct prelude to my apostasy. So the problem wasn’t ever corrected as it should have been…it was just ignored. And to this day I don’t know of a reasonable way to completely get around those problems without just not taking what the Bible says seriously…which of course works…but it’s a much more parsimonious methodology as an apostate.
Rohirok,
I didn’t read the Bible to determine whether it was true. I already believed that. I just wanted to know what was all in it. And that loaded all these “loose canons” in my guilt management system that inevitably set me up for situations I could not deal with that would emotionally cripple me for 6 months to a year at a time. And yet I still embraced it for a long while after that.
But yeah, SaS missed the point. My experiences were only meant to lend validity to how someone could very easily go astray with such extreme unqualified statements in Scripture…they weren’t the main argument of this post. He can argue I’m mistaken all he wants, but it remains a fact that many people do get hurt by ethical extremes of the Bible even if from some bizarre reason those things are actually ethically sound. The various moderate glosses have to be read into the text in order for that to not happen.
It’s not like there’s a disciple that asks Jesus, “Do you really mean we should chop off our hands?” And Jesus replied, “For the sake of future generations that might not pick up on my use of ANE hyperbole…after all the whole world is going to read these words…I should probably note that I am not being entirely serious here. Self mutilation is condemned elsewhere in Scripture in obscure passages in the OT and I don’t expect everyone to be a perfect student of the Bible who might happen to read these gospels first and I don’t want to hurt anyone as that is not in my nature. Thus I only mean to imply you should consider deprioritizing anything that hinders your growth as a moral being.” But of course, you’ll never find anything so sensible as that in Scripture and no doubt that’s how most moderates would understand it. But it is very easy not to see it that way and to doubt a moderate interpretation with so much ethical extremism elsewhere in the Bible. It’s just really hard to be sure on the Bible’s terms. Especially when God’s definition of good is not our definition of good…and that opens the door to practically any evil thing under the sun.
ARU