New Indian-Chennai News + more

Members Login
Username 
 
Password 
    Remember Me  
Post Info TOPIC: Bertrand Russell-Why I Am Not A Christian


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Bertrand Russell-Why I Am Not A Christian
Permalink  
 


Why I Am Not A Christian
by Bertrand Russell


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. 
 



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

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. 



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

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. 



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

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.


__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Why I Am Not a Christian (2006) -Richard Carrier
Permalink  
 


Why I Am Not a Christian (2006)

Richard Carrier

Introduction

The Top Four Reasons I Am Not a Christian Are...

1. God is Silent 
2. God is Inert 
3. The Evidence is Inadequate 
     A Digression on Method 
     Hero Savior of Vietnam 
4. Christianity Predicts a Different Universe 
     Origin and Evolution of Life 
     The Human Brain 
     Finely Tuning a Killer Cosmos 
     The Original Christian Cosmos 

Conclusion




Introduction

A fellow freethinker by the name of John Ransom engaged me to compose a statement of why I am not a Christian. I should summarize my case, he said, simply and clearly so everyone can understand where I'm coming from. John was especially frustrated by Christians who routinely come up with implausible excuses to defend their faith, which they don't really examine--as if defending the faith with any excuse mattered more than having a genuinely good reason to believe in the first place. Discussing our experiences, we realized we'd both encountered many Christians like this, who color their entire perception of reality with the assumption that theyhave to be right, and therefore the evidence must somehow fit. So they think they can make anything up on the spur of the moment and be "sure" it's true. This is the exact opposite of what we do. We start with the evidence and then figure out what the best explanation of it all really is, regardless of where this quest for truth takes us.

John and I also shared the same experiences in another respect: when their dogmatism meets our empiricism, slander is not far behind. I have increasingly encountered Christians who accuse me to my face of being a liar, of being wicked, of not wanting to talk to God, of willfully ignoring evidence--because that is the only way they can explain my existence. I cannot be an honest, well-informed pursuer of the truth who came to a fair and reasonable decision after a thorough examination of the evidence, because no such person can exist in the Christian worldview, who does not come to Christ. Therefore, I must be a wicked liar, I must be so deluded by sin that I am all but clinically insane, an irrational madman suffering some evil psychosis.

There is nothing I can do for such people. Nothing I ever show or say to them will ever convince them otherwise--it can't, because they start with the assumption that their belief in Christ has to be true, therefore right from the start everything I say or do is always going to be a lie or the product of some delusion. They don't need any evidence of this, because to their thinking it must be true. Such people are trapped in their own hall of mirrors, and for them there is no escape. They will never know they are wrong even if they are. No evidence, no logic, no reason will ever get through to them. When we combine this troubling fact with the observation that their religion, like every other, appears tailor-made to justify their own culture-bound desires and personal vanities--as if every God is made in man's image, not the other way around--then we already have grounds for suspicion. The fact that even the Christian idea of God has constantly changed to suit our cultural and historical circumstances, and is often constructed to be impervious to logic or doubt, is reason enough to step back and ask ourselves whether we're on the wrong track with the Christian worldview.

This essay will never convince Christians who have locked themselves inside a box of blind faith like this. But for other Christians out there who actually have an open mind, a good summary of my reasons for rejecting Christianity will help show why I am not a deluded liar, but an honest and reasonable man coming to an honest and reasonable decision. What follows is not meant to be a thorough exploration of every nuance and problem, nor an exhaustive account of all the arguments and evidence. Rather, it's a mere summary of the four most important reasons I am not a Christian. This is only the beginning of the story, not the whole of it.[1] That's what John asked for: a simple but well-written explanation of why I am not a Christian.

I shall assume here that C.S. Lewis was correct when he said "mere Christianity" consisted in the belief that "there is one God" who "is quite definitely good or righteous," "who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another," and who "invented and made the universe." But this God also "thinks that a great many things have gone wrong" with the world and thus "insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again," and to this end arranged the death and resurrection of "His only Son," Jesus Christ, who is or embodies or represents the Creator, and can alone "save" us from "eternal death" if we now ask this Jesus to forgive our sins. That's as quoted and paraphrased from his aptly titled Mere Christianity.

If this is what Christianity is (and most Christians appear to believe so), there are four major reasons why I do not believe a word of it. And all four would have to be answered with a clear preponderance of evidence and reason before I would ever change my mind. I'm serious about this, too. If all four points are ever refuted with solid, objective evidence, then any other quibbles I have beyond these four would not stop me from declaring faith in Christ. For surely any other problem I or anyone might find with the Christian worldview could easily be solved from within the faith itself--if it weren't for the following four facts.

 

The Top Four Reasons I Am Not a Christian Are...

1. God is Silent

If God wants something from me, he would tell me. He wouldn't leave someone else to do this, as if an infinite being were short on time. And he would certainly not leave fallible, sinful humans to deliver an endless plethora of confused and contradictory messages. God would deliver the message himself, directly, to each and every one of us, and with such clarity as the most brilliant being in the universe could accomplish. We would all hear him out and shout "Eureka!" So obvious and well-demonstrated would his message be. It would be spoken to each of us in exactly those terms we would understand. And we would all agree on what that message was. Even if we rejected it, we would all at least admit to each other, "Yes, that's what this God fellow told me."[2]

Excuses don't fly. The Christian proposes that a supremely powerful being exists who wants us to set things right, and therefore doesn't want us to get things even more wrong. This is an intelligible hypothesis, which predicts there should be no more confusion about which religion or doctrine is true than there is about the fundamentals of medicine, engineering, physics, chemistry, or even meteorology. It should be indisputably clear what God wants us to do, and what he doesn't want us to do. Any disputes that might still arise about that would be as easily and decisively resolved as any dispute between two doctors, chemists, or engineers as to the right course to follow in curing a patient, identifying a chemical, or designing a bridge. Yet this is not what we observe. Instead, we observe exactly the opposite: unresolvable disagreement and confusion. That is clearly a failed prediction. A failed prediction means a false theory. Therefore, Christianity is false.

Typically, Christians try to make excuses for God that protect our free will. Either the human will is more powerful than the will of God, and therefore can actually block his words from being heard despite all his best and mighty efforts, or God cares more about our free choice not to hear him than about saving our souls, and so God himself "chooses" to be silent. Of course, there is no independent evidence of either this remarkable human power to thwart God, or this peculiar desire in God, and so this is a completely "ad hoc" theory: something just "made up" out of thin air in order to rescue the actual theory that continually fails to fit the evidence. But for reasons I'll explore later, such "added elements" are never worthy of belief unless independently confirmed: you have to know they are true. You can't just "claim" they are true. Truth is not invented. It can only be discovered. Otherwise, Christianity is just a hypothesis that has yet to find sufficient confirmation in actual evidence.

Be that as it may. Though "maybe, therefore probably" is not a logical way to arrive at any belief, let's assume the Christian can somehow "prove" (with objective evidence everyone can agree is relevant and true) that we have this power or God has this desire. Even on that presumption, there are unsolvable problems with this "additional" hypothesis. Right from the start, it fails to explain why believers disagree. The fact that believers can't agree on the content of God's message or desires also refutes the theory that he wants us to be clear on these things. This failed prediction cannot be explained away by any appeal to free will--for these people havechosen to hear God, and not only to hear him, but to accept Jesus Christ as the shepherd of their very soul. So no one can claim these people chose not to hear God. Therefore, either God is telling them different things, or there is no God. Even if there is a God, but he is deliberately sowing confusion, this contradicts what Christianity predicts to be God's desire, which entails Christianity is the wrong religion. Either way, Christianity is false.

So this theory doesn't work. It fails to predict what we actually observe. But even considering atheists like me, this "ad hoc" excuse still fails to save Christianity from the evidence. When I doubted the Big Bang theory, I voiced the reasons for my doubts but continued to pursue the evidence, frequently speaking with several physicists who were "believers." Eventually, they presented all the logic and evidence in terms I understood, and I realized I was wrong: the Big Bang theory is well-supported by the evidence and is at present the best explanation of all the facts by far. Did these physicists violate my free will? Certainly not. I chose to pursue the truth and hear them out. So, too, I and countless others have chosen to give God a fair hearing--if only he would speak. I would listen to him even now, at this very moment. Yet he remains silent. Therefore, it cannot be claimed that I am "choosing" not to hear him. And therefore, the fact that he still does not speak refutes the hypothesis. Nothing about free will can save the theory here.

Even when we might actually credit free will with resisting God's voice--like the occasional irrational atheist, or the stubbornly mistaken theist--the Christian theory is still not compatible with the premise that God would not or could not overcome this resistance. Essential to the Christian hypothesis, as C.S. Lewis says, is the proposition that God is "quite definitely good" and "loves love and hates hatred." Unless these statements are literally meaningless, they entail that God would behave like anyone else who is "quite definitely good" and "loves love and hates hatred." And such people don't give up on someone until their resistance becomes intolerable--until then, they will readily violate someone's free will to save them, because they know darned well it is the right thing to do. God would do the same. He would not let the choice of a fallible, imperfect being thwart his own good will.

I know this for a fact. Back in my days as a flight-deck firefighter, when our ship's helicopter was on rescue missions, we had to stand around in our gear in case of a crash. There was usually very little to do, so we told stories. One I heard was about a rescue swimmer. She had to pull a family out of the water from a capsized boat, but by the time the chopper got there, it appeared everyone had drowned except the mother, who was for that reason shedding her life vest and trying to drown herself. The swimmer dove in to rescue her, but she kicked and screamed and yelled to let her die. She even gave the swimmer a whopping black eye. But the swimmer said to hell with that, I'm bringing you in! And she did, enduring her curses and blows all the way.

Later, it turned out that one of the victim's children, her daughter, had survived. She had drifted pretty far from the wreck, but the rescue team pulled her out, and the woman who had beaten the crap out of her rescuer apologized and thanked her for saving her against her will. Everyone in my group agreed the rescue swimmer had done the right thing, and we all would have done the same--because that is what a loving, caring being does. It follows that if God is a loving being, he will do no less for us. In the real world, kind people don't act like some stubborn, pouting God who abandons the drowning simply because they don't want to be helped. They act like this rescue swimmer. They act like us.

So we can be certain God would make sure he told everyone, directly, what his message was. Everyone would then know what God had told them. They can still reject it all they want, and God can leave them alone. But there would never be, in any possible Christian universe, any confusion or doubt as to what God's message was. And if we had questions, God himself would answer them--just like the Big Bang physicists who were so patient with me. Indeed, the very fact that God gave the same message and answers to everyone would be nearly insurmountable proof that Christianity was true. Provided we had no reason to suspect God of lying to all of us, Christianity would be as certain as the law of gravity or the color of the sky. That is what the Christian hypothesis entails we should observe--for it is what a good and loving God would do, who wanted us all to set right what has gone wrong. And since this is not what we observe, but in fact the exact opposite, the evidence quite soundly refutes Christianity.

Despite this conclusion, Christians still try to hold on to their faith with this nonsense about free will--but they haven't thought it through. Meteorologists can disagree about the weather forecast, but they all agree how weather is made and the conditions that are required for each kind of weather to arise. And they agree about this because the scientific evidence is so vast and secure that it resolves these questions, often decisively. It can't be claimed that God has violated the free will of meteorologists by providing them with all this evidence. And yet how much more important is salvation than the physics of weather! If God wants what Christianity says he wants, he would not violate our free will to educate us on the trivial and then refuse to do the same for the most important subject of all. Likewise, if a doctorwants a patient to get well, he is not vague about how he must do this, but as clear as can be. He explains what is needed in terms the patient can understand. He even answers the patient's questions, and whenever asked will present all the evidence for and against the effectiveness of the treatment. He won't hold anything back and declare, "I'm not going to tell you, because that would violate your free will!" Nor would any patient accept such an excuse--to the contrary, he would respond, "But I choose to hear you," leaving the doctor no such excuse.

There can't be any excuse for God, either. There are always disagreements, and there are always people who don't follow what they are told or what they know to be true. But that doesn't matter. Chemists all agree on the fundamental facts of chemistry. Doctors all agree on the fundamental facts of medicine. Engineers all agree on the fundamental facts of engineering. So why can't all humans agree on the fundamental facts of salvation? There is no more reason that they should be confused or in the dark about this than that chemists, doctors, and engineers should be confused or in the dark.

The logically inevitable fact is, if the Christian God existed, we would all hear from God himself the same message of salvation, and we would all hear, straight from God, all the same answers to all the same questions. The Chinese would have heard it. The Native Americans would have heard it. Everyone today, everywhere on Earth, would be hearing it, and their records would show everyone else in history had heard it, too. Sure, maybe some of us would still balk or reject that message. But we would still have the information. Because the only way to make an informed choice is to have the required information. So a God who wanted us to make an informed choice would give us all the information we needed, and not entrust fallible, sinful, contradictory agents to convey a confused mess of ambiguous, poorly supported claims. Therefore, the fact that God hasn't spoken to us directly, and hasn't given us all the same, clear message, and the same, clear answers, is enough to prove Christianity false.

Just look at what Christians are saying. They routinely claim that God is your father and best friend. Yet if that were true, we would observe all the same behaviors from God that we observe from our fathers and friends. But we don't observe this. Therefore, there is no God who is our father or our friend. The logic of this is truly unassailable, and no "free will" excuse can escape it. For my father and friends aren't violating my free will when they speak to me, help me, give me advice, and answer my questions. Therefore, God would not violate my free will if he did so. He must be able to do at least as much as they do, even if for some reason he couldn't do more. But God doesn't do anything at all. He doesn't talk to, teach, help, or comfort us, unlike my real father and my real friends. God doesn't tell us when we hold a mistaken belief that shall hurt us. But my father does, and my friends do. Therefore, no God exists who is even remotely like my father or my friends, or anyone at all who loves me. Therefore, Christianity is false.

The conclusion is inescapable. If Christianity were true, then the Gospel would have been preached to each and every one of us directly, and correctly, by God--just as it supposedly was to the disciples who walked and talked and dined with God Himself, or to the Apostle Paul, who claimed to have had actual conversations with God, and to have heard the Gospel directly from God Himself. Was their free will violated? Of course not. Nor would ours be. Thus, if Christianity were really true, there would be no dispute as to what the Gospel is. There would only be our free and informed choice to accept or reject it. At the same time, all our sincere questions would be answered by God, kindly and clearly, and when we compared notes, we would find that the Voice of God gave consistent answers and messages to everyone all over the world, all the time. So if Christianity were true, there would be no point in "choosing" whether God exists anymore than there is a choice whether gravity exists or whether all those other people exist whom we love or hate or help or hurt. We would not face any choice to believe on insufficient and ambiguous evidence, but would know the facts, and face only the choice whether to love and accept the God that does exist. That this is not the reality, yet it would be the reality if Christianity were true, is proof positive that Christianity is false.



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
RE: Bertrand Russell-Why I Am Not A Christian
Permalink  
 


2. God is Inert

The God proposed by the Christian hypothesis is not a disembodied, powerless voice whose only means of achieving his desires is speaking to people, teaching them to do what's right. The Christian God is an Almighty Creator, capable of creating or destroying anything, capable of suspending or rewriting the laws of nature, capable of anything we can imagine. He can certainly do any and every moral thing you or I can do, and certainly much more than that, being so much bigger and stronger and better than we are in every way. All this follows necessarily from the definition of mere Christianity, and therefore cannot be denied without denying Christianity itself.

It's a simple fact of direct observation that if I had the means and the power, and could not be harmed for my efforts, I would immediately alleviate all needless suffering in the universe. All guns and bombs would turn to flowers. All garbage dumps would become gardens. There would be adequate resources for everyone. There would be no more children conceived than the community and the environment could support. There would be no need of fatal or debilitating diseases or birth defects, no destructive Acts of God. And whenever men and women seemed near to violence, I would intervene and kindly endeavor to help them peacefully resolve their differences. That's what any loving person would do. Yet I cannot be more loving, more benevolent than the Christian God. Therefore, the fact that the Christian God does none of these things--in fact, nothing of any sort whatsoever--is proof positive that there is no Christian God.

If God at least did something, however much we might still argue about what that action meant about his ability, character, and desires, we would at least have evidence (and therefore reason to believe) that a God existed, maybe even the Christian God. And there are many things any god could do. He could make all true bibles indestructible, unalterable, and self-translating. He could make miraculous healing or other supernatural powers so common an attribute of the virtuous believer that they would be scientifically studied and confirmed as surely as any other medicine or technology. He could, as I've already explained, speak to all of us in the same voice, saying the same things. He could send angels to appear to us on a regular basis, performing all manner of divine deeds and communications--exactly as the earliest Christians thought he did.

The possible evidences a God could provide are endless, though none might be sufficient to prove we have the Christian God. To prove that, this evident God would have to act as the Christian hypothesis predicts. For example, only those who believe in the true Christian Gospel would be granted the supernatural powers that could be confirmed by science; only true Christian Bibles would be indestructible, unalterable, and self-translating; and the Divine Voice would consistently convey to everyone the will and desires of the Christian message alone. But God does none of these things--nothing at all.

A Christian can rightly claim he is unable to predict exactly what things his God would choose to do. But the Christian hypothesis still entails that God would dosomething. Therefore, the fact that God does nothing is a decisive refutation of the Christian hypothesis. Once again, a prediction is made that consistently fails to pan out. Instead, we observe the exact opposite: a dumb, mechanical universe that blindly treats everyone with the same random fortune and tragedy regardless of merit or purpose. But that's a fact we'll examine later. For now, it is enough to note that we do not observe God doing good deeds, therefore there is no God who can or wants to do good deeds--which means Christianity is false.

Excuses won't fly here, either, because a loving being by definition acts like a loving being. It is a direct contradiction to claim that someone is loving yet never does what a loving person does--because the name refers to the behavior. To be loving literally means to be loving. You can't be heartless and claim to be loving. As Christ himself is supposed to have said, "it is by their fruits that shall ye know them." The only possible exception here is when a loving person is incapable of acting as he desires--either lacking the ability or facing too great a risk to himself or others--but this exception never applies to a God, who is all-powerful and immune to all harm. This exception also never applies to any human so absolutely that she can never act loving. Even the most limited and constrained person there is can at least do something that expresses their loving nature. Indeed, if it were ever truly possible to completely prevent this, a truly loving person would probably prefer death to such a horrible existence. And a loving God would be no different. Failing to act in a loving way would be unbearable for a loving being. From having the desire and the means to act in a loving way, it follows necessarily that God would so act. But he doesn't. Therefore, again, the Christian God does not exist.

Think about it. A man approaches a school with a loaded assault rifle, intent on mass slaughter. A loving person speaks to him, attempts to help him resolve his problems or to persuade him to stop, and failing that, punches him right in the kisser, and takes away his gun. And a loving person with godlike powers could simply turn his bullets into popcorn as they left the gun, or heal with a touch whatever insanity or madness (or by teaching him cure whatever ignorance) led the man to contemplate the crime. But God does nothing. Therefore, a loving God does not exist. A tsunami approaches and will soon devastate the lives of millions. A loving person warns them, and tells them how best to protect themselves and their children. And a loving person with godlike powers could simply calm the sea, or grant everyone's bodies the power to resist serious injury, so the only tragedy they must come together to overcome is temporary pain and the loss of worldly goods. Wewould have done these things, if we could--and God can. Therefore, either God would have done them, too--or God is worse than us. Far worse. Either way, Christianity is false.

The logic of this is, again, unassailable. So Christians feel compelled to contrive more "ad hoc" excuses to explain away the evidence--more speculations about free will, "mysterious plans," a desire to test us or increase opportunities for us to do good, and stuff like that. And, yet again, Christians have no evidence any of these excuses are actually true. They simply "make them up" in order to explain away the failure of their theory. But once again, even putting that serious problem aside, these ad hoc elements still fail. For there is no getting around the conjunction of facts entailed by the Christian theory. God cannot possibly struggle under any limitations greater than the limitations upon us (if anything, he must surely have fewer limitations than we do), and God loves love--and is therefore a loving being, which means he desires to act like one. These two terms of the hypothesis entail observations, and nothing can explain away the fact that these observations are never made--unless we contradict and therefore reject either of these two essential terms of the theory. So the Christian theory is either empirically false, or self-contradictory and therefore logically false.

In fact, all the "ad hoc" excuses for God's total and utter inaction amount to the same thing: claiming that different rules apply to God than to us. But this is not allowed by the terms of the theory, which hold that God is good--which must necessarily mean that God is "good" in the same sense that God expects us to be good. Otherwise, calling God "good" means something different than calling anyone else "good," and therefore calling God "good" is essentially meaningless. If God can legitimately be called "good," this must mean exactly the same thing when you or I are called "good." And the fact that God is predicted by the Christian theory to "love love and hate hatred" confirms this conclusion, since "loving love and hating hatred" is exactly what it means to call you or I "good." To be good is to be loving and not hateful. And that entails a certain behavior.

"Love your neighbor as yourself" is universally agreed to mean giving your neighbor what he needs, helping him when he is hurt or in trouble, giving him what he has earned, and taking nothing from him that he has not given you. It means giving water to the thirsty, protecting children from harm, healing infirmities. Jesus himself said so. He did or said all these things, we are told, and the Christian surely must believe this. Therefore, for God to be "good" entails that God must have the desire to do all these things--and there is no possible doubt whether he lacks the means to do all these things. And anyone with the means and the desire to act, will act. Therefore, that God does none of these things entails either that he lacks the means or the desire. Either way, Christianity is false.

This conclusion follows because there cannot be any limitation on God greater than the limitations upon us. So God must necessarily desire and have the unimpeded means to do everything you and I can do, and therefore the Christian God would at least do everything you and I do. The fact that he doesn't proves he doesn't exist. Therefore, all the excuses invented for God simply don't work. Because it does not matter what plans God may have, he still could not restrain himself from doing good any more than we can, because that is what it means to be good. He would be moved by his goodness to act, to do what's right, just as we are. God would not make excuses, for nothing could ever thwart his doing what is morally right.

Hence anything God would refrain from doing can be no different than what any other good people refrain from. Children must learn, often the hard way. But that never in a million years means letting them get hit by a car so they can learn not to cross the road without looking. People must know struggle, so they feel they have earned and learned what matters. But that never in a million years means letting them be tortured or decimated or wracked with debilitating disease so they can appreciate being healthy or living in peace. No loving person could ever bear using such cruel methods of teaching, or ever imagine any purpose justifying them. Indeed, a loving person would suffer miserably if he could do nothing to stop such things... or worse, if he actually caused them!

Conversely, any excuse that could ever be imagined for God's inaction must necessarily apply to us as well. If there is a good reason for God to do nothing, then it will be just as good a reason for us to do nothing. The same moral rules that are supposed to apply to us must apply to every good person--and that necessarily includes the Christian God. God cannot have more reasons to do nothing than we do--to the contrary, it must be the other way around: only we have limitations on our abilities, creating more legitimate reasons for inaction than can ever apply to God. So if it is good for me to alleviate suffering, it is good for God to do so in those same circumstances. And if it is good for God to refrain from acting, it is good for me to do so in those same circumstances.

Nor can it be argued that God must sit back to give us the chance to do good. For that is not how good people act. Therefore, a "good" God can never have such an excuse. Imagine it. You can heal someone of AIDS. You have the perfect cure sitting in your closet. And you know it. But you do nothing, simply to allow scientists the chance to figure out a cure by themselves--even if it takes so long that billions of people must suffer miserably and die before they get it right. In what world would thatever be the right thing to do? In no world at all. When we have every means safely at our disposal, we can only tolerate sitting back to let others do good when others are actually doing good. In other words, if misery is already being alleviated, perhaps even at our very urging, then obviously we have nothing left to do ourselves. But it would be unbearable, unconscionable, outright immoral to hide the cure for AIDS just to teach everyone a lesson. That is not how a good person could or would ever behave.

This same conclusion follows in many ways. As a friend, I would think it shameful if I didn't give clear, honest advice to my friends when asked, or offer comfort when they are in misery or misfortune. I loan them money when they need it, help them move, keep them company when they are lonely, introduce them to new things I think they'll like, and look out for them. God does none of these things for anyone. Thus he is a friend to none. A man who calls himself a friend but who never speaks plainly to you and is never around when you need him is no friend at all.

And it won't do to say God's with "some" people--speaking to, comforting, and helping them out--because this means he doesn't really love all beings, and is therefore not all-loving. This would make him less decent than even many humans I know. And it's sickeningly patronizing to say, in the midst of misery, loneliness, or need, that "God's with you in spirit," that he pats you on the head and says "There! There!" (though not even in so many words as that). A friend who did so little for us, despite having every resource and ability to do more, and nothing to lose by using them, would be ridiculing us with his disdain. Thus, we cannot rescue the idea of God as Friend to All. The evidence flatly refutes the existence of any such creature. It therefore flatly refutes Christianity.

Likewise, as a loving parent, I would think it a horrible failure on my part if I didn't educate my children well, and supervise them kindly, teaching them how to live safe and well, and warning them of unknown or unexpected dangers. If they asked me to butt out I might. But if they didn't, it would be unconscionable to ignore them, to offer them no comfort, protection, or advice. Indeed, society would deem me fit for prison if I did. It would be felony criminal neglect. Yet that is God: An absentee mom--who lets kids get kidnapped and murdered or run over by cars, who does nothing to teach them what they need to know, who never sits down like a loving parent to have an honest chat with them, and who would let them starve if someone else didn't intervene. As this is unconscionable, almost any idea of a god that fits the actual evidence of the world is unconscionable. And any such deity could never be the Christian God.



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

3. The Evidence is Inadequate

Besides all that, another reason I am not a Christian is the sheer lack of evidence. Right from the start, Christians can offer no evidence for their most important claim, that faith in Jesus Christ procures eternal life. Christians can't point to a single proven case of this prediction coming true. They cannot show a single believer in Jesus actually enjoying eternal life, nor can they demonstrate the probability of such a fortunate outcome arising from any choice we make today. Even if they could prove God exists and created the universe, it still would not follow that belief in Jesus saves us. Even if they could prove Jesus performed miracles, claimed to speak for God, and rose from the dead, it still would not follow that belief in Jesus saves us.

Therefore, such a claim must itself be proven. Christians have yet to do that. We simply have no evidence that any believer ever has or ever will enjoy eternal life, or even that any unbeliever won't. And most Christians agree. As many a good Christian will tell you, only God knows who will receive his grace. So the Christian cannot claim to know whether it's true that "faith in Christ procures eternal life." They have to admit there is no guarantee a believer will be saved, or that an unbeliever won't. God will do whatever he wants. And no one really knows what that is. At best, they propose that faith in Christ will "up your chances," but they have no evidence of even that.

Now, this could change. It is theoretically possible to build a strong circumstantial case that God exists, that he has the means to grant us eternal life, that he never lies, and that he actually did promise to save us if we pledge allegiance to the right holy minion. But that's a lot of extraordinary claims to prove, requiring a lot of extraordinary evidence. Christians simply don't come close to proving them. Of course, Christianity could be reduced to a trivial tautology like "Christ is just an idea, whatever idea brings humankind closer to paradise," but that is certainly not what C.S. Lewis would have accepted, nor is it what most Christians mean today. When we stick with what Christianity usually means, there is simply not enough evidence to support believing it. This holds for the more generic elements of the theory (like the existence of God and the supernatural), as well as the very specific elements (like the divinity and resurrection of Jesus). We shall treat these in order, after digressing on some essential points regarding method.


A Digression on Method[3]

Long ago, people could make up any theories they wanted. As long as their theory fit the evidence, it was thought credible. But an infinite number of incompatible theories can fit the evidence. We can design a zillion religions that fit all the evidence, yet entail Christianity is false. And we can design a zillion secular worldviews that do the same. We could all be brains in a vat. Buddha could have been right. Allah may be the One True God. And so on, ad infinitum. But since only one of these countless theories can be true, it follows that the odds are effectively infinity to one against any theory being true that is merely compatible with the evidence. In other words, not a chance in hell. Therefore, we cannot believe a theory simply because it can be made to fit all the evidence. To do so would effectively guarantee our belief will be false.

Fortunately, people came up with what we now call the scientific method, a way to isolate some of these theories compatible with all the evidence and demonstrate that they are more likely to be true than any of the others. The method works like this (and this is very important): first we come up with a hypothesis that explains everything we have so far observed (and this could be nothing more than a creative guess or even a divine revelation--it doesn't matter where a hypothesis comes from); then we deduce what else would have to be observed, and what could never be observed, if that hypothesis really were true (the most crucial step of all); and then we go and look to see if our predictions are fulfilled in practice. The more they are fulfilled, and the more different ways they are fulfilled, the more likely our hypothesis is true.

But that isn't the end of it. To make sure our theories are more likely the true ones (as any old theory can be twisted to fit even this new evidence), they have to be cumulative--compatible with each other--and every element of a theory has to be in evidence. We can't just "make up" anything. Whatever we make up has to be found in the evidence. For example, when Newton explained the organization of the solar system, he knew he was restricted to theories that built on already proven hypotheses. Every element of his theory of the solar system was proved somewhere, somehow: the law of gravity had an independent demonstration, the actual courses of the planets were well observed and charted, and so on. Nothing in his theory was simply "made up" out of whole cloth. He knew the data on planetary behavior had been multiply confirmed. He knew there was gravity acting at a distance. The rest followed as a matter of course.

Consider a different analogy. Suppose a man is on trial for murder and, in his own defense, proposes the theory that his fingerprints ended up on the murder weapon because a devious engineer found a way to copy and paste his fingerprints, and did so to satisfy a grudge against him. No one on the jury would accept this theory, nor should anyone ever believe it--unless and until the defendant can confirm in evidence every element of the theory. He must present independent evidence that there really is an engineer who really does have the ability to do this sort of thing. He must present independent evidence that this engineer really does hold a grudge against him. And he must present independent evidence that this engineer had the access and opportunity to accomplish this particular trick when and where it had to have happened. Only then does the defendant's theory become even remotely believable--believable enough to create a reasonable doubt that the defendant's fingerprints got there because he touched the weapon.

But to go beyond that, to actually convict this engineer of fixing the evidence like this, even more evidence would be necessary--such as independent evidence that he has or had the equipment necessary to pull off this trick, and had used that equipment at or around the time of the crime, and so on. That's how it works. That the "devious engineer's fingerprint trick" fits all the immediate evidence at hand (the existence of the fingerprints on the weapon) is not even a remotely sufficient reason to believe it is true. Rather, every element of the theory must be proved with evidence that is independent from the evidence being explained. In other words, the mere existence of the fingerprints on the weapon is not enough evidence that the devious engineer put them there.

Now imagine the defendant argued that the fingerprints were placed there by an angel from God. Just think of what kind of evidence he would have to present to prove that theory. No less would be required to prove any other claim about God's motives and activities, right down to and including the claim that God created the universe or raised Jesus from the dead. This standard is hard to meet precisely because meeting a hard standard is the only way to know you probably have the truth. Otherwise, you are far more likely to be wrong than right.

Therefore, even if it could be contrived to fit all the facts--even the incredible facts of God's absolute silence and complete inactivity--the Christian theory is still no better than any other unproven hypothesis in which belief is unwarranted. Belief in Newton's theory would have been unwarranted without evidence supporting the law of gravity, and belief in the "devious engineer's fingerprint trick" would be unwarranted without any of the required supporting evidence. And Christianity will rightly remain no more credible than this "devious engineer's fingerprint trick" until such time as every required element of that theory has been independently confirmed by empirical evidence.

For example, the Christian theory requires that God has a loving character. Therefore, we need at least as much evidence of that entity as we would expect in order to establish the existence of a human being with a loving character. I may tell you there is a man named Michael who is a very good man. But if I build any theory on that premise--like "You should do what Michael says," "Your neighbor could not have been the one who robbed your house, because Michael is your neighbor and he is a very good man," or "Don't worry about losing your job, because there is this man who lives near you named Michael and he is a very good man"--I must first establish that the premise is true: that there is such a man, and that he is in fact very good. Whatever evidence would convince anyone of this fact, will also be sufficient to convince them that there is this guy named God who is a very good person. But the case must still be made. The underlying premise must still be proven. We must have evidence of the existence of this Michael or this God, and evidence that their character is indeed really good, before we can believe any theory that requires this particular claim to be true.

If I added further premises, like "Michael has supernatural powers and can conjure gold to support your family," I would have to prove them, too. This goes for God, as well. "He is everywhere." "He is invisible." "He can save your soul." And so on. I cannot credibly assert these things if I cannot prove them from real and reliable evidence. This is a serious problem for the Christian religion as an actual theory capable of testing and therefore of warranted belief. None of these things have ever been observed. No one has observed a real act of God, or any real evidence of his inhabiting or observing the universe. So no one has really seen any evidence that he is good, or even exists. Therefore, even after every possible excuse is made for it, the Christian theory is just like all those other theories that merely fit the evidence but have no evidential support, and so is almost certainly as false as all those other theories.

In truth, it is even worse for Christianity, since that is not like the proposed "devious engineer's fingerprint trick" but more like the "angel from God forged the fingerprints" theory. And that is a far more serious problem--because the evidence required for that kind of claim is far greater than for any other. This, too, is an inescapable point of logic. If I say I own a car, I don't have to present very much evidence to prove it, because you have already observed mountains of evidence that people like me own cars. All of that evidence, for the general proposition "people like him own cars," provides so much support for the particular proposition, "he owns a car," that only minimal evidence is needed to confirm the particular proposition.

But if I say I own a nuclear missile, we are in different territory. You have just as large a mountain of evidence, from your own study as well as direct observation, that "people like him own nuclear missiles" is not true. Therefore, I need much more evidence to prove that particular claim--in fact, I need about as much evidence (in quantity and quality) as would be required to prove the general proposition "people like him own nuclear missiles." I don't mean I would have to prove that proposition, but that normally the weight of evidence needed to prove that proposition would in turn provide the needed background support for the particular proposition that "I own a nuclear missile," just as it does in the case of "I own a car." So lacking that support, I need to build at least as much support directly for the particular proposition "I own a nuclear missile," which means as much support in kind and degree as would be required to otherwise prove the general proposition "people like him own nuclear missiles." And that requires a lot of very strong evidence--just as for any general proposition.

We all know this, even if we haven't thought about it or often don't see reason--because this is how we all live our lives. Every time we accept a claim on very little evidence in everyday life, it is usually because we already have a mountain of evidence for one or more of the general propositions that support it. And every time we are skeptical, it is usually because we lack that same kind of evidence for the general propositions that would support the claim. And to replace that missing evidence is a considerable challenge.

This is the logical basis of the principle that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." A simple example is a lottery. The odds of winning a lottery are very low, so you might think it would be an extraordinary claim for me to assert "I won a lottery." But that is not a correct analysis. For lotteries are routinely won. We have observed countless lotteries being won and have tons of evidence that people win lotteries. Therefore, the general proposition "people like him win lotteries" is already well-confirmed, and so I normally don't need very much evidence to convince you that I won a lottery. Of course, I would usually need more evidence than I need to prove "I own a car," simply because the number of people who own cars is much greater than the number who win lotteries. But still, the general proposition that "people win lotteries" is amply confirmed. Therefore, "I won a lottery" is not an extraordinary claim. It is, rather, a fairly routine claim--even if not as routine as owning a car.

In contrast, "I own a nuclear missile" would be an extraordinary claim. Yet, even then, you still have a large amount of evidence that nuclear missiles exist, and that at least some people do have access to them. Yet the Department of Homeland Security would still need a lot of evidence before it stormed my house looking for one. Now suppose I told you "I own an interstellar spacecraft." That would be an even more extraordinary claim--because there is no general proposition supporting it that is even remotely confirmed. Not only do you have very good evidence that "people like him own interstellar spacecraft" is not true, you also have no evidence that this has ever been true for anyone--unlike the nuclear missile. You don't even have reliable evidence that interstellar spacecraft exist, much less reside on earth. Therefore, the burden of evidence I would have to bear here is enormous. Just think of what it would take for you to believe me, and you will see what I mean.

Once we appeal to common sense like this, everyone concedes that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And Christianity quite clearly makes very extraordinary claims: that there is a disembodied, universally present being with magical powers; that this superbeing actually conjured and fabricated the present universe from nothing; that we have souls that survive the death of our bodies (or that our bodies will be rebuilt in the distant future by this invisible superbeing); and that this being possessed the body of Jesus two thousand years ago, who then performed supernatural deeds before miraculously rising from the grave to chat with his friends, and then flew up into outer space.

Not a single one of these claims has any proven general proposition to support it. We have never observed any evidence for any "disembodied being" or any person who was present "everywhere." We have never observed anyone who had magical powers, or any evidence that such powers even exist in principle (at least, what stories we do have of such people are always too dubious to trust). We have no good evidence that we have souls or that anyone can or will resurrect our bodies. We have never confirmed that anyone was ever possessed by God. We have never observed anyone performing anything confirmed to be miraculous, much less rising from graves or any comparable ability. Supposed claims of psychic powers, astrological prediction, biblical prophecy, and so on, have all turned out to be unprovable or outright bunk.

Therefore, these are without doubt extraordinary claims every bit as much as "I own an interstellar spacecraft," and indeed are even more extraordinary than that. For we already have tons of evidence confirming the elements of the general proposition that "there can be an interstellar spacecraft." We could probably build one today with present technology. But we have no evidence whatsoever confirming the general propositions "there can be a disembodied superbeing," "there can be disembodied souls," "there can be genuine miracles," and so on.

I do not mean these things are not logically possible. What I mean is that we have no evidence they are physically possible, much less real, in the way we know an interstellar spacecraft is physically possible or that a nuclear missile is real. Therefore, Christianity entails many of the most extraordinary claims conceivable. It therefore requires the most extraordinary amount of evidence to believe it, even more evidence than would be needed to believe that I own an interstellar spacecraft. And Christianity simply doesn't come even remotely close to meeting this standard. It could--just as I am sure I could prove to you I owned an interstellar spacecraft, if I actually had one. So I am sure I could prove to you that Christianity is true... if it actually were.

 

That's the proper way to get at the truth. Now back to the point...

Consider the generic claims that God exists, God is good, and God created this universe. What evidence do we have for any of these particular propositions? The only evidence ever offered for the "existence" of God essentially boils down to two things: "The universe exists, therefore God exists" and "I feel God exists, therefore he does." Otherwise, we can't prove anyone has ever really seen God--seen him act, speak, or do anything. Even if we could prove a single genuine miracle had ever really happened, we still would not have evidence that God caused that miracle, rather than a misunderstood human power over the supernatural, or the work of spirits, or sorcery, and so on. To confirm God as their cause would require yet more evidence, of which (again) we have none.

As for those who claim to have "seen" or "spoken" to God, it turns out on close examination (when we even have the required access to find out) that they are lying, insane, or only imagining what they saw or heard. Even believers concede that this is most often the case--because they must in order to explain all the non-Christian visions and divine communications pervading human history and contemporary world cultures. These always turn out to be subjective experiences "in their minds," and they are rarely consistent with each other. Rather, we find a plethora of contradictory experiences which seem more attenuated to cultural and personal expectations than to anything universally true.

So, too, for the "feeling" that God exists. This is no different than the "feeling" I once had that the Tao governs the universe, or the "feeling" others have had that aliens visit them, the spirits of the dead talk to them, or several gods and nature spirits live all around them. People have "felt" the existence of so many contradictory things that we know "feeling" something is the poorest possible evidence we can have. Most people "feel" something completely different than we do, and since there is no way to tell whether your feeling is correct and theirs is wrong, it is just as likely that theirs is correct and yours is wrong. And since there are a million completely different "feelings" and only one can be true, it follows that the odds are worse than a million to one against your feeling being true. So "feeling" that God exists fails to meet even a minimal standard of evidence, much less an extraordinary standard. The same goes even for more profound religious experiences involving the actual appearances or voices of supposedly supernatural beings.[4]

Other than that, people offer the existence of the universe as "proof" that God exists. Some propose that there would be no universe if there wasn't a god, but this is not a logical conclusion. A theory like "nature just exists" is by itself no less likely than "a god just exists." Others propose that since the universe had a beginning, a god must have started it, but this fails both empirically and logically. Empirically, a beginning of time and space became suspect when examination of the quantum theory of gravity led to the realization that a beginning of space-time at a dimensionless point called a singularity is actually physically impossible. So now most cosmologists believe there was probably something around before the Big Bang--and probably quite a lot of things (we shall examine this point more later). As a result, we can no longer prove the universe had a beginning.[5] And logically, even if the universe had a beginning, this does not entail or even imply that an intelligent being preceded it. If God can exist before the existence of time or space, so could the nature of the universe (as many cosmologists argue, all we would need is a fairly simple quantum state to get everything else going). In short, the appearance of time and space may have simply been an inevitable outcome of the nature of things, just as Christians must believe that God's nature and existence is inevitable.

The most popular--and really, the only evidence people have for God's existence and role as Creator--is the apparent "fine tuning" of the universe to produce life. That's at least something remarkable, requiring an explanation better than blind chance. As it turns out, there are godless explanations that make more sense of the actual universe we find ourselves in than Christianity does--but we shall examine this point later on. For now, it is enough to point out that "intelligent design" is not the only logically possible explanation for the organization of the universe, and so we would need empirical evidence for it. Just as scientists needed copious amounts of evidence before justifying a belief that the present cosmos was the inevitable physical outcome of the Big Bang, so do Christians need copious amounts of evidence before justifying a belief that the organization that arose from the Big Bang came from an intelligent engineer. Again, the mere possibility is not enough--we need actual evidence that an intelligent engineer was the cause and not something else. And Christians don't have that. Or anything like it.

Finally, to prove "God is good" we have essentially nothing at all. Since God is a totally silent do-nothing, we don't have anything to judge his character by, except an utter lack of any clear or consistent action on his part--which we saw earlier is sufficient to demonstrate that if there is a God, he is almost certainly not good (and therefore Christianity is false). Christians do try to offer evidence of God's goodness anyway, but what they come up with is always circular or far too weak to meet any reasonable burden.

For example, some argue "God gave us life" as evidence he is good, but that presupposes God is our creator, and so is generally a circular argument. But it also fails to follow from the known facts, since a mindless natural process can also give us life, and even an evil or ambivalent God could have sufficient reason to give us life. Moreover, the harsh kind of life we were given agrees more with those possibilities than with the designs of a good God, especially since there is as much bad in life as good, and no particular sense of merit in how it gets distributed. In fact, the evidence is even worse for Christianity on this score, since if the universe was intelligently designed, it appears to have been designed for a purpose other than us--but, again, we shall examine this point later.

Other Christians try to argue that God is probably good because "God gave his one and only son to save us," but that is again circular--for it already presumes that Jesus was his son, that God let him die, and that God did this to accomplish something good for us. Until each one of those propositions is confirmed by independent evidence, there is no way to use this "theory" as if it were "evidence" that God existed or was good. Indeed, that "God gave his one and only son to save us" still fails to follow from the known facts because the same deed could have been performed just as readily for different motives, motives that were not so good.

For example, early Christians tried to explain away the existence of pre-Christian resurrection cults by accusing the Devil of fabricating them to fool mankind and lead us astray. That is a coherent theory that could just as easily explain the entire Christian religion. In other words, Christianity may simply be just one more clever scheme to give a devious God a good laugh. And considering all the evil, misery, and torment that has been caused by the Christian religion--and the fact that God, if he exists, quite obviously gave, or allowed to be given, contradictory and mutually hostile messages to Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Hindus with the inevitable and predictable consequence of furthering human conflict and misery--the theory that "God gave his one and only son to screw us" has even more to commend it than the Christian alternative.[6]

So the supposed evidence that Christians try to offer for God's existence, creative activity, or goodness simply doesn't cut it. It turns out not to be evidence, but theories about otherwise ambiguous evidence, theories that themselves remain unproven, and often barely plausible when compared with more obvious alternatives that more readily explain the full range of evidence we have. Therefore, the Christian theory has insufficient support to justify believing it. And this would be so even if Christianity was true. For even if it is true, we still don't have enough evidence to know it is true. By analogy, even if it were true that Julius Caesar survived an arrow wound to his left thigh in the summer of 49 B.C., the fact that we have no evidence of any such wound entails that we have no reason to believe it occurred. We can only believe what we have evidence enough to prove. And there are plenty of true things that don't make that cut.

So much for the general propositions. Now we get to the more specific propositions that Jesus performed miracles and rose from the dead. Many Christians really do offer the miracles and resurrection of Jesus as evidence that God exists and that the Christian theory is true. We will set aside the problem that even doing such things would not prove Jesus was God, since other supernatural powers or agencies could have arranged the same result. More problematic for Christianity is that we have insufficient evidence any of these things really happened. To understand why, let's consider an imaginary alternative:


Hero Savior of Vietnam

Suppose I told you there was a soldier in the Vietnam War named "Hero Savior" who miraculously calmed storms, healed wounds, conjured food and water out of thin air, and then was blown up by artillery, but appeared again whole and alive three days later, giving instructions to his buddies before flying up into outer space right before their very eyes. Would you believe me? Certainly not. You would ask me to prove it.

So I would give you all the evidence I have. But all I have are some vague war letters by a guy who never really met Hero Savior in person, and a handful of stories written over thirty years later by some guys named Bill, Bob, Carl, and Joe. I don't know for sure who these guys are. I don't even know their last names. There are only unconfirmed rumors that they were or knew some of the war buddies of Hero Savior. They might have written earlier than we think, or later, but no one really knows. No one can find any earlier documentation to confirm their stories, either, or their service during the war, or even find these guys to interview them. So we don't know if they really are who others claim, and we're not even sure these are the guys who actually wrote the stories. You see, the undated pamphlets circulating under their names don't say "by Bill" or "by Bob," but "as told by Bill" and "as told by Bob." Besides all that, we also can't find any record of a Hero Savior serving in the war. He might have been a native guide whose name never made it into official records, but still, none of the historians of the war ever mention him, or his amazing deeds, or even the reports of them that surely would have spread far and wide.

Besides the dubious evidence of these late, uncorroborated, unsourced, and suspicious stories, the best thing I can give you is that war correspondence I mentioned, some letters by an army sergeant actually from the war, who claims he was a skeptic who changed his mind. But he never met or saw Hero in life, and never mentions any of the miracles that Bob, Bill, Carl, and Joe talk about. In fact, the only thing this sergeant ever mentions is "seeing" Hero after his death, though not "in flesh and blood," but in a "revelation." That's it.

This sergeant also claims the spirit of Hero Savior now enables him and some others to "speak in tongues" and "prophecy" and heal some illnesses, but none of this has been confirmed or observed by anyone else on record, and none of it sounds any different than what thousands of other cults and gurus have claimed. So, too, for some unconfirmed reports that some of these believers, even this army sergeant, endured persecution or even died for believing they "saw Hero in a revelation"--a fact no more incredible than the Buddhists who set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War, certain they would be reincarnated, or the hundreds of people who voluntarily killed themselves at Jonestown, certain their leader was sent by God.

Okay. I've given you all that evidence. Would you believe me then? Certainly not. No one trusts documents that come decades after the fact by unknown authors, and hardly anyone believes the hundreds of gurus today who claim to see and speak to the spirits of the dead, heal, and predict the future. Every reasonable person expects and requires extensive corroboration by contemporary documents and confirmed eyewitness accounts. Everyone would expect here at least as much evidence as I'd need to prove I owned a nuclear missile, yet the standard required is actually that of proving I own an interstellar spacecraft--for these are clearly very extraordinary claims, and as we saw above, such claims require extraordinary evidence, as much as would be needed, for example, to convince the United Nations that I had an interstellar spacecraft on my lawn. Yet what we have for this Hero Savior doesn't even count as ordinary evidence, much less the extraordinary evidence we really need.

To complete the analogy, many other things would rightly bother us. Little is remarkable about the stories told of Hero Savior, for similar stories apparently have been told of numerous Vietnamese sorcerers and heroes throughout history--and no one believes them, so why should we make an exception for Hero? The documents we have from Bob, Bill, Carl, and Joe have also been tampered with--we've found some cases of forgery and editing in each of their stories by parties unknown, and we aren't sure we've caught it all. Apparently, their stories were used by several different cults to support their causes, and these cults all squabble over the exact details of the right cause, and so tell different stories or interpret the stories differently to serve their own particular agenda. And the earliest version, the one told by Bob, which both Bill and Joe clearly copied, added to, and edited (which Carl might have done, too, perhaps by borrowing loosely from Joe), appears to have been almost entirely constructed out of passages from an ancient Vietnamese poem, arranged and altered to tell a story full of symbolic and moral meaning. These and many other problems plague the evidence, leaving it even more suspect than normal.

This Hero Savior analogy entirely parallels the situation for Jesus.[7] Every reason we would have not to believe these Hero Savior stories applies to the stories of Jesus with all the same force. So if you agree there would be no good reason to believe these Hero Savior stories, you must also agree there is insufficient reason to believe the Jesus Christ stories. Hence I am not a Christian because the evidence is not good enough. For it is no better than the evidence proposed for Hero Savior, and that falls far short of the burden that would have to be met to confirm the very extraordinary claims surrounding him.

 

That's the problem.

Things could have been different. For example, if miracle working was still so routine in the Church that scientists could prove that devout Christians alone could genuinely perform miracles--restoring lost limbs, raising the dead, predicting tsunamis and earthquakes (and actually saving thousands with their timely warnings)--then we would have a well-confirmed generalization that would lend a great deal of support to the Gospel stories, reducing the burden on the Christian to prove those stories true. Likewise, if we had credible documents from educated Roman and Jewish eyewitnesses to the miracles and resurrection of Jesus, and if we had simultaneous records even from China recording appearances of this Jesus to spread the Gospel there just days after his death in Palestine, then the Christian would surely have some solid ground to stand on. And the two together--current proof of regular miracles in the Church, and abundant first-hand documentation from reliable observers among the Jews, Romans, and Chinese--would truly be sufficient evidence to believe the claim that Jesus really did perform miracles and rise from the dead, or at least something comparably remarkable.

But that is not what we have. Not even close. Therefore, I do not have enough evidence to justify believing in Christianity. Again, this could easily be changed, even without the evidence above. If Jesus appeared to me now and answered some of my questions, I would believe. If he often spoke to me and I could perform miracles through his overt blessing, I would believe. If everyone all over the world and throughout history, myself included, had the same religious experience, witnessing no other supernatural being--no other god, no other spirit--other than Jesus, and hearing no other message than the Gospel, I would believe. If we got to observe who makes it into Heaven and who doesn't, and thus could confirm the consequences of belief and unbelief, with the same kind and quantity of evidence as we have for the consequences of driving drunk, I would believe. But we get none of these things, or anything like them.

This is a state of evidence that a "loving" God, who "wanted" us to accept the Gospel and set things right, would not allow. Therefore, the absence of this evidence not only leaves Christianity without sufficient evidence to warrant our believing it, but outright refutes Christianity, which predicts that God would provide enough evidence to save us, to let us make an informed decision. Since this prediction fails, the theory fails. A loving God would not hide the life preserver he supposedly threw to me, nor would he toss it into a fog, but near to me, where it was plain to see, and he would help me accomplish whatever I needed to reach it and be saved. For that is what I would do for anyone else. And no Christian can believe I am more fair and loving than their God.



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

4. Christianity Predicts a Different Universe

I mentioned before that the Christian hypothesis actually predicts a completely different universe than the one we find ourselves in. For a loving God who wanted to create a universe solely to provide a home for human beings, and to bring his plan of salvation to fruition, would never have invented this universe, but something quite different. But if there is no God, then the universe we actually observe is exactly the sort of universe we would expect to observe. In other words, if there is no God then this universe is the only kind of universe we would ever find ourselves in, the only kind that could ever produce intelligent life without any supernatural cause or plan. Hence naturalist atheism predicts exactly the kind of universe we observe, while the Christian theory predicts almost none of the features of our universe. Indeed, the Christian theory predicts the universe should instead have features that in fact it doesn't, and should lack features that in fact it has. Therefore, naturalism is a better explanation than Christianity of the universe we actually find ourselves in. Since naturalism (rejecting the supernatural) is the most plausible form of atheism I know, this is what I shall mean by "atheism" from here on out.[8] Let's look at a few examples of what I mean.

Origin and Evolution of Life

First, the origin of life. Suppose there is no God. If that is the case, then the origin of life must be a random accident. Christians rightly point out that the appearance of the first living organism is an extremely improbable accident. Of course, so is winning a lottery, and yet lotteries are routinely won. Why? Because the laws of probability entail the odds of winning a lottery depend not just on how unlikely a win is--let's say, a one in a billion chance--but on how often the game is played. In other words, if a billion people play, and the odds of winning are one in a billion, it is actually highly probable that someone will win the lottery. Now, if the game is played only once, and the only ticket sold just happens to be the winner, then you might get suspicious. And if the game was played a billion times, and each time only one ticket was sold and yet every single time that ticket happened to be the winner, then you would be quite certain someone was cheating. For nothing else could explain such a remarkable fact.

Therefore, the only way life could arise by accident (i.e. without God arranging it) is if there were countless more failed tries than actual successes. After all, if the lottery was played by a billion people and yet only one of them won, that would surely be a mere accident, not evidence of cheating. So the only way this lottery could be won by accident is if it was played countless times and only one ticket won. To carry the analogy over, the only way life could arise by accident is if the universe tried countless times and only very rarely succeeded. Lo and behold, we observe that is exactly what happened: the universe has been mixing chemicals for over twelve billion years in over a billion-trillion star systems. That is exactly what we would have to see if life arose by accident--because life can only arise by accident in a universe as large and old as ours. The fact that we observe exactly what the theory of accidental origin requires and predicts is evidence that our theory is correct.

Of course, we haven't yet proven any particular theory of life's origin true. But we do have evidence for every element of every theory now considered. Nothing about contemporary hypotheses of life's origin rests on any conjecture or assumption that has not been observed or demonstrated in some circumstance. For example, we know porous rocks that can provide a cell-like home were available near energy-rich, deep-sea volcanic vents. We know those vents harbor some of the most ancient life on the planet, indicating that life may well have begun there. And we know these vents would have provided all the necessary resources to produce an amino-acid-based life, and that they had hundreds of millions of years of time in which to do so. In a similar way, we have evidence supporting every other presently viable theory: we know homochiral amino acids can be mass-produced in a supernova and thus become a component of the early comets that bombarded the early Earth; we know that amino acids that chain along a common crystalline structure in clay will chain in a homochiral structure; we know simple self-replicating chains of amino acids exist that do not require any enzymes working in concert; and so on.[9] So by the rules of sound procedure, the accidental theory is well-grounded in a way intelligent design theory is not. We have never observed or confirmed the existence of any sort of divine actions or powers that God would have needed to "create" the first life--nor have we demonstrated the existence of any such agent, not even indirectly (as we have for natural theories of life's origin). So the intelligent design theory is completely ad hoc, in exactly the way our accidental theory is not, and is therefore not presently credible.

The situation is even worse than that, really. For the Christian theory does not predict what we observe, while the natural theory does predict what we observe. After all, what need does an intelligent engineer have of billions of years and trillions of galaxies filled with billions of stars each? That tremendous waste is only needed if life had to arise by natural accident. It would have no plausible purpose in the Christian God's plan. You cannot predict from "the Christian God created the world" that "the world" would be trillions of galaxies large and billions of years old before it finally stumbled on one rare occasion of life. But we can predict exactly that from "no God created this world." Therefore, the facts confirm atheism rather than theism. Obviously, a Christian can invent all manner of additional "ad hoc" theories to explain "why" his God would go to all the trouble of designing the universe to look exactly like we would expect it to look if God did not exist. But these "ad hoc" excuses are themselves pure concoctions of the imagination--until the Christian can prove these additional theories are true, from independent evidence, there is no reason to believe them, and hence no reason to believe the Christian theory.

The same analysis follows for evolution. The evidence that all present life evolved by a process of natural selection is strong and extensive. I won't make the case here, for it is enough to point out that the scientific consensus on this is vast and certain.[10] And as it happens, evolution requires billions of years to get from the first accidental life to organisms as complex as us. God does not require this--nor does taking so long make much sense for God, unless he wanted to deliberately fabricate evidence against his existence by planting all the evidence for evolution--all the fossils, all the DNA correlations, the vast scales of time over which changes occurred, everything. Again, there is no credible reason to believe the Christian God would do this, and no actual evidence that he did. In contrast, the only way we could exist without God is if we live at the end of billions of years of meandering change over time. Lo and behold, that is exactly where we observe ourselves to be. Thus, atheism predicts the overall evidence for evolution, including the vast time involved and all the meandering progress of change in the fossil record, whereas Christian theism does not predict any of this--without adding all manner of undemonstrated ad hoc assumptions, assumptions the atheist theory does not require.

Even DNA confirms atheism over Christianity. The only way life could ever arise by accident and evolve by natural selection is if it was built from a chemical code that could be copied and that was subject to mutation. We know of no other natural, accidental way for any universe to just stumble upon any kind of life that could naturally evolve. Also, as best we know, the only chemicals that our present universe could accidentally assemble this way are amino acids (and similar molecules like nucleotides). And it is highly improbable that an accidentally assembled code would employ any more than a handful of basic units in its fundamental structure. Lo and behold, we observe all of this to be the case. Exactly as required by the theory that there is no God, all life is built from a chemical code that copies itself and mutates naturally, this code is constructed from amino-acid-forming nucleotide molecules, and the most advanced DNA code only employs four different nucleotide molecules to do that. The Christian theory predicts none of this. Atheism predicts all of it. There is no good reason God would need any of these things to create and sustain life. He could, and almost certainly would, use an infallible spiritual essence to accomplish the same ends--exactly as all Christians thought for nearly two thousand years.

Again, the only way a Christian can explain the actual facts is by pulling out of thin air some unproven "reason" why God would design life in exactly the way required by the theory that life wasn't designed by God--a way that was demonstrably inferior to what he could have done. Either God must have a deliberate intent to deceive, which no "good" or "loving" God who "wanted" us to know the truth would ever have, or God has some other motive that just "happens" to entail, by some truly incredible coincidence, doing exactly the same thing as deceiving us into thinking he doesn't exist, which at the same time just "happens" to require adding needless imperfections in our construction. In the one case, Christianity is refuted, and in the other it becomes too incredible to believe--unless the Christian can prove from actual evidence that this coincidental reason really does exist and really has guided God's actions in choosing how to design life and the universe it resides in. The possibility is not enough. You have to prove it. That has yet to happen.

We can find more examples from the nature of life. For example, a loving God would infuse his creation with models of moral goodness everywhere, in the very function and organization of nature. He would not create an animal kingdom that depended on wanton rape and murder to persist and thrive, nor would animals have to produce hundreds of offspring because almost all of them will die, most of them horribly. There would be no disease or other forms of suffering among animals at all. Yet all of these things must necessarily exist if there is no God. So once again, atheism predicts what we see. Christianity does not.

The Human Brain

As a more specific example, consider the size of the human brain. If God exists, then it necessarily follows that a fully functional mind can exist without a body--and if that is true, God would have no reason to give us brains. We would not need them. For being minds like him, being "made in his image," our souls could do all the work, and control our thoughts and bodies directly. At most a very minimal brain would be needed to provide interaction between the senses, nerves, and soul. A brain no larger than that of a monkey would be sufficient, since a monkey can see, hear, smell, and do pretty much everything we can, and its tiny brain is apparently adequate to the task. And had God done that--had he given us real souls that actually perform all the tasks of consciousness (seeing, feeling, thinking)--that would indeed count as evidence for his existence, and against mere atheism.

In contrast, if a mind can only be produced by a comparably complex machine, then obviously there can be no God, and the human brain would have to be very large--large enough to contain and produce a complex machine like a mind. Lo and behold, the human brain is indeed large--so large that it kills many mothers during labor (without modern medicine, the rate of mortality varies around 10% per child). This huge brain also consumes a large amount of oxygen and other resources, and it is very delicate and easily damaged. Moreover, damage to the brain profoundly harms a human's ability to perceive and think. So our large brain is a considerable handicap, the cause of needless misery and death and pointless inefficiency--which is not anything a loving engineer would give us, nor anything a good or talented engineer with godlike resources would ever settle on.

But this enormous, problematic brain is necessarily the only way conscious beings can exist if there is no God nor any other supernatural powers in the universe. If we didn't need a brain, and thus did not have one, we would be many times more efficient. All that oxygen, energy, and other materials could be saved or diverted to other functions. We would also be far less vulnerable to fatal or debilitating injury, we would be immune to brain damage and defects that impair judgment or distort perception (like schizophrenia or retardation), and we wouldn't have killed one in every ten of our mothers before the rise of modern medicine. In short, the fact that we have such large, vulnerable brains is the only way we could exist if there is no God, but is quite improbable if there is a God who loves us and wants us to do well and have a fair chance in life. Once again, atheism predicts the universe we find ourselves in. The Christian theory does not.[11]

Finely Tuning a Killer Cosmos

Even the Christian proposal that God designed the universe, indeed "finely tuned" it to be the perfect mechanism for producing life, fails to predict the universe we see. A universe perfectly designed for life would easily, readily, and abundantly produce and sustain it. Most of the contents of that universe would be conducive to life or benefit life. Yet that is not what we see. Instead, almost the entire universe is lethal to life--in fact, if we put all the lethal vacuum of outer space swamped with deadly radiation into an area the size of a house, you would never find the comparably microscopic speck of area that sustains life. Would you conclude that the house was built to serve and benefit that subatomic speck? Hardly. Yet that is the house we live in. The Christian theory completely fails to predict this--while atheism predicts exactly this.

The fact that the universe is actually very poorly designed to sustain and benefit life is already a refutation of the Christian theory, which entails the purpose of the universe is to sustain and benefit life--human life in particular. When we look at how the universe is actually built, we do find that it appears perfectly designed after all--but not for producing life. Lee Smolin has argued from the available scientific facts that our universe is probably the most perfect universe that could ever be arranged for producing black holes.[12] He also explains how all the elements that would be required to finely tune a perfect black-hole-maker also make chemical life like ours an extremely rare but inevitable byproduct of such a universe. This means that if the universe was designed, it was not designed to make and sustain us, but to make and sustain black holes, and therefore even if there is a God he cannot be the Christian God. Therefore, Christianity is false.

Smolin explains how a universe perfectly designed to produce black holes would look exactly like our universe. It would be extremely old, extremely large, and almost entirely comprised of radiation-filled vacuum, in which almost all the matter available would be devoted to producing black holes or providing the material that feeds them. We know there must be, in fact, billions more black holes than life-producing planets. And if any of several physical constants varied by even the tiniest amount, the universe would produce fewer black holes--hence these constants have been arranged into the perfect combination for producing the most black holes possible. The number and variety and exact properties of subatomic particles has the same effect--any difference, and our universe would produce fewer black holes. Christianity predicts none of these things. What use does God have for quarks, neutrinos, muons, or kaons? They are necessary only if God wanted to build a universe that was a perfect black hole generator.

Think about it. If you found a pair of scissors and didn't know what they were designed for, you could hypothesize they were designed as a screwdriver, because scissors can, after all, drive screws. In fact, there is no way to design a pair of scissors that would prevent them being used as a screwdriver. But as soon as someone showed you that these scissors were far better designed to cut paper, and in fact are not the best design for driving screws, would you stubbornly hang on to your theory that they were designed to drive screws? No. You would realize it was obvious they were designed to cut paper, and their ability to drive screws is just an inevitable byproduct of their actual design. This is exactly what we are facing when we look at the universe: it is not very well designed for life, though life is an inevitable byproduct of what the universe was more obviously designed for: black holes. So if the universe was intelligently designed, it clearly was not designed for us.

But that is not the only explanation. If the universe was indeed perfectly designed to sustain and benefit life--if the whole cosmos was hospitable and beneficial--that would be evidence it was intelligently or supernaturally designed, since only an intelligent or supernatural being would ever have such a goal in mind. But this does not follow for black holes. Smolin explains why. Black holes possess all the same properties that our own Big Bang must have possessed before expanding into the present cosmos, so it seems likely that every black hole might produce a new universe inside it. Smolin then demonstrates that if every black hole produces a new universe slightly different than its parent, then our universe is the inevitable outcome of literally any possible universe that could arise at random. If any universe emerges randomly from a primordial chaos, no matter what arrangement of particles and physical constants that universe accidentally ends up with, it will always produce at least one black hole (even if only by collapsing in on itself), which in Smolin's theory will reset the whole slate, producing an entirely new universe with a newly randomized set of properties. This new universe will in turn produce at least one more black hole, and therefore one more roll of the dice, and on and on, forever. There is nothing that could ever stop this from continuing on to infinity.

Some of these early random universes will just by chance have properties that produce more black holes than other universes, and will thus produce far more baby universes than their cousins do. The more black holes a universe produces, the more likely it is that some of the new universes this causes will also be good at making black holes, or even better. And eventually this chain of cause and effect will generate perfect or near-perfect black hole producers, after an extended and inevitable process of trial and error. Therefore, if the whole multiverse began with any random universe from some primordial chaos, eventually a universe exactly like ours would be an inevitable and unstoppable outcome. Hence Smolin's theory predicts exactly our universe, with all its finely tuned attributes, without any God or intelligent design.

Now, Smolin's theory has yet to be proven. It is at present just a hypothesis--but so is Christianity. Just like Christianity, there are elements to Smolin's theory that are conjectural and not independently proven to exist. However, the most important element--the fact that unintelligent natural selection can produce incredibly precise fine tuning over time--has been proven, whereas any sort of divine activity has not. We have never observed a single proven case of a god causing anything, much less any fine-tuning of the properties of our universe. But we have found overwhelming evidence for a process that produces very amazing fine-tuning without any intelligence behind it, and that is evolution by natural selection. This is a known precedent--unlike bodiless minds or divine causation. And a theory based on known precedents is always less ad hoc than a theory based on completely novel and unobserved mechanisms. So Smolin's theory already has an edge over creationism.

Even so, there are still some ad hoc elements to Smolin's theory, and therefore it is not yet a fact, just a hypothesis. But suppose for a moment that Smolin's theory is the only possible way our universe could come to exist without a God. It is certainly one possible way. No Christian can yet refute Smolin's theory or prove it is not the correct explanation. There are also other theories now that explain our exact universe without a God, like chaotic inflation theory. But let's assume we ruled out all those alternatives, and all we had left was Smolin's theory and the Christian's theory. Then, if Christianity was false, Smolin's theory would necessarily be true.

Now observe the facts: the universe is exactly the way Smolin's theory predicts it would be, right down to peculiar details--such as the existence and properties of obscure subatomic particles, and the fact that the universe is almost entirely devoted to producing and feeding black holes, is almost entirely inhospitable to life, and almost never produces life. Christianity predicts none of these things, and in fact many of these details seem quite improbable if Christianity is true. In contrast, atheism would predict every single one of those details, exactly as we observe. Once again, Christianity predicts a different universe than the one we have--while atheism predicts exactly the universe we have. This even extends to the Big Bang theory itself. In no way does Christianity predict God would "create" a universe with a long deterministic process from a Big Bang. But if Smolin's theory is the only possible explanation of our universe without God, then it necessarily follows that our universe must have begun with a Big Bang and evolved slowly over many eons. Yet again, atheism predicts a Big Bang universe. Christianity does not.

Even aside from physics, the nature of the world is clearly dispassionate and blind, exhibiting no value-laden behavior or message of any kind, and everything we find turns out to be the inevitable product of mindless physics. The natural world is like an autistic idiot savant, a marvelous machine wholly uncomprehending of itself or others. This is exactly what we should expect if it was not created and governed by a benevolent deity. Yet it is hardly explicable on the theory that there is such a being. Since there is no observable divine hand in nature as a causal process, it is reasonable to conclude there is no divine hand. Conversely, all the causes whose existence we have confirmed are unintelligent, immutable forces and objects. Never once have we confirmed the existence of any other kind of cause. And that is strange if there is a God, but not at all strange if there isn't one. Nowhere do we find in the design of the universe itself any sort of intention or goal we can only expect from a conscious being like us, as opposed to the sort of goals exhibited by, say, a flat worm, a computer game, or an ant colony, or an intricate machine like the solar system, which simply follows inevitably from natural forces that are fixed and blind.

Given the lack of any clear evidence for God, and the fact that (apart from what humans do) everything we've seen has been caused by immutable natural elements and forces, we should sooner infer that immutable natural elements and forces are behind it all. Likewise, the only things we have ever proven to exist are matter, energy, space, and time, and countless different arrangements of these. Therefore, the natural inference is that these are the only things there are. After all, the universe exhibits no values in its own operation or design. It operates exactly the same for everyone, the good and bad alike. It rewards and craps on both with total disregard. It behaves just like a cold and indifferent machine, not the creation of a loving engineer. Christianity does not predict this. Atheism does.

The Original Christian Cosmos

A Christian might still balk and ask, "Well, what other universe could God have made?" The answer is easy: the very universe early Christians like Paul actually believed they lived in. In other words, a universe with no evidence of such a vast age or of natural evolution, a universe that contained instead abundant evidence that it was created all at once just thousands of years ago. A universe that wasn't so enormous and that had no other star systems or galaxies, but was instead a single cosmos of seven planetary bodies and a sphere full of star lights that all revolve around an Earth at the center of God's creation--because that Earth is the center of God's love and attention. A complete cosmos whose marvelously intricate motions had no other explanation than God's will, rather than a solar system whose intricate motions are entirely the inevitable outcome of fixed and blind forces. A universe comprised of five basic elements, not over ninety elements, each in turn constructed from a dizzying array of subatomic particles. A universe governed by God's law, not a thoroughly amoral physics. A universe inhabited by animals and spirits whose activity could be confirmed everywhere, and who lived in and descended from outer space--which was not a vacuum, but literally the ethereal heavens, the hospitable home of countless of God's most marvelous creatures (both above and below the Moon)--a place Paul believed human beings could live and had actually visited without harm.

That is, indeed, exactly the universe we would expect if Christianity were true--which is why Christianity was contrived as it was, when it was. The first Christians truly believed the universe was exactly as Christian theism predicted it to be, and took that as confirmation of their theory. Lo and behold, they were wrong--about almost every single detail! Paul truly believed that the perfect order of the heavens, the apparent design of human and animal bodies, and the perfect march of the seasons had no other explanation than intelligent design, and in fact he believed in God largely because of this, and condemned unbelievers precisely because they rejected this evidence.[13] But it turns out none of this evidence really existed. Christians have long abandoned their belief that the perfect order of the heavens can only be explained by God, since they now know it is entirely explained by physics and requires no intelligent meddling or design. And a great many Christians have abandoned their belief that the apparent design of human and animal bodies can only be explained by God, since they now know it is entirely explicable by natural evolution.

All the evidence we now have in hand only compounds Paul's error. For what we know today is exactly the opposite of what Paul would have expected. It is exactly the opposite of what his Christian theory predicted. Paul certainly would have told you that God would never use billions of years of meandering and disastrously catastrophic trial and error to figure out how to make a human. God would just make humans. And Paul certainly believed that is exactly what God did, and surely expected the evidence would prove it. But the evidence has not. It has, in fact, proved exactly the opposite. Likewise, Paul naturally believed God simply spoke a word, and Earth existed. One more word, and the stars existed. That's exactly what the Christian theory predicts. But that isn't what happened.

Again, Christians can fabricate excuses for why God did things differently--but that's all just ad hoc. Like Christianity, none of these excuses have been demonstrated to be true. It is even doubtful such excuses would be compatible with Christianity. As noted earlier, God can do essentially anything, so what he does is pretty much limited only by what he wants to do. Christianity says he wants us to be good and set things right, which entails that God wants us to know what is good and how to set things right. Christianity says God wants to do what is good, and his choices are guided by his love of love and his hatred of hatred--therefore anything he designed would be the good and admirable product of a loving being. There is no way to "define away" these conclusions. If any of these conclusions are false, Christianity is false. But these conclusions entail that certain things would be true about our universe that are in fact not true.

The existence of a divine creator driven by a mission to save humankind, for example, entails that his creation would serve exactly that end, better than any other. And that means he would not design the universe to look exactly like it would have to look if God did not exist. Instead, if I wanted people to know which church was teaching the right way to salvation, I would lead the way for them by protecting all such churches with mysterious energy fields so they would be invulnerable to harm, and its preachers alone would be able to work miracles day after day, such as regenerating lost limbs, raising the dead, or calming storms. The bibles of this church would glow in the dark so they could always be read and would be indestructible--immune to any attempt to mark, burn, or tear them, or change what they said. Indeed, I would regard it as my moral obligation to do things like this, so my children would not be in the dark about who I was and what I was about, so they would be able to find out for sure what was truly good for them.

So, too, the Christian God would design a universe with moral goals built in. For example, if I were to make a universe, and cared how the people in it felt--whether they suffered or were happy--I would make it a law of nature that the more good a person really was, the more invulnerable they would be to harm or illness, and the more evil, the weaker and more ill. Nature would be governed by survival of the kindest, not survival of the fittest. Obviously, such a law would not be possible unless the universe "knew" what good and evil was, and cared about the one flourishing rather than the other. And unlike mere survival, which does its own choosing through the callous mechanism of death, if the very laws of the universe served a highly abstract good instead, that would be inconceivable without a higher mind capable of grasping and caring about all these deep abstract principles--as we know humans do, and the universe does not. So a physical law like this would indeed provide good evidence the universe was created by a loving God.

But, lo and behold, that is not the universe we live in. Even if a God made this universe, it could not be the Christian God because no God who wanted us to know the truth would conceal it by making a universe that looked exactly like a universe with no God in it. The simple fact is that Christianity does not predict our universe, but a completely different one. Atheism, however, predicts exactly the kind of universe we find ourselves in. So the nature of the universe is another failed prediction, confirming our previous conclusion that Christianity is false.



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

Conclusion

Christianity entails that God, like any other person, would say and do at least some things we would all see. Since we haven't seen such things, the Christian theory is falsified by the evidence. Christianity also entails that God would have made the universe differently than we observe it to be. So it is falsified again by the evidence. A failed prediction means a failed theory, especially when these failures apply to the very design of the universe itself. At the same time, there is insufficient evidence for any of the essential propositions of Christianity. So the Christian hypothesis contradicts a lot of evidence, makes numerous failed predictions, is not the best explanation of the universe we find ourselves in, and fails to find sufficient evidence in its own support. Therefore, I believe Christianity is false.

 

Copyright © 2006 by Richard C. Carrier, who gives the following blanket permission to all the people of the world: This essay may be cited, quoted, copied, and disseminated in print by anyone, free of charge, provided credit is given to its author, no material herein is sold for profit, and no words are added or changed; however, this essay may not be reproduced in its entirety on the Internet except by John Ransom, Richard Carrier, or the Internet Infidels, though it may be quoted and excerpted on the internet as long as a link is provided to the complete text.


References

[1] If you want to know more, I have explored many of the issues in detail elsewhere: • In numerous articles at the Secular Web, especially Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story (6th ed., 2006). • In my book Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (2005). • And in three chapters I contributed to The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (2005), some of which material can be viewed in my Debate with Mike Licona. I have also answeredFrequently Asked Questions for those three chapters. More is always to come.

[2] Detailed scholarly arguments for the points made in this and the following section can be found in: • J. L. Schellenberg, Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993). • Ted Drange, Nonbelief and Evil (1998). • Nicholas Everitt, The Non-Existence of God (2003). See also the Secular Web libraries on The Argument from Nonbelief and Evidential Arguments from Evil.

[3] On these and other issues of sound method, see: • Brian Skyrms, Choice and Chance (4th ed., 1999). • Hugh Gauch, Jr., Scientific Method in Practice (2002). • Ronald Giere, Understanding Scientific Reasoning (1996). • Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry (1995) and Defending Science (2003). • Mario Bunge,Emergence and Convergence (2003), as well as his detailed works: Philosophy of Science I: From Problem to Theory and Philosophy of Science II: From Explanation to Justification (1998). Also relevant is • Giulio Agostini, Bayesian Reasoning in Data Analysis (2003)

[4] On the known causes and kinds of religious experience, see: • Dean Hamer, The God Gene (2004). • Eugene D'Aquili and Andrew Newberg, The Mystical Mind (1999) and Why God Won't Go Away (2001). • John Horgan, Rational Mysticism (2003). • Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (2002). • Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust (2002). • Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds (1993). See also: • William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which should be read with • Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today (2002). For more on the general point that faith and feeling are unreliable, see the Secular Web library on Faith and Reason.

[5] On this new understanding of Big Bang theory, see sources and discussion in Richard Carrier, The Big Debate (2004). For the best summary: G. Veneziano, "The Myth of the Beginning of Time," Scientific American 290.5 (2004): pp. 54-65. On the failure of ontological, cosmological, and design arguments for God, see the Secular Web library on Arguments for the Existence of a God. On some alternative cosmologies, see the Secular Web library on the Atheistic Cosmological Argument.

[6] "All the evil, misery, and torment that has been caused by the Christian religion" is documented in books like: • James Haught, Holy Horrors (1999). • Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History (1995).

[7] For documentation supporting the Hero Savior analogy (as applied to the resurrection of Jesus), see: • Bruce Metzger, The Text Of The New Testament (4th ed., 2005) and The Canon of the New Testament (1997). • Bart Ehrman, The New Testament (3rd ed., 2003), The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1996), and Lost Christianities (2003). • Udo Schnelle, The History and Theology of the New Testament Writings (1998). • Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament (2000). • Charles H. Talbert, What is a Gospel? (1977). See also the Secular Web library on the Resurrection
       In addition, the following scholars might be wrong about many of their conclusions, but their surveys of the actual state of the evidence and its problems are often sound: • Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus (1995), The Resurrection of Christ (2004), and What Really Happened to Jesus (1996). • Bob Price,Deconstructing Jesus (2000) and The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003). • G. A. Wells, The Jesus Legend (1996) and The Jesus Myth (1998). • Earl Doherty, Challenging the Verdict and The Jesus Puzzle (1999).

[8] For precisely what naturalism is and what I consider "supernatural," see Richard Carrier, "What We Are Debating" in Naturalism vs. Theism: The Carrier-Wanchick Debate (2006); Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (2005), pp. 65-70, 211-12; and Richard Carrier, Defending Naturalism as a Worldview: A Rebuttal to Michael Rea's World Without Design (2003).

[9] On the current science of the origin of life, see: • Richard Carrier, "The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities Against a Natural Origin of Life," Biology and Philosophy 19.5 (November 2004): pp. 739-64. • Geoffrey Zubay, Origins of Life (2nd ed., 2000). • Tom Fenchel, Origin and Early Evolution of Life (2003). • Andri Brack, The Molecular Origins of Life (1998). • Noam Lahav, Biogenesis (1998). • Iris Fry, The Emergence of Life on Earth (2000). • Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada, The Spark of Life (2000). • J. William Schopf, Life's Origin (2002). • John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, The Origins of Life (1999). • Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth (2000).

[10] For a list of resources demonstrating this point, see: • AAAS Resources on Evolution. • Chris Colby, "Introduction to Evolutionary Biology" (2nd ed., 1996). See also the Secular Web library on Creationism and leading textbooks on the science: • Monroe Strickberger, Evolution (3rd ed., 2000). • Mark Ridley,Evolution (3rd ed., 2003). • Douglas Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology (3rd ed., 1998). For good examinations of why evolution theory is a better explanation of the facts than creation theory, see: • Eugenie Scott, Evolution vs. Creationism (2004). • Niall Shanks, God, the Devil, and Darwin (2004). • Matt Young & Taner Edis, eds., Why Intelligent Design Fails (2004). Douglas Futuyma, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (1995).

[11] For more on this point, see the Secular Web library on the Argument from Physical Minds. For thorough scientific discussion of the need for and problems of an enormous brain see: • Joseph Ledoux, Synaptic Self (2002). • William Libaw, How We Got to Be Human (2000). • Gerald Edelman, Wider than the Sky(2004). • Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open (2004). • Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness (2004). • Susan Blackmore, Consciousness (2003). • Julian Paul Keenan, et al., The Face in the Mirror (2003). • Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme (2002). • V. S. Ramachandran, Brief Tour of Human Consciousness(2004), Phantoms in the Brain (1999), and the Encyclopedia of the Human Brain (2002). 
       In ancient times, mortality rate for mothers giving birth varied between 5% and 15% (from roughly 1 in 20 to 1 in 7): Bernardo Arriaza, et al., "Maternal Mortality in Pre-Columbian Indians of Arica, Chile," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 77 (1988): pp. 35-41. From the dawn of the scientific and industrial revolutions, however, things improved, and mortality varied between 0.3% and 8% (from roughly 1 in 300 to 1 in 12), until the early 20th century, when it began to decline in most nations, to the point that now fewer than one in several thousand women die because of childbirth (except in the poorest of countries): Irvine Louden, "Deaths in Childbed from the Eighteenth Century to 1935," Medical History 30 (1986): pp. 1-41.

[12] For the following discussion of the Smolin theory, see the sources and discussion in Richard Carrier, The Big Debate (2004). For primary references: • Lee Smolin, "Did the Universe Evolve?" Classical and Quantum Gravity 9 (1992): pp. 173-192. • Damien Easson and Robert Brandenberger, "Universe Generation from Black Hole Interiors," Journal of High Energy Physics 6.24 (2001). • Paul Davies, "Multiverse Cosmological Models," Modern Physics Letters A, 19.10 (2004): pp. 727-743. 
       In light of John Barrow's demonstration that the precise dimensionality of our universe is also optimal for life (John Barrow, "Dimensionality," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences 310.1512, December 1983: pp. 337-46), which happens also to demonstrate the same optimality for black hole formation that Smolin discusses, some support for Smolin's theory is therefore provided by the plausible link made by superstring theory between dimensionality and the numbers and properties of all subatomic particles (i.e. if a specific dimensionality entails a precise set of particles, then Smolin's demonstration that our precise set is optimal for black hole formation entails that our universe's specific dimensionality is likewise optimal for black hole formation--especially when we consider that Barrow's discussion does not exclude the addition of the collapsed dimensions required by string theory). See: • John Gribbin, The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything (2000). • L. E. Lewis, Jr., Our Superstring Universe (2003). • Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004) and The Elegant Universe.

[13] Per Romans 1:18-22. The ancient view of the cosmos and intelligent design can be found in Galen's extensive demonstration from human anatomy in On the Use of the Body's Parts, Ptolemy's Almagest, Aristotle's On the Heavens, and Plato's extensive cosmology in the Timaeus, which became his most popular and influential book, as one can see from reading the works of the Greek scholar Plutarch (e.g. On Isis and Osiris) or the Jewish philosopher Philo (e.g. On the Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses). A detailed example of how Christians thought the universe was designed can be found in the surviving section of Dionysius of Alexandria's 3rd century treatise On Nature. See: • Rosemary Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity (1995). • Sam Sambursky, The Physical World of the Greeks(1956), The Physical World of Late Antiquity (1962), and Physics of the Stoics (1959).



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

theists_suck_banner.jpg

(Click here for author information.)


Why I Am Not A Christian:

Introduction:

    This essay was inspired by the consistent assumption of Christians that if I believed the Bible were true, I would become a Christian.  There are several reasons for my atheism, the leading of which is the idea of a higher power is not probable in light of current scientific data.  The second of which is I do not find the state of the world in accordance with an idea of a loving and merciful higher power.  Then of course there is the factor that the basis of this essay shall be about; I do not find the Biblical God fit for worship.  Over the course of this essay there will be some times when I will speak as if I believe in the Bible, when in fact I do not.

    I plan to examine the Bible with critical inquiry.  This essay will not be based upon scientific facts and how they disprove the Bible.  It shall be an application of my emotions regarding compassion, love, mercy, patience, and justice.  I hope to explain more clearly why the God depicted in the Bible violates my idea of a moral being. This shall be done over a series of topics.  Each pointing out how Jehovah is undeserving of my worship. I will utilize Biblical verses to support my claim as well as what I consider to be logical reasoning.

    Now would be the time to ask you to please take out your bibles for consultation.  (I personally prefer the NIV or KJV)  I will only cite the verse and a brief over view.  I do not have the space to write out the verse in its entirety. I especially don’t wish to spew out so much information that I run the risk of overloading those people who dislike reading.  (Funny confliction here, isn’t it?  We are online, in a purely textual world, and people still have the audacity to complain about reading.)  In the case that you dislike reading online essays, I recommend you print this out and thumb through it at your convenience.

Hell:

    Hell, of course, is the mother of all of my problems with the bible.  It is perhaps the most despicable and hideous of all of the Christian God’s crimes.  Indeed, the cruelest of all concentration camps.  (Certainly far worse than the ones created by the Nazis.)  Described biblically as the “lake of fire”, “the place of eternal torment with weeping and gnashing of teeth” Jesus said in Mark 9:42-48 That it is better to commit suicide or self maiming then to be delivered unto hell. So, according to the bible I assume that all here can agree that there is an existence of hell, and that hell is the worst of all circumstance. Knowing this, let me indulge you as to why the existence of hell paints the Christian God as not fit for worshiping.

    I am a moderately compassionate individual, rational, moral, and nurturing.  Most of all I am a creator, a mother.  I propose this to you, a human question.  Can all here, Christian or atheist, safely say that if there is a God, he is our greatest thought magnified?  Whatever emotion we feel as human, being created in his image, God is infinitely more feeling?  For he is the creator of all things created, I believe this concept is pretty safe to assume.  With this being so, my love for my daughter must be a fraction of God’s love for his children.  Speaking as a mother, I can safely say that if my child were to commit the greatest harm upon me tomorrow, I would never wish her harm.  Why?  Simply because she is my creation.

    If my daughter were to maim me, slander me, etc.  I would still love her, for my instinct and emotion demands of me to protect and care for her regardless of her actions, much like all rational beings (animal kingdom included). So now I pose the question, why then would God condemn us to hell for something as menial as lack of faith?  If he is not infinitely more so loving then me, why would hell even exist?  Any true loving being would never condemn his own children to everlasting torment, especially one that proclaims himself to having the very essence of forgiveness.

But “God Is Just” You Claim:

    Most Christians have responded to this statement with the following rationalization.  “God can not let all of his creations into heaven because he is just.”  I ask in rebuttal to this, since when is justice more important than love in the heart of a parent?  Is hell even justice, or is it simply cruel and unusual punishment?  The bible states the system of justice very simply.  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  There is also another variation of that system with the biblical verse “eye for an eye”.  The Christian God violates his own system of law when he damns his creations to eternal suffering for sins as menial as theft or blasphemy.  I hardly think, nor would any logical person, that throwing someone into a gnashing jaw would be justly befitting of nearly any crime.  (With the exception of murder, and even so, eternal punishment is pretty excessive.)

    Most courts of law would take custody of your child from you just for an excessive spanking.  We as a people enacted these laws, for we thought them to be logical. Is God above logic, or what we deem as compassionate behavior?  After all he pitches a majority of his children into a lake of “fire and brimstone.”  How many of us would want a parent such as that?  Anyone of us would immediately sever our ties with such an abusive person. Yet Christians knowingly continue the insanity of giving worship to a God so cruel!

“Free Will”, You Say?

    It is also written that I was given free will with which to choose if I will go to hell or not.  How can you possibly deem something free when you must fear consequences?  That completely conflicts with the definition of free.  If I were to hold a gun to your head and say “you have free will to not give me your wallet, but if you attempt to defy me I will kill you.”  Does it really feel as if you have a choice in the matter?  Of course not.  Free means to give or receive something with out an expectation of return.  The whole free will concept is self defeating.  Call it Circumstantial Will, for that is what it truly is.

    Despite this, I have still had the displeasure of debating with those Christians who accept hell as a rational and fair wrath of God.  They defend Jehovah’s creation of hell with the opinion that those who are committed to hell go voluntary, as if it is a consequence rather then a punishment.  That indeed, we as children of God, chose rather to be hell’s inmates then God’s disciples in heaven.  It’s an interesting idea.  However, you don’t have to hurt anyone to get into Hell.  All it takes, according to Scripture, is knowing about Jesus and not accepting him as Savior.  It doesn’t matter how virtuous you are, how much good you do, how happy an environment you create for others. Given this, the voluntary entry argument doesn’t make sense.  The same argument could be used to justify the sending of Aryan opponents of Nazism to concentration camps: they voluntarily chose not to give homage to Hitler, so they chose to be interred. Why should we blame the Nazis for the inmates’ choice?  Why should we blame God for the choice of the damned?

Genocide:

    I hear a lot from Christians about God’s “infinite compassion and mercy”.

    Instead of harping on me about something so unapparent, they should go tell it to the Midianites. (Please open your Bibles to Numbers 31)  The following verses are a classic example of wholesale slaughter and rape under the direction of the same God they claim to be so merciful.  A quick sample of this tale: On the way to the promised land, God had Moses wage a war campaign against the Midian.  Moses was told to put every Midianite to death, plunder anything of value, set fire to their towns where they lived and all their encampments.  Moses gave the orders to his troops (the sons of Israel) and went on a further campaign.  On the return of his troops Moses was enraged with the commanders of the army.  He said, “Why have you spared the life of all the women and children?  You are to kill all the children and kill all the women who have slept with a man. The lord says spare the lives only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take them for yourselves, so that we may multiply into a great nation.”  Yes, friends, this is biblical infinite mercy and compassion for you. I particularly like the way that Moses got upset with them for sparing women and male children, but allowed the young girls to be kept for later raping.

    I have had some Christians proclaim that these Midianite girls were not taken for raping but marriage.  How ridiculous!  If you continue further in the scripture you will find that marriage to a Midianite was a crime against God.  A man named Zimri, broke the law and married a Midianite woman this angered God so he sent a plague among the Hebrews.  Fortunately, a zealous son of Israel speared Zimri right through the genitals, and the plague went away.  So now I ask you, if you could not marry a Midianite, just what were these “virgin woman who were to help multiply” good for?

    I don’t think the first born in Egypt during the captivity would have agreed with the verdict of compassion and mercy either.  (Exodus 11:5 & 12:29)  First of all, Jehovah is the one who purposely hardened the heart of the Pharaoh so that he would not let Moses and the Jews go.  God messed with someone’s free will.  God could have even teleported the Jews out of captivity without bloodshed, or put the Egyptians to sleep while they left, but no.  God decided to set up a situation in which he knew he would have to punish the Pharaoh.  Though this he didn’t even do.  He punished the children instead.  Judging from God’s previous actions, killing innocent children is much more his forte.

    Lastly, please attempt to read the entire book of Joshua some evening. It is a long sequence of atrocities. I have not given all these quotes for space reasons. I urge you to look them up for yourself. Especially for Christians who are not familiar with the bible. It will leave you not only shocked and in question of just what you are worshiping, but it will give a new definition to all morality you claimed was a derivative of God. If by some chance you read Joshua and you are still compliant with the loving notion of God, I suggest you re evaluate your code of ethics.

    Here is the place I will now speak of common rationalizations used for this slaughter.  I have discovered via my discussions that there are two major forms: the corruption argument and the mercy argument.  The former says that those slaughtered were evil and deserving of their fate; the latter says that since they were religiously incorrect, it was a mercy to terminate their existence.

    The corruption argument simply does not hold up.  The people slaughtered in the Old Testament were almost uniformly blameless (with a few exceptions, of course for instance, the Sodomites violated the conventions of hospitality.)  Usually, no justification is offered beyond the fact that since they were of another tribe, it was OK to kill them. It goes with out saying that the hordes of slaughtered children were innocent.  (*Quick tip-If God was anti abortion he wouldn’t have ordered the murder of pregnant women and young children.)

    As to the mercy argument: If I don’t claim to be suffering, and don’t ask to die, neither you nor any god has the right to decide that you know better.  (This would of course be a violation of my free will.)  If a person tried to do this to me, I would quite frankly attempt to kill him; if a god tried, well, the only weapon I would have would be withholding my worship.  Are you beginning to see why I do not comply with the worship of the Christian God?

Neglect:

    Most of us, given omnipotence, would be able to do a far better job than Jehovah.  What would you do if given omnipotence?  If your answer is anything other than “abolish world hunger, disease or save the earth”, there’s something more than a little skewed in your perception of mankind.  There is no question that the very balance of life is in peril.  To wish for these things doesn’t take “infinite mercy”, just normal compassion and a bit of common sense.  God’s supposed infinite mercy is apparently the same thing as no mercy at all.

    What makes this particularly unforgivable is that even Jesus’ own standards demand feeding of the poor.  See Matthew 25:35, in which it is stated that the blessed feed the hungry, and that the damned do not.  I find it funny that God is held blameless, though, for not feeding them.  Does not the old saying “practice what you preach” apply to God?  Is his lack of action a hypocrisy or a sin?  Could it perhaps be both?

    Usually, when I bring this up in a discussion, someone says, “No.  It is the evil of men that is to blame; they have lots of money and keep it to themselves rather than feeding the poor.”  (Funny thing that the Christians who say this are usually conservative.)  This argument uses a double standard.  Men are held guilty for not feeding the poor, while God is held innocent for doing exactly the same.  In fact, it would be far easier for God to feed all the poor with his omnipotence, than for any mortal man to feed even one! Mankind is certainly not blameless here, but it is Jehovah who is the true villain.

    Another popular rationalization is that life without “challenges” would be boring and dehumanizing, so God does not remove them.  The fallacy here is grouping all challenges together.  I personally lead a very challenging and satisfying life, but I have not lately had to flee any volcanoes or earthquakes, go without food for a week, or suffer the ravages of some disease.  I would be quite happy, in fact, if I never do have to face such challenges as those. There is plenty of room for amelioration of the human condition without making it dull.     Does it not defeat the purpose of living life if you are to starve to death?

Faith Is Required To Know God:

    Suppose you were an omnipotent god, and you demand worship, such as the Christian God.  Would you give proof of your existence to those who wished to follow you?  I imagine for Jehovah that it would be quite simple to perform a continual sequence of verifiable miracles.  It would be quite logical in practice too, for it would keep God’s followers from delusion and doubt.  There is no such luck with Jehovah though.  He demands absolute fidelity without any demonstration of his existence. The only so called record of his existence is the bible.  I think it pretty much goes with out saying that not only is the bible 2,000 years out dated, but it is also very unoriginal.  Any Christian who proposes that the bible is indeed evidence for God’s existence is proposing a double standard.  For there are many books which claim to be actual accounts of a higher power. With this in mind, why not believe in Allah from the Koran? Could it be because your faith is what determines your belief and not your so called “factual” book?

    Let’s examine what faith is.  The definition of faith is hope for a circumstance or thing that is not proven to be true. There is no virtue in accepting something on faith, since it may very well be false, and it is clearly not virtuous to believe the false.  Faith has also been proven through out history, time and again, that it is equivalent to massive hysteria; IE: Crusades, Burning Times, Inquisitions, Holy Wars, etc. On a grand scale faith, thus far, has only proven to be an intellectual weakness, and a significant barrier to scientific and moral progress. With all of this in mind, how can God possibly expect us to view faith as the greatest way to glorify him, let alone demand this of us?

    Most importantly, the point to remember here is that if we don’t believe in him, we go to Hell, and this is a greater evil than a lack of the “virtue” of faith or a stunting of science, or anything else conceivable. If God is truly concerned about the good, he will do what he can to keep us from Hell, and withholding vital information from us is the exact opposite of this.

God Is The Creator Of Evil:

    I am frustrated at two specific verses in the bible, which applies to this particular topic.  The first is the biblical statement that “God is the Alpha and the Omega”.  Loosely defined it means the beginning and the end, the all knowing.  Which of course implies that all of his actions and the results are fore known to him.  I have a real problem with this notion.  For if God was to know ahead of time that someday he would send me to hell for being an Atheist, I ask what was the purpose in him creating me in the first place?  Was it simply to watch me be tortured?  That seems to be the most logical explanation.  I can think of no other rational explanation, nor neither has any Christian who I posed this question to.  Some people have attempted to tell me that God has a purpose unknown to us, and that we must simply accept his will.  Would you keep a friend who commits evil and offers no self-justification or remorse?  Of course not, so why is this same judgment not applied to God?  It’s seems rather contradictory that this trait is despised in humanity, yet, it is worshiped in religion.

    Secondly, I want to reinforce the fact that God is indeed the creator of evil.  Please read verse Isaiah 45:7.  “I form the light and create darkness.  I make peace and create evil.  I the lord do all these things”.  The Christian God outright claims that he is indeed the source of evil.  So how can he then claim to be sinless?

    To be more specific, let’s talk about the lord’s creation of evil, let’s talk about the conception of Satan.  This being was created and unleashed by God.  Jehovah knew (for he is the all knowing) that at the time of Lucifer’s creation he would eventually become Satan, and spend his existence reeking havoc on man kind.  Leading people into criminal activities.  Suppose I were to build an evil robot, that I knew would go around torturing and murdering people.  Whose fault would it be if I let it loose?  Mine or the robot’s?  Of course it would be mine, for I created it with that purpose and unleashed it for that purpose.  Now I ask you, whose fault is deviltry in the world?  Is it the PUPPET Satan or the being that deliberately created Satan’s evil?

    Now God Plays Switch-A-Roo And Humans Are The Creators Of Evil Not only does the bible imply, but so do many Christians, that we as a people are the creator of evil.  It is clear for reading the bible that this is untrue, but the speculation still remains.  Supposedly, when Adam and Eve fell from grace, they single handedly brought evil into the world.  All you have to do is think logically for a moment, and you will obviously see something is very unjust with this concept.  Could any rational being hold a starving infant in Ethiopia responsible for the actions of two long dead people?  Or perhaps, would you find it fair to be convicted of Jack the Ripper’s crimes?  The connection in both of these instances are not only ludicrous but, disgusting to nod your head at.  People who use this argument are simply attempting to rationalize sadism.

    I must declare that a Christian that walks into a children’s ward and insists that it is correct that children suffer as a result of the original sin, must destroy themselves of all compassion and mercy.  I insist that those who worship the lord knowing this hypocrisy must be as cruel as the Christian God he/she believes in.  A complete and utter moral degenerate, taking stabs at protecting their belief system.  A person as such would just as easily worship Satan as God in their blindness and faith.  For apparently, no amount of evidence could convince him that God was bad once they decided to worship him; their basic assumption is that they are correct, which makes them untouchable by any amount of rationality.

Human Judgment

    One of the criticisms most frequently leveled at me when presenting any of the above arguments has been that I have no right to judge God.  A pretty feeble grasp at the straws.  Christians proclaim that God is the definition of good.  All morality proceeds downwards from him, so it makes no sense to apply moral standards to him.  But I must interject.  God allowed my ancestors Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.  Thus, allowing us “to be like gods, and know the difference between good and evil”.  This very biblical verse, written in the first book of Genesis, conflicts with the same argument these Christians attempt to use.  If we as humans are now capable of knowing good and evil LIKE THE GODS why can't we use our judgment?  How can it be lower then God’s if God is the one who claimed that we are like him?

    Let’s say for the sake of argument that I should not judge God.  Well then, would it be fair to hold him up to his own standards?  Please consult verses Matthew 25:41-46 We hear Jesus say: “Go away from me with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.  For I was hungry and you never gave me food; I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink; I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me. . . And they will go away to eternal punishment, and the virtuous to eternal life.”

    Now, I have never personally seen Jesus feed the hungry nor, have I seen him give drink to those who thirst.  But, I do personally see thousands of people die of starvation.  I do not recall Jesus dispensing clothes.  He has never made me feel welcome, let alone acknowledged.  I see the faithful sicken and die on a daily basis.  In light of this Jesus himself is the worst of all sinners; if there is no double standard he will be at the head of the line into eternal punishment.  He is guilty of every crime of which he accuses the damned.

In Conclusion

    I don’t think I could ever complete a whole list as to what I find objectionable regarding the bible.  There are many more topics in which to tackle such as sexism, infanticide, homophobia, and the likes.  Frankly, I find it too tiresome to go on any further.  As I read over all that I have wrote I simply wish to close this essay with a very brief summation: I do not believe in the reality of God, except as a psychological phenomenon, but if I did believe I would not worship that horror.  It violates my morality to worship a hypocritical, judgmental, self righteous murderer.  In punishment, it could send me to the hell it’s made for those it dislikes, and if there was no other choice but worshiping it, I would walk in proudly.



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

சார்வாகன் said...

பெர்டினான்ட் ரஸ்ஸல் ஒரு கணித மேதை என்பது பலருக்கு தெரியாது.அவர் எழுதிய பல புத்தகங்கள் இந்த இணைப்பில் கிடைக்கின்றன.

http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/brtexts.html

http://www.positiveatheism.org/index.shtml



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN ... 1

 

Scan+1+wrapper.jpg
WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN 
and other essays on religion and related subjects

First published in 1957

*


பெர்ட்ரண்ட் ரஸ்ஸல்  - 1872 - 1970
 
jest.jpg


* போர்களுக்கும் காலனியாதிக்கத்திற்கும்  எதிராகக் குரல் கொடுத்தவர். 
* ஹிட்லருக்கு எதிரான கருத்துப் போராட்டத்தை நடத்தியவர். 
* அமெரிக்காவின் வியட்நாம் யுத்தத்தைக் கடுமையாக எதிர்த்தவர்; 
* அணுகுண்டு அழிப்புக்கும்  குரலெழுப்பியவர்.

மனிதப் பண்பாடுகளுக்காகவும், சுதந்திரத்திற்காகவும் அவர் எழுதிய இலக்கியத்திற்காக 1950-ல் இலக்கியத்திற்கான நோபல் பரிசு பெற்றவர்.  

*
Richard Dawkins  நூலில் பார்த்தது போலவே இந்நூலிலும் கிறித்துவத்திற்கு என்று சொல்லப்படும் பல கருத்துக்கள் ஆப்ரஹாமிய மதங்களுக்கும் பொதுவானது என்றே கொள்ள வேண்டும்.


__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

CHAPTER I
WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN
மக்கள்  பலரும் கடவுள் நம்பிக்கையுள்ளவர்களாக இருப்பதற்கான காரணம் சிறு வயதிலிருந்தே அவர்களுக்கு அந்த நம்பிக்கை கற்றுக் கொடுக்கப்படுகிறது.
‘வலது கன்னத்தில்  அடித்தால் அடுத்த கன்னத்தைக் காண்பி’ - இது ஒன்றும் புதியதல்ல.கிறிஸ்துவிற்கு ஐந்து, ஆறு நூற்றாண்டுகளுக்கு முன்பே புத்தரும், Lao-Tze-வும் சொன்னவைகளே. (20)
’உன் சொத்துகளை விற்று ஏழைகளுக்குக் கொடுத்து விடு’  - நல்ல கோட்பாடு; ஆனால் வாழ்க்கையில் பயன்படுத்த முடியாத ஒன்று. (21)
கிறிஸ்துவின் நல்லொழுக்கக் கோட்பாடுகளில் எனக்கொரு ஐயம். அவர் நரகத்தை நம்பினார். ஆனால் மனிதத்தன்மையுள்ள எவரும் அப்படியொரு கால வரையற்ற தண்டனையை நம்ப முடியாது. 
அவருடைய போதனைகளுக்கு எதிராகச் செல்லும் எவருக்கும் இத்தகைய கொடூரமான நீண்ட தண்டனை என்பது கிறித்துவின் உயர் பண்புகளுக்கு எதிரானதாக இருக்கிறது. (22)
பாவங்களுக்கான சம்பளம் நரகம் என்பது கொடூரத்தின் உச்சம். கிறிஸ்துவின் இந்தக் கோட்பாடு உலகத்தின் வரலாற்றில்  நடந்த பல வன்முறைகளுக்கு காரணமாக இருந்திருக்கிறது.
அத்தி மரத்தை நோக்கிப் பசியோடு வந்த ஏசு அங்கே வெறும் இலைகளே இருப்பதைக் காண்கிறார். கோபமுற்று ‘இனி நீ கனி கொடுக்கவே மாட்டாய்; உன் கனியை இனி யாரும் உண்ணவே கூடாது’ என்று சாபமளிக்கிறார். பின்னால் வந்த சீடர்கள் அம்மரம் அவரது சாபத்தால் பட்டுப் போனதை அவரிடம் சொல்கிறார்கள். (மத் : 21; 19;  மாற் : 11 : 14)  விநோதமான கதை இது. தவறான கால கட்டத்தில் கனி கொடுக்கவில்லையென்று மரத்தைக் கோவிப்பதா?

அறிவு சார்ந்த விஷயத்திலோ, பண்பாட்டு விஷயத்திலோ வரலாற்றில் வரும் பலரோடு சேர்த்து வைத்துப் பார்க்கும்போது கிறித்துவிற்கு உயர்ந்த இடம் கொடுக்க முடியவில்லை; புத்தரையும் சாக்ரட்டீஸையும் இதைவிட உயர்ந்த இடத்தில் வைக்கலாம். (24)
நம்பிக்கையோடு இருப்பவர்கள் விவாதத்திற்கு அப்பாற்பட்டவர்கள்; ஏனெனில் அவர்களது நம்பிக்கைகள் எல்லாமே உணர்ச்சி வசப்பட்டவை. (emotional)
 
ஆசிரியர் Samuel Butler எழுதிய Erewhon Revisited என்ற அங்கத நாவலின் கதையைக் கூறுகிறார். நல்ல கதை. குட்டிக் கதையாக, இங்கேஇருப்பதை வாசித்துப் பாருங்கள். நமது நம்பிக்கைகளின் பிறப்பிடத்தின் ‘ரகசியம்’ புரியும்!

கிறித்துவ நம்பிக்கைகள் இல்லாதவர்கள் மிகவும் கெட்டவர்களாக இருப்பார்கள் என்பதும் ஒரு நம்பிக்கை. ஆனால் மத  நம்பிக்கையுடையவர்கள்தான் அனேகமாக அப்படிப்பட்ட கெட்டவர்களாக இருப்பார்களென நினைக்கிறேன்.

உங்களைச் சுற்றிப் பார்த்தால் உலகத்தில் ஒவ்வொரு மனித உணர்வுகளின்  முன்னேற்றத்திற்கும், குற்றத்தடைச் சட்டம் ஒவ்வொன்றின் முன்னேற்றத்திற்கும், நமக்குள் நடக்கும் யுத்தங்களைக் குறைக்க எடுக்கப்படும் முயற்சிகளுக்கும், நிறவெறிகளைக் குறைக்க எடுக்கும் நடவடிக்கைகளுக்கும்,   அடிமைத்தனத்தை ஒழிக்க எடுக்கப் படும் செயல்களுக்கும், பண்பாட்டு முன்னேற்றத்திற்கான முயற்சிகளுக்கும் கிறித்துவ மதம் எதிர்ப்பாகவே இருந்து வந்துள்ளது. கோவில்கள் மூலமாக இயங்கும் கிறித்துவ மதம் இப்பொதும் எப்போதும் உலகின் பண்பாட்டு வளர்ச்சிக்கு முட்டுக்கட்டையாகவே இருந்து வந்துள்ளது என்று நான் துணிந்து சொல்வேன்.

மதங்களின் முதல் முக்கியமான அடிப்படையே அச்சம் தான். புரியாதவைகளின் மேலுள்ள அச்சம் பாதியென்றால், அடுத்த பாதி நம் ‘பெரிய அண்ணன்’ ஒருவர் நமக்குத் தோள் கொடுக்க இருக்கிறார் என்ற நினைப்பும் ஒரு காரணமாயுள்ளது. (25)


__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

CHAPTER II

HAS RELIGION MADE USEFUL CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVILIZATIONS?
சமயங்களைப் பற்றிய என் கருத்துக்கள் Lucretius என்ற ரோமானிய தத்துவ ஞானியின் கருத்தோடு ஒன்றிப் போகிறது. சமயங்கள் பயத்தின் அடிப்படையில் பிறந்து மனித  குலத்திற்கு சொல்ல முடியாத மிகுந்த சோகங்களைத் தந்துள்ளன. ஆனாலும் மனித நாகரீகத்திற்கு அவைகள் பங்களித்திருக்கின்றன என்பதை நான் மறுக்கவில்லை. (27)

கிறித்துவம் பெண்களின் சமூக நிலையை மேலேற்றியதாகக் கூறுவதுண்டு; ஆனால் இது வரலாற்றை மிகவும் திரிக்கும் செயலாகும். (29)

ஏறத்தாழ ஒவ்வொரு கிறித்துவனும் சிறு வயதில் பாலியல் தொடர்பாகக் கொடுக்கப்பட்ட தடைகளால் முதிய வயதில் மனக் கோளாறுகளோடு இருப்பதுண்டு. பாலியலைப் பற்றிய செயற்கையான கருத்துக்கள்  மனித மனத்தில் கடுமை, அச்சம், மடத்தனம் போன்றவைகளை முதிய வயதில் ஏற்படுத்துகின்றன. (30)

ஒரு மனிதன் என்ன தவறு செய்வான் என்பது கடவுளுக்கு முன்பே தெரியுமென்றால்,  அப்படி ஒருவனைப் படைத்ததற்கும், அந்த மனிதன் செய்யும் எல்லா தவறுகளுக்கும் கடவுள் தானே பொறுப்பு. 

உலகத்தில் மனிதனுக்கு வரும் துன்பங்கள் எல்லாமே அவனை தூய்மைப்படுத்துவதற்காக; ஆகவே துன்பங்கள் நல்லதே என்பது ஒரு கிறித்துவ விவாதம். ஆனால் இது ஒரு கொடுமையை அறிவுக்குப் பொருத்தமாக்கும்  (rationalization of sadism) முயற்சியேயொழிய வேறில்லை.


சமயங்களுக்கு எதிராக இரு வாதங்கள் உண்டு: ஒன்று அறிவு சார்ந்தது; மற்றொன்று பண்பாடு சார்ந்தது. அறிவு சார்ந்த எதிர்ப்பில் சமயங்கள் உண்மையென்று சொல்ல  சான்றுகள் ஏதும்இல்லை. பண்பாடு சார்ந்து எழும் விவாதத்தில்,  இப்போதிருக்கும் மனிதனை விட மிகவும் கொடூரமாக மனிதக் கூட்டம் இருந்த போது சமயங்கள் ஆரம்பித்தன. அப்போதிருந்த மனிதத் தன்மையற்றவைகளையும், இப்போதைய மனசாட்சிக்கு எதிரானவைகளையும் சமயங்கள் தொகுத்துக் காத்து வருகின்றன.(31)

மெக்ஸிகோவிலும்,. பெருவிலும் ஸ்பானியர்கள்  செவ்விந்தியர்களின் இளம் கைக்குழந்தைகளுக்கு ஞானஸ்நானம் (கிறித்துவத்திற்குள் கொண்டு வருதல்) கொடுத்து, உடனே அந்தக் குழந்தைகளைத் தரையிலடித்துக் கொன்று விடுவார்கள். அவர்கள் கொல்லும் குழந்தைகளுக்கு நேரே மோட்சம் ! அப்போதிருந்த அடிப்படை கிறித்துவனுக்கு அது தவறாகப் படவில்லை. ஆனால் இன்றைய நிலையில் எல்லோருக்கும் இது தவறு.

கிறித்துவத்தில் ஆன்மாவையும் உடலையும் பிரித்துப் பார்க்கும் முறையால் மிகவும் மோசமான விளைவுகள் நிகழ்ந்தன. (34)

யூதர்கள் தங்களின் நேர்மைத்தனத்தின் மீது வைத்திருந்த நம்பிக்கைகளும், தங்கள் யூதக் கடவுளே சரியான கடவுள் என்ற நம்பிக்கையும் தொடர்ந்து வருகின்றன. கிறித்துவ மதம் பரவிய காலந்தொட்டு மற்ற சமயங்கள் உண்மையல்ல என்ற சமய அடிப்படைவாதம் உலகந்தொட்டு வளர ஆரம்பித்தன.  

யூதர்களும் அதிலும் முக்கியமாக  தூதர்களும் தங்கள் நேர்மைத்தனத்தின் மீதான கடும் பிடிப்போடும், தங்கள் மதத்தைத் தவிர வேறு எந்த மதத்தின் மீதும் நம்பிக்கை கொள்வதைத் தாங்க முடியாதவர்களாகவும் இருந்தார்கள்.

நம் உலகம் உருவானது ஆறாயிரம் ஆண்டுகளுக்கு முன்புதான் என்றால் இப்போது யாரும் நம்புவதில்லை. ஆனால் சில ஆண்டுகளுக்கு முன் இதை நம்பாதது பெரிய குற்றமாகக் கருதப்பட்டது. (35)

FREE-WILL - சுயாதீனம்: 
இயற்கை நியதிகளின் மீதான கிறித்துவர்களின் எண்ணங்கள் நிச்சயமற்றதாகவும், பெரிதும் உறுதியற்றதாகவும் இருந்தன. சுயாதீனம் (free-willஎன்பதையே பெரும்பாலான கிறித்துவர்கள் நம்பினார்கள்.  இந்த சுயாதீனத்தால் மனித குலம் இயற்கை நியதிகளுக்கு உட்பட்டவர்கள் அல்ல என்ற நம்பிக்கை அவர்களிடமிருந்தது. (36)

சுயாதீனத்தைப் பற்றிய கேள்விகள் இன்னும் கேள்விகளாகவே நிற்கின்றன. யாரும் நடப்பியல் வாழ்க்கையில் அதை நம்புவதாக இல்லை. (37)

கார் ஒன்று கோளாறாகி நின்றால் அதை ஒரு பாவமாகப் பார்ப்பதில்லை; அதில் என்ன தகராறு என்று பார்ப்பதே இயல்பு. அதை விட்டு விட்டு ’இந்த கார் பாவம் செய்து விட்டது’ என்று கூறுவதில்லை. அதைப் போலவே ஒரு மனிதனையும் பார்க்க வேண்டும் என்பது சமயங்களுக்கு எதிரான ஒரு கொள்கையாகப் பார்க்கப்படுகிறது. (38)

ஆபிரஹாமிய மதத் தூதுவர்கள் சொல்வதெல்லாம் உண்மை; ஜெஹோவாவின் எண்ணமும் அதுவே என்று சொல்வதுண்டு. (’இது பரிசுத்த ஆவிக்கும் எங்களுக்கும் நல்லது என்று தெரியும்’. நடவடிக்கை: 25:28) இன்னொரு தூதுவர் வந்ததும் முந்திய தூதர்களின் வார்த்தைகளை விட என் வார்த்தைகளே சரியானவை என்று சொல்வதும் கண்கூடு. (40)

கிறித்துவத்தில் அறிவு பாவமாக முந்திய காலத்தில் பார்த்தைப் போல் இப்போது பார்க்கப்படுவதில்லை. ஆனாலும் அது பாவமில்லாவிட்டாலும் அது ஆபத்தானது; ஏனெனில், அறிவு ஒருவனைப் புத்திசாலியாக்குகிறது; அதன் மூலம் அவன் கிறித்துவக் கொள்கைகளை கேள்வி கேட்கலாம்.(41)

சமயங்கள் பகுத்தறிவான படிப்பினையைக் குழந்தைகளுக்கு மறுக்கின்றன; சமயங்கள் பழைய பழக்க வழக்கங்களை, பாவம் தொடர்பான கருத்துக்களை,  தண்டனைகளைவிடாது பிடித்துக் கொண்டு, புதிய, அறிவியலோடு தொடர்புள்ளவைகளைத் தெரிந்து கொள்ள விடாது தடுக்கின்றன.  

மனித குலம் ஒரு புதிய பாதைக்கு இட்டுச் செல்லும் நுழை வாயிலில் நிற்கிறது. ஆனால் அதில் நுழைவதற்கு முன் ஒரு பெரிய ராட்சத மிருகத்தைக் கொல்ல வேண்டியதுள்ளது. அந்தக் கொடிய மிருகம் நமது சமயங்களே.


__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

CHAPTER 3
WHAT I BELIEVE




1925-ல் ரஸ்ஸல் இதே தலைப்பில் எழுதிய ஒரு சிறு நூலின் தொகுப்பே இந்தக் கட்டுரை.

கிறித்துவத்தின் அடிப்படை உண்மைகளான கடவுள், (நித்தியம்) அழிவின்மை என்ற இந்த இரண்டுமே அறிவியலோடு எந்த தொடர்பும் இல்லாதவை.

கடவுள் இல்லையென்பதை என்னால் நிரூபிக்க முடியும் என்றெல்லாம் நான் நடிக்க விரும்பவில்லை. அதே போல் சைத்தானும் இல்லையென்பதை என்னால் நிரூபிக்க முடியாது. கிறித்துவர்கள் சொல்லும் கடவுள் இருக்கலாம்; அதே போல் பழங்காலத்திய கிரேக்க, எகிப்திய, பபிலோனிய கடவுள்களும் இருக்கலாம்.  இந்தக் கடவுள் நம்பிக்கைகளில் எது மேலோங்கியது என்றெல்லாம் கூற முடியாது. (44)

நமக்கு சாவின் மீதான பயம் இல்லாவிட்டால் அழிவின்மை பற்றிய நம்பிக்கை தோன்றியிருக்காது.
அச்சமே மதங்களின் அடிப்படைக் கருத்தாக உள்ளது. மக்களின் வாழ்விலும் இந்த அச்சம் நிரந்தேயுள்ளது.

கடவுளால் இந்த உலகம் ஆளப்படுகிறது; ஆனால் அந்தக் கடவுளை உங்கள் ஜெபங்களால் நீங்கள் மாற்ற முடியும் என்றால் கடவுளின் 'எல்லையில்லா ஆளுமையில்' நீங்களும் தொடர்பு ஏற்படுத்திக் கொள்கிறீர்கள். அந்தக் காலத்தில் பல அதிசயங்கள் எல்லாம் உங்கள் ஜெபங்களின் எதிரொலியாக நடந்து வந்துள்ளன. கத்தோலிக்க கிறித்துவத்தில் இந்த அதிசயங்கள் இன்னும் நடந்து வருகின்றன; ஆனால் பிரிவினைக்காரர்களிடம் இந்த 'சக்தி' இப்போது இல்லாமல் போய் விட்டது. (46)

இயற்கையின் விந்தைகளை இந்த உலகத்துக்கு மட்டுமேயானதாக ஆக்கிவிடக் கூடாது. ஏனெனில் இந்த உலகம் பால்வீதியின் கோடிக்கணக்கான விண்மீன்களின் தொகுப்பில் உள்ள ஒரே ஒரு விண்மீன் தொகுப்பில் உள்ள ஒரு கோள். இயற்கையின் விந்தைகள் அனைத்தையும் இந்தச் சிறு கோளுக்குள் இருக்கும் சின்னச் சின்ன ஒட்டுண்ணிகளான நம்மோடு இணைத்துப் பார்ப்பது வேடிக்கையானது. (47)

அழகான நல்ல வாழ்க்கை என்பது அன்பால் உருவாக்கப்பட்டு, அறிவால் அணைகாக்கப்படுவது தான். (48)

அறிவு பூர்வமான ஒரு மனிதன் வேதநூல்களாலோ, மதங்களின் படிப்பினைகளாலோ எப்போதும் அசைந்து விடமாட்டான் எனபது நிச்சயமான உண்மை. (54)

ஒரு குழந்தை உருவாவதிலிருந்து மடிவது வரை வாழ்க்கையின் ஒவ்வொரு புள்லியிலும் கண்மூடித்தனமான நம்பிக்கைகள் பல நுழைந்து, வாழ்க்கையையே பல நேரங்களில் கேள்விக்குரியதாக்கி வேதனைகளைத் தருகின்றன. (55)
------------------------


இந்நூல் ரஸ்ஸலின் பல சொற்பொழிவுகளின் தொகுப்பு. இதில் வரும் அடுத்த பகுதிகள் மதங்களோடு நேரடித் தொடர்பு இல்லாதவை. ஆகவே இப்பகுதிகளைத் தாண்டி, நூலின் இறுதிப் பகுதிக்குச் செல்கிறேன்.
--------------------------



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

CHAPTER  14
CAN RELIGION CURE OUR TROUBLES?
நமக்கு நேரும் தீமைகளை மதம் வேரறுக்குமா?


மதக் கொள்கைகள் இல்லாத ஒரு சமூகத்தில் நேர்மை மலருமா என்றொரு கேள்வியுண்டு. மத நம்பிக்கையாளர்கள் நம்புவது போல் எனக்கு அந்த நம்பிக்கை கிடையாது. மத நம்பிக்கையாளர்களை விடவும் நம்பிக்கையற்றவர்கள் பல விதங்களில் நேர்மையோடு இருப்பார்கள் என்பது என் எண்ணம். (இதற்கு என் வாழ்க்கையில் ஒரு நேரடி அனுபவம் உண்டு. "நானும் சத் சபையும் .." என்ற தலைப்பில் பிறகு எழுதுகிறேன்!!) (154)

மதங்கள் உண்மையானவை; ஆகவே அதனை நம்ப வேண்டும் என்று சொல்லும் ஒருவரை நான் மதிக்கிறேன். ஆனால், மதங்களை நம்பியேயாக வேண்டும்; ஏனெனில் அது நல்லது செய்யும். மதம் உண்மையா என்பது போன்ற கேள்விகளை கேட்பதே தேவையில்லை என்பவர்களை நான் மறுத்து ஒதுக்குகிறேன்.

நிறைய கிறித்துவர்கள் கம்யூனிசத்திற்கும் கிறித்துவத்திற்கும் மிகுந்த வேறுபாடுகள் உண்டு. கம்யூனிசத்தில் உள்ள தீமைகள் ஏதும் கிறித்துவத்தில் கிடையாது என்றெல்லாம் சொல்வதுண்டு. இது ஒரு மிகப் பெரிய தவறு. O.G.P.U.(Russianl political force) -க்கும் கிறித்தவத்தின் மதத் தீவிரவாததிற்கும்(inquisition) நிறைய வேறுபாடு ஏதுமில்லை.

418995_10150595471847685_686367684_94425jv263_357330823_n.jpg
INQUISITION


கம்யூனிஸ்டுகள் வரலாற்றைத் திரிபு செய்வதுண்டு. அது போலவே மறுமலர்ச்சிக் காலம் வரை கிறித்துவமும் அதையே செய்ததுண்டு. இப்போது கிறித்துவம் கம்யூனிசத்தை விடவும் மோசமில்லாமல் இருப்பதற்கான காரணமே கிறித்துவத்திற்குள்ளிருந்த எழுந்த போராட்டமும், council of Trent (13 December, 1545, -- 4 December, 1563) குழுவின் முனைப்புமே காரணம். (157)



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

CHAPTER  15
RELIGION AND MORALS

மதங்களும் நெறிகளும்


கடவுள் மேல் நம்பிக்கையில்லாதவர்களுக்கு வாழ்க்கையில் மகிழ்ச்சியோ, நற்பண்புகளோ இருக்காது என்றும் பலர் சொல்வதுண்டு. நான் பார்த்த வரையில் நம்பிக்கையாளர்கள் நம்பிக்கையற்றவர்களை விடவும் மகிழ்ச்சியாக இருக்கிறார்கள் என்று என்னால் சொல்ல முடியாது.

பண்புகள் என்று பார்த்தால் அவை இரக்கமும் அறிவுசார்ந்தவைகளுமாகும். அறிவுசார்ந்தவைகள் எப்போதும் மதக் கோட்பாடுகளால் தடை செய்யப்படுகிறது. இரக்கம் மதச்சார்பான பாவம், தண்டனை போன்றவைகளால் தடை செய்யப்படுகிறது. (162)



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

Ibnu Shakir said...

அன்புள்ள தருமி,
உங்கள் மீது ஏக்க அல்லாஹ்வின் சாந்தியும் சமாதானமும் (காப்பிரைட் முஸ்லீம்கள்) நிலவட்டும்.

முதலில் ஈஸா நபி அல்லாஹ்வின் இறைதூதர் என்று அறிவியற்பூர்வமாக நிரூபிக்கிறேன். ஈஸா நபி எந்த இடத்திலும் அல்லாஹ் என்ற ஒருவார்த்தை கூட சொல்லவில்லை என்றாலும் அவர் அல்லாஹ்வின் தூதர்தான். அவருக்கு அரபி மொழியே தெரியவில்லை என்றாலும் அவர் அல்லாஹ்வின் இறைதூதர்தான். தன்னை இறைதூதர் என்று ஒரு இடத்திலும் சொல்லவில்லை என்றாலும் அவர் அல்லாஹ்வின் இறைதூதர்தான். ஆதாரம் வேண்டுமா? அல்குரானை படியுங்கள். படித்துவிட்டீர்களா? அவ்வளவுதான். அல்குரானிலேயே அல்லாஹ்வின் இரைதூதர்தான் ஈஸா நபி என்று இருக்கிறதல்லவா? இதற்கு மேல் என்ன ஆதாரம் வேண்டும்?

அப்புறம் இந்த பஹாவுல்லா, குலாம் அஹ்மது எல்லாம் தங்களையும் அல்லாஹ்வின் இறைதூதர் என்று சொல்லிக்கொள்கிறார்கள். அவர்கள் இறைதூதர் இல்லை. அதற்கு ஆதாரம் என்ன என்று கேட்கிறீர்களா? அதற்கும் அல்குராந்தான் ஆதாரம். ஆனால் பஹாவுல்ல்லாவை நம்புபவர்கள் அல்குரானில் சொல்லப்பட்டிருக்கும் இறுதி தூதர் மொஹம்மத் இப்னு அப்தல்லா என்று அவர்களது புத்தகத்தில் எழுதியிருக்கிறது என்று சொல்கிறார்கள். ஆனால், அல்குரான் மட்டும்தான் அல்லாஹ் கொடுத்தது. பஹாவுல்லாவின் புத்தகம் அல்லாஹ் கொடுக்கவில்லை. ஆதாரம் என்ன என்று கேட்கிறீர்களா? அதற்கும் அல்குரான் தான் ஆதாரம். எப்படி! சூப்பரா இருக்கு இல்ல? 

இன்னேரம் உங்களுக்கு ஒரு ஐடியா வந்திருக்கணுமே? நீங்களே ஒரு புத்தகத்தை எழுதி, அதில அல்குரானை கொடுத்ததை மொஹம்மத் இப்னு அப்தல்லா திருத்திட்டாரு. தப்பு தப்பா எழுதிட்டாரு. அதனை திருத்த என்னை அனுப்பியிருக்காரு அல்லாஹ் என்று ஒரு கதை விடுங்கள். இனி நீங்கதான் இறுதி இறைதூதர். 

ஆனாலும் உங்களால கண்ணுமணிமாதிரி கூட்டம் சேக்க முடியாது. அது தாவூது இப்ராஹிம் மாதிரி தாதாவா இருந்தாத்தான்முடியும்.
தாவூது இப்ராஹிமுக்காக அந்த கூட்டத்து ஆள் உசிர கொடுக்க தயாரா இருக்கிறமாதிரி உசிர கொடுக்க தயாரா இருக்கிறமாதிரி கூட்டம் உருவாக்கணும். 

உங்க நல்ல மனசுக்கு அதெல்லாம் முடியாதுன்னு நென்க்கிறேன்.

சுவனப்பிரியன் said...

இப்னு ஷகீர்!

முதலில் இஸ்லாமிய பெயரில் ஒளிந்து கொண்டு எழுதுவதை தவிர்க்கவும். நீங்கள் என்னதான் வேடம் போட்டாலும் உங்கள் எழுத்து நடை உங்களை காட்டிக் கொடுத்து விடுகிறது.

//ஆதாரம் வேண்டுமா? அல்குரானை படியுங்கள். படித்துவிட்டீர்களா? அவ்வளவுதான்.//

குர்ஆன் மட்டும் அல்ல பைபிளிலிருந்தே ஆதாரத்தைத் தருகிறேன்.

'பின்பு ஏசு கலிலியோ எங்கும் சுற்றித் திரிந்து அவர்களுடைய ஜெப ஆலயங்களில் உபதேசித்து ராஜ்ஜியத்தின் சுவிசேசத்தைப் பிரசிங்கித்தார்'
-மத்தேயு 4:23

'இயேசு கலிலயோவில் வந்து தேவனுடைய ராஜ்ஜியத்தின் சுவிசேசத்தைப் பிரசிங்கித்தார்'
-மாற்கு 1:15

'காலம் நிறைவேறிற்று. தேவனுடைய ராஜ்ஜியம் சமீபமாயிற்று. மனம் திரும்பி சுவிசேசத்தை விசுவாசியுங்கள் என்றார்.
-மாற்கு 1:15

தேவனுடைய புத்தகமான சுவிசேசத்தை விசுவாசியுங்கள் என்று ஏசு தனது நாவாலேயே சொல்ல ஏசு எப்படி கடவுளாக்கப்பட்டார்? அதற்கும் பைபிளேலேயே விளக்கமும் இருக்கிறது.

'மகாகனம் பொருந்திய தெயோப்பிலுவே! நீங்கள் முழு நிச்சயமாய் நம்புகிற சங்கதிகளை ஆரம்பம் முதல் கண்ணாரக் கண்டு வசனத்தைப் போதித்தவர்கள் எங்களுக்கு அறிவித்தபடியே அவைகளைக் குறித்து சரித்திரம் எழுத அனேகர் ஏற்பட்டபடியினாலே ஆதி முதல் எல்லாவற்றையும் திட்டமாய் விசாரித்தறிந்து நானும் உமக்கு உபதேசிக்கப் பட்ட விசேஷங்களின் நிச்சயத்தை நீர் அறிய வேண்டுமென்று அவைகளை ஒழுங்காய் உமக்கு எழுதுவது எனக்கு நலமாய்த் தோன்றிற்று.
-லூக்கா 1:2-4

நான் எழுதியது இறைவனின் வேதம் அன்று: பரிசுத்த ஆவியின் தூண்டதலால் எழுதப்பட்டதுமன்று: தான் விசாரித்தறிந்ததையே எழுதியிருக்கிறேன் என லூக்கா ஒப்புக் கொள்கிறார்.கடந்த காலங்களில் நடந்த சம்பவங்களின் தொகுப்பை செவி வழியாக கேட்டு தாம் பதித்திருப்பதாக லூக்காவே ஒப்புதல் வாக்கு மூலம் கொடுக்கிறார்.

இயேசு உபதேசித்த இன்ஜிலை (பைபிளை) மறைத்து விட்டு மற்றவர்களின் செவி வழி செய்திகளையே பைபிள் என்று நமக்கு காட்டுகிறது கிறித்தவ உலகம். எனவே ஏசு உபதேசித்த அந்த சுவிசேசம் நமக்கு கிடைக்குமானால் கிறித்தவர்களில் நாத்திகர்களின் எண்ணிக்கையும் குறையும்: தருமியும் 'நான் ஏன் மீண்டும் கிறித்தவனானேன்?' என்று பல பதிவுகளை போட்டு தள்ளுவார்.

வால்பையன் said...

//முகமது நபி காலத்திலேயே குர்ஆனை எழுதுவதற்கென்றே பலரை நபிகள் நாயகம் நியமித்திருந்தார். அவர்கள் தோல்களிலும், எலும்புகளிலும் மரப்பட்டைகளிலும் அவ்வப்போது குர்ஆன் வசனத்தை எழுதி வந்தனர். 23 வருடகாலம் இந்த பணி தொடரந்து நடந்தது. முகமது நபியின் மரணத்துக்கு பிறகு ஏற்கெனவே இருந்த குர்ஆன் ஜனாதிபதி உஸ்மான் அவர்களால் தொகுக்கப்பட்டு பல நாடுகளுக்கும் அனுப்பப்பட்டது.

ஐந்து வசனங்கள் ஒரு நாள் அருளப்பட்டால் அந்த ஐந்து வசனங்களையும் நபிகள் நாயகம் அவர்கள் உடனே எழுதச் சொல்வார்கள். அது தோளிலோ, எலும்பிலோ எழுதப்படும். அடுத்த நாள் மூன்று வசனங்கள் அருளப்பட்டால் அதை எழுதச் சொல்வார்கள்; அது தனியாக எழுதப்படும்.
எழுத்து வடிவத்தில் அனைத்து வசனங்களும் பதிவு செய்யப்பட்டிருந்தாலும், அவை வரிசைப்படுத்தப்படாமல் இருந்தன.

மனனம் செய்த தலைமுறையினர் மரணித்து விட்டால் அந்த ஏட்டிலிருந்து இந்த வரிசைப்படி தொகுக்க முடியாத நிலை ஏற்பட்டு விடும். இந்த நிலை ஏற்படக் கூடாது என்பதற்காகத் தான் அபூபக்ர் (ரலி) அவர்கள், உமர் (ரலி) அவர்களின் ஆலோசனையைப் பரிசீலித்து எழுத்து வடிவில் உள்ளதை முறைப்படுத்தும் பணியை மேற்கொண்டார்கள்.

எழுதப்பட்டு, நபிகள் நாயகம் (ஸல்) அவர்கள் வீட்டிலிருந்த ஏடுகளையும், தனிப்பட்ட முறையில் எழுதி வைத்திருந்தவர்களிடம் உள்ள ஏடுகளையும் ஸைத் பின் ஸாபித் (ரலி) திரட்டினார்கள். மனனம் செய்தவர்களை அழைத்து அவர்கள் மனனம் செய்தவற்றையும் எழுத்து வடிவமாக்கினார்கள்.


இது ஏற்கெனவே விரிவாக விளக்கப்பட்ட கேள்வி. புதியவர்களுக்காக மறுபடியும் பதிக்கிறேன்.//


ஏற்கனவே விரிவாக விளக்கபட்ட கேள்விக்கு நாங்கள் கேட்ட பதில் கேள்விக்கு இன்றூ வரை பதில் இல்லையே, அப்படியானால் குரான் என்பது பொய்தான் என்றூ நிரூபணமாகிறதே!

அது என்ன கேள்வின்னு தெரியனுமா?
மற்ற நண்பர்களால் தொகுக்கபட்ட மூலகுரான் ஏன் அழிக்கபட்டது, இடைசொருகல்கள் தெரிந்துவிடும் என்று தானே!

நீங்க எனக்கு பத்து லட்சம் கடன் கொடுத்தேன்னு சொல்றிங்க, சரிங்க எங்க பத்திரம்னு கேட்டா கிழிச்சி போட்டுட்டேன்னு சொல்றிங்க, அப்ப உங்களை மற்றவர்கள் பைத்தியம் மாதிரி தானே பார்ப்பார்கள் அதுனால ...................

Sunday, October 30, 2011 8:56:00 PM



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

சார்வாகன் said...

வணக்கம் அய்யா 
உங்கள் அனுமதியோடு நண்பர் சுவனப் பிரியனுக்கு பட்ஜில் சொல்லுகிறேன்.
அதாவது அவர் சொல்லுவது 
A)
***********
1.இயேசு சுவிசேஷம் பிரங்கித்தார் என்று புதிய ஏற்பாட்டில் வருகிறது.

2. லூக்கா விசாரித்து எழுதினேன் என்கிறார்.
B)
*****************

முதலில் இஸ்லாமிய பிரசாரகர்கள் கிறித்தவத்தை விமர்சிப்பதில் அவர்களுக்கு பல சிக்கல்கள்,எல்லைகள் உண்டு.குறைந்த பட்சம் இயேசு ஒரு இறைத் தூதர்,வேதம் வழங்கப் பட்டவர்,அற்புதங்கள் செய்தவர்,கன்னி மேரி மகன்,இரண்டாம் வருகையாக வருவார் போன்றவற்றை குரானும் சொல்வதால் அதனை மறுக்க முடியாது.

இந்த இன்ஜீல் எனப்படும் புதிய் ஏற்பாட்டை(?) முற்றும் முழுதாக விலக்குவதா அல்லது அதில் உள்ள பால் &பிறரின் கடிதங்களை மட்டும் விலக்கி சுவிசேஷங்களை இன்ஜீல் என ஏற்பதா என்ற இறையியல் சிக்கல் இஸ்லாமில் உண்டு.
ஏனெனில் குரான் இயேசுவுக்கு இன்ஜீல் இறைவ‌ன்(அல்லாஹ்) வ‌ழ‌ங்கிய‌தாக‌ கூறுகிற‌து.

நண்பர் சுவனப் பிரியன் குரான் சொல்லும் இன் ஜீல் புதிய ஏற்பாட்டு சுவிசேஷம் அல்ல என்கிறார்.சரி.நம் கேள்வி என்ன எனில் குரான் இஞீல்தான் புதிய ஏற்பாடு என்றோ இல்லை என்றோ வழக்கம் போல் தெளிவாக கூறவில்லை.
இப்போது இன்ஜீலை புதிய ஏற்பாடாக முகமது நினைத்தாரா?
என்பதை ஹதிதுகள் மூலம் அறிவோம்.

முகமதுக்கு முதன் முதலில் இறை செய்தி(வஹி) வந்த போது அவருக்கு அது இறை செய்திதான் என்று உணர்த்திய அன்னை கதிஜாவின் உறவினர் 'வரக்கா இப்னு நவ்ஃபல்' 
************
புஹாரி
4953. .....பிறகு நபி(ஸல்) அவர்களை அழைத்துக் கொண்டு தம் தந்தையின் சகோதரரான 'வரக்கா இப்னு நவ்ஃபல்' என்பாரிடமும் சென்றார்கள். -'வராக்க' அறியாமைக் காலத்திலேயே கிறித்தவ சமயத்தைத் தழுவியராக இருந்தார். அவர் அரபு மொழியில் எழுதத் தெரிந்தவராயிருந்தார்; இன்ஜீல் வேதத்தை (ஹீப்ரு மொழியிலிருந்து) அரபு மொழியில் அல்லாஹ் நாடிய அளவு எழுதுபவராயிருந்தார்;.........
*********
பைபிள் முழுமையாக 3ஆம் நூற்றாண்டிலேயே தொகுக்கப் பட்டது.அதுவும் வரக்கா அரபியில் மொழி பெயர்த்துள்ளது புதிய ஏற்பாடாக் இருக்கவே வாய்ப்பு அதிகம். 
(contd)

Saturday, October 29, 2011 7:40:00 PM

 

Blogger சார்வாகன் said...

இப்போது நண்பர் சுவன்ப் பிரியனின் முதல் கேள்விக்கு வருவோம். இயேசு சுவிசேஷம் பிரசங்கித்தார் என்றால் அபோதே சுவிசேசம் இருந்தது அது இப்போதைய புதிய ஏற்பாடு அல்ல என்கிறார்.
இந்த சுவிஷேசம் என்பதின் பொருள் அறிவோம் ஆங்கிலத்தில் gospel எனவும் கிரேக்கத்தில்[புதிய ஏற்பாடு முதலில் கிரேக்க மொழியில்தான் எழுதப்பட்டது ஹீப்ரு அல்ல] euangelion என்றழைக்கப்படும் வார்த்தைக்கு நல்ல செய்தி என்று பொருள்.

http://www.levitt.com/essays/language.html

The word gospel derives from the Old English gōd-spell [1] (rarely godspel), meaning "good news" or "glad tidings". It is a calque (word-for-word translation) of the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, euangelion (eu- "good", -angelion "message"). The Greek word "euangelion" is also the source (via Latinised "evangelium") of the terms "evangelist" and "evangelism" in English.

ஆகவே இயேசு பயன்படுத்திய gospel வார்த்தையே பிறகு புதிய ஏற்பாட்டின் பெயராயிற்று.

லூக்கா விசாரித்து எழுதிய புதிய ஏற்பாட்டை குரான் இறைவன்[அல்லாஹ்] இயேசுவுக்கு வழங்கியதாக(?) கூறினால் அருமையாக இருக்கிறது.இதற்கும்கு பதில் சொல்ல முடியும் என்றாலும் அது கிறித்த‌வ்ர்களின் வேலை என்று ஒதுங்குகிறேன்.நம்மை பொறுத்தவரை இபோதைய கிறித்தவ்ர்களின் சுவிசேசங்களே குரான் குறிப்பிடும் இன்ஜீல். மறுப்பு தெரிவிக்க வராக்க மொழி பெயர்த்த அரபு பிரதி இன்ஜீலை கொண்டு வர வேண்டுகிறேன்
அப்பாடா!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
நன்றி

Saturday, October 29, 2011 7:58:00 PM

 

Blogger எண்ணங்கள் 13189034291840215795 said...

அருமையான கருத்துகள்.. தொடர்ந்து படிக்க காத்திருக்கிறேன்.

Sunday, October 30, 2011 11:07:00 AM

 

Blogger சுவனப்பிரியன் said...

நரேன்!

//அப்படி பார்க்கும் போது குரானும் முகமது ......அப்படி தொகுகப்பட்டது என்று கூறுவதிலும் சில சர்ச்சைகள் உள்ளன.//

முகமது நபி காலத்திலேயே குர்ஆனை எழுதுவதற்கென்றே பலரை நபிகள் நாயகம் நியமித்திருந்தார். அவர்கள் தோல்களிலும், எலும்புகளிலும் மரப்பட்டைகளிலும் அவ்வப்போது குர்ஆன் வசனத்தை எழுதி வந்தனர். 23 வருடகாலம் இந்த பணி தொடரந்து நடந்தது. முகமது நபியின் மரணத்துக்கு பிறகு ஏற்கெனவே இருந்த குர்ஆன் ஜனாதிபதி உஸ்மான் அவர்களால் தொகுக்கப்பட்டு பல நாடுகளுக்கும் அனுப்பப்பட்டது.

ஐந்து வசனங்கள் ஒரு நாள் அருளப்பட்டால் அந்த ஐந்து வசனங்களையும் நபிகள் நாயகம் அவர்கள் உடனே எழுதச் சொல்வார்கள். அது தோளிலோ, எலும்பிலோ எழுதப்படும். அடுத்த நாள் மூன்று வசனங்கள் அருளப்பட்டால் அதை எழுதச் சொல்வார்கள்; அது தனியாக எழுதப்படும்.
எழுத்து வடிவத்தில் அனைத்து வசனங்களும் பதிவு செய்யப்பட்டிருந்தாலும், அவை வரிசைப்படுத்தப்படாமல் இருந்தன.

மனனம் செய்த தலைமுறையினர் மரணித்து விட்டால் அந்த ஏட்டிலிருந்து இந்த வரிசைப்படி தொகுக்க முடியாத நிலை ஏற்பட்டு விடும். இந்த நிலை ஏற்படக் கூடாது என்பதற்காகத் தான் அபூபக்ர் (ரலி) அவர்கள், உமர் (ரலி) அவர்களின் ஆலோசனையைப் பரிசீலித்து எழுத்து வடிவில் உள்ளதை முறைப்படுத்தும் பணியை மேற்கொண்டார்கள்.

எழுதப்பட்டு, நபிகள் நாயகம் (ஸல்) அவர்கள் வீட்டிலிருந்த ஏடுகளையும், தனிப்பட்ட முறையில் எழுதி வைத்திருந்தவர்களிடம் உள்ள ஏடுகளையும் ஸைத் பின் ஸாபித் (ரலி) திரட்டினார்கள். மனனம் செய்தவர்களை அழைத்து அவர்கள் மனனம் செய்தவற்றையும் எழுத்து வடிவமாக்கினார்கள்.


இது ஏற்கெனவே விரிவாக விளக்கப்பட்ட கேள்வி. புதியவர்களுக்காக மறுபடியும் பதிக்கிறேன்.

வால்பையன்!

//வள்ளூவர் கூடத்தான் சுவிசேசத்தை உபதேசித்தார், அவரையும் ஒரு தூதராக்கி வேறொரு மதத்தை உருவாக்கிரலாமா!?//

தமிழகத்துக்கு அனுப்பப்பட்ட தூதராகக் கூட இருக்கலாம். ஆனால் அவரின் வரலாறு அழிந்து விட்டதனால் அவரைப்பற்றிய மேலதிக விபரங்கள் கிட்டவில்லை. ஏனெனில் குர்ஆன் உலக மொழிகள் அனைத்துக்கும் வேதத்தையும், தூதுவரையும் அனுப்பியதாக கூறுகிறது



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

சுவனப்பிரியன் said...

சார்வாகன்!

//மறுப்பு தெரிவிக்க வராக்க மொழி பெயர்த்த அரபு பிரதி இன்ஜீலை கொண்டு வர வேண்டுகிறேன்//

நீங்கள் விட்ட பாக்கி பாதி ஹதீதையும் முழுவதுமாக படியுங்கள்...

……மேலும் அவர் கண் பார்வையிழிந்த முதியவராகவும் இருந்தார். அவரிடம் கதீஜா அவர்கள், 'என் தந்தையின் சகோதரர் புதல்வரே! உங்களுடைய சகோதரரின் புதல்வர் (முஹம்மது) இடம் (அவர் கூறுவதைக்) கேளுங்கள்!' என்றார்கள். அப்போது அவர் (நபியவர்களிடம்), 'என் சகோதரர் புதல்வரே! நீங்கள் என்ன பார்த்தீர்கள்?' எனக் கேட்டதற்கு நபி(ஸல்) அவர்கள் தாம் பாார்த்தவற்றின் செய்தியை அவரிடம் தெரிவித்தார்கள். இதைக்கேட்ட 'வரக்கா', '(நீர் கண்ட) இவர் தாம் (இறைத்தூதர்) மூஸாவிடம் (இறைவனால்) அனுப்பப்பட்ட வானவர் (ஜிப்ரீல்) ஆவார்' என்று கூறிவிட்டு, (மகனே!) உம்மை உம் சமூகத்தார் உம்முடைய நாட்டிலிருந்து வெளியேற்றும்) அந்தச் சமயத்தில் நான் திடகாத்திரமானவனாக இருந்தால் நன்றாயிருக்குமே! நான் அந்தச் சமயத்தில் உயிருள்ளவனாய் இருந்தால் நன்றாயிருக்குமே!' என்று சொல்லி வேறு சில வார்த்தைகளையும் கூறினார். 
இறைத்தூதர்(ஸல்) அவர்கள் , '(என் சமூக) மக்கள் என்னை (நாட்டைவிட்டும்) வெளியேற்றவா செய்வார்கள்?' என்று கேட்க, 'வரக்கா', 'ஆம். நீங்கள் பெற்றிருக்கிற (உண்மையான வேதம் போன்ற)தைப் பெற்ற (இறைத்தூதர்) எவரும் (மக்களால்) துன்புறுத்தப்படாமல் இருந்ததில்லை. உம்முடைய (பிரசாரம் பரவுகின்ற) நாளில் நான் (உயிருடன்) இருந்தால் உமக்குப் பலமான உதவிபுரிவேன்' என்று கூறினார். அதன் பின்னர் 'வரக்கா' நீண்ட நாள் உயிருடன் இராமல் இறந்துவிட்டார். (இந்த முதலாவது வேத அறிவிப்புடன்) இறைத்தூதர்(ஸல்) அவர்களுக்கு வஹீ (இறைச்செய்தி) (சூவத அறிவிப்பு) வருவது சிறிது காலம் நின்று போயிற்று. அதனால் அவர்கள் கவலைப்பட்டார்கள். 3 

Volume :5 Book :65

இவரோ கண்தெரியாதவர். பைபிளின் ஒரு சில வசனங்களை மட்டுமே(இறைவன் நாடிய...) மொழி பெயர்க்கக் கூடியவராக இருந்தார். இந்த சம்பவம் நடந்த சில காலங்களிலேயே இறந்தும் விடுகிறார். முகமது நபியை உண்மையை அறிந்து இறைத் தூதராகவும் ஏற்றுக் கொண்டார். அவர் சொன்னபடியே முகமது நபியை அந்த மக்கள் மக்காவிலிருந்து மதினாவுக்கு விரட்டி அடித்தனர். இவ்வளவுதான் அவரைப் பற்றிய செய்தி கிடைக்கிறது.

அவரிடமிருந்தது ஏசு உபதேசித்த முழு இன்ஜீலுமே என்று வாதிட்டால் அதற்கான ஆதாரத்தை நீங்கள்தான் தர வேண்டும்.



__________________


Guru

Status: Offline
Posts: 24601
Date:
Permalink  
 

NO said...

நண்பர் திரு தருமி,

ரஸ்ஸல் ஒரு மாபெரும் மனிதர்! பல வருடங்களுக்கு முன் நான் படித்த முதல் நாத்திகவாத எழுத்துக்கள் அவருடையது!! 

என்னை பொறுத்தவரையில் இங்கிலாந்திலிருந்து புறப்பட்ட மாமனிதர்களின் பட்டியலில் டாப் ஐந்தில் வருபவர் இவர் அதாவது என்னைபொருத்தவரை
இங்கிலாந்தில் உதித்து பின்னர் உலகில் பலரை நல்லவிதமாக சிந்திக்க வைத்தவர்கள் - நியூட்டன்,டார்வின், தாமஸ் பெயின், ரஸ்ஸல், ரிச்சர்ட் டாகின்ஸ்!!
(பெர்னார்ட் ஷா ஐர்லாண்டுக்காரர்). இன்னும் பலர் உள்ளார்கள் ஆனால் நான் டாப் ஐந்து என்று கருதுபவர்கள் இவர்கள்!! 

நல்லதை சொல்லும்பொழுது நகைச்சுவை தேவைதான் என்பதற்கு எடுத்துக்காட்டாக நண்பர் திரு சுவனப்பிரியன் இங்கே உலாவுகிறார் போலும்!!!
பாவம் இங்கே நல்லவை சொல்லுவது நீங்கள், நகைச்சுவை என்று புரியாமல் பேசும் அவர்!! 

இவரைப்போன்ற சுத்தமான முற்றிலுமாக பிரைன் வாஷ் செய்யப்பட்ட ஜந்துக்கள் இந்த மனித சமுதாயத்தையே மூடர்களின் விளையாட்டு திடலாக்கி உளறலுக்கு
புனிதத்துவம் கொடுத்து மேலும் அதை ஏற்காதவர்களுக்கு ஆபத்து விளைவிக்க தயங்காத மத பொம்மைகளாக மாறக்கூடாது என்ற நோக்கத்தில்தான்
இவர்களெல்லாம் எழுதினார்கள்! ஆனால் பாருங்கள் மூடத்தனம் அதைவிட அசாதாரணமானது! அது உதித்துக்கொண்டே இருக்கும்!! 

நண்பர் திரு சுவனப்பிரியன் போன்றவர்கள் அணையிடபட்ட மூட வெள்ளத்தின் தழும்பி வரும் அலை! மத மூர்கத்த்னத்தனங்கள் ஓரளவு புரிந்து கொள்ளப்பட்டு
பல இடங்களில் ஓரளவு அடைத்து வைக்கப்பட்ட இந்த காலகட்டங்களிலும் சுவர்களை உடைத்தோ அல்லது கிடைக்கும் சந்துகளில் ஒழுகி வர துடிக்கும்
வன்மமான நினைவலைகள்!! 

காலையில் ஆபிசுக்கு செல்ல காருக்கு பதிலாக புஷ்பக விமானம் வரும் என்று ஒருவன் கூறினால் எப்படி அந்த ஒருவனை பார்ப்பார்களோ அப்படி பார்க்கப்பட வேண்டிய எழுத்துக்களை கையில் வைத்துக்கொண்டு, அதை துதித்து, அதற்க்கு சளைக்காமல் ஆயிரத்தெட்டு விளக்கங்கள் கொடுத்து அதற்க்கு அவர் காட்டும் அதே புனித நோக்கை மற்றவர்களெல்லாம் கூட கொடுக்கவேண்டும் ஏனென்றால் அதுதான் உண்மை என்று கொக்கரிக்கும் இவர், ரஸ்ஸல் என்ன எவன் சொன்னாலும் கேட்கப்போவதில்லை!!! 

While they enjoy all the privileges that the modern science has to offer and while they will laugh if you say that you can fly a magic carpet, the same is venerated and considered true if told as done by his prophet!! While Science has made men to fly to the moon, religion made men to fly into buildings!! Thats what the beliefs of the fanatics can do! There is no such thing a s a peaceful fanatic. He looks so because he has not got the opportunity. The hate and contempt Mr. Suvanapiriyan and his ilk hold inside their heart against people who do not concur with his god and prophet is matched only by the frustration that beholds him for not having the power to make others relent!!! 

People like Bertrand Russell put in a lot of work for stopping such in their tracks! A truely great man indeed!



__________________
Page 1 of 1  sorted by
 
Quick Reply

Please log in to post quick replies.

Tweet this page Post to Digg Post to Del.icio.us


Create your own FREE Forum
Report Abuse
Powered by ActiveBoard