Friendly outgoing eclectic agnostic seeks one gram of soul
I’m not always a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen, the man behind character like Ali-G and Borat, but he does come out with some funny ones occasionally.
Best line from the clip:
Ali-G: “Let’s talk about this man, the main man, the mack daddy of this Christian thing… what was his name again?”
Catholic Priest (clearly frustrated): “Jesus Christ!”
Assume, for a moment, that there is in fact a God. If we follow a “correct” religion, then we will be able to “know god”, “reach nirvana” or otherwise know some ultimate truth. If we follow a “wrong” religion, then, well, we put ourselves at the mercy of the “correct” God. Since every religion has different rules and beliefs about the nature of God and how to reach “heaven”, we immediately have a problem. Either:
If “all religions are wrong” (but there still is a God), then we have a serious problem. It could be that there is a correct religion, but we just don’t know what it is yet (or, we’ve long since abandoned it), or that religious teaching is inherently incapable of allowing us to reach God. If these is indeed a God (which we’ve assumed, for now) and God has provided no way of “reaching heaven”, or at least, seems uninterested in educating us. Given the vast number of religious beliefs we have, if God actually played any part in inspiring these beliefs, we’re either incapable of being inspired in this way (which would be God’s fault, if we are his creations), or God’s doing a bad job of inspiring us. A powerless or incompetent God seems worse than no god at all!
If we assume that “some religions are wrong”, and therefore some are “right”, then there must be one or more religions (the “right” ones) which are similar on some fundamental level, and it is only at this level that matters. For example, we have two “correct” religions - Religion A and Religion B.
If both state that “there is only one true God”, but Religion A says God likes to be worshipped on a Friday, but Religion B states that all worshipping should be performed on a Tuesday, then it must not matter if you worship God on a Friday or a Tuesday. If this were the case, then religions are more complicated than they need to be - to reach heaven, we don’t need to follow all the rules, only the ones that matter.
The “all but one” option is, I suppose, an extension of the previous idea. For one religion to be right, and all others wrong - there must be some point at which two religions differ on a fundamental principle. In other words, if my religious views were exactly the same as the “right” religion except for one detail, and I am “wrong”, but the other religion is “right” then that detail must be fundamental to the “correctness” of religion. This seems to be the view that many religions take - every religion but this one is wrong. Of course, given that all religions make this claim, how do we know who’s telling the truth?
Finally, if “all religions are right”, perhaps the fundamental concepts of religion which must exist before a religion can be considered “right” are so broad, that every religion agrees on the points that matter. Eating pork, getting circumcised, abortion & contraception, wearing a hijab, etc. are trivial and God doesn’t care (or, is willing to allow us to make up our own minds on these issues). This could mean that every religion simply looks at the “truth” from a different perspective adding their own “flourishes”, but each is equally correct. Or, as far as God’s concerned, all that matters is that you have religion (whatever that may mean).
This last option is also the one I find most compelling, and in my next post, I’ll attempt to justify this choice using a variation of Pascal’s Wager.
If you read my essay Reconciling Darwinian Natural Selection with Christian Theology (and you did, didn’t you?) You’d know that I think it’s entirely possible to believe in both Darwinian evolution, and the Christian God (not that I necessarily do, but the possibility isn’t entirely ruled out). There are different ways of accepting evolution and Christian theology, of course, and I’m sure even Christians who have reconciled their faith with evolution differ on the specifics, as I outlined by the two views expressed by Moore and Gray:
“Moore separated [special creation and evolutionist theories] by allowing them both to act in their own time periods. For Moore, special creation was the mode for primary creation, while evolution was the method by which species continued to diversify. Gray, on the other hand, separated them by purpose. While evolution was the guiding process by which species were created, God was still the driving force behind it.”1
One group that may not be convinced by either of these options, however, are those who believe that the bible is to be taken literally, and is infallible. Putting aside, for the moment, my views on this position as a whole, this raises another important question:
If the words in the bible are the true word of God, then which version of the words do we take as the ultimate truth?
As you are probably aware, the bible as we know it today didn’t come down written on stone tablets like the 10 commandments supposedly did - it was written by many different authors, over many years. Even worse, we don’t actually have many of these original writings. We have copies of copies of copies of copies, with god knows (irony intended) how many errors. Then, of course, we have the issues of translation. It’s one thing to say that the original scriptures were the infallible word of God, but that each and every version of the bible (however different) is also God’s infallible word?
Then, of course, there’s the issue of contradictions within the bible itself. If we assume these translations are trustworthy, how to we know which bits to follow when there are definite contradictions? “The Atheist’s Wager”2 examines one aspect of the problem noting that Jews and Christians seem to have very different ideas on what God actually thinks about homosexuality based on giving authority to certain words in the bible over others - how do we know which ones are really important?3 When is the last time you heard a Christian or Jew saying “I’m sorry, I can’t eat shrimp or oysters, the bible clearly states ‘all creatures in the seas or streams that do not have fins and scales … you are to detest. And since you are to detest them, you must not eat their meat’”4 Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps people like this do actually exist - anyone met any? Of course, the seafood issue isn’t the only one - have a look at Skeptics Annotated Bible for just some of the “absurdities” that can be found within the word of God.
A book I’ve been reading recently5 goes much into much more detail about the problems with the issues associated with translation and access to the original biblical writings. So, even if we wanted to take the bible at its literal word, there seems to be no hope of doing this without significant problems in verification of what those words actually are.
“Christianity from the outset was a bookish religion that stressed certain texts as authoritative scripture… , however, we don’t actually have these authoritative texts… we can’t interpret the words of the New Testament if we don’t know what the words were.”6
We need to interpret the bible if it’s to have any real meaning. And in doing so, there will obviously be different interpretations. How can we know which interpretation is correct? Simply, we can’t - that’s why the bible should not be treated as a 100% factual account of history or the nature of god. It is definitely a valuable text, which has historical and spiritual significance, but I fail to see how it can logically be accepted as “gospel”.
Here are some of the sites I’ve been looking at recently, that I wanted to share:
I found this video a while back, and thought it appropriate to post here. Enjoy “Creation Science 101″
This essay was originally written in 2006 for the subject “God and the Natural Sciences” at Melbourne University’s History and Philosophy of Science department.
“Some Nineteenth century Christian Darwinians were scientifically and theologically successful in reconciling Darwinian Natural Selection with Christian theology.”
Darwin’s ideas have been greatly debated over the years, but most of all his theory on natural selection, cited by Gould as the means by which these favourable variations are acquired, and thus, after long periods of time new species created. “Natural selection is a process by which biological populations are altered over time, as a result of the propagation of heritable traits that affect the capacity of individual organisms to survive and reproduce.” This caused issues for many, especially those for whom ‘special creation’ was the preferred method by which new species were created. For many, God had been exiled from the process of creation and, if one accepted Darwin’s arguments, there seemed to be no plausible theological alternative but to hold a Deistic or Atheistic point of view.
Read the rest of this entry »
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman
Atheist Manifesto by Michel Onfray
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