July 22, 2007
Posted at 5:38 pm by Richard and tagged books, christianity, conversations-with-god, interpretation, neale-donald-walsch, truth. Popularity: 13% [?]
After discussing Misquoting Jesus recently, I thought it was about time I talked about another book that’s had a profound impact on my views – “Conversations with God”. A 3-part (now, with many more ) work in which the author, Neale Donald Walsch, claims to be having an actual written dialogue with God.
“I was unhappy … and my life was feeling like a failure on all levels … This time, rather than another letter to another person I imagined to be vicimizing me, I thought I’d go straight to the source; … I decided to write a letter to God.”
… and, God replies. The book follows with a written dialogue between Walsch and God, talking about prayer, love, divine inspiration and the nature of the bible, and all sorts of potentially controversial topics.
Now, if you haven’t already read these books, you’re probably thinking exactly what I thought when a friend first told me about them – “what kind of nut-job publishes a book claiming he actually had a conversation with God? He’s either nuts, or full of c#@p”. A perfectly valid position to take, but as you read further, you start to understand that it doesn’t matter if Walsch is actually having a conversation with God, if he’s a con artist, or even if he’s nuts – what matters is the book contains some very valid insights.
If God truly did inspire the bible, then why those people? Many of them “never met or saw Jesus in their lives, they lived many years after Jesus left the Earth”. Some might suggest that the bible as we know it cannot be the word of God unless each of these writers, scribes, translators, etc. were all divinely inspired, which further complicates the issue. Walsch (or, God) suggests the answer to this problem is that the bible is not the only divinely inspired text – “everything in life is holy”, and God’s inspiration is available to anyone who “listens”:
“Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.”
The God portrayed in “Conversations with God” is exactly the kind of higher power I could imagine being behind all the world’s religions. There’s no way any one religion has got it perfectly right, because each rely on the words that have been passed down through generations, which have been translated, changed and misinterpreted. Each “divinely inspired” text may have come from people who were more in touch with this “God”, and therefore came closer to God’s true message, but each writer had their own human flaws as well, and thus no text is perfect. In the later books, he hints at the idea that by being “in touch” with God, one is really in touch with oneself – God is not only “in” each of us, but we are (collectively) God.
The book certainly solves some of the issues with traditional religion, but possibly so much so that it’s incompatible with traditional religions (which is probably a good thing!). I mentioned in my previous post “Soft Atheist, Hard Agnostic”, that I am a “soft” agnostic when it comes to “spiritual” gods or other non-interfering higher powers. Despite the personal connection Walsch claims to have with this god, to me his ideas seem very close to these types of “gods”
The books are certainly a departure from the seemingly popular non-fiction books on religion and atheism today, but if you haven’t read anything like this before, it’s not a bad place to start.
Popularity: 13% [?]
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July 1, 2007
Posted at 12:00 am by Richard and tagged bible, books, catholosim, evangelism, marriage, morality, religion, sex, slavery, sociology. Popularity: 15% [?]
It seems a common claim that morality is impossible without religion. While I might agree that in some cases religion (or, more specifically, the fear of eternal damnation) can be a pretty good motivator, I think that a morality that doesn’t rely on religion is not just possible, but it’s a lot more desirable. Last time, I outlined a somewhat extreme view of what some people think of morality without religion. In this post, I’d like to explain how I feel Christian morality (and religion-based morality in general) can be flawed and potentially abused. Next time, I’ll outline some of my ideas about morality.
Immoral Religion
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. – Steven Weinberg
As Steven Weinberg suggests, some people use religion to justify their immorality. I remember a joke I was told a few years ago (by a Lawyer, I think – who knew they had a sense of humour?), that talked about there being two types of Catholics – those who felt so restricted by their religion, that they had very dull lives, and those who live life to the full (“immorality” and all), and then simply ask forgiveness. Religion, I suppose, can be quite liberating for one’s morality if one can always rely on the forgiveness of sins.
According to one book (at least, the review of it that I read) evangelical Christian teenagers, although likely to think not having sex before marriage is the right thing to do, are actually more likely than many other Christians to commit this “sinful” act.
80 percent think sex should be saved for marriage. But thinking is not the same as doing. Evangelical teens are actually more likely to have lost their virginity than either mainline Protestants or Catholics.
Sure, maybe you could argue that these teenagers “aren’t true Christians”, otherwise they wouldn’t be having sex before marriage. But then, that wouldn’t stop people using the bible to justify slavery (as long as the slaves are from neighbouring nations), and killing people who work on the Sabbath. Not to mention all the historical atrocities committed in the name of religion.
I’m definitely not claiming that religious people are necessarily immoral, but I think I’ve shown that it’s certainly possible to “live by the rules” of religion, and act completely immorally (honestly, does anyone still think slavery is moral?). There’s people out there clearly saying that religion is not always a force for good, and they make some pretty good points!
Why, then, do people persist in claiming that religion is the only way to live a moral life?
Popularity: 15% [?]
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June 17, 2007
Posted at 11:07 pm by Richard and tagged books, flatland, god, rudy-rucker, sci-fi, science. Popularity: 11% [?]
One of the earliest books I can remember reading that had an influence on my spirituality was not a book on religion at all but a book by a science fiction writer, Rudy Rucker. “God” is usually talked about as a father figure, or some mystical being (who looks somewhat like us – old dude, white beard) in the sky – and while these stories might be just metaphors for the true nature of God, it created a barrier to the possibility of me ever accepting the existence of higher power. I remember that “The Fourth Dimension: And how to get there” inspired me to think about the possibility of this higher power in a new way. Rudy Rucker is best known as a science fiction writer, but the book “The Fourth Dimension” is a work of non-fiction. In it, Rucker draws on the works of Edwin A. Abbott who wrote “Flatland” in 1884.
In “Flatland” Abbott explores the fictional life of “A. Square”, who lives in a two dimensional world and is visited by “A. Cube” (a 3-dimensional creature). While it’s a rather simplistic example, it raises the possibility that we (3-dimensional creatures) may be surrounded by “beings of a higher dimension” who could interact with us in God-like ways. While I don’t necessarily believe that God is, in fact, a creature from a higher-dimensional universe, the book suggested the possibility that maybe God can physically exist, but still be “omnipotent”.
Rudy Rucker gave me a way of thinking about the nature of a higher power that still allowed me to understand the world from a scientific viewpoint, and while I’m sure it wasn’t his intention – Rudy Rucker opened my mind to the possibility of “God”.
Popularity: 11% [?]
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May 23, 2007
Posted at 10:44 pm by Richard and tagged 10commandments, atheism, bible, books, christianity, homosexuality, interpretation, language. Popularity: 11% [?]
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.”
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” 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? 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’” 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 recently 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.”
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”.
Popularity: 11% [?]
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