28 posts tagged “christian”

There are numerous types of love: platonic love, romantic love, humanistic love. It's been quite a while since I've experienced romantic love. And, to be honest, I'm not sure I will any time soon. As one of my females friends recently told me, I seem to be an emotionally distant person, someone who is emotionally detached. While I've never really noticed this (it's hard to see your own flaws), I don't doubt her statement. For quite sometime, I've just been somewhat emotionless. Now, I'm not saying I'm an emotionless robot or something, but I am someone who watch his emotions and tries to understand when I should be emotional and not. In my life thus far, I've found that we, as humans, are too dramatic and sensitive. It would seem to me that most of our emotions are unjustified--we make a big deal out of nothing. Yet, making a big deal out of nothing is what makes us human because, well, there is nothing, everything is ultimately meaningless, so we have to make something out of nothing.

Anyway, back to the romantic love bit. Recently, I've been hanging out with a girl that I am beginning to really like. Problem is, she is a Christian. Now, this isn't really a problem for me. My current worldview is that we all have our own unique perspectives, which are founded upon subjective grounds, thus making them meaningful. This doesn't mean that I agree with the truthfulness of particular perspectives, but it does mean that I am willing to work with a perspective as long as it produces a meaningful outcome, like living a good life, helping others, etc. Thing is, my nonbeliever status may be a turn off for her (we haven't had this discussion yet).

You see, my Christian friends all believe that a Christian should only marry a Christian. Moreover, they also believe that a Christian should only date a Christian, and should not date if there is no reason to believe that you may end up marrying your boyfriend/girlfriend.

So I'm helping my Christian friends feed the homeless this morning. After the feeding is done, my buddy comes to me and asks how last night went. I tell him I had a wonderful time with the girl I was hanging out with (the Christian girl). He then proceeds to ask me, "Do you know how strong of a Christian she is?" "Uh, not really. We haven't talked about that," I replied. "Oh. Well, I'm just wondering because it may be problematic down the line." The "it" he is referring to is my atheism.

Naturally, this really bothered me. Because I'm not a Christian, this girl may not be able to love me romantically? Mmm, since when did love become constrained? This all led me to ask the question, "Can religion destroy love?" I think it's a good question. I thought love was supposed to have zero constraints. Oh, right, it does if you meet said requirements. If not, then you have problems. You can't be loved by a group if you aren't a part of it. 

Now I wonder if I should talk to this girl about our differences, thereby insuring that neither one of us is wasting our time. Sucks....

There is a devout atheist that writes articles in the school newspaper about the absurdity and irrationality of religion. He has been writing these articles since last year. Given the Christian population at my school, he is constantly pissing people of, which is understandable. As I read his articles, I can't help but notice his tone of belittlement, and I find myself disagreeing with some of what he says. So, I wrote an article in response to one of his:

In Ken Ueda's most recent article, he is correct in saying that not all atheists would agree with his assertion, "Religion is destructive and backwards to human progress," or with his anti-theist position. I, being a nonbeliever myself, do not agree with his assertion or his position. The point of this column is to critique Ueda's most recent article, particularly the anti-theist position he upholds.

The basic premise of antitheism, as described by Ueda, is valid: "people's beliefs guide their actions." He goes on to give some examples that prove this premise to be true. But, his argument goes awry when he uses extreme examples in which a belief would be used to justify a believer's atrocious action to represent the dangerous capacities of religion as a whole: "It shouldn't be a surprise that a fundamentalist that believes that non-believers should be killed takes actions to kill those non-believers."

I'm sorry, but can such an extreme example prove that religion is destructive to human progress? No. Perhaps fundamentalists hold such a belief. Yet how many would actually go through with this belief? How many would actually kill a nonbeliever because their belief justifies his or her action? Not many, if any.

One cannot use extreme examples to show that religion is destructive as a whole, because such extreme examples do not accurately represent the majority of religious beliefs. Moreover, the irrationality of extremists and fundamentalists cannot be applied to all of the religious because the majority of the religious are far more rational than these people. In other words, there is a certain level of rationality that leads most religious people to be moderates, which, in my opinion, is a good thing.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I have more faith in the faithful than Ueda does. The religious are not irrational people. They may be irrational in that they subscribe to a belief that has no legitimate justification, but they are still rational human beings, just not when it comes to religion. With that being said, in our pluralistic society, I think the religious are recognizing that rationality must play a role in determining which beliefs one should hold. In a sense, traditional religious positions must be softened, I think they are being softened, with most people being moderates: religious people use their rationality to reject extreme views that might cause physical danger to others. Of course, pluralism could lead more religious folk to fundamentalism, but I would hope one's rationality would not lead one down such a path. Thus, I think any form of fundamentalism is dangerous, but religion isn't necessarily so.

I imagine that Ueda's response to the above would go something like this: Religious moderates and their religion provide breeding grounds for extremists and fundamentalists. Thus, we should do away with religion to prevent the destruction that could arise from harmful religious beliefs. The thing is, religion isn't destructive, it can be destructive. But what ideology can't be destructive? What ideology isn't a breeding ground for fundamentalism? Is there a difference between secular fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism? No. Both are irrational and intellectually, and potential physically, dangerous. None of this means that we should rid the world of ideologies because of their potentially harmful effects.

The last thing that I would like to address is the quote by Steven Weinberg that Ueda used in his latest article: "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." This is a popular quote amongst atheists, and I can see why. It vilifies religion. Yet Weinberg's assertion is patently fatuous. It implies that the non-religious are incapable of doing evil things and only capable of doing "good," which is flat out false. All humans whether religious or not, are capable of doing good and bad. This, I'm sure, is commonsense to most of us, but atheists copiously quote Weinberg as if his statement has validity. See? Even atheists are capable of being irrational.

The majority of people, at least religious people, believe that morality comes from religion. I have argued hat this is not the case numerous times, but I was thinking: Even if people actually believe morality comes from religion, how is such a belief even possible? How can morality possibly come from religion? Well, I was thinking, and I don't see how the religious can rationally believe this (and, yes, the religious can be rational within the system of religion).

Traditionally, morality derived from religion is considered to be absolute, unchanging, black and white. First of all, it is quite clear that religious morals change as societies are influenced by thought and culture. Secondly, how can we use religion as a basis for absolute morality when Christians themselves, or any religious peoples for that matter, cannot even decide what is moral and what is immoral.

Is homosexuality morally permissible in the eyes of God? Well, queer theology thinks so. But, what about those God-hates-fags-believing people? Uh, well, homosexuality is completely immoral. You see, both groups call themselves Christians and subscribe to the same holy book, but neither one can agree on what is moral and what is immoral, when probably the majority within each group claims that morality is absolute.

Thirdly, how is religious morality black and white? It isn't. Religious morality usually comes in the form of rules: this is moral, this is not. How can we form moral rules for subjective experiences? What if, at the time of the experience, what the rule deems to be immoral is actually quite moral. Or what if, given the individual's subjectivity, the rule seems to be morally contradictory. Perhaps I was Hitler's child. Should I honor my father? Probably not. Or what if I was homeless and needed something to eat? Are you honestly telling me I couldn't steal something to eat? What if I was too kill someone in self-defense? What if I needed to kill someone in order to prevent the harm that could possibly be imposed on others? Possibly moral rules can be used as guidelines, but rules are meant to be broken, especially moral rules.

I don't see morality as a system of rules working all that well. I prefer a system of virtues.   

I was talking with my buddy last night. We were watching House on television; I was sitting on the couch across from where my buddy was sitting. There was a commercial break and we began to talk about something. I'm not sure how we started talking about this topic, but I started talking about the poor and the homeless.

My twin brother is a Christian and active in church and community service. Every Wednesday night he goes downtown and helps feed the homeless. My brother told me a story last week that really touched me. If I remember correctly, over a couple of feeding sessions, my brother had gotten to know this particular homeless man. He comes to the place my brother helps at and grabs a meal every week. Then, he goes across town to shack up in a homeless shelter for the night, but he hadn't been able to get over there for a few days because his car didn't have a battery. The guy asked my brother if he could possibly get a ride to the shelter this past Wednesday night. My brother and his friend took the guy to the shelter, where the man showed my brother his car without a battery.The man was so thankful for my brother and his friend's kindness and willingness to help someone in need. Now the guy could sleep well. Then, my brother and his friend gave him $15, and the man was even more thankful. I could really tell that my brother felt good about helping another human in need. After hearing this story, I told my brother that I would like to go and help him feed the homeless.

I told this to my buddy last night and he asked me "Why?" I replied, "Wouldn't you want to help another person in need?" "No. I have better things to do with my time. And, well, I really just don' care to help others that I don't know or are strangers." After hearing this, I was pretty pissed off. "You are what's wrong with society. We don't fucking help each other anymore because we "don't care" or because we don't *know* the people in need. It is every man/woman for his or herself. American individualism is what is killing us. The very thing we all treasure is killing us. Don't you feel a responsibility to help your fellow man who is in existential need?" "Dude, no. I just don't care. Why would I?" What's more, the idiot said, "Dude, you sound like a Christian. You sound just like a religious person." This has nothing to do with religion or being a Christian. Any decent human would feel like he or she has a responsibility to help others in need and the community as a whole. 

My buddy talks like he has no time. Ha, yeah right. He could definitely make time by cutting out his WoW play and by decreasing the amount of time he spends playing other pointless games.

My buddy's thoughts on this topic are the epitome of what is wrong with American society.    

I'm taking a religious studies course (very different from a theology course) over the Gospel of Mark this semester and have thoroughly enjoyed myself thus far. The class isn't too demanding, but there is a ton of reading for each class. And, well, I have to write a 25 page research paper on a topic of my choosing. The only restriction is that the topic has to deal with the Gospel of Mark in some way. I'm not sure what I'm going to write about. Perhaps the Historical Jesus, Jesus and Mysticism, or the Future of Christianity.

The Gospel of Mark is the earliest gospel, dating to around 70 CE. Scholars aren't sure whether this gospel was written right before, during, or after 70 CE. 70 CE is an important date because this is when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans. Because of this date, Mark is considered to be the earliest of the synoptic gospels, which comprise of Mark, Matthew and Luke. The majority of scholars think that Matthew and Luke based their gospels on Mark and another source called "Q" (Quelle in German which means source) by scholars. Q is thought to be a gospel similar to the Gospel of Thomas that was used by both Matthew and Luke to create their gospels.

It is important to note that we do not know who the author of Mark was and that we do not have the original copy of Mark. Moreover, we only have copies of copies of copies of copies. As far as textual evidence goes, we only have 8 complete copies of Mark from the first 800 years of Christianity and about 5500 bits and pieces of manuscript dated post-9th century.Furthermore, the complete copies are not all exactly the same--this is due to additions, changes, mistakes and omissions made by scribes over the years.

One of the things scholars know is that the author of Mark seriously thought that the "end times" were near and were going to happen soon. In light of this knowledge, most people who derive meaning from the Gospel of Mark believe that the end times have yet to come and will come. This type of thinking is extremely tetchy, to say the least.

Furthermore, the author of Mark was writing to a specific group during a specific time in a specific environment. It is hard to imagine that the author of Mark thought that his gospel would be used over the course of the next 2,000 years to derive meaning from. His gospel wasn't meant to do this. I read an article for class that talked about reader-response criticism--which argues whatever meaning is and wherever it is found, the reader is ultimately responsible for determining it, thus the intended meaning by the author is irrelevant--and meaning, and wrote this in response:

Throughout my reading of Fowler’s article, I couldn’t help but ask “Should we even derive meaning from the Gospel of Mark?” More specifically, did the author of Mark intend for us to derive meaning from his gospel nearly two thousand years later? These are profound questions that require answers, although I think most people, even some scholars, are hesitant to ask such questions. My reasoning is this: if the author of Mark was writing with a specific purpose and agenda to a specific community in a specific time period and honestly thought that the “end times” were coming, then we shouldn’t be deriving meaning from the gospel solely because it wasn’t written with that intent for us to do so. This isn’t to say that we can’t derive meaning from Mark, because we most definitely can, but perhaps we shouldn’t derive meaning from Mark because the meaning we derive will not be close to what the author was intending.

Meaning is a function of many things: culture, language, interpretation, theology, environment, experience, etc. Thus, the intended meaning of the author of Mark is nearly impossible to recreate because we were not there to experience the environment and culture in which the ancient reader would’ve constructed his or her meaning. Subjective experience in the author’s environment is crucial to understanding the author’s intended meaning, yet we cannot create subjective experiences in the ancient environment. Thus, any meaning we derive from the gospel is tainted by our modern-day culture, language, theology—which has no doubt evolved since the author’s time—environment, and experience.

In conclusion, my biggest problem with reader-response criticism is the lack of objectivity. Contrary to what Soren Kierkegaard believed, objectivity should always influence the subjective. This isn’t to say that the subjective meaning is useless, quite the contrary—subjective meaning is immensely important. If the objective intent of the author cannot be derived, and the purpose of the author wasn’t for us to deriving meaning from his work almost two thousand years later, then perhaps we shouldn’t be deriving meaning from it in the way most of us do.

Is this the Christian conception of love? There is no such thing as "the" Christian conception of love: at different times, different Christians have held many different conceptions of love. But when one offers four cardinal virtues, it is appropriate to consider Paul's celebrated paean on love in First Corinthians 13, since this is the classical exposition of the three Christian virtues. Paul couples love with faith and hope, and his conception of love involves faith and hope: "Love," he says, "believes all things, hopes all things." The love I mean does not believe all things and hope all things. It survives disillusionment and persists in despair. Love is not love that ceases without hope or  faith. As long as faith and hope support it, it is hardly more than puppy love. That love is pleasant is a fashionable myth, or, to be more charitable about it, the exception. The Buddha knew that love brings "hurt and misery, suffering, grief, and despair"; and he advised detachment.* The love I consider a virtue is not the blind love of the lovers or the trusting, hopeful love of Paul, but the love that knows what the Buddha knew and still loves, with open eyes.

-Walter Kaufmann

  When we investigate what Christians mean by their peculiar use of the word faith, I think we come to the remarkable conclusion that all their accounts of it are either unintelligible or false. Their most famous account is that in Hebrew 11:1 "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." This is obviously unintelligible. In any case, it does not make faith a virtue, since neither a substance nor an evidence can be a virtue. A virtue is a praiseworthy habit of choice, and neither a substance nor an evidence can be a habit of choice, When a Christian gives an intelligible account of faith. I think you will find that it is false. I mean that it is not a true dictionary report of how he and other Christians actually use the word. For example. Augustine asked: "What is faith but believing what you do not see? (Joannis Evang. Tract., c. 40, 8). But Christians do not use the word faith in the sense of believing what you do not see. You do not see thunder; but you cannot say in the Christian sense "have faith that it is thundering," or "I have faith that it has thundered in the past and will again in the future." You do not see mathematical truths; but you cannot say in the Christian sense "have faith that there is no greatest number." If we take Augstine's see to stand here for know, still it is false that Christians use the word faith to mean "believing what you do not know," for they would never call it faith if anyone believed that the sun converts hydrogen into helium, although he did not know it.
  A good hit of what Christian really mean by their word faith can be got by considering the proposition: "Tom Paine had faith that there is no god." Is this a possible remark, in the Christian sense of the word faith? No, it is an impossible remark, because it is self-contradictory, because part of what Christians mean by faith is belief that there is a god.
  There is more to it than this. Christian faith is not merely believing that there is a god. It is believing that there is a god no matter what the evidence on the question may be. "Have faith," in the Christian sense, means "make yourself believe that there is a god no matter what the evidence on the question may be. Christian faith is a habit of flouting reason in forming and maintaining one's answer to the question whether there is a god. Its essence is the determination to believe that there is a god no matter what the evidence may be.

-Richard Robinson

What do you think? Is his analysis of "faith" accurate?

My brother's pastor has been going through some rough times. His wife recently gave birth to their first child, which had to be in the ICU for a couple of weeks. Life, the child's name, had bleeding in her brain and for a while her parents thought she wasn't going to make it. I'm not close to my brother's pastor, but I have met him a couple of times and I can honestly say he is a nice guy. I can't imagine what him and his wife have being going through. Luckily, it seems that Life is doing much better.

The pastor and his wife have a blog that they update quite frequently. Lately, they have been blogging about Life and the situation they have been going through. I couldn't sleep last night, so I decided to check their blog, which I rarely do. After looking at some pictures, I found a post that was a prime example of what I completely disagree with: the rationalization of suffering and pain. This post was written by the pastor.

He first starts out by saying that God has lead him and his wife down a path the last few weeks. He juxtaposes two paths: the good path, which leads to a health baby, and the bad path, which leads to complications with the baby's health, possibly resulting in the baby's death. 

He continues by saying:

Pain is real. I know the other path presents great pain, much greater than we experienced. But I also know that God resurrects pain into something beautiful. When Jesus was resurrected, his resurrected body, which is the prototype for the rest of creation, had nail scars in it. God saw fit to resurrect a disgusting moment of pain into his new creation, making it unspeakably beautiful. If God gave you the other path, believe that God will resurrect your pain. It is real. It hurts. But I believe the degree to which we experience pain is the degree to which we will experience joy when the Day comes (and, my friends, the Day has already dawned).

I think you can already see my objections with his thoughts. First of all, and this is something that I've never really understood, how is it that Jesus, who is supposed to be both fully God and fully human, felt pain during his crucifixion? And if he felt some sort of "pain," I don't think it would exactly equate to human suffering. For some reason, I think God's "suffering" and human suffering are quite different. My main objection to the above excerpt is the rationalization of pain and suffering to some afterlife or future event. The mentality is that all this pain and suffering must to lead to some sort of happiness later on. Instead of trying to accept this pain and suffering now, the notion of some future event or afterlife is used as a beacon of hope, which I find to be false. But, he is only doing what Christianity teaches...

He goes on to say that "God entered into the depths of our pain, and He did it in the form of a Jewish peasant. As a matter of fact, He took all the pain of all the world for all time, took it upon his back, bore it's weigh, allowed it to do it's worst to Him. He absorbed it, defeated it, and triumphed over it. God stands beside us in our pain, not above us." Are we not talking about God here? Honestly, isn't God suppose to defeat and triumph over pain and death? I don't see how this is amazing in any way. We are talking about God here!

He ends his post by basically saying the antithesis of what I think: "It is good to feel pain, hate sin, hate death, look to God, hope in His resurrection, long for it, and work for it in the here and now." At least he acknowledges the "here and now." Nevertheless, his belief in rationalizing pain and suffering to God overrides his "here and now" mentality. Because what he is essentially saying is: Work here and now for the benefits after death. This isn't a true "here and now" mentality. It is a "here and now" mentality with the focus on something other than the "here and now."