Judge Not

"Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment that you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye," when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." (Matthew 7:1-5)

These verses have puzzled me in the context of the verses that follow.

"Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine" (Matthew 7:6)

"Beware of false prophets...You will know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:15,16,20).

Thus, this principle isn't a statement of moral relativity or tolerance of evil or a recognition of human falliability, so far as I can tell. To the contrary, my reading of the full context is that we must judge and indeed much of ethics is nothing more than judgment-- discernment of moral truth from falsehood. Thus, I would paraphase the phrase as "Judge not falsely, that you be not judged falsely."

What say you?

Read More.

Moderation and Nonconformity

How would you reconcile these two ideas, in personal terms?

Philippians 4:5: "Let your moderation be know to all men..."
Romans 12:2 "And be not conformed to this world..."

Doesn't prudence require that you conform to the folkways of tradition? The problem with a theory of moderation is that by definition, you allow the extremes to define what is immoderate and thereby you choose to go between those extremes. But could it be that the moderate path is the unethical path whereas the extreme path-- the path of non-prudence and non-conformity-- is the ethical path? Thus, a moderate in Bull Connor's Alabama during the Selma march would neither condone police brutality nor efforts to introduce civil rights to (as they were called back then) negroes. Does moderation ever effectuate change?

Prudence may mean going along with one's traditions or it might not.
It would not have been prudent to join King's march on Selma but it was the right thing to do. It had advantages to the whole of civilization but not to one's own best interests. Prudence is not only appreciation of the situation at hand and doing what is appropriate to that situation but it also involves doing what is appropriate to the advancement of the society as a whole. That is where arete fits in with the notion of prudence. Perhaps a prudent person would have stayed home that day but would have applied himself or herself to advancing the causes that the marchers were advocating. I don't know.

My view is that non-conformity is a a spiritual and intellectual ideal-- to be "transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable, and perfect will of God." I understand moderation however to mean temperament-- the shape of one's mind-- in trying to communicate truth effectively but amiably.

There is a strain in Christianity that is dangerously immoderate. I have noted in my lifetime the prevalence of Christian apocalyptic death cults. In the case of Jim Jones who poisoned almost 1,000 of his followers in in 1978, he started in a mainline liberal denomination, but during his years in the jungle became an atheist. However, on the other side of the political spectrum, as right wing as Jones was left wing, you have the cultist David Koresh who immolated 84 of his followers at Waco, Texas at the time of our honeymoon. Koresh preached pre-millennialism and saw his prophecies realized when the government overreacted. And then you have in 1997, 39 members of Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult who killed themselves. Jones, Koresh, and Applewhite called themselves Christians, although obviously they were not. These false prophets tricked simple, trusting people and those people who died did so because they acted on an excess of blind faith and in the absence of constructive doubt and critical thought. Religious zealots truly scare me, and that motivates me to give my boys the mental tools to deal with such folk. The most dangerous people are those who take the words of Our Savior and dangerously twist them. In the 10th chapter of Matthew, Jesus says: "Think not that I come to send peace on the earth: I come not to send peace but a sword. For I come to set man at variance against his father …He that loveth his father or mother more than me; and he that loveth his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." And, on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus says "If you right eye offend thee, pluck it out…And if your right hand offend thee, cut it off." While I don't think these challenging words are words of a fanatic, they surely have fueled fanaticism, causing some unstable minds to abandon their families or harm themselves.

I'm not sure that the answer is the pursue moderation for its own sake. This basically means that we let others decide the extremes of opinions while we walk down the middle of the road where the dead skunks lie. Philosophers going back to the Greeks of the Golden Mean have recommended a life of moderation. Our hero in Daniel Defoe’s 17th century novel Robinson Crusoe had his father cast pearls of wisdom before the swine: “He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had fewer disasters and was not expos’d to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind.” But moderation is not always right. “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” said Arizona’s most famous liberal Barry Goldwater in a speech that was much criticized. “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” That this was said at the high noon of the Cold War set off four-station alarm bells. But I think the basic proposition is beyond reproach. There are times when moderation is immoral and unethical.

The Problem of Pain

A man named Rick Rood wrote this interesting article about "The Problem of Evil". It starts by saying, "John Stott has said that "the fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith." It is unquestionably true that there is no greater obstacle to faith than that of the reality of evil and suffering in the world. Indeed, even for the believing Christian, there is no greater test of faith than this--that the God who loves him permits him to suffer, at times in excruciating ways. And the disillusionment is intensified in our day when unrealistic expectations of health and prosperity are fed by the teachings of a multitude of Christian teachers. Why does a good God allow his creatures, and even his children to suffer?"

www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/evil.html

According to the Bible, God punishes those who hate or ignore him as in Ezekiel 20:24-26:

"Because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, and had polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes were after their fathers' idols. Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD."

It hardly seems God is allowing freedom, but instead demanding obedience. This passage does not suggest that the evil is the natural or inevitable result of disobedience, but the specific act of God in response to it.

Good observation. However, there are many other passages that intimate that God is a god of grace, and that mercy proceeds justice.

I also have a problem with Hume's formulation:

"David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher, stated the logical problem of evil when he inquired about God, "Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

Consider a father with a five year old playing next to a busy street. That father would indeed be evil if he did not prevent an immanent evil of that child running into the traffic. But that same father would not be evil if that child was a mature ten year old. The question is no longer a matter of the father's impotence or inability to to prevent evil, but the father now recognizing that the child is developing personhood and commonsense to prevent the evil himself from happening.

I also have a problem with the notion that pain is punishment or that pain is meant to teach us some kind of a lesson. Here is an essay I wrote on this point.

“Tell me about your God of love,” an atheist wrote to me, “for all that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14.” Never let it be said that atheists haven’t read the scriptures. Sometimes they have read it only too well. And I must admit that I too I have trouble squaring God’s command to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” with the One who said “Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” That God would inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job.
Grandma June provided one answer to Natalie Angier. “When I was eight years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died,” she writes. “The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.”

A 16 year old has more questions for an advice columnists: “When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block making fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I’m a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people—even myself—so I can’t blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad fate? Even if I did some bad things, I didn’t do any before I was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn’t know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don’t believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?”

The basic formulation for the problem is as follows: If God is good, He is not God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish to make his creatures happy. If God was all-powerful, He would be able to do what He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or both. Either God doesn’t exist or He is impotent or He is evil.

In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the end of history. It’s a hollow argument made by some theologians to explain the holocaust—that Hitler was God’s punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was fulfilled when the state of Israel was born.

“Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear, kind God'! “

The classic counter is that God made man not as robots but with free moral agency. God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral universe without at the same time freeing man’s spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good, there would be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. The classic Christian reply to suffering makes sense only if we assume that God is not in control of all that happens. If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then God must be responsible. If those actions are bad, then God must be evil and the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a contingent universe and delegated to humanity the freedom to work through the vicissitudes of life—dealing with war, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally, intellectually, and technologically. So this is another reason why I believe God’s self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life, death, and God.

This accords with the view of Harold Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the “rapid aging disease. By the time his son had died at 14, the boy looked like an old man. “An aching sense of unfairness” led Kushner to write the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner argues that bad things didn’t happen because God wants to punish us for our sins, test our strength, or teach us lessons. Instead, Kushner sees randomness to the universe. Lottery winners are merely lucky—not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn’t question ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect and unfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and hurricanes that kills hundred of people “acts of God”, but they use God’s name in vain. These are acts of nature, not acts of God. Nature is morally blind. The act of God is the courage of us to continue in the face of disaster.

But I think this is a sterile argument that doesn’t address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of the two million Jewish babies and children that were swallowed by the maw of the Nazi death camps, including kids of relatives of my wife. It makes me think that if there is a God, it’s a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be good strikes me as incomprehensible. Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from the Reverend Charles Kingley: “As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words “If the dead rise not, let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all the best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came, the cause of great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge.”

I have great sympathy for this reaction, and should I lose my wife or child, my grief would be as great, but I could not be persuaded that their lives had been at no purpose. I think of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the orthodox Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain. You may remember the movie “Shadowlands”, played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had a crisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end of the day, there are no satisfactory answers—only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends. In one of the last scenes in “Shadowlands,” we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears. Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God. Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job—without an explanation but with the existential experience of God—turns for questioning to wondering silence: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” In this fragment of time on this island in space, we are in this together and we must help each other out. Evil and suffering is inextricably part of the human condition individually and institutionally, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.” It did not say, “My tragedy comes from the Lord.” The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning.

It's really due to Epicurus, not Hume. Many explanations for evil have been invented. Some, such as the free will defense you cite, do an acceptable prima facie job with moral evils such as war and crime, but do not even touch on contingent evils such as natural disasters and epidemic diseases.

Why reject the free will defense of evil as a method of teaching the ways of God to man? My answer would be that it is obviously random and often misapplied. God allows a child to die a cruel death to teach the parents to serve him better? Not truly credible. God's methods of insruction in this defense seem crude and unfocused —the innocent are often taken with the guilty.

It is true that natural disasters appear random and that is because they are random. Insurance companies call them Acts of God, only because they are outside of the domain of man's control, such as a hurricane. I agree that there is no credibility to the idea that they such disasters are meant to impart a moral lesson (a view that many fundamentalists ascribe to the 9/11 attacks-- Wall Street was attacked because of what the gays were doing in San Francisco.) The rebuttal is a ditty that circulated after the 1907 earthquake in San Francisco, that goes like this:

If, as some say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling's whiskey?

The only answer that makes sense to me is to presuppose a God who is not immanent and who is not omnipotent, at least in the way we perhaps would like to believe. Thus, natural disasters that wipe out the good and the bad, the wise and the dumb, the rich and the poor, are all inseperable from the human condition. And, as such, God gives humans the gift of evil so that we can transcend ourselves through medicine, inventions, discovery, and charity. A world that is free from evil would also be free from morality and love as well as science and reason. Perhaps we cannot do good without experiencing evil anymore than we can have light without also having darkness. In Shadowlands, Lewis proclaims that "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." But in the rueful acceptance and grief of the death of his wife, he finds that "We can't have the happiness of yesterday without the pain of today. That's the deal."

Is Man Totally Depraved?

Yes, in Romans 3:10-11 for example

As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.

And Calvin in the Institutes, Book II, Chapter I, §8 says:

"Hence, even infants bringing their condemnation with them from their mother's womb, suffer not for another's, but for their own defect. For although they have not yet produced the fruits of their own unrighteousness, they have the seed implanted in them. Nay, their whole nature is, as it were, a seed-bed of sin, and therefore cannot but be odious and abominable to God. Hence it follows, that it is properly deemed sinful in the sight of God; for there could be no condemnation without guilt.Next comes the other point, viz., that this perversity in us never ceases, but constantly produces new fruits, in other words, those works of the flesh which we formerly described; just as a lighted furnace sends forth sparks and flames, or a fountain without ceasing pours out water. Hence, those who have defined original sin as the want of the original righteousness which we ought to have had, though they substantially comprehend the whole case, do not significantly enough express its power and energy. For our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle."

There can be no doubt that in Christianity man is evil through and through and is totally depraved, without hope to save himself.

The baseline teaching of Christianity, at least most of it, is that mankind is simul peccator et iustus, both sinner and justified at the same time and capable of both. While Christianity seems to hold with some hereditary taint, it also holds people responsible for their actions.

Monastic theology was an interesting wrinkle. While thoroughly Christian, it focuses on the humanity of Jesus with the optimistic view that humans can become more godlike. The Orthodox call it theosis, of course, but Western monasticism holds much the same. This may be a result of its roots in John Cassian, who was a monk from Egypt who formed a religious order that gave rise eventually to the Benedictines. Cassian's own conferences had a really optimistic view of mankind (and womankind), saying that God's desire to save everyone is enormously powerful. His conference on the subject is considered a refutation of Augustine's predestinarian views -- views that Calvin swallowed whole. Even Augustine reconsidered them late in life but Calvin didn't.

Judaism holds that we are capable of doing evil and good, that both tendencies exist within us, and that we need to listen to our "better angels." I mention this not to make Judaism look good but as a way of getting into the part the monastic rule plays in that theosis/reformation of manners. The monastic rule governs every part of the monk's day, how he prays, when he prays, what he eats, how he relates to his brother monks (translate this into female for convents and nuns). The monastic rule makes the 613 mitzvot look like whoopie but it serves the same purpose. It is not a way to keep the monk/nun from sinning but rather a way of helping him/her be good the way the order feels God intends.

Much of Christian theology stresses our sinful nature, that we were conceived in iniquity, born in sin, and all we like sheep have gone astray and will continue to do so. But I wonder if this is a case of taking something that is explicitly taught in the Bible-- that all have sinned-- and making into something that isn't taught-- that there is nothing good about us-- that we are utterly evil and corrupt. Consider, for example, some of the images in the Bible, such as the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 and that we are children of a King and ambassadors of His Kingdom. So many Christians in particular lack a sense of self-worth to the point of joylessness and depression. It is as if they have over internalized to their harm the hymn that God saves "a wretch like me." My thoughts when I hear "Amazing Grace" is that while I've done bad things in my life, I'm far from wretched.

I recently read a book by Roy Robertson, who headed the Navigators, a missionary organization in Asia. His book Legacy of Discipleship describes some of the implications and my own reservations about this theory of man's total depravity.

"Even in the traditions of the Christian religion we find someone else to blame-- at least temporarily. We can place the blame squarely on Adam and Eve, our first parents. Doesn't Romans 5:12 say because of their sin death passed upon all men, for all have sinned?

"Augustine and other Catholic fathers carried this even further. The Catholic Church dogmatically taught that because of Adam's sin, man not only received the condemnation of death but he was fundamentaly changed do that he became utterly depraved, physically and morally. The implications are devastating.

"If man is toitally depraved morally, he has no capacity to choose to do good. So man has inherited both a body and a will that is corrupt. He has no choice but to do evil. If man has no choice, then he is not responsible. Who then is responsible? We blame God for making us like we are, and we conclude we have an unjust God! He punishes us for that we cannot help. We have reached a position that contradicts many clear passages of the World of God.

"Coupled with Augustine's teaching of inherited total depravity, which locked man in a terrible state of helplessness, was his view on predestination which reinforced the helpless feeling that there was no way of escape. He taught that "God had a fixed number of those eho would be saved, and those utterly without any chance for salvation. Nothing could be done to alter that number." How terribly depressing, not even a ray of hope! We are damned and nothing can be done to change it. We must cast ourselves on the mercy of the clergy of the church who hold they keys to heaven.

"But wait, the words of Jesus Christ ring like heavenly music in the dark dungeon of despair. "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10) "God so loved the world that He gave his only begotton Son , that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life" (John 3:16)

I have to agree that Robertson's position is more aligned to how I read the Bible, that we are not totally depraved, that no matter what you are or who you are, we matter to God, and that the choice is in our hands whether or not we choose redemption. I see no evidence from the Bible to support the claim that the fall impaired man's will. To the contrary, according to Genesis 3:22, Adam and Eve's act of disobedience enhanced our will by allowing us to recognize moral differences, "to know good and evil".

That was a very interesting and thoughtful post. As an atheist I am not entitled to comment credibly on Christian theology, but that usually doesn't stop me.

You probably agree with me that as a one sentence summary of Christian theology, you can't do better than the oft-quoted Romans 5: 19 For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.

However, taking that as the baseline there are several directions in which you can proceed. If you need to justify a doctrine like predestination, as Calvin did, you want to emphasize the total depravity of man so that it does not seem unjust. If you want to justify universal salvation, you would prefer to emphasize the atonement as giving hope to all. Some might see an equal balance between them as the only way to keep people awake.

I have always thought that Buddhism is more encouraging than Christianity in the sense of leading the individual to do good. It recognizes that people start in different places with different minds and make progress at different rates, but in the end, over the very long haul all reach enlightenment. Human life is considered a precious gift that puts you closer and is therefore to be taken advantage of.

I'm not Jewish, but that has never stopped me before from talking about something I know nothing about. :) There is much we can learn from our Jewish brothers and sisters on this point.

http://www.jewsforjudaism.org/web/faq/faq123.html

Christians, it seems to me, start from a baseline that we are all sinners, that we all start in the classroom of life with a "F", whereas the Jewish religion presupposes God's love for us, that we start with an "A". Simplistically, Christians are born again into redemption whereas Jews maintain their covenant with God by keeping the law. It is as if Christians transcend that "F" through conversion while devout Jews maintain that "A" by following the Talmud.

My view is that one's journey of faith starts out neutrally, at a "C" as it were, and it is both a conscious choice (say, of being born again or of adhearing to your Jewish heritage) and a life's journey having to do with personal ethics and other-awareness.

The Folly of Calvinism

"The difference is that Calvinism recognizes a dimension of the saving love of God which Arminianism misses, namely God's sovereignty in bringing to faith and keeping in faith all who are actually saved. Arminianism gives Christians much to thank God for, and Calvinism gives them more."

www.lgmarshall.org/Arminianism/packer_arminianisms.html

I disagree. Arminianism gives Christians a reason to make moral choices, a reason to fight evil, a reason to have a conscience, and a reason for Christ's atonement. Calvinism presupposes something that the Bible never states-- that God's sovereignty voids man's ability to recognize and choose good from evil, salvation from damnation, and thusly gives Christians much less.

My chief objection to Calvanism is that it is morally evasive. If the Devil made me do it or God made me do it, why should I be blamed or rewarded accordingly? If God is sovereign over all, what is the point of the tree in the Garden of Eden—or indeed the tree from which Our Lord was crucified? If He is the potter and we are the clay, if He is the chess master and we are the pawns, then where is our responsibility for anything including even our existence? If God predetermines everyone for either hell or heaven, why waste time, money, and effort on churches and missions? How does God’s creation of a single human being who will inevitably go to Hell glorify God? From the Garden or Eden on, man has been presented with choices, and it is entirely up to us as to whether we make the right or the wrong choice. If those choices are removed, sin cannot exist, and there is no need for a redeemer as God has made the choice already. Calvinism also insists that nothing passes on this earth, indeed in all of creation, without His ‘permission’. It must make God minimally a co-conspirator in every evil that befalls man, from last week’s jay-walk to the holocaust, a premise that can only be acceptable if we posit that God is evil. I think we can affirm that God is King of kings and Lord of all-- and absolutely sovereign-- so long as we insist that God's sovereignty must never curtail human responsibility in any way, including repentance in sin and faith in Jesus.

As I see it, all references to election and predestination are indications of divine intentionality. When my boys were six months old, I started to read to them. The purpose was to predestine a love of reading in them when they got older. But there is no assurance that they would love to read. That is entirely up to them. That’s the way I see it here. God predestrines us to life through His creation and salvation through Christ. But it is entirely up to us to make the key moral choices that follow in consequence: “Choose you this day whom you will serve.”

Was Jesus the Messiah?

A Jewish perspective.

http://www.jewsforjudaism.com/jews-jesus/jews-jesus-index.html

Jesus as Myth: A Critique

It seems that you have found sufficient justification that defies the consensus of most scholars.

On the particular issue of Jesus' historicity, yes, I have come to believe that the scholarly consensus is mistaken.

"What justifies doubt is the fact that his existence as a human being is not unambiguously attested in places where I am convinced it would have been if he had been real."

Can you be more specific?

I have put a summary of my arguments on my Web site here:

http://dougshaver.com/christ/ahistor/ahistor1.htm. If you're pressed for time, go to the bottom of the page and click on "What wrong with this picture?"

I finally got a chance to read your thesis. I apologize in advance if I have misatated your argument, which I understand is somewhat as follows.

What we read in the gospels are essentially camp fire tales-- an accumulation of incidents and wisdom from the Jewish community and the surrounding mystery religions.

That's possible. It isn't quite what I have in mind, but it could work, too.

I have not done enough research myself to form a clear hypothesis about their origin, but I think they began as something akin to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. The stories originally were not about Jesus as such. They were collections of teachings, and Jesus, like Gibran's Almustafa, was just a mouthpiece for those teachings.

From these stories, a Christian cult began to develop.

No, that's not my theory. I think several savior cults, one of which was Paul's, existed prior to the gospel stories. The gospels, or at least an early version of Mark's gospel, was produced independently of any of those cults.

Paul of Tarsus, a hellenized Jew, saw the light and began his missionary efforts and epistles. Paul's Jesus was essentially a Platonic Form, which in the second century merged with the camp fire tales of the earlier mystery cult . And from that came the Jesus of history.

Yes, that says it pretty well.

In your discussion, on several occasions, you invoke the principle of parsimony. It seems to me that there ise too little parsimony to make this credible. For example, what I didn't get from your essay was the motivation of the merger between the mystery cults and Paul's Platonism, an explanation of how the gospels came to be especially relative to its size-- the sheer length of the account-- and the agreement between the gospels, and also the motivation behind Paul's missionary efforts and the growth of the early Christian church.

Aside from simply giving appropriate credit, one reason I referred to Doherty's work was that I was trying to keep the essay to a manageable length and so was focusing on the basic argument against historicity, not the details of an alternative account of Christianity's origins. I was hoping that anyone interested in those details would go to Doherty's Web site for them. It's not that I think he has all the details right. I think it very unlikely that any ahistoricist has all the details of Christianity's true origins right, because most of the evidence we would need to get them all right is irretrievably lost.

Why the merger? Doherty addresses that, but very briefly and so it's easy to miss. Paul's Christ doesn't grab the average person's gut very well. It's too esoteric. Your average Joe wants something a little more (literally) down to earth. As Doherty notes, savior-gods who died and came back to life were not a new idea in those days. The notion that one of them had done it as a man of this world, and had done it very recently, was new, and would have appealed to many more people than the previous versions did.

I fail to see what it is about length of the gospel story that makes it more improbable as a work of fiction than of purported history.

Insofar as the gospels agree on anything, it is easily accounted for on the supposition that they have a common origin. The disagreements among them suggest that the common origin was something other than factual history.

You and Earl Doherty place a great deal of emphasis on what he calls the silences in Paul's writings regarding the historical Jesus. It seems to me that there is a lot of straining to make a point that doesn't appear to be especially valid to me. Take the following statement by Doherty, in which questions why the message they preached wasn't the gospel of Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 2:2
. . . we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the face of great opposition. [RSV]

Early Christian writers like Paul are constantly referring to the message they carry as the "gospel of God." They also talk of the work of God, the saving actions of God, the call of God (cf. Romans 1:16, 3:24, 1 Cor. 1:9, Phil. 1:6, Gal. 4:7, etc.). If these apostles were preaching a message about an historical Jesus who had himself taught about God and his own relationship to him, surely they would style it the "gospel of Jesus." Why is there no mention in the epistles of an earthly ministry of Jesus? On the other hand, if Jesus is a spiritual figure, a "mystery" known only through scripture and God’s revelation of him, then Paul’s message is indeed the gospel of God (see especially Romans 1:1-4), and God is the primary "Savior" (see also Titus 1:3).

In every letter that Paul wrote, I believe without exception, Paul begins the letter invoking Jesus and God. For example:

Romans 1:1, 7-9: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all…”

Thus, from Paul's perspective, Jesus is God, the Logos of John 1:1. The apostles were not preaching about a historical Jesus but about Jesus preincarnated as God. Since Jesus, in Paul's view, was the resurrected Christ, there was no need to dwell on Jesus' earthly ministry.

Among the evidence that you purport is the silence in the letters written to Paul on Jesus as man and a distinction between secular (such as Tacitus) and non-secular writings (such as the Gospels). At least to me, neither point is especially convincing.

Paul was writing to work through theological issues informed by his Hellinistic background (like John) and the only fact that was important to him was that "Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures(I Cor. 15:3)." For example, in the writings of Plato, even where he references Socrates as in the Apology, there is little biographical information except for the premise that Socrates lived; the emphasis is on the development of ideas. If Paul died between 64-67 AD, he would have certainly lived within the lifetimes of people that would have known Jesus, and perhaps he simply felt there was no need to expand on the obvious-- that Jesus lived. Akin to a stone dropped in a pond, Paul never saw the stone but he did feel the waves as they were just beining to radiate outward, effecting not just him but clearly many others. This begs the question as to what caused those waves-- the emergent belief in many more people than Paul. It could have been hysteria or delusion. But it seems just as likely if not more likely that it was the effect of a real person, namely Jesus, who died about thirty years before Paul was killed.

I don't buy the distinction you make between secular and non-secular writings. The book of Matthew, for example, was written between 50-100 AD, somewhat equivalent to us and the events of the Reagan to the Roosevelt presidencies. It was not written as history but as a testimony to key snapshots of Jesus' life, about no more than a month or so of his life. It was written with a point of view, as generally is all history ancient and modern. Even assuming that fables are weaved into the narrative by design or default, it is just as likely that cores of fact remain. The logical question before we dismiss the gospels is to ask not how are the gospels different but why are the gospels in general agreement. That the thrust of the narrative parallel each other suggests to me that the core factuality within the gospels are in at least some measure historically true.

Here are my summary conclusions on the question of the historical Jesus.

Did Jesus exist in the same way that we know that Abraham Lincoln existed? Or was Jesus a myth like Thor or Apollo? I raise this question to reassess for my own satisfaction what I have long assumed to be self-evident. The evidence convinces me that Jesus lived as a flesh-and-blood person. It is significant that few professional peer-reviewed historians challenge the factuality of the existence of Jesus, although I’m sure that there are some.

First, we have the record of the gospels and a small but significant part in Acts. These were written with a point of view, and in fact they only account in totality for about two months of Jesus’ life. But I believe that they are credible. They were written from about 50 to 100 AD, a relatively short time in a culture that had a strong oral tradition. By contrast, Caesar’s Gallic Wars date from 100-44 BC, but our earliest copy is from 900 AD. It would be the equivalent of writing about the events of the First World War—well within the memory of living people or their children. There are credible parallels between the gospels as well as confirmation of names of rulers and places that historians have unearthed.

Secondly, we have the testimony of perhaps a half dozen writers that were roughly the contemporary to Jesus and His apostles. External sources include Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and others. Some extra-canonical writings also provide us with insights. While some of these writings may be fictional, in totality there is enough to support the claim that Jesus lived. It is remarkable that a man of Jesus’ rank—a common carpenter—would have so much documentation.

Thirdly, we have the fact of the mass movement of Christianity that resulted in the replacement of the old gods of by Constantine the Great by the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. chose Christianity because of a vision of the Christian cross, but as a politician, I suspect he was counting noses as well. By this time, the emperor was aware of his Christian military officers and state officials as well of the popular appeal and moral force of Christianity in the face of persecution. Christianity, I believe, was a bottom-up movement. The political elite responded to the people rather than vice versa. Myths have sometimes created mass movements. But the most parsimonious and most likely explanation for this mass movement is that it started with one man who stands at the hinge of history—Jesus Christ.

My thinking on the gospels has done a lot of evolving over the years, but I've never believed that any of the writers was lying.

For most of my adult life, I thought they were just mistaken, that although much of what they wrote wasn't true, they thought it was. If you believe what you say, then you're not lying.

But are you prepared to apply the same standard to yourself? My sense is that you personally are honest. Or, to put it alternatively, I see no reason to think that you will consciously lie. Having said that, and without impugning your personal integrity, I do think that you are embracing a dishonest methodology in your search for historical truth, just as religionists of impeccable integrity nevertheless embrace a methodology to assert that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. There are people who wish to raise the bar into the clouds in testing whether or not Jesus is a myth because they hate Christianity, but their bias is cancelled out by Christian scientists who have lowered the bar so that it hits the ground because they want to prove that Genesis is fact. They are both intellectually bankrupt, although they may no know it.

What the creationists, those who assert that Jesus is myth, the revisionists who claimed that Auchwitcz was a spa, and the tobacco lobbists all have in common is a similar cast of mind that puts their conclusion before the data and cherry picks data to support their conclusion. That Jesus was a historical figure is not Xtian propaganda formented by the magisterium any more than the notion that all animals ascended frm a common ancestor is atheistic propaganda formented by the geology department of Columbia University. While it is true that the mass of the scholars can be wrong, it still behooves you to account for why this consensus exists in the face of two millennia of powerful anti-religionist voices who wish it did not exist.

A good test for intellectual honesty is to develop as strong a case as you can possibly develop contra to your hypnothesis, examine all the facts including in this case analogous documents from analogous figures during that time period, and then see if your theory is more compelling than orthodox scholarship. I doubt that the creation of a strawman and then its systematical dismantlement can prevail at any peer review no matter how much in sympathy those peers may be with your hypnothesis.

If you think my method fails to sort fact from fiction, then you can tell me what is wrong with my method.

By making, as do the creationists and the holocaust revisionists, doubt a fact. Here, for example, are arguments that go the other way:

http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/gospdefhub.html#anon

"There are excellent reasons for maintaining the traditional ascriptions of Gospel authorship, when standard tests for such determinations are applied; There is no reason to date ANY of the Gospels later than 70 AD, although such dating may be permissible in the case of John; There is no reason to suppose that the Gospel authors took creative liberties with the events they recorded, to the point of fabrication."

Consider the question of attribution. If we assume that the Gospel of Matthew was written by someone or some people other than Matthew, then lets use the same standard to attribute Tacitus' Annals. Seems fair to me.

What if Pontius Pilate Had Pardoned Jesus?

What if Pontius Pilate had pardoned Jesus? Would Christianity exist?

I was in Costco's book section today waiting for some film to develop when I had came across a compilation of essays of alternative histories, sometimes based on the most subtle of cirumstances, that would have changed the course of world history. Often, these circumstances had to do with trivial circumstances-- a moment of indecision that saved George Washington's life early in the Revolutionary War from a soldier's bullet, for example.

I forget the historian who wrote the essay, but he made the case that Christianity may well have developed the way it did regardless of what most Christians think is the central fact of their faith-- Christ's death and resurrection. The counterfacts were that Pilate in defiance of the Jewish mob pardoned Jesus and Jesus went on to live until the age of 95 preaching, doing his miracles, and returning on occasion to Jerusalem to try to sacrifice himself in obedience to his Father's will. Jesus' pacifistic teachings and obedience to civil authority were condoned by the Roman Imperium and they became his protector. The missionary activities of Paul and his disciples spread the faith that was officially recognized by Constantine the Great around 300 AD.

Interesting,but possibly misleading.

Like all religions ,Christianity was a response to the needs of its society. It was and is a reflection of the societies in which it is found. That is one reason it has never been an homogenous belief system,regardless of claims by apologists. Had Jesus lived on,it is most likely he would have faded into obscurity. He was an very ordinary Jewish Rabbi. His actual teachings as far as I can tell, were Jewish,and meant for Jews. Initially,gentiles were not accepted by the followers of Jesus. The religion which developed into Christianity was invented almost entirely by Saul. It has very little do with Jesus.

Christianity contains no new moral code. The same code was taught by some Greek philosophers,in Hinduism by and by Siddhartha Gautama in the C7th BCE..In China The Dao and Confucian moral codes have many similarities with Christian moral values..Christianity contains no new theology or cosmology.Every single idea was taken from elswhere.

Until Constantine adopted Chrstianity,it seemed for that Mithraism might become the dominant religion insead of Christianity..The two religions have a lot of similarities.

Had Jesus lived,Mithraism may well have dominated the Roman Empire.That Christianity spread was more because it became the State Religion of the Roman Empire than any other single reason.Mithraism was an accepted mainstream religion until the C4th CE. It could easily have become the State religions instead of Chrsitianity--whether or not Jesus had survived.

Of course,that's the wonderful thing about alternate history.No one knows enough about affecting varaibles to be able to give more than a possibly entertaining guess.

Perhaps Christianity took root while competing cults such as Mithraism did not was because it was universalistic-- largely detaching ethics from tradition and legalism-- syncranistic-- absorbing ideas from other religions, especially Judiaism but probably other religions as well as you mention, and democratic-- appealing most especially to the marginal in society, which is necessary for creating any mass movement. The persecution the Christians suffered under Nero and other emperors also helped catalize the faith from a cult into a multinational religion by creating a future-based end-of-days narrative. The writings of Paul that effectively married Greek and Jewish thought and the very fact that the gospels and the epistles were made and preserved contributed to Christianity's early acceptance and growth, IMO.

I doubt that Constantine the Great simply by executive fiat made Christianity the official religion, for by that time the faith had penetrated all stratas of society, most particulary the officer corps, and like any good politician, he was responding to his constituency through identity politics.

This is one of those topics that can keep historians busy for years, since ther is no cut and dried answer. It seems to me to have been a combination of factors. Here are a few.

Once Paul had produced a version that did not require one to be or becoem a Jew, it was certainly open to all. Plenty of other cults were, though.

It developed a story that sounded very similar to many of the other religious stories going around, so it wasn't unaccepably bizarre.

Unlike the others, though, it had a one-way valve. Once you were a Xian, you were supposed to leave all the other cults alone.

I really have doubts about the Neronian persecution. Domitian seems to have been more interested in persecuting Jews. (Not surprising, since his father and elder brother were famous for winning the Jewish wars, while Domitian had to stay at home.)

Here's an interesting site about it.

http://users.drew.edu/ddoughty/Christianorigins/persecutions/index.html

"creating a future-based end-of-days narrative"

That seems to have been a part of Christianity from the beginning. Ehrman and others see Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, and Paul expects the end in his own lifetime.

Biblical Proof

Now as to proofs that God does or does not exist—I believe they are not possible. Here I quote Hans Kung, the Catholic theologican:

• It is possible to deny God. Atheism cannot be eliminated rationally. It is irrefutable.

• Affirmation of God is also possible, Atheism cannot be rationally established. It is undemonstrable.

•If God is, he is the answer to the radical uncertainty of reality.

•The fact that God is, can be assumed not strictly in virtue of a proof or indication of pure reason (natural theology), not unconditionally in virtue of a moral postulate of practical reason (Kant), not exclusively in virtue of the biblical testimony (dialectical theology), but only in a confidence rooted in reality itself.

From his book, Does God Exist?

You cite scripture as your "proof" that God exists, the basis of your knowledge of what you believe is fact. I have a problem with that assertion, namely that it depends on an assumption: the Bible is the word of God. You are free to make any assumption you wish, but the proposition the Bible is the word of God itself presupposes the existence of God—in other words, it makes no sense unless God is assumed to exist.Consequently to use it to deduce the existence of God is circular reasoning. To be quite explicit your reasoning has to run: "I believe that God exists and that the Bible is the word of God. Therefore I may conclude that God does in fact actually exist."

Yes, there is a problem with circularity. Thus, the Bible is true because it confirms that is is true, a premise Christians would reject in considering whether on not other holy books were true. But even the assumption that you make "the Bible is the word of God" goes beyond what the Bible really says. The Biblical canon is no where defined. Secondly, the Bible is far from uniform is asserting that its words are God's words. It's our assumption (or rather the judgement of councils over the centuries) as books of the Bible were included in the canon while others were excluded. Thirdly, no where does the Bible make any effort to prove God's existence. Rather, God's existence is assumed by the writers of the Bible.

The Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer asserts that his world view derives from the axiom that "the God of the Bible is." However, the problem with this is that the God of the Bible is anything you want it to be based on how you read particular verses in the Bible-- immanent, transcendent, montheistic, polytheistic, triniterian, and so on.

The proof most people resort to is experiential and existential-- it is true because I feel it to be true. I'm not sure it's easy to argue against such claims. On the other hand, such statements are outside what we commonly understand is fact or proof.

Faith

The scripture in Hebrews chapter eleven says faith is an evidence of things not seen or in other words, faith is the evidence of things not perceived by any of the human senses. However, it is true that just because something can’t be apparently perceived doesn’t mean the object in question is nonexistent. The reality of a thing is therefore not dependent on human perception. Moreover, the reality of a thing isn’t changed or affected by our merely believing in it or against it either.

What is Reality? Well, I think we can learn a lot about reality from the bible and Hebrews 11:3 sums it up very well I think. It says, “by faith we understand that the universe was formed by God’s command so that what is seen is not made by what is visible.” The verse says that the reality of physical things, the reality of our physical universe, was created God. This verse though is more specific than we tend to think in how God made it though. By implication this verse says that the universe was created by something invisible. I also learn that this invisible force is connected to God’s command.

I appreciate the thought you have invested in your essay. However, I'm not sure I completely agree with it, or perhaps I'm don't fully understanding what you are saying. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is a bit like a piece of music that different people sing with different tunes. This is the way most people read this Hebrews 1:1:

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Thus, the emphasis is on a feeling, belief, inutiion, or emotion --hope-- that may or may not be realized. And what is the target of that emotion? The answer is: things that are not seen. This puts the cart before the horse, in my view, as it makes faith essentially a passive act and humans essential are automota manipulated by a cosmic puppet-master , not unlike the subservient chicken.

http://www.subservientchicken.com/

So, in the minds of many Christians, faith is the antithesis of intelligence or commonsense or experience. It is the behavior of an infant to his mother, a puppy to his master, or a turkey awaiting the butcher's knive-- uncaring and oblivious but consumed with dumb, blind, mindless trust.

But that isn't the context of Hebews 11 at all. Note what follows.

"By faith Abel offered ...By faith Noah prepared k..By faith Abraham sojourned ..." and so on. All of these are acts of personal will-- good choices followed by good actions that were freely made in accordance to God's will.

Thus, the implicatioin is that faith relates less to one's state of mind than free will and free effort.

The emphasis I would place on this verse is as follows:

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

What are things? It is anything-- things of this world and things not of this world. Well, how do we know what those things are and if they really are? How do we know that North Dakota exists, that the permanent record and the Loch Mess monster do not exist, that the landing on the moon was not fake, and that professional wrestling is fake? Why shouldn't we believe or disbelieve in The Flying Spaghett Monster?

The answer lies again in an act of will and courage, not unlike that taken by Abel, Noah, and Abraham, at first things, trying to discern through intellectual struggle and doubt the difference between the illusion of things and the substance and evidence of things. If I were to have a patron saint, it would have to be Thomas the Apostle. He is remembered for his incredulity when the other apostles announced Christ’s resurrection to him: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and I put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” (John 20:25) Eight days later, he made his act of faith. “Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou has believed,” Jesus said. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed.” (John 20:29) So how do we know what is true? We start, as Thomas did, from a point—not of belief-- but of doubt. And from that doubt comes inquiry, the exacting search for facts, principles, and applications, and the exercise of logic and its implications. All of life conspires to trick us, to make us think that appearance is reality, that the shadow of things is the substance of things. The Bible asks that we be economical in our faith even in the world of politics: "Put not your faith in rulers, or in the son of man, in whom there is no salvation." (Psalm 146:3).

Doubt is especially important when it comes to foundational beliefs. Cults find fertile soil in mysticism and irrationality precisely because such cults discourage critical thinking and tough-minded rationality with their fallacious appeals. In the laboratory and the academia also, you must be ready. Someday, you may encounter a popular and smart teacher who eloquently bashes the “Xian myth.” He may even take a special interest in you. At such times in particular, you need to carefully weigh, think, and debate the issue through, and be prepared to disagree without being disagreeable. This mental engagement is needed where ever any argument is made—from professors or the pulpit, the media or your friends, and even what you are reading right now. And rationality and Christianity are not in opposition with each other, as the writings of Thomas Aquinas attest. In fact, as time goes by, you will see that rationality and doubts accords with faith much more so than does irationality and credulity. I would go so far as to say that irrationality and credulity are the enemy of faith.

Common Ground: A Challenge

A full page advertisement appeared in today's New York Times entitled "Loving God and Neighbor Together: A Christian Response to A Common Word Between Us and You. It is a response to 138 Muslim scholars and clerics who sent an open letter "to leaders of Christian churches, everywhere."

http://www.acommonword.com/

The following response was drafted by scholars at Yale Divinity School's Center for Faith and Culture, and is endorsed by 300 other Christian theologians and leaders. Some of the names I recognize include Richard Cizik, of the National Association of Evangelicals, Harvey Cox of the Harvard Divinity School, Bill Hybels of Willow Creek, Rick Warren of Saddleback and Jim Wallis of Sojourners, among many others.

Here are some excerpts, to give you the spirit of the letter:

"Preamble

"As members of the worldwide Christian community, we were deeply encouraged and challenged by the recent historic open letter signed by 138 leading Muslim scholars, clerics, and intellectuals from around the world. A Common Word Between Us and You identifies some core common ground between Christianity and Islam which lies at the heart of our respective faiths as well as at the heart of the most ancient Abrahamic faith, Judaism. Jesus Christ’s call to love God and neighbor was rooted in the divine revelation to the people of Israel embodied in the Torah (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18). We receive the open letter as a Muslim hand of conviviality and cooperation extended to Christians world-wide. In this response we extend our own Christian hand in return, so that together with all other human beings we may live in peace and justice as we seek to love God and our neighbors.

"Muslims and Christians have not always shaken hands in friendship; their relations have sometimes been tense, even characterized by outright hostility. Since Jesus Christ says, “First take the log out your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:5), we want to begin by acknowledging that in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the “war on terror”) many Christians have been guilty of sinning against our Muslim neighbors. Before we “shake your hand” in responding to your letter, we ask forgiveness of the All-Merciful One and of the Muslim community around the world.

"Common Ground

"What is so extraordinary about A Common Word Between Us and You is not that its signatories recognize the critical character of the present moment in relations between Muslims and Christians. It is rather a deep insight and courage with which they have identified the common ground between the Muslim and Christian religious communities. What is common between us lies not in something marginal nor in something merely important to each. It lies, rather, in something absolutely central to both: love of God and loveof neighbor. Surprisingly for many Christians, your letter considers the dual command of love to be the foundational principle not just of the Christian faith, but of Islam as well. That so much common ground exists – common ground in some of the fundamentals of faith – gives hope that undeniable differences and even the very real external pressures that bear down upon us can not overshadow the common ground upon which we stand together. That this common ground consists in love of God and ofneighbor gives hope that deep cooperation between us can be a hallmark of the relations between our two communities.

"Love of Neighbor

"We find deep affinities with our own Christian faith when A Common Word Between Us and You insists that love is the pinnacle of our duties toward our neighbors. “None of you has faith until you love for your neighbor what you love for yourself,” the Prophet Muhammad said. In the New Testament we similarly read, “whoever does not love [the neighbor] does not know God” (1 John 4:8) and “whoever does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). God is love, and our highest calling as human beings is to imitate the One whom we worship.

"Since Muslims seek to love their Christian neighbors, they are not against them, the document encouragingly states. Instead, Muslims are with them. As Christians we resonate deeply with this sentiment. Our faith teaches that we must be with our neighbors – indeed, that we must act in their favor – even when our neighbors turn out to be our enemies. “But I say unto you,” says Jesus Christ, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good” (Matthew 5:44-45). Our love, Jesus Christ says, must imitate the love of the infinitely good Creator; our love must be as unconditional as is God’s—extending to brothers, sisters, neighbors, and even enemies. At the end of his life, Jesus Christ himself prayed for his enemies: “Forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

"The Prophet Muhammad did similarly when he was violently rejected and stoned by the people of Ta’if. He is known to have said, “The most virtuous behavior is to engage those who sever relations, to give to those who withhold from you, and to forgive those who wrong you.” (It is perhaps significant that after the Prophet Muhammad was driven out of Ta’if, it was the Christian slave ‘Addas who went out to Muhammad, brought him food, kissed him, and embraced him.)

"The Task Before Us

“Let this common ground” – the dual common ground of love of God and of neighbor – “be the basis of all future interfaith dialogue between us,” your courageous letter urges. Indeed, in the generosity with which the letter is written you embody what you call for. We most heartily agree. Abandoning all “hatred and strife,” we must engage in interfaith dialogue as those who seek each other’s good, for the one God unceasingly seeks our good. Indeed, together with you we believe that we need to move beyond “a polite ecumenical dialogue between selected religious leaders” and work diligently together to reshape relations between our communities and our nations so that they genuinely reflect our common love for God and for one another."

http://www.yale.edu/faith/abou-commonword.htm

I think the sentiments expressed and efforts for reconciliation are not merely worthwhile but even critical in the context of world events, and I would have no problem signing such a statement myself.
However, I wondered if such a statement of common principles could be drafted between theists and atheists, neither compromising their core principles but each each seeking to find productive common ground, a statement that Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and you as well as the signatories of the Yale statement could sign.

So that would be my challenge. What is the irreducable and indisputable common ground between theists and atheists?

Maybe it's because I'm a middle child, I try to find a middle ground before any two seemingly hostile world views. Thus, my common ground with paganism is a love for nature, with Mormonism a love for family, with Catholicism a love for tradition, and so on.

But even that subjectivizes more than I want. The question I'm asking is not what is my common ground with atheists, which is my admiration for doubt and argument. The question is: what is the common ground between theists and atheists. I don't even want to conditionize that presumed common ground by nationalism-- that the common ground of believer and unbeliever is the Consitution, for example. I am prepared, however, to accept the caveat that fanatics who give themselves labels of one kind or another will never concede that common ground can exist, so there must be some assumption of good will just as there was with the Muslim and Yale statements.

As I said, this is a challenge. But I would conceptualize the case as follows. First, I would ask: what is it that I have in common with-- to put a face on the discussion-- Richard Dawkins and Pope Benedict XVI, besides, in the former an Anglican upbringing and in the latter a love for cats? If we strip away their respective rhetoric, affiliations, and ideas, the factual answer must be: a great deal, and we know that without even knowing them very well. And what is that I presume we all know? It is firstly self-evident that they are humans, and that implies a commonality of physiology and psychology, the differences of which make them individuals but the similarities of which make them humans. They have blood, brains, kinships, and life-spans. It is secondly self-evident that they both possess an inner world, and this manifests itself in art, family ties and friendships, dreams, ambitions, speculation on ethics, interests in politics and literature, and so on. Again, the differences that are manifested here make them respectively individuals but the similarities provide at least the start of the recognition that despite ideological differences we have more in common than we have do not have in common.

I might also suggest that any striving for common ground begins by dispensing with theology, metaphysics, and god-talk of any kind, not because many people don't find that important, but because such language are reasons for articulating differences that divide us. (On the other hand, I think it may be possible to identify common or transcending ethical principles, so long as those principles are not conditioned in religion, faith, or the law. But as a practical matter, this raises complex philosophical issues, that probably cannot be reduced to a single statement.)

Finally, I may end with the premises that I originally proposed-- that the search for common ground is a journey that can only be undertaken given fundamental assumptions by all concerned of goodwill, communication, and rationality, the inability or the denial of which renders such an exercise as futile.

And, of course, there is this.

http://www.cracked.com/article_15663_god-fuse-10-things-christians-atheists-can-agree-on.html

"Judge Not"

"Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment that you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye," when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." (Matthew 7:1-5)

These verses have puzzled me, especially in the context of the verses that follow.

"Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine" (Matthew 7:6)

"Beware of false prophets...You will know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:15,16,20).

Thus, this principle isn't a statement of moral tolerance or a recognition of human faliability, so far as I can tell. To the contrary, my reading of the full context is that we must judge and indeed much of ethics is nothing more than judgment-- discerning of moral truth from falsehood. Thus, I would paraphase the phrase as "Judge not falsely, that you be not judged falsely."

Jewish Theism

Could you give me some examples of dogmatic God concepts in Judaism?

Can there be any doubt that theism permeates the Jewish religion, from the Shema of Deut. 6:4-5: " Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one LORD: and thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." to the first of the Ten Commandments: "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." Can there also be any doubt as well that a clear definition of God eludes Jewish people as it does Christians, at least to the precision that I can define Felis silvestris catus (house cat)?

I think that in some way we must be talking (writing) past one another. I don't deny that Judaism is definitely God-saturated. I've in the past participated in enough seders to know that. I also know that the various Jewish sages have harped on the impossibility of characterizing God, that only analogies can be used, etc. My point was only that overall Judaism is less tied to dogma in the way it views God, so that individual Jews, say in a given congregation, may have quite different concepts, one viewing God in an almost pantheistic way and another envisining God as more personal and involved in, and maybe another being in effect an atheist but still willing to engage in God-talk as part of the ritual. I'm sure too that in a large Christian congregation there are variations in how people view God, but probably less, because views of God are more determined by dogma. You are supposed to sign on to God being certain specific things, some of which I enumerated previously, so your god-concept is much more circumscribed by that dogma. Jesus enormously complicated things for Christians, who spent a lot of time and spilled a lot of blood hammering out how he was to be regarded. Is Jesus of one substance with the Father or is he separate? The Gnostic view that he wasn't real person but just a ghostly substitute got booted out. They got very nitpicking and very specific about all these things. Of course there were always differences that arose, new heresies to wipe out (e. g. Pelagianism), and the reformation and all those obstreperous Protestants, who split into a zillion sects, each with their own nitpicking differences.

Although I am an obstreperous Protestant, I hesitate to speak for all Protestants, obstreperous or otherwise. I think you are right that there may be more moving parts in Christianity as regards to the idea of God than Judiasm. The one distinctive with all Christian sects, no matter how liberal or orthodox, is that Jesus is some way figures in, as God, as the Son of God, a man/God, as once man now God, as a mythic figure or even as an entirely fictional symbol. But it isn't true that all Christians must be theists. However, it is true that some Christians sects such as the Catholics have an achitecture of dogma that you mention, even throwing in Mary as the mother of the triune God. On prima facie grounds, it all seems incoherent. But it may also have been this kind of deep deductive reasoning first by the scholastics and then by the reformationists that helped establish the foundations of the enlightenment, mass literacy, the industrial revolution, and the age of science.

You may be right that Jewish theology doesn't have much need to grapple with such questions. But the correllary must be that Christians theologians have consequently created a multiplicity of contradictory answers to what God is, some of which I include in the following essay that I wrote a few years ago, trying to sort out wht God is in disctiction to what God is assumed to do.

When I was going through my sesquipedalian phase as a teenager, my uncle Ray Johnson, wrote to me that “some of us enjoy big words because the little ones cause trouble. Consider the word “God.” That little monosyllable has probably given rise to more discussions, more speculations, more argumentations, more disputations, more publications, and certainly more sermons than any other word in the language. Perhaps the ancient Hebrews had a laudatory concept with their secret name for the Deity. Expressed only by four consonants, it technically could not be pronounced, and any attempt to add vowels (r vowel points, as Hebrew students would say), as strictly forbidden to the people under penalty of death. The high priest alone was permitted to add vowel points and thus pronounce the name, and that only on the annual occasion of the Day of Atonement. (See Leviticus 24:16) The four letters of the secret name transliterate out into English consonants as IHVH, JHVH, JHWH, YHVH, or YHWH, depending on who is doing the transliteration. And these four letters of the secret name have come to be known as the Tera grammaton. This means, quite literally, “the four-letter word.” Ray then suggested that “this linguistic peculiarity of our four-letter words may be some sort of cultural fallout.”

The word God is one of those words that everyone uses but no one really defines or
understands. When politicians say that we’re one nation “under God”, the question becomes exactly what is it that we are under? If the answer is: a supreme being, the question then becomes, what exactly is this supreme being and how do we know that it is interested in us or if it even exists? The Bible isn’t clear as to whether God is a “being” and if “supremacy” is a quality of God. It surely rejects the notion of the old man with the white beard and the deep voice, as God is defined as spirit (John 4:24), fire (Hebrews 12:29), light (1 John 1:5), love (1 John 4:8), and logos (John 1:1). The Church of England defines God as “living, without body, parts or passions” but I certainly have trouble picturing a life that is without body, parts, and passions, like an autistic the Friendly Ghost. If God is spirit, is God therefore emotion? Does God exist in the same way that my cat exists or in the same way that my love for my cat exists? Is God a metaphor for what we don’t know or cannot know? Is God real in the same way that Santa Claus is real? Is God a sewer that flushes away the waste and the worst of this world? Does God exist in the same way that a unicorn exists? What is it that distinguishes the reality of the Christian God from, for example, the unreality of Zeus? Can we believe in God if we cannot define or describe God? If God is consciousness, is that consciousness human consciousness, which would die when all humans die? Is God nature, as the Deists believe, or the sum of all natural laws, as Albert Einstein believed? Is God all that which is not—all that which is outside an imaginary circle drawn around all that exists? Is God localized in persons, places, or things—the Buddha, volcanoes, or money? Is God someone playing with her retarded sister in a playground while both giggle with delight? Are we, as some New Age religionists believe, God? Could God not be noun at all but a transitive verb— like the loving relationship of my boy to his worthless but comforting teddy bear? Does God care about us? Is our Father in Heaven a reflection of our fathers on earth—a cruel and distant father on earth makes us believe in a cruel and distant God, a loving and tender father lets us believe in a loving and tender God? Is God numinous—the awe we feel when we look at a sunset or a baby? Is the word God a mental bucket—a meaningless word that only gains meaning when we fill it with meaning? Is belief in God animated only by the fear of our death and the fires of hell? Is belief in God a utilitarian decision-- because the majority of people are theists, our lives will be easier if we are theists? Is belief in God a kind of celestial bet? Is God a projection of our hopes, a mass delusion, or a part of our biological wiring? Do we believe in God because our fathers and their fathers believed in God? Is God as Karl Barth said ganz Anders—wholly different? Is God the absolute, all matter and all force, swirls of atoms and hurricanes and galaxies, the first cause and the end of history, the alpha and the omega? Is God not here, not yet, evil, impotent, a crutch, a drug, a clown, asleep? And so the questions keep coming—some with answers but many without answers.

Well, obstreperous protestant,

Hey, that fits me!

I was away for a couple of days, and then I wanted to think about your essay. It is interesting that Christianity, at least some branches of it, is effectively polytheistic, despite protestations (!) to the contrary.

I agree that triniterianism is polytheism or, more accurately, tritheism.

God concepts are indeed amazing in their variety. It’s enough to make one resort to atheism. James Blish, the science fiction writer (at least, I think it was Blish), once had a character in a book (Cities in Flight?) who was capable of scientifically analyzing what someone had said or written. I’m kind of vague on the details, but I recall that great skill was atttributed to an ambassador, whose speech seemed very impressive, but the scientific analysis showed that it added up to exactly nothing. I think that is what the god concepts do. Then there is theological noncognitivism, an atheological approach that holds that statements about gods are simply meaningless. One cannot hold that they are potentially true or false; they are meaningless. Of course that makes it equally meaningless to say that God doesn’t exist. Ganz Anders and Ground-of-Being (not to be confused, with the hamburger god or ground-up being) seem essentially atheistic.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Into Wittgenstein’s silent category go statements such as “Jesus is the life, the way and the truth.” To whether or not there is a "last judgment", Wittgenstein writes that “I couldn’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the statement that there will be such a thing. No ‘perhaps’ nor ‘I’m not sure’. It is a statement that does not allow for such an answer.” Thus, Wittgenstein is neither theistic, nor atheistic, nor agnostic but "acognostic." It is meaningless to affirm or deny that God exists or even to raise that question. It is not a meaningful question to raise, because God is in the realm of value, and the world is the realm of fact. This position, which seems to be based on logical positivism, is that the question of a god or gods is not meaningful.

I think Wittgenstein is correct in his repudiation that the spectrum of belief is merely theism or atheism, or theism, agnosticism, or atheism, as if these were all embracing and mutually exclusive categories. Consider the sentence: “Jesus is God.” Wittgenstein would say, I believe, that such a statement cannot be affirmed or denied or even addressed any more than we can evaluate the sentence “@#$ is %^&.” We cannot even suspend judgment on the question as we have no basis for any kind of a judgment. However, I don't think that acognsoticism is necesserily a kind of atheism. Rather, it can be a postulate for theism.

Can I prove that God exists? No and nor need I. I like apologetics and I think I’ve read most of the arguments, including the standard cosmological, moral, mental, experiential, teleological, and mathematical proofs. But, in my opinion, they are all flawed. There are many books that lay out the disproofs. Suffice it to say that they remind me of the children’s game, where you try to remove a log without the structure falling down. Proofs for the existence of God seem to reduce to talking in circles, and the elaborate intellectual architecture always collapses under scrutiny. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that intimations that there is something greater than all that I can conceive. You may recognize this as a paraphrase of Anselm of Canterbury's (1033-1109) ontological proof for the existence of God, except that I place the proposition into the subjunctive: If God is that which is greater than which nothing greater can be thought, then how then shall I live? This belief is comforting in that even while life and even all of existence has in the scheme of things the transience of a soap bubble, there is that which is not transient. I call this God, “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 12:2). Because I believe in this conception of God, I believe that there are also truths that are real, transcendent, and immutable, and that these truths have consequences-- axioms that inform both my epistomology-- that there are limits to reason and reason is integral to faith-- and my ethics-- that the search for t