On doubt

[pw201]

I'm talking about doubt in a few places at the moment. The feeds of my comments don't cover stuff outside LJ (I was using CoComment, but decided that was too risky), so here's where the action is:

Over at Hermant the Friendly Atheist's place, top Christian evangelist Lee Strobel turns the tables on us, and invites other Christian authors to ask

Comments

great post

[apdraper2000]

I have two links for you, one apropos of our earlier exchange about Keller on Hell:

http://www.redeemer.com/news_and_events/articles/the_importance_of_hell.html

the other apropos of what you're writing about now- you can see my entry there, FWIW

http://poserorprophet.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/3-doubts-a-meme/#comments

If I had time to spare for online writing right now, I'd be all over this, just want to say I appreciate it in the abstract. As for me, I've been reading Comte-Sponville (sp?) and have finally found an advocate for atheism who I find persuasive.

Re: great post

[pw201]

The Keller link seems to be an elaboration of what his book says, which I've said is (a) unlikely to be what the NT authors thought on the matter, and (b) not backed by evidence in any case. In saying people send themselves to Hell and then claiming Jesus's death did something important, Keller wants to have his cake and eat it. Every additional claim someone makes is burdensome, and there are plenty of claims:

• "infinitely dependent we are on God for everything" - So how does anything exist at all if God has withdrawn his presence from it? If good things somehow come from God in this life, why does God withdraw his supportive presence when people die?
  
• "Even in this world it is clear that self-centeredness rather than God-centeredness makes you miserable and blind" - Is it? Even if self-centredness makes you miserable, are self-centredness and God-centredness the only two options?
  
• "But if, as the Bible teaches, our souls will go on forever, then just imagine where these two kinds of souls will be in a billion years. Hell is

quibble

[apdraper2000]

As you should have learned when you read Bart Ehrman, Rev 22:18 is not a profound rebuke for those who try to "save the hypothesis" by the multiplication of assumptions, but rather a threat to scribes tempted to add appendices to the book of Revelation when they copied (and recopied) it for posterity.

Re: quibble

[pw201]

I was being a little sarcastic, as I have seen it used as a threat by Christians to other Christians, even though it only refers to Revelation and to people copying the text on that book, as you say.

[apdraper2000]

Your pitting Keller against orthodoxy seems to me a bit wishful.

What does orthodoxy really mean? We would both agree that no one is simply reading the Bible and doing "what it says." You have to interpret it. You need a community, or in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit at work in the body of Christ. So we are all postmodernists at this point - "the orthodox reading of scripture" is not fixed but is continually being negotiated across time. It is still being negotiated. (In retrospect, Keller may prove to have been an influential negotiator

[pw201]

It seems you're warning me that I might be taking robhu's former path of being what I called an evangelical Christian atheist. That's pretty serious: after all, we all know what happened to him.

You're right to say that some of my criticism of Keller's stuff is objecting to his apparent inconsistency with how I used to read the Bible. That's because Keller is claiming to be a part of the community that I used to be part of, but as far as I can tell, he's doing it wrong. I'm not part of that community any more, so it's possible things have moved on since then. I'd take that as evidence that this community is of human construction, but it does mean I should not call my views of what evangelicals should believe "orthodoxy".

Instead, I'd like to talk about how things have moved on. That is, what has caused this change of mind? I'd claim it's an ad hoc response to modern rejection of the divine right of kings, which lead to a rejection of the right of the divine King (something which at least one evangelical seems to be bothered about). The

[apdraper2000]

You have a substantive objection to my objection, which I understand as: if Christianity doesn't have a fixed cognitive content, where it makes assertions about the world that can't just be changed at the convenience of an individual or an entire culture, then we can all be done with it. It simply has nothing to do with truth.

My objection to that objection would be weak, in particular ad hominem, and would run along these lines: if you're not done with it, how do you expect anyone else to be done with it?

I don't try to consciously think like a Christian most days. The exception is probably when I'm arguing with Christians, in which case I try to experience some sort of empathy, I suppose.That I have the impression otherwise is probably an example of the myopia of online exchanges. A lot of your thinking about Xianity makes it online; less of your other activities (such as dancing

[pw201]

You sound a little like someone else I ran across recently. Halfway though his transition from fundy to humanist atheist, at the liberal Christian stage, Robert Price wrote:I warn my ex-Evangelical reader that every time he announces his repudiation of his former compatriots, each time he derides what now seem to him absurd views, every time he becomes resentful over having been "taken for a ride," he is placing himself, albeit negatively, back into his Evangelical world. Now all of this is quite understandable, even justifiable, since one must "get it out of one's system." And, as is well known, a pendulum never stops in the middle the first time. But the ex-Evangelical should look forward to its settling down in the middle eventually. That is, his goal is to put the whole thing behind him, not to continue to be involved with it, fighting the same old battle only on the opposite side.
I'm not done with it because I think that a lot of Christians (especially evangelicals) need permission to disbelieve, and I wish I'd had permission

[apdraper2000]

I'm not done with it because I think that a lot of Christians (especially evangelicals) need permission to disbelieve, and I wish I'd had permission earlier, and there's this Golden Rule thing, so...

Ha ha, that's awesome. Very well said, sir.

And it IS fun to debate.

Those are two very good reasons. I withdraw my objection.

In any case, there's a symbiosis going on here. When I was in high school I thought Camus was pretty cool, and probably aspired to being an existentialist. When I went back to Camus for reinforcements against evangelicalism, I couldn't help but notice that he was hammering out his philosophy in a more or less constant dialogue with Christianity. This had the undesired effect of making the religion look better. Call it the "worthy opponent" syndrome.

So, may you hold on to your coolness, and may we hold on to you.

hit the comment limit: here's part 2

[pw201]

trying to relate cognitively to Christians. In that respect, your link to the "freud v god II" post is spot on. That's EXACTLY the problem I'm talking about.

Let me see if I understand the problem. Brown's problem with neo-atheist fundamentalist neo-sceptical secularists like Dawkins is, as far as I can tell, not that they're wrong about whether there's a God, but that they're naive. In the Freud vs God post, Brown says that the sort of cognitive hygiene that seems second nature to the neo-atheist is rare, hard work, and that it's not clear to most people that it's worth the bother. Given this, you cannot take religious people at their word: when they say they believe a thing about how the world is, they're making another sort of statement entirely, even if they themselves claim otherwise. Trying to demolish these supposed beliefs about the world isn't going to make religious people into atheists, because they never really believed them in the first place

[apdraper2000]

Nevertheless, the Christianity I knew appeared to be genuinely making statements about how the world is, and I stopped calling myself a Christian when I realised it was very unlikely those statements were true.

I should always keep in mind, when I get impatient with your more extended discourses, that you pay us a vital compliment by engaging with our ideas, as if we really took them seriously ourselves. "Hygeine" is a good word in this context.

Re: great post

[pw201]

For those of you following along at home, the thread continued a bit with some comments on this later post.

Re: great post

[pw201]

Having beaten up on Keller, I should say that I thought your comment on doubt was interesting. I guess by "apologetics", you mean arguments that Christianity is true. It does seem that people are less affected by those than by knowing Christian friends. It's on the way out that arguments seem to matter, as I remember it.

Re: great post

[apdraper2000]

Touche.