Mr. Moderate

From the standpoint of a born-again Christian, is executed murderess and fellow born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker enjoying full privileges in Heaven? If so, is that in any way “justice” for her victims? On the Christian worldview, it is highly-unlikely that either of her two dead victims, both members of an underworld biker community, were in any Christian sense “saved” before they were killed, so would not Tucker’s acts of murder have sent the victims straight to Hell? And if the murder victims go to Hell and the murderess goes to Heaven, what does that say about God’s idea of Justice?

One of the key concepts in the whole idea of what “justice” means is the idea of proportionality. We do not impose the death penalty, or million dollar fines, upon people convicted of parking tickets because the punishment is not proportional to the crime. “Let the punishment fit the crime is the principle that the severity of penalty for a misdeed or wrongdoing should be reasonable and proportional to the severity of the infraction.” So, on the Christian worldview, why is God so unjust as to have only one possible punishment of the most-extreme sort (an eternity in Hell), with the only other possibility being the most-extreme possible reward of an eternity in Heaven? In fact, it is exactly the concept that God is just, and Hell is an impossibly-extreme punishment that can never be just for any person, which led many Christians to the idea of universal salvation; everybody goes to Heaven when they die, regardless of any sin they might have committed while alive.
Continue reading ‘Justice & Death’ »

A story is told of a family moving to a very small town in the Midwest and then looking to see what church was available for them to join. They were quite surprised to find two very large and expensive-looking churches situated right across the street from each other. A bit confused, they asked a local resident how such a small town could possibly afford to maintain two such churches, and wouldn’t it be better if they merged together? The local replied that merger was not an option as the two churches had deep religious differences that were irreconcilable. And “what are those differences?” they asked? “Well,” the local replied, “that church over there believes there ain’t no Hell, and the other one asserts ‘the Hell there ain’t!’”

Up until the time of the Enlightenment, virtually all Christians believed in demonic possession. But Enlightenment viewpoints and scientific understandings have undermined that uniformity of Christian beliefs, and these days “liberal” Christian churches have cast aside beliefs in demonic possession, preferring to view the Bible stories of such events as alegorical for political events or other meanings altogether. But the New Testament is so riddled with stories of demonic possession that it becomes very difficult indeed to reconcile modern views about the subject with the idea that the Bible is in any way an accurate narrative of the life of Jesus.
Continue reading ‘Swimming With The Gadarene Swine’ »

Jerry Falwell is dead. It is enough to make me wish I believed in Hell. It is in the moments following a significant death that we come to contemplate the life of the departed and to wish them everlasting existence in one of two places: eternal pleasure or eternal torture. Falwell set a high bar for those who would wish to outdo his outrageous comments. CNN had this paragraph in the story it posted:

Many now remember him most for outrageous statements he made after leaving the Moral Majority — in 1999, his house organ the National Liberty Journal warned parents that the Tinky Winky TV character was secretly gay and morally dangerous; in 2001, he blamed the September 11 terrorist attack on “pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.”

How many of you Christians out there believe that your God would deliberately kill 3,000 Americans because the folks mentioned above were trying to secularize America? Is that the way your God works?
Continue reading ‘Fallwell: Hate & Discontent’ »

For the past decade, evangelical Christians, disgusted with the moral morass they saw in Washington, DC, have voted solidly for the Republican Party. So long as the issues considered by these Christians were narrowly defined as the 3-Gs, Gays, Guns, and God, evangelical Christians were easily roped into voting a straight Republican ticket.

Recently, however, a split has developed between the far right and the more-moderate factions within the evangelical community over global warming in particular. But that tentative split on environmental policy is just the first crack in a logjam of issues that have long divided America, such as the teaching of evolution in our schools (the “more-moderate” evangelicals have no issue with that, a position identical with that of the Roman Catholic Church) and the place of science education within our hierarchy of knowledge (the radical right wing decries reliance upon “science” as “just another opinion” not entitled to any real respect as it is clearly “anti-God”).
Continue reading ‘Evangelicals Split From The Right?’ »

It has become quite popular for atheists to bash the very idea of religion. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris have produced a trifecta of recent best-selling books asserting that religion is bad for humanity. Well, doing away with religion altogether would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. If there is some bad (bathwater) about religion, then by all means, please do throw it out. But the baby represents our future survival as the only known intelligent species, and religion has been demonstrated to be vital to the continued survival of the human species.

It is no coincidence that every known civilization that left monuments or writings for us to analyze clearly had a dominant religion. In his landmark book, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler asserted that culture is born out of a strong religious feeling which becomes held in common by all of the people who will eventually comprise the civilization that the culture produces. It is the purpose of religion to bind a people together for common purpose by continually reminding them that they have duties to entities larger and/or older than themselves. Any good psychologist can produce multiple theories about why religion has good effects upon groups of people. For instance, it creates a common bond of trust and security among fellow believers. It acts like an insurance contract in that your fellow-believers will rush to your aid if you are victimized in some way, by another human or by nature itself. All of these attributes are pro-survival, and as I’ve shown in yesterday’s blog essay, survival is the foundation of morality.
Continue reading ‘We Need Religion’ »

When he derived his Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein unwittingly gave birth to postmodernism. Einstein asserted that, in physics, there was no privileged observation point. Every observer observed facts according to their point of observation, and differences in observation were explainable by the differences in the points from which the observers observed things.

The above idea means a lot in the context of physics. But postmodernism takes that idea and extends it in unjustifiable ways to assert that every idea is unprivileged, and that nobody has a better view of the facts of any given matter than does anybody else. At the end, postmodernism denies that objective facts even exist at all. To a dedicated postmodernist, every idea is the opinion of one person, and no person is privileged by having the “correct” idea. This leads to utter rubbish in everything written by any postmodernist.
Continue reading ‘Postmodern Religion’ »