Christian and Atheist discussion: A response to https://steemit.com/@anjkara
In trying to take on board the symbolism being used I did a quick search for some regarding Atheism with a wry smile. Although it is humorous, it does make the point that denial of something is in its self non constructive and doesn't offer anything, which is why, I guess, there is a need for those seeking to make a case for 'Atheism' symbolically to use adulterated religious symbols and pictures. What I would ask for future threads is that symbols of something that mean something to Atheism should be used rather than taking something that means something to a Christian, or indeed any other faith, after all this thread is about us seeking to live alongside each other peaceably. It cannot be right that taking something of meaning to someone and adulterating it, is a peaceably act, in the same way as taking a child's picture off a home shelf and altering its meaning in an abhorrent way would be offensive to the mother of that child! That apart I really appreciate you taking the trouble to reply to me Anj and look forward to extending our conversation.
I am really glad you liked my poem https://steemit.com/atheism/@andrewcarnegie/starting-position, I enjoyed writing it and I have had the privilege of performing it live on several occasions. Obviously as an Atheist you are intended to like the initial presentation and I am really pleased you did. There is a point behind the poem though which is more than it being simply the opposing message when read in reverse. You see the poem is called 'Starting Position' and that is it's point. The words are identical, it is purely where we start that defines our human understanding of what they actually mean.
Thus you commence, as I understand it, from the paradigm of a dysfunctional and traumatic childhood which you relate to your parents faith and therefore your starting position was laid for you to become an Atheist. I think that it is quite understandable and I applaud your integrity in making such a firm and unchangeable statement.
For myself I was never able to take that step. I have a background in science and medical physiology and whilst I come from a faith background I spent most of my years as a semi agnostic. I didn't have a dysfunctional childhood, both my parents loved me deeply, and so I never had a reason to turn sharply against faith, I just wasn't interested nor did I see any relevance to some old religion that potentially stopped me pursuing my greatest loves, alcohol and girls, intermixed with intermittent fighting and subsequently the pursuit of wealth. My namesake and forebear was the richest man in the World and still remains the 2nd richest in recent history, so I had a lot to live up to. It was only in my early twenties that I came to a conundrum. I was about to dissect a human brain and whilst my class mates commenced this with interest I spent nearly half an hour sat there looking at this organ that had been a living, thinking person. I had great insight into how complex it was and also how it had evolved but I also know that complexity was beyond my personal understanding and indeed beyond the understanding of the human race. With the entire intelligence of humanity we have never created life, only manipulated it, and for that reason I made a conscious decision to accept that there was something there beyond my ability to understand and comprehend. Thus if somebody asked me, I would have described myself as a Christian, after all I believed in 'God' or some force that could be 'God' like but I rarely went to church unless it was to drink champers at a wedding whilst eying up the bridesmaids. That said my children were all baptised and I made sure that they had a balanced outlook on faith as they grew up. I guess that reflects the less troubled background I had the fortune to have as it freed me to allow my children to make their own minds up without any parental imposition. Sadly, in your case, it sounds as though your children won't have the opportunity to explore for themselves as children as the decision, as it was for yourself, has been made by their parent.
Before we continue with this, if I may, can I ask you to clarify a few things that puzzle me? I hope that is ok?
Obviously its a known fact that the majority of charitable organisations have their roots in faith. Thats not just Christian, Islam instructs its followers to be charitable but I think it is something like 98% of all charities originate that way.
The reasons are obvious, in seeking to live peaceably and to love their neighbour, whilst caring for the environment and opposing injustice and inequality, follows of a faith are natural founders of charitable endeavours whilst a non belief tends not to produce very much at all. So your comment regarding the Brownies / Girl guiding being 'Christian' in origin is correct but it is quite unusual for it to be perceived as a 'church' type organisation. I am wondering if you were raised in some sort of extreme sect or odd branch of faith that created this impression of the brownies?
I enclose a link to their web site below, brownies being part of the whole girl guiding / scouting movement formed by Baden Powell originally. Or could this be a typo?
https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/about-us/
You then go on to say that belief causes you to stop thinking (in your original post). I found that strange as obviously if I was looking at something medically, part of my assessment is based upon a belief. Indeed the whole concept of peer reviewed scientific discovery is founded upon prior belief, which is subject to change. If we look at Christian Barnards work on heart transplants, this commences with the classification of heart sounds and ends with the first surgical attempt. When he opened up his patient, Christian Barnard was taking a pioneering step of faith, walking humankind into the unknown, based upon his scientific and surgical belief. The patient only lived for 18 days but that operation pioneered based upon a belief.
As I am sure you are aware, much of scientific discovery, take for example the theory of the Big bang, has originated from faith, Georges Lemaître being a Catholic priest and professor. As this is originating from the joy and wonderment of people seeking to discover the how of what they believe is God's creation, surely you don't deny this as well?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
You then go on to say:
'I still don't know for sure What are We, Where we came from, Why we are here, or What happens after we die. These questions are still very much up in the air. And I'm okay with that.'
Surely as an Atheist this position is untenable. Atheists completely deny the possibility of God and anything connected or having arisen from faith, as I understand it. If you have any degree of uncertainty, should you not really be an agnostic, something I relate to myself as I said above?
You often mention the popular falsehood that the majority of scientists are not people of faith but that again has no basis in fact. Ard Louis is head of theoretical physics at Oxford University and is a Christian. I accept that there is a fake news movement seeking to portray science and religion as being at logger heads but just because you can find it being ranted on the internet doesn't make it true. I enclose a link to a youtube clip below. The real truth is that whilst some scientists, as with the general population, do not believe, a high proportion do and that there is a middle area of agnostics who are open minded to what is beyond their knowledge or ability to understand. In terms of the Abrahamic religions, which accounts for over 50% of the Worlds population, scientific discovery has come about due to religion, not because religion is in opposition to it. To a believer the scientific enquiry to how things are and how things have come about is a welcome insight into the mind of God.
Lets celebrate one thing we have agreed on though - no belief can be forced and we both abhor any attempt to make it so.
I'm a bit concerned that you believe 'idiocy' can be a gift. I am not sure how you found that belief and I wish well with it but I don't think anybody I know would see idiocy as something you could gift to someone else. If I am an idiot then I can affect somebody else by by idiocy, I can force them to do things due to be idiocy but I cannot offer it to them as a gift, it is a condition that effects myself alone.
I can gift something that I own or have control over. I can offer unconditional love to somebody, but as a philosophical construct I can also take it back. It is in itself not a true gift because it remains under my control. A true gift is given freely with no control over its reception or subsequent use and indeed is not demanded back. Thus when faith is offered as a gift it is offered unconditionally and it is upon the recipient of that gift to accept it, utilise it or reject it. You have never had that gift and quite probably never will but I would argue that it is not akin to idiocy nor should it be diminished by a statement so profoundly incorrect.
You then go on to say that for people of faith everything is mapped out, oh if only that were true! Again faith is the hard path, the unpopular path, the poet Robert Frosts poem 'Road not taken'. It is the path to persecution, to spending a life challenging injustice. I know you will potentially despise people of faith such as the Rev Martin Luther King (he championed the right of racial equality and died for it) and William Wilberforce who fought and won the fight against slavery, both due to their Christianity, but it is your right to oppose what they stood for.
As you will know the very reason that we are having this conversation has arisen from books and books came into being due to the smuggling of the Gospels in the early Christian church. Non Christian rulers have predominately been opposed to mass education as it makes governance of the masses difficult. Thus Tyndale's bible which created mass education through the Christian scriptures is something you should also be opposed to. I don't wish to change your personal Atheism, as I said I applaud it, but please stop and actually think about what you are denying by attacking the very thing that allowed you to have the freedom to have that opinion in the first place.
Thankfully we have some excellent examples of non faith influenced societies in recent history.
Would you see as most closely emulating what you would like to stand for?
We have Nazi Germany, which freed of the restriction that Germans such as Bonhoeffer tried to impose on it, pioneered the extermination of a religious group, the Jews, due to being believers. As you know, Bonhoeffer died for what he believed in and the stand he took against the Nazi's. It wasn't just Atheists who colluded with the regime, many so called 'faith' establishments did as well and in doing so ceased to be anything but a facade for what they pretended to believe. We saw this touched upon in relation to genetics by a 'high priest' of confrontational non belief, Richard Dawkins, in relation to Down syndrome babies. It seems Atheists believe in racial purity and obviously killing disabled babies is a necessary step to achieving that.
A more recent example of a society freed of its religious past is of course communist Russia, although interestingly there are many tenants of Christian faith which socialism relates back to. As you know, freed of the chains and shackles of faith, Stalin and Lenin were free to cleanse their society of pesky academics and scientists. Is this the model we should adopt?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
or should we aim for that great modern example of North Korea, there is a really good example of a modern atheist society which lays out what we could aspire towards?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea
What I hope you might pick up upon is that in all these examples you, as an Atheist, have much better chances of survival. The people murdered by Atheists tend to be those of faith and for good reason. People of faith are called to stand up against evil, which as you said you don't believe in, and to do the hard things whilst obviously people who simply exist due to their denial have no basis to do anything. Thus in all these cases most if not all non believers simply became bystanders and observers to mass murder by Atheist regimes. This was the experience of Corrie ten Boom who, due to her faith opposed the Nazi regime in Holland whilst Atheists and people of little or weak faith did nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrie_ten_Boom
How can you possibly see being someone of faith as being lazy? It is going against the flow, it is raising the flag of sedition. Whilst you Atheists are happily being consumed by the consuming society, people of faith are called to look after our World through the stewardship of creation. True believers are out on the high seas campaigning against plastic oceans whilst you read this, they are pulling people out of the water off the coast of Syria and fighting for the equality of women in ghettos in some of the Worlds poorest countries. Its an easy platitude to hold such a facile view but the true easy path is that of nothing or doing what is depicted repeatedly in the scripture, taking the easy route of Atheism and attacking things that actually have created worth and value. I cant accept your view as having any validity in that regard, it is so obviously at odds with the known facts. I am sorry I have to say that.
There are a myriad of attempts to alter history, the misconception regarding the early churches attempts to only include things that had large numbers of witnesses to them is a case in point. When Jesus appeared, at some points there were several hundred witnesses and it obviously makes far better sense to include these than a single persons account. And of course there are ridiculous things being rejected, that is why they were rejected, it is fairly obvious I am sure you will agree. You mention the bible and having read it but I think this must be from within the lens of your childhood rather than as an adult. I don't mean to be rude in saying that but everybody knows the book of Job is a fairy story designed to demonstrate philosophical points as opposed to being a factual account. It commences with 'In the land of Uz' which is the Hebrew equivalent of 'once upon a time' and is designated a book of wisdom, as is Ecclesiastes.
I do thank you for mentioning the book though because I have a personal account that relates me to it. You see I became a Christian due to a particular experience in the early hours of the 8th April 2012. I didn't wish to become a Christian, being someone of faith in todays World is hugely inconvenient and the most difficult thing. It is much preferable to society at large if someone is a drug dealer or has a drink problem than being someone of faith. You exemplify the scenario of the average, where most people don't believe in anything and don't really care. I certainly, as I mentioned, had no desire to be a 'born again' type and I resisted everything that happened until I reached a point where i had no choice. No matter what happened to me, or does happen to me, no matter what arguments people try to make, I can never not believe.
A good example of this did actually occur on the 17th August 2012, when my son died. As a former medic I was unable to save him and I would hope that you would understand that this would be a huge challenge to belief in a God. The book of Job that you rubbish helped me tremendously because no matter how you read it one thing shines out, Job knows God exists, as I do, and therefore he has to deal with that irrespective of how he feels about what does and doesn't happen. Job sees God as an unrelenting tyrant, a force beyond imagination who created everything, but he cannot deny his existence and in the end of the story, Job is put back on his feet again. To the father of a dead baby, I saw this God who had turned up unannounced and unrequested as an unrelenting tyrant but I couldn't deny his existence. This isn't some dry dead myth that you seem so fond of, this is a living force that permeates our society and having had the gift it is not possible to deny it's existence even though you yourself haven't received that gift and wish to deny it exists, in the same way there are no black swans.....
But coming back to Atheism. You go on to say:
'Modern spirituality is just the evolution of the drive to be religious in some way. I think it's hardwired into humans.'
Surely you need to rethink this or reword it? Nothing can be hardwired into humans as I understand your position other than that which occurs by one of the myriad of surprising accidents which allows us to exist. Assuming you believe in the big bang, you surely oppose the Atheist philosopher Flew and believe Hydrgoen invented itself just after the big bang occurred? How can hydrogen come into being during the big bang from relative nothingness unless there was a model of physics already in situ to allow that to occur? Obviously as that would imply design then hydrogen must be intelligent or you have to extrapolate beyond the provable and come up with fantasy to explain it away because the bible with its single point of creation, when God spoke everything from nothing, ex nilo, is completely congruent with the big bang and what is known without fantasy.
But look Anj, outside of the odd bit of nit picking we both agree you will never be a believer and that will never change so there is no need to go over this other than I am genuinely interested if you are an Atheist or more what I used to be, i.e an agnostic, open to accepting I didn't know everything.
But could you answer me three things please, outside of that.
This is dead simple. As you know Genesis, probably written under the direction of Moses as a prelude to the Pentateuch,
has two creation accounts. The first deals with time and the second with space.
How did this ancient people construct through sheer guesswork two accounts of creation which accidentally offer insight into space and time, which we only now know, over 4000 years later, as to be the two things which interrelate to being formed from the single point of creation we call the big bang?How do you explain away Y Chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve? As you say there is no fact in the Bible so the fact the entire human population has arisen from two statistically relevant human lines around 90,000 to 110,000 years ago must be a bit of scientific fake news.
The last thing is a bit of a true story that I experienced before I became a Christian. I have witnesses to it and it didn't turn me into one so you are quite safe reading it.
Meet our black Labrador. In 2009 my wife (to be) and I decided we wanted a dog. We went to a Labrador rescue and were offered one called Geoffrey. In my book that is an awful name for a dog and I had no desire to be running around a park yelling 'Geoffrey' after a dog. Thankfully the dog warden was all over this puppy and I looked up and said we couldn't take it, even though it had cost us money to reach this point, the dog was obviously hers. We left and she rang the next day to thank us, she was keeping the dog.
About six months went by and suddenly the phone went, we were offered another black Labrador. We decided we would accept it unseen and give it a home. That evening we discussed what we would call it if it was called something stupid like Geoffrey (please I hope your dog isn't). We didn't come to an agreement and went to sleep with the problem unsolved.
During the night my grandfather, who I was particularly close to, came in a dream. He was too young for me to remember him like this although I knew it was him. He was wearing an off white suit and in his arms was a black Labrador dog. In the dream he handed me the puppy, and said 'Andrew, here is your dog, his name is Jester'.
I woke up the next day and told my wife about the dream and said we needed to call the dog Jester. She was sympathetic but her niece is called Jesse and she was worried we might create confusion so she suggested we call the dog 'Chester'.
So we had the dogs name sorted out due to a dream.
The next day, well over 24 hours later, the Labrador rescue rang and said they would bring the dog around, did my wife want to know the name? She obviously did, hoping it wasn't Geoffrey or similar, and the dog was called... 'Jester'.
She initially thought it was a wind up and so started questioning the lady who thought she wanted to reject the dog.
It took some considerable time for the two of them to understand each other and so we got our dog, who remains to this day called 'Jester'. He is a perfect pet, doesn't need a lead and is a major part of our family.
Due to this I went to see my grandmother, who was still alive then, and explained about the dream. She broke down into uncontrollable sobs and reached for her wedding album. The man in the white suit, whom I knew was a younger version of my beloved grandfather, was my grandfather on his wedding day. In some inexplicable way, I was given, by way of a dream, an insight into the future and also received a message of hope to pass to my grandmother, even though I wasn't at that time, really a believer. My lovely nan was a believer and she died peacefully in mid 2012, completely reassured that there was more than this life.
Now I could, if I wanted, get my wife to supply witness statements, get a letter from the lady at the lab rescue, my mum etc etc but at the end of the day what I have written it true. Somehow I experienced a dream that gave me information I didn't have access to which was confirmed in reality, on two different levels, nearly two days later for the dogs name and after some confusion and questioning, a few weeks later when I finally spoke to my nan about it.
Now scientifically this didn't happen. Although there is considerable evidence of people gaining insight into future occurrences as far as I am aware modern science discounts what happened as impossible. I have had several things like this happen during my life, they started as a young boy when I knew my grandads dog had died several days before they phoned. We were in Germany and they were in England.
So I am interested, how do you account for them from within your Atheism, as it surely can't be possible for you to believe me? The latter, for myself personally, as an agnostic, was slightly easier, as I was able simply put it down as inexplicable and leave it at that. Obviously as an Atheist there is only what exists in this world, there cannot be anything supernatural or spiritual, hence the question. I hope that makes sense,
Kind regards and thank you for responding,
Andrew C