Tag Archives: Hedonism

Commentary

Is there a Tea Party faction within the Christian Church? Who is it?

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Did someone say "Tea Party?"
Did someone say "Tea Party?"

Consider this report by a non-Christian who attended the recent “On Guard” conference in Dallas, Texas. (H/T Melissa of Hard-Core Christianity)

Excerpt:

Over the weekend, I attended the On Guard Conference 2010, a Christian apologetics conference. Before you read any further I must quickly explain my history with Christianity.

Back in high school, I was holy rollin’ like a 80-year-old on a Rascal. I  knew for sure I was going into the ministry and was entirely prepared to spend the rest of my life in the service of God. Several things happened about which I would write a book (and might one day). The short version is, my church was populated with small-minded, bigots. The church split twice and once because of a situation I was involved in. A poor black woman living out of an old rusted mustang barely survived two lots down while the church sent money to missionaries in Honduras. By the time the church had sucked my soul from me and spit me out, I turned my back on it all.

Fast forward to now. I have two children and I live in Texas. They will be exposed to Christianity in some form. We visited many churches (and synagogues since they are technically Jewish) and nothing appealed to me. The primary problem I have is that traditional worship is a broken record, especially when handled by Southern Baptists. There is only so much of the same catch-phrases, slogans, and cliches I can take before I hit toxic cynicism. The other problem I have is with modern worship. There is only so much canned slides, unfamiliar songs, and slick (but only re-purposed traditional) sermons I stomach. Where others claim tradition, I claim “rut”. I was on the other side long enough to see all of these things as meaningless.

I kept myself at such a distance from religion for so long, that aplogetics is entirely new to me. Christian apologetics is a discipline (and I would argue a culture as well) within Christianity where Christians defend their faith through logic, reason, and even science. Yeah, I know, sounds crazy. But here’s the kicker:

In my entire life, not once have I ever seen or heard a Christian say these words: “I’m not afraid for anyone to question me about my faith. I have nothing to hide [intellectually].”

Keep in mind, growing up Southern Baptists means growing up knowing very little about your own faith and spending time around other people who are openly hostile to those who don’t believe the same way.

For me, I don’t know what I believe anymore. I feel burned by a long history of disappointments by my own faith. In a nutshell, God to me is very similar to my own father. He came around, did his business and is long gone. I don’t and probably will never believe God is much more than a designer who set up some sophisticated systems that still work today but has moved on to other interests. I frankly think it’s absurd to believe God takes the time to help somebody have the strength to make it through a job interview while somewhere else around the world a child is sold into a life of sex slavery. But I digress.

So my attendance at the conference is me intrigued by the kind of intellectual topics presented because that’s not the Christianity I know or see on TV.

He summarizes the conference and then ends with this:

So the conference was great. So great in fact it occurred to me if actual mainstream Christianity was like that instead of the feelings-based judgment frontal assault I grew up with, I might have never left the church. However, the conference seemed to be geared toward two types: believers (meaning Christians who want to defend their faith) and atheists, who comprise the main apologetics boogie man. “Atheist” was used constantly to refer to the kind of people they needed to stay prepared for.

As a guy who lost his faith long ago, I never doubted God’s existence.  However, since I think he is a deadbeat dad, I have many questions and am looking for meaning without being convinced God is real. My struggle with faith has lasted me about 25 years. I would like to have seen a session on reconciling the Bible as a whole. For instance if Intelligent Design is really using science as I heard, how do they address the Adam and Eve question? I also would like someone like Dr. Moreland to discuss why he gets three angels and conversations with God directly when clearly God never bothered with me to begin with.

The premise on which they build many of their arguments is their belief. I don’t have that. So while I enjoyed the conference overall, I walked out of there with more questions. But isn’t that kind of the point? For the first time in over two decades, I felt mentally stimulated by a religious event. In that, I’m intrigued.

And what do we learn from this?

Well, I will try to be civil, but what I really want to do is rant against the postmodernism, irrationality, mysticism, pietism, relativism, inclusivism, universalism, hedonism, etc. that has got us to a point where something like 70% of young Christians who grow up in the church abandon it as soon as they go off to college. The church is a club that is run by people who want nothing to do with the honest questions of people who are less interested in feelings, intuitions, amusement and community and more interested in truth. And we are failing these honest questioners, because we are too busy having fun and feeling happy.

I have a very good idea of why the church is losing all of it’s young people. And we need a tea party revolution in the church to get people to come back.

So here’s my stand:

  • The church believes that belief in God’s existence is divorced from logic and evidence, but I believe that God’s existence is knowable, rational and supported by publicly-accessible evidence
  • The church thinks that people become Christians because they like Christianity, but I believe that people become Christians when they think Christianity is true
  • The church believes you can seek happiness without caring about the moral law, and their job is to make you feel accepted no matter what you do, but I believe that we need to set out clear moral boundaries and explain to people using non-Biblical evidence what damage is caused if those boundaries are broken
  • The church believes that reading the Bible and attending church as therapeutic, but I think that the Bible and church are for clarifying my obligations in my relationship with God and for setting out the broad goals that I will use when I develop my life plan to meet those goals by solving problems using my talents in the way that *I* think is most effective – and my plan doesn’t involve making you feel happy, by the way
  • The church thinks that the Christian life consists of singing, praying and not disagreeing with anyone or thinking that we are right about anything, but I think we should get off our duffs and start studying to think about how our Christian convictions apply to the world around us in every area of life, from politics to economics to foreign policy to marriage and parenting and beyond
  • The church believes that Christianity is true for them while other religions work for other people, but I believe that religions are assessed by whether they are true or not – and that other religions can be mistaken where they make false claims
  • The church believes that evangelism is done without using apologetics or focusing on truth, but I think we should all be prepared by watching debates, holding open forums, hosting speakers and conferences, and generally training ourselves to engage with the outside world in the realm of ideas
  • The church thinks Christianity is a faith tradition, but I think Christianity is a knowledge tradition

Anyway, check out these other posts for more snarky defiance.

Mentoring

Apologetics advocacy

Commentary

Greg Koukl comments on the decline of shame and personal responsibility

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Here is the commentary on the Stand to Reason web site.

Read the whole thing, and take note of this part:

But there’s one necessary requirement for someone ever to feel ashamed for his behavior, and the resistance to shame is really a resistance to this necessary requirement. This requirement is: he must feel responsible for the behavior. If you were forced to do something or it was an accident, there is no reason to feel ashamed. It is when you choose to do something that is patently immoral, and you reflect on it, there is a sense of shame associated with that because you chose to do it. But this is currently one of the deep, deep flaws in the American moral character–the loss of a sense of personal responsibility.

One of the reasons for the plethora of legal cases now is because everybody is saying it’s somebody else’s fault. I trimmed my hedges with a Sears lawnmower. I fell and it cut me. That’s not my fault for doing something stupid. It is Sears fault for not telling me that I shouldn’t have used their lawnmower to trim the hedges with. By the way, that’s a real story and the person collected for that. There are abundant examples of those kinds of crazy things because more and more people are saying that they are not the ones who are really responsible. Everybody is a victim, and if you are not responsible then there is no reason to feel shame about what you are not responsible for. Ergo, no shame and no guilt. The two go hand in hand.

I think it would be great if one phrase was restored to the language of our moral discourse. It would be great if we would have the moral fortitude to say with conviction, Shame on you. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. It feels kind of awkward even to say that. It sounds so rude. Of course, this cuts across the grain of the cult of self-love and self-esteem, which exists not only in our culture but even in the church.

[…]Nowadays we go way out of our way not to act as if there is anything even marginally questionable about any of those things. It’s as if we’re desperately trying to make people who do bad things feel good, or at least feel neutral when they should be feeling very bad about what they’ve done.

It’s as if people have the idea that if we can get rid of shame, we can get rid of the moral offense that is at its root. To say that you ought to be ashamed is like saying that you ought to feel something about your genuine guilt.

The idea seems to be that if we can change our feeling about guilt–I’m speaking here of true moral guilt, not the emotion of guilt, which I would consider much like shame itself–then the guilt itself will disappear. It’s like saying that if we can get rid of the symptoms that sickness causes, then we can get rid of sickness, too. If we can take away the pain that causes the sickness, the sickness is gone. It doesn’t work that way.

If a sinner harms another person, they need to not gloss over the sin and just try to be friends with the victim again, without any real effort to treat the sin as a serious failure. The sinner needs to claim responsibility, to understand how the victim felt, to make it up to them with some actions, and to take steps to change their character so that the mistake won’t happen again.

Without growth, the same selfish mistakes are made over and over again. And saying “I’m sorry – are we friends now? are we friends now?” doesn’t fix the problem with the victim of the sin, and it doesn’t prepare  sinner for real relationships with real self-sacrifice and real moral obligations. It’s OK to make a mistake, but you don’t learn from it unless you listen to the other person and then come up with things to do to change who you are and how you treat them. Creating sympathy through deliberately selected experiences can change how you feel. For example, I’m very selfish and arrogant, so I should probably do more volunteer work and spend more time helping other people with ordinary stuff. Reading about issues to create empathy and understanding is also good.

News

Why does the news media exaggerate some scientific discoveries?

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What does it take for a planet to be habitable by complex life?

Excerpt:

Complex life in particular probably needs many of the things that we Earthlings enjoy: a rocky terrestrial planet similar in size and composition to the Earth, with plate tectonics to recycle nutrients, and the right kind of atmosphere; a large, well placed moon to contribute to tides and stabilize the tilt of the planet’s axis. That planet needs to be just the right distance from the right kind of single star, in a nearly circular orbit–to maintain liquid water on its surface.

It also needs a home within a stable planetary system that includes some outlying giant planets to protect the inner system from too many deadly comet impacts. That planetary system must be nestled in a safe neighborhood in the right kind of galaxy, with enough heavy elements to build terrestrial planets. And that planet will need to form during the narrow habitable window of cosmic history. (This is to say nothing of having a universe with a fine-tuned set of physical laws to make stars, planets, and people possible in the first place. But that’s another long and complicated story.)

That’s a tall order and it’s not even an exhaustive list of all the requirements.

Now keeping that list in mind, Christian apologist Peter Williams explains how the latest discovery of an exoplanet that might support life was presented to the media by the excited scientists.

Excerpt:

Nasa scientist and Nobel laureate in physics John Mather’s recent comment about ‘Earth-like’ planets was rather timely. Mather said: ‘We know there are earth-like planets out there, but what we don’t know is whether any of them are capable of supporting life.’ Well, Nasa have announced that: “If confirmed, [Gliese 581g] would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.”

Thus far we have an unconfirmed report that Gliese 581g might be rocky (since it may be too small to be a gas giant – although the mass given is a minimum figure) and that it seems to be in the right ‘goldilocks’ temperature zone for liquid water – that’s if there is any water there and if the atmosphere is of the right composition!

Of course, the phrase ‘Earth-like’ is being used with some lattitude here: the gravity on Gliese 581g is higher than on earth (because its about three to four times the size of Earth). Moreover, the planet is ‘tidally locked’, meaning it doesn’t rotate (i.e. no seasons). This probably means that there’s only a narrow ‘twilight zone’ of the planet that’s even potentially habitable; assuming, of course, that the atmosphere (if it even has one) hasn’t frozen out over time to the night side of the planet!

At most (it’s hard to extrapolate here), this discovery may indicate that rocky planets in the habitable zone of stars aren’t all that rare; but consider this interesting passage from The Hiffington Post article on the discovery:

‘Vogt and Butler ran some calculations, with giant fudge factors built in, and figured that as much as one out of five to 10 stars in the universe have planets that are Earth-sized and in the habitable zone. With an estimated 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, that means maybe 40 billion planets that have the potential for life, Vogt said. However, Ohio State University’s Scott Gaudi cautioned that is too speculative about how common these planets are.’

There’s more to habitability – let alone the origin of life – than a chunk of rock at the right temperature!

This is Peter Pan science. They believe what they want to believe.

Many people want to believe that we are nothing special simplifying the world so that they don’t have to worry that maybe, somehow, they were created for a relationship with a cosmic Creator and Designer. Because if that were true,then they might not be free to just do whatever they want without any moral rules in order to make themselves happy. What they really want is to have all the benefits of being created by a loving God, without any of the responsibilities. They like sex, but they don’t like being told how to use it. So they jump at any news story that breaks down the evidence for a Creator/Designer. And they praise moral evil to the skies in order while bashing moral good down, in order to obliterate any vestiges of the idea that there might be any way that they ought to act. They don’t want to be accountable to God. They don’t want moral obligations.

Now look at the latest news from the New Scientist.

Excerpt:

Last month, a team of astronomers announced the discovery of the first alien world that could host life on its surface. Now a second team can find no evidence of the planet, casting doubt on its existence.

The planet, dubbed Gliese 581 g, was found to orbit a dim, red dwarf star every 37 days, according to an analysis by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in DC, and their colleagues.

Unlike the four previously known planets in the same system and hundreds of others found throughout the Milky Way galaxy, Gliese 581 g sits in the middle of its host star’s habitable zone, where temperatures are in the right range for liquid water to exist. It is also puny enough – weighing about three Earths – to have what is likely a rocky, solid surface.

But it might be too early to claim a definitive detection. A second team of astronomers have looked for signals of Gliese 581 g in their own data and failed to find it.

“We easily recover the four previously announced planets, “b”, “c”, “d”, and “e”. However, we do not see any evidence for a fifth planet in an orbit of 37 days,” says Francesco Pepe of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. He presented the results on Monday at an International Astronomical Union symposium in Turin, Italy.

They wanted to believe we were cosmic accidents. Did they distort their data to prove what they wanted to believe? Like hiding the decline to “prove” that capitalism is evil?

We have to be careful about what some educated academic people want. Some educated academic people are sufficiently wealthy and powerful that they can avoid being hurt by most other people. So what they want is to pursue pleasure without being limited by moral rules. So they want to break them down because they view them as “speed bumps” on the road to pleasure in this life. Whatever they say has to be interpreted in light of this desire to get free from moral obligations and moral judgments by you and by your children. They want to normalize the idea that selfishness that causes damage to others is morally neutral. The breakdown of moral realism is what is behind many fads like Dan Brown, sex education, moral relativism, etc.

My previous article on what it takes to make a planet that is habitable by complex life.