The God Question Revisited

 Listening again to the discussion at Uncommon Knowlege with Steven Meyer, Tom Holland and Douglas Murray that was the subjet of my previous post, I have a lo9t less of the feeling that they are spiritually close to the truth than I had then and more of the feeling that they are lost in the usual errors of fallenness.  I'm happy that Tom Holland has discovered the abiding influence of Christianity on the west and he's quite right about that, and I like Murray's willingness to take Christianity seriously and of course I'm happy with Meyer's views becaus he is the only true Christian there.

But Holland says some very odd things such as that Christianity contains within it a tendency to atheisim.  Partly he gets this from his assumption that Roman Catholicism is a genuine Christian experession which in its inception was revolutionary.  Why he thinks that I don't get at all.  But that's because I know Romanism to be the apostate deviation from the true Christianity of the early Church, usurpinjg its place inte world and ushiering in the Antichrist along with all the pagan religi8ous baggage of the Roman Empire and its legacy from babyolon.   The Reformation was a return to the true biblical Christainity of the early Church, it was no trend toward atheisims at all.  It was a recovery to of the truth from the pagan accretions and distortions of Rom. e    What the atheism of today is, which does contain the hyper Christian morality against Christianity they impute to it, that is just the fallen mind reasserting its native atheism now laden with the cultural baggage of Christainity, against God.  It's atheism and it's fallenness, the Christain aspect of it is pervasive and inescapable but it is nevertheless just an overlay.

Murray says a return to the original faith is not possible for many in our time and he's one of them, due to so many philosophical influences that have grown up in the ewest over the last century or so, and I'm not really sure how he finds that an impediment to faith in heimself.   But then I'm on the other side of the line and to me it's just a simple matter of believing what the scripture says.  If you can take it seriously at all surely you can believe it as written, as history told by trustworthy witnesses.  I don't see why not, but then I'm no longer where I was before I was a believer and it didn't look easy to me then and I guess that's where a lot of people are.  

It's a matter of truth.  Dawkins has that right, we believe what we are convinced is true and his problem is hethinks we believe on other grounds.  Mainly that we are irrational and believe what we want to believe.  The way some poepole think we must beleive just because it's comforting.  I suppose some do or think they belive for that reason.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains her own believe tf that way, but for me it is because I came to understand that it is true.  I don't think I could accept itj  as a mere comfort.  And besides, I don't think it weever was for me a comfort.  I didn't necessarily like it at all at first.  I likesd some aspects of it that I discovered in some writers such as a few of the Catholic mystics, but I didn't like Martin Luther at all at first.  Little of it appealed to me emotionally excpet the idea that God exists, and that was a powerful influence, it made me happy beyhond happy to think God exists.   I'm not even entirely wusure why it made me so happy but I do know that is what made me happy.

It was later that I finally  took the gospel itself seriously the fact of the need for salvation and what God did to save us.  And for that I think scripture is very clear.  Jesus did rise from the dead and many saw Him alive after His death.  That's all the evidence needed.  It's all there, there is no reason to doubt it.  Jesus even goes out of His way to make the point that we dhshouldb believe the witneses when He gives Thomas the direct evidence he needed.    If we believe the resurrection there should be no difficulty in believing all the other supernatural  parts of the story.  

I'm not all tht inspired by the science questions that Steven Meyer finds so important in determining the reality of God.  I'm interestinged in the smaller scientific observations I've listed here many times recently because I think they prove evolution to be false, and I suppose you can go from there to the reality of God easily ienough but that hasn't ben my frame of reference.

Does God Exist? A Conversation with Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer, and Douglas Murray

I'm still bvery taken with this quote by someone Roger I think he said, about climbing this dimly lit stairway which is our life and suddenly coming upon a window thgouth which we catch sight of another and brighter world, a world to which we belong although we cannot enter it...  \\

I had experiences like that and so do many others, before becomeing a bwliever.  It didn't make a believer of me and may not for the others either.  

Later .  Just ran across another interview with Tom Holland where he makes it excruciatingly clear that he think sthe Roman Church represents a revl;lutionary expression of true Christainity, and he even includes the papacy as part of this wonderful revolution.  Ouch.  this is so wrong it hurts.

JHe sees cycles of revolutionary cleansings of society followed by decay followed by renewal of the reformation in cleansing.  this is so wrong it takes my breatha away.  

 Holland on the Great AwokeningLater    Just

later:   I didn't quite say what this so called hyperChristainity means.  It's a reference to the woke trend going on now, the antishite racism, the transgender stuf etc.  The idea is that these ideas make use of a sort of Chrsitian morality against Christianity, and I think that's true enough and a good obeservation.  That was also the case with the moveme4nts of the sixties, gay rights and feminism for instance, later gay marraige.   The moral attitude is definitily Christian, this concern about rights of minorisites, th last legitimate expression of which, if I may say so, ws the Civil Rights movement of the sixties.   None of these other movements has anythign Christian about them at all .  In fct it strikes me as ver odd swhen people critidize them as not being Christian in the sense that they have no concept of forgiveness.  That's certainly true but that's not the place to start to criticize them for not being genuinely Christian.  The point is that these are all violations of biblical moraltiy in one way or another and therefore there is nothing Christain about them whatever.  Even feminism although that has genuine Christain aspects to it, is not Christain in the form it started taking in the sixties with the Marxism framework that took it over.    But you can't call anything Christain that demands rights and freedoms for what the bible clls sin.    Without even referencing the bible though you can point out that the idea that abortin is a right is indefensible just because no sane societ would call murder a right.  They have to completely obscure the fact that it is murder in order to carry on about "reproductive rights' and all that inasanity.    But you don't ned to point to the Bible to say that murder is not a right.

Some Seriour Thoughts by Unbelievers on The God Question

Wonde4rful things pop up on You Tube fairly frquently despite its being a leftist bastion of cancel culture and wokeness and all that craziness.  I can't navigate anywhere else so I'm stuck here but grateful for how much really good stuff comes up nevertheless.

Theatest I just litened to is a \n episode of Uncommon Knowledge with guests A\Douglas Murray, Tom Holland and Steve oh drat I keep forgetting his name.  But all three of them are deep thinkers and whatever they say is rivieting.  For me anyway.  

This one is The God Question and each of these men has written a book relating to this subject.  All have conlcluded to one degree or another that Christianity is the philosophical cultural foundation of wester civilization, even having coming from points of view that would put them at odds with such a conclusion.   

Theyreno belivers and talk about Chrisitanity ass a body of concepts.  They addresss the question of how theis perspective relates to the question of belief.  I keep wanting to argue with them about this or that, particularly with Tom Holland, because they miss the whole point of belief.  They do know this though and that's important.  

To summarize, they see how the moral framework of estern culture is thoroughly Christain even though belief in the resurrection is not necessarily part of that.  

It's a great discussion even if I think they go offf the rails here and there.  

Toad the end someon quoted someone, I don't believe in God but I miss HIm.  Apparently they can relate tot aht feeling.  I remember something like that feeling myself from the years before I became a believer.  I was a pretty committed atheist but I did from time to time have to admit that I felt a pang of loss from the time I gave up my pretty shallow childhood believe in God about the age of Ffifteen.  A pang of loss but I became an atheist.  For the next thirty or so years.    I well remember the first Christmas I experienced in church hafter becomeing a believer, sitting there hearing the old carols sung and actually believing them and knowing their meaning for the first time in my life, tears streaming down my face.  

Why can't they believe in the resurrection?  It seems an odd sort of stubbornness to me.   The disciples themselves didn't believe in it either at first but their coming to believe it by witnessing Him alive ought to carry some weight with readers of the account.  They saw Him alive.  He even appeared to do called doubtingg Thomas.  Then he believed too.  It's all there.  They are honest people.  

These are highly intelligent men and men of ddeep feelings too.  Very touching.

\Does God Exist? A Conversation with Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer, and Douglas Murray

Just want to add a couple remarks I remember from the discussion.  Both might have come from Douglas Murray but I'm not sure.   All of them agreed with the sense of strangeness of Christianity.  I thought that was an interesting observation.  Yes there is a strangeness to it and certainly to unbelievers committed to the contemporary secular mindset.    The other remark I remember was the poignant statement that everyone has had an experience like looking out a window at an entirely different world and feeling That is my true home.   Yes.  

Dawkins on Religion Again

 

IBest of Richard Dawkins against Religion (youtube.com)

Going to try to answe r Dawkins again without the intemperate rant.  I think that URL above goes to the same video , at least I haope so because capturing URLs is not easy for me.

As usual it all starts out with his claim that faith is belief in something without evidence, and as usual my answer is that it simply isn't so.  I really don't think anyone believes anything without evidene.  It may be bad evidence but you always have some kind of evidence for whatever you accept as true.   Anyway, faith as he is thinking of it comes from Christianity and is of course the strongest concept we use in discussing what we believe.  I sue the term myself as my own psedonum here.  But my believe in the God of the bible and in the teachings of the Bible, and in my dsalvation through the death of Christ on the cross, which I believe in by faith, is all baed on the evidence given by the witnesses in the Bible and the witnesess of the Bible itself as a collection of testimonies attributed to the inspiration of God Himself.  

Why Dawkins doesn't think of witness evidence as evidence I don't know.  I believe in tghe resurrection of Christ becaues it is reported in the Bible by people who claim to be wyweyewitnesses of the life of Jesus, and who report on other witnesses of His life and of His appearing after His death.  All this is evidence whther you think it is good enough evidencde for you or not.   If your cousin told you he syw a bobcat in the woods and narrowly escaped and you never saw a bogcat would you not believe him anyway?   Wouldn't it be a basis for taking it as reality?  

We knw a lotof thigs this way.  but we certainly have to know the revelations of the Bible this way because we have no other way of knowing it.  It's all intin the past and we can never see it ourselves.  Some of ti is outside our normal experience, supernatural , and that askes a lot of us to believe it, but we believe it because we count the witnesses to be trustworthy.   If you don't you don't, I can't help that, but I do and for me the ressurection is very real and my salvation based on it trustworthy.

And I don't have faith in the boiling temperature of water for pete's sake.  I can measure that.  Or any other question that can be dealt with by the method of observation and experience, the scientific method.  Good grief.  

Then we have his remarks on biblical morality as he objects to stoning people for adultery and death for breaking the sabbath without regard to the biblical context which of course escapes him completes.  Laws for the ancient Israelites had a specif purpose of keeping themj separate from the peoples around them and protecting the integrity of the population of God's chosen people.  Christians wer not subject to those laws, they were for the Israelites only.  We ave are subject to eh Ten Commandments because those are universal laws but we are not subject to those given to the Israelites for the purpose of identifying them with the true God.   Since the people wer e prone to wander off into the mindset of the surrounding nations they sometimes had to be brought back harshly.  Bug t askdide from theat adultery threatened the cohesiveness of the group and had to be punished severely.  The Sabbath had farreaching implications concerning the nature of God and His promise of the Messiah to come, breaking the law of respecting the prmomise was a very serious thing, and it isn't that it could be violated inoocently, the death sentence for breaking it was well known so there was no expecuse.    There is also  reelation of the mind of God on these thigns, what He considers to be of great importance, which we too are to take seriously even if we are not under the lolaws as the Israelites were.

I'm not very happy with that paragraph but oh well, on we go.

He goes on to say how he liekes our modern morality, for instance that we are rid of slavery, women are treated as equals with men, we favor gentleness in general and being kind oto animals and so on.   He has zerio idea that this all comes from Christianity.  He thinks it is a secular achievement.   Slavery used to be universal throughout the world, may cultures depended on it economically and there was no opposition to it.  To oppose it under those circumstances would have accomplished nothing but the rebellion of the pepole or at least the leaders.  SlAvery couldn't have been effectively opposed until modern times and when it finally was it came from Christianity.  The west was finally freed sfrom slavery but it still remains entrenched in the rest of the world.  It is a Christian achievmenet and Dawkins is completely wrong about history.    Same sith equality for women.  Jesus liberalized relations with women and that became the basis for its eventual accewptance in modern times.  Again only in the west.  Same with kindness to animals and kindness in generl.  All from Christ.  

He aparently thinks that secular morality and rational thought somehow exist apart from the Christainity that pervades the west but aththat is his big mistake.  It all derives from Christaintiyh.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali understands this which she touches on beriefly in the previous post.

Then he goes into his hatred of the doctrine of original sin which he considers to be highly immoral and demeaning.    Funny when I first understood it I wa thrilled by it because to my mind it explains all kinds of things in our lives that otherwise don't get exlainsed,  all the suffering and hatred and violence and war and etc etc.   but I take the Bible as revealing universal truths, dawkins takes it as being the wordk of fallible humanity so he thinks we can just do away with it and make up our own morality.    

I'm not at all happy with this post but  it's the best I can do right now.  I think I'll end it by saying that I think Richarc d Dawkins needs to engage in some empirical science to get a better nderstanding of what is really going on with religion.  If for instance he learned something about how Chrsitain children perform in science I'm sure he'd be forced to admit that there is no difference in how they perform than unbelieving children, that includeds strictly homeschooled Christain chidlren.  They are taught the scientific method like weveryone else.

the only difference is that evolution is not science in that scense, it is hosistorical science that can't have the absolute certainty we get from the hard sciences.   they don't even have witness evidence for their supposed facts concerning the change from ne species to another, ti's all speculative, all conjecture and thee evidence as I've tbeen trying to show in many recent posts is just not there at all.  

but now I'm going to end this very unsatisfactory post.  

Later .  I have to add here that I just went back and listened to some of the Ayaan Hisrsi Ali interview and want to emphasize that I think it's an extremely good discussion about how the west and all our institutions and philosophies are shot through with Christain principles.  They refer to a gook by Tom Hallond I'm not familiar with but apparently he developes this theem and I'd like to be able to read it.  But the discussion alone is very good and I want to promote it for anyone who is interested.

GoGoing Down Under the Avalanche of Lies, or Will God Have Mercy on Us

 The entire Harris side of the election is built on lies, absolutely every word of it.  It's staggering.  How do they live with themselves.  And lies could win the elecrtion and plunge the nation into a dark ages most naive Americans have no way of imagining.

I don't think most Democrats or liberals could really be in favor of what their party actually stands for but if all they are hearing is lies they may well be deceived into voting for them anyway, and that is the big problem we have now.  How to get the truth to the liberals.  There seems to be no way to do that.  They are in the habit of trusting the usual sources and won't even think of checking out sources that might oppose them.  I ran into this recently with two liberals who were trying to convince me that Google wouldn't have intentionally interfered with my blog because I'm a conservative as i told them, no they have must simpler explanations, inocent explanations for why I'm having the problems I'm having.  The kind of problems one has in the old ckind of America swhere as a general rule we could trust both sides to be basically honest.  That is not the case any more and they have no idea that it isn't.  I certainly can't persuade them otherwise, they have a mountain of information they trust on their side.  That it is misinformation isn't cgoing to occur to them without many encounters with evidence and that isn't going to happen because they don't expose themselves to it.   They are convinced the misinformation is on the other side so why should they spend any time investigating it?

So it's up to God.  Well it isn anyway.  Will He have mercyh on us or not?  Does He want America to go down now?  Or will He give us another chance?

Have mercy on us, Lord.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: In Her Own Words || Conversation with Glen Scrivener\\

This is after her conversion to Christianity and she is ver clear that the benefits of western civilication are all due to Christian influence.

Bret Weinstein and Brandon Strat

\\\\Leave No ALeave No American Behind: Brandon Straka on DarkHorse (youtube.com)maricon Behind: Brandon Straka on DarkHorse (youtube.com)

Leave No American Behind: Brandon Straka on DarkHorse (youtube.com)

Trying to et the right URL I got the three above and I'll have to try to sort them out carefully sometime.  At least one of them goes to the middle of the video, I don't know if any go to the starting point of the video.  

Anyway.  Brandon Strat is the founder of the Walkaway movement which consists of people who feel disenfranchised by the Democratic Paty and left it, although they don't all nevcessarily to to the same place.  Strat himself has pretty much joined Trump but seems to have some rservations about that too.

Bret Weistein has done his own alking away but I find him less easy to understand or agree with than Strat.  He's still too much of a liberal for me, his reasoning just comes from some other place than minde andit's hard to get into his.  

He still doesn't get MAGA meaning the last A because his focus is all on how America has failed with racial issues.  Strat says he doesn't see it that way but as getting back to a time when Ameria was prospecerous and enjoyhing our liberties or something like that.  I'd agree with that but when I think of being great again I thik mostly of the Greatest Generation, the fact that Amerida has always been a generous good force in the world, helping our enemies rebuild after war being part of that.  That's the kind of greateness I'd like ot see us get back to , but also the propsperity and especially the times when we felt safe and trusting of our neighbors and left our doors unlocked.  That America is long gone since the Left took over.

And Weistein doesn't swant Strat to identify the Left as the prolblem but I agree with Strata and hoepe he doesn't change his mind about that.  I get bBret's problem that he still identifies with that word but to my mind the Left just now has come to stand for all the bad stuff.  If he wants to hold onto Liberal I can handle that one, but no, Left belongs to the stuff i want to get rid of.  

It's always good to have da discussion about these things anyway and maybe Bret's views will start making more sense to me if I hear more of them.

Just a Little Rant Against dawkins and the other antireligionists, and against the Left

I am cancelling this post because I was way too intemperate.  And 

And I spologize to Mr. dawkins for my insulting remarks.

IBest of Richard Dawkins against Religion (youtube.com)