Posted on 07/16/2007 4:13:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
Years ago I had a series of debates with the literary scholar Stanley Fish. Our topic was political correctness. I portrayed Fish as the grand deconstructor of Western civilization, and he fired back in There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, several chapters of which are an answer to my arguments. As I got to know Fish, however, I recognized that although he defended some of the practices being promoted in the name of multiculturalism and diversity, he was not himself a politically correct thinker. We became friends, and in 1992 he and his wife attended my wedding.
Fish has of late been demonstrating his political incorrectness by writing critically of separation of church and state, and also by challenging leading atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christoher Hitchens. Indeed Fish uses his detailed knowledge of Milton as well as his famous skills of literary deconstruction to show the emptiness of the atheist arguments.
In his New York Times blog, Fish takes up the argument advanced by Dawkins and company that belief in God is a kind of evasion. According to this argument, we avoid the responsibilities of this life by putting our hopes in another life. Religion makes us do crazy things.
Fish takes as an example of the Harris-Hitchens-Dawkins critique the behavior of Christian in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Christian becomes aware that he is carrying a huge burden on his back (Original Sin) and he wants to get rid of it. Another fellow named Evangelist tells him to "flee the wrath to come." Evangelist points Christian in the direction of a shining light. But Christian can't clearly see the light. Still, he begins to run in that direction. Bunyan describes his wife and children who "began to cry after him to return, but the man put his fingers in his ears and ran on, crying Life! Life! Eternal Life!"
For Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins, this is precisely the kind of crazy behavior that religion produces. Here is a man abandoning his duties and chasing after something he isn't even sure about. Fish writes, "I have imagined this criticism coming from outside the narrative, but in fact it is right there on the inside." Bunyan not only has Christian's wife and children imploring him to return, he also has Christian's friends struggling to make sense of his actions.
Fish comments, "What this shows is that the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking. Rather than being swept under the rug of a seamless discourse, they are the very motor of that discourse." Citing the atheists' portrait of religion as unquestioning obedienece, Fish writes, "I know of no religious framework that offers such a complacement picture of the life of faith, a life that is always presented as a minefield of difficulties, obstacles and temptations that must be negotiated by a limited creature in the effort to become aligned with the Infinite."
Fish observes that while religious people over the centuries have dug deeply into the questions of life, along come our shallow atheists who present arguments as if they first thought of them, arguments that Christians have long examined with a seriousness and care that is missing in contemporary atheist discourse.
In a follow-up article, Fish deepens his inquiry by looking at the kind of evidence that atheists like Hawkins and Harris present for their “scientific” outlook. Harris, for example, writes that “there will probably come a time when we will achieve a detailed understanding of human happiness and of ethical judgments themselves at the level of the brain.” Fish asks, what is this confidence based on? Not, he notes, on a record of progress. Science today can no more explain ethics or human happiness than it could a thousand years ago.
Still, Harris says that scientific research hasn’t panned out because the research is in the early stage and few of the facts are in. Fish comments, “Of course one conclusion that could be drawn is that the research will not pan out because moral intuitions are not reducible to phyhsical processes. That may be why so few of the facts are in.”
Fish draws on examples from John Milton to make the point is that unbelief, no less than belief, is based on a perspective. If you assume that material reality is all there is, then you are only going to look for material explanations, and any explanations that are not material will be rejected out of hand. Fish’s objection is not so much that this is dogmatism but that it is dogmatism that refuses to recognize itself as such. At least religious people like Milton have long recognized that their core beliefs are derived from faith.
Fish concludes that “the arguments Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens mostly rely on are just not good arguments.” We can expect our unbelieving trio to react with their trademark scorn, but Fish has scored some telling points.
(Q)Think of plate tectonics for an example of light and heat without nuclear fusion.(/Q)
I’m glad you take such pleasure at my frustration - what would Jesus say about that?
At any rate, I don’t think you understand plate tectonics. Plate tectonics may generate some heat due to friction, but this heat is negligible compared to the heat left over from the Earth’s condensation into a solid mass, (and the subsequent collision with a Mars-size planetoid a billion years after its formation which created the Moon, and caused Life to start all over again), and the natural heat given off by radionuclides which are spread throughout the lithosphere, and below in the outer and inner core. The plates “float” on hot, liquefied rock known as magma. Plate tectonics do not give off any visible light, unless there is a volcanic eruption and glowing magma from deep below the Earth’s crust makes it way to the surface. It is so hot that it glows in visible orange, yellow or red as it cools. Only Infrared light is given off by plate tectonics, and not very much at that. Plants do not live by IR light, but by UV light, and some frequencies of visible. Plants require the spectrum of light which the sun gives off, as they evolved to do this.
The main form of light, and radiation in general, in the Universe, is thermonuclear fusion in the cores of stars.
And I haven’t been banging my head against God, I’ve been banging it against some folks who are clinging desperately to archaic superstitious beliefs because they fear their own (God-given) mortality.
Good for Foxworthy! It’s not often that you see a personal testimony in the mainstream media that isn’t played for laughs or slanted to make some other point.
As you like.
(Q)Life (as it continues to adhere to Biblical truths) has taught me never to make that assumption and that I am to be even more suspicious of those who would make such a claim.(/Q)
Too bad, your suspicion is completely misplaced, here. Anybody that doesn’t believe in God, as you define him, is automatically evil and worthy of suspicion and mistrust? We wouldn’t need armies or policemen if everybody was as moral as I am. Please explain to me why God would allow an innocent and otherwise perfectly healthy baby to be conceived, fully gestated to term, then die in birth, strangled by it own umbilical cord? What’s the point of that? To punish the parents for their sins? Does your infinitely-compassionate God have anything to do with that? And if your God is so all-knowing - why did he create Satan, with the full foreknowledge of all the trouble and pain that would cause mankind (and God himself?) You people crack me up. You are living in a fantasy world, a fairy tale written by superstitious primitives over 2 millenia ago.
(Q)Technically, God created Hell to store the rebellious angels and their ringmaster Lucifer.(/Q)
Why did God create Lucifer in the first place, knowing full well with his perfect omniscience that Lucifer would rebel, and cause all manner of trouble in Heaven and in Earth? Doesn’t that seem kind of like, umm, a mistake? Did He do it with malice aforethought? Isn’t that sadistic?
Humans condemn themselves to hell. God doesn't. God has provided a way out of hell for man.
Adam and Eve had a choice, and they chose wrong.
God can’t be archaic since he doesn’t change. Everything is new in Christ.
I think you will find, if you talk to most Christians, that it is not at all fear of death that led them to Christ. I’ve never personally known anyone that came to Christ out of fear actually. Most of the time it’s surprise, joy, understanding, conviction, inspiration.
“Be not Afraid.”
It is in the Bible over 150 times in various ways. Those words are a gift from God to his people. The thing I’ve noticed is that the people that claim religion is a crutch are the people that are the most afraid and most need comfort, courage, and strength in thier lives.
What do you think Jesus would say about the way I’m chatting with you? I think we are doing just fine! No name calling, good spirits.
I love you man!
Why create us, then, with the foreknowledge granted by omniscience, that many, perhaps untold billions, will go to Hell? Isn’t that horrifically sadistic? Why not just let the evil ones die forever into oblivion and not go to heaven? Wouldn’t that be more merciful than an eternity of torment? What kind of Supreme Being would preside over a Hell? An infinitely-compassionate one? I think not!
(Q)Adam and Eve had a choice, and they chose wrong.(/Q)
Who did Adam & Eve’s children marry?
Since all have rebelled against God and sinned the better question is why does God save anyone?
“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. - Romans 1:18-20
If all are guilty and none without excuse why save any?
And would it be fair to give a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao the delights of heaven and a relationship with God? Did none of their choices to do evil count against them? Would that be the act of a just God? If no, then you recognize the need for a fair judge at the end of time and are now, here, just questioning the fairness of God and saying you don’t trust him to do the job properly.
The answer to why he saves his people is, as always, love.
Since all have rebelled against God and sinned the better question is why does God save anyone?
“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. - Romans 1:18-20
If all are guilty and none without excuse why save any?
And would it be fair to give a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao the delights of heaven and a relationship with God? Did none of their choices to do evil count against them? Would that be the act of a just God? If no, then you recognize the need for a fair judge at the end of time and are now, here, just questioning the fairness of God and saying you don’t trust him to do the job properly.
The answer to why he saves his people is, as always, love.
Hell is a place of eternal separation from God, and people go there when they die because they chose to separate themselves from God while living on earth. God created us with the free will to make our own choices, and separating ourselves from God is one of the choices we are free to make. Our free will is a wonderful gift from God in that He does not force us to love Him or to follow Him. Without our free will, we would be nothing but puppets or robots, which does not please God, and certainly does nothing to better our lives.
While God desires that everyone would choose to love Him, some people will choose not to. These people will die in their sins and be separated from God forever in hell. Many would say that this is unfair, and that a loving God would never set up a system such as this; however, it is precisely God's love for us, and the fact that He is perfectly just, that tells us why hell exists, and why men and women will choose to go there. God loves us so much that He respects our freedom of choice. If we choose not to love Him, then why would He want to force us to live with Him eternally in heaven? Wouldn't living for eternity with someone we don't love be hell anyway? God wants to spare those people who don't love Him from having to live with Him and be under His rule for eternity.
God's perfect justice demands that there be a hell to punish the unrepentant and wicked among us.
What kind of a loving God would He be if the wicked were never punished? Why would He have sent His Son to die for our sins, if we could reject that redemption and not eventually pay the price? What incentive would we have to do good and love God if we knew we could reject His Son and choose to do evil all of our lives and never be punished? We would not want this lack of justice in the streets of our cities and towns, so why do we expect God to mete it out in the overall universe?
An infinitely compassionate, loving God sacrificed His own son so that human beings could escape His judgment. Men and women send themselves to hell; God does not put anyone there.
I agree with you, belief-wise. One thing though, Pat Robertson may be a bit ‘out there’, but he’s mostly harmless. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, has some mental problems.
Genesis 5:4 says Adam and Eve had other sons and daughters, and Jewish tradition teaches they had 33 sons and 23 daughters. (Remember that Adam lived 930 years, so he and Eve had plenty of time to have 56 children!)
To get the population started, of course, at least one of Adam and Eve's sons had to marry one of the daughters. It is likely that in the first generation all marriages were between brother and sister. Living so close to the time of the perfect creation, no genetic problems would have developed yet, so no harm would have come from such close marriages.
By the time of Moses, 2600 years later, many biological problems had accumulated, which made marriage between close relatives dangerous, so laws were given against it and are still in place today.
Why didn’t God, a perfect, omniscient, omnipotent being, create humanity so that we COULD understand his Word, and cause the Bible to be written in a way that we could not possibly misinterpret? Instead of designing us to fail?
_________________________________________________________
I just caught this. You are not designed to fail. You are designed to succeed and God wants you to. God loves you. It’s a personal relationship that you can have with God; your salvation is personal, not corporate. As far as “no possible misinterpretation” goes that wouldn’t leave free will. It would have to be embedded in you as instinct if it left no choice and no free will. Not the way humans were made, praise God.
1 Timothy 3-4 This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
If the Bible is too be believed (which it's not) that's exactly what he's done. Most of the Nazis were Christians while Anne Frank was a Jew. According to your religion that means Anne Frank is right now burning in hell while the guards at her camp are now enjoying the "delights of heaven and a relationship with God". The same with the Khmer Rouge who have in recent years converted to Christianity and their victims who were mostly Buddhist.
From my viewpoint it doesn’t take much to “deconstruct” atheism - merely the simple observation that atheism is trying to prove a negative.
An impossibility. Don’t pass GO, don’t collect $200.
“ok, i admit i was wrong.”
there are a number of answers; whoops, my bad, holy mackerel, well i’ll be a s.o.b., dayam, oh no and ay ay ay ayay. (among others)
suicide bomber finds himself in front of st. peter after pulling the string. he says to st. peter, “please give me my seventy virgins.” st. peter tells him about a mistake in the translation. “it was not seventy virgins, but seventy virginians”, he tells the bomber.
Do you really think that the Nazi were Christians with a saving faith in Christ? Same with Pol Pot? It makes no sense at all. If they were Christians they would have acted differently wouldn’t they?
They must not have had the same Bible I do:
Love for Enemies
27”But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. 30Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31Do to others as you would have them do to you.
32”If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them. 33And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ do that. 34And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ lend to ‘sinners,’ expecting to be repaid in full. 35But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
My understanding is that the State and the Race was all important for the Nazis and they jailed many believing Christians.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.