From: hartigan@ac.dal.ca
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Stop thinking? (Was: Why I am an atheist)
Date: 11 Sep 92 20:38:26 -0300
Organization: Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

In article <adams.716182305@spssig>, adams@spss.com (Steve Adams) writes:
> 
> Or, in which Steve Adams demonstrates the bredth of his heresy...;-)

As part of my new project to achieve moral perfection, I'm not going to
call Steve names anymore. 

>>"Space-age cybernomad..." I like it! Maybe I'll put it in my .sig. Or if you
>>want to, you can...or we both can!
> Yeah, I like it!  It'll go in my .sig!

Kind of conjures up images of a ghostly electronic figure endlessly 
wandering the wastelands of an infinite cyberverse...what is he looking
for? Will he ever find it?  Tune in to future posts and see...

>>So we're still left with the problem of: why did God have to pay a price
>>to himself? 
> To fulfill his own rules of justice.  The price HAD to be paid.  There was
> no other way to save humanity that was truly just.  This was the only way.
> A God/Man combination.

Okay...but why? Couldn't God waive his own rules?  Especially regarding a
price to be paid to himself by himself?  I still don't understand.

> JC, as you call him, was, in this version of the passion idea, the 'perfect
> sacrifice', the 'sin offering' from the Deuteronomic laws.

I'm still unclear as to why this sacrifice was necessary, I'm afraid.

>> She keeps trying to get me to go to theology school. Oh well.)
>  Go.  Go!  Get a PhD in Theology...you'll definately shake some people up!

It's tempting actually...but I can do the Bible _my_ way if I continue
with English. However - all options are open.  Emerson, one of my 
favourite writers, used to give speeches on religion. I _think_ he 
may actually have been a Unitarian minister. It's been a while, I don't
remember...but I know he DID give a lecture at the convocation of 
Harvard Divinity School one year that got him banned from further
lectures for 30 years!   For a fascinating and unique (as far as I know)
approach to Christianity, take a look at Emerson's "The Divinity School
Address."  It has influenced my attitude towards Christianity greatly.
I was ready to write it off as a silly old superstition until I 
read the text of this lecture.

>>> Basically, since only God can pay the price, but has no sin, the
>>> incarnation allows a man (Jesus, who was fully human) to pay the price.
>>> But Jesus was also God, or at least the divine presence was in Jesus.  
>>                                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^   
>>The Apollinarian heresy!  <gasp>
> Catching me in a heresy.  How novel.  Not. ;-)  But note, that I gave that
> as an alternative...my belief is that Jesus WAS God, others disagree!

This is, as I have learned, an extremely tricky issue. However, it seems
that your belief is pretty orthodox, since you concede that he was also
fully human, too. Have I got this straight? 

>>Still, this kind of language is VERY fuzzy. How did he "take the pain of
>>the world onto himself?"  A) Jesus was supposed to be sinless, so HE never
>>felt the eternal pain of sin...B) A lot of sin is just good fun! 
>>C) is pain some kind of "thing" etc. etc. etc... blah blah...
> No, it was through his suffering and death on the cross that Jesus took all
> of the 'pain' of sin onto himself...remember the OT sacrificial lamb.

I'm afraid I still don't get it. How did he take _all_ of the pain of
sin for the whole world onto himself?   Can one person pay the moral
price for another?  I beat up my brother and then convince my sister to
take the punishment? Something doesn't seem right... have I got this
straight?
 
>>Once you recognize human creativity, it is 
>>darn tempting to think that maybe humans created.........God? And this
>>whole cosmology?  Yikes!
> "Let us make God in our image and likeness"...or somesuch thing.  I don't
> buy this...God does exist.  Can I 'prove' it?  No.  Leap of faith.  Of
> course, in that discussion, I never said that God didn't exist, or that God
> didn't create the universe, just that we can affect it more and in different 
> ways than most Christians would say.
  
I think you admitted that you could generate decisions _ex nihilo_, that 
you are a miniature First Cause. The doctrine of free will requires that you
be a small-scale "unmoved mover," an independant source of motion. (i.e.
decisions)  This doesn't deny God, as you say, but it _does_ say that
you can be an _independent_ source of value. 

>>That means God is not the sole creator of the universe. 
> Not the conclusion I drew, but a possible conclusion, nonetheless.

I think it's a valid conclusion, if you say that "humans assist with 
a continuing creation."

>>He only created part of it...hmmmm....so 
>>he is NOT the source of all goodness, then...just SOME of it. And if
>>we can create independently, maybe we can do better than God! Maybe
>>we can create a heaven on earth - maybe...maybe <gasp> we...don't...
>>NEED...God!  
> Hmm.  I don't think we can create independantly, but can shape our world to
> make it better.

It seems to me that the free will doctrine implies that we CAN create
independantly. Unless you would qualify it by saying that there is no
such thing as human creativity, that our decisions are free but that 
every other thought that arises in our minds gets there deterministically.
But why should _one_ category of thought be free while all others 
are determined?  

>>Maybe our creations will be inherently BETTER than God's
>>once we get our act together.  Hurray!  Steve, old buddy, you've moved out
>>of the middle ages and into the Renaissance!  The next step, of course,
>>is that if we are independent sources of value, than a God-centered
>>ethic is not the only one possible. There are OTHER ways to judge good
>>and bad besides the whims of that stodgy old Yahweh...
>>..and the only reason to obey Yahweh, now, is FEAR.
> This sounds about right...at least as AN explanation.  I don't think that
> it is THE explanation.  You can't get me that easy!

It's just a stripped-down interpretation of history since the
Renaissance. Subject to all the limitations of one man's interpretation.
However - I think it is true that if we have free will, than we are
independant sources of good and evil.  On reflection, though, a Christian
perspective defines "good" as having existence only in relation to
God i.e. what God does/wants = good.  Or does it?
If you combine free will with a notion of objective good (not
connected to God, necessarily...then we can be sources of good, too.

Good and evil aside, free will does imply that humans can think and
create independantly from God. It creates the possibility of a new ethical
centre - the "unmoved mover" Steve instead of the "unmoved mover" God.
In a deterministic universe, God is doing everything, ultimately. 
(_theistic_ determinism...)

This re-focusing of values, I think, is part of what has made the
modern age what it is.

>>Hurray! We've just invented Fundamentalism! We've reached the modern
>>age at last.  Fundamentalism, of course, is Christianity for the
>>19th and 20th centuries. 
> 
> Or at least you've brought the conversation down the path...is there some
> method to your madness? ;-)

Actually, I was quite surprised and pleased to see that little thought-
experiment lead somewhere interesting.  It doesn't tell us very much,
though, now that I think about it some more. I think the only valuable
insight to come out of it might be the recognition of the connection
between free-will and humanism.  Free will, of course, is an essential
doctrine of "secular humanism," too.  I suspect the notion of "human
rights" comes from the combination of the free-will doctrine with the
idea of objective (non-God-related) good. 

Hard to be sure at this point, though. :) 

It is fascinating, though, to try and spin out the implications of 
the free-will business. It leads all kinds of interesting places. 
Ultimately, too, I suspect it leads to this kooky New Age "I am God"
pseudo-Hindu stuff.  Hinduism (I believe) has no free will doctrine.
How could you be an independent source of action, a Hindu would ask,
since everything is God? Charmingly, a traditional Hindu greeting is
to put one's hands in the praying position and bow. The meaning of
the ritual is that one is meeting a manifestation of God when one
meets another person, so one bows out of respect and religious feeling.
Much nicer than our shaking hands, which I seem to remember originated
in the need to show that one's right hand was not holding a weapon...
Always the practical ones, we Westerners! :)


>>> (Ack, I'm a heretic again!)
> 
>>Well, we're getting used to it. 
>
> We who?  You don't actually think that any mortal would actually wade through 
> all this dreck, do you?

I don't know!  Hey! Is anybody reading this? 

>>Of course, there are a lot of people around who are happy sinners.  
>
> Hmm, I suppose if Christie Brinkley were to magically appear in my bed
> while my wife was away, I'd be a pretty happy sinner, too.  At least until
> judgement...(appeal to fear!)

Remarkable, isn't it?  In this respect, I admire the Catholics, who have
always managed to keep Puritanism from taking over the Church. 
"Puritanism" in its extreme form - Cromwell and the boys outlawing fun
in Britain for what, 60 years?  

Mark Twain thought it amazing, BTW, that the one thing that everybody
agrees is more fun than just about anything is totally excluded from
our concept of heaven. For another fascinating perspective on Christian
faith, take a look at Twain's "Letters from Earth." 
 
>>This is exactly right. (about Paul, that is.)   If you accept Paul
>>purely as an "existential choice" (i.e. I believe it because I WANT to)
>>then there is no common ground. 
>
> Appeal to authority?  Hmm.  That's a violation of logical thought isn't it.
> Well, uhm, <squirm>, yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at right now.
> Actually closer to "lots of people have accepted Paul, so I start there
> too because of my basic religious upbringing." 
> It's a starting point.

I can't argue with this, really, as it is a matter of choice, and you admit
that it is not entirely logically kosher.  However, to use Paul as a
starting point...isn't there a computer expression "garbage in, garbage out?"
If you start with a bad assumption, you are unlikely to get anywhere.
Your first step should be: evaluation of your starting points, shouldn't it?
(Note- this is not to disparage Paul, only to say that he is a 
_questionable_ base to build one's world upon.)
 
>>Then I ask, was he inspired or not? Then I look at various factors and come 
>>to a tentative conclusion: I doubt it.  
> I'd like to know why...granted, I appeal to 2000 years or so of tradition.
> Why do you discard it?

Not "discard," doubt...Jesus is a mysterious figure. He is very difficult
to figure out on his own. Even his own apostles never understood him,
if one can extrapolate from the gospels. They're always standing around
scratching their heads every time Jesus says something, then they wait
until the crowd leaves and rush up, "So explain all that to us, boss!"

I guess I want to be free to try and understand Jesus for myself. To test
what he says against my own experience. Then along comes this Paul
fellow and says No, no, no, boy...let me tell you how it _really_ is...
On the basis of a hallucination. I've had hallucinations as dramatic as
Paul's, although they were quite different in character, and not so
semantically loaded. 

Anyway...I ask myself...why should I believe Paul? His interpretation
of Jesus sounds nutty as all get out to me.  When I look at the
churches that arose from his teaching, I cringe. I am incapable of
believing in Paulist ideology. It repels me aesthetically, morally, and
intellectually. It goes against every intuitive feeling I have about life.
And...having once been a believer, I can remember the psychological
mechanism of belief in Paulist ideology. It's a matter of hypnotism -
confusing the imaginative realm with the non-imaginative. People
do it all the time, with every ideology. 

This is probably the biggest thing, actually. I can see WHY Paulists 
believe, and I see that it is a form of self-hypnosis.  Stop
hypnotizing yourself, and you can't believe it any more, not really.
This is not a criticism...why do you think Jesus said we need to 
be "born again?"  Born once - hypnotized by society and parents.
The second birth - waking up from the hypnosis. Now, in a world where
all the dualisms you thought were absolute no longer apply, you discover
that "the kingdom of heaven is all around you, but you do not see it."
- Gospel of Thomas.

>>People have experiences near-identical to Paul's EVERY DAY.  I am inclined
>>to think that Paul was just another Temporal Lobe Epileptic. There are lots
>>of them around, lots of them think they're on a mission from God. 
> Not knowing much about epilepsy, I can't comment on this beyond saying 'oh,
> really?'

According to an article in the Spring 1988 (?) Skeptical Inquirer entitled
"Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession,"  what we know
of Paul matches almost perfectly the standard-type of someone suffering
from epilepsy of the temporal lobes. Symptoms include: vivid visual and
auditory hallucinations, loss of interest in sex, zealous, driven behaviour,
rigid dogmatism amounting to fanaticism, and others.  The author of the 
article describes an encounter with a modern TLE patient, a Canadian
serviceman who was a convert to fundamentalism after a violent conversion
experience. The man had elaborate plans to reorganize his branch of the
Canadian military according to shoe size (I think), and when asked if
he had any record of his thoughts, produced a knapsack full of notebooks
crammed with detailed explanations and plans, all in rhyming couplets!
The man had left his wife because she was "obsessed with sex."

If you want details I can go try and find my copy of the article. It;s
around somewhere....

>>>Where does this get us?  Only back to the question of God's nature.  If the
>>>Genesis story is simply allegorical, we can still learn about God's
>>>revealed nature from it...back to the other thread with Paul Harvey on
>>>Genesis 3.
> 
>>I have my own thoughts about Genesis 3 - English student thoughts. Big,
>>important, SECRET, English student thoughts...:)
> 
> Oh yeah?  I bet that this big ol' secret it that Gen3 is, <gasp> POETRY!
> Ahhhhhggghhh!!!...Run...hide the kids!  I've let his secret out of the bag!

Ahhh....but what is poetry, grasshopper?

>>Come on, tell me AGAIN that there's such thing as free will! Even YOU don't
>>believe it! :)
> 
> Keep it up.  Some day you might even get me to say it exactly that way...

I have actually been thinking more about this, and I think I may have
another way to approach this whole free will business. Interested?

>  -Steve

Sean Hartigan
hartigan@ac.dal.ca

Disclaimer: I am probably wrong.