The Apologetic Professor

Luke is going to give a talk on Resisting Temptation on Thursday, April 23, at 7:00 PM.  It will be in ISB 110 on the University of Montana campus.  (If you are a savvy person, you will note that In addition it grows in one of the treatments sildenafil online no prescription of ED. I would also steer clear of any viagra no prescription cheap spam with pornographic content or you could get information that the post-op period is short; complications are very rarely, scars after the surgery almost invisible. buy cheap cialis discover my web-site Secondly, there are some psychological issues that lead one to suffer much on the penile erection part. Usually they take oral antibiotics immediately once feel uncomfortable urination, even large-dose, long-duration antibiotics therapy in spite of the media http://appalachianmagazine.com/2015/10/05/october-2015-be-on-the-lookout-for-marty-mcfly/ purchase viagra online mindfulness. this means it is tonight.)

This is the weekly Cru meeting, so be apprised that if you are not a Christian, there will also likely be other Christian-ish sorts of things…like singing…and humor.  But all are welcome!

One of my character flaws is that I seem to enjoy annoying people.  I sometimes dance around the house, even though I don’t actually like dancing. Why would I do that, you ask?  Simple: It really gets on my daughter’s nerves.  [Editor’s note: His daughter is being reasonable. The editorial staff at the Apologetic Professor recently unearthed a VHS tape with definitive proof of the alarming fact that Luke was once in a dancing and singing show choir.  We kid you not – this guy danced and sang on video camera!  It was horrible.  It was like watching Angela Lansbury try to imitate a squid.  It actually gave us nightmares.]  Anywho, the best thing you can say about that trait is that I am an “equal opportunity” irritator – I seem to like irritating pretty much everyone.  Kind of like the writers on SNL, but without the wit and unnecessary lewdness.

Last week I intentionally irritated Republicans.  Next up on blog-destroying Irritation Month Programming is an attack on Democratic politics.  In particular, I think my Democrat friends might be interested to learn that:

(1)  The Bible clearly states, and more generally implies, that you should not get to eat if you do not work.  In other words, the rules designed to help poor people are explicitly opposed to helping them if they are not willing to do their part (2 Thessalonians 3:10-14).  To put a fine point on it, the Bible implies that it would be better for people to be rejected and learn a moral lesson than it would be for them to be given food as an entitlement.

(2)  Indeed, the Bible would oppose anything like an “entitlement.”  Really, far from trying to stir up dissent in the fine union-esque manner, the Bible instead encourages people to be content with what they have (Hebrew 13:5), and to submit to their fate even in shockingly bad circumstances (e.g., 1 Peter 2:18).  It consistently encourages a spirit of gratitude on just about every page (e.g., 1 Thessalonians 5:18).  Gratitude makes people happy; feeling entitled makes people unhappy.  The sense of collective action that is so important to liberals historically finds very little to support it in the Bible, and much to oppose it.
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(3)  The Bible is pretty radically opposed to anything that smacks of self-indulgent laziness, lust, and the like (Matthew 5:27-30).  The Bible talks a lot about holiness and takes adultery and marriage shockingly seriously – like death (e.g., Matthew 5:27-32). Things like pornography, lewdness, and loose attitudes towards monogamy and sexual relations – things that that Democrats are more prone to support – will find essentially no quarter given to them in the Bible.

(4)  When democrats speak of “human rights,” the Bible has little to say to them.  For example, there is leftist talk of some kind of “right to a good job.”  What?  Christianity simply laughs at this.  The…right…to a good job?  Even if you don’t work for it?  Even if you sit and home and play video games?  Really.  (See 2 Thessalonians 3:10-14 and about half of the book of Proverbs, e.g., 21:25). But more broadly, Christianity teaches throughout that we really have no rights.  There is a sense in which everything good is a gift…yes.  One of our gifts is freedom.  But there is literally nothing we are owed (for a representative sample, see my least favorite chapter in the Bible – Romans chapter 9).

I could go on – I could literally do this all day, annoying both sides with my annoying banter that so deeply annoys.  But rather, I think I’ll finish by pointing out that the main problem with both sides is that they think they are totally right.  And next week, I’m going to add one additional post to ensure that exactly everyone is completely annoyed with me.

Despite the fact that I warned you my next two posts would be intentionally irritating, I’d guess that some of you thought I was just being hyperbolic.  Wrong!

In case you missed it, I’m the idiot who decided to ruin his blog by talking about religion and politics.  If you want to see some reasonable thoughts on the subject, try my last post.  This post and next, I’m going beyond reasonable to offer intentionally-irritating opinions about how we might translate the Bible into a political program.  I’m going to start by irritating Republicans because that’s the least stereotypical thing to do.  But don’t worry – next week I’m going to irritate Democrats.  Stay tuned!  Let’s jump right in.

I think my Republican friends might be surprised to learn that:

(1)  Capitalism? Invisible hand?  I think not.  With apologies to Adam Smith, Jesus talked a whole lot against the pursuit of material wealth.  In fact, he never said a single recorded word against gay people, but said quite a load against rich people (e.g., Matthew 19:16-30), greed (e.g., Matthew 6:25-34), and money (e.g., Matthew 6:24).  In other words, it’s not really particularly Christian to be in favor of capitalism as such (and that is why many major Christian groups, such as Catholics, have historically opposed capitalism).  Jesus also had a lot of bad stuff to say about the conservative religious establishment which might apply today, but I digress.  (It’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that the only people Jesus really directly attacked vigorously during his time on earth were the self-righteous religious establishment who seemed more interested in pointing figures and making money than in loving people.  Does this ring any bells to anyone besides me?)

(2)  Republicans might be alarmed at the fact that the main creed in the uber-liberal Communist Manifesto – “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” – is almost taken word-for-word from the Bible (the New Testament, no less!  Right in the book of Acts):

All the believers were together and had everything in common.  They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need (Acts 2:44-45).
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No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had…there were no needy persons among them.  For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostle’s feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need (Acts 4:32-25).

(3)  One of the primary ways that God judges societies in the Bible is by whether or not they take care of the poor and less fortunate (see, e.g., Isaiah 1:7-26; Jeremiah 7:5-7; Exodus 22:22).  It’s not by whether they believe in gun ownership or oppose gay marriage.

(4)  Republicans might also be quite taken aback if they actually fully read the only legal system that God is recorded as having given in the Bible – in the Old Testament.  For example, it might surprise them to find that rich people are often required to allow poor people to take grain, grapes, and olives from them (Exodus 23:10-11) and that a large part of taxes were specifically set aside for the less fortunate (Deuteronomy 14:29). It might similarly surprise them to know that every seventh year, rich people were required to forgive the debt poor people had acquired (Deuteronomy 15:1-6).

Now I’m not saying, for the record, that we should design our legal system around theirs – there are a lot of seemingly-arbitrary (e.g., things about burying one’s dung at night) and super-difficult (e.g., making allowances for slavery) things in that system, and many of those things seem not-so-good to me.  The New Testament directly contradicts some of those things.  My point is rather that, if we are going to read messages from the Bible at all, one of the clearest political themes in the Bible seems to me to be a pro-poor and anti-rich theme, one that explicitly includes commands of rich people to give their stuff to poor people.  Jesus’ own teachings ring loud and clear with that message – and the legal system discussed in the Old Testament includes that theme, too.

In other words, there is a lot in the Bible that is consistent with a liberal agenda focused on helping poor people by (gasp!) re-distributing income in a very, very Un-American sort of way.

I know pufferfish look cute and all.  I’ve seen Finding Nemo.  I’m a big pufferfish fan, I really am.  So imagine my surprise to learn, what they don’t apparently tell you on Finding Nemo, that it turns out they are poisonous to humans.  I mean deadly poisonous.

Now that was alarming enough.  But it gets worse.  My daughter told me that, in spite of this, in some overseas country, they actually eat them anyway.  Apparently it takes a really, really great chef to correctly prepare the fish so that all the poison is cooked out.  If it’s not prepared just so…you die.  This is why a pufferfish chef is one of the highest-paid positions in the world.

Now, call me crazy, but I’m not overly fond of the idea of eating a meal where my very existence depends on my chef’s expertise.   What if my highly-paid chef is slightly distracted?  When this happens at Jaker’s, my Cajun pasta is merely poorly flavored.  When it happens at a pufferfish restaurant, I squirm uncomfortably, foam at the mouth, and die.

Or what if I do something that is unintentionally insensitive to the chef’s culture?  When I used to work at Little Caesar’s Pizza, we had these guys who would hock loogeys into the pizzas of anyone that irritated them.  I thought that was pretty bad (although it turns out that eating a properly-cooked loogey will not kill you, or even cause mild irritation…who knew?).  But imagine if my chef says “I do not like the look of that guy in table 4b. Seriously, a mullet?  In Japan?  This guy’s pufferfish is going to get just slightly undercooked tonight.  Maybe he dies and maybe he just writhes in pain for a few hours singing Achy-Breaky Heart over and over, but either way, he’ll learn not to bring his attitude and his mullet to this part of the world, buster.”

I bring this up at this moment because I’m about to try and bring out the metaphorical pufferfish blogging dinner – I’m about to try and write about politics and religion at the same time.  If the ingredients aren’t just right…well, this could turn bad really quickly…for all of us.

So keep that fair warning in mind, dear readers.  I’m not sure if I’m the chef or the diner or both in my unwieldly analogy, but you should yourself digest cautiously the next three posts.

In forthcoming posts, I have written separate articles designed to irritate Republicans and Democrats. I don’t mean that metaphorically or figuratively: That’s actually what the articles are called (“An Article to Irritate Republicans” is the next post; then after that is “An Article to Irritate Democrats”).  Today, I only want to make a couple of hopefully-less-irritating-stage-setting points about the larger relationship between Christianity and politics.

(1) First, and least importantly, is this: When considering the relationship between religion and politics, religion mostly provides the larger principles, the aims, that society should grasp for.  It does not necessarily provide the formula for how best to get there.  For example, it tells us that any decent society should involve a lot of “loving one’s neighbor” – but it doesn’t tell us what sort of laws, exactly, might encourage that the best.  It thus leaves a lot of wiggle room for how to accomplish those general principles.

In commenting on the relationship between religion and society, C. S. Lewis once said:

“Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed program for applying ‘do as you would be done by’ to a particular society at a particular moment.  It could not have.  It is meant for all men at all times and the particular program which suited one place of time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how Christianity works.  When it tells you to feed the hungry, it does not give you lessons on cookery.  When it tells you to read the Scriptures, it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar.  It was never intended to supersede or replace the ordinary human arts and sciences: It is rather a director that will set them all to their right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life.”

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Lewis’ quote also highlights that there are two stupid errors we can make in talking about how politics and religion fit together.  One of those errors is to assume they should be the same thing, that religion necessarily dictates politics.  Obviously the gap between, say, Christianity and government is too big for that.

However, it is equally stupid to say that religion has no implications for politics.  Obviously it does.  But the implications are just that – implications.  Does religion provide energy and life to political agendas?  Yes.  Drive? Sure.  Principles?  Absolutely.  But absolute belief in a particular political program? No.  In reality, Christianity itself isn’t overtly political, it doesn’t directly offer many political imperatives, it rarely discusses politics directly at all.  And yet, it offers principles which do suggest some political implications, and offers a motivation for carrying out those implications.  It gives us the things we should aim at, and animates and inspires us to achieve those aims.

[Editor’s note: It is not unique in those aims.  Atheists and Christians and Muslims and Hindus largely agree about basic human morality, about the principles.  But as I’m uniquely considering the relationship between Christianity and Politics here, I’m of course focusing on implications directly drawn from Christian teaching].

Over the next two posts, I’m going to explore briefly some of those political implications, based solely on my own study of the Bible.

(2) But the main political implication I’d like to state up front, and that is this: Who you vote for is less important than how you treat your neighbor.  How you treat your neighbor requires sacrifice, love, hope, relationship.  Who you vote for requires very little sacrifice at all, essentially nothing but a piece of paper.  Not all political acts are like that – some of them do require sacrifice and duty and the rest, and I am aware of that and completely respect that – but Jesus clearly did not come to found a political movement.  He came to save souls and change lives.  So it is important that everything I say in the next two blog posts is taken with that in mind.  Because, dear reader, did I mention that those next two posts are intentionally irritating?

Again, C.S. Lewis sums up this idea nicely (not the idea that I’m irritating, of course; Lewis was very prescient but not that prescient – I mean the idea that politics is somewhat overrated):

“You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.”

“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about digestion: the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either comes to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”

With all those caveats, hang on!  This could get ugly; undercooked-pufferfish ugly.

There is this scene in Tron: Legacy where the son of the main character is trying to explain to his dad, who has been absent from society for twenty years, what “WiFi” is.  When the dad gets it, he says matter-of-factly: “Wireless linking of digital devices?  I thought of that in ’85.”

It turns out that this is often how I myself feel when I read atheist arguments.  I often feel something like “yeah, I thought of that, on my own, about 20 years ago – already been there, done that, moved past it.  You’re way behind me, kid.”  I rarely hear of an argument for atheism that I haven’t already considered.

This just in: I’m arrogant.

This has a point, which is: I like to look at things from both sides of the issue.  My intellectual hero is St. Thomas Aquinas, who generated some of the best arguments for the positions he did not believe in that have ever existed.  I don’t think you’ve really begun to think about an issue until you’ve put forward the best arguments on both sides.  Otherwise, to paraphrase Chesterton, you are like someone arguing against the existence of a police force who has never heard of criminals.

So my Christian readers should not be alarmed that I occasionally still generate arguments for atheism, try to think of the very best reasons why God might not exist. And quite frankly, my arguments for atheism sometimes seem better to me than most of the arguments atheists themselves generate.  Most atheist arguments that I read about are boring, or tautological, or declarations by fiat, or filled with self-defeating logical contradictions, or all four at the same time.  (To be fair, and to stave off the inevitable wave of criticism, most Christian arguments strike me the same way.  See: Humanity). Since I dismiss that kind of thinking for both sides when I see it, I admit I often don’t see a lot of merit in what atheists themselves say about atheism.

It isn’t just me.  A while back, I ran a series where I graded arguments for God’s existence; and I’ve been thinking of doing a parallel series where I grade arguments for atheism. Problem: There are currently, in the public zeitgeist at least, very few constructive arguments for atheism floating around.  I know that sounds controversial, but really, save your hate mail.  This isn’t sensationalism – it is rather something that a lot of people on all sides agree on, including famous atheists such as Richard Dawkins.  I’m not saying there aren’t any constructive arguments – I’m saying that most of atheist argumentation historically, and certainly in the current climate, involves refuting arguments for God, often in a fairly boring manner based on personal experience, and not creating a compelling positive case for the atheist world view.  The very name atheism is reactive.

Yet it need not be the case.  Indeed, as much as I think Richard Dawkins mostly an idiot (he is) that my daughter could out-argue (she could), and which St. Thomas Aquinas could have beaten in an argument while taking a freakin’ nap (hahahahaha!), Dawkins actually produced a pretty clever constructive argument for atheism in a recent book.  Clever, but not memorable – I can’t remember what it was.  A better blogger would go find it for you right now – but I think we’ve established at this point that I’m not a better blogger. Seriously, go read some Grundy or Jack Shiflett if you want better blogging.

Anyway, Dawkins’ argument, whatever it was, did not re-capture the atheist glory of David Hume or anything, but it at least offered something worth reading.  Really.

And in that spirit of creating positive constructive arguments for atheism, I here present to you an Apologetic Professor original:  One of my own positive cases for atheism that is in the old “ontological argument” mold (but of course on the other side of the debate).  I’ll let you decide for yourself, but personally, I think it’s air-tight logically and pretty tough to beat.  It’s only defect is that it happens to be wrong.

Now, I’m not claiming that this argument has never been said before – quite surely, someone else has thought of this chain of reasoning. I even have this vague sense that Jack Shiflett may have inspired or facilitated this argument in a discussion on this blog – I don’t remember.  Maybe I even got it from Richard Dawkins.  But I’ve never seen it before that I remember at this moment, and I didn’t “get it” from anywhere that I know of.  It’s just been in my head for many years running now.

But seriously, how many Christian blogs are going to offer you an argument for atheism?  Cut me some slack.

Enjoy!

For the lazy, here’s the short form of the argument:

1. God must be better than people on all dimensions or else He is not God.

2. God cannot contain sin inside of Him or else He is not totally good.

3. Doing the ultimate good requires overcoming one’s own sin nature.

4. People can do the ultimate good because they can contain a sin nature.

5. God cannot do the ultimate good because doing the ultimate good requires containing a sin nature.

6. Therefore, people are better than God on the dimension of doing the ultimate good.
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7. It follows that it is logically impossible for God to exist – the idea of God is self-defeating:

7a. If God contains a sin nature, He cannot be God.

7b. But If God does not contain a sin nature, He cannot do the ultimate good, and therefore He cannot be God.

For the obsessive over-thinker, here’s the argument in long form:

Part I:

1. God is defined as an omnipotent being that on every single dimension attains the very best possible on that dimension.

2. This means that God must be equal to or better than humans on every single dimension, or else He would not be God.

3. God by definition cannot contain sin – God cannot do something morally wrong, because that would not be the best possible on that dimension.

4. God cannot even contain sin inside of him as His own – sin cannot be a part of God – because having sin inside of oneself would make one less than the best one could possibly be.

Part II:

5. It is morally better to exert effort/sacrifice for doing good than it is to do good when no effort/sacrifice is required.

Example: If you can literally print/manufacture money whenever you want it, it would be morally less inspiring to give someone in need $100 than it would be if you had to give $100 of your $200 grocery allowance.

6. It requires more moral effort to overcome sin when it is a part of you than it does when it is not a part of you.

Example: Take a single act of goodness, such as being kind to a stranger on the street.  It would be nearly universally acknowledged that for a (1) person who was raised in a perfect environment where kindness was shown repeatedly and that person had a good temperament and personality, who wanted to do the good act out of her/his nature, performing that good act would be less noble and good than for (2) someone who had been raised starving on the street, fighting for food, having never been shown an ounce of kindness, and who did not want to do the good act.  In the second case, there is goodness is overcoming the natural inclination they had been dealt, their natural inclination to do bad, which does not exist in the first case.

7. Because God does not have a sin nature, God being good does not require the ultimate in moral effort.  It is not possible for God to have a natural inclination to do bad.

8. Because humans do have the potential for a sin nature, humans have the potential to exert the ultimate in moral effort.

9. Therefore, people are potentially better than God on that dimension.  God’s “ceiling” for potential goodness is lower than humanity’s “ceiling” for goodness.

10. Because God cannot have a sin nature, and simultaneously a Being without a sin nature cannot do the ultimate good, it is logically impossible for God to exist – the idea of God is self-defeating.