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When Self-Absorption Becomes Our Religion
“If you’re doubting the love of Jesus, you try to work it out through your circumstances. No, you never read your circumstances and then read the Love of Jesus. You read the Love of Jesus towards your circumstances. If you are doubting his love for you, if you are struggling with his authority in the midst of sadness and confusion, let the cross speak to you again.”
— Chad Scrubbs, pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville and father of a nine-year-old daughter, murdered this week by a transgender maniac
It has been a hard week for many Christian families in Nashville. If their experience is like mine was after my own daughter died, they have some hard months still ahead of them. When someone you deeply love is deprived of her life, you at first feel strangely disloyal going on with your own. I suspect this is how returning soldiers feel when, having lost a friend in battle, they come home then have to get on with their own lives.
It would be nice if the mass murder of Christians in Nashville turns out to be a national tipping point for coming to grips with our present madness. I don’t really expect that, but I hope it will jar many Christians at least into an awareness that spiritual warfare is real. That something rather more is going on in the world than what kind of music we sing in church or whether taking the vaccine is really the measure of true Christian love.
What’s happening in our culture is a spiritual conflict that only sometimes takes a political form. But because it is essentially spiritual, it can’t really be explained or combated on materialist terms.
“Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.” — Revelation 12:17
I want to offer an explanatory idea that might connect some dots and perhaps provide a unifying point of view regarding several of the most troublesome and violent pathologies of our time: transgenderism, homosexuality, abortion, and (oddly enough) climate change. The unifying theory boils down to the observation that each of these different pathologies are just varying manifestations of a kind of metastatic self-absorption, one which has reached critical mass within our culture. I describe this self-absorption as “metastatic” because, like a cancer that has metastasized, the essential self-absorption our society has been promoting is spreading and appearing in unexpected places and ways.
I’ll propose how each of these represents a form of self-absorption further down, but at this point, let me suggest a reality-based lens through which to understand our situation.
In the first chapter of the apostle Paul’s letter to Christians in Rome, he offers an intriguing description of how a person, and even a society, descends into mental madness and moral chaos. Before looking at the text itself, perhaps I should say a word about how I conceive of the biblical text.
Many of us, I think, have a tendency to view the biblical text almost entirely as a vehicle for moral prescription. In other words, we view it as a source of moral guidelines for how to live our lives and, importantly, how to regain our moral footing in our relationship with God. Of course, the Bible is not less than a source of moral prescription, but it is also much more than that. One of the key things offered by the biblical text is an explanation and description of the reality in which we live — the circumstances of our very existence. To put it another way, the Bible is not only prescriptive but descriptive as well.
I believe that, among other things, the first chapter of the book of Romans describes some of the ideas and conditions that lead to moral and spiritual chaos. In that particular chapter, it is less about prescribing what to do and more about describing the context for mental and moral unraveling.
So with that background, let’s look at the relevant text:
18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
The first thing to notice was that the descent of the people being talked about was characterized by a suppression of the truth. Truth, in this sense, is not merely in regard to some moral obligation but entails suppressing the knowledge of the nature of reality itself. It involves a willful closing of one’s eyes to God’s existence and the downstream implications of his existence for the circumstances of one’s own life. If God is there, then to suppress that truth in service to one’s own wickedness is a characteristic of those on a path of moral and intellectual suicide.
In my own life, I have known (and been friends with) any number of people who presented themselves as intellectually principled atheists. This is to say, they professed that their unbelief in God was for intellectually principled reasons. But invariably, I have found that my friends were less principled than they claimed. At the end of the day, there was always something in their lives they wanted to hang onto which a belief in God would have interfered with. Aldous Huxley was open enough to explain this dynamic of his own atheism in publication:
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning — the Christian meaning, they insisted — of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”
— Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
Everyone knows that God is real. There can be sincere and temporary myopia about God’s existence, but the more stubborn the resistance to the obvious reality, to what Romans describes as being “plain to them,” the more we ought to question just how principled such resistance really is.
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
So what happens next involves a conscious decision not to acknowledge God and his place in the world relative to our own — “they neither glorified him as God….” That refusal is inevitably followed by the neglect of gratitude. If one takes the position that God isn’t real or doesn’t need to be acknowledged, then gratitude is owed to no one.
But what happens, apparently, to people who make such choices is that their thinking becomes futile. Why? Well, I suppose if you deny what is manifestly true about the universe — that God is in it and he is owed something by the rest of us — you have entered the realm of fantasy and delusion.
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Now catch the next downstream effect of denying the reality of God — disordered sexual appetites combined with a thoroughgoing materialist life (i.e., “they worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.”) Loving and serving material things alongside misdirected sexual appetites is, according to the apostle Paul, an artifact of refusing to acknowledge God’s existence and what God’s existence implies about our obligations of gratitude. Human beings are worshiping creatures. If we preclude God from our consideration, the only remaining options for us to worship are material things, or ourselves.
So here’s where we find ourselves in the apostle’s argument: he tells us that if someone decides not to acknowledge God’s existence and God’s place, it disrupts that person’s ability to think well (i.e., “their thinking became futile”) and leads eventually to disordered sexual appetites and a love for material things above all else. Again, when you reject a fundamental facet of reality — God’s existence — your psyche and appetites begin to fragment and decay. You have gaslighted yourself and destabilized your own mind.
Humans are value-seeking beings, especially in regard to themselves. We want to know what we’re for and what gives us value. One of the foundational premises of the entire moral code set forth in the Bible is that man’s value is based on the fact that he bears God’s image (e.g., Genesis 9). In other words, human value is derivative but not inherent. We are valuable because, having been created (i.e., not self-originated), we are stamped with the image of our creator.
But from whence does human value come if a person decides that he is uncreated? What happens to someone when he loses this essential insight that his value is not inherent but derived? We are all only valuable by our association with God’s image. It is a marker of our importance and serves as a prohibition against harm. What happens once we cast that knowledge aside?
For generations now, we have indoctrinated American youth with the falsehoods that the material world is all there is, and that each person’s value is intrinsic. We have told children in schools across the land that the only true knowledge is the knowledge acquired through the investigation of material things. We have told them that there is no transcendent purpose or task they are here to undertake. We have indoctrinated generations of children with the idea that they are not for anything in particular. We have told them that the sexes are interchangeable parts and infinitely malleable, socially, but even more recently, physically. We have told children that they are nothing more than a conglomeration of material ingredients. And we have done this using the imprimatur and authority of government and “the science.”
We should not be surprised that many have actually believed this about themselves. We have left generations of children bereft of any knowledge of their actual value or transcendent purpose. That knowledge has been replaced by the superstitious belief that they are gods unto themselves, living in the world for nothing more than their own gratification and pleasure.
For at least a generation, we have possessed the technological means to propagate this unreality on a global scale, and now much of the rest of world is deeply enmired in self-worship and material consumption. And as the apostle Paul described, right on cue, many are descending into madness.
The difficulty, of course, is that it is easy enough to tell ourselves lies, but it is impossible to alter the fundamental nature and essence of our created being.
We can lie to ourselves but the real still abides.
Our modern lies have left human beings with an understanding of the world that is in complete conflict with true human nature. As a culture, we have lost an understanding of the distinctive differences between men and women. We do not understand the transcendent purpose of sexuality. We do not understand family, work, or what constitutes wisdom. How can we, when the very premise for our reasoning is based on lies?
Bereft of any understanding of why we matter, we inevitably conclude that our value and worth is intrinsic to ourselves. Everyone deserves a trophy just for showing up in all their own glorious, but material, uniqueness. One’s own gratification and psychological satisfaction become the measure of all that constitutes the good.
In other words, we make idols of ourselves and of our appetites. All of this, of course, is tarted up with benevolent happy talk about rights, the “marginalized,” and the “misunderstood.” In practice though, what actually emerges from such ferocious self-absorption is sterility and misery and death. The vulnerable, and especially the innocent, as we are even now seeing, inevitably become the prey.
Think about how this worship of self is reflected in homosexuality. Homosexuals, by very definition, have developed a sexual attraction to others like themselves. Their most intimate interests are not in someone different from themselves but in someone like themselves. There is nothing more attractive to them than someone whose form is the same as their own. Thus, they themselves represent the form they desire.
Transgender people believe their powers are so great that they can define their own reality. They are obsessively preoccupied with their bodies and, especially, their own supposed god-like ability to be self-defining. It would be hard to conceive of a more megalomaniacal frame of mind than to conceive of oneself as god over one’s own biology.
Abortion’s siren call is “my body, my choice.” It reflects a preoccupation with the self without regard to the effects of one’s choices on anyone else. The act of abortion is the act of someone for whom the desire to be free from any personal disturbance outweighs every other consideration. It makes total sense for anyone who believes that their own satisfaction and comfort is the measure of what is good in the world, and the only thing worth having.
And even something as seemingly unrelated to the self as climate change, is grounded in the idea that even the planetary weather revolves around us. We loom so large in our own imaginations that things that our parents and grandparents took for granted as the natural vagaries of the weather we now interpret as something entirely about ourselves. So much so, that no amount of scientific data can offset the frisson of virtue enjoyed by those who participate in the climate religion. They conceive of themselves as gods who are able to control even the climates of whole planets.
Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher, who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, was famous for saying, “Let me write the songs of the nation, I care not who writes its laws.” He was making the obvious point that the arts influence human thought and that laws were downstream from that. The arts have long been on the bandwagon, promoting the view that the world revolves around us.
In 2017, a blockbuster movie biopic about the life of P.T. Barnum was released in American theaters. The musical score of The Greatest Showman yielded more than one hit. But perhaps the lyrics of no tune from that movie are more illustrative of the mindset of people in our time, who have become the center of their own universe, than the anthem of the movie “This Is Me“:
I’m not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me
…
and I know that I deserve your love
there’s nothing I’m not worthy of
…
Look out ’cause here I come
And I’m marching on to the beat I drum
No apologies. Worthiness suspended upon nothing more substantial than oneself. A self-drummed drumbeat for one’s own life. There is no transcendent drummer here. No recognition of fallenness, or of a need to be changed. Everything the singer is is already good and worthy. In the context of the movie itself, the song is sung by a sideshow performer and is a song of liberation of sorts. But sung into a culture that worships the self, the lyrics have a rather more expansive effect.
We’re facing a global spiritual crisis and that crisis isn’t confined merely to the fact that millions of people don’t want to live according to a Judeo-Christian moral code. That would be bad enough, but it would not be unprecedented. Our current conundrum is rather different. We’re living in a world in which many appear to really believe the lies: they have come to conceive of themselves as god-like beings, and with nothing less than a self-gratifying imperative. Taken to such extremes, people turn into monsters. We can see many of them going mad before our very eyes. The current alliance between transgender activists and violence is, in this regard, no aberration or mere coincidence.
The precious children who lie murdered in their Christian school in Nashville are the bitter satanic fruit of the church of self-absorption. After all, once you really come to believe the entire world revolves around you, everything is permitted.1
“Justice is driven back; godliness stands far off. Indeed, honesty stumbles in the city square and morality is not even able to enter.” — Isaiah 59:142
From my personal site, prompted by events in Nashville.
Published in General
As an atheist, I often watch debates between a Christian and an atheist over various topics. Sometimes it is whether the gospels are reliable. Sometimes it is whether Jesus actually rose from the dead. Sometimes it is whether science points to the existence of God.
But many times there is a discussion about the suffering and imperfection in this world, a world that God supposedly created and is involved in.
We see an imperfect world but yet we are told that a perfect God created this world. We are told that human beings were made in the image of God, yet human beings are imperfect not only intellectually but also morally and physicially.
Of course, Christians will then mention the fall, as described in Genesis. Adam and Eve made a free will decision to disobey God and, thus, the world contains the suffering that it does and contains the imperfection that it does.
But as atheist philosopher Graham Oppy often says, what we try to do when we evaluate a worldview is determine how many ontological commitments are required and how much explanatory power the worldview provides. It does seem that a primarily naturalistic worldview can explain the suffering and imperfection we see in the world.
If there is no omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God, then all of the chaos we see in our world makes a lot of sense. Don’t get me wrong. Christians do have an explanation for how we got from perfect God to imperfect world. It’s just that on its face it seems counter-intuitive that a perfect God would generate an imperfect world, the events in the garden of eden notwithstanding.
This debate will rage on and on. The Muslims will claim that Islam is the one true faith. Some very traditional Catholics will claim that there is no salvation outside the Catholic church. Some protestant Christians will claim that Catholics will go to hell. “Progressive” Christians will argue that there are other paths towards heaven. Atheists will argue that all of these people have it all wrong, that there is the natural world and perhaps some non-natural concepts like numbers and moral facts.
But that’s all philosophical mumbo-jumbo, isn’t it. The way we feel in the aftermath of a tragedy like Nashville is what matters.
Science has demonstrated conclusively that there are very many things that are counter-intuitive but also true.
It’s all so very tiring, amirite?
Why? Why does it matter?
Ricochet athiests please note – Keith’s article is decidedly not an exercise in apologetics, but (as he says) “explanatory.” It assumes a Christian perspective rather than arguing for it. Any attempted refutation pretty much misses the mark, here.
That’s correct.
For example, it seems counter-intuitive that the Sun doesn’t rise but it appears to rise because the Earth spins on its axis.
Still, one wonders if the “being” described in Genesis is supposed to be an omnibenevolent God or merely a very powerful being. (Think of a very powerful dictator like Stalin. Stalin wanted people to obey him and he would punish people who disobeyed him.) Perhaps the “triple omni God” (omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent) was a later interpretation, one unintended by the authors of Genesis.
I’m not saying that philosophy isn’t interesting. It’s just that our intuitions about tragedies like the tragedy in Nashville tend to have more impact on our discussions than philosophy textbooks.
No, it is not philosophical mumbo-jumbo. These are people looking for answers to life’s deepest questions. We ought to take it seriously and seek the answers even if they are not comforting answers.
You rightly bring in the question of salvation and the afterlife. It might be little comfort to the parents of 9 year-olds who were taken from them, but I do believe that all young children go to heaven when they die. The adults who died were old enough to make their choices about what they believe and the commitment they made, or didn’t make, to God.
Our eternal destiny is in our own hands. That is a lot more serious, and scary, than the evil that we may suffer here. Perhaps suffering on earth is God’s way of getting our attention about more serious matters. According to the Bible, we humans have made the mess we are currently in. We want to hold God responsible for our faults just like Adam and Eve blamed others for their own failures.
The Bible doesn’t just teach that we are “imperfect”, but sinful. Jesus bore our sins on the cross to free us ultimately from them. God is more than able to make up for our sufferings on earth with the joys of the afterlife.
Do yo think that all young children go to heaven when they die or only those children who have accepted Jesus as their savior and have repented?
There are some Christians who subscribe to a universalist salvation theory where God’s merciful nature overwhelms God’s judicial nature.
I wonder whether the (human) authors of Genesis were less philosophers than story-tellers, telling of the evolving encounter between a pagan people and the true, living, omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. To my human mind, it’s no wonder there was considerable confusion and ambivalence there.
Sorry about my snark earlier. I’m feeling irascible today. You responded very graciously.
I think the reader of Genesis 2-3 is faced with at least 2 challenges.
One is the question of whether the writer of Genesis 2-3 believed the he was writing about events that actually happened or if he believed he was writing a fable, a morality tale.
Another is the question of, if the writer intended to write actual history, if this writer did accurately record history in this case
Sort of apropos, my wife told me yesterday that she had had a conversation with a particular well-educated woman at work who said she had “a black heart”. My wife reflexively said, Oh, don’t say that. I asked did she mean evil? And she said yes.
Yesterday my wife saw her car and it had two red horns attached to the hood. The woman apparently did mean satanic, or black hearted and evil. It’s no chance occurrence that people are aligning themselves with satan these days.
I suppose from the perspective of Christian theology, God allows Satan to exist and act as he does out of respect for free will.
But now we have yet another ontological commitment. When someone argues for the existence of fairies and goblins, can one draw a line in the philosophical sand and say, “I have no need for that hypothesis?”
At the risk of repeating myself, ALL young children go to heaven if they die. Children live in a state of innocence until they reach what we call the age of accountability. At a certain point, they become as adults, responsible to God. Once a person has reach that point, they would need to repent and receive Jesus as Savior.
That is not universalism. Universalism actually undoes the whole idea of free will. If God made everyone “get saved”, free will would be meaningless.
As an non-believer, but someone who has read the bible cover to cover twice (one about 25 years ago and a second time 4 years ago) and also have read some books on church history, I am interested in two things about what you stated here.
First, how did you determine that there is an age of accountability such that if one dies prior to reaching the age of accountability one would go to heaven even if one does not accept Jesus as Savior?
Perhaps you read the works of a Christian theologian or philosopher? Or perhaps certain passages of the Bible have lead you to accept this? Just curious as to how you reached this conclusion.
Second, what is the age of accountability? Does it vary from person to person? Perhaps for one person the age of accountability is 12 years old while for another person the age of accountability is 14 or even 19?
Or is the age of accountability the same for all people, from cognitively gifted people to people who lack the cognitive ability to understand even the simplest concepts?
I think one could have an understanding of free will in which even if God did decide to welcome all of humanity into heaven, people would still retain free will in a meaningful sense.
By this I mean that if during the course of a person’s life, they evaluate various options, from volunteering to teach children how to read and do math to volunteering to be a hit man for a drug cartel, and they choose among those options, then this person has free will in a meaningful sense. They consider their options and choose among them and many of their choices are morally relevant.
If God were to decide to welcome everyone into heaven, I don’t think this would restrict anyone’s free will. It would, however, indicate that God’s merciful nature overwhelmed God’s judicial (judging) nature. At least this is how I have thought about it.
First: Regarding the age of accountability. While I have heard Christian teachers teach it, I do find this in the scriptures.
Romans 7:9 Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.
My interpretive reading is as follows: Once as a child I was spiritually alive before I understood the Law of God; when the commandment came in a revelatory way to me personally, it stirred up that sin nature inherited from Adam and I made the conscious decision to commit sin. Then I died spiritually like Adam did.
I trust that you followed my thinking here. And while it requires a lot of interpretation I think it is sufficient to establish an idea of age of accountability. Others who do not interpret this passage this way may still hold to the age of accountability.
Additionally, Jesus, speaking about children said, “Of such is the Kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:14)
So, the idea of an age of accountability is inferred from scripture rather than directly taught as a doctrine.
As for that age, it differs according to the intellectual development of the child. Someone mentally retarded may never reach that mental age. Both Christians and Jews basically acknowledge this age of accountability in the Confirmation and Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah rituals.
Second, my point about free will was about our eternal destiny which is far more important than even the best or worst of other choices we might make. But God does not have two natures – a judging one and a merciful one. God is one.
God’s nature is holy and good. This means that He must judge sins. He could simply have destroyed us all, but that would have thwarted His plan which is to have a human family that freely loves Him. He does not force us to love Him and to do good. Forced love is not love at all. His nature is love so He desired to make us His own but He will not force us to love and obey Him.
So He put our sins on Jesus, making Him our substitute in judgement to satisfy His justice. Then He offers salvation to those who receive Jesus. It is that one nature of God that both judges and saves.
Finally, I want to commend you for actually reading the Bible. Too many condemn it without reading it. I read through a large portion of the Bible before I actually committed my life to Christ. It did not make much sense to me and thought that it must be wrong. It seemed like a old, dead book to me.
Once I committed my life to Christ, it came alive to me. I found that the Bible was alive because I became alive to God and therefore to the Bible.
And of course, there’s David who when his infant son died said “But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.” Meaning that after death David and his son will be reunited in heaven. This speaks directly to the salvation of the innocent who have no capacity to do good and to eschew evil.
I am tempted to put a Universalist Christian hat on and attempt to make the case for the idea that God would in fact welcome all human beings into heaven. I will do that with a somewhat guilty conscience because I, as a self-described atheist or at the very least self-described agnostic, am not very convinced that God exists at all. However, I can not completely discount the possibility that God exists and not only that, but that this God is omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent.
So, as I see it, this “triple Omni” God would be powerful enough to save all of humanity, knowledgeable enough to know that human beings would feel more comfortable in heavenly bliss than in the torture of hell and morally good enough to want human beings to enjoy heavenly bliss rather than the torture of hell.
To put this another, and more provatcative, way, God doesn’t really need to have his son, Jesus, tortured on a cross and killed and then raised from the dead a few days later in order to create a pathway for salvation for human beings.
God could simply say to all of humanity, “I forgive you, all of you, regardless of which God or gods you worship or even if you don’t worship any God or gods at all. I understand that human beings suffer from cognitive limitations and moral imperfections such that it is very difficult for human beings to sort among the thousands of differing religious claims made by thousands of different religious evangelists and determine which among these claims are true and which are false. Therefore, I will welcome all of you into heaven and will not allow any of you to suffer eternal torture in hell.”
One could argue that God could not hold such an attitude because God is just and therefore God requires blood, either the blood of animal sacrifice in the Old Testament or the blood of Jesus in the New Testament. However, I think this is a description of a God that possesses the human tendency towards vengeance.
A less than morally perfect God could hold to the idea that if one believes one thing about an alleged historical event 2,000 years ago, he goes to heaven, and if one believes something else about an alleged historical event 2,000 years ago, he goes to hell. But a morally perfect God could never allow people to suffer under such an unjust system.
To say, “If God says it, then it is just,” is to make justice arbitrary, not substantive, in my view.
Sorry for being so long winded.
You are making a case that you do not even believe. You are making empty arguments.
I disagree.
I am starting from the assumption that [a] God exists and that [b] God is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly morally good.
Then, I am attempting to develop a salvation theory that is aligned with those assumptions.
This is such admirable thinking and writing. Thank you for posting it here!
Boy howdy! Isn’t that the truth? It is common to reject the very notion of God because He makes moral demands. We’re especially chafed by His demands about sex. It fascinates me that many prominent Catholic converts (Tim Staples, Kimberly Hahn, . . .) converted because of the Catholic teachings on contraception.
The truth written on our hearts (and willfully buried there) is that, unless the sexual act you’re in engaged in is within a covenantal promise of fidelity (marriage) and is a complete self-giving to your spouse using your God-given reproductive faculty (without intent to contracept), it is inherently exploitative. This is what makes homosexual acts, adultery, and every kind of perversion immoral. It is in defiance of the love we’re to have for one another — willing the good of the other, especially when it costs us something.
I’ve been saying for sometime now that the modern affliction is self-deification. Your expanded reflections on the matter are most welcome additions to my own thinking.
I grew up in a household where my dad was an agnostic. He was one very fine man.
I am enjoying your logical arguments regarding items of belief.
Like you, I disapprove of arbitrary justice. To me, one of the worst aspects of religion is how each religious sect states that their path is the only path to the Lord.
Even inside the Catholic faith, those Catholics surrounded by Dominican nuns and priests held to the idea that they who die outside of God’s grace are given a time out in purgatory, which is not at all that unpleasant. While other denominations inside Catholicism portray purgatory as a mini-hell whose main difference from hell is the idea that the individual may at some point get out.
If Jesus died to save us all from our sins, why then is there still all the chest beating and teeth gnashing over our sins? In the Catholic mass, I am repeating words about a need to be forgiven at 8Am on a Sunday morning – far too early for me to have even gotten around to committing any sins.
I keep looking for a church where the Lord who is celebrated is not that obsessed over my sinfulness. I am looking for the One who had fun and knew how to have a good time. In fact, He tried to make it clear that that is who He was on the day at the wedding when He turned the water into wine.
I don’t want to sidetrack this post to explain purgatory and its Biblical basis, but I’ll just say, your notion isn’t it.
Keith, I admire the statements that are inside this paragraph:
“The first thing to notice was that the descent of the people being talked about was characterized by a suppression of the truth. Truth, in this sense, is not merely in regard to some moral obligation but entails suppressing the knowledge of the nature of reality itself. It involves a willful closing of one’s eyes to God’s existence and the downstream implications of his existence for the circumstances of one’s own life. If God is there, then to suppress that truth in service to one’s own wickedness is a characteristic of those on a path of moral and intellectual suicide.”
This is certainly an insightful description of those individuals who have turned away from God and even the idea of God in order to ignore any higher callings that the path of a true spiritual calling would demand of them. Thus freed, they can be fully embroiled in hedonistic pursuits.
But what of people who have turned away from God because some devastating occurrence in their lives took away the peace and serenity that a belief in God usually seems to bestow?
You have brought up a few objections to the message of the Bible, but I won’t address them all. I do want to address your claim that if God demands sacrifice for sins, then we are making Him like us in the fact that we are naturally vengeful. But human vengeance, as in all sins, are perversions of a good. In this case, it is justice.
In our own society, we reject personal vengeance and retaliation. Instead, we have a justice system (admittedly imperfect) that metes out punishments and corrections according to the crimes committed. Good societies recognize two things. A. Personal vengeance leads to injustice. B. Justice must be impartial and fair; nevertheless, it can be very hard.
Some progressives make the assertion that things like the death penalty and life imprisonment are cruel and based on vengeance. But we conservatives take the view that there is a true justice that is not simply retaliation against someone who has harmed us. Look at some of the new progressives in our legal system now.
Another thing: What if God did let everyone into heaven whether or not they had repented from their sins? Would they not make heaven just like the earth is today? Sin turned a paradise into what we have now. Do you think that God is going to make everyone perfect and sinless whether or not they want to be? Why not just create everyone in heaven, make them perfect and unable to sin and never give them a choice? It is not God’s choice to send people to hell. It is their choice. And it is yours.
It almost seems as if you want to make God’s rule of the universe into a cosmic equity and welfare state. It does not matter what you do, the outcome should be the same. I do not think that that is just. I do not think that that is fair. We are responsible for ourselves. God will enforce our decisions. He has revealed that the choice is ours, not His.
@heavywater
Is Heavy Water making objections to the Bible, or simply explaining his own thinking around the idea of what an all knowing, all powerful and all totally morally good God would be?
One of the problems in explaining one’s own thinking about such an important matter as what the makeup of God would entail is that then someone else come along and uses their interpretation of the Bible, or their minister’s, or their parents – whoever it is that most influenced that individual to create their own GodConcepts – to explain “No you are wrong.”
All we need to do is to examine history to understand that all the many various interpretations of scripture across the centuries has not brought about unity of thought on the subject, but continual disputes. Then often whoever has the political power can “settle” those arbitrary disputes. When that doesn’t happen, actual bloodshed often occurs. (Look to the history of France in the 17th Century where first there were Catholics killing protestants and then vice versa and then vice versa for 100 years.)
Even (especially?) As an atheist, I am grateful that we have had the Bible as a central text full of the condensed wisdom of ages untold. Just appreciating the descriptivist angle.
I realize that from a Judeo-Christian perspective, I am missing the point, a criticism I accept, Nolo Contendere.
Flicker is right. He’s being quite polite, too.
To me, those who do not believe in God ultimately do so because they do not want to submit to a moral power higher than themselves. They themselves are the ultimate God of their universe.
Christians on the other hand believe in an infinitely higher mysterious power, one who not only demands submission to a moral code and view of the world, but one who brought love, hope, faith and charity to a world where there was little.
Christ is the God of Love. He commands that we love our neighbor (and all of them) and also ourselves. That is our purpose that if followed will give us great joy and meaning to our lives.
Atheists, bereft of such a moral calling , have no sense of purpose, and are then lost in a world without meaning or purpose , while free to pursue a life endless empty pleasures , will face in the end, a life of emptiness, confusion, pain, sorrow and depression.
Keith, I am truly sorry for your great loss.
@caroljoy I imagine there are plenty of people who hold a grudge against God for reasons like you describe. I would argue that their grudge is wildly misdirected, but that’s an entirely different post. In this post, my more narrow focus is trying to unpack how a determination to believe we have no creator works itself out in individuals and in culture. I’m arguing that a line can be traced from a denial of God to self-worship and that self-worship is, at some level, behind some of the narcissistic-turned-violent pathologies of our moment. My own experience suggests that some people say they don’t believe in God when they absolutely do believe in him, but have put on a mask of unbelief in an effort to punish God for some disappointment in their lives. That is probably a different phenomenon that works itself out differently. Also, it may not have the same societal-scale effect as the intentional indoctrination we’ve been doing for 60 years.
@dunstaple
This is a very helpful clarification and thanks for making this explicit. I was away all day yesterday and am just now getting around to reading responses. But the distinction you’re making is absolutely correct in regard to this post.
In this post I wasn’t, of course, trying to provide a theodicy for human suffering. As @dunstaple mentioned in a comment, this post is not an apologetic. The problem of human suffering is a frequent reason people give for unbelief. It presupposes, of course, that in our inescapable finitude we nevertheless absolutely comprehend what an infinite being would do with his omnipotence, omniscience, et al. More than that, it presupposes the finite is in a position to judge the infinite in this regard. If I were arranging the circumstances of our existence, I would strongly incline toward arranging things so that all is only ever sweetness and light. But it may turn out to be the case that a universe without the possibility of suffering is necessarily one without the possibility of love. I have my own suspicions along those lines.
The recent uptick in people beginning to openly identify with demonic imagery is disturbing, but it also explains a lot.