How Christianity Trashes Rationality

 atheism, Christianity, objectivity, reason  No Responses »
Jul 212012
 

One must understand the craftiness of Christianity to realize how it is able to manipulate unquestioning allegiance from many of its followers. And that is its goal, its raison d’etre, its self-proclaimed mission (Mark 16: 15-16): to convince, convert, and control as many people as possible.  Christianity principally employs four tools in its craft to accomplish this mission:

  1. It exploits real human needs and vulnerabilities to convince potential converts of its “truth” (e.g. fear of death).
  2. It invents otherwise nonexistent human needs, vulnerabilities, and remedies to convince potential converts of the necessity of embracing Christianity (e.g. original sin and Christ’s atonement for it).
  3. It transmutes familiar cultural practices and artifacts into Christian “truths” in order to make Christianity more palatable to potential converts (e.g. the synthesis of Jewish monotheism and pagan polytheism in the doctrine of the Trinity).
  4. It demeans and/or demonizes anything that would cause the dismissal of and defection from Christian “truth” claims.

I will illustrate the last bit of this craftiness (#4) in this post.

While Christianity is particularly adept at garnering and maintaining the allegiance of multitudes of people, it is not without vulnerabilities, some rather obvious ones at that. Nevertheless, a large part of the success of Christianity lays in its ability to make its devotees oblivious to its vulnerabilities, even the obvious ones. Historically, it has manufactured this obliviousness by several means: persecution, execution, censorship, intimidation, societal shunning, denial, mendacity, fallaciousness, and mystification only to name some of the more obvious methods. But one of its more insidious methods (insidious because it attempts to manipulate the potential convert and Christian at an unconscious level) is disparagement and demonization. Christianity will often demean and make into a positive evil that which shows it to be vulnerable, especially that which shows Christianity’s “truth” claims to be lies or too incredible for belief or lacking sufficient evidence to warrant belief.

Consider rationality (or any term roughly synonymous with rationality like “wisdom”).  Rationality is problematic for Christianity. It makes Christianity vulnerable. It exposes Christianity’s contradictions, punctuates Christianity’s implausibility, insists on Christianity’s presentation and replication of evidence, and accentuates Christianity’s absurdities and counter-intuitiveness. Rationality makes considerable demands on Christianity precisely because Christianity makes incredible claims. And on the level of rationality, Christianity is not up to the task. It’s not even close to being up to the task. Christianity is, therefore, left with only one option to overcome a test that it cannot by its very nature pass: it must dismiss the test by claiming that the test itself is wrong. Instead of honestly failing the test of rationality, Christianity makes avoiding the test a virtue. It does this by characterizing rationality as flawed, irrelevant, and evil.

There are many examples in the history of Christianity to choose from, but let us look close to the source of the invention of this craftiness, this sleight of hand:

 18. Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise.

19. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God. For it is written, “He is THE ONE WHO CATCHES THE WISE IN THEIR CRAFTINESS”;

20. and again, “THE LORD KNOWS THE REASONINGS of the wise, THAT THEY ARE USELESS.”  (NASB 1 Corinthians 3)

The Apostle Paul, the alleged writer of this epistle, is fully aware of the challenges that come to the Christian message on rational grounds. The question for him is what instructions can he give to Christians so that they can obviate these challenges. Notice that he does not take up specific arguments made against Christian “truth” claims. He knows perfectly well that Christianity cannot compete successfully at the level of rationality and demonstrable fact. In fact, he effectively admits that in rational terms to embrace the Christian is to become irrational: “If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish….”  This couldn’t be clearer. To embrace Christianity is to embrace foolishness according to the standard of rationality.  Christianity cannot compete on that level.

So what Paul does is to disparage rationality and he does so from the onset: “Let no man deceive himself….” This is the ultimate nullification of the primacy of rationality in adjudicating truth claims: rationality can be a source of deception!   You can’t trust it. It will lead you astray. You can only trust what will make you irrational (“foolish”) by the standard of rationality: the Christian message.

Of course, this is poppycock since it makes no sense to use irrationality to responsibly adjudicate truth claims. If anything, irrationality would leave potential converts and believers with no reliable gauge by which to adjudicate competing irrational truth claims (e.g. a different religious claim). So Paul’s attempt to disparage and nullify rationality doesn’t succeed and still leaves it vulnerable by opening the prospect that people could convert to competing irrational religions and enthusiasms, which, in point and fact, many people are inclined to do. In any case, Paul isn’t finished yet with trashing rationality.

Part of what makes rationality exemplary and virtuous as a means to adjudicate truth claims is that it does not claim for itself a kind of omniscience. It doesn’t say that you can use its methods and always determine if a given truth claim is either true or false. Sometimes, rationality will leave a person in the position of simply declaring, “I don’t know” or even “It cannot at present or perhaps for all time ever be known.”  Rationality recognizes and acknowledges its limits.

Yet although rationality can recognize its limits, it can still claim to be the best vehicle for adjudicating truth claims. That is, it can still claim to be the best vehicle if and only if some other vehicle doesn’t possess rationality’s limitations, if it doesn’t leave a person in the position of saying “It can never be known.”  The Apostle Paul is perfectly aware of these limitations on rationality and he exploits them.  Paul does this by (baldly) asserting that there is another standard for adjudicating truth claims that lacks rationality’s limitations: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God.”  In other words, what rationality lacks (omniscience more or less) God possesses, so much so that in spite of rationality’s achievements it is foolishness compared to God’s knowledge.

Hopefully, it is obvious that Paul’s gambit here begs the question. It’s fallacious to assume the existence of the Christian God and his superior wisdom when assessing whether Christian “truth” claims are worthy of assent. The Christian God’s existence and his wisdom are precisely what are at question, so it makes no sense to assume what needs to be proven.

Nevertheless, Paul shows considerable cunning in this move if the Christian God exists and if Christianity’s “truth” claims about God are both true and valid. It is true that IF the Christian God exists, then his knowledge and rational capacities almost certainly far exceed ours, so much so that we would be at a minimum relative imbeciles in contrast. What Paul does—and he is a shrewd one here—is to play a kind of rhetorical trick to jolt people from giving much credence to rationality. He employs the force of a probable truth (i.e. God is far smarter than us) to blunt the contingency upon which that probable truth is based (i.e. if the Christian God exists). One can easily find themselves overwhelmed into conceding the nearly certain truth of God’s superior wisdom without even noticing that they have, thereby, assumed the very existence of the Christian God whose existence is precisely in question.  It’s a clever trick, but it’s still fallacious. It’s still nonsense. It still begs the question.

There is also another problem with Paul’s ploy. It misses what we would reasonably expect of God’s wisdom/knowledge if the Christian God existed. While we would expect that God’s knowledge and rationality would far exceed ours if he existed, we wouldn’t expect God’s knowledge and rationality to express itself in ways that are beneath our knowledge and rationality. If it is superior to us, it cannot also be in any matter inferior to us. But that is precisely the problem with many Christian truth claims. They offend what we already know and can assess rationally. Take your pick among many of the Christian “truth” claims. God’s and Christ’s real existence are vouchsafed by claims of miracles, but none of these miracles can ever be replicated. The Christian God is both a good God and the God of the Old Testament, but the God of the Old Testament is often a rampaging, vicious, and genocidal maniac. He’s hardly good, often not even good by the very standards he sets for goodness. It’s absurd to believe these claims (and many others) about the Christian God. They are beneath even our limited capacity for rationality, much less a God’s. It’s ridiculous to even take it seriously.

But Christianity wants us to believe its “truth claims” precisely because they are absurd…because absurdity is made a virtue in Christianity. And that will be the topic of the next installment.

The Sorcery of the Christian Imagination: A Reflection on Ludwig Feuerbach

 atheism, Christianity, faith, miracles, objectivity, reason, subjectivity, theism  No Responses »
Jul 132012
 

Perhaps one of the most unknown and underrated critics of theism, and of Christianity in particular, is Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). To the extent that Feuerbach is known, it is because of his influence on Karl Marx and his theory of alienation.  But we need to correct the record of Feuerbach’s true importance. Given the force and persuasiveness of Feuerbach’s full out assault on Christianity, his influence on Marx is comparatively only of a pedantic and passing interest.

In his The Essence of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach argues that the spiritual reality of the Christian God is actually an anthropological one.  In short, what God is, a person is. God just is the projection of human characteristics, potentialities and wishes into an externalized imaginary being. It doesn’t matter what attribute of the Christian God you propose as possessing reality, that attribute is constitutive of an individual human being or the human species as a whole. That’s why the Christian God is readily experienced as a personal God. What the individual Christian unknowingly really has a relationship with is him- or herself or some potentiality that lies within the human species.  Indeed, it is by means of these projections that Christians come to know and experience themselves (except, crucially, that they are projecting themselves into an imaginary being). While I am not convinced that Feuerbach’s theory succeeds in every particular, I think it largely does and, as such, constitutes an important and seminal work in the history of atheistic thought.

One could dip into any portion of The Essence of Christianity to see how Feuerbach applies his hermeneutic of the conception of Christian experience and doctrine.  But I have selected his chapter “The Mystery of Faith—The Mystery of Miracle” (chapter 13) to explicate analyze here.

According to Feuerbach, faith and miracles are inextricably linked.  Although for Feuerbach miracles have no real existential reality (i.e. they have no external being), they are nonetheless the projected objectification of faith into the external world:

That which is objectively miracle, or miraculous power, is subjectively faith; miracle is the outward aspect of faith, faith the inward soul of miracle; faith is the miracle of mind, the miracle of feeling, which merely becomes objective in external miracles. [The Essence of Christianity (Chapman's Quarterly Series) (Kindle Locations 2537-2539)]

Don’t be confused. When Feuerbach uses the word “objective,” he is not saying that miracles actually occur. He is saying that what miracles are really about is the projection made by faith—by what the believer feels and wishes for—into a claim made about an event in the external world. If I want to believe that incurable sick bodies can be made whole, then I will either fashion a claim about an external event where that miracle occurs or I will uncritically believe such a claim when it is presented to me.  So that means faith is

nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of nature and reason, — that is, of natural reason.  [The Essence of Christianity (Chapman's Quarterly Series) (Kindle Locations 2535-2536)]

A big theme for Feuerbach is how faith is hostile to the facts and realities of the natural world and to reason—especially to reason because it assimilates and accommodates its claims to the facts and realities of the natural world. Instead of faith being “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1), faith is, in fact, evidence-adverse. What faith does is to invent or uncritically latch onto the evidence it wants confirmed (e.g. a miraculous claim) instead of first looking out into the world to critically examine what evidence the world (reality) actually presents.  To take the latter approach is to entertain doubt:

Doubt arises only where I go out of myself, overstep the bounds of my personality, concede reality and a right of suffrage to that which is distinct from myself; — where I know myself to be a subjective, i.e., a limited being, and seek to widen my limits by admitting things external to myself. [The Essence of Christianity (Chapman's Quarterly Series) (Kindle Locations 2543-2545)]

Since faith is all about actualizing its subjectivity (wishes, hopes, fears, etc.), faith can never concede its limitation as mere subjectivity. It must arrogantly make its subjectivity objective:

But in faith the very principle of doubt is annulled; for to faith the subjective is in and by itself the objective — nay, the absolute. Faith is nothing else than belief in the absolute reality of subjectivity. [The Essence of Christianity (Chapman's Quarterly Series) (Kindle Locations 2545-2546)]

The arrogance of the subjective in the Christian, says Feuerbach, knows no bounds. Faith makes the subjective objective down to the tiniest detail:

The essence of faith, as may be confirmed by an examination of its objects down to the minutest  speciality, is the idea that that which man wishes actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature and reason, therefore such a being exists; he wishes for a world which corresponds to the desires of the heart, a world of unlimited subjectivity, i.e., of unperturbed feeling, of uninterrupted bliss, while nevertheless there exists a world the opposite of that subjective one, and hence this world must pass away, — as necessarily pass away as God, or absolute subjectivity, must remain. [The Essence of Christianity (Chapman's Quarterly Series) (Kindle Locations 2573-2577)]

The faculty that manufactures and attaches itself to the miracles that faith requires is imagination, especially imagination that is under the sway of subjectivity:

Miracle is a thing of the imagination; and on that very account is it so agreeable: for the imagination is the faculty which alone corresponds to personal feeling, because it sets aside all limits, all laws which are painful to the feelings, and thus makes objective to man the immediate, absolutely unlimited satisfaction of his subjective wishes. [The Essence of Christianity (Chapman's Quarterly Series) (Kindle Locations 2637-2640)]

Imagination in the person of faith has no or little truck with reality or reason. To the person of faith the contents of subjectivity imaginatively conceived are objective reality:

The imagination is not to him what it is to us men of active understanding, who distinguish it as subjective from objective cognition; it is immediately identical with himself, with his feelings, and since it is identical with his being, it is his essential, objective, necessary view of things. [The Essence of Christianity (Chapman's Quarterly Series) (Kindle Locations 2676-2678)]

Feuerbach is so lucid and incisive that he is able to make the relationship between faith and miracles nearly formulaic: [(rampant, arrogant faith) + ((human subjectivity imaginatively projected) – (any constraint from reason or reality)) = miracles]:

But where miracles happen, all definite forms melt in the golden haze of imagination and feeling; there the world, reality, is no truth; there the miracle-working, emotional, i.e., subjective being, is held to be alone the objective, real being.  [The Essence of Christianity (Chapman's Quarterly Series) (Kindle Locations 2662-2665)]

For the person of faith, miracles are the contents of subjectivity bewitched by the projective capacities of the imagination:

[S]een in clear daylight, miracle presents absolutely nothing else than the sorcery of the imagination, which satisfies without contradiction all the wishes of the heart. [The Essence of Christianity (Chapman's Quarterly Series) (Kindle Locations 2692-2693)]

I find Ludwig Feuerbach’s analysis here to be unassailably correct.

I am a Deathbed Atheist

 atheism, theism  4 Responses »
Jul 072012
 

You have probably heard the expression: “There are no atheists in foxholes and deathbeds.” The expression turns on two threats: the possibility of dying in a time of war and the fear of an uncertain afterlife. Fear has always been theism’s trump card and given that it is, we see that theism has no intrinsic, salutary appeal that trumps all objections against it. Its last and ultimate gambit is nothing ennobling, nothing that calls forth the best in us, nothing that amplifies what is distinct about us as human animals. Instead, it manipulates us at level that is primal, base, rudimentarily instinctual, and something common to any organism that can behave to protect itself from ultimate harm. The fear of death.

Nevertheless, I am living proof that the expression is wrong. Moreover, I am evidence that precisely the reverse can be true. I became an atheist on what I thought was my deathbed.

I was age 28 at the time. I had been a Christian since age 17. I even had attended three conservative theologically orientated colleges by then.  I was married and my wife was expecting our first child. I was the picture of good health. But something unexpected happened; something that landed me in the intensive care ward thinking I was about to die. My heart over the space of a few hours would fluctuate between either beating too fast or too slow, and the doctors had no idea what was causing it.

Now I’d had some doubts about Christianity, doubts I thought I could handle in the context of faith. I had read many critics of theistic belief as well as critics of Christianity in particular. The names of David Hume, Bertrand Russell, David Frederick Strauss, and Gotthold Lessing come to mind. I am certain there were others. And I had come under the influence of philosophically-minded atheistic friends  who often had challenged me about my beliefs. Although I had come to the opinion that much about my faith could not be defended on rational grounds, I believed I could with Soren Kierkegaard make a leap of faith and affirm my belief in the salvific work of Jesus Christ anyhow. I told myself it was enough that Christian religion appealed to me and that it would offer me the consolation of hope when I would eventually die.

At age 28 I thought I was dying and the imagined wellspring of consolation that I counted upon was empty. In fact, I realized that the faith did not appeal to me at all. As I looked at my pregnant wife and thought I might not ever see my first child, I realized that a nebulous hope about what might occur after death in a life to come had little appeal to me. My values weren’t centered in an uncertain hereafter. Rather, my values were centered in a certain here and now. It wasn’t a next life that appealed to me. It was this life that appealed to me, and in this life there is no need for a god and there is no credible reason to believe in one. My faith crumbled and fell away on what I thought was my deathbed. It was dying that made life valuable to me, and valuing this life made my faith unnecessary and, indeed, a hindrance.

Needless to say, I survived the experience and with no lasting damage.  I have remained an atheist to this day. Now that I have more memories than time left, I can say confidently that should I again be in a position to think that I am dying, absent any compelling evidence to think otherwise, I will not return to the false hope provided by any theism. I will convey my love to my family and friends and tell them how they made life worthwhile.  And I will wait for the lights to be turned off.

That suffices.

Why “Infidelity?”

 atheism, theism  No Responses »
Jul 012012
 

“Infidelity” evokes marital unfaithfulness, a sexual transgression, an erotic taboo. Now I will be clear about this at the onset. This blog is not about individuals stepping out on their romantic and erotic partners, but it is about that sense and degree of violation. Only, in this case, the violation is against all forms of theism—monotheism, pantheism, polytheism, deism, whatever—and any spiritual mumbo jumbo that interjects into, diverts and mitigates individuals’ direct apprehension of reality through their human faculties. Not only is no higher power or some “divine other” ground of being not needed for us to sufficiently apprehend and work with reality, but the theisms tend to impair our ability to do so. This blog aspires to detail the mechanisms of that pernicious impairment.

“Infidelity” as “unfaithfulness,” “transgression,” and “taboo” are important because in truth, we do not yet live in a post-theistic world. And if we ever hope to deliver the human episteme (or world view) from the benighted and infected ravages of theism, we atheists must assault theism with a thoroughgoing argumentative mercilessness that will satisfy theism’s criteria for iniquity.  We must seem to them as monsters of blasphemy.  Now do not misunderstand this point. No political or binding social prescriptions are being advanced in these remarks. Nothing is being proffered that savors of official intolerance for theistic views. After all, why should atheists emulate the persecutions, holy wars, crusades, inquisitions, fatwas, and acts of censorship that theists have eagerly engaged in? No one should want to be like them. But no atheist should cede them any ground philosophically.  No intellectual quarter should be surrendered because a necessary condition of progress is to be reality orientated.  This blog will offer none.

“Infidelity” because it is important for individuals to step outside the claims of holy books, catechisms, doctrines, and official religious pronouncements and see clearly the purposes they serve—what they are up to—and not merely what they claim in their own terms. This blog will attempt to demonstrate that theistic dicta of all kinds are designed to convince, convert, and control individuals (in a word, manipulate) and rarely to purely describe and inform.

Finally. “Infidelity” because the stepping out from theism should be perceived as an ongoing practice of investigation and exposure. It’s not enough to once have become an atheist and, then, assume that one has excised him- or herself of every corpuscle of theistic infection that our cultures bear. A god may no longer be explicitly exalted in a temple for a non-believer to continue to dwell there. This blog will be an instance of the practice of de-theizing the person and culture.

I hope you return often.