Friday, February 02, 2007

How "Good Christians" Look to Atheists


(I was going to entitle the article "How Fundamentalists...", but, honestly, this seems to hold true of pretty much all the folks I've met who label themselves "Christian" without further qualification. This post doesn't apply to Christians with a more specific designation unless they agree with the likes of Le Haye, the 700 Club, &c.)

EDIT: My wording of this post last night was not good, and I've offended at least one person already (which wasn't my intention). I've asked a "language" question in the comments, but wanted to put right up front that I'm sorry to have offended folks.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

So that's how I rate? I think your Fundamentalists lable would have been more accurate. I am pretty quiet about it, but I consider myself a Christian. I just hold that my faith is between me and God and once I am dead, we will hash it out then. No reason to harsh anyone else's mellow about it.

boxingalcibiades said...

I agree, Jim. You're off on this one. The whole "lake of fire" bit has been wayyyy out of mainstream Low Protestantism for a long time now. Now, the Fundies? Yeah, they're still in "flaming pit" mode.

I just got some folks from the new megachurch near me dropping off a business card and a blurb this morning. You could *feel* the wholesomeness radiating off them. Now, I don't think they were real intellectual heavyweights, but Christianity has never been about being smart, but about how people behave, since, if there is a creator, we're all Meat Popsicles by comparison, anyway...

Anonymous said...

I have to admit: I also have a problem with this cartoon.. This is the sort of thing I was talking about on Crow's blog that annoys me about athiests.. It's very much akin to "Oh, you believe in God? Well why not Unicorns and Goblins too?".

I find that attitude disgusting. There are SO many things in life that people take on faith, yet it is only when it enters the realms of the metaphysical that these people start acting like this.

Meanwhile, for 100s of years, the same type of people have completely accepted 'proven' scientific 'facts' which were then disproven later.

JimDesu said...

Mike, do you really fall in with Le Haye & such? Or, hmmm, I guess you're right, they really do count as fundamentalists.

Hmmm. Point taken.

Question: I have a grrr with the "good christians" label that fundamentalists tend to use -- in my experience as if the one required the other. What would be a better wording to get the point across without tarring undeserving folks? The point was to take the cartoon, which is a little on the self-righteous side, and use it vis-a-vis the "moral pillar" self-image that I've got a chip on my shoulder about.

Anonymous said...

Ah, don't worry about it. The thing you need to remember is if someone says they are a good christian, they automatically are a liar (no person who I would consider really a righteous soul would ever be so assuming to say that they were anything less than a deeply flawed human) and so you should just go "er, yeah" and ignore them.

I have faith, but I swear, drink, look at nasty photos, seek to do harm to my fellow man and wish him ill (namely the Taliban, AQ and the AIF), and try to have wild sex when possible for reasons other than procration.

Good Christian? ME? Snicker, oh hell no. But if some M(*&#(*&#(*@ing self-righteous A)(*$)(@# tried to get in my face about it, I would serious go off on his ass. I will clear the books with God when I am dead and I know for damn sure (there is another couple of sins I need to answer for) that none of these goobers are going to be sitting on the right hand and advising God on how I am to be judged.

Just tell them that Pride ranks up there in the Seven Deadly sins category.

If they were a "moral Pillar" then they wouldn't ever really bring faith into it.

Mike

Amanda said...

I don't agree with putting "scientific" and "facts" in quotes, and in the same category with religious faith. Science isn't accepted on faith. Scientists will accept a theory tentatively and then try to disprove it. That's what science is.
The reason that people talk about faith when the metaphysical comes up is because science is only about the physical world.
Religion is about the supernatural - things that cannot be proven or unproven. That's why faith exists. It is completely outside the territory of science and science should have nothing to do with it.
And not all, "people like this" accept "so many things on faith". While I can't speak for all, I can say that I don't. I have witnesses, too.

Anonymous said...

There is a large difference between the scientist who is researching the truth behind a theory and the layperson who simply accepts what they have heard but has no knowledge or participation in determining that truth. THAT is faith.. believing what one is told by someone who one trusts.

And considering how many athiests I meet that take a stance of "science can't prove God exists, therefore he doesn't", I don't see that there is such a clear separation.

Unknown said...

Faith is believing what one is told without proof.
If I believe a scientist it isn't that I trust that scientist. There are scientists who say all kinds of things. But I do trust in the scientific method, experimental science, peer review. Whereas that kind of thing can't operate on a metaphysical level, so there's nothing behind the "trust" that someone gives a religious leader. A religious leader can't back up his viewpoint with facts - that's not the point of religion. A scientist can.
Anyone who thinks you can prove a negative is just wrong.

Anonymous said...

Meh.. This is arguing semantics which is a waste of time so I'm done.

Unknown said...

It isn't. Faith with proof isn't faith at all.

Anonymous said...

And then man goes on to prove that black is white and gets run over at the next zebra crossing...

JimDesu said...

Items of faith are truer than fact, end of story. Whether that faith is that socialism works or that blaspheming the holy spirit like I've done means hellfire forever, these things are completely orthogonal to fact.

It's not semantics.

Anonymous said...

It IS semantics when it comes down to people believing what they're told by media pundits who know next to nothing about the science they are reporting on, and that's what the vast majority of the world is doing and has always done. Unless you're someone who actually has the interest and/or ability to read about the facts behind the science, you're taking it on faith, namely the faith that the people doing the explaining have facts behind them.

My point was that while its not necessarily that simple (what ever is), throughout humanity a lot of people believe they have witnessed evidence (i.e. 'fact') that directly proves what they are teaching as scripture. The people who follow them are little different in their 'faith' then those who believe in sciences they know nothing about.

I put "facts" in quotes in my earlier example not to make a statement against science; anyone who knows anything about me would know that I am MUCH more on the science side than the 'spiritual beliefs / faith' side. I merely put the word in quotes to denote the fact that throughout history, science has changed its 'facts' nearly as much as religion has, albeit for what most of us would consider better reasoning (i.e., discovery)..

That reasoning, however, doesn't change the reality that those who believed in those false truths (such as the 'fact' pushed by 'scientists' in the 14th century that rats were spontaneous created by way of grains being left in dirty laundry) were doing so based on the word of others and were no more correct than the doomsday cultists who preached Apocalypse 1999.

JimDesu said...

Vis-a-vis the 14th century guys, those ideas came from "Natural Philosophy", not science. The difference being the former is "how do I think this works?" without any falsifiability criteria. Deductive reasoning isn't sufficient there.

Otherwise, ok, I see your point. Faith means either casual faith "I assume there really is a place called Turkmenistan" versus religious faith, "I accept that as unquestionable truth", aka bringing axioms into your belief system.

In the context of religion, I am almost always referring to the latter. The difference between fact and truth is that fact requires one, as Russ so often says "to spin on a dime" when the fact is falsified. Truth is eternal and immutable.

Anonymous said...

I can swing with that, although I would ask "Did the average person at the time know the difference between Natural Philosophy and Science?'..

But again, just like your comment was not an attack on Xians in general, mine was not a comment on athiests/agnostics in general but was about a specific mindset I have long since had a problem with..

Here's an interesting example of what I'm talking about: the argument for the existence of WMD in Iraq. The argument was presented with loads of data, proof and facts. However, very few of us actually saw any of this evidence directly.

Thus, whether the WMD 'facts' proved true or false, our choice of whether or not to believe what the administration was telling us was done on, in essence, faith.

JimDesu said...

Sure, but what you're calling faith is really belief: when correlating evidence failed to come along, belief eroded rather rapidly in most circles.

This is different than faith, which says "regardless of what anyone says, I'm putting my eggs in that basket over there".

Now, I'll grant you that many political folks really are acting on faith, but I'll save that for when I have a drink at hand :-).

Anonymous said...

See, that's why I say that some of this is semantics.. I don't think all faith is always so to the point of denying anything that one sees..

But then we're getting pretty far away from my original intent which was merely to observe that everyone takes some things on belief/faith/trust/whatever word you want to use.. How can we not?; none of us are masters of all knowledge..

I think we've beaten this poor horse too much.. The Iran/Saudi thread is much more interesting :)

Anonymous said...

Racial inferiority was once a scientifically proven fact.

So was the usefulness of phrenology.

So, for that matter, was the inherent mental deficiency of homosexuals.

Proofs were at hand. These things are, as I suspect we can all agree, not factual at all. But they were said to be so.

I am therefore suspicious of proofs which I have not seen and understood; too often, smart people use other peoples' proofs unexamined (the "scholarly commonplace") simply to reinforce their bias.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps those who put faith in things that are contrary to what is known either misunderstand or misapply faith itself. By the same token, those who seek to know what is knowable through reason of necessity either refine, reinforce, or transform their faith.

This is an old position, that faith and reason do not, and must not, conflict. If faith and reason appear to conflict, either one's faith is misplaced or one's reason is flawed. Both misplaced belief and faulty reasoning are falsifiable through contrary observable evidence and reasonable argument, but the implications of faith and reason both appear unidirectional.

A further difficulty emerges when one considers that all reasonable "conclusions" in science are not actually conclusive but conditional; consequently there are no proven facts in science, only working hypotheses based upon limited observations using instruments developed to test the validity of a conceptual framework, either in whole or in part. If the conceptual framework is ill-suited to observe a particular phenomenon, the observer may not recognize the framework's invalidity until sufficient anomalies accumulate in, and are disseminated from, the observational record to produce a crisis of faith in prior assumptions about what is "known".

Applying this concept to happycrow's examples suggests that sufficient anomalies existed in the observations of individuals from various races, cranial configurations, and sexual orientations to cast assumptions about racial hierarchy, phrenology and homosexuality into serious doubt. These are empirical and therefore testable claims. By contrast, claims such as the existence or non-existence of God, or of a teleological cosmos are, as far as we can tell, not testable.

The difficulty that the fundamentalist has with scientific inquiry generally revolves around a misconception that the conditional claims based upon empirical observation and experimental technique constitute conclusions certainties about the nature of things independent of their own assumptions about a teleological universe.

Says T.H. Huxley, "The known is finite; the unknown, infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land." From the discussion above I am reminded of a definition of faith from Flannery O'Connor: "Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge." If this be so, then perhaps faith is best suited for those things that cannot ever be known.

Blog Archive