The debate on atheism tends to occur at a very crude level. For modern thinking, it is clear that major elements of traditional Christianity are obsolete, even dangerous. In this category I would put ideas of heaven and hell, supernaturalism, miracles, and the myths of Eden, virgin birth and the flood etc. These are all objectively false, and continued belief in them is a pathology, resulting in delusion and suffering. Hence the debate about creationism and intelligent design is tedious and pointless because it involves trying to talk sense with an ignorant throwback group who are opposed to the advance of knowledge. The debate should be about sociology and politics, not theory, ie why do creationists, this big group of otherwise modern rational people, believe things which are demonstrably false? And what are the dangers to our planet resulting from this widespread false consciousness? My view, discussed also at http://www.bautforum.com/questions-answ ... ost1079126, is that Creationism is not really central to their supposed worldview, but essentially runs interference for the idea of Christ as Saviour. It is a smokescreen designed to protect fundamentalist beliefs regarding Christ, notably that he was a sacrificial substitute who was murdered by God as a ransom to forestall the divine wrath deserved by fallen sinful people. The problem with this whole fundamentalist 'system' is that creationists have turned Christ into a laughing stock.

The key task in my view is to set the creationist rubbish to one side in order to engage on theology, applying a modern set of scientific values to the stories of the Gospel. When this is done it can become possible to separate the wheat from the tares, in the terms of the parable at Matt 13:25, and extract the kernel of truth from the lies of the church. The Old Testament prophet Malachi put it well when he said (Mal 3:2) that God is like a refiner's fire. This idea is highly Darwinian, indicating that life forms which adapt to reality will survive, while reality/God will weed out the maladaptive forms which in the long term will fail to procreate. Creationists just have it wrong about which ideas are adaptive

RT2,

I hope to find the time to respond more fully to your post, in that I find a good deal we share common gound with; and some areas of real difference too.

Would you be interested in reading and discussing one of the following books? Considering what you've written above, I think you'd find them worth the effort. I've not read the first, but found Lash's "Easter In/Ordinary" to be a great challenge and a serious theological education. I have read the latter, and find Professor Caputo to be a brilliant delight to read...I think you might find his "religionless religion" very interesting.

Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God by Nicholas Lash http://www.amazon.com/Holiness-Speech-Silence-Reflections-Question/dp/0754650391/ref=pd_ybh_1?pf_rd_p=280800601&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1501&pf_rd_i=ybh&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1E59DD4107HNE29GTM2E

The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event by John D. Caputo http://www.amazon.com/Weakness-God-Theology-Philosophy-Religion/dp/0253218284/ref=pd_ybh_5?pf_rd_p=280800601&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=1501&pf_rd_i=ybh&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1E59DD4107HNE29GTM2E

I agree that Creationism is not the primary ingredient in their ideology, and that it is utilized for something more than protecting Biblical inerrancy; but I don't think it is protecting Christ as Savior, as much as protecting a patriarchial, martial, authoritarian, imperial way of life which is justified by way of Christ as patron, as godfather, as boss. More specifically, Christ is the projected amalgem of forces that keep a particular way of life in place: a way of life that follows the dictates of power and domination. Christ as Savior is the spectral hallucinogen that keeps a system of imperial dominance in order. Christ is not a laughing stock, but the biggest God on the block to whom all must pay homage, respect, and protection fees. Creationism is part of the ideological framework that explains how Christ attained Boss Status and why we are obliged to seek his protection and patronage.

Instead of turning the cheek, going the extra mile, giving one's cloak as well as coat, praying for and loving one's enemies, embracing an economy of grace and hospitality, focusing primarily upon feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, protecting the sojourn, healing the sick, eating with the outcast, and embarking upon what it means to pick up and carry one's cross....the Gospel becomes justification for everything Imperial and Martial.

Hi DH. This degenerate confusion, which you have highlighted by depicting how creationists treat the god of love like a gangster, is so absurd that it shows why Christ has become a laughing stock for anyone with a modicum of reason. It is not Christ the creationists worship but a false invented idol. They are directly breaking commandments one and two from Exodus 20: You shall have no other gods before me; and You shall not make for yourselves an idol. Your comments show the selectivity and inconsistency of the so-called inerrancy doctrine

I don't think we can let ourselves off the hook so easily. Selectivity is not simply a fundamentalist phenomenom: all of us perform an exegesis of the text that highlights some elements and leaves out others...as well as reads into and projects onto it our favorite meanings, hopes, and fears. I don't think this has to result in sheer subjectivism: but none of us escape eisegesis when practicing exegesis. Atheist, agnostic, baptist, congregationalist, methodist, roman catholic...all of us engage the text from where we are: there is no unadulterated objective place to read from. As Paul, and you remind us, we see through a glass darkly.

Still, there are some, I believe, who simply choose not to see at all. For these, there is no conflict in the text: no contradiction and confusion, all is seamless and sure...total certainty and complete explanation regarding every dotted i and crossed t. And some who go the opposite direction: nothing but deception and stupidity, everything worthless and wasted...a similar certainty, but instead of adoration- disgust.

Rabbi Michael Lerner describes a Jewish tradition of reading the Bible with two notions of God in mind: the right hand and left hand of God. The right hand reflects the wrath, vengeance, punishing, martial, and destructive side of God in the text; and the left is the forgiving, compassionate, generous, loving and healing side of God in the text.

If we approach the text in hope we highlight the left hand of God; if we approach the text in fear, the right. Lerner explains that the production of the Bible was by men and women living in hope and in fear, and their experiences with God are captured in the text within the context that hope and fear. The right hand of God reflects the angers and frustrations of traumatized people seeking protection and justice: wanting some sort of advocate and defender in a terribly violent world. The left hand represents traumatized folk as well, but these people are wanting to stop the cycle of violence and the compulsion to repeat the trauma they receieved onto others. Thus, the passion for vengeance and forgiveness in the same text.

Lerner argues that the right hand of God is the distortion of God's true nature: the healing, generous, transformative, loving force of the universe that is constantly making possible a new future and fueling the hope of people to repair and mend the wounds of the world. This is Tikkun.

It makes sense that the Gospel would be transformed from a narrative of liberatory grace to imperial force. Surviving on this planet is a bloody affair, full of violence and treachery and dissimulation. A question I have is: why would Science require we go either direction: i.e., what about science would have us choose (using Lerner's model) the Right Hand or the Left Hand of God within the text?

As an atheist and someone who has read the bible without any prior indoctrination from any religion I will say this about the text. There is truth in the bible but no more than in any other epic human story.

What I find confusing is that so many people ignore (or don't know about) the ghastly portions (incest, the condoning of slavery, genocide and the subjection of women to mention but a few) and focus solely on the good which is far less common throughout the book; and then to claim that this book is the source of morality... pure bunk.

Many people are currently trying to make religion seem more tolerable to secular minds by changing its meaning. In another thread that DH started some author is calling it love. This does not change anything, I can be in love and have passions and not be religious or believe in gods. Just because one silly man says that all love is a love of god does not make it so.

I personally think that any book as flawed as the bible can never be reconciled with atheism except as fable, and trying to alter the meaning to make it seem more tolerable to the more secular minded people is not only a waste of effort but insulting to believers as well.

Later

How is it possible to live in the US and not receive multiple types of indoctrination regarding the Bible: popular culture, public education, electoral campaigns, legal issues, friends, family, neighbors, co-workers in and out of the church...all of this involves lots of teaching about the Bible, both implicit and explicit, even if mostly contraditory. I suggest you are (all of us) bombarded with doctrine regarding the Bible all the time, and have been since the womb (those of us born and raised in the US, at least.)

This neither validates nor invalidates your/our conclusions: but it clears the discussion of any perspectives that claim an absence of indoctrination.



Pure bunk, but understandable. Whatever our source of morality, it seems we can't escape the stain of ghastly portions that discolor and uglify our human, all-too human endeavors. Perhaps bunk is our common denominator.



Professor Caputo (who I refer to above) takes an unorthodox approach to discussing religion: in that he accepts that a discussion is not the best way to understand the subject...simply exchanging facts, arguments, debating contrary evidence and conclusions...because the primary subject of religion is love, something else is at work in the exchange. Love unhinges people, knocks them off-center, keeps them guessing, and in many cases, makes us crazy...it often demands what isn't possible, making Religion an engagement with the impossible. Love of God is, well, what the hell is it? Caputo makes the case (as a suitor seeking the hand of a lover, not a professor arguing for the existence of x) that God is the name of an event that will not be contained, controlled, or easily conversed about...the event has something to do with a kingdom where outcasts, rejects and the unsuccessful enjoy ridiculously generous feasts, in the midst of a kind of hospitality that risks everything, is willing to lose it all, give it all away for one lost lamb, or a damned ugly, even ghastly, maniac wandering noisily amongst the tombs...it has something to do with an economy that forgets tomorrow's obligations and forgives the unforgivable: using lillies in the field as a model for exhuberant feduciary responsibility.

When I say indoctrinated I mean...



I had none of that... and what little I was exposed to went in one ear and out the other; I honestly had no idea that Christmas had anything to do with Jesus until I was in my early teens. Its not that I did not hear some of the stories it was just that In my case my care factor was zero.

At any rate when I did read the bible I had no one to "guide" my interpretation of the text and was forced to take it at face value. The vast majority of the text and stories I had never heard before.

And most of what I read was ghastly.

When I asked some of my Christian friends about those stories I was shocked to find that none of them even knew that that material was in the bible.



Its that understanding that causes much of an atheists grief. it is a belief born of ignorance but a powerful belief all the same.

It seems that most believers do not know about the dark side of the bible and yet have come to the conclusion of a higher morality through the teachings of the bible. This is clearly not true but it does not keep them from pointing fingers at us atheists as immoral godless scum.

If they only knew that the book that they point to for their moral code was rife with condoned incest, ordered genocide, rules for beating a slave, ordered bashing/gnashing of babies, accepted rape, human sacrifice, murder and torture, maybe they would go easier on us people who do not subscribe to such a morality.



Probably because he recognizes that religion holds no ammunition in a rational playing field. So he is making an attempt to move the argument to a more obscure field in the hopes that some people will not recognize the sleight of hand.

Later

Heaven is not pie in the sky in the sweet by and by, but- well, what is it then? It has something to do with transforming this world from the brutal cesspool it often is, into something else- something to do with global peace and human flourishing. But, why is this Darwinian and how does science get us to desire something more than the cesspool we often find ourselves in? Science, it seems, doesn't tell us which direction to go: global peace or imperial cesspool. Frankly, it seems the Darwinian direction would be a matter of eliminating those who can't leave the cesspool...i.e., destroy all those who don't want global peace or believe that human flourishing is possible. Find the most effective way to eliminate the threat: identify, isolate, quarantine, and annihilate those who just don't get it.

Sacrificing one's wealth, status and power for the benefit of one's enemy, or one who is sick and bungled and sure to die...is, in terms of Natural Selection, de-selective. I guess I don't understand how taking up one's cross is adaptative.

Eisegesis is reading in to the text what we want to see. I am actually all in favour of this, as long as it produces a contestable debate about what the text means for us. Personally, I find exegesis boring when it has degenerated into a timid scholasticism where basic concepts such as God and salvation are off limits for debate as to their real meaning. The challenge should be to accept the world view of modern atheist science and ask what Biblical resources can add to that. This is more eis than ex.
This is an example of eisegesis which should be contested! Yes, the universe is loving, but no, wrath is not simply a distortion. Per my earlier claim that Jesus represents the cosmos as Gaia, the challenge is for us too to represent Gaia in order to understand the path of cumulative adaptation for humanity. If we can represent Gaia, we are living in love, and on a path to increased complexity. If not, we are like a ship heading for the rocks

Why should we accept the worldview of the modern atheist scientist...or any for that matter? I don't deny the value of science and its methods, but I certainly don't think their extension into entire worldviews should go without challenge. I think the Bible should challenge all of our worldviews: unsettle, disturb, confront, expose and ultimately...well, perhaps I should slow down a bit here. I am not exactly sure what the Bible is ultimately about: I think it has something to do with getting things right with God and each other. I don't think the Bible is entirely clear or consistent about what it means by God, or how to treat each other. Although I do think it's clear that we, meaning the human race, usually get it wrong: terribly wrong. This is a complicated issue, no doubt.



Rabbi Lerner's point is to challenge those who utilize the Right Hand of God in the Bible to justify their own personal and political wrath: a vengeful and punishing God establishes my obligatory vengeance and martial attitude towards those I deem fallen, outsider, sinful, etc.. The wrath of God is left to God and God alone, not to those who claim to represent divine demands on earth. The only exception that Rabbi Lerner makes is when oppressed peoples imagine a vindicator and protector in God, and they utilize the punishing hand of God as fuel for justice: God is not on the side of the terrorists and tyrants, but with those who suffer their abuse. God chooses sides, and it is with the victims of injustice. Still, their is danger in anybody utilizing God as their violent protector, even if they are deserving of it. Thus, the necessity to approach eisegesis in a spirit of hope and not fear: fearful eisegesis will find plenty of reasons to annihilate one's enemies in the text; hopeful eisegesis will see a more demanding alternative...something that doesn't destroy your enemy, but loves them instead.



So, Abba for Jesus is best understood as Gaia for the contemporary scientific mind? More Biblically, the Kingdom of God is the Gaia we must understand, and in this understanding, humanity will attain a cumulative adaptative niche of loving complexity? For Jesus, the Kingdom of God was largely presented in parables: extravagant dinner parties where the guest list includes anyone off the street, lots of children, healed minds recently exorcised of demons, healed bodies with new mobility, like a mustard plant that once planted is never esily removed, blind folk seeing, prisoners released...and ultimately, even crucifixions lose their power, tombs release their dead and a new kind of life is introduced to existence: a resurrected life- something radically and profoundly outside of the parameters of creation to that point. Something no one imagined possible, completely impossible, becomes the only real thing. Maybe I've lost my point....what was the point?



If we don't observe the laws of ecological necessity, we will be punished by rising coastlines, burining forests, drought ravaged farmland, polluted air, poisoned water and contaminated soil...and all of the accompanying social and political chaos that will follow. It will be hell. In many places, it is hell already.

But, why not work to eliminate the risk in natural selective terms? I mean, why not work to get rid of the major portion of human population that cannot be sustained and will not adopt sustainable lifestyles? Seriously, why not sterilize the mass of women and men, eliminate the worst off, force the surviving few into highly restricted areas where any behavior that deviates from sustainability will result in death? If survival is the issue, then those who don't want to survive can be helped off the stage: those who get in the way can be eliminated. This is wrath in a way that perhaps you aren't willing to engage: nor is it survival of the fittest as most scientific naturalists are willing to pursue.

Why not? If the goal is some sort of cumulative human adaptative point in evolutionary terms: what keeps you/me/us from eliminating threats to its success?

Hi again. May I say, I appreciate being able to have this conversation, which is a rare pleasure. My outlook is 'atheism plus'. Science is necessary not sufficient. We should start from modern empiricism as the foundation of thought, while recognizing that (i) there is immensely more to the human spirit than can be seen in a laboratory; (ii) modern rationality has basic errors in confusing human knowledge with ultimate truth; and (iii) any spiritual speculation should be compatible with the self-consistent logic of science. Spirituality gets a bad name by promoting claims which science has proved impossible. The Bible is not consistent, but it is a human document. My claim is that a consistent salvific theology can be extracted from the dross of Biblical error.

Yes, this is a very good point which again illustrates why fundamentalism is anti-Christian. American fundamentalist idolatry imagines it knows the mind of God when it is simply wrong, and headed on a path to destruction. I just read this http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20813 great article in the New York Review of Books about Paul Krugman and how Ronald Wilson Reagan appealed to the most base and racist instincts of the American people. Fundamentalism is very dangerous.

Well said. This illustrates how real security derives from love and trust rather than fear and hate. The trouble, as I noted in my previous comment about the new covenant, is that fearful eisegesis is anti-Christian, relying on ideas which Jesus specifically rejected.

Yes, this is a great summary of a possible Kingdom of God. I have a rather Johannine take on the Gospels in terms of a scientific integration of theology and gaian cosmology. The real metaphysics of Christ which supports this Darwinian theology is in the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse. So for example John's 'I am' statements: when Jesus says 'I am the true vine' he is indicating that a connection to the divine source is the basis of salvation, that we need real cosmic understanding as a basis for strategic vision and progress. I interpret this in Gaian terms, with the wholistic reality of our planet as the local instantiation of the divine source, and the sense that when humanity becomes too cancerous, people will arise who will speak powerfully on behalf of the planet.

Such a bleak option would produce a negative spiral to extinction, whereas a loving path is affordable, adaptive, necessary and immensely fruitful. Our planet can support ten billion people and increased biodiversity. I wrote a short story explaining a small part of my vision of a positive generous future, in which security derives from science and the spirit rather than the gun, at www.ascm.org.au/jgOnline/jg2007Autumn.pdf