eChurch Blog

At times I do find the more extremist brand of atheists rather outlandish…

Cross Post by David of Anglican Samizdat

From here:

American atheists lined up to be “de-baptized” in a ritual using a hair dryer, according to a report Friday on U.S. late-night news program “Nightline.”

Leading atheist Edwin Kagin blasted his fellow non-believers with the hair dryer to symbolically dry up the holy water sprinkled on their heads in days past. The styling tool was emblazoned with a label reading “Reason and Truth.”

Kagin doned a monk’s robe and said a few mock-Latin phrases before inviting those wishing to be de-baptized to “come forward now and receive the spirit of hot air that taketh away the stigma and taketh away the remnants of the stain of baptismal water.”

Baptism is an outward and visible sign of an inner and invisible grace; these atheist antics are, I suppose, an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible disgrace. In addition  to being superstitious and not particularly funny.

Further Link: ABC News – Atheists Break Out New Ritual Tool: The Blow-Dryer

As wacky as this news item from Yahoo may appear to us, I remember some years ago reading that Hindu Gods could be regarded as legal entities in regard to Indian probate law. Put simply, you were within your rights to leave your house and property to a Hindu god, who would presumably dwell therein.

Yahoo

Two judges at the Bombay High Court on Friday rejected a petition from a private religious trust to open accounts in the names of five deities, including the revered elephant-headed god, Ganesha.

“Trading in shares on the stock market requires certain skills and expertise and to expect this from deities would not be proper,” judges P.B. Majumdar and Rajendra Sawant said, according to Indian newspapers.

The trust, owned by the former royal family of Sangli, in western Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, brought the case after successfully securing income tax cards and savings accounts for the deities.

But National Securities Depository Limited (NDSL) rejected the trust’s application for permission to open trading accounts, arguing that it would be difficult to take action against the gods in the event of irregularities.
An Indian court has ruled that Hindu gods cannot deal in stocks and shares, reports said Saturday, after an application for trading accounts to be set up in their names.

Did you know that communion has been celebrated on the moon?

Baptist Press:

ALEXANDRIA, La. (BP)–Apollo 11, NASA’s first manned mission to land on the moon, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., 41 years ago on July 16, 1969. Four days later, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the lunar surface and proclaimed, “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”

While the first activities by man outside of the Apollo 11 lunar module were broadcast and publicized, one of man’s first acts on the moon’s surface — a religious act — which took place inside the lunar module was kept very private.

On July 20, approximately two-and-a-half hours after landing and prior to exiting the lunar module, Buzz Aldrin broadcast to Earth: “This is the LM pilot. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”

Aldrin, who attended a Presbyterian church, then paused and took communion. It was “a ceremony I had planned as an expression of gratitude and hope,” Aldrin wrote in his book “Magnificent Desolation.” “I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God.”

Aldrin intended to share his communion experience with the world, but NASA officials instructed him not to. “NASA was still smarting from a lawsuit filed by atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair after the Apollo 8 astronauts read from the biblical creation account in Genesis,” wrote Aldrin. “O’Hair contended this was a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.”

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Can’t think of anything that would top that!

Whilst queuing for the supermarket checkout, I often check out the cheap DVD stand to glean any nuggets and yesterday I happened upon a film called The Nines.

I’d never heard of this one but had a good feeling in my loins and felt I deserved a top film after the harrowing disappointment of Matt Damon’s Green Zone the night before. Bourne goes epic, my arse….

Anyway, The Nines was one of the best films I have ever had the great pleasure to watch. I’m not going to tell you much about it, because I simply wouldn’t know where to start and I don’t want to spoil it for you in any way.

This is the blurb from the back of the DVD, which doesn’t even come close to doing this film justice:

The Nines stars Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy and is the directorial debut of the acclaimed screenwriter John August

An intricately constructed blur of reality and metaphysical fantasy, The Nines unfolds in three separate but parallel and connect movies, featuring the same actors and often overlapping incarnations. Together, the three stories form a single narrative that explores the relationships between the author and character, actor and role, creator and creation. Alternately funny and unsettling, The Nines is like a riddle where the answer is the question: “How does it all add up?”

This is simply a mind-blowingly awesomely splendid film which I can’t praise enough. I will shortly be rushing to the shops to get the necessary munchies for another viewing tonight.

Best £1.99 I’ve ever spent. If you haven’t seen it, then get it!

OK, I know we’ve already had our weekly dose of psychobabble, but bear with me, you’ll like this.

On Monday I posted some research by Ian McGregor (Associate Professor in York’s Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health) that appeared to confirm:

Anxiety and uncertainty can cause us to become more idealistic and more radical in our religious beliefs…..

I mentioned that it seemed to me rather intuitive that folk should turn to spirituality in times of increased stress. What is perhaps not quite so intuitive is the possibility that atheists should become more vehemently atheistic in times of increased stress.

This is what Professor McGregor had to say in this regard:

Our research indicates that atheists become more zealously atheistic in response to anxious uncertainty threats. It is important to distinguish zeal from other phenomena that have been linked to religious belief, however. Our research focuses on personally empowered religious and idealistic zeal. Some other research indicates that some people do become more deferent to, and paranoid and credulous about, a wide range of religious and supernatural factors when threatened, but those outcomes appear to be driven by different motivational factors that are associated with different personality orientations.

Specifically, in our research, we find that people with overtly confident personalities are the ones who respond to the threats by becoming more zealous about their belief (or atheism). They do not become more paranoid, credulous, or broadly superstitious, however. We have some preliminary evidence that, in contrast, it is the people with overtly meek personalities who respond to threats by becoming more paranoid, credulous, and superstitious.

Ian McGregor is a professor of psychology at York University.

Perhaps our friends over at the Richard Dawkins website shouldn’t have been quite so swift in citing the results of the study in relation to religious belief.

For the sake of ease I will describe Gordon – the author of the below article – as a ‘non-believer’ or ‘ex-believer’, this is of course an over-simplification but allows you to better put the article in context.

Reading his piece I was suddenly struck by the simple fact that I can’t remember any atheist or agnostic detailing exactly what it is they don’t believe in. This is a remarkable fact to me.

I found this to be a thought provoking piece and I have begun to ponder if I’m alone as a Christian in also rejecting elements of the characteristics of the god Gordon identifies.

I would value your thoughts on this one…..

The God I Don’t Believe In – by Gordon

Earlier this week I mentioned that the God I don’t believe in probably does not exist. I think I need to expand on this a bit. Not just for the benefit of my regular readers, but because writing it down will give me the opportunity to reflect on it further and order my thoughts.

To start with, its quite clear that I still lack belief in God and that lack of belief is very strong. My friend Nelu Balaj has pointed out during our various conversations that he does not believe in most of the things that I don’t believe in, but he still believes in God. His feeling is that the God I don’t believe in does not exist anyway, and that there is room for me to believe in God and still give the same weight to reason and the world we live in. Nelu’s background is in Romania where most of the post communist missionary work was done by American evangelical churches, and he has had a journey to adapt from that narrow approach to a wider belief about God. This gives him an openness to discussing things like this which is very helpful.

Having had some time to reflect on our discussions I think that Nelu has a valid point and that rather than considering myself as a general unbeliever I should really define what I don’t believe in. As well as helping me it might also help other people having a similar experience of loss of faith or who have never been able to embrace the possibility of faith.

So who exactly is the God that I don’t believe in?

Its quite difficult to distill a lifetimes accumulations of belief, but here are some of the characteristics of the God I used to believe in:

He is a limited God who only enters the lives of people who choose him. I have written previously about my dislike of the alpha course whose main message seems to be that life is pointless without God. Clearly it isn’t. Most of my friends do not acknowledge God in any way yet they have lives full of meaning, interest and – dare I say it – joy. This either means that God only enters the lives of the unhappy and dissatisfied or he is already acting in everyone’s lives regardless of whether they recognise it.

He is a God who requires a decision to accept him rather than a decision to follow him. The disciples accepted an invitation from Jesus to “follow me” which implies a journey, but this God views faith as a destination rather than a journey. Once the convert has accepted God all things will come right provided they sufficiently exercise their faith. Try telling this to a poor person in a developing country where the resources available for change are very limited indeed, or to someone with mental health problems who can’t exercise faith as they are struggling to sustain their own sense of self worth. Real life teaches us that not all problems can be solved and not everything can be put right. The inevitable implication of this God of decision and faith is that if things don’t improve then he doesn’t care, has withdrawn, does not exist at all or that the believer has insufficient faith to conjure him up. Worse still, if someone has the misfortune to have insufficient mental faculties to make a decision then there is hope, but no certainty, that they are acceptable to God. This includes people with mental handicaps, young children and people with dementia. He is a God who has little time for people like these.

He is a God who has favourites. He is vindictive, preferring his favourites at the expense of others whom he actively punishes in life and whom he will hold in eternal torment after death. His favourites vary from the Jews in the Old Testament to the true believers of today. He also favours certain believers by blessing them more than others. Yet the Jesus described in the New Testament regularly showed care towards people who would have been considered outsiders. The story of The Syrophoenician woman in Mark chapter 7 is one example that springs to mind here.

He is a God who requires us to deny reason and accept things as fact which contradict our knowledge of the physical world and our experience of real life. The biggest example of this is the creationist doctrine, barely mentioned in Britain before 1990, but now a touchstone of evangelical orthodoxy. Yet, if God is our creator then he created reason too. It would be illogical for him to ask us to believe things which contradicted what we can clearly observe in his creation.

He is a God who does not like difficult questions. Rather than being open to examination we are asked to accept a fixed understanding of God through a literal interpretation of the Bible with no room for putting it in its historical or social context. If we disagree with something or don’t understand it this is due to our lack of understanding or enlightenment rather than the accepted understanding of it being wrong.

He is a God of the individual. A very 21st century God who delivers on promises made to the individual without requiring anything from us as a community. Yes, he requires our individual worship, and he recognises a body of believers, but they are simply an assembly of individuals. He does not recognise that assembly as a community with a mission to the world or responsibilities to others, other than the need to make more converts. This itself usually manifests as individuals trying to convince other individuals, not as a community accumulating new members as it grows.

He is a collector God. Having created every individual with a soul and free will he then needs to collect them all back in at the end of their physical life. Not only is this an unnatural separation of the spiritual and physical, but it also drives believers to evangelise by quantity through targeting those who are most likely to convert. Why is it that students, young people, the lonely and unhappy get targeted by churches? Does God love these people more, or is it just that they are more likely to convert and help balance the books of a collector God?

He is a God of dubious morals. If the bible is to be accepted as the unadulterated, directly delivered word from God then it logically follows that God does not live by the same rules he expects us to live by. He regularly asks people to kill on his behalf, does bad things to people because of things their parents did, sends plagues on people who have not directly done anything to provoke it and generally seems to revel in his unbridled power. If this God was a person I knew in daily life I would avoid his company at all costs. He just isn’t my kind of person.

He is a God of moving goalposts. As new believers we are given milk and as we grow we are fed new solid food doctrines. These may contradict what we were originally told, but our acceptability to God depends on us accepting them. In marketing this is known as “bait and switch”. Hook someone in with a simple message and then gradually add in the other things like creationism, dispensationalism, pentecostalism and any other number of novel ideas.

So that is a partial description of the God I do not believe in.

In regards to this God I am an atheist, not merely an agnostic.

Cross-post by Joseph of Rosh Pina Project:

St Athanasius was the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria who oversaw the Council of Nicea, which challenged the Arian heresy that Jesus was not in fact equal with God.

The Jewish Encyclopedia carries a page on Athanasius in which it examines the bishop’s beliefs, personality, writings and influence.

Regarding Athanasius’ attitude towards Judaism, the Jewish Encyclopedia page explains:

“Jesus is for Athanasius not only the true and real Son of God, but he is also of similar essence (homoüsios) and of like eternity, but in such fashion as to permit of a duality of the divine personages. This, of course, is contradictory not only to the ruling idea of strict monotheism among the Jews, but also to the teachings of the Old Testament; and the Arians therefore rightly asked (ib.iii. 7) how Athanasius could harmonize his doctrine with such words of Scripture as “The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut. vi. 4); “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me” (Deut. xxxii. 39), and similar passages.”

In his religious polemics, Athanasius would argue against both Arians and religious Jews. Despite obvious disagreements about the Messiah, Arians and Jews sometimes worked together. Athanasius charged that the religious Jews supported the Arians; a charge corroborated by historical evidence.

As clear in the above link, Athanasius’ theological opposition to Jews alongside Arians was exacerbated by the political climate of the time. Many Jews were deeply unhappy with the Alexandrian clerical establishment, and often sided with Arians in their social disputes with the city’s Catholics.

Yet Athanasius went beyond the social climate of his city to make a cosmic point about the identity of those not sharing his theology.

Christine C. Shepardson writes in Anti-Judaism and Christian orthodoxy: Ephrem’s hymns in fourth-century Syria (p.119):

Around 340, soon after the beginning of his second exile, Athanasius wrote his Orations against the Arians [...] In these orations, Athanasius argues that the “Jewish” beliefs and behaviour of the Arians proves that they are, in fact, Jews. For example, Athanasius elaborates on his frequent references to his “Ariomaniac” opponents by calling them “new Jews”.

Athanasius’ most famous work was De Incarnatione, which C.S. Lewis described as a ‘masterpiece‘. It may have been brilliant in its exposition of the incarnation, but it also carried many anti-Jewish assumptions.

Let us consider the first sentence of De Incarnatione Chapter 22:

“But it were better, one might say, to have hidden from the designs of the Jews, that He might guard His body altogether from death.”

The assumption here is that the Jews are uniquely responsible for the death of Christ or that they are chiefly to blame for his unjust condemnation.

This charge is hugely inaccurate, with even the Sanhedrin itself deeply divided over their attitudes towards Jesus. This false charge has – both directly and indirectly – served as a justification in the mind of many calling themselves Christians who have perpetrated great atrocities against the Jewish people.

With Athansius incorporating the Christ-killing accusation into his theology, it is little surprise that religious Jews are suspicious of other things he has to say about the Almighty.

Then, there is this rather astounding sentence in Chapter 35 of De Incarnatione:

“But all Scripture teems with refutations of the disbelief of the Jews.”

Athanasius assumes that ‘the Jews’ disbelieve in Christ as if they were a homogeneous entity.

In reality, we read in the New Testament that although many leading clerics of the Jewish establishment opposed Jesus’ teachings, plenty of Jews greatly warmed to Jesus, with thousands accepting him as their Messiah at Shavuot in Jerusalem one year (Acts 2:41).

And in Chapter 40 of De Incarnatione:

“What is left unfulfilled, that the Jews should now disbelieve with impunity?”

It is extremely revealing that Athanasius qualifies this ‘disbelief’ with the word ‘impunity.’ In doing so, Athanasius perhaps ignores Paul’s warnings in Romans 11 for Gentile Christians not to boast against their Jewish branches (Romans 11:18), and thus not to be arrogant (Romans 11:20). Athanasius has collected evidences which he presents against the Jews in polemical form, rather than for Jewish people with gentleness and lovingkindness.

Consequentially, thanks to Athanasius, the affirmation of God’s bodily incarnation in Jesus Christ becomes synonymous with anti-Jewish prejudice. Perhaps some Jews may think: The higher your Christology, the more you hate the Jews and blame them for Christ’s death.

David Brakke even suggests that Athanasius associated Jewish corporeality with evil, which is deeply ironic as the very person whose divinity Athanasius was affirming was a Jew with a Jewish body.

The challenge then for those of us believers in Jesus with a high Christology is to denmonstrate to Jewish people that we repudiate anti-Semitism, and that our Christology should lead us to a positive attitude towards the Jewish people, not a negative one.

Whilst we should redeem the more positive elements of Athanasius, sifting it away from the highly-charged politics of fourth-century Alexandria, we should loudly condemn the negative aspects of his writings.

Of all the identities he could have taken, our God chose to become a Jewish man with a Jewish body, living in first-century Israel. He lived with Jews, he breathed in and breathed out Jewish teachings, and he broke bread with Jews.

If God had this positive and affirming attitude towards the Jewish body – becoming Jesus the Jew – then how much more should Jesus’ followers?

I’ve consciously avoided the current hot potato of banning Islamic full face veils, as I feel somewhat conflicted on the issue.

I confess that personally I can’t abide the full veil as I simply find it unnerving and alien, however, this is not a good enough reason to ban it.

We have to accept that many Islamic women may well choose voluntarily to wear the face veil, and I’m left in the quandary whereby I’m not entirely sure what unnerves me most, the full face veil, or the secular law which seeks to impose itself upon religiosity.

Put simply, is this a dangerous precedent? Could these laws sweeping across Europe potentially gain traction and move on to other perceived “threats”, to wit, Christian “threats” perhaps?

Anyway, those are a few disjointed thoughts on the run. I’ll hand over to Michael Merrick of Outside In, who has put together a very thoughtful blog post on this subject:

Banning the face veil – Michael Merrick

WARNING: During the course of this article I shall agree with both Mehdi Hasan and Madeleine Bunting.

French MPs have finally taken steps to ban the full veil meaning that, in the name of defending the Republican principles of ‘secularism’ and ‘equality’, the state should determine how certain Muslim females shall dress.

Which is not a welcome development, less because I have any great love of the Muslim veil than because it might just trigger a cascade of similarly illiberal laws throughout the continent.

One justification that the French have given, and it is a reasoning that seems to be rapidly gaining common currency, is that the face-veil ‘is the symbol of the repression of women, and… of extremist fundamentalism’.

But I wonder if that is a little simplistic.

To start with, it is important to dispense with two myths. Firstly that the wearing of a veil is a uniquely Muslim phenomena. It’s not. It has its place in the Christian religion, and I dare say other religions too. For example, one thing I notice more and more in my own Church is the rising numbers of (usually young) women who are electing to wear the mantilla to Mass. Partly, this is because there is a long established (and theologically sound) tradition of doing so, but also it is because (I suspect) more and more young women wish to make a statement of some kind; be it on their devotion to faith, or against the liberalisation of the Church they are in, or indeed against the society in which they reside. Whereas, admittedly, this veiling is within the context of worship, nonetheless I think Madeleine Bunting gets it right when she rejects the possibility that all women who wear the face-veil are necessarily victims of patriarchy, and concludes instead that some ‘young women are choosing to wear the full veil, seeing it as a powerful statement of identity’ (there is also an argument one could get into about where worship ends and ‘normal’ life begins – but I won’t).

The second myth is that such practice is chracteristic of Middle-Eastern, and not Western, culture. Which is perhaps true on the very superficial level of this particular kind of veiling, but the act of veiling oneself per se is not at all alien, be it in public places or religious. Visit a Cathedral or monastery in France or Spain or pretty much any country in Europe, and one would be expected to ‘dress modestly’ (this often includes the covering of legs and arms – ie/ no shorts or t-shirts, and it is not at all unusual for monasteries to insist that women wear a veil). Indeed, to bring it closer to home, I remember at my confirmation listening to two elderly ladies loudly horrified (they thought they were whispering) at the state of dress (or undress) of some confirmants, and unwittingly informing the whole Church that in their day it would never have been allowed and that ‘Father would have had us marched out the Church and sent right back home to put some clothes on’. Equally, calls for modesty have not always been confined to designated religious spaces; the public space also historically demanded certain minimum standards of modesty, and even if those standards appear to be increasingly redundant it is still not true to say they do not still exist, or that they never existed in the first place.

As such, the question of the veil is as much one of degree as anything else, and indeed the extent to which offers a very vocal rejection of the society in which it is situated (read Raedwald’s take on the powerful statement made by covering the face, here). And I think this is the key. Not only is the covering of the face a deeply anti-social act, it also constitutes a very visible rejection of the society in which the wearer resides. Just as wearing the mantilla has come, in my mind, to have both positive expressions (expressing a particular devotion) and negative expressions (establishing an identity over and against overriding trends), so the same is true of the face-veil; an expression which attracts all the more ire because it rejects contact with precisely that society that offered those wearers, at some point or another, a place they could call home.

Which is where I come to the novel position of agreeing with Mehdi Hasan, who quotes Fareena Alam in saying that ‘the controversy over the veil “has more to do with Europe’s own identity crisis than with the presence of some ‘dangerous other’. At a time when post-communist, secular, democratic Europe was supposed to have been ascendant, playing its decisive role at the end of history, Islam came and spoiled the party.” Now I disagree with the air of triumphalism, because Islam hasn’t at all spoiled the party; rather, Europe has sought for centuries to spoil its own party, and is looking for someone to point the finger at now that it needs someone to blame. But the central point is surely accurate – Europe has spent so long dismantling its own roots that it no longer knows who or what it is, and lies prostrate before a religious community very sure of who and what it is. In its defence, it must resort to the only weapon left in its armoury, one that it has become increasingly dependent on; the awesome power of the long idolised state.

Which leads to the bizarre position of a French government making it illegal to wear too many clothes, rather than (as has been more customary throughout the ages) the wearing of too little. For the French, the bogus principle of secularism is the shield behind which the attack on the face-veil has been advanced, even when the alternative they enforce, a secular space and culture marked by hedonism and immodesty, is precisely what the face-veil fundamentally seeks to reject. As such, the French follow a dangerous path, drifting toward proscription of that which defies or denies secularity and/or the character of the secular public space, even when some might feel such defiance and denial to be wholly justified. This is dangerous because is risks criminalising friend as well as foe: if secularism becomes seriously ill and is in need of medicine, then one would be ill-advised to criminalise the chap who might just bring it medicine.

I am not a fan of the face-veil, and think it is alien to our culture and history. But then I am not a fan of the path down which contemporary society is walking, either. And I think it unlikely that any state power that felt compelled to outlaw the face-veil would stop at just the face-veil; it would very soon find other dissenting voices, too.

Bram Stoker wrote Dracula by the way.

Who do you write like?