eChurch Blog

R Joseph Hoffman is one of the most interesting, honest, thought provoking and knowledgeable of the atheist / humanist camp (I’m not sure which).

As he’s somewhat critical of New Atheism (or as he terms it “E Z Atheism”) he’s often accused by other atheists of queering the pitch and even covertly batting for the other side; which is patently absurd if you spend any time reading his work. He simply highlights inconsistent or lazy thinking and poor behaviour and terminology.

Anyway, he has written a blog post entitled: Atheism’s Little Idea within which he raises a fascinating paradox.

The crux of the paradox is that as modern atheism has consistently belittled the concept of God – invisible sky fairy – and religion, it has belittled its own cause. What’s the big deal in being an atheist if you don’t think the idea of God is a big deal? If you’re opposing an idea you consider ridiculous, insignificant and pathetic, then what does that say of your own cause?

Here’s what Hoffman has to say on this matter:

To be brutal, I cannot imagine a time in the history of unbelief when atheism has appeared more hamfisted, puling, ignorant or unappealing.

Is this because its savants are also described by those adjectives, or because their fans are just being fans, merchandising the cause: t-shirts, coffee mugs, quick fixes, blasphemy competitions, and billboard campaigns? (Axial tilt is the reason for the season: Honest Jethro,  I thought I’d never stop laughing). I mean, who are we unless someone is offended by who we are?  What good is blasphemy if no one is getting their knickers in a knot anymore, for Christ’s sake. How can we “come out” when there’s no one standing outside the closet to yell “Surprise!” at? And, by the way you churchy jerks: we are victims.

Atheism has become a very little idea, an idea that has to be shouted to seem important.  And that is a shame, because God was a big idea, and the rejection of the existence of God was also a big idea, once upon a time.

[.....]

When did atheism cease to be a big idea?  When atheists made God a little idea.  When its idea of god shriveled to become a postulate of a new intellectual Darwinism.  When they began to identify unbelief with being a woman, a gay, a lesbian, or some other victimized cadre.   When they decided that religion is best described as a malicious and retardant cultural force that connives to prevent us being the Alpha Race of super-intelligences and wholly equal beings that nature has in store for  us. When they elevated naturalism, already an outmoded view of the universe, to a cause, at the expense of authentic imagination.

Atheism has become a little idea because it is based on the hobgoblin theory of religion: its god is a green elf with a stick, not the master of the universe who controls it with his omniscient will. –Let alone a God so powerful that this will could evolve into Nature’s God–the god of Jefferson and Paine–and then into the laws of nature, as it did before the end of the eighteenth century in learned discussion and debate.

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Oh Lord!

Sky News have a disturbing report on the deaths of HIV positive patients which can be directly attributed to churches declaring them healed and telling them not to continue with their medication.

Gordon notified me of this and sent me a link to one of the churches mentioned in the article, to which Sky sent undercover reporters. The Church is called: Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), which is based in Southwark, South London and if you click the link, you’ll see videos of testimony of purported healing of: HIV, mental disorders (of course), Crohn’s, cancer, and bizarrely:

Healing & Deliverance From Eating Uncooked Rice

Deliverance From Eating Mattress

I don’t care what anyone says, these people are dangerous and irresponsible madmen.

And no, I don’t deny the possibility of miraculous healing.

I just want to note at the outset that this post is in no way to be construed as a negative comment on Lesley’s blog post; I’m absolutely delighted when someone blogs on the issue of mental health within the Christian context.

Lesley relays to us a story told at an Inclusive Church Conference relating to Mental Health Chaplaincy, which is worth reading in its entirety, but I just want to pick up on the following paragraph which gives me a platform to say a few words on psychiatric wards:

Community Mental health chaplaincy is about travelling very privileged and sometimes distant journeys and about sharing sacred, enigmatic, and paradoxical spaces. We travel theological pathways of cosmic mileage with people who are both insiders and outsiders. People who have spent many months and often years of their lives inside locked, chaotic, often bedlam – like psychiatric wards and inside a chaotic, or even colourful cosmos of secret visions, inside silent and solitary cells of profound depression and anxiety or deafening dwellings of controlling or cajoling voices. (These are places where both Christopher and Mary, in their own unique ways, have personally and experientially found themselves, inside these bedlam – like dwelling places of fearful, insistent voices). That is why, perhaps, we are so passionate about, and so tentative amongst such wounded lives. Here are the secret-holders, the secret-bearers, who not only on behalf of themselves but also on behalf of us all, bear secrets which torture when told and are torturous to hear. Yet hear we must. Secrets of childhood and life-long trauma, violence, sexual and emotional abuse, shared by those who in deep self blaming shame often perceive rejection and punishment by God and God’s people or have intimate and unique experiences of God and godding.

This paragraph may be read as more a comment on ‘bedlam of the mind’, but picking up the reference on the ‘bedlam’ nature of the psychiatric ward, I made the following comment which I’d like to reproduce here:

Warning: This is one of those ambiguous posts within which I ramble a bit, raise questions and ultimately answer nothing.

I’m a great admirer of Normblog who happens to be an atheist and is always eminently interesting, thoughtful and intelligent. I was intrigued to read his post today entitled: ‘Belief and Choice‘, in which he ponders the relationship between belief and choice:

I think it would be, in general, misleading to talk of sincere beliefs as if they were arrived at by choice. The temptation to do so may be based on the fact that a person’s beliefs can, and sometimes do, change; so they are not just like some permanent, biologically-fixed feature of his or her make-up. But they are also not like anything that can be the object of a free choice – such as, say, whether I’ll have this or that flavour of ice cream (when I like both equally well), or whether I’ll take a holiday in July or in August. If after considering the matter carefully, I have come to the conclusion that there is no God, I cannot but be an atheist. I could pretend not to be one. I could try not to be one – by reconsidering all the best arguments for not being one. But if this doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’m stuck with the belief. The same applies to other beliefs: I don’t choose to think that respecting human rights is a better way of relating to other people than violating them; I don’t know how to think otherwise.

I must say that my experience bears out these salient observations.

In my youth, I was a non-believer. I didn’t choose to be; I simply did not – and could not – believe. I was evangelised to by my peers and they answered my questions fabulously; in fact, they had an answer for everything. I could see the benefits of believing and how comforting it must be; however, I simply could not believe. No matter how much force of will I might have mustered, no matter how cogent and persuasive the argument, no matter how much I might have wanted it, I knew, I simply could not believe.

The day the Jehovah Witnesses’ banged on my door, I began my first baby steps in belief. It is an evening that is a little fuzzy to recall; one of the reasons for this is that the JW’s didn’t argue with me, or seek to persuade me, they simply spoke of their faith and the reasons why they believed the world was as it is. The best way I can describe what happened, is that it was akin to a ‘belief switch’ being activated within me.

I just simply suddenly believed in God. No evidence, no powerful arguments, no reasoning, no choice. It happened to me; not by me.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no quarrel when a good friend such as Stacy wishes to articulate the reasonableness of our faith; no argument whatsoever. I have now evolved my understanding to accept and appreciate this; however, my faith journey did not really begin with ‘reason’ as such. It was belief and then reason for me.

I now find myself in the curious position in which I can no longer not believe, with exactly the same force with which I could not believe.

I feel I had little choice in all of this.

Does that make me sound deterministic; perhaps. A Calvinistic understanding – of which I subscribed – is a proponent of this very thinking. Does this cause me something of a dilemma when considering the non-believing; of course it does.

We have all experienced the situation in which we have witnessed somebody confronted with irrefutable evidence and yet they refuse – or are unable – to change their belief.

Belief is a strange thing isn’t it.

*Irony alert – This post contains irony*

[Irony begins]

The Daily Mail has an article today with the provocative headline: Time for confession? Catholics more likely to commit adultery (and Church of England are most faithful). I must say I’m dreadfully disappointed with the Daily Mail, as usually they are the very bastion of nuanced, well researched, balanced, equitable information, and given this, they have woefully let themselves down today.

[Irony ends]

In all seriousness, the Daily Mail have outdone themselves in spurious bullshit on this one.

They have produced some ‘research’ based on a ‘survey’ which apparently confirms that 54.5% of members of an extra-marital dating website are Christians. Bear in mind this only reveals the Catholics (21.5%) and Anglicans (33%); therefore, perhaps the figure would be higher if it included other denominations!

The Daily Mail article helpfully goes on to explain the potential reasons for this.

Sometimes in life you come across something that is so unbelievably ludicrous and off the planet, it’s actually quite difficult to engage with it; this is one of those times.

We are not told who conducted the ‘survey’; we are not told if the ‘research’ has been published, we are not told who financed and sponsored this, we are not told the purpose or aim and so we are left completely unable to scrutinise the data in order to rebuff this nonsense. Of course, we are to believe this has nothing to do with blatant publicity seeking.

Seriously, this, for me, must be the worst piece of ‘journalism’ I’ve ever seen. I’m almost speechless and believe me it takes a lot for that to happen.

A few links I personally found interesting today for one reason or another:

Outside the Asylum – Unreason, demagogues and the end of the West

Hope not Hate – Dean of Bradford calls for Atzmon’s invite to be withdrawn

David Lindsay – Flight Out Of Egypt

Chelliah Laity – Another Day, Another Show of ‘Out of Touch’ Clergy

Get Religion – In atheist blitz, where’s the other side?

Dreaming Beneath the Spires – Belated photographs from St. Peter’s and the Vatican Museum

Beaker folk of Husborne Crawley – The Doctrine of Total Mediocrity

Epiphenom – Religious diversity linked to unhappiness

We’ve been rumbled brothers and sisters

But back to the start of Advent. This is a particularly dangerous time for secularism. Many of these religious people will often feel a renewed zeal for their faith. Be especially suspect if anyone in your family wants to bring in an Advent Calendar. These cardboard devices count down to Christmas by opening a little window each day. The little pictures look harmless but are actually secret signals sent to Christians instructing them on such practices as praying, reading the Bible and speaking about religion in public. The latter is meant to undermine the secular order. Remember the aim of anyone religious who dares to speak out loud or want “their place in the public square” is actually working towards a theocracy.

Blinking Holiday Season lights are also not as harmless as they might appear. If you know how to read them, see AtheistWeekly issue #12, you can read the signals that these lights are sending out. These help co-ordinate subversive Christian activity on a street by street basis.

Source

Fab little article on ‘niceness’ by the Anchoress – Elizabeth Scalia – over on First Things; well worth a read and one of those you wish you could have written yourself.

Go on, hop over and help the nuns raise funds to buy a house in Didcot to convert into a monastery.

You can go direct to their donations page here.

You know you want to….

According to the annual “Status of global mission” report produced in 2011, the Catholic Church has one billion and 160 million faithful around the world, with 34,000 new people joining every day. The figures from the study, released by the agency Analisis Digirtal, say that there are two billion people in the world today, out of a total of approximately seven billion, who have never received the Gospel’s message.  Another two billion and 680 million listen to it sometimes, or are vaguely aware of it, but they are not Christians.

“Despite the fact that Jesus Christ only founded one Church, and shortly before his death he prayed ‘that all would be one’ today there are many separate Christian denominations: at the beginning of the Twentieth century there were 1600; in 2011 there are 42,000,” according to the study. The number of charismatic Protestants reaches 612 million. There are 426 million “classic” Protestants and this number is growing at a rate of 20,000 a day.

The Orthodox Churches count 271 million baptized believers and are joined by an additional five thousand a day.  Anglicans, concentrated mainly in Africa and Asia, amount to 87 million, with three thousand more joining each day. Those which the study defines as “marginal Christians” (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, those who do not recognize the divinity of Jesus or the Trinity) amount to 35 million and are growing at a rate of two thousand a day.

SOURCE