MandM: religious history

Showing posts with label religious history. Show all posts

Wednesday, 8 July 2009

Weight Watchers and the Historical Atrocities Argument

We've all heard the slogan that atheism is superior to theism because of all the atrocities committed in the name of religion. If you flick through the pages of the new-atheist publications by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Loftus, Harris, et al you'll probably find some version of this assertion in each.

Setting aside the dubious factual claims, I could list a stack of atheist atrocities that could outnumber the theist ones just from the last century alone, last night at Thinking Matters Tauranga, I heard another way of addressing the slogan. Rodney Lake simply said well if a person joined Weight Watchers, got the points book, the pamphlets explaining how the program works and began attending weekly meetings to fellowship with others on the same journey but instead of following the instructions began to bend the rules, invent new ones and ignore others and as a result began to gain weight, could that person justifiably claim that Weight Watchers made them fat? That Weight Watchers should be rejected as a weight-loss program, in fact, attempting to lose weight in and of itself is a bad thing, because this person gained weight whilst ostensibly being a follower of the program?

If you can see how ridiculous it would be to blame Weight Watchers and to abandon the pursuit of weight loss because someone who cheated on the program had a bad outcome then why can't you see it when the same reasoning is applied to atrocities committed in the 'name of' Christianity?

Saturday, 4 July 2009

The Theology of the Declaration of Independence

As I write this it is probably just beginning to be the 4th of July in the United States now, though its been 4th July for some time here in New Zealand.

The 4th of July is, of course, Independence Day. Typically in New Zealand, those members of the secular blogosphere, who consider themselves to be classical liberals, have an annual rave on the 4th of July about the Declaration of Independence, praising the philosophy expounded in this document.

Not PC, for example, states that it is “With the exception of just a few words, the words could hardly be bettered today;” the declaration is, “A wonderful, wonderful anthem to freedom that rings down through the years. If only the real meaning of those words could be heard and understood.” A few years ago David Farrar made similar claims, he stated he would often “marvel at those marvellous words, written in the heat of oppression…Marvellous, absolutely marvellous.” I agree. I would simply point out to my secular, liberal, country-men what the words in this document actually say, and some of the philosophical ideas they expound.

First, the declaration refers to God; it does so four times. Maverick Philosopher has an excellent analysis of the theological content;

In the initial paragraph, we find the phrase “...Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God....” This phrase rules out pantheism: God is distinct from Nature. In the second paragraph, there is the phrase, “...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights....” Putting these two references together, we may infer that the God being referred to is not merely a deistic initiator of the temporally first segment of the physical universe, but a being involved in the creation of the human race. For if God endowed human beings with rights, this endowment had to occur at the time of the creation of human beings, which of course occurred later than the beginning of the physical universe. In traditional jargon, God is a creator continuans rather than a mere creator originans. He is not a mere cosmic starter-upper, but a being who is continuously involved in maintaining the universe in existence.
…
The other two references are in the final paragraph. There we find the phrase, “...Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions....” near the beginning of the paragraph, and near the end, “...a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence....” Now if God is the Supreme Judge, then he is more than a mere metaphysical cause responsible for the universe’s beginning to exist; he is also the supreme moral arbiter. And since he endows human beings with rights, as opposed to being merely a judge of rights antecedently possessed, then it seems we may infer that God is the source of moral distinctions (as opposed to a mere judge of them).

The reference to divine providence is further evidence that the conception of God in the Declaration is non-deistic. For if God provides and protects, then God has an ongoing involvement with the world and its inhabitants such as would be ruled out by a deistic view. It should also be obvious that talk of providence (from the Latin, pro-videre) implies divine foreknowledge which implies intelligence and perhaps omniscience on the part of the deity. The God of the Declaration is not a blind metaphysical cause posited to explain why the universe began to exist, but a being with such attributes as moral goodness and intelligence…. So if by 'deism' is meant the doctrine that God is a mere metaphysical cause of the universe's beginning to exist who is thereafter uninvolved in its continuing to exist, then the God of the Declaration is non-deistic.

Second, the declaration claims that belief in a creator is self-evident; that is, it is a properly basic belief, which is rationally acceptable to hold in the absence of any proof.

Third, the declaration makes political pronouncements about public policy on the basis of these theological claims and expects these pronouncements to be taken seriously.

Fourth, the declaration says that various rights, such as the right to life and liberty, are unalienable. That is, a person cannot alienate one’s life or freedom as they can legally alienate a piece of property. You can’t take my property if I do not consent to you having it but if I do consent, you can take it; property is alienable, life and liberty are not. The argument of the declaration reflects John Locke’s argument in the Second Treatise of Civil Government;

TO understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.[1]

…

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure[2]

...

This freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man's preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together: for a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another, to take away his life, when he pleases. No body can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it.[3]

The point here is that because your right to life and liberty are from God, no one can legitimately enslave or kill you, even if you consent to it. This was not a mere incidental addendum idea, it was central to Lockean political philosophy, which maintained (as the declaration does) that the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed. If a person can consent to be killed or enslaved then they can consent to the government enslaving them also to having the arbitrary power to kill them and hence tyranny can be legitimate. The reason tyranny is illegitimate is because, “No body can give more power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away his own life, cannot give another power over it.”

The declaration then makes a metaphysical claim: God exists. It makes an epistemological claim about faith and reason: that belief in God is rational independent of proof. It makes an implicit claim of political philosophy: religion is not a private thing that should not influence public life but rather, theological claims should influence public life. Finally it makes a moral claim; that consenting adults do not have a right to do whatever they like with their own bodies, rather there are “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that bind all human beings, that they are compelled to follow even if all parties consent otherwise. Governments are legitimate to the extent in which they respect these laws.

I agree with PC, it is hard to improve on this philosophy; I have defended it in several places on this blog.

Ironically, however, the militant secular liberals in NZ who parrot the declaration seem committed to attacking these ideas and rejecting them on every point. They argue that belief in God is irrational because it cannot be empirically proven, they claim that the public square should be secular, that religion should be private and not influence public policy and they argue that liberty means consenting adults can do whatever they like with their own bodies and lives. Far from being unalienable, a person’s life and freedom is his property to alienate as that person sees fit.

It is also hard to disagree with PC’s sentiments that the declaration is “A wonderful, wonderful anthem to freedom that rings down through the years. If only the real meaning of those words could be heard and understood.” Indeed, if only.

[1] John Locke Second Treatise of Civil Government Section II 4.
[2] Ibid II6.
[3] Ibid IV 23.

Wednesday, 1 July 2009

John Loftus on Madeleine Flannagan and Women and Other Red Herrings

A few days ago I posted, Sunday Study: Slavery, John Locke and the Bible; in this post I defended an argument proposed by John Locke that the Bible does not support slavery. In that article I quoted from John Loftus’ book “Why I Became an Atheist” as an example of what is typically meant by slavery when sceptics claim the Bible supports slavery. John Loftus runs the blog Debunking Christianity, is a former preacher and student of William Lane Craig, turned new-atheist. On page 231 of his book, Loftus cites an eyewitness description of a malicious, brutal and bloodthirsty whipping of a female slave that took place in the antebellum south. Immediately after this he asks, “Why didn’t the Christian God ever explicitly and clearly condemn slavery?”

Now by juxtaposing this question next to the description of the beating, Loftus insinuates, that the scriptures explicitly or implicitly condone these sorts of practices. In his book, Loftus reinforces this by noting that,

the Bible was still used by Christians to justify the brutal slavery in the American South. Distinguished Princeton professor Charles Hodge defended American slavery in a 40 page essay written in 1860, just prior to the Civil War.

Here Loftus suggests that Hodge supported the “brutal slavery in the American south” which he had just described, on the same page only a few lines earlier, with his graphic account of a female slave being beaten. In the same paragraph Loftus also refers to the book Slavery Sabbath and War, which summarises various pro-slavery theological arguments to the same effect and then he states, “The Catholic Church didn’t condemn slavery until the year 1888, after the Civil War and after ever other Christian nation had abolished it.” This again suggests that the writers in Slavery Sabbath and War, along with the Catholic Church, all condoned and failed to condemn the practices he refers to.

Now in my post I pointed out that Loftus’ claim that the Bible does not explicitly condemn the kind of practices he describes is mistaken. In the comments thread I also noted his suggestion that Hodge did is also mistaken. Hodge did defend the existence of slavery an as institution, but on page 831 of Cotton is King, the book Loftus himself referred me to, Hodge states that if the bible is used to argue that “slavery as it occurs among us [in the US south]” is sinful, then “he has no objection.” Hodge only objects to the idea that all forms of slavery, including the ebed in scripture, are unjust. On the same page, he states that laws allowing people to beat, harm, kill and starve their slaves are condemned by scripture. A point, Loftus conveniently missed. On the next page, page 832, Hodge again states that it is very plain that the institution which existed in the US was condemned by scripture.

The same is true if one looks at Slavery Sabbath and War. Many of the pro-slavery theologians Loftus referred to, in fact, criticised the abuses that were occurring in their day and suggested these should be condemned.

It is also worth noting, at this juncture, that Loftus’ claim about the Catholic Church has been shown to be false by Rodney Stark. Stark notes that “[the Catholic Church repeatedly condemned slavery] … beginning in 1435 and culminating in three major pronouncements against slavery by Pope Paul III in 1537.” He notes that Pope Eugene IV (1431-1447), Pope Pius II (1458-1464), Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484), Pope Paul III (1534-1549), Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644) issued bulls against slavery; in addition, the Roman Inquisition condemned slavery on 20 March 1686. These condemnations were largely motivated by concerns about new world slavery.

In addition to weighing into the comments, Loftus responded with a post on his own site, Nitpickers Have Started to Attack; this response led with aspersions about my education and intelligence concluding that my comments were “nitpicking” and did not address the real issue. This lead to a response by Glenn Peoples, Skeptics and the annoyance of the little things…. like facts. Glenn noted.

Apparently it’s just in poor taste and really just skirts around the edges to point out that contrary to the claims that some skeptics love to make, the Old Testament does not endorse what we call slavery. But I daresay that annoyance has clouded John’s vision, for what has been shown is that in fact God did condemn kidnapping and/or mistreating people, the very things that Loftus is concerned about and which he is calling “slavery.” it may be irritating to have the rug ripped out from under your argument, but getting annoyed and demanding that people deal with the “main” argument by pretending that the rug is still there (for the sake of your argument and nothing else) is a bit of an ask, don’t you think? Why not just graciously thank the other person for their helpful explanation and remove the argument from your repertoire?

Glenn wasn’t the only person to ask Loftus to respond to the main argument and address the factual claims I had called him on. Loftus’s response to this pressure was to single out the only woman who’d criticised him along the same grounds, Madeleine. He dedicated a post to her, Madeleine Flannagan is Happy to be Treated as Women Were in the Bible!, publicly ridiculing her as “backward thinking,” “incredibly ignorant” quoted her out of context and finished with an aspersion on our marriage:

Here's exhibit "A" of the backward thinking of some Christians. This is incredibly ignorant:
"So yes, I...am happy to be treated the same way women were in the Bible." Link
How much more ignorant can someone be? Although, her husband probably likes it! ;-)

Of course in the actual comment Madeleine qualified her statement (as the “So yes” will tell any observant reader) and of course Loftus pasted it without this qualification into his own contextual understanding which assumes that his take on the Bible and on its teachings on gender is correct and is what Madeleine meant.

I write this post to demonstrate how some people who pass themselves off as free-thinkers or rationalists are often dogmatic proponents of a secular party-line who will happily ridicule and attack other people personally who question the orthodoxy that they expound even if the facts get in the way.

Madeleine asks that even though Loftus hefted a stone at our marriage that commenters refrain from doing the same in turn.

Tuesday, 17 March 2009

St Patrick's Day: A Protestants' Musings

Today is St Patrick's day. Despite it being a Tuesday, many tonight who do not have something better to do, such as attend the Thinking Matters Seminar, will find themselves dressed in green, possibly slurring slightly, with a handle of green Guinness in one hand.

Now one wonders why so many people who are not Catholic or Irish feel the need to celebrate a "saint". Some might say the cause for celebration is the excuse to consume Guiness, any excuse to drink... but the green? Who looks good in green and who wants to drink green food colouring?

I thought it would be interesting to look into Patrick and see if there is something there beyond the green guiness, the saint commemoration that protestants might find interesting.

It was difficult to find anything concrete about the man, obviously the internet didn't quite go back that far so I couldn't just go and read his blog. Apparently historians haven't fared much better as centuries of legend make sifting through the facts confusing and only two documents appear to have survived, a confession he wrote and a letter of excommunication he wrote to Coroticus.

What does survive when one sifts through the legend and the documents is interesting.

Patrick lived around 400 AD and when he was 16 he was kidnapped by Celts and taken to Ireland where he spent 6 years before escaping and returning to his family.

At some point Patrick trained in the Church and then returned to Ireland as a missionary though apparently no one can associate him with any particular parish. Many accounts speak of his evangelistic approach as being that of an equal, someone who just got alongside his countrymen, rather than holding himself out as someone holding a special place in the church. It also seems apparent that he adopted Paul's tactic of using the culture around him in his promotion of Christianity.

Some credit him with lighting the Paschal Fire at Knowth to bring Celtic culture's emphasis of fire together with celebrations for Easter; It is said he made the Celtic cross by combining the sun, another prominent feature of Celtic culture, with the cross. He used an object lesson of the shamrock (3-leaf clover) to explain the trinity to the then heavily Arian culture. It is also said he raised the dead, chased the snakes out of Ireland (though this could have been a metaphor for chasing the druids out instead).

He claimed to have had visions including the one claimed as the earliest example of God having a joke with an Irishman; he claims God told him to leave Ireland (a journey of around 200 miles) and once he left he then had another vision telling him to return.

How much is fact or fiction is historically uncertain and disputed but it all makes good legend.

I did find it interesting to discover that originally the colour blue was associated with Patrick but around the 1750's, probably due to the shamrock-trinity thing and Ireland's rejection of paganism and adoption of Christianity, the association switched to green. If this is the case then protestants can wear green today without worrying about saint worship or aligning themselves with drunkeness; we can wear green to remember a man who served God and brought Christianity to pagan cultures.

Friday, 10 August 2007

Contra Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens' critques of religion get a thorough rebuttal here.

My favourite paragraph is this expose,

The effectiveness of Hitchens’ book is also undermined by the large number of errors it contains, many so glaring that they will be picked up by even a casual reader with some knowledge of history and theology. The Gnostic gospels are not of the “same period and provenance” as the canonical Gospels, but were written several decades later; the “synoptic” Gospels are not synonymous with the “canonical” Gospels; “Q” is an assumed source for the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, but not Mark and John; the process of deciding which books to include in the New Testament was not one in which “many a life was horribly lost;” “the Vulgate” was what the Reformers were trying to get away from, not what they were attempting to translate the Bible into; Luther declared “Here I stand, I can do no other” at Worms, not Wittenberg; John Adams was not a slaveholder, nor was T.
S. Eliot a Catholic; the amount of wood from relics of the True Cross would not be sufficient if gathered together to recreate the Cross, much less create a “thousand – foot cross;” Christians have never practiced animal sacrifice, nor did the Arian heresy teach that the Father and the Son were “two incarnations of the same person;” the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption were promulgated in 1854 and 1950, not 1852 and 1951; the Lateran Treaty was signed seven years after Mussolini marched on Rome, not after he “had barely seized power;” Maryland never prohibited Protestants from holding office, and condoms are not a “necessary” condition for preventing the transmission of AIDS, or else celibates would all be infected. Given all these errors (and many more), there is no reason to accept anything Hitchens writes on his own authority, and he offers no authority other than his own for most of what he writes.

Wednesday, 18 July 2007

The Flat Earth Myth

A few days ago I got sent the following message from a high-school student in the US.

I've been studying Christopher Columbus in my history class and my history books say that prior to Columbus everyone did think the world was flat........I don't know if it was a mistake in the history book or your mistake.....but anyway....I guess i have some things to learn! god bless ~Katie Joy~

This was in response to a comment I made online, I had I criticised the popular claim that prior to the time of Columbus, the Church taught the world was flat. In another post on this blog I have criticised Victoria University for making a similar claim as part of it's advertising campaigns.

For our overseas visitors, last year Victoria University had a slick advertising campaign where it is stated that in the 14th century most people believed the world was flat. It then showed a picture of a boat sailing across the sea only to fall over the side of the earth.

We have all heard the story behind this; prior to Columbus, the Church and it’s theological scholars taught that the world was flat. For this reason they opposed Columbus' proposed voyage in 1492 as they believed he would sail off the edge of the earth.

Katie is correct; they do teach this in high school text books. I was taught it repeatedly at primary and high school. In fact not too long ago Pretence Hall published claims to this effect in a middle school textbook Prentice Hall Earth Science. I have heard the story repeated ad nauseam. Normally when I contest it’s veracity I get an incredulous stare (as if I were, in fact, asserting that the earth was flat) “Come on Matt, everyone knows this story is true, didn’t you learn this at school?”

Well, yes I did learn it but I also took the time to research the history of theology when I was at university. What they don’t tell you in high school is that this claim is false. It is a slanderous fabrication invented by opponents of Christianity in the 19th century and has been thoroughly debunked by contemporary historians of science.

The definitive study is undoubtedly that of Jeffrey Burton Russell, he summarises his findings here. However, the same thing is uttered in many studies on medieval science. For example, Edward Grant in his work notes that “there is no mention of a flat earth in any medieval writings, except for a few references to refute it.”

Even Wikipedia, not known for its ability to rise above popular anti-religious prejudice, concedes,

Today essentially all professional medievalists agree with Russell that the "medieval flat Earth" is a nineteenth-century fabrication, and that the few verifiable "flat Earthers" were the exception.

Interestingly, Wikipedia does not point to a medieval scholar who was one of these “verifiable "flat earthers" and its section on the Middle ages ends with the following conclusion.

A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth. Of course it was probably not the few noted intellectuals who defined public opinion. It is difficult to tell what the wider population may have thought of the shape of the Earth – if they considered the question at all.

Yes, what the school textbooks teach is wrong. In fact the kinds of textbooks Katie mentions have been subject to scathing criticism in the literature. Lawrence S. Lerner a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at California State and director of The Textbook League University and a member of the panel that wrote the 1990 framework for science education in California's public schools criticised Pretence Halls text denouncing it as “ignorant fakery.” He goes on state,

The flat-Earth story quickly became a popular piece of pseudo historical folklore, and it remains popular today among people who have had little education. These evidently include the people who produce "science" books for Prentice Hall.” [we kiwis can add that it includes the advertising staff at Victoria university]

The facts are very different. Here are just a few: during the so called dark ages Boethius (480-525) in the Consolidation of Philosophy cited a well known and accepted ancient Greek cosmological model which affirmed the sphericity of the earth. Isidore of Serville, (560-636) published in the Etymologies, affirmed a round earth. Bede (672-735) in his, The Reckoning of Time, taught the earth is round; as did Rabanus Marcus in the ninth century.

The late middle ages are no different. Hemannus Contractus (1013-155), in fact, measured the circumference of the world. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) taught the world was round. As did John of Sacrbosco (1200-1256) and Peire d’Ailly (1350-1420). Dante’s Divine Comedy portrays the earth as a sphere. In the Summa Theologicae Thomas Aquinas in wrote,

The physicist proves the earth to be round by one means, the astronomer by another: for the latter proves this by means of mathematics, e.g. by the shapes of eclipses, or something of the sort; while the former proves it by means of physics, e.g. by the movement of heavy bodies towards the center, and so forth.

In fact, medieval textbooks taught the world was round. The Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis a twelfth century manual for educating clergy and On the Sphere of the World the standard cosmological textbook of medieval universities in the thirteenth century both taught that the world was round.

When I began studying philosophy and theology at University I was literally shocked to discover this. One of the reasons I despise public schools is because they repeated lied to me about things like this. This is not the first or only instance where I was fed false propaganda about Christianity at high school. I could document several other instances; the flat earth story will suffice for now. The point is that state institutions affirm falsehoods about the history of religion and teach propaganda for history.

The fact that a state University, like Victoria, should perpetuate discredited slander as part of its advertising campaign to obtain higher learning about the arts is appalling. One would have thought this institution imparts knowledge, not fraudulent anti-Christian propaganda.

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