Tag Archives: Christianity

What It Means to Really Believe

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At some point along the way, most philosophers came to the conclusion that having a belief isn’t simply an internal state of the believer. One might suppose otherwise — that in order for Mary to believe some proposition P, she simply needs to be in the appropriate internal mental state, perhaps one in which she is silently saying to herself “You know, I really believe P”.

There is some truth to the internalist view. After all, we sometimes reach conclusions without announcing them to the world. Archimedes could have stepped into his bathtub, noticed how the water rose and immediately acquired a belief about how to measure the volume of irregularly-shaped objects — while keeping his mouth firmly shut, saving “Eureka!” for another time and place.

One problem with this view, however, is that it seems wrong to say that Mary believes P if her behavior is (consistently) inconsistent with believing P. Say, for example, that Mary claims to believe that all Americans should pay their required income tax, yet fails to pay any tax at all on her extremely high income. When the IRS comes calling, she is nowhere to be found. Mary might loudly proclaim that she believes in paying her income tax — she often says to herself “We Americans should all pay what we owe to the IRS” — but we would be remiss if we didn’t reply: “You claim to believe that, Mary, but your behavior shows that you really don’t”.

I was recently moved to think about what it means to really believe by an exchange of views on an Internet message board. The subject of this particular board is a certain fairly well-known musician. During a recent discussion, a Christian gentleman, veering seriously off-topic, wrote the following:

I got on here before and some people complained, saying that I shouldn’t be using the forum for a place to discuss God. It started a controversy. The people here who go to church etc, and those who don’t. It starts a conflict. That’s the way witnessing is. That’s the way it always is. I won’t continually use the forum here to witness day to day, etc. That’s not the only purpose of the community here. People have a right to get on here and talk about music without someone telling them that they need God. I understand that. But I can’t deny God when I need to mention Him.

And later:

We don’t have to be preaching every minute of the day…. I am getting ready to take a trip up the road to the place I go to see flowers, etc. I don’t feel that I am lost because of it. There is plenty of time for me to enjoy my life, whether it is music, art or whatever, being with family, etc.

The question that occurred to me was: how should a person behave if he really, truly believes that the Christian God exists and that each of us is going to face an eternity of paradise or damnation? How much time should a person spend “witnessing”, i.e. doing God’s work by trying to convince other people of the truth of Christianity, so that they might enjoy a good afterlife? Should one witness only when the mood strikes? An hour a week? One day a week? Five days a week? Every waking hour?

Charles Stanley, of the First Baptist Church in Atlanta, put it this way: “God’s plan for enlarging His kingdom is so simple — one person telling another about the Savior. Yet we’re busy and full of excuses. Just remember, someone’s eternal destiny is at stake.”

Here’s another example. If you truly believe that every fertilized egg is a full-fledged human being, so that abortion is murder plain and simple, what should you do to stop abortions? If you really believe that there are murders being committed every day in a neighborhood clinic, is it enough to express disapproval to your friends, or to show up once a week outside the clinic and try to convince women not to go inside? Or should you be doing something much more dramatic? If you believed that children were being murdered every day in the back room of your local 7-11, what would you do to stop it from happening?

I go back and forth between atheism and agnosticism (do I believe that God doesn’t exist? Or do I strongly doubt it?). So I’m asking these questions as an outsider. I’m not trying to live according to the supposed dictates of the divine ruler of all creation. But I wonder why more Christians don’t behave like those Asian monks, giving up their worldly pursuits, leaving their loved ones and spending all of their time preaching and praying, relying on donations to survive (remember that comment about rich people finding it terribly difficult to get into heaven).

Do serious Christians truly believe what they claim to believe? I think the answer is “yes”, but why don’t they behave more often as if they do?

One answer is that they think some level of prescribed behavior is “good enough”. It isn’t necessary to be a perfect Christian. You just need to meet some minimum requirements in order to get to heaven, so why do more? It’s only right that we should enjoy life while we can, even if that means a few more souls end up in Hell and some more babies are murdered. 

Another possibility is that the seriously religious don’t feel it’s necessary to be their brother’s keeper. So long as they (and their loved ones, perhaps) are doing the right thing, they don’t have a responsibility to make sure that everyone else does the right thing too. It would be wonderful if lots of other people could be saved and go to heaven. It would be wonderful if there were no more abortions. In fact, it’s your Christian duty to do what you can to make those wonderful things happen, but only within reason. It isn’t necessary to devote your whole life to other people’s problems. 

Or maybe they just haven’t thought too hard about this kind of thing. They grew up in the church, saw how other Christians behaved and followed their lead. That’s human nature. 

P.S. — I could have written about Islam instead of Christianity, of course. It’s doubtful that all Muslims try to be perfect Muslims. Unfortunately, a tiny minority of Muslims take their religion extremely seriously, mixing it with politics to violent effect.

Pope Francis Didn’t Mean That Thing About Atheists

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There was a story in the news a few days ago suggesting that Pope Francis is o.k. with atheists, so long as they’re good people. Some interpreted the Pope’s statement as meaning that atheists can even go to heaven if they’re sufficiently upstanding, which sounds like the idea that “good works” are good enough. An article from the Religion News Service said that the Pope’s remarks “may prompt a theological debate about the nature of salvation”.

Here’s what the Pope actually said:

“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

Unfortunately for any of us atheists or agnostics making plans for the afterlife, the “there” where we can meet the Pope probably won’t be heaven.

A Vatican spokesman, and other commentators, have explained that, in the view of the Catholic Church, all humanity was redeemed by Jesus’s sacrifice, even the atheists. This means that it is possible for everyone to be saved. Nobody is automatically ruled out (for example, by being born Hindu or by having been an atheist). This is traditional church doctrine.

However, in order to get to heaven, you have to meet one of two requirements:

(1) Be a good Catholic; or

(2) Be a good person who never had the opportunity to be a good Catholic, like a Kalahari Bushman who never heard about the gospel.

Anybody who had the opportunity to be a good Catholic but decided not to bother is out of luck:

171. What is the meaning of the affirmation “Outside the Church there is no salvation”? This means that all salvation comes from Christ, the Head, through the Church which is his body. Hence they cannot be saved who, knowing the Church as founded by Christ and necessary for salvation, would refuse to enter her or remain in her. At the same time, thanks to Christ and to his Church, those who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ and his Church but sincerely seek God and, moved by grace, try to do his will as it is known through the dictates of conscience can attain eternal salvation. (Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church)

So even a full-fledged non-believer, somebody who has consciously rejected belief in God and the Catholic Church, has been redeemed, but he or she has to become a good Catholic in order to be saved. Meanwhile, the Pope, to his credit, believes that we can all work together, even us non-believers, to make the world a better place.

I’m glad that’s cleared up.

__________________________________________________________

One of the original news stories:

http://www.religionnews.com/2013/05/22/pope-francis-god-redeemed-everyone

What the Pope said:

http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2013/05/22/pope_at_mass

The official explanation:

http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/explanatory-note-on-the-meaning-of-salvation-may-22

Mary, My Wife, My Disciple?

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The Smithsonian has a long article with a lot more information about the scrap of papyrus that suggests Jesus had a wife.

Personally, I don’t care whether he was married or not (or what kind of sex life he had, if any). What’s interesting is that Professor Karen King, who is presenting this new information to the world, doesn’t claim that the papyrus provides reliable biographical information about Jesus. She admits that it calls into question the official view that Jesus wasn’t married, but she thinks that its real significance is that it shows yet again that important alternative versions of Christianity were suppressed by church authorities:

“Her scholarship has been a kind of sustained critique of what she calls the ‘master story’ of Christianity: a narrative that casts the canonical texts of the New Testament as divine revelation that passed through Jesus in ‘an unbroken chain’ to the apostles and their successors—church fathers, ministers, priests and bishops who carried these truths into the present day.

According to this ‘myth of origins,’ as she has called it, followers of Jesus who accepted the New Testament—chiefly the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, written roughly between A.D. 65 and A.D. 95 —were true Christians. Followers of Jesus inspired by noncanonical gospels were heretics hornswoggled by the devil.”

In this case, the alternative version is one in which a woman (possibly Mary Magdalene) has a larger role in the history of Christianity, either as the wife of Jesus or as an “apostle to the apostles”.

 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Inside-Story-of-the-Controversial-New-Text-About-Jesus-170177076.html#ixzz27288Pbf5

A Revelation

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Anyone who has been exposed to the Book of Revelation or had trouble sleeping after watching The Omen should read Revelations, a recent book by Princeton professor of religion Elaine Pagels.

According to Professor Pagels, the Book of Revelation was written around 90 C.E. by John of Patmos, an itinerant preacher and follower of Jesus. He wrote the book as a piece of anti-Roman propaganda, in response to the fact that Rome had colonized Judea and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. The Romans are the villains in the Book of Revelation. The number 666 is probably a numerological translation of the full Latin name of the emperor Nero.

The Book of Revelation became an official part of the Bible when the New Testament was codified in 325 C.E. Professor Pagels argues that it was included for political reasons. It was useful to the men who were organizing the Catholic Church to have a story that could be used against their political enemies, i.e., the Christians that church leaders like Irenaeus and Athanasius called “heretics”. The early leaders of the church were a quarrelsome, unprincipled bunch who did whatever was necessary to suppress opposing views. They claimed that some of their fellow Christians were the evil enemies of God described in a story written 200 years earlier about the Romans. But now the Romans weren’t the bad guy anymore. 

This is a depressing but necessary book. Generations of innocent people have been scared and even scarred by a horror story that purports to describe a coming apocalypse, albeit one with a happy ending for a few true believers (us, not them). To borrow from Nietzsche: “What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man who thought this up”.

Gore Vidal 1925-2012

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On monotheism:

“I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single… well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.”  (1988)

“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose.”  (1992)

On himself:

“I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”  (1956)

“Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”  (1992)