Christopher Hitchens accuses Rick Warren of bigotry for believing that Jews will not go to heaven (thanks to Wally for the link). Hitchens’ condemnation strikes me as unduly harsh. I don’t think it’s fair to label a theological position as bigotry simply because it does not conform to secular principles.
But here’s another possibility: Do modern Christians still believe with the same fervor as in the past all those unyielding doctrines of eternal damnation for the unbaptised and unconverted? They sure don’t act as if they do. If they really were convinced that their friends, co-workers, neighbors, and in-laws were going to hell because they possessed the wrong or no religious belief, I would think that the knowledge would be unbearable. Christians surely see that most of their wrong-believing personal acquaintances are just as moral and deserving as themselves. How, then, do they live with the knowledge that their friends and loved ones face an eternity of torment? I would expect a frenzy of proselytizing, by word or by sword.
In previous centuries, when religion had the upper hand, religious differences meant more. But ours is a world dominated by the secular values of tolerance and equality. Either believers live with an extraordinary degree of cognitive dissonance between the inclusive values of their society and the dictates of their religion, or they unconsciously mitigate those bloody-minded dictates as atavistic vestiges from a more primitive time.
I wonder which it is.
Heather, you ignore a third and, I believe, correct possibility: the feeling of spiritual superiority that comes from knowing you will achieve eternal life but members of other religions will not. Such a feeling may actually increase the bemused tolerance one feels toward members of other religions. In other words, the fact that non-believers may “face an eternity of torment” actually creates delight, not dissonance. And may in fact lead to reduced proselytizing. Why crowd heaven with “them”?
My mother would say it’s “sad” that I don’t believe as she does (meaning she must accept that, in her mind, I am going to Hell), just as she might say it’s “sad” that thousands of children were swept away in a tsunami. In neither case does she actually do anything about it, so one has to wonder, indeed, whether the feeling is genuine, or whether she’s merely saying it because it’s what she’s supposed to say.
A possible fallacy here is the assumption that all belief is created equal; i.e., that one’s belief that another person will suffer eternal damnation is the same as the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, or the belief in the existence of the self. In fact, there are many shades of belief, and not all of them inspire action and emotion in the same way. This struck me the other day when I caught a scene of The Negotiator on cable. Samuel Jackson’s character asked the bad guy a question, and watched his eyes as he answered. He said he knew the bad guy was lying by observing those eye movements. But later, when he accessed the bad guy’s computer and found hard evidence of his lies, he was outraged and promptly slugged him. What changed? He always believed the bad guy was lying, but the strength of the evidence changed things quite dramatically.
So too with beliefs about theological and transcendental things. These are important questions that shape one’s worldview, but they do not always stir one to immediate, emotive action. This capacity to stir to action should not be made the quantum for the value of a class of beliefs, in my view.
Christopher Hitchens doesn’t believe Jews will go to heaven either.
It may not be “bigotry” per se, but it is the utter height of arrogance (and extremely annoying) for somebody to declare that they have special knowledge and that only those who believe as they do are worthy of eternal life. I can’t stand it when I hear that kind of talk from religious people.
Atheists and biblical literalists share one belief in common– both think that the Bible was intended to be a sort of “how-to” manual. It is not and never was. It is a compilation of ancients books that have to be read and understood first in their historical, cultural and literary context. It drives literalists wild to hear that the first 22 chapters of Genesis are mythology. But even St. Augustine knew that the seven days of creation were “God-divided, not sun divided days”. Anyone who reads the New Testament attentively notices rather quickly that Jesus took the letter of the law (of Moses) and extended it. It was still recognizably the law of Moses but broadened. So, love of neighbor extended to outsiders, not just to other Jews. The New Testament is full of this sort of thing.
Likewise the historic church has continued to wrestle with all sorts of questions over the centuries, not the least of which is the question of hell and who can be saved. We know that that everyone who is saved is saved through Christ but what does that mean for those who have never heard of him? We do know that God is sovereign and can and will save anyone he wishes to.
Someone mentioned the Jews in the post that followed this one. From a specifically Catholic perspective I can tell you that we do not think that God’s covenant with the Jews has been broken. How will it all be sorted out in the end? Who knows? We do think that anyone who rejects God will not be forced into a relationship with him which follows on our belief that man is a free moral agent. Certainly, there must be some sort of punishment for those who do evil– at least my sense of justice would be outraged by the notion of a Hitler getting off either by virtue of oblivion (i.e. no afterlife) or by being saved by a deathbed conversion (I really can’t recommend that–it is taking a really big chance).
Paul– anyone who thinks he is worthy of eternal life hasn’t been reading the New Testament very closely. Even Protestants who believe firmly that confessing belief in Christ is enough to ensure salvation, don’t think they *deserve* it.
It may be simply that most people, even those who profess themselves to be Christians, simply don’t believe that deeply in all the tenets of their own denominations. Or the denominations themselves currently hold a more relaxed view of who goes up and who goes down. As far as I know, Roman Catholics of generations prior to mine were taught that all non-Catholics went to hell after death (the father of a friend was told by a priest that his father, a Protestant, had been consigned to the flames after his death, surely a horrifying experience for an eleven-year-old boy). I don’t think the Roman Catholic church actively promotes that belief any longer, and they have stopped proselytizing, which they did when I was a child. (I recall being termed “no good” by a classmate because I wasn’t RC.) It seems to me the only American Christians now who hold the belief that solely members of their flock ascend to heaven are fundamentalists, who also by the way are now claiming that you can’t be a conservative without being a fundamentalist. Being jut a Christian isn’t sufficient.
In sum, I think that most people today who call themselves Christians–apart from fundamentalists–hold more flexible theological views, and the various denominations are more flexible. If not, there’d be a lot more people running around trying to force the rest of us onto the road to heaven.
If you water down the rules too much, they won’t mean anything after awhile…
I’ve had a theory about the undeniable impact belief has on religious people. I think the belief in god/buddha/allah is nothing more than a mirror that reflects back the hope, faith, prayer, extremism or what have you that is exercise or invested in that belief. In that case, doctrine is only relevant if it matters to you.
Susan, you bring up an excellent example of the kind of thing I was trying to get at when I talked about how the church (and I mean all the bodies who have been around since, say, March 2003) has struggled to understand various doctrines. The Catholic Church changed, not because it is more relaxed, but because it has struggled for years with the question, “who is the “church”? Today, as you can read in the Catechism, it has come to believe that all who have been baptized validly (i.e. with water and in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are members of the church.
For the various reasons that Protestants and Catholics are still divided, the Catholic Church refers to Protestant ecclesial(I know I have misspelled that) bodies instead of Protestant churches but it does recognize all who are baptized as brothers and fellow Christians.
I do think that we have gotten kinda mealy-mouthed about hell. In part, this reflects that it is a hard doctrine. So, it doesn’t get taught very strongly outside of evangelical and fundamentalist denominations. In part, the more educated view of it is that it is not a place, but, rather, a condition of separation– and that is really hard to describe. Then there are certainly those who downplay it psychologically or, maybe, they just do hold whatever beliefs they hold lightly. I suspect there are probably several more reasons that I can’t even imagine.
Ms. Mac Donald makes a valid point, but it’s yesterday’s news. This goes back at least as far as George Orwell, and I’d bet a lot further. Orwell, in a column written in the 1940s, claimed that Christians don’t really believe in Hell, no matter what they say. His proof was that Christians make light-hearted jokes about Hell, the Devil, and damnation. He asked whether anyone would make a joke about an RAF pilot who was horribly burned when his plane crashed.
“Christopher Hitchens accuses Rick Warren of bigotry for believing that Jews will not go to heaven (thanks to Wally for the link). Hitchens’ condemnation strikes me as unduly harsh. I don’t think it’s fair to label a theological position as bigotry simply because it does not conform to secular principles.”
I’m not so sure on this. Would it not be bigotry for a Christian to believe, based on scripture, that all Jews bear the guilt for the death of Jesus? Would it not be bigotry for a Christian to believe that people of African descent are “sons of Ham” and thus inferior or fit for slavery?
Simply because a believe is deemed “religious” is no basis to absolve it from also being reasonable and rational. In fact, given what religion is, I would hold such religious ideas to a higher standard of reasonableness and rationality and condemn those which do not meet the standard.
It occurs to me too that Christian theologians simply recognized, at some point during or shortly after The Enlightment, that religious tolerance promoted a more peaceful and stable society. If ministers or priests were shouting from their pulpits that all heretics or apostates or believers in different creeds needed to be forcibly converted or killed, then western society would have reduced itself to tribal levels pretty quickly, with members of Denomimation X warring against Denomination Y, and both of them going after Denomination Z, which was in its turn slaughtering the adherents of Denominations A and B. This whole “live and let live” policy filtered down to people in general.
If religion was invented to enforce social order and cohesion, which I believe it was, then it follows that after a certain point religious tolerance would obviously promote that ideal.
Except, of course, that religion doesn’t always enforce social order and cohesion, does it? By the way, who “invented” religion? Where did the notion come from? I always find this idea that someone or some group sat down and thought up “religion” very hard to understand. How does one come up with a concept like “God” out of thin air? Of course, the notion that it is all a human construct is made immeasurably harder to grasp by the simple fact that religion is not all one thing. Certainly the abrahamic religions bear strong similarities but that follows on their development. Religions across the world have very different world views and it is hard to see how they could all spring from the same impulse.
A fine example of theology being changed by forces outside sacred texts and prescribed rites. As Sam Harris pointed out repeatedly in “The End of Faith”, moral *progress* (or “change”, least) usually comes from outside religions. Indeed, religions are often well behind the curve on this.
I wonder, has the RC Church formally distanced itself from the punishments required by revelation in Deuteronomy and Leviticus? If so, I wonder why….was there further revelation? Hmmmm.
Lily, I don’t know. Some people think that the religious impulse is hardwired in humans, so that as soon as humans became sentient, some sort of religion evolved. I think part of the religious impulse comes from man’s inability to grasp the concept of his own mortality–it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of your own non-existence.So you invent an afterlife that rewards the good and punishes the bad. Or reincarnation, so you can return and correct the errors of a previous life, or do penance for them. Whatever. But the point is, that belief allows everyone to continue to exist after physical death in one condition or another. There isn’t any society I can think of in history that hasn’t had some sort of impulse toward the supernatural, even if it’s just toward animism.
I don’t know who the first person was who realized that religion could be used to bring order out of chaos and enforce loyalty to the group, or clan, or tribe, or whatever, or to a code of behavior. But religion has been used to promote whatever kind of order a particuar society wanted to have. Prohibitions against adultery make sense if you want to preserve the family unit. And they make even more sense to men who wanted to ensure that the children their wives give birth to were sired by them. A prohibition against abortion makes sense if you have one-quarter of your population being periodically wiped out by the plague, and a general life span of about 30 or 40 years for those who escape the plague.
But since everyone can’t be depended upon to abide by the rules just to preserve the social fabric, the notion of those who broke the rules being consigned to hell arose. So…while murderers and adulterers and thieves may escape justice in this life, they get clobbered in the hereafter.
Religion is crowd control. In the past century or so, it’s sort of lost that function.
Great questions, and there are the beginnings of an answer:
http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Pascal-Boyer/dp/0465006965
Best,
It does among the in-group, at the expense of the out-group.
That works fine when you are a small tribe or relatively homogenous nation. Not so well in a diverse setting. Religious tolerance allows different in-groups to peacefully coexist with one another.
With regard to your earlier point, you said, “It was still recognizably the law of Moses but broadened. So, love of neighbor extended to outsiders, not just to other Jews.” This wasn’t a new concept, or even really an extension of a narrower concept. “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. Leviticus 19:34.
Christians surely see that most of their wrong-believing personal acquaintances are just as moral and deserving as themselves. How, then, do they live with the knowledge that their friends and loved ones face an eternity of torment?
It’s worse than that: they themselves are worshiping and praising the being that decreed that torment.
Their reaction to a human that tried to torture old lady Weinberg would probably be a punch in the face, or worse; but make it a god that wants to torture her, and they get down on their knees and praise him. I find this literally incomprehensible.
@Sheldon
I disagree with the idea that the believers bemusedly put up with non-believers because they know in “heaven” they won’t have to. Because if believers proselytize and convert non-believers, those that were “them” are now “us” and will get to heaven. No, I think it’s there is a measure of cognitive dissonance believers are willing to put up with to get along in our society. There are boundaries, however, across which non-believers must not cross. Don’t blaspheme their Jesus; don’t come in and marry their daughters and sons and dilute the flock with non-believers; don’t ask or tell them to tolerate abortion or homosexuality; don’t suggest that the Bible isn’t entirely the literal word of God.
Beyond that, I think believers have no problem with the rest of us. So long as they have the freedom in this country to protest against anti-Christian messages and to pray the way they want, it’s all good.
“It was during the Reagan years (first term in fact) that I learned to hate Christians; hate them because of what they said about my uncle, hate them because of what they said about HIV, hate them because their Jesus-jugend youth groups lorded over my high school exuding smug, self-righteous superiority, the kind that comes from people who are certain they’re going to heaven and you’re not.”
From “The War on Sex and Andrew Sullivan’s “Degenerate Republicanism” a response to Andrew Sullivan’s “Theocons vs. The Breeders>
CS Lewis in Mere Christianity opines that the gravest of sins is that of Pride…But the pride where one feels morally superior to others…The sin of the Warrens…..
I think part of the religious impulse comes from man’s inability to grasp the concept of his own mortality–it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of your own non-existence.
Susan,
Dealing with my mortality has never been a problem. As usual, Mark Twain said it best. “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” Rather, I’ve always thought causality to be the root of religion. The most basic survival trait is the connection of cause and effect. When man finally had time to ponder the “ultimate” cause, religion came into existence. But then I’m an atheist, so I have to assume my view may be severely skewed.
Heather – You say that you would imagine the knowledge that those around them aren’t going to Heaven would be ‘unbearable’ for Evangelicals. I find it much more likely that such a feeling is what attracted them to such an exclusionary religion in the first place. As for the ‘cognitive dissonance’ you fear they must be living with? Perhaps that’s why Evangelical Christianity is the most anti-intellectual force in America today: They don’t want to find out what ‘cognitive dissonance’ means, because if they did they might realize how much of it they ought to have.
@Tim Kowal
All beliefs are not created equal…what an incredibly convenient and self-serving thing to say. What about their ‘belief’ that abortion is murder, or their ‘belief’ that gay marriage is wrong? Those beliefs sure do motivate action. Are they more important or more strongly held than the belief in bringing other souls to God? If so, doesn’t that pretty convincingly make the case against Christianity in general?
Essentially, if what you say is true, then nobody is responsible for any of their beliefs, except as they find it convenient to act on them, a perception which can change at any time. Wow.
Actually, extending the concept of *neighbor* to the despised Samaritans was a new twist on an old theme. It had to be so, otherwise, how could Christ’s listeners have gotten it, if the parable he told came out of nowhere?
But I don’t want to belabor various possible biblical interpretations. I want to maintain the point I have made before– the Bible is not a how-to manual. It is rooted in a particular time and place (actually, of course, in particular times and places). Even though its principles are unchanging, every generation reads it anew in the light of its own time, history and culture. Thus, it seems strange to me to suppose that our understanding of it would not grow and evolve– just as the understanding of “neighbor” did. Likewise when Jesus spoke of the limitations of ceremonial laws that was a real advance in understanding the principles involved.
While all of this can be endlessly debated, I am mostly interested in responding to another one of the interesting messages Susan has posted. Specifically, this: “In sum, I think that most people today who call themselves Christians–apart from fundamentalists–hold more flexible theological views, and the various denominations are more flexible. If not, there’d be a lot more people running around trying to force the rest of us onto the road to heaven.”
Christians, including fundamentalists, do hold more flexible views than, say, the Christians of 1624 but I don’t think that reflects less belief but, rather, more experience. In this case, there aren’t all that many of us who think anyone can be badgered into belief. No one can be “forced onto the road to heaven”. That was never possible; those who thought it was have been forced to face reality.
@Susan
You say that religion was invented to enforce social order…that’s a polite way of saying religion was invented by the masters to make the slaves willing.
With regard to your earlier point, you said, “It was still recognizably the law of Moses but broadened. So, love of neighbor extended to outsiders, not just to other Jews.” This wasn’t a new concept, or even really an extension of a narrower concept. “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. Leviticus 19:34.
Yes. The cliche that Judaism is a tribal religion whose God likes to punish, where Chirstianity is a universal ones whose God preaches love is both false and pernicious. Less of it, please.
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Lilly wrote:
“Atheists and biblical literalists share one belief in common– both think that the Bible was intended to be a sort of “how-to” manual.”
Atheists think the Bible is suppose to be a how-to manual? Where do you idiots get these ridiculous straw men from?
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-obama-real-change.html
Tolerance? Please. The fact is that many evangelists believe that all gay people are going to hell, and they don’t just sit back and ‘tolerate’ gays. No, they do everything that they can to strip gay people of their rights. Witness Prop. 8. Also, see their attempts to prevent gays from adopting children (not that they would ever adopt children in numbers to make up for the loss, of course).
Worse, many churches, including Warren’s, do what they can to try to ‘convert’ gays. Sometimes, parents will forceably sent their gay children to ‘re-education’ camps in a bizarre attempt to change them. It always fails, of course. The funny part, is that researchers have found that the first time gay teens ever had a homosexual experience was at these very same camps!
Nonetheless, there is no tolerance for gay people, as Heather implies, and there is no live and let live accomdation.
Heather is also wrong about the unbearableness of exclusion. There is a pastor in OK, I believe, who had a fundamentalist church. Anti-gay, anti-abortion, the whole nine yards. He had a large congregation of a few thousands. Then he had an epiphany, and he realized that Christianity is all about inclusion,, and that everyone should be welcome, that God loves everyone.
Naturally, attendence dropped, he was kicked out of his own church, and he made a lot of enemies. Seems people need that exclusion part of their religion.
You know, some people can’t feel good about themselves unless they have someone else to look down on.
Lily says “It is a compilation of ancients books that have to be read and understood first in their historical, cultural and literary context.”
This one of the places where religion so obviously falls apart at the seems. One would think that if God did exist and was going to give us a peek into his wonderful brain, that he would expect his messengers to give us the straight scoop. If the bible is so open to interpretation by men, aren’t you arguing for it’s inherent non-godness?
Heather –
Jehovah’s Witnesses actually do believe that everyone who isn’t a JW is going to die (very soon, in fact). It leads them to just that frenzy of proselytism that you’d expect. I sometimes wonder if their disbelief in hell (they’re very secular about death itself – you’re just dead/cease to exist) allows them to skip that whole “if God is good, why torment people forever in hell?” dichotomy that makes most believers a little more agnostic about what happens to people outside the church. If you can’t completely square the circle between Good God/Eternal Torturer, you’re probably not as convinced that it’s really going to happen and or thus a bit more sanguine about that eventuality.
The problem with your post is the common denial of wide variation in religious belief and practice. Religion and Christianity evolves even amongst the most ardent fundamentalists as you yourself suggest. You present a false dichotomy when you suggest “Either believers live with an extraordinary degree of cognitive dissonance between the inclusive values of their society and the dictates of their religion, or they unconsciously mitigate those bloody-minded dictates as atavistic vestiges from a more primitive time.” This statement misses the messy interconnection and mutual influence between “society” and “religion”. These aren’t monolithic entities even within a single denomination or often a single church itself.
The dictates of religion change and are rethought as believers wrestle with their texts, tradition, and experience with the world at large including nonbelievers. Some of this changing surely may be a subtle and unconscious coping mechanism for fundamentalists. Other times I suspect they begin to soften their approach as they rethink their belief system against their experiences all the while trying to be faithful to their tradition/scriptures. Of course this can land them all across the theological spectrum.
For an evangelical leader, Warren has reached out in an unprecedented way to address the AIDS crisis and climate change. Significant concern for “earthly matters” that in any way steer attention away from working to saved the damned is unacceptable to many fundamentalists as you no doubt understand. I suggest that Obama sees in Warren someone with the capacity to genuinely listen to others in an open-minded way and truly work with them on those things they share in common. Teasing apart variations between the beliefs of evangelicals and fundamentalists in order to find potential partners in accomplishing positive change may be just too much for Christoper Hitchens or Heather MacDonald. But I’m glad we will have a president who thus far has demonstrated a belief in such bridge building. Not too mention the political saavy to accomplish one’s agenda by finding partners who disagree with him but can respect and support him despite some profound and seemingly irreconcilable moral differences.
Lily
Christians, including fundamentalists, do hold more flexible views than, say, the Christians of 1624 but I don’t think that reflects less belief but, rather, more experience.
Indeed, Christianity is so “flexible” as to be self-defeating and I am thankful to it for the very idea of secularism.
As noted by Max Weber and also Marcel Gauchet (in The Disenchantment of the World the disparaging of “wordly things” actually allowed the emergence of rational thought about physical phenomenons and ultimately science, notwithstanding the current backfiring from perceived “excess” by the fundamentalists.
There is even more than that in Christianity which, paradoxically, hints at a dissolution of classic religiosity, namely the subversion of the “standard” notion of sacrifice upon which all previous religions relied as explained at length in the works of the (christian) author René Girard. (*)
Well done folks, I hope that your “message” will ultimately deflate the nonsense by showing its inconsistency.
* Dumouchel has clearly showed, during the colloquium of Cerisy in 1982, that the scientific viability of the Girard’s hypotheses (mimetic desire, sacrificial crisis, ignorance necessary for the efficiency of the victimary mechanism) do not require the adhesion – initial or final – in Christianity.
Just curious.
Sometimes my comments are held in moderation, sometimes not and this does not appear to depends on whether there is a link or not.
Is there a grey list of “critical words” or the like?
There is a frenzy of proselytizing in some regions. We have required inservice training at work at which they invite in ministers to tell us that we can’t do our job correctly unless we’re “right with Christ,” “pray with passion,” etc. This is categorized to the state (which mandates training to maintain our licensure) as “burnout prevention.” It has the opposite effect on me.
Beyond that, I am truly in the midst of a frenzy of proselytizing, and I can assure you that in some regions people are very sure that everyone who isn’t Christian is going to hell. There’s hand-wringing over whether the Baptists are going to hell, or the Church of Christers, and a great many people are pretty convinced that the Methodists are, for that matter. Never mind the Jews – that’s a no-brainer.
Maybe you just aren’t exposed to the right circles. These beliefs are alive and well.
I love listening to people on Secular Right argue about religion.
No. But your post allows me the joy of saying “told ya so!” to all those skeptics who scoffed when I said that atheists can be as literal in their approach to the Bible as “fundamentalists” can be. It isn’t a how-to manual. (I am repeating myself). Even God cannot do that which is logically impossible. I cannot even begin to imagine what a text would look like that could transcend the barriers of history, culture and language and would always and forever be as transparent to the iron age Hebrew soldier in the field, as it is to the 21st century physicist and will be to the 22nd century human clone (doing whatever they will be doing). I am guessing that just as only God could “write” such a text, only God could read and understand it, which sorta makes the exercise pointless.
More seriously, we refer to the Bible as the “Good Book” not because the book is good but because the Gospel is. Good news, that is. But it still needs to be interpreted (and yes, it can be wildly, offensively misinterpreted as we all know). Paul’s earliest letter dates to 50 or 51 AD which is to say, 20 or so years after the resurrection. Yet even though he is writing within the life time of the Apostles and other contemporary witnesses to the events in question, all sorts of questions of interpretation arose– perhaps most famously, the question of whether the new gentile converts needed to be circumcised.
If the first generation could face issues that arose as different circumstances occurred, we aren’t going to get off more easily than they. Of course, we believe that the church is guided in interpreting scripture by the Holy Spirit. That is a bit much for non-believers but it is easy for us. After all, we believe in the Resurrection.
I would say that there’s probably a diversity of views on this page and that some have valid points and some perhaps less so, and the name of the blog hardly makes for a snappy retort. Look, I’m a former Christian, and still very happy for anyone to have views that give their life meaning and structure and provide them with community. They just aren’t the right structure/community for me. I don’t see how that might disqualify me from saying that in my community, fundamentalism in an everybody-else-is-going-to-hell way is very much out there. Pardon me if that is off topic, but secular people can know from religion (I’m a former three-Bible-studies per weeker and still very engaged in the topic), and they can certainly have insight into their communities.
Not all atheists think of the bible as a how to manual. Mark Twain got it nearly right describing it as “some interesting history, some passable poetry and upwards of ten thousand lies.” The reason the non religious have to discuss it is the religious try to ruin our lives with it. If a gang of people who are going to beat you up because they have an imaginary eight foot rabbit telling them to, you’d discuss the rabbit too.
Didn’t mean to offend, K. Fennel. Just noting that even the “secular” right is still mired in the study of how to properly view, worship, ignore, or fear, an unseen being.
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No offense taken(love Diogenes, btw). I am prickly this time of year. I do think that many secular people come to the conclusions that they have through much thought (as well as do many believers), so it doesn’t seem odd to me that some remain engaged with the topic.
Anyway: fundamentalism of the variety that Hitchens describes is alive and well, I think.
Heather,
You say that you believe we shouldn’t hold a theological view as bigotry. My question to you is how can you not? Especially when telling one group of people that they are going to hell because of their religion and that the religion you believe in is the only religion acceptable.
Telling Mormons that they are a false religion and a cult is bigotry. So is telling the Jews they’re going to hell. Christians preach volumes of tolerance but when it comes to homosexuality and competing religions, evangelicals condemn them all. The hypocrisy in it is all too much for me.
I don’t care what your religion is…you cannot preach hate or intolerance of another person for any reason or that is, in fact, bigotry whether or not you shroud it in the vail of “religion”.
It’s always amusing to see atheists patting thmeselves on the back for their superiority to the cartoon figures they imagine.
It’s amusing to see someone with critical thinking skills?
There is something my pastor once said, that sticks with me when dealing with massively sad things like natural disasters, and applies equally well to the question of who will or will not go to Hell.
“I’m not the Christ.”
I don’t have to bear the sorrows of the entire world on my own shoulders. I don’t have to be responsible for everyone making the right decisions and everything coming out all right. I don’t have to bear that cross.
That’s God’s place.
That knowledge is not incompatible with free will and an existing Hell where all those who do not accept the supremacy of God will go. And, while I can do my best to help illuminate the darkness, I am not the light, and if someone chooses to live in the dark, I can be sad for them without being responsible.
Mr Hitchens and Ms MacDonald both should understand that.
Re: Sheldon’s post … “religious superiority”. I was just going to post exactly that option. I think a lot of the more religious like the thought that they are “special”, part of the “in crowd”… not like those lowly “others”. I think that’s at the heart of most bigotry. The desire to believe you’re better than.
Let’s face it… according to the bible, there are a very limited amount of people who will actually make it to heaven. Add up all the souls that existed since the dawn of man…. your odds ain’t too good.
Many of the religious are like the popular high school cheerleaders. They see some acquaintances and “feel bad” that they can’t be part of the popular crowd… but to actually risk your OWN standing with the “in crowd” by being open and accepting to the geeks??? …. No WAY!.