Maybe this is a uniquely Christian phenomenon. Either way, holy crap, it’s 1:16 AM.

Maybe this is a uniquely Christian phenomenon. Either way, holy crap, it’s 1:16 AM.

Well, it’s normal on a blog comment section for many people to not hold back their opinion, even if it wasn’t adressed to them ;D Hope you didn’t mind, but it was just such a magnificent set-up for a joke.

Anyways – have you read the comments that came before now? If not, a quick summary: There exists a fallacy that is called No True Scotsman. It’s used to dismiss evidence to the contrary of an assumption/claim. There original goes something like this…

A: Every Scotsman likes haggis.
B: But Evan is Scottish and he doesn’t like haggis at all.
A: Clearly, Evan is no True Scotsman.

Now your thought process goes…

A: Once you have found Jesus Christ you can never doubt his existence.
B: But Vicky lost her faith after decades of serving the Lord and Jesus.
A: Clearly, Vicky was no True Christian.

So you’re right, both can’t be true. But instead of doing the logically valid thing and discarding your assumption, you instead choose to disbelieve Vicky ever being Christian. Basically, you’re discarding evidence that would threaten your worldview.

Just because she now thinks Jesus Christ doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean she thought that back when she served him (since it would be really silly to serve someone you don’t think exists). See Caravelle’s example with the astronomer.

or to put it in different terms: just because a lot of kids really believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, doesn’t mean either really exists. Just because adults no longer believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy, doesn’t mean that they didn’t once very honestly believed in them.

Caravelle and others have answered this point fairly clearly but of course because all our comments were bottled up in the “intertubes” this morning you couldn’t see them. Most of us seem to think that a “conversion” experience and a passionate attachment to the notion of Jesus could be “real” and “true” by any standards and *still* be later rejected or found to be false. In fact, such things happen all the time in real life. I was just listening to an interview on NPR with a woman who left the cult of Sri Chinmoy. People go in and out of passionately believing in various cult leaders–living and dead–and having all the marks of true belief all the time. (I’m using the word “cult” in its old sense of a “cultic religion” and not in its modern sense of something that is not a true religion.)

This whole discussion reminds me of the time a prominent public Lesbian was accused of “never having tried a man” as the source of her insistence that she wasn’t sexually attracted to men. I remember that she said, very politely that, well, no, she’d had lots of boyfriends when she was younger because of her determination to be as normal as possible and to hew to normal social mores. It was actually *because* she’d had some many unhappy experiences with men that she’d come to her decision that she was happier being a Lesbian.

In that sense on a purely experiential level Vyckie and Laura didn’t come to their conclusion that there was no Jesus, or at least no Jesus as their entire social network conceived of him, because they *didn’t* know him but because they *did* fully give themselves over to him–or the socially sanctioned version of him that they were taught.

aimai

I really wasn’t posting to you, I’ll just say that you’ve not changed my mind at all, but I wasn’t trying to get a rise out of you–I wanted to ask Vyckie.

I’m saying that if Jesus Christ doesn’t matter in life (or doesn’t exist) and that is fact, then, how could that person have a “conversion” experience (with this Jesus Christ who doesn’t exist). Both can’t be true.

How can it be?

Unfortunately, Allison also said she wasn’t posting here any more, because “Your level of self-righteousness and self-importance is nauseating.”

Meek and quiet spirit indeed.

ALLISON: “I was EXACTLY like all the rest of you women…an ego-maniacal piece of self-righteous crap that the world revolved around.”

Made me crack up. Allison, when do you think you stopped being an “ego maniacal piece of self righteous crap?” You’ve just roped god in to make yourself more comfortable and, as you imagine, make yourself more powerful. You’ve made god part of your ego by, as you pretend, being the only one who submits to his will correctly. It takes an immense amount of self love and self regard to imagine that of all the people in the universe you and you alone have figured out what god wants and is doing it. That’s the very definition of egotistical and self righteous.

aimai

From the very beginning of Christianity there has been a tension between the notion that the individual believer, having already a spark of the godhead, can be trusted to make his or her own union with god and the notion that the community, study, and scriptural authority were needed to intercede between the individual believer and god. The entire Catholic approach, for example, assumes the necessity of an intercessor between the believer and god and a hierarchy of knowledge with the Pope and priests and learned folk at the top and individual believers at the bottom. Of course there were struggles between different Catholic factions from the very beginning–the Albigensians? anyone remember them?–but the big break apart came with the Protestant Reformation.

I’m only saying what all of you already know which is that when a believer states that they “know” or “believe” that one or more beautiful early texts should determine how we read all the other texts they are making a very tendentious claim vis a vis other Christians. If not also vis a vis other religions and their members who don’t acknowledge the primacy, or even the authenticity, of the referenced scriptures.

As for me, as I think I said elsewhere, I’m an atheist Jew with a tendency towards Buddhist approaches to incarnation, salvation/nirvana, the idea of “sin” and suffering. I’m personally fascinated by the role that the idea of suffering *for god* or *because of god* or because of *falling away from god* plays in the Quiverful Christianist imagination. I’d love to have a discussion with current true believers, like Allison, about “suffering” and how they think it fits in with their notions of gods plan. But its hard to have that conversation because of the very strong insistence that other religions and their ideas of suffering in this world or the next have no place in the discussion. That is, I think to have such a discussion you’d have to acknowledge a certain utilitarianism in your perspective and perhaps be willing to entertain (even if only for a second) that your solution to the problem of suffering is only one among many not the “True” one.

aimai