Love vs. Bible Smackdown

Moral dilemmas are our gadflies, the weak spots of any philosophy, and by extension, of any religion. When one esteemed virtue battles with another, reflective people the world over turn to their philosophy or faith to make peace between the two. But how would your favorite life-enhancing ethic deal with the following:

• Does your duty to “crown & country” outweigh your duty to “hearth & home”?
• Is it better to teach your child that “patriotism” or “human rights” represent the higher standard?
• How do you determine the value of a human life?

Under the weight of these and similar dilemmas, any philosophy or faith can eventually buckle, and thereby (a) yield up deplorably inadequate advice, (b) cloud the issue with so much ambiguity that it could justify any action (or non-action) whatsoever, or (c) for most, simply leave us to follow our ephemeral emotional reaction unencumbered by genuine adult thinking.

Over the past 2 weeks, I have played both witness and provocateur for such a moral dilemma. If you like, you can follow my online conversation with my counterpart, a Midwest Evangelical minister named Scott. (My user name there is “NH Baritone”.) He has appeared on the “A Christian and an Atheist” podcast. Scott is not a biblical literalist, although I think it is fair to say that he still strongly reveres the Bible. He has said that the Bible contains the message that “God wants us to know.” So I was a bit surprised when, taking a moment to discuss his attitudes toward homosexuality on the most recent podcast, he hinted at a personal moral dilemma. See if you notice it:

There are all kinds of behaviors that are listed in the Bible as sinful, and you know what? I engage in a lot of them. But the core of the teaching of Jesus is that I have no right to stand in judgment over somebody, even if they are practicing a sin. … I could point at a homosexual and say, “You’re practicing homosexuality, [which] the Bible calls a sin, but you know what? I practice 10 other things that the Bible calls a sin. How can we talk about this?” I think there is room at the table for people who are struggling with all kinds of different behaviors.

Here’s his dilemma: Scott wants to build and maintain a relationship. At the same time, Scott has to deal with homosexuals whose behavior is condemned in the Bible, and Scott reveres the Bible. He is really stuck, because as he later said, he thinks the only Christian response to gay people is to love them, but at the same time, the Bible insists that he hold their relationships in second class status, at best.

Now to be honest, Scott wavered between positions. Sometimes his training in conservative Christianity would shine through his posts, such as his response when I asked what was different about sex between a monogamous gay couple and his own relationships with his wife:

In terms of human sexuality, the same argument could be used to justify just about ANY kind of sexual activity…

- How can you say homosexuality is wrong? The only difference is the gender of the people involved.
- How can you say pedophilia is wrong? The only difference is the age of the people involved.
- How can you say necrophilia is wrong? The only difference is the biological status of the people involved.
- How can you say bestiality is wrong? The only difference is the species involved.

Now, I do NOT mean to equate a monogamous homosexual relationship with pedophilia, and I hope I didn’t come across as that insensitive, but I did want to make the point that (for me at least) the morality of homosexuality is not based on how similar or different homosexuality is from heterosexuality. It is based on how closely the practice of homosexuality aligns with the teaching of the Bible.

Then at other times he almost sounded like he was ready to sign on for gay marriage:

This leaves us a handful (and by “handful” I mean “two”—one in 1 Corinthians 6 the other in Romans 1) of passages in the NT. Both of these passages are similar in that they were written by Paul, do not explicitly state a moral imperative (”Thou shalt not…”), and use homosexuality as examples for a larger argument (in other words, the point of the passage is NOT to prohibit homosexuality but to give a broader moral or theological teaching).

The difficulty with Paul is that he often interjects his own opinion into the teaching, and sometimes blatantly distinguishes his own opinion from the moral teaching (1 Corinthians 7). He also has a penchant for overly harsh and hyperbolic language, like when he says that he wishes a certain group of people would castrate themselves (Galatians 5). These observations cause me to ask the questions, “Was Paul teaching homosexuality was prohibited, and thus making a statement which is morally binding for Christians today? Or, was he citing his own feelings about homosexuality in order to make a point about something else, and thus making a statement which is NOT morally binding for Christians today.” To be honest, I fluctuate back and forth on this point.

But the dilemma is never resolved; he inevitably returned to the need to maintain a relationship with (to love) the gay person, but still embrace his bible by denying the Christian gay person equality within his church.

As I have said in other places, I refuse to pick up the anxiety that belong to other people, particularly around issues like that (even though in our culture it is almost a social expectation that people will say, “Oh, that’s alright. At least you’ve come this far”). So I violated some fairly standard social rules by holding up a mirror to Scott’s moral dilemma. I’m not certain I won any friends in doing so.

Nonetheless, I was reminded today of the movie, Sophie’s Choice, and it brought to mind Scott’s responses to my questions and the subsequent dialogue. I began to wonder to myself if Scott is in the midst of a “Sophie’s choice”-style moral dilemma.

Just a summary of the movie: A Nazi concentration camp guard told Sophie Zawistowski that she would have to choose which of her two children would be sent to the gas chamber. If she didn’t choose, they would both die. It was a horrible position to be put in, and it turned her love of both of them into torture for her. The choosing altered her perception of herself and of her life for its duration.

Perhaps Scott feels a similar tug here. Sophie loved both of her children. Scott cherishes the messages within the Bible and yet strongly values interpersonal love and building relationships. And in a way that strongly suggests doubts, I keep asking him, how does he imagine a way that he can have both his beloved relationships and his beloved bible? How is it possible for him to genuinely love gay couples when he cannot accept them as equally Christian alongside him?

Perhaps if this metaphor has any validity, in Scott’s mind I may have acted like the concentration camp guard, forcing him to choose between two cherished elements of his faith. But I don’t think so. All I have done is ask the question. Since other Christians who cherish their Bible just as much as he does have reached different conclusions, I think it is his church, its traditions, and his Bible interpretation that has placed him in this difficult position. It is up to Scott to decide if he can still cling to his Bible interpretations while simultaneously loving those who practice the “love that dare not speak its name.” And whatever choice he makes, I dare say it might change the way he sees himself and his life … perhaps for its duration.

How Christians-Turned-Atheists Change Their Morals

On Yahoo! Answers Religion & Spirituality forum, I recently asked the following question:

ATHEISTS (FORMER CHRISTIANS): How have your morals changed since your “de-conversion”?

Here is a sampling of the answers I received:

• Honestly I feel more moral. I used to be against gays and felt weird around atheists and other religious people. But now the chains of intolerance have been broken!
  I support gays, dont mind other religion, and love my fellow infidels!
• No. they are the same. I just feel less guilt now.
• We’ll, I “de-converted” around the age of 10, so I’m not sure if I even knew what my moral convictions were then. What I do know is that I see a lot more Christians with “looser” moral behavior that my own. In fact, I seem to be something of a moral compass amongst my circle of friends - most of whom are theists.
• My morals have improved greatly since I am no longer a Christian. I find I am far less judgemental and a great deal more loving than I used to be.
  I have a developed spiritual philosophy that has positively impacted my mental, physical and spiritual well-being.
• I’ve become a better person I think once I stopped worrying what the church thought of things. I now work with kids doing community service and am working on a career in nursing.
• I’m a former Christian who is now non-religious (I believe in a spiritual realm, but not in hell or heaven or any of that bs). You could say my morals “changed”, in that I no longer fault people for having different lives, and embrace differences. I’m much more at peace with the world, not troubled by who’s going to hell and what God thinks of what I’m doing. I can be myself, and know that all that matters to me is being happy and being kind to others. My personal philosophy makes much more sense without the added bigotry of religion.
• I think my “morals” have remained much the same… but my sense of integrity has become more acute…
• I have more compassion for my fellow human beings. I have begun to actively support (verbally and financially) the cause for equal rights for gay people. I have a greater appreciation for life.
• I’ve noticed that I became more honest after I deconverted (both with myself and others). Ironic, no?
• I stopped hating homosexuals and I realized that the only reason I ever thought them to be less than me was because the Bible warped my mind.
  And I’m less judgmental, more honest, and more open-minded.
• Actually I think I hold myself to a higher set of morals….. I find it harder to forgive myself than god does.
• Morality doesn’t change upon religions or lack of belief in any deity. Morality is what we learn. It’s not like we can change morality like changing a red shirt to a black shirt.
  Only difference is realization when a religion warps your mind to what is truely moral and what isn’t and realize how wrong these religious hatred and judgments are. I never hated anybody, nor did i ever judged anybody. Because there is no need to be judgmental or hateful.
• Losing my faith makes me feel more moral.
  The holy book is not a good source of morals, IMHO.
• I don’t get emotional hangups about being a “good enough” person for a god. I realize that I’m normal and not superhuman, and it’s fine to think about anything, including sex. I don’t have a fear that the devil is going to come out of the dark and send me to hell, as I did when I was a Catholic child.
  So I would call myself more stable and reasonable about human behavior. I’m not hyper focused on getting married or going to church, like my old religion encouraged. I am happy the way I am.
  I savor the increased free time most of all - I always felt that church services sucked and that I could do better things with my mornings - like sleeping.

Can a Christian be Pro-Choice?

I am no longer a Christian, but I used to be, and a fairly well-studied one. So I felt qualified to answer when Purified on Yahoo! Answers asked the following question:

Can you be a Christian and be pro-choice? Scripture please. I am a Christian and believe God’s word to be the guiding light to the Christian.

Here is how I responded:

Yes.

Although Christians who oppose abortion make reference to God knowing a person “before they were formed in the womb,” we really should keep the topic on abortion itself. The closest thing to an abortion in the Bible is actually a miscarriage, also medically known as a spontaneous abortion. Therefore, it makes sense to read how the Bible suggests handling miscarriages. Does the Bible treat miscarried fetuses the same way that it treats breathing human beings?

Passages from the Old Testament are the only ones that refer to miscarriages. There, the ancient Jews did not treat miscarried fetuses as human beings. They instead considered them simply the equivalent to a woman’s menstrual blood.

For example, Job 3:16 refers to “like a miscarriage which is discarded,” indicating that a miscarried fetus is not given a proper burial, as would have been necessary for any Jewish human being.

Miscarried fetuses were clearly meant to be forgotten. The passage in Ecclesiastes 6:3-4 refers to this: “If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, however many they be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, ‘Better the miscarriage than he, for it comes in futility and goes into obscurity; and its name is covered in obscurity.’”

Exodus 21:22-25 refers to a woman who miscarries as a result of a assault on her body. If she is relatively unscathed, the only payment is money. If, on the other hand, if she is hurt in the process, the penalty is an equal injury inflicted upon the assailant:

“Suppose a pregnant woman suffers a miscarriage as the result of an injury caused by someone who is fighting. If she isn’t badly hurt, the one who injured her must pay whatever fine her husband demands and the judges approve. But if she is seriously injured, the payment will be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, cut for cut, and bruise for bruise.”

Clearly here, the woman’s life is valued much more highly than the life of her fetus, which can be bought like a calf or a head of cabbage. The only true injury occurs when the woman herself is hurt.

These passages indicate that those who worshiped God in the Bible did not value fetuses as human beings. As such, it is entirely within the realm of Christian practice not to treat abortion as anything approaching murder. What’s more, the passage from Exodus, a book not generally known for its kindnesses toward women, indicates that the woman’s life is supremely more valued than that of an aborted fetus.

Given these passages, it is quite easy to show that allowing a woman a choice in her pregnancies falls entirely within the realm of Christian belief.

- {♂♂} - {♂♀} - {♀♀} -

Rational beyond belief

In our hyper-Christian society, religious doubts are not easily entertained. They are discouraged in the church and barely tolerated in our American society. Thus, when you have them, they can make you feel incredibly isolated.

But many people find religious doubts impossible to dismiss, and we have to think them through. So here are the ways I thought about the existence (and ultimately, non-existence) of God:

First, we must define the term “God.” The problem with most theists is that this term is a moving target.

In addition, because there is no absolute evidence either for or against the existence of God, you cannot use deductive logic (for example, deductive logic is used as follows: a+b=c, therefore c-b=a). You can only reach a conclusion by inductive reasoning, i.e., using the balance of evidence to reach a conclusion. (For example, 90% of A is also B; C is B, so there’s a 90% chance that C is also A).

So to begin with, I will assert (and others may shoot this down) that the only RELEVANT definition of God states that GOD INTERVENES TO CIRCUMVENT NATURAL LAWS.

But IF God circumvents natural laws, then it becomes impossible to understand natural laws. All scientific findings would have to include the stipulation, “It is also possible that these results are an act of God, a miracle, thereby making our research meaningless.”

However, as medical advances, molecular chemistry and microwave ovens indicate, we have been able to continuously expand our knowledge of natural laws. Therefore, because the scientific method leads to accurate predictions and applicable discoveries, the likely (inductively reasoned) conclusion is that God, at least the intervening kind, does not exist.

Next, if God is defined as all loving, all powerful, and all knowing, then it is impossible to explain suffering. Either God is not all loving (he acts sadistically), not all powerful (he cannot prevent suffering), or not all knowing (he created suffering by mistake because he didn’t know the consequences of his actions). A God who is not all-loving, all-powerful or all-knowing is also not sufficient for the definition of God, because any God that fails to meet these criteria becomes bound by rules that are greater than God.

So if God is bound by external rules and/or does not intervene in our existence, then God is either non-existent or irrelevant. This is not absolutely certain, but the amount of evidence supporting this conclusion is so great that it makes any other conclusion outlandish. The classic Bertrand Russell argument is as follows: I cannot prove that a china teapot is or is not orbiting the sun between the earth’s orbit and Mars. But while I cannot prove this it either way, the evidence against it is compelling.

The evidence against God is equally compelling, and thus it makes enormously more sense to live your life as if there were no God.

Although it is admittedly speculation, it is more compelling to me that humans have invented God (a) to help people deal with the pain and fear associated with death and loss, and (b) to reflect the thoughts of the ruling powers in a particular time. Humans have evolved to search for explanations. When early civilizations found none, it was their natural inclination to declare that the cause of the unexplained was a superpower they called a god (or gods). (This process continues to be used by theists in their “god-of-the-gaps” arguments.)

As the faith grew, coincidences were defined as (and exaggerated into) miracles. Laws and moral authority were attributed to this divinity in order to give the powers-that-be more clout, and an orthodoxy grew up around the entire structure of “faith.”

Now it seems unhelpful to believe in such superstition. Most people, even believers, live as if the only matters that aid in our ongoing well-being are work, location, health, sustenance, and pure, blind luck. And no one ever went wrong in under exactly that assumption.

So those are my doubts, and they summarize why I have ceased to believe that any relevant God exists. And oddly enough, I went through a similar process to accept the fact I am gay and that society’s homophobia was ill-informed and prejudicial.

So who said that rational thinking was cold and unfeeling?

- {♂♂} - {♂♀} - {♀♀} -

© 2008. All rights reserved. Edited from my Sept. 2006 posting in my Yahoo! 360 blog.

From out of the (toothless) jaws of Pauljub –

Alas, I have been on a rescue mission, all to save my own verbiage.

I found an unbelievably sophomoric presentation of atheism tonight on Pauljub’s blog. (Click on the link to read it. The following will then make more sense.) When I pointed out that in his writing he had set up a straw man argument, his response indicated he had a poor understanding of the concept, so I wrote him back, as follows:

A “straw man” is a statement that is said to represent an argument of or position held by the opposition, but in fact is a phony presentation, set up simply for taking pot shots, but not truly addressing the genuine arguments. Yours is as phony as they come, and thus fallacious.

Simply put, I don’t believe you when you say that you’ve summarized “all the wisdom and statements” you’ve heard atheists make. Since you are willing to unrepentantly engage in logical fallacies, then I must be wary of your other statements, too. Until you supply the evidence, I must presume that it does not exist.

And as further evidence of your lack of trustworthiness, the flow of your conversation goes exactly as you would like it to, without even an acknowledgment that you and atheists might have actual points of disagreement. Entire libraries are filled with the arguments and counterarguments regarding the existence of God. This wimpy summary is an insult to both atheists and Christians alike. It indicates that you have, in spite of all your conversations with “thousands of atheists,” utterly failed to understand their position. It may even indicate a dismal of understanding of the Christian position.

I note that you don’t discuss the arguments that you have had the most difficulty with, but instead present things like “I have proof, but I cannot give it to you.” This doesn’t even rise to the level of entertaining conversation, much less edifying theological discourse.

But as I said, this has been a rescue mission. It’s necessary that I post this here because, in what I can only surmise was a fit of either panic or rage, he deleted it.

- {♂♂} - {♂♀} - {♀♀} -