Posted by Anthony on November 30, 2007
I don’t suppose you’ve read about the British teacher in the Sudan who allowed a student named Mohammed to name his teddy bear Mohammed. She was in danger of getting flogged but now she will only spend 15 days in jail, guilty on the charge of insulting religion and inciting hatred. As that article explains, there were also people who wanted her killed. Hmmm. I guess I won’t say which object around my house I’ve given a certain name.
Now, meanwhile, there are thousands of atheists looking at this incident and thinking to themselves, “See, religion. It is all bad.” That’s an interesting response since I’m looking at the incident and I’m thinking it is bad, but I have a different conclusion, “See, Islam. Bad.” I could refine it further to exclude westernized Muslims and focus on the Sudanese, but the basic idea is that a reasonable person will only go as far as the evidence will allow. Over the last decade, I have noticed an increasing number of atheists arguing about the evils of religion and usually citing examples from Islam. Does that even begin to make sense? The whole notion of ‘religion’ is ridiculous on its face because of the many absurdities and abuses we find in Islam?
As a case in point, consider this gent posting on my discussion forum. He’s talking about the recent outcry in Turkey about the publication of Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” which, to be fair, really does insult religion and incite hatred. Watch what happens:
For centuries it was a virtual death sentence to declare oneself as Atheist. The modern world is becoming more enlightened but religious fervour can still wield a powerful fist. Just look at a current news story where Turkey is attempting to prosecute the publisher of Richard Dawkin’s book ‘The God Delusion’ because it may be “an attack on religious values”.
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/11/28/dawkins.turkey.ap/index.html
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. Religion is of course an attack on rational values.
Not, ‘Islamic fervor’ but ‘religious fervour’ [sic]. You can easily find atheists continuing this rant of late in regards to the Christian reaction to Pullman’s Golden Compass. It really torques them off that some Christians have called for a boycott for the series. Oh, those evil, evil Christians. Don’t they know that good and decent people are obligated to buy the products perpetuating things they don’t agree with? Such intolerance! Such evil! See, religion bad!
Now, I haven’t heard a Christian call for Pullman to be flogged, or thrown in jail, or beheaded. Have you? It doesn’t matter to many atheists. They only have one brush and it is ten miles wide. For them, it has to be, because it is only by lumping Islam with Christianity as ‘religion’ that they can have their argument.
One of the clearest examples of this argument was in fact found in Dawkins’s Delusion. He talks about religious fanatics flying into the WTC towers on 9-11 and the calls for beheadings and, if I recall correctly, the fatwa on Rushdie. I agree, all bad. But he shows how Christianity is not immune to such abuses by showing… how a school board in Dover brought in a text book that de-emphasized evolution and focused on intelligent design. OOOOOOH the travesty! The agony! The HORROR of RELIGION! Elected officials did their job in a way that some people didn’t agree with! Why not un-elect them, if you don’t agree with them?
Why, that is exactly what happened. Was that enough for our tolerant atheists and Darwinists? Heaven’s no! A lawsuit, please! These damned evil Christians who were properly elected and then voted out- and went out peacefully without threats of jihad- proof positive of the dangers of religion! So, let’s slap a lawsuit on them, too, Freedom from Religion style, that’s the way tolerant unreligious people handle it. Much better.
Naturally, when you start digging into the question, the old standbys begin to emerge. Let’s not forget the Crusades or the Inquisition, for example. Yes, let’s not forget the evils of the past perpetuated while most of Europe’s population was illiterate and couldn’t read the Scriptures for themselves to see if what the leadership was saying was true. But we have evidence in modern times, too. Look at Eric Rudolph. And not just Rudolph… there is also… uh Rudolph… (give us a minute and we’ll think of another example…) oh yea, and those damn Christians trying to pass constitutional amendments and boycotting things they don’t like. Yea, that’s the SAME THING as flying into buildings, blowing oneself up in coffee shops, beheading infidels, and trying to hang, and if not flog, and if not flog, imprison a woman for 15 days when her student names a teddy bear after Mohammed.
The SAME thing.
So this is just a little note out to the atheists out there… I think reasonable Christians would agree that some discussion about things like events hundreds of years ago like the Inquisition is in order, but if you can’t tell the difference between a religion whose adherents flock to be suicide bombers and a religion whose adherents- now able to read their writings for themselves- generally work through the legislative process, you are completely discredited. You can call yourself ‘rational’ all you like, as did Dicoll in the forum thread I posted above, but really rational people know better.
Haven’t you noticed the historical trend where Christians who know their Scriptures well tend not to advocate violence in the name of their God or religion while Muslims who know their Scriptures well do?
Meanwhile, there will be atheists upset that I did not talk to them with ‘gentleness and respect.’ I used ALL CAPS, more evidence that Christianity is vicious and its proponents are unloving, which one can fully expect since religion is bad, bad, BAD. Beheadings, flogging, suicide bombing, ALL CAPS, and of course, my playful tauntings. All in a days work for those wicked religionists, ya know?
Posted by Anthony on November 7, 2007
I am currently working on a much lengthier reaction to Pullman’s His Dark Materials Series but I thought I would take a break and comment on this article that passed across my desk today from worldnetdaily.com categorizing the Pullman series as paganism. For example, this quote:
“Pullman has been quoted in interviews as saying he is an atheist, but that label is highly misleading. There is spirituality here, and it’s as blatantly occult as it gets. Pullman’s tales combine clever plots grounded in dark nihilism with a default pagan cosmology. Everyone believes in something, and Pullman does, too, whether he will admit it or not. The plot revolves around spiritism, magical thinking, mysterious visions, parallel worlds, and yet as always with pagan beliefs, they come off as glitteringly empty.”
I won’t dispute that ‘everyone believes in something.’ Nor will I dispute that there are elements that we would normally consider as ‘pagan.’ However, I believe the author of this article completely misunderstands the current strategy of the secular humanists.
If we take an example like Harry Potter, whom the author of that article also decries, the difference between the threats is easy enough to detect: Rowling did not present her series as potentially being reality, nor does anyone- even young readers- think that it might be, whereas in the Pullman series, what he presents is explicitly something that he believes could be real, and by connecting with claims that students will hear described as scientific (Ie, Evolutionary theory and the Multiverse), students are led to think the same. There is no line between reality and fantasy, here.
What is paganism but religion without revelation? The Pullman series is part of the new trend in secular atheism to take the claims of both revealed religion and paganism and show how they could be compatible with an atheistic world view. Everything that pagans and Christian theists might posit as evidence for the truth of their views are reinterpreted in naturalistic terms.
For example, in Richard Dawkins’s Delusion, he begins by pointing out that just because he is an atheist and an evolutionist, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t stand in awe of the universe. In the NBC television series, “Heroes,” we see evolution being able to produce people with abilities that we would have otherwise described as miraculous and supernatural. Indeed, in the latest episode, the characters talk about whether or not they are ‘gods.’
This is perfectly compatible with the Pullman series which allows that ‘god’ exists, but thinks of Yahweh as merely the first conscious agent that evolution produced. This, too, harkens back to Dawkins, who in TGD defines the ‘God’ he wishes to denounce as being Yahweh, or Zeus, or Baal… of course failing to understand the God of the Bible as a transcendent entity that is simultaneously immanent in his creation, non-contingent, and everlasting- much different than putative entities like Zeus.
This trend is also percolating up on the net. For example, an atheistic gent with a masters in philosophy tried to make the argument on my forum that even if we granted the miracles ‘as described in the Bible’ (by which he only meant Jesus’s miracles), we should still prefer a naturalistic explanation for those miracles. This is really identical to what Pullman is doing, except that his series argues that even the truths that pagans accept should be interpreted in naturalistic terms, too.
In other words, the current trend in secular atheism is to back off of the strident claims of past generations that mocked the human race for being seeped in religion and superstition, but to admit that they themselves are awed by the universe as much as anyone else, and further, to argue that any true thing we might find in any religion- revealed or otherwise- can still be understood in naturalistic terms.
I need not go into the fact that such a view is self-evidently unfalsifiable. If you interpret everything in naturalistic terms, it isn’t exactly an impressive argument when you say there is no evidence of the supernatural.
So, as much as I agree with the author of that article on the threat and danger of the Pullman series, I definitely don’t agree that it is a ‘pagan’ story or that Pullman himself has any interest in the occult. The real danger of the Pullman series is that it prepares the young, thinking person, to believe that even if Jesus rose from the dead, that still would not be evidence for the existence of God, or for the truth of Christianity.
Since we Christians follow Paul in 1 Cor 15 as pointing to the resurrection as the single most important validater of the Christian religion, one can see how one would prefer to have more pagans running around that would likely be persuaded if they thought the resurrection was actual than a bunch more secular humanists who are willing to concede the resurrection but interpret it within an atheistic framework.
As an atheist said on a discussion forum a few years back, “What’s the big deal that Jesus rose from the dead? With 10 or 20 billion people that have ever lived, the odds are that someone would come back to life eventually.” And there are more than 20 billion universes in the ‘multiverse’/many worlds hypothesis.
Posted by Anthony on August 25, 2007
While I have glimpsed in a few places atheistic reactions to my assertion that the church itself is producing atheists, I had yet to see any real formal comment on it until today, when a member of my forum pointed me to Austin Cline’s entry on it located here. It so happens that I know of Mr. Cline and have had a little interaction, but for the record I don’t believe he understands that ‘Anthony Horvath’ is also ’sntjohnny.’ That interaction has a little in common with his entry here. In word, I think he is again being quite presumptuous, and I’m going to take this opportunity to respond even though he’ll never likely see it.
He cites the Christian Post article which is all well and good, but he seems to be unaware of how such stories are pieced together in the first place. The reporter poses questions and I answer those questions. But those questions are not in the article, and my answers are sometimes given as quotes but in some respects are paraphrased. That means that a newspaper article should be taken with a grain of salt, and if someone really wants to take someone to task- by name- they probably should make the effort to dig a little deeper. I would have been willing to cut a little slack, as the article unfortunately does not mention my screen name nor does it list my website. But it is not hard to figure out via simple google and I made it easy by posting my web page twice in the comment section of the article he cited. Maybe I should get used to this now that I’m such a public figure. (read as self-mockery).
So for the record, let it be known that Mr. Cline did not contact me and he has not, to my knowledge, made any efforts to go beyond the Christian Post article. I was not asked “Do you stand by this” or “Would you clarify this?” etc. Nor am I going to do the same for him. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. But he has one thing going for him that I didn’t- he picked and chose every word and paragraph with full control, whereas my views came through a filter. Now that we have my chief complaint and criticism fully aired, let me turn my attention to some of his statements.
Let’s take this one to start with: “Are we to sincerely believe that Christian churches and organizations are not engaging in apologetics?”
In point of fact, Christian churches are not engaging in apologetics. Probably, by ‘churches,’ Mr. Cline is thinking in narrow terms. I was speaking about the broad picture, referencing whole denominations and how they invest their energy, and he ignores a clarification that does actually make it into the article:
“I am talking about apologetics at a much broader scale then normally understood,†said Horvath. “It should not be left to professors or specialists, such as C.S. Lewis. It needs to be incorporated into everything we do as the Church from cradle to grave.â€
In other words, I am not, as Mr. Cline so snidely dismisses as ‘ridiculous’ insinuating that I am the first person to engage in apologetics. In the article itself I am hinting that I mean something different then normally understood. Hence the phrase, “then normally understood.” Mr. Cline did not ask me to elaborate on this, and point of fact, neither did the reporter for the Christian Post.
If at some point Mr. Cline would like to discover my point for himself (assuming he doesn’t just ask me), he can count up how many paid Christian apologetics positions there are across as many denominations as he likes, include, if he desires professors at universities, and compare that number with how many pastoral positions, youth ministry positions, and worship and music positions there are. Then, he can check into the curriculum being produced by the various denominations to ascertain what kind of attention is explicitly paid to common apologetics issues, and what age levels that material is geared towards.
Naturally, as I am merely a man who attended Christian elementary, middle, and high schools, who has a four year bachelors degree in pastoral ministry, has been interacting with the Christian culture from the inside for more than ten years, four of which were actually as a religion teacher for 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 12th grades, two years of teaching at a Bible college, and then three years working on staff at a church as a director of education, expressly tasked with evaluating curriculum for Sunday School, VBS, etc, it is quite obvious that Mr. Cline will have a much better grasp then I will on exactly how apologetics is implemented by various denominations. Naturally.
Moving on.
“Now, if Anthony Horvath had argued that Christian churches are doing a poor job at explaining why they believe what they do and must improve their apologetics, that might be plausible.”
Hmmmm. That is exactly what I am arguing. Again, this is something that the Christian Post article does pick up on:
“Churches are producing atheists by not answering the questions of young people and explaining why they believe in the Bible,” and “As a solution, Horvath recommends apologetics – the defense of the Christian faith. He points to 1 Peter 3:15 which teaches believers to be ready to give the reasons for what they believe.”
Understandably, the first quote was easy to miss as it was the first sentence of the article. However, since he cites both of these quotes in his summary of the article, I fail to understand how he did not perceive that I was advocating for exactly what he suggested might be plausible, and it was actually expressed in the article.
Not content with that, he wishes to go further: “If he had argued that the questions being asked by young people today need different sorts of answers than what apologetics geared towards previous generations can provide, that might also be plausible. Those are more cautious and careful arguments that could be taken more seriously.”
Different sorts of answers? What, pray tell, would these quotes be referring to:
Horvath, who has taught religion to middle school and high school students explained that some of the recurring questions young adults struggle with but churches often fail to address include the formation and development of the Bible, the presence of evil and suffering in the world, and the question of inspiration and inerrancy.
“In large part, it happens when the church leadership is completely unaware that their members – and not necessarily just the young members – have questions at all,†explained Horvath to The Christian Post. “And [they] continue merrily along thinking that to retain the youth they just need to be entertained.â€
That sounds an awful lot like proposing an implementation of apologetics that is different then previous generations were satisfied with. I understand it takes a tad bit of reading between the lines. One has to make the connection that the ‘church leadership’ and ‘the young members’ are likely going to be members of different generations, and certainly I could elaborate further (if only prompted), but I think there is enough in the article to suspect that this is exactly what I’m proposing. Instead I have to now hear the second strawman accusation:
“As it is, Anthony Horvath is making claims that aren’t even remotely plausible. People don’t become atheists because Christians aren’t engaging in any apologetics; instead, people become atheists because Christian apologetics isn’t working so well.”
Note here the equivocation. My challenge was to the church, not at individual Christians. Certainly there are Christian engaging in apologetics. This was not the point. Again, that first sentence was easy to skip, but the Christian Post gets it in there: “Churches are producing atheists…” This equivocation leads Mr. Cline to infer a position that is no where supported by the Christian Post article. Indeed, I am arguing that Christian apologetics isn’t working so well, though Mr. Cline and I will disagree for the reasons. So we see, he has appropriated for himself two positions that were actually mine and called them ‘plausible’ and foisted on me a position that isn’t mine at all. That’s annoying.
Moving along.
“Books like The God Delusion and The Da Vinci Code don’t require a society that doesn’t understand Christianity in order to be popular, just a society which no longer accepts traditional, orthodox Christianity like it used to.”
The two ideas are not mutually exclusive. The problem here is that Mr. Cline does not bother to ask me precisely what connection I’m drawing between their popularity and Christianity. The Christian Post accurately posts my statement, but observe how it does not provide in the articles any of my reasons for making the statement:
“He further noted, “Books like Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ and Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ do not become best sellers in a society that understands what Christianity is all about.â€
If Mr. Cline were to ever contact me, I suggest this as one of the first points of clarification to seek with me. In his defense, in some of the other atheistic responses I’ve seen, similar leaps to judgment have been made. Certainly, at some point it would be reasonable for me to more clearly provide a ‘why.’ But Mr. Cline takes issue with my ‘why’ even though I do not actually have a ‘why’ recorded in the article. What then, is his source? It doesn’t seem to be me. That leaves few options. And so it goes…
“The only explanation that comes to mind for Anthony Horvath making these statements is the assumption that to understand Christianity is to accept and believe it.”
More nonsense. Here I would like to point out that a little investigation would have done wonders. For example, both here on this blog and on my forum I advocate adopting a definition of ‘Christianity’ that is propositional in nature. Take this thread as an example. What that expressly means is that in principle, anyone should be able to understand Christianity, whether they agree with it or not. As I am apparently uneducated pond scum when held up against Mr. Cline, let me support this view briefly using a Christian apologist that he has no doubt read, and in this way preserving me from accusations that I’m just pulling these ideas out of my rear. That apologist is not CS Lewis, as the reader might have instinctively assumed, but rather Dorothy Sayers, and I am going to quote out of her “The Mind of the Maker” which I found to be quite formative.
Allow me to quote extensively from her introduction, as I think what she says here speaks to my own position on a number of points. If anyone actually cares about what my own position is, of course. Here it goes, copy and pasted from here, thankfully sparing me five minutes of typing:
This book is not an apology for Christianity, nor is it an expression of personal religious belief. It is a commentary, in the light of specialised knowledge, on a particular set of statements made in the Christian creeds and their claim to be statements of fact.
It is necessary to issue this caution, for the popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling. Some time ago, the present writer, pardonably irritated by a very prevalent ignorance concerning the essentials of Christian doctrine, published a brief article in which those essentials were plainly set down in words that a child could understand. Every clause was preceded by some such phrase as: “the Church maintains”, “the Church teaches”, “if the Church is right”, and so forth. The only personal opinion expressed was that, though the doctrine might be false, it could not very well be called dull.
Every newspaper that reviewed this article accepted it without question as a profession of faith-some (Heaven knows why) called it “a courageous profession of faith”, as though professing Christians in this country were liable to instant persecution. One review, syndicated throughout the Empire, called it “a personal confession of faith by a woman who feels sure she is right”.
Now, what the writer believes or does not believe is of little importance one way or the other. What is of great and disastrous importance is the proved inability of supposedly educated persons to read. So far from expressing any personal belief or any claim to personal infallibility, the writer had simply offered a flat recapitulation of official doctrine, adding that nobody was obliged to believe it. There was not a single word or sentence from which a personal opinion could legitimately be deduced, and for all the article contained it might perfectly well have been written by a well-informed Zoroastrian.
I certainly recommend reading the rest of the preface, and also the essay she is referencing, “The Dogma is the Drama” which can be found in her collection of essays, “The Whimsical Christian.” Excellent, excellent stuff. All this to say that my own approach completely agrees with the sentiment expressed by “it might perfectly well have been written by a well-informed Zoroastrian.” So, no, it is not the case that the only explanation driving my arguments is that I think you have to be a practicing Christian in order to understand Christianity.
I think that Mr. Cline inadvertently let’s the cat out of the bag… “…the only explanation that comes to mind…” … but by ‘to mind’ I am sure he means his own mind. Perhaps a quick email to the Johnnymeister could have alerted to him to other possible explanations. Given my alignment here with Ms. Sayers, unless I’m an irrational freakazoid (you decide), I probably have some other explanations in mind. Only the inquisitive mind would find out.
Moving on.
We now move into his concluding paragraph which thankfully no longer explicitly mocks and ridicules me by name, but I am inclined to think that he still has me in mind. He says,
“I see this attitude often from both Christian and Muslim apologists who assume that because I’m an atheist, I must never have learned anything about their religion, read their holy books, read their arguments, etc.”
Well, I don’t make that assumption about Mr. Cline. Or any atheist, for that matter. You have to take these things on a case by case basis. While I have met atheists who fit into the category he described above, I’ve met many that don’t, as well. And I don’t feel that my generalization about the state of affairs is out of line, though I would grant that further substantiation should be forthcoming (remembering that I wasn’t really given the opportunity to give it). If one wanted to get a good idea, check out the nearly 1,000 reviews of Dawkins’s Delusion, nearly all positives by ‘free thinkers’ parroting and hyping the arguments of their mentor. And yet, I have yet to meet an educated Christian that views Dawkins’s book as possessing any kind of accurate representation of Christianity at all, and the book itself is riddled with all kinds of errors, some of which I document here. (note, I have since acquired the book Dawkins quoted from, and verified that he at least got his fellow right.)
Naturally, it is very important to atheists to think that they are rejecting Christianity’s actual positions. But Dawkins’s success illustrates how many don’t understand Christianity’s actual positions, believing Dawkins to have actually attacked them. (I’m starting to throw Cline some freebies, here, elaborating on questions he ought to have asked, but didn’t). So, here is a smattering of educated Christians taking issue with Dawkins’s grasp of Christianity, and if almost 1,000 parrots on Amazon.com aren’t enough to begin to substantiate what was admittedly a generalization, nothing is.
Here are some reviews, or references to reviews, and you will see that all of them take Dawkins to task for not grasping basic Christian theology. Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. And here. The sad reality is how many atheists applaud Dawkins. You could find their reviews fast enough. But surely after enough people have pleaded that they are being misrepresented it’s worth taking seriously? Isn’t it just possible, after persistent assertions that you aren’t listening that maybe you aren’t listening? It is at least worthy of a little introspection. But my accusation was not that the atheists aren’t listening, which if it was, that certainly can be perceived as insult. No doubt if that had been my accusation he would have been highly offended.
But my accusation was that the church itself has poorly communicated some of its most basic doctrines. How is it that by shouldering some of the blame for ourselves, Mr. Cline is still so offended? Is this a case where the Christian is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t? It’s an insult if its the atheist’s fault and it’s an insult if it’s the theist’s fault? Is that about right. There’s just no pleasing some people. That he was so grossly offended is clear, as he says,
“It is, in my opinion, the most extreme sort of arrogance and egotism that I ever encounter.”
Boy, am I glad he hasn’t singled me out in this paragraph or I’d really be annoyed at this point. 
Granted, Christian arguments may simply be unconvincing, and certainly there are atheists that actually comprehend those arguments and know the core doctrines, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t atheists that aren’t. If Mr. Cline believes that this is not the case and that we apologists don’t also have our own collection of anecdotes to fall back upon supporting our views- thus insinuating that all atheists are perfectly informed while their theistic counter-parts are blathering and ‘ridiculous’ entertaining claims that are not ‘remotely plausible,’ I believe the charge of ‘extreme arrogance and egotism’ is probably misapplied.
