This question came up on my Facebook feed and there was some lively discussion around the question. I added a comment and was taken to task for it so I thought I'd post the conversation here.
It will most likely ruffle feathers and that is ok, all I'm after is thoughtful, respectful ideas.
KYLIE:The way I think about it, God is love so if you make a choice to live with love, you will most likely go to heaven, no matter what your religion is. Jesus showed us what love is and it's probably easier to live with love if you know about Jesus but I don't think Christianity as we understand it is a prerequisite to heaven or a lot of people would be excluded
OTHER PERSON:
Sorry, Kylie, but this is completely against Christian and certainly Salvationist theology. Jesus said "I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me." There is but one way to Heaven and that is through faith in Jesus Christ.
Do you really think that if "as long as you live with love" was an option for getting into Heaven, that God would have asked His one and only son to endure what He did, as a sacrifice for you? For me?
KYLIE:
I think that our entry to heaven is in accordance with our understanding. I also know that the Holy Spirit speaks to people who have no, or different understanding of God. Or who know God but don't name Him as such.
Jesus was sacrificed for us but do we need to know his name in order to benefit from his sacrifice?
What if a person who doesn't know anything about God in the formalised way we have been taught, hears the Spirit, responds to the Spirit and continues to do that for their lifetime. Is that person excluded from God's presence for all eternity?
83 comments:
You both believe in heaven, but you didn't mention hell.
OTHER PERSON's belief was what I grew up with, only we didn't believe that anyone who wasn't a member of our small denomination could go to to heaven (meaning that all of them would go to hell), and we used the same argument that OTHER PERSON used, i.e. Jesus only died so that people who belong to HIS ONE TRUE CHURCH could go to heaven, and that anyone who sincerely sought God would be led to HIS ONE TRUE CHURCH , by which we meant our church. It didn't matter if a person lived in some place where the gospel was never preached, or in which our church had never been heard of, we believed that if that person sought Christ sincerely, Christ would lead him or her to us. The fact that nearly all of our membership lived in the Southeastern U.S. didn't phase. The fact that no record of our church could even be found before the mid 19th century didn't phase us, because when you have faith, it doesn't matter to you that your beliefs fly in the face of known reality.
Like my childhood church, OTHER PERSON has zero respect for other religions, and would probably be fine with destroying their art and their places of worship, but I don't know how she feels about people in churches other than her own, it being very common for Protestants to believe that Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and various other churches to be impure and therefore doomed to hell, and it's common for people in the condemned churches to feel that same about people who condemn them.
Love doesn't mean crap to people like OTHER PERSON, Christ's message not being about love to them but about purity, about getting doctrine right, which was the very thing that Christ condemned the Pharisees for. OTHER PERSON feels superior as she looks about her at the millions of people who don't accept her beliefs because, after all, God is going to take her to live with Him while condemning nearly everyone else who ever lived to hell.
More thoughts. I can see your point, Kylie, but as far as my understanding of the Bible goes, OTHER PERSON also has a point. While you're trying to reconcile your belief that a God of Love wouldn't deny heaven to people who are doing the best they can in life, OTHER PERSON is pointing to texts that very much seem to suggest that if you don't believe that Jesus is God's son and your savior, then you're cooked. You probably have the Unitarian Universalist Church down there. It is the result of a combination of two churches, the Universalist half of which believed that EVERYONE goes to heaven. After all, if Christ died for the sins of the world, does it make sense that the a person could nullify his sacrifice by not believing in him? By way of comparison, let's say that you're convicted of a crime and fined $10,000, and I come along and pay your fine, what you think or say about my action wouldn't matter to the court because your fine would have been paid.
I once took a semester long class that was entirely devoted to the different beliefs that people hold about the atonement, and while such things interest me, it also seems bizarre to me that people can take an ancient book that was written by unknown authors and that contains horribly contradictory beliefs about the nature and character of God, and use that book to say that, if you don't believe as I do, then God is either going to deny you a place in heaven, sentence you to everlasting agony in hell, or both. I mean, come on! We're talking eternity here, and we're talking about a really screwed-up species that is no better and no worse that what God himself made us to be. Even his first two people who lived in paradise and walked with him in the Garden of Eden "in the cool of the day," sinned the very time they were tempted to sin. THAT is our origin as a species, so does it really make sense that God would say, "Well, you people have failed me miserably, but I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll send my "only begotten son" to die as a blood sacrifice to myself so that I can forgive you. But wait, even then I won't forgive you unless you believe certain illogical things that there is no evidence for."
Way back all those years ago when I realized what the true of my religion was, even then I tried to hold onto it, to make sense of it, and that is why I took that course in college along with a number of other courses. I thought that if I could pray enough and learn enough, I could hang onto my faith. But I couldn't, and I truly don't know how anyone can. I can understand why they would want to, but how they actually do it, I have no idea. None. The Christian faith is to me like Alice going down the rabbit hole in that the nature of reality is completely abandoned, only in the Christian faith, what is left is called a divine mystery, or a divine reality, or ultimate reality, but why should anyone believe all this? THAT, no one has ever been able to explain to me in a way that I could understand it, and it's not that I don't want to understand or that I haven't made a very great effort to understand. What I see in you that is vastly superior to what I see in OTHER PERSON is that your bottomline is that God has to be good according to the human conception of goodness, whereas OTHER PERSON takes the position that God can do any horrible and unfair thing that God pleases and OTHER PERSON will call it good simply because if God does it. If OTHER PERSON got it into his or her head that God wanted Christians to torture and kill "heretics," then OTHER PERSON would applaud the torture and killing of heretics. I say this because history is full of Christians doing just that. You wouldn't do it though because you hold God to a higher standard than people like OTHER PERSON.
Wow, you sure have a lively comment stream here!
I'll eventually give you some replies! I'm a bit flat chat with other things!
I knew I wouldnt have a lot of readers here
"Christ's message not being about love to them but about purity, about getting doctrine right, which was the very thing that Christ condemned the Pharisees for."
You express that really well. I have never quite managed to put my finger on that attitude and you have got it on the knocker.
Your arguments make sense to me. Interestingly, this person went on to say that they feared my belief that people can get to heaven without acknowledging Jesus would make me complacent and not make any effort towards their eternal salvation. Maybe it was doctrine in the guise of concern, I don't know. It's interesting that they say they are concerned and you see them as completely disrespectful. Maybe it's possible that you are both right?
"it also seems bizarre to me that people can take an ancient book that was written by unknown authors and that contains horribly contradictory beliefs about the nature and character of God, and use that book to say that, if you don't believe as I do, then God is either going to deny you a place in heaven, sentence you to everlasting agony in hell, or both. I mean, come on! We're talking eternity here"
And this is the exact reason I believe that our traditional understanding of salvation must be wrong, maybe not entirely wrong but incomplete.....
"What I see in you that is vastly superior to what I see in OTHER PERSON is that your bottomline is that God has to be good according to the human conception of goodness, whereas OTHER PERSON takes the position that God can do any horrible and unfair thing that God pleases and OTHER PERSON will call it good simply because if God does it. "
If I believe that the human concept of goodness is modelled on or reflective of God's goodness (and it has to be) then I also must believe that God is conforms to the idea of goodness that He has given to us.
I do understand that morality is subject to education and cultural values etc but ethics are a more universal kind of concept and I think that a "good" person is recognisable in any culture and according to any religion.
I"m a bit tired and I could be going in circles but if God is the source of all goodness, the designer and creator of everything good, pure, beautiful and noble the God must conform to those ideals.
I understand that my ideas are not conforming to traditional teaching and don't conform to what the bible appears to say, I just can't reconcile a good God with one who doesn't give everyone an equal chance. I would prefer to try to live with a contradiction like that than to accept the idea of my God as completely arbitrary about these things and lets be real, why should an infinite and unknowable God conform to humanity's interpretation of His word?
"If I believe that the human concept of goodness is modelled on or reflective of God's goodness (and it has to be) then I also must believe that God is conforms to the idea of goodness that He has given to us."
I don't see our goodness in the Biblical deity; I instead see cruelty and hypocrisy in the Biblical deity. First there were the blood sacrifices he demanded, the wars and massacres he ordered, his sentencing people to death because they are gay, his prejudice toward non-Jews and women; and that's just in the OT. In the new, there's the story of him sending his Son (God has a son!) to die as the ultimate blood sacrifice to HIMSELF! I recently came across a school of Christianity called "Progressive Christianity," which, as near as I can determine, throws out the parts of the Bible that portray God in a way that is offensive to compassion, justice, openness, tolerance, and decency, and holds to what is left. I could go to a church that did this, but I would still be unable to believe that a good God presides over such a world as we inhabit, although I very much wish I could.
"It's interesting that they say they are concerned and you see them as completely disrespectful."
I know. It's the old "hate the sin but love the sinner" claim with the emphasis being on the hatre. At the same time, Christ himself heaped contempt upon those who didn't accept him, and Christ himself certainly seemed to say that the only way to get to heaven was through belief in him. But then how do we even know WHAT he said? I think that religious faith must be seen from the inside to be understood because if it could be understood from the outside, then I would understand it, and maybe even figure out a way to make it work for me so I wouldn't be perpetually tortured by wanting to believe that an ultimate purpose exists and that I won't lose the things that I love when I die, yet no being able to do so.
In my thoughts about Trump, I wonder if people's faith in him doesn't come from the same mindset that religion comes from because people like Marion continue to believe that he is good despite him being so overwhelming and demonstrably false and in all ways bad. For example, I've started (on my blog) comparing him and his followers to Nazis now that he and they are referring to desperate people invading our borders in terms that are reserved for rodents and diseases, which is exactly how Hitler referred to non-Aryans. Because I can't come up with a way to believe that decent people can talk like that, I'm rapidly losing the ability to distinguish between these modern Americans and those early twentieth century Nazis. I wish I didn't think about all this so much, but I figure that maybe I'll eventually find some way to come to peace with it all. At least that's my hope.
"I understand that my ideas are not conforming to traditional teaching and don't conform to what the bible appears to say, I just can't reconcile a good God with one who doesn't give everyone an equal chance."
cont.
As you know, I grew up in an ultra conservative political and religious environment, and when I reached my twenties and discovered a whole world of liberal thought (and, yes, doubt), I thought that I hadn't previously encountered, I thought it was all new. Thankfully, I discovered that liberalism in both politics and in religion have ancient roots, and my love affair with the writer Margaret Deland represented a further advancement in that direction because in her novel "John Ward Preacher," and in her second autobiography, I found in the words of this 19th century woman my own story.
As you know, but might could stand to remind yourself of from time to time, there are other ways of interpreting the Bible than what you regard as "traditional teaching," traditional teaching simply being what most of the believers with whom you associate hold to be true. There are also other ways of thinking about the place of other religions in the scheme thing, the most appealing to me being that all religions represent a more or less successful attempt to grasp ultimate truth, which is something that, by our very nature, none of us can have more than an inkling of. I'm not feeling well today, Kylie, so bear with me. What I'm trying to say is this. I don't think it's good for one's thoughts about the nature of God and the interpretation of his message to be static because it is surely true that the more a believer grows in wisdom and benevolence, the more her conception of what God will also grow in wisdom and benevolence. It's also true that the Bible itself calls for Christians to recognize the limits of the Christian conception of God (I Corinthians 13:12: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.")
Forgive me if I seem patronizing by saying things that surely seem obvious but are nonetheless easy to forget. Your faith isn't a place but a journey, and the fact that you recognize that you don't have many of the important answers is surely a good thing if only because it will keep you from looking down on others as well as from committing excesses of thought if not of action. You are my main link to religion as a virtue, and this isn't because you have the answers but because of how well you treat me. I see in you a genuinely good person who is doing her best to use religion as a vehicle for good in her life and in the lives of others. I just hope that you will never imagine that you have some responsibility for presenting me with something called "sound doctrine" as opposed to presenting yourself as an evolving person because, believe me, the former will never work, no matter how subtle, how loving, or however well-intentioned. More often than not, I surely make it hard for you, but I never mean to attack you as a person, and behind my attacks is a very great desire to discover that, despite all my doubts, the universe really is a good place and that all of these horrible things that happen here on earth have some transcendent purpose. Most religious people, it seems to me, abandon intellectual integrity.
I find it odd that, if believers see it in me, they never think it prudent to say it, and what I refer to is that if religion can be thought of as a wrestling with God in the same way that Jacob wrestled with God (meaning down in dirt for an entire night), then I am a very religious person given the direction of my thoughts. I well remember reading something by Isaac Singer, and being astounded by how much more deeply and honestly the Jews in his books talked about--and questioned--God than had any Christians I had ever known, it seeming to me that most Christians are scared to death of God. While they claim to have faith in his love, they act as if they're afraid they'll piss him off, either that or they really do regard themselves as possessing all of the important truths, and that there is therefore nothing left to be done but to fill in around the edges.
Snow, I have always regarded you as wrestling with God and you are right, I didn't think it right to say so.
The reason being, you say you are an atheist. If I were to say I think you are not an atheist but wrestling with God there are two possible effects that concern me:
You are the right person to identify yourself, it's not my place.
Saying such a thing has a religious arrogance to it, as though I have to bring your belief as close as possible to mine, as though it is not possible for a person to come to the conclusion of atheism but must fit some kind of Christian box.
Certainly in my experience, questioning of faith could be seen as failure by many and i have reminded friends that their faith is meaningless if it hasn't been examined. The Jewish people are much better at questioning and wrestling, indeed it is an essential part of their identity.
Is religion a set of dogmas or is it a search for some vague ultra reality that one can't avoid wanting to exist although he has no reason to think it does? You are right in that it's presumptuous to define a person in ways that he doesn't want to be defined, although if your God is the God of pantheism, then, by your definition, an atheist would be a theist.
I think I have a fairly good understanding who God is to you, but what I don't know is how certain you are of the existence of your God. Would you say you're at 95% certainty or would it be 45%? Maybe it's 33% on your bad days, but 90% on your good days? A similar thing is true of atheists. Few atheists would completely deny that something called God might exist, although it would be harder to put a % to "I don't believe it, but I could be wrong" kind of thinking." I can but say that when it comes to the belief in the God of the Bible, I would put my certainty that he doesn't exist at 100%, partly due to some of the objections you've mentioned (like his gross immorality in the Bible). But if God is the sum total of existence, then I believe in God, although I don't see what good it would do me to use the word.
I'm an animist at heart, meaning that I see consciousness everywhere. I've always felt this way, not because I can give a smidgen of evidence for it being true but because I am unable to believe that it's not true. Because I feel this way, I show greater respect than most people for all of the things of which our universe is composed. I've heard it said that we all have myths that we live by, and perhaps this is my myth. Would I really like to know if it's not true? Yes, I would, and this leads me to ask you: would you want to know if your God is unreal?
Peggy's father's preacher's wife had a cancer on her face. Instead of going to a doctor, she was confident that God had put it there in order to heal it through prayer as a sign to his people. So she prayed, and prayed, and prayed, before giving up and going to a doctor. Her nose and jaw had to be removed (she now "eats" through a feeding tube). She no longer goes to church or anyplace else that people can see her. Now, THERE was a woman who put her trust in God, although I don't know how she feels about God now. I suppose some would say that she failed the test, and that if she had persevered, then God really would have healed her. If there is a God, one thing I'm 100% sure of is that that God doesn't answer prayer. Never, ever, have I seen any prayer answered unless the prayer was for something that might reasonably have been expected to happen without prayer.
I wonder if Rhymes would be interested in this blog. We could ask him.
I think Rhymes will disagree with me but that's ok. He has actually visited this blog before but has probably forgotten it with it's low activity
It is now August 12th and I have just discovered this post and comment thread. Let me put in my two cents worth.
Rhymes agrees more with kylie and even at times with Snowbrush than with the hardline view of OTHER PERSON, though I understand where OTHER PERSON is coming from and have been there myself in days gone by. I am like Ralph Waldo Emerson, I contain multitudes. Some days I am an ultra-fundamentalist and other days I am a progressive liberal. I suppose that might make me what St. James calls "a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways; let not that man think he will receive anything from the Lord," but my faith journey has not been like a straight line from here to there, it is more like a beach ball with wonderful colors that you can't see all at one time, that you can grasp only a part of at a time, like the blind men and the elephant. If that makes sense, which it probably doesn't.
Here's the thing. I do believe Jesus was saying the truth when his words are quoted by John in chapter 14, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father but by me" but notice that the quote is not about placing one's faith in Jesus. It doesn't say "no man comes to the Father but by PLACING YOUR FAITH IN me", that is adding to the scriptures *which John called a definite no-no in Revelation) and projecting what we may have been taught onto the passage, making it say something it plainly does not. What I'm trying to say, and saying very badly, is my belief is that however a person gets to the Father, it will have been by Jesus even if the person doesn't think it was by Jesus or rejects the idea altogether. If he gets there, Jesus was the road, the way. You reach Miami by going south on I-95 and you reach San Diego by going south on I-5, but if you wind up in Miami you will not have been on I-5, you will have been on I-95 the whole time even if you thought you were not.
I'm sure I'm only convincing both of you of my advanced senility, and perhaps you are right. Then again, perhaps you are not. When all is said and done, kylie's way of love is closer to the mark, in my opinion, than OTHER PERSON's loveless, dogmatic approach.
"Some days I am an ultra-fundamentalist and other days I am a progressive liberal."
I too feel differently in different days, but I'm sad to report that I've found the churches to be more destructive than supportive, although I must admit that I haven't always made it easy for them, a thought which takes me back to the words of the prayer..."that I may seek to understand rather than to be understood."
"I suppose that might make me what St. James calls 'a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways; let not that man think he will receive anything from the Lord,...'"
I hadn't thought about this verse in years, and now that I do, it enrages me, not because some moron said it, but because it found a place in what is supposed to be Holy Writ. I regard it as the hateful and dismissive position of a rigid man who is devoid of compassion for anyone who struggles and, as a result of those struggles, thinks differently today than yesterday. These are the words of one who feels ever entitled to speak on God's behalf and to threaten those who disagree or vacillate with a God-created hell, yet St. James got up-close and personal with Jesus and the other apostles, and while I don't recall whether he performed miracles, he certainly saw them performed. Compared to THAT, what did the people he was writing to have, and what do we have? What if we had seen Jesus walking on water or feeding thousands out of a few loaves and fishes? On the one hand, Jesus condemned those who demanded miracles, but on the other hand, he and the apostles performed them freely "that you may believe." (I think I got the circumstances of the quotation correct.) Rhymes, if it didn't make you feel a little crazy trying to make sense of the Bible, I don't see how you could be the fair, honest, and compassionate person who I know and love. I referred to that biography of Bishop Pike. How that man struggled. He was incredibly flawed and hurtful, but how I wish I had known this man who was also in such deadly earnest and so unafraid to change.
Counting this one, you're up to 13 comments, Kylie. I'm certainly impressed.
"Rhymes agrees more with kylie and even at times with Snowbrush..."
"Even at times"? Does this mean that you're greatly astounded to observe that you agree with me "at times"? Does this mean that you regard me as having a poor track record of valid observations? In the words of All Consuming, "Ha, ha, ha, ha ha!"
Another thought, Rhymes...I think you and I should both start referring to ourselves in the third person around our wives and, after a week or so, check back in about it went. Kylie, you could be part of the experiment too, you know.
Comment the 14th.
"check back in about it went."
I left out the word "how" because I couldn't decide where to put it (no snide remarks, please).
Rhymes,
I like your beach ball analogy. Faith is a slippery thing to explain or describe, isn't it?
Some of my opinions on these kinds of matters are just that: opinions based on what I know of God, not really informed by any specific study or understanding of the Bible.
Having said that, my understanding of God, which informs my opinions, has some biblical basis.
I've often been tripped up an the "I am the way...." verse and have wondered how to reconcile it with a world full of people who have not been introduced to God or maybe know Him by another name. Your point about what it actually says and what we assume it to say is a very good one and clears up a lot of uncertainty.
Thanks for dropping by and waiting a very long time for my reply! I like the exchange of ideas and of course it's implications for expanding my thought processes
Snow,
I started referring to myself in the third person first with the dog. He seems to appreciate it, especially when I say "Kylie is going to get your breakfast" although I pronounce my name more as Kollie because it seems right to talk to a dog in a special dog voice. I'm not a mad dog lady, I swear, I just love my fur grandchild :)
How does Peggy like you referring to yourself in the third person?
There's an old proverb: Good things come to those who wait. I just knew you would get around to commenting again on this post eventually, and my hopes were not misplaced. Thank you for proving me right!
My mum uses that saying often!
I came round hoping you had something new up, although your latest post on your other blog could qualify for this blog as well.
Thanks for supporting this blog, Snow!
"Thanks for supporting this blog, Snow!"
You're welcome, but is your insistence that I tithe to it really Biblical? Surely you know that I wouldn't complain about the money I've been sending if it were all my money, but half of the money I've been sending belongs to Peggy, and Peggy says that it's not only not Biblical, it wouldn't matter if it were Biblical since we're both atheists. That woman can think circles around me.
You know that God blesses those who give, right? and the more you give, the more you will be blessed, right? and tithing is pretty much the base rate of giving?
so, you know, if you give more you will be blessed more! i would think that a 25% rate would result in unparalleled blessing.....maybe you could become rich
.....you could be healed
......the sky is really the limit but brother, you can't be mean!
Peggy may be able to think circles around you but giving isn't a thinking thing, t's a heart thing!
You have a heart big as old Texan, doncha?
"if you give more you will be blessed more! i would think that a 25% rate would result in unparalleled blessing.....maybe you could become rich"
There have been churches like the Worldwide Church of God that have imposed double and triple tithes. Would it be true, do you think, that tithing Christians give little if anything to organizations other than their churches because nothing in the Bible suggests that God would reward them for doing so? I've also wondered why tithing is considered fair since rich people are giving money that they don't miss, and poor people are giving money that they need for essentials.
Here's something else that I wonder about. If self-interest is the raison d'être for religion, what would you do if it should be proven that Christians go to hell and atheists to heaven? Would you say, as did Job, that "I will serve him even if he slay me."
Gee, Kylie, hard to imagine that it has been more than a year since you posted here, and I, for one, very much regret that .
Hi Snow,
I'm kind of disappointed too!
I just don't know what to post. Some of my thoughts on my own "faith journey" ( I hate that term but can't think of a better one) are inspired by my negative reactions to other people. I sometimes find myself wondering if they understand anything of the God they worship and imagine myself to be a little more enlightened and of course there's nothing humble in that kind of thinking so I have proved myself wrong :)
I would not be surprised, we are not saved by what we believe, we are saved by God's eternal mercy by his sacrificing His Son for our sin. He chooses, pays debt, regenerates whom he will, remember the thief on the cross.
"we are not saved by what we believe, we are saved by God's eternal mercy by his sacrificing His Son for our sin."
So, atheists are saved?
I don’t think it’s possible for only Christians to go to heaven. Then what about the billions of people that never heard of Christianity? (Such as Native America before Columbus)
to snowbrush, no, only those given the spirit are saved.. but are you saved because you believe or do you believe because you are saved? Faith is a fruit of the spirit, without it you cannot be saved. faith (belief) is a fruit of the spirit you must be given the spirit before you believe, this can happen at anytime time as the spirit moves at His will, when you hear the gospel you respond because of having the fruit of faith. Another way to understand is to search the five points of Calvinism.
Snow,
I suspect you are well aware of the ideas ming is espousing.
I dont think salvation is a simple matter of being "chosen". There has to be agency on our part but must it take the form of faith in Christ? I suspect it's much broader than that: living by loving principles, choosing to care when it is costly, openness to growth.....
Akasha,
I agree. There has to be opportunity for all.
Thanks for visiting and commenting
ming,
thank you for visiting and commenting!
It's lovely to have new people read this rarely updated blog
I too once thought I had "accepted" Jesus and did my part; If this were true, then I share in God's glory by adding to his works. This then is not mercy, it become a mercenary deal.
Ming, I'm not suggesting that we gain our place in the kingdom through good works.
I am suggesting that the atheist or the person who has never heard of Jesus might find favour with God simply by an attitude of humility and love.
Obviously we cannot know who will reach heaven but I don't think an infinite and loving God would be entirely self centred about it.
At the same time, we cannot be saved by Gods choice, it must be our choice, I think that is clear
As offensive as they will surely be to the Christians who read this blog, the questions that I am about to ask are honest ones that go to, what is for me, the heart of the matter. Even so, they represent only the merest beginning of the questions that I have asked, and they are not even the most significant of those questions. They are simply the most relevant to the topic of salvation. As a result of having started down this very road of inquiry at age eleven, I spent years in abject terror because although I could not avoid asking--within the silence of my head--questions that made it impossible for me to love the god of the Bible until I found answers to them, I realized that they surely qualified as the New Testament sin of apostasy, a sin for which the blood of Jesus was inadequate to atone.
...Christians commonly believe that Jesus died in expiation for our sins, but what does this really mean? Does it mean that he suffered the exact amount that everyone of us put together would have suffered had we gotten the punishment we deserve? Or does it mean that Jesus' suffering, being of infinite merit, didn't need to add up to the total amount of suffering that we would have suffered? However, if the latter were true, why was it necessary for him to die such a horrific death? In fact, why was it necessary for him to suffer AT ALL beyond the sorrow he felt over our alienation from our Creator? Furthermore, if Jesus died in complete expiation for our sins, why isn't everyone on earth--even atheists--saved? Does God's demand that we believe in him not suggest that the merit of Jesus' suffering was insufficient to atone for non-belief? That aside, why did Jesus or anyone else need to suffer, that is, why couldn't God simply do that which he demands of us, which is to forgive freely? Was it because his demand for justice required suffering, but if so, how could the suffering of the innocent Christ atone for the sins of our guilty species? And if faith is essential for salvation, how is faith to be defined, and how much faith is required? Is it adequate to simply say "I believe in Jesus," and one is saved no matter how much evil one has done and will continue to do, and if a person dies on a day when his or her faith is low, will that person then be lost by virtue of not having died on a day when his faith was high? Or are both right belief, right dogma, and right living, all essential, in which case Protestantism is wrong about salvation being by faith alone?
My comment is too lengthy to fit into one frame...
...Another very large problem for me is that if God is a God of justice who has cursed the earth because our species sinned, why does he allow innocent children and animals to suffer? Also, if in the whole of human history, only one person has ever been able to live a blameless life, how can it be said that anyone has free will, yet if we don't have free will, how can we be held responsible for our bad behavior? Ming made reference to the five points of Calvinism, which holds that every last person who ever lived or ever will live has been consigned to spend eternity in either heaven or hell from before the world was created. In relation to this, I would refer Ming to Margaret Deland's book John Ward Preacher, which you, Kylie, might recall was the first thing I read by her.
When I consider the named characteristics of the Biblical deity, I--quite literally--can't find even a single reason to conclude that he is morally superior to Satan, although, unlike Satan, he has the power and willingness to torment us for all eternity, not for being LESS than he made us to be, but for being exactly WHAT he made us to be. The question that this raises for me is that of how anyone can worship such a deity. Assuming that one sincerely believes in "him" (with the exception of the genderless Holy Spirit, the remaining two-thirds of the deity are male, although how this is possible, I can't imagine), I can well understand being afraid NOT to worship him, yet to worship him out of fear alone--which was the sole feeling that I had for him after age eleven--would no more qualify as worship as would pretending to feel affection for any infinitely malevolent creature.
You are right you don't worship this God, however if one tiny grain of sand moves without Gods degree, He is no longer God. He knows his sheep and they hear his voice. One way of explanation, My child is at the swimming pool for a day long swim, because I love my child, I prepare lunch for her, with all the good nutrition she needs, drive to the pool, visit with her as she lunches, gather my basket and leave; now am I this HORRID person because I did not bring lunch to everyone or am I a loving parent to my child. Jesus paid the ultimate price for sin for his sheep.
Two points made by rhymeswithplague and snowbrush.
We are saved by faith. By placing ALL our faith in Christ's finished work on Calvary.
Jesus got what he did not deserve, my sin.
I get what I don't deserve, his perfect righteousness, imputed to me.
There is but ONE mediator between sinful mankind and God: Jesus.
Do not think in terms of being ultra-fundamentalist. This is the media's label and the media is pagan, with contempt for Biblical faith.
Follow the Biblical truths rediscovered in the Reformation:
Sola Scriptura. Solus Christus. Sola Gratia. Sole Fide. Soli Deo Gloria.
Liberal Christianity is another religion as Gresham Machen said.
Yes, they are nice people. So are Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons.
Bishop Pike denied the Gospel, and dabbled in spiritualism, an abomination.
Read Francis Schaeffer, who met Pike, pleading with him to return to truth.
Before his crucifixion Jesus said he did NOT pray for the world (Gospel of St. John) but only for those the Father had given him.
Predestination runs all through Scripture.
God did not choose the Jews because they were lovable, they were lovable because God chose them.
Sound doctrine is not being taught in liberal and progressive churches.
Pope Francis in Rome has departed from the Gospel, pushing a universalist One World faith.
We have no Biblical warrant for saying there will be non-Christians in heaven.
I have a brother who rejected the Gospel and died: I do not know where he is.
Listen to *The Way of Salvation* and *The Nature of Apostasy 1 of 5* by Arthur W Pink (YouTube). Read his biography by Iain H Murray (Banner of Truth).
Pink died in 1952 and said the faith was in ruins, at least in Britain.
Listen to Martyn Lloyd-Jones, David Pawson, John MacArthur, John Piper (YouTube) who all preach Sola Scriptura.
Listen to Dr. Peter Jones: The Gnostic Gospel (YouTube) about the deception of New Age spirituality, magic, the goddess, ecumenicism, gay marriage, and now the ayahuasca drug.
John Haggerty
John Haggerty, Rhymes is a conservative Methodist, and I'm an atheist, so I suspect that he is surprised as I that you would view us as sharing similar theological views.
If the imagined truths of the Bible were as obvious as you make them out to be, there wouldn't be tens of thousands of churches, each of which teach that they are right and everyone else is wrong.
In my view, the God in whom you believe deserves to be cursed and spat upon rather than worshiped. It ever surprises me that whereas I insist that God, if God existed, would be good, millions of Christians envision God as being, if God were a man, evil.
God WAS spat upon and mocked and cursed, Snowbrush.
The Jewish priests had Jesus flogged and crucified even though it had been foretold in Isaiah, 800 years before.
A friend of mine, an atheist like you, asked me what we owe to Judaeo-Christianity.
Everything, I said.
Outside of Judaism most people were slaves, they weren't even seen as individuals.
Christianity said we had souls, that God cared about us even in this fallen world.
Read an objective work of history, Tom Holland's *Dominion - How the Christian Revolution Remade the World* now in paperback. It is entertaining and surprising.
The many denominations saddens me more than anyone.
Most of those denominations proclaim that Jesus of Nazareth is Lord, Saviour and King.
In churches I have met men and women of all ages and backgrounds. Many of them have had hard lives, bad health, disability, abuse, poverty, loneliness, mental illness.
Two young women I know were on heroine. *I needed a Saviour,* they told me.
I was only converted at 57 and it took 18 months of ups and downs. The world looked more terrible after conversion than before. I saw the monstrosity of sin from which Jesus Christ, true man and true God, came to save us.
Even the atheist has to live in a cruel, unjust, sinful world, Snowbrush.
But without hope and without Christ.
John
If I can be allowed an addendum.
I have read your blog for the first time, Snowbrush.
As a cat person I liked your latest post.
Then I chose a past post at random: *Reflections on a broken back* etc.
You have been in the wars; I who have only known good health, extend my sympathy.
Now I shall read your back posts.
I enjoy reading about plants, ecology, animals, and wild places.
My regards, and wishes for a happy festive season.
Yours, John.
"God WAS spat upon and mocked and cursed, Snowbrush."
That was his plan so that the third of him that couldn't forgive freely but required a blood sacrifice could forgive our faulty species for being as he made us to be, this in the full knowledge that we would turn out exactly as we did, and he would have to send his innocent son to die for us. Or at least that's the version of events that works for you, and which--if I understand you correctly--the acceptance of which is essential for salvation, although there are maybe ten other interpretations. I took a class called "Theories of the Atonement" that covered all of them, but that was fifty years, and I've forgotten most of what I learned.
"A friend of mine, an atheist like you, asked me what we owe to Judaeo-Christianity."
Do you mean that he's an actual friend rather than a friendly acquaintance? How's that friendship working for the two of you? I ask because the Bible discourages alliances with nonbelievers, because I assume that you think he's under the wrath of God, and I further assume that he thinks you're deluded, so I'm wondering what common ground your relationship is based upon. As for what our species owes to Christianity, I would say some magnificent art and music, the occasional transcendent church service, and a few exemplary lives, yet these things are greatly outweighed by Christianity's wars, murders, tortures, bigotry, persecutions, tribalism, blatant hypocrisy, mistrust of science, anti-intellectualism, the election of Donald Trump (who even now has the overwhelming support of America's evangelicals and conservative Catholics), and so on.
cont.
"Even the atheist has to live in a cruel, unjust, sinful world, Snowbrush. But without hope and without Christ."
I "discovered" Christ around age eleven, and began to lose him about the same time because, upon reading the Bible, I couldn't understand how the actions of its perpetual angry, jealous, childish, narcissistic, vindictive, and self-contradictory deity were superior to those of its devil. I concluded that my puzzlement and the anger issuing from it meant that I had committed the unpardonable sin, and for years afterwards, my life was a hell on earth. In my twenties, I gradually began to lose confidence that God even existed, and as hard a road as atheism has been, it is better than living with the fear of everlasting condemnation. That said, I have known many atheists and many Christians in my life, and I've not observed that one group is less happy. While this might seem counter-intuitive since the latter group has heaven to look forward to while the former only has death, upbringing and personality play a larger part than belief, not everyone is invested in living forever, and it's also true that the Biblical heaven is portrayed as a place that sounds like an unending church service with no explanation of why the Lord of the Universe would even want to be the focus of the worship of underlings. Also, I am free from the fear of an angry deity that made my life miserable from my early childhood through much of my twenties, plus I've observed that Christians are forever having struggle to believe, and enduring the occasional crisis of faith (a crisis that they're expected to move through quite rapidly in order to maintain the acceptance of their fellows), which I interpret to mean that they're very much in doubt about whether they really do believe. In regard to this, I think that, for most people--theist and atheist--belief/non-belief exists along a continuum, with most believers--in their heart of hearts--entertaining some doubt, and most atheists leaving room for some possibility that there is SOMETHING out there. For me, the core is that if there is SOMETHING out there, I am quite certain that it is superior to the Trump-like deity of the Bible, and I seriously doubt that it is a metaphysical entity of any sort.
"I enjoy reading about plants, ecology, animals, and wild places."
I too enjoy these things. Visit anytime.
Kylie, I think you're okay with me carrying on like this on your blog, so let me know if you're not.
Dear Snowbrush:
You took the path of wisdom and not bitterness; and as you have observed, we have to choose one or the other, more or less continuously. You learned this by hard experience, no doubt, and your sources of spiritual knowledge came from a wide source, I should imagine.
Doctrinal Christianity (rather than Gnostic) is subject to scrutiny as much as Islam.
I read New Testament scholars before I discovered the names of Reformed theologians such as A.E. Hodge, Benjamin Warfield, Gresham Machen etc. Please watch YouTube. *Dr Peter Jones: The Gnostic Gospel.* Dr. Jones has a theory about where religion is going.
You write about theories of the Atonement. I can honestly say I came to them with a fresh mind, informed by textual analysis and all too aware of the 19th Century Higher Critics.
It was a surprise to discover that the above theologians had been there before me, and had resolved most of the problems, in as much as they can be resolved.
God was jealous of his people but was not always angry. Ezekiel was heartbroken when he saw the Jews had returned to idolatry. The Lord took away their hearts of stone and gave them a heart of flesh. It is questionable whether the genocidal passages in the O.T. (terrifying as they can be) are in literal truth genocidal. Nobody can justifying the killing of children. It is striking Jesus never quoted from such passages when he preached.
There will be no churches in heaven because God himself will be with us. As Paul said, *to be with Christ is far better.* Here is what I puzzle over. If the unregenerate do not like Jesus now, will they like him any better when they stand before the judgment seat?
I am sorry that some years were difficult because you were tormented by hell. Valerie Tarico wants churches closed which preach hell. I do not. There are sinners who will only come to Christ because they are afraid of death and judgment. Karl Barth has one entry in the Encarta Book of Quotations: *Man is not good. Man has never been good. Man will never be good.* Read Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelago* or any book on Stalin or Pol Pot.
Many churches in my city are now pubs. On Sunday evening they thump out with rock music. We are awash in a sea of alcohol and drugs. Family breakdown. Violence against women.
Our patron saint, Mungo, baptised the Druids in a stream up near the present Glasgow Cathedral. Mungo wrote our motto: Lord, let Glasgow flourish through the preaching of Thy Word and the praising of Thy Name. Now this has been reduced to Let Glasgow Flourish.
The friend I mentioned is an old hippy. He is still into the occult, Tibetan Buddhism, goddess worship, the esoteric, magic. His wife does charitable work and we share an interest in poetry and the visual arts. He often quotes Alister Crowley.
Yes, he is a friend, but his mind is closed. I gave him a copy of John Murray's short book, *Redemption Accomplished and Applied* : Tom said he couldn't read that sort of thing. Murray was a classical scholar, lost an eye in WWI, and wrote lucid prose. Tom simply dislikes Christianity. Which is why I think of him as an old hippy.
*Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?*
2 Corinthians 6:14.
The truth Paul expressed is that we cannot be JOINED to unbelievers in spiritual activity. My sister asked me why I do not become a Buddhist. I suggested she read Paul's letter to the Romans, particularly the first chapter. In destroying its Christian foundation I believe the West is committing suicide. The burning of Notre Dame was symbolic.
Yours sincerely, John.
Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.
Galatians 3: 13
But God demonstrates his own love towards us, in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5: 8
friend I mentioned is...still into the occult, Tibetan Buddhism, goddess worship, the esoteric, magic."
He doesn't sound like an atheist to me, so I'm wondering if he calls himself that, or if it is your designation.
"Yes, he is a friend, but his mind is closed. I gave him a copy of John Murray's short book, *Redemption Accomplished and Applied* : Tom said he couldn't read that sort of thing."
Being open doesn't mean living in perpetual indecision, nor does it require that one read every book that a believer might recommend, especially one that, judging from its title, would only interest someone who had a baseline belief in the concept of redemption with the context of the Christian religion. My rule of thumb is that if I nod off just from reading the title (*Redemption Accomplished and Applied* had this effect), the book itself probably wouldn't interest me.
I went into atheism kicking and screaming, so along the way, I read a great many books of Christian apologetics, and I found them so lacking that I came away from them--as I did from my college classes in Bible and theology--with more doubt than I went in, so I've gone on to what I consider more interesting, if not productive, reading. I also came away from them wondering why Christians find the writings of, say, a C.S. Lewis so darn impressive, his arguments being utterly unconvincing to anyone who doesn't already agree with him.
When you quote Bible verses to me, I view it as an example of the logical fallacy of "begging the question." To give an example of this, if you said, "Steve was at the party," and I asked how you knew, and you said, "Steve told me," that wouldn't constitute proof. So it is with quoting the Bible to prove the Bible, especially if the person you're quoting it to has a low opinion of its veracity. I understand that, to you, the voice of God speaks so strongly through the Bible that it's impossible to understand why His voice isn't obvious to even a decided non-believer as long as that non-believer is open to its truth, but when I read the Bible, what I find are a few beautiful and poignant books and passages with the rest of it being a bizarre mess. By the way, there is even reason to believe that the average atheist already knows more about the Bible than does the average Christian: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/21/among-religious-nones-atheists-and-agnostics-know-the-most-about-religion/).
I think that a difference between us is that I don't view you as a destructive person, and so I don't much care what you believe. While I can enjoy discussing religion with you--as I hope you can with me--my doubts and questions are so numerous and go so deep that if your goal is to win me to Christ, you're wasting your time.
Tom says he is an atheist. He describes himself as an armchair occultist and has a large library of rare books on occult themes.
He meditated with Sangharakshita (Dennis Lingwood) and under his advice I purchased this English Buddhist's book, *The Rainbow Road* which I learned much from.
Buddhism does not incline Tom to believe in a transcendent deity. He is a 33rd degree Freemason and Masons acknowledge a Grand Architect: he said he was always sceptical about the Grand Architect, and doesn't go to his Lodge now.
I thought John Murray's book might interest Tom because he reads widely on spiritual matters; and because Murray is from the Scottish Highlands, fought in the trenches, lost an eye, lost his two brothers, and took a First in Classics at Glasgow University. No, Tom wasn't curious. I have no time to waste so I did not bring the up book again.
C.S. Lewis the critic is more impressive than the Christian apologist. Even as a critic Lewis could not interest himself in James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence which Frank Leavis did to his credit. The two men met at Cambridge (when Oxford did not give Lewis the professor's chair) but did not have a lot to say to each other.
I have never employed the Bible in verification claims and I don't hold to the ontological proofs, does anyone? Goals are not my business and I have no power to persuade anyone about anything.
Like you my questions are many and my doubts were deep enough to take me to Spinoza, Hume, Marx, Freud, Jung, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Daniel Dennett.
I am glad you do not see me as destructive. Like the Roman you are relaxed about what others choose to believe. Thanks for your interest. I look forward to your Snowbrush posts.
John
Snow,
I have in the past deleted a comment or two on my blogs because I felt that there was too much potential for hurt.
These days I would be more of the mind that if someone is going to be super nasty, their target should be aware of that.
Anyways, all that is just to say, you're welcome to comment as you wish :)
"He is a 33rd degree Freemason and Masons acknowledge a Grand Architect"
He's a friend of Hiram Abiff as the saying goes. Perhaps you know that the basic unit of Masonry is the Blue Lodge in which all Masons must maintain a lifelong membership in order to belong to the optional York Rite or Scottish Rite. The 33rd Degree is a Scottish Rite award for exemplary service, the 32nd degree being its highest earned degree. I went through the York Rite (I was also a long-time member of the IOOF), yet I no longer remember how many degrees the York Rite has because they are broken down over several subordinate York Rite Lodges (one having the cool name of "the Cryptic Masons"). Also, as you might know, Masons rely heavily on geometrical and architectural metaphors (they maintain a crucial and elaborate legend about the construction of Solomon's temple), so although they speak of a Grand Architect, they place no requirement upon how this is to be interpreted just so long as some version of a deity is accepted. This brings up the question of why, if something has to be believed without the least regard to its meaning, what, then, is the good of believing it. Like AA and the American Boy Scouts, they seem to say, "You have to believe in something bigger than yourself, but we won't presume to tell you what this means." This came to bother me to the point that I eventually left Masonry because while I appreciated their openness, the implication was that they weren't really open to an avowed atheist. I know of a French Masonic lodge that does openly welcome atheists, but then I don't live in France.
Kylie, I don't exaggerate my thoughts and feelings. As to whether my thoughts and feelings are worth sharing is a matter of opinion. Christianity is typically presented as an entirely admirable system by its defenders, the implication being that its non-admirable aspects are a perversion. Yet, I initially turned against Christianity as a result of the Bible itself, for example, the God-ordered genocides in the Hebrew Bible, followed by the New Testament's exclusionary message of Christ, accompanied by threats of eternal fiery damnation for anyone who doesn't toe the line. When I, while still in my teens, began to express these concerns within my church--a place where I stupidly believed myself to be loved and therefore safe--I was quickly shunned as a heretic by people who had been my lifelong friends. John speaks of liberal Christianity as a falling away from the true message of salvation, but what I see in liberal Christianity is all that is good in Christianity, for it was the liberals who embraced me when my conservative friends shunned me, and it was they who--150 years ago--taught that the Bible is a human book filled with human errors, and that we must therefore hold to the good and shun the evil. It was also they who marched for Civil Rights in the American South in the 1960s and for Black Lives Matter today, even while conservative Christians blame the poor for their poverty, and the oppressed for their oppression. It is liberal Christians who oppose America's endless wars, who support the rights of women, workers, homosexuals, prisoners, immigrants, atheists, other species, and the environment; even as conservative Christianity countenances war and tribalism, embraces materialism, defends an oppressive status quo, and talks endlessly and with self-satisfaction of "being saved," a state that will someday allow them to walk the same streets of gold in the next world that their savior taught them to despise in this world. Kylie, most Christians in America are evangelicals, fundamentalists, or conservative Catholics, and it was they who put Trump in office, and it is they who continue to support him in full knowledge of what he is. After four years of Trump, all of the anger that I ever felt toward conservative Christianity is as nothing to what I feel now for I have determined that conservative religion is far worse than even I imagined it to be, and no doubt some of that anger appears in my comments. Yet, I know that you, and Rhymes, and John, are conservative Christian, and therefore my generalizations hardly apply to everyone. Even so, I grew up in ultra-fundamentalist church and in an area in which most aspects of life were under the oppressive control of conservative Christians, so while my generalizations don't apply to every member of every conservative church, they still do apply.
Dear Snowbrush:
I was interested to hear that you went through the York Rite. I did not know the 33rd degree was for exemplary service. The most famous Scottish mason was Robert Burns:
I suspect it was fellowship, dinner and a whisky that appealed most to the Ayrshire lad o' airts. My father had friends who were in the Craft, but he did not like the secrecy.
Once Tom and I were discussing the Sirius mystery and how African tribesmen knew about this star. He pointed up to the night sky and said that the ceiling of the Masonic temple reflected the constellations. As above, so below. He liked the illumination that comes from Mystery Religions. I enjoy epiphanies myself, Joycean or Blakean, so I understand that part only too well. Tom laughs to hear W.B. Yeats is my favourite poet, hardly a Christian.
Are French masons not wiser in accepting members who deny theism? There was a Japanese anthropologist who wondered why Europeans did not go to church. He said the important thing was to participate in the ritual. Believing or not believing in doctrine was irrelevant, he stated. Isn't there a story by Borges about this? Something about a leopard disturbing a religious ceremony until the leopard becomes incorporated into the ritual. Borges said he liked Chesterton, but said Chesterton was a fool to become a Catholic.
Enlightenment or illumination, without dogma, is the appeal of New Age whether Wicca, Tarot, or I-Ching. I watched a YouTube video of a young European woman who no longer takes ayahuasca. Listening to what she had put her body and mind through made me feel sad. The writer Graham Hancock said he is now under the guidance of a female ayahuasca divinity.
If my theology is conservative it does not mean that I am politically conservative, although the battle lines are being drawn in moral and cultural terms. One of my favourite writers, James Purdy, was an American outsider all his life.
See online:
*Christmas with James Purdy* Lemda Library.
*I'm not a gay writer I'm a monster: How James Purdy Outraged America.*
The Guardian 2019.
Best, John.
Correction.
Christmas with James Purdy: Lambda Literary.
Purdy's Collected Stories have been published in one volume.
In spite of being unable to get published in his last years, Purdy's novels were lavishly praised by Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Susan Sontag.
John
"Once Tom and I were discussing the Sirius mystery and how African tribesmen knew about this star."
The annual appearance of Sirius heralded agricultural abundance in some lands and drought in others.
"Are French masons not wiser in accepting members who deny theism?"
One French lodge, anyway. Every Grand Lodge is a law unto itself, so while Grand Lodges sometimes refuse to associate with other Grand Lodges (when I was a Mason, a stink developed between the Grand Lodges of Oregon and Idaho), there is no Masonic body that rules over them all, and some nations--France being an example--have more than one Grand Lodge. What such a dissociation means is that if, for example, a member of the non-theistic French grand lodge visited America, he wouldn't be welcome to attend a meeting that was held under the jurisdiction of any of the fifty American grand lodges because they wouldn't recognize him as even being a Mason. As for the theistic requirement, Masons maintain harmony by avoiding the subjects of religion and politics within their physical lodge buildings, particularly during lodge meetings. As for the secrecy, to my knowledge it is purely ritualistic secrecy because I certainly never encountered what one might call higher wisdom. My own reason for joining was for the ritual, the brotherhood, and because they made me work hard on my degrees before I won the honor of being called a Master Mason. I met some fine men in the Masons and also in the Odd Fellows. My taste ran more toward the latter lodge, partly because I'm not much on dressing up, and the Masons do love their tuxedos (it is common for the Worshipful Master of a lodge to conduct meetings under cover of a top hat). Another reason is that some of the Masonic degrees contain parts that I consider highly offensive in that they are bloodthirsty. My Masonic lodge was primarily composed of railroad workers, lodges often consisting of members of members of a given trade or profession. However, it is my understanding that, in early America, Masons tended to be primarily of the owner class and Odd Fellows of the working class. Both lodges are rapidly dying out.
cont.
"There was a Japanese anthropologist who wondered why Europeans did not go to church. He said the important thing was to participate in the ritual. Believing or not believing in doctrine was irrelevant, he stated."
I came across this view some years ago, and was immensely drawn to it. I've even read that equating faith with the assent to dogma (instead of to practice) is relatively modern. I left the fundamentalist Church of Christ (in which I sometimes preached) when I was eighteen, and joined the Episcopal Church when I was 22 because I had imagined that I could recapture my belief in God by expanding my conception of what God is. I failed in that, yet I continue to love the church's beautiful buildings and ancient rituals, and I am open about my atheism with such people as are important to me. So far, two priests know, and both are strongly supportive of my attendance. So, while I'm adamantly opposed to dogmatic Christianity, I see a great deal of good in liberal Christianity. You mentioned Bishop Pike as someone in need of conversion. For all his flaws, Pike was the man most responsible for opening the Episcopal priesthood to women. If you have a low opinion of Pike, then your estimation of Episcopal Bishop John Spong would drop right through the floor because, while he denies being an atheist, I can't understand his reason for such a denial. If I were decades younger, I would seriously consider becoming a Reconstructionist Jew (the founder of which was an atheist) or a Reformed Jew because both have beautiful rituals and both are even more accepting of atheists than are most Episcopalians (I would be unwelcome in some Episcopal parishes), being strongly supportive of the view that the important thing isn't what one believes, but what one does. When I attend the local Reconstructionist synagogue, I sit in the back because I know I'm going to cry, almost sob at the breathtaking beauty of the service. Upon my first attendance, I sat in the front, and soon realized that doing so had been a mistake because I never dreamed that a worship service could be so moving. So here you have it. On the one hand, I'm an atheist, but on the other I built backyard altars as a child, and I still have it in me to be deeply moved by ritual. One other thought in line with all this is that believers such as I understand you to be speak of the freedom from works that is to be had through faith in the atoning blood of Christ. Yet, for someone like myself, works is possible, faith impossible because no one can believe something that he regards as untrue, yet for me, the idea of an atoning blood sacrifice is not only untrue, but unworthy of God.
John, I'm impressed by the breadth of your interests and learning, although I'm finding it hard to reconcile your current expressions of openness with your initial opposition to heresy. Are you simply following St. Paul's example of being "all things to all men, that I might by all means save some," which would be consistent with your pragmatic belief about the advisability of preaching hellfire and damnation?
Dear Snowbrush:
The appearance of Sirius is troubling.
*The Sirius Mystery Revisited: Professor Robert Temple.* YouTube.
I am rereading a novel by Randolph Stow, Visitants (1979): the inhabitants of a remote island in Papua New Guinea have taken to destroying their villages and crops, a cargo cult is celebrated, and there is talk of visitors from the stars. Stow was born in Western Australia in 1935, studied anthropological linguistics, and was a patrol officer in New Guinea. He settled in coastal England. His mysterious novel is told in various voices.
Born in 1951, I grew up with an awareness of space travel. Kenneth Arnold saw the first UFO flying over the Pacific Northwest, and this was reflected in my comic books, movies, television. As was the Cold War and the atom bomb. Both the numinous and the apocalypse!
You found no higher wisdom in the lodge, alas. The liturgical year in the Episcopal Church was similar to my Roman Catholic childhood. It is what I miss in Reformed churches.
My opinion of James Pike and Bishop Spong is not low. Christian humanism and occasional church-going got me through my thirties and forties. Soteriology did not interest me then.
While reading a book about the battle of Kursk I began to think about the need (in me) for supernatural faith: Doctrine. Karl Barth was a discovery. Barth broke from liberalism during his post-1918 crisis. Frequently I commend liberal churches to my own brethren. *They are welcoming while we frighten people off,* I tell them.
John Piper said no one rebukes him for the social Gospel, but if he preaches one sermon on hell, there is always opposition. Liberals were behind reform movements like Civil Rights, but Chuck Colson had a prison ministry, and there are Evangelical churches in the heart of Manhattan, like James Wilkerson's. Black churches in London are very strong in doctrine.
Hauerwas said he is neither a fundie nor a liberal.
*I became a theologian because I could not be saved*: The Conversion of Stanley Hauerwas, Transpositions.
*Why community is dangerous.* An interview with Stanley Hauerwas. Both online.
Martin Buber said Jews would one day recognise Jesus as prophet, but never as *Messiah come*, yet he died before the Messianic Jesus movement in the USA and Israel.
I am not here following Paul of Tarsus, because I take your rejection of the atonement seriously. Paul is for another blog.
Vlasta, a Czech woman of my acquaintance, who hands out Bible tracts in our city streets, brought me to a new understanding of Paul. Tom Wright's Pauline studies are exciting.
Now I shall look out for a Reconstructionist synagogue in Scotland or England.
Primo Levi said there could be no God after Auschwitz. The suffering of the innocent never goes away. Nor the problem of evil. A subject I shall discuss one day with a Sikh friend.
Best, John.
"The appearance of Sirius is troubling. *The Sirius Mystery Revisited: Professor Robert Temple.* YouTube."
A 110 minute film is more than I would care to watch given that I have no belief whatsoever that the movements of far distant stars are relevant to anything that happens on earth. You are aware, I assume, that Sirius is visible for months out of every year, and, if memory services, it's the brightest non-planetary body--aside from our moon--that regularly appears in the northern night sky.
I only listened to about ten minutes of Professor Temple's lecture, intending to return.
I read his book years ago, published by a paperback imprint which seemed less than serious, Von Daniken stuff. So I thought the claims might be half-bogus, or one hypothesis heaped on another ... What if and what if etc.
Later I learned there was some basis in reality to the tribesmen's knowledge of Sirius, and the *fish people* who came down in skyboats: their foundation myth.
Yes, Tom pointed Sirius out to me, one night last year. I think his wife likes astrology, but she sees it more as an art form, symbolic truth, rich in metaphor, as Ted Hughes did.
The line in Sean O'Casey comes back to haunt.
*What is the stars?*
*The stars is bloody indifferent!*
That's what I meant about reading about the Battle of Kursk. Lying half dead under the stars, what would I have to believe in? Better men and women than me, with hard lives, died believing in nothing.
John
Snow,
I just wanted to say I don't regard myself as a conservative. I used to call myself a liberal until one of my colleagues said he prefers the word "progressive" because liberal implies that the bible is irrelevant ( i think thats what he said, thats how I understood it)
Dear Kylie:
In some ways it is a pity that political labels, conservative and liberal, are applied to theology. Liberal is a slippery enough word even in political thinking.
Jordan Peterson said he is a classic liberal, and I know he is an honest man. His opponents in Toronto, who may or may not be cultural Marxists, paint him as a reactionary.
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said he knew when he was inside a liberal church, there was often an absence of reverence in worship.
I attended a seminar on sexuality in a liberal Baptist church. I noticed that the seminar did not open with any prayers. No one spoke about the Lordship of Christ over all things. There were pagan and New Age ideas floating around. They grieved the Holy Spirit.
Please listen to Dr. Peter Jones: A Gnostic Gospel (YouTube). A Reformed theologian, Dr Jones has exposed paganism inside churches. Liberals have a pagan idea of sexuality.
Without doctrine the faith cannot stand up and walk, without doctrine there is no backbone. The Puritans were strong in doctrine and inner holiness, thinking and preaching Biblically, always led by the Holy Spirit in prayer. Let me end with one my favourite Puritans:
*Believers are a great delight to Christ. It is the gladness of heart of Christ, the joy of his soul, to take poor sinners into this relationship with himself. He rejoiced in the thoughts of it from eternity. He suffered the pangs of a woman in childbirth until he had accomplished this task (Luke 12:50). Because he loved the church, he gave himself for it (Ephesians 5:25). He despised the shame and endured the cross (Hebrews 12:2).*
*Communion with God* by John Owen, published by the Banner of Truth.
The Banner of Truth publishes a monthly magazine which I never miss, available online.
The Banner was founded by Martyn Lloyd-Jones and other Reformed believers, because Christian publishers were unwilling to reprint the Puritans who are now widely read again.
Yours, John Haggerty
"Better men and women than me, with hard lives, died believing in nothing."
To claim that someone believes in nothing is oxymoronic. Even nihilists believe in something, in their case in the imagined truth that truth is unknowable. To believe in nothing would be to declare that no facts, behaviors, values, emotions, levels of comfort, or states of being, are preferable to any other facts, behaviors, values, emotions, levels of comfort, or states of being.
"Christian publishers were unwilling to reprint the Puritans who are now widely read again."
Does the fact that these groups murdered "witches" and "heretics"; thanked God for destroying entire villages of Native Americans with European-borne smallpox so that the Christians could take their property (just as the Israelities took the property of the ancient Palestinians); impaled the heads of slaughtered Native Americans on pikes within Christian settlements while thanking God for his mercy thereby shown; forced Native Americans onto reservations; and murdered any Native American of any age who wandered across those European-imposed boundaries in search of food, not give you pause? So it ever is that when a people conclude that they have a direct-line to God, and everyone else is living in willful disobedience to God, all crimes become possible. Puritans or ISIS, ancient Jews or Red Guards, Torquemada or Trumpians, it's all the same, the world's greatest evils being done by people who trust completely in their own God-ordained righteousness.
"I just wanted to say I don't regard myself as a conservative. I used to call myself a liberal until one of my colleagues said he prefers the word "progressive" because liberal implies that the bible is irrelevant."
I assumed that you are a theological conservative due to the fact that you belong to the Salvation Army, an organization known for its good works and its conservative theology. Yet, I know that you do not accept their beliefs in a party-line manner, so on many things, I really don't know a great deal about what your personal beliefs are. I do know that you are a good person who struggles to live a good life, sometimes against great odds, and that this makes it relatively easy for me to get along with you, my main problem with believers arising when they are smug, dishonest, doctrinaire, or unrepentantly hypocritical.
"I used to call myself a liberal until one of my colleagues said he prefers the word "progressive" because liberal implies that the bible is irrelevant."
Your colleague wasn't framing Christian liberalism in a way that its followers frame themselves, but rather in a way that they would regard as a negation of their values based upon ignorance at best and slander at worst. It is true that, in America, the Unitarian Church is exceedingly liberal, yet it has so left its Christian roots that it literally has atheistic congregations (I once belonged to a large one), and even its theistic members don't generally regard themselves as Christian (many are Buddhists and, locally anyway, a great many are Wiccans). However, all other liberal Christian churches of which I am aware hold strongly to the Bible. For example, the Episcopal liturgy consists almost entirely of Biblical passages, and Episcopal sermons are nearly always Biblically based. However, the Episcopal Church allows for a wide variation of opinion when it comes to interpreting the Bible, and in instances where it thinks the Bible is simply wrong (as in its treatment of women and its acceptance of capital punishment and slavery), it goes in another direction, something that it can do because it doesn't regard the Bible as the dictated Word of God, but rather as ancient people's best thinking about the nature and will of God (to this end, many liberal Christians are fond of saying, not that the Bible IS the Word of God, but that the Bible contains the Word of God). By and large, liberal Christians still pray to the Christian God, and while some of them are open to learning from other faith traditions, they hold Christ as paramount in their lives, so it is simply WRONG to say that they regard the book which is at the heart of their faith as irrelevant. There is another reason that liberal Christians can justify a departure from the parts of the Bible that are unjust and immoral (for example, its God-ordained thefts, rapes, and genocides), that reason being that they believe that God still speaks to people today. If I understand your own church correctly, you believe that God spoke to the peoples of the 19th century AD through General William Booth no less than he spoke to the peoples of the 10th century BC through the prophet Hezekiah, while the far more liberal Quakers center their entire meetings around the congregation sitting in silence until such time as one or more of them believes that he or she is receiving a message from the voice of God. I have been to such meetings, and aside from announcements, the ONLY thing that occurs is sitting in silence while waiting for God to inspire oneself or someone else to speak.
Dear Snow:
Thanks for defining oxymoron.
To quote Yogi Berra, *I never said most of the things I said.*
If Jesus were alive today, he'd turn over in his grave!
*Thank God I'm an atheist,* as my friend Annie is always saying.
People die without belief in transcendence, quite peacefully. Solzhenitsyn observed that men in the Gulag with faith had something to live for. And there were Jews in Hitler's death camps who were determined to survive in order to survive. *I'll show the bastards* can work. The quality of one's life and the circumstances of one's death matter greatly.
Nothing I have found in ten or more Puritan writers suggests support for murder. The American puritans were intolerant of the Quakers. Some 20 innocent women were condemned to death in Salem. One historian suggested that witch persecution elsewhere may have been motivated by sexual abuse; that the witch-finders abused teenage girls, elderly women being a smokescreen. I recommend *Five Myths About Puritans* Lori Stokes, Washington Post online.
According to written sources as well as the Ken Burns documentary The West, there was a determination to clear Western territories of Natives, using any means possible. The policy was one of genocide. It came from the highest office in Washington.
Christendom must take full responsibility for that as it must for slavery. As James Baldwin used to point out, one of the slave ships was called Jesus.
Slave owners justified their atrocities quoting the Bible. Wilberforce used the Bible in his condemnation of slavery. Jefferson had no real supernatural faith and kept slaves.
*The world's greatest evils being done by people who trust in their own God-ordained righteousness*: Are you speaking of Stalin, Beria, Hitler, Goebbels, Mao? If anything they were products of the Enlightenment. Pol Pot studied at the Sorbonne.
ISIS has been condemned by Muslim scholars who have also condemned the Wahhabist mosques in Britain. I am reading my way through a number of books on this subject: I can recommend two by Ed Hussein, The House of Islam and The Islamist; and A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is by John McHugo.
The United States spent three trillion dollars in Afghanistan. The life of Afghans is not any better. Who do we blame? For that matter who did we blame for the escalation of the war in Vietnam? Nixon's Quaker upbringing? I met atheists and Christians in the movement to rid Britain of nuclear weapons. Lord Soper a Methodist minister was a prominent peace activist.
Yours sincerely, John.
Me: The world's greatest evils being done by people who trust in their own God-ordained righteousness.
John: "Are you speaking of Stalin, Beria, Hitler, Goebbels, Mao? If anything they were products of the Enlightenment. Pol Pot studied at the Sorbonne."
Enlightenment scholars esteemed reason, evidence, science, and freedom of thought and conscience, virtues that are anathema to the totalitarian mindset embodied by the people you named. A god is simply something that is worshiped. It can be an animal, or one's ancestors, or the spirit of a waterfall, but the gods that do the most harm are the ones that are human and whose words are accepted without question, such as the people you listed with the exception of Goebbels who was a propagandist and therefore a tool of Hitler. What these human gods--and their recorded words--have in common is that they are held superior to the Enlightenment virtues that I just mentioned, and this makes their followers unreachable by employing those virtues. For example, if someone believes that his or her deity regards homosexuality as a sin worthy of imprisonment or death, nothing that anyone can do or say will change that person's mind.
Another very real and current example. Donald Trump claims that the recent election was fraudulently stolen. He has no evidence, lawsuit after lawsuit has been thrown out of court (often with a judicial rebuke), and three re-counts in the Republican state of Georgia still affirm that he lost the vote in that crucial state. Yet, Trumpians continue to believe his claim solely because he said it. If he said the opposite, they would believe that instead, the reason being that they have elevated him just short of being a deity. If Trump were to say that the weather was hot when it was freezing, perhaps that would give them pause, but then again, they might simply redefine the word hot, the fact being that Trump's thoughts are their thoughts, Trump's loves are their loves, Trump's hates are their hates, and Trump's behaviors are their models for virtue. So it is that religion often turns authoritarian inclined people into automatons, and this is true whether their god is Haile Selassie or an imaginary old man who lives in the sky and whose commands were entrusted to Joseph Smith on tablets of gold that he unearthed near his home in New York state (the tablets that were later taken to heaven after Smith transcribed into the Book of Mormon, a book that depicts God as an oversized human looking male right down to his genitals).
"Pol Pot studied at the Sorbonne."
Even when such internal qualities as intelligence and persuasiveness are combined with the external advantages of travel, wealth, and a good education, there is no guarantee that the result will be a life of virtue, and it might even be a life that adds immeasurably to the miseries of the world. As to your claim that the men you listed were true to Enlightenment values, I can scarcely imagine anything more fanciful.
When I took the compost out last night, Orion was still low in the eastern sky. By standing on tiptoe, I could barely see Sirius, beautiful as always, the moreso for being low in the sky (Mars was also gorgeous). You might know that while Sirius is in the constellation Canus Major, a nearby star (Procyon) is in Canus Minor, and because they both follow Orion, legend has it that they are his hunting dogs. You might also know that, long before Egypt became a great nation, many of America's indigenous peoples created astronomically sophisticated edifices that continue to mark and predict the passage of time. I often reflect upon these people's brilliance when I look upon the very stars that, to them, were so rich in legend and so helpful in scientifically ordering their lives. Speaking of Joseph Smith, perhaps you also know that he wrote in the Book of Mormon, that America's indigenous peoples are Jews who constitute the "Lost Tribe of Israel," and that following his crucifixion, Jesus came to America and preached to them.
Dear Snow:
Did I ever say *Stalin = Enlightenment*?
Before her suicide Stalin's wife wrote him a letter saying he had betrayed the Revolution.
I wish I could have seen his face as he destroyed that letter.
Kant, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin are among figures one associates with the Enlightenment.
Kant's dictum: *The starry sky above me, the moral law within me.*
The United States separated church and state thanks to the Founding Fathers, who were influenced by the Enlightenment. Francis Schaeffer said they held Christianity highly.
Thomas Jefferson wanted to see an end to slavery, not as quickly as Tom Paine.
Jefferson's estate in Virginia functioned because of slavery.
George Washington as a land surveyor admired the tracking skills of Native Americans, but he would not have accepted they had a culture worth protecting as we (happily) do.
Before the American Civil War there were fears slavery would spread to non-slave states.
Lincoln understood tensions between reason and faith, very much an Enlightenment concerns.
*As to your claim that the men you listed were true to Enlightenment values, I can scarcely imagine anything more fanciful.*
Sorry if I gave you that idea: I meant that they rejected the myth of the Fall and human corruption (not that I believe in a literal Adam and Eve) and believed in the perfectibility of man. Voltaire and Rousseau's ideas were challenged by William Blake as later by Kierkegaard. The myth of progress replacing the myth of the Fall.
If I had spoken Russian I would have enjoyed the company of Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev and dozens of other Soviets (like Edwin Wilson the Russian Revolution is one of my interests) but it is frightening to think that they caused famine (deliberately) by setting kulak against kulak. Bad men? Good men who thought they were on the side of progress?
Utopian ideals seeded by the Enlightenment created dystopias. Orwell saw this though he had no interest in Christianity until the end. He wanted buried in a country churchyard.
Hitler despised Christianity which he regarded as a slave religion. He had contempt for the Protestant church ministers who went along with National Socialism; he likened them to grovelling servants. He said *They will be hearing from me,* so who knows what his plans were. The erasure of Christianity? He never practised his Catholicism.
Latter Day Saints have had churches in Glasgow for decades. Young American men and women (missionaries) frequently stop me in the street to talk. I tell them I have read the Book of Mormon. They are nice kids with good manners and haven't an idea in their heads. We part as friends.
Two scholarly studies have been published by the Oxford University Press under the
*A Very Short Introduction* series: *Mormonism* by Richard Lyman Bushman (Professor of History at Columbia) and *The Book of Mormon* by Terry L Givens (Professor of Literature and Religion at the University of Virginia).
Ever wondered what Reinhold Niebuhr would have written about Trumpism?
What happens in the United States is watched very closely in Britain.
We care about America and do not understand Americans even as we share their language.
How does President Elect Biden address those alienated Americans who feel sore and betrayed? Studs Terkels, where are you when we need you?
I liked your description of *gorgeous Mars*.
I am reading *The Ruin of Kasch* by the Italian writer Roberto Calasso (Penguin).
*The state of the world cannot be seen during the day,* he writes, *but at night observing the positions of the stars.*
Best, John.
Correction: Edmund Wilson.
In my youth I read *To the Finland Station*. In the last decade I have picked up volumes of his Journals, which make close reading if you enjoy intoxicating ideas and high-minded gossip.
Wilson was commissioned by The New Yorker to write about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the community at Qumran, and its implications for our understanding of Judaism and early Christianity.
From memory I recall his description of the monotony of the Judean Desert, with nary a grotto to shelter a beguiling nymph: or something like it.
Saul Bellow said he would pick his brains for Hebrew words which Bellow learned as a child.
JH
The Ruin of Kasch/ Rain Taxi. (Review)
A close reading by M Lock Swingen, whose name I shall remember.
A review like this is my idea of a virtual Martini, which gives you a rush to the head and stimulates the appetite for dinner.
Swingen describes Calasso's opus as *a veritable serpent of a book*.
Not that I have had a real Martini in decades!
A glass or two of wine suffices.
J.H.
"Saul Bellow said he would pick his brains for Hebrew words which Bellow learned as a child."
Did you know that William Bradford taught himself Hebrew so he could feel closer to God in his heart and in his understanding. I have no idea if it worked, but I had to admire his effort.
"Ever wondered what Reinhold Niebuhr would have written about Trumpism?"
I watched a one hour documentary about Niebuhr this week (which was followed by a documentary about Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers). Did you know that Niebuhr was greatly admired even among atheists for his rationality and his openness to people outside of Christianity, an openness that led him to ask the Jewish theologian, Herschel, to conduct his funeral? I have wondered what a great many people would have to say about Trump and Trumpism, none moreso than George Carlin. The fact is that what Trump deserves is ridicule, and no one could have equaled Carlin. Mencken is someone else whose thoughts about Trump and Trumpism I would have found interesting. cont.
"We care about America and do not understand Americans even as we share their language."
It's an awfully large and diverse country, as you well know, and I wouldn't be surprised but what your liberals understand our liberals and your fascists understand our fascists better than our liberals understand our fascists and our fascists understand our liberals. In other words, I believe that a person's political underpinnings matter more than national boundaries.
"How does President Elect Biden address those alienated Americans who feel sore and betrayed?"
Do you refer to Trumpians? IF so, I don't foresee anything but failure. Over 70% of Republicans believe that Biden stole the election, this based upon no evidence whatsoever--unless the utterly unsubstantiated claims of Trump are counted as evidence. Trump and his supporters have filed roughly sixty lawsuits in their attempt to have the election results in Democratic states overturned so that Trump can continue as president. These suits have--to my knowledge--been tossed-out, often with a stern rebuke from the judge for wasting the court's time. Probably the largest of these suits is now in progress. In it, the state of Texas--with the approval of Trump and numerous other high-ranking Republicans--is taking the unprecedented strategy of suing four other states that Biden carried (Texas is appealing directly to the Supreme Court, but it's doubtful that the Supreme Court will agree to hear the case). Another large % of Trumpians believe that Democratic leaders--including Biden--are pedophiles who are have, for years, been running a massive international child sex-trafficking operation. Again, they have no proof whatsoever. I have contempt piled upon contempt for Trumpians, and I can't imagine how anyone imagines that Biden can reach such morons... I'm going to give you my email address because I don't know how much longer we should continue being penpals on Kylie's blog. If Kylie is sure she doesn't mind, I'm fine with going on in this way, but in case she does mind, I'm at tabbyofdarkness at gmail.com (I'm writing my address without the proper connecting symbol way so that it will hopefully escape notice by not being highlighted as a link).
I had wondered where you were from, and was delighted to see that you're Scottish (not that I would have liked you less had you been from somewhere else). I don't know that I've ever met a Scot, but I think fondly of your country for various reasons. Your cute kilts, for one thing, and your wonderful accents for another (do accents differ much from one part of your country to another?). I'm now awaiting delivery of Nan Shepherd's 1944 book, "The Living Mountain"; I recently read and enjoyed "The Little Minister" by J.M. Barrie; and I reread Stevenson's delightful book "Kidnapped" a few months ago. As you might imagine, I was also pleased with David Hume's criticism of the basis of theism. Genetically, my ancestors were nearly all from England, Ireland, and Scotland (with a smidgen of western European, Neanderthal, and West African. I learned--from a documentary that I watched last night--that there's an effort being made to bring back the forests of the Highlands. I hadn't realized that the Highlands had been forested.
Thanks for the considered response, Snow.
All of your points deserve a reply, and I have jotted down a few notes, ranging from Niebuhr to J.M Barrie, but it would be wrong to go so far off-topic on Kylie's worthy blog.
These I will follow up in your email address, thanks for it.
Strangely I have never sent or received an email, having come late to the Internet.
Without intending to do so, I broke blog etiquette by leaving far too long comments.
This I can only put down to Corona lockdown, and to the fact that these fascinating blogs stimulated me into writing too much. Before lockdown I never visited blogs, never mind leaving public comments. I do not even know how to download an app or however one puts it.
I was treating blogland like a Viennese cafe where discourse went on all night. But this is not pre-war Vienna, and I am not Elias Canetti, as much as I revere him.
In the words of the greatest play in English, *The rest is silence.*
"Strangely I have never sent or received an email, having come late to the Internet."
Then I am vastly honored by your interest in emailing me. Please let me know--perhaps on my blog--if you have any difficulty. You could also put your email address on your Blogspot profile page, and I could write to you that way (a lot of blog owners make their emails public). Another option would be to put your email address into a comment on my blog. No comments to my blog can be seen by others until I approve them, so if you do this, I will save your address but not allow others to see it.
"I was treating blogland like a Viennese cafe where discourse went on all night."
It's up to every blog owner as to what behaviors she or he will allow, and Kylie did say that she tends toward tolerance, so I don't think you need to feel badly, but if you do need to feel badly, then I should feel even more badly because I've been blogging for twelve more more years. Like Kylie on her blog, I tend to be open on mine unless someone repeatedly goes altogether off topic--as I have been doing here--and even then, I might not object (assuming that their comments interested me) except for the fact that all comments get emailed to every person who signed up to receive comments. As for you and me, I had been holding back on a great many things that I wanted to say because they were completely off topic, so when I found myself talking about Scottish forests and authors rather than religion, I thought that perhaps it would be better if we either emailed or continued our discussion on my blog, perhaps on one of my old religion-oriented posts.
You mentioned making notes regarding my last comment, so since you also mentioned being new to some computer-related things, I'll take the liberty of asking whether you're familiar with copying and pasting? In case you're not, I've saved every comment that either of us made here (all 27 pages worth), and will exuberantly email them to you if you would like.
Thank you for your kind indulgence, Kylie.
"Strangely I have never sent or received an email, having come late to the Internet."
Then I am vastly honored by your willingness to email me. Please let me know--perhaps on my blog--if you have any difficulty. You could also put your email address on your Blogspot profile page, and I could write to you that way (a lot of blog owners make their emails public). Another option would be to put your email address into a comment on my blog. No comments to my blog can be seen by others until I approve them, so if you do this, I will save your address but not allow others to see it.
"I was treating blogland like a Viennese cafe where discourse went on all night."
It's up to every blog owner as to what behaviors she or he will allow, and Kylie did say that she tends toward tolerance, so I don't think you need to feel badly, but if you do need to feel badly, then I should feel even more badly because I've been blogging for twelve more more years. Like Kylie on her blog, I tend to be open on mine unless someone repeatedly goes altogether off topic--as I have been doing here--and even then, I might not object (assuming that their comments interested me) except for the fact that all comments get emailed to every person who signed up to receive comments. As for you and me, I had been holding back on a great many things that I wanted to say because they were completely off topic, so when I found myself talking about Scottish forests and authors rather than religion, I thought that perhaps it would be better if we either emailed or continued our discussion on my blog, perhaps on one of my old religion-oriented posts.
You mentioned making notes regarding my last comment, so since you also mentioned being new to some computer-related things, I'll take the liberty of asking whether you're familiar with copying and pasting? In case you're not, I've saved every comment that either of us made here (all 27 pages worth), and will exuberantly email them to you if you would like.
Thank you for your kind indulgence, Kylie.
Thanks again, Snow.
I shall need help setting up my own email address, because I don't have one.
Probably I misunderstood the raison d'etre of the comments box.
Like Ursula who (sadly) has stopped commenting, I am of the opinion that the longer reply is useful, so long as it makes some attempt at discourse.
If I had a blog of my own it would not bother me if a comment proved longer than my post.
Indeed I would be gratified to see a reader responding in depth.
But others feel differently and I must respect their blogging rules.
HL Mencken, RL Stevenson, J.M. Barrie and Nan Shepherd are the writers I hope to talk to you about.
Barrie was a pariah for so long in Scottish literature because, before Peter Pan, he made his reputation writing kailyard stories, like the forgotten William S Crockett.
And kailyard was despised ever since the publication of The House With Green Shutters.
Nan Shepherd was rediscovered in the 1980s, a bad time for Scotland because of unemployment and Mrs Thatcher's government in London.
The Living Mountain and The Weatherhouse were republished by Canongate in Edinburgh, a go-ahead house who republished the work of Nelson Algren, one of my favourite Americans.
There is a YouTube documentary on Algren, who was never honoured in Chicago.
Thanks Kylie for permitting this last (honest) off-topic comment!
J.H.
Correction.
I meant to write Samuel Rutherford Crockett to whom RL Stevenson dedicated his poem *Blows the Wind Today* which you can read online.
S.R. Crockett was a larger than life character: See Wikipedia
JOhn,
Frankly, I was appalled when a person who was not even the write of the blog told you off for your comments. The way I see it, this is the internet and if one wants to post on the internet, one has some obligation to be at peace with what happens next (I don't like abuse)
People talk about "owning" their blog and for sure there is the one who sets it up and writes it and curates etc but the copyright of a "blogger" blog belongs to google.
I have personally been delighted to see both of you converse at a level which is befitting your commitment and you are most welcome to converse here (or for that matter at my other blog eclectica) as much as you like.
I consider it an honour to have provoked such a wide ranging conversation and to "host" it.
Having said all that, there are distinct advantages to having your own email address so I don't discourage that! Imagine all the online shopping you could do! t mght stop you from commenting on unwelcoming blogs.
For the record, I also welcome Ursula, though I dont understand her sometimes and I don't seem to provoke her interest.....cest la vie
and my final comment, for the record, I dont do word counts on my commenters!!!!
As you were, gentlemen!
Thanks, Kylie.
I did not feel told off by Soupspoone.
My comments were far, far too frequent. And much too long.
I could not bear to go back and read any of them !
I understood what Soupspoone meant by *narcissistic* behaviour.
Friends and family members say that I rarely speak about myself, so this must be a kind of blogging narcissism.
It is amazing that one can speak to strangers via the Internet as I am speaking to you; perhaps in some way it over stimulated my brain. I am quite a calm person normally.
Yours is a Christian site, so it is not good to go off-topic so much.
I am going to give most of my time to the Gospel, because I believe the hour is very late, both for myself, and for our lost, post-Christian world.
In my mid-50s I expected to see out my days as an agnostic or atheist.
By God's grace I discovered the preaching of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and through the work of the Holy Spirit I came to a saving faith in Christ.
A minister of the Free Church of Scotland is now preaching weekly in the centre of Glasgow, the very first time I have seen any minister doing this.
Along with other brethren I have been distributing Christian tracts as the minister preaches.
I saw a street preacher in Australia on YouTube. He said: *You say you don't believe in God, but the name of Jesus Christ is never out of your lips, which you say in blasphemy.*
Street preaching like this will become more and more important.
*The Word of God never returns void* as Francis Schaeffer loved to say.
The harvest is great as Christ told the Apostles.
Biblical churches always preach the Blood: we are saved by faith alone.
An Anglican bishop once said, *I wish our men were as well trained as those Free Church ministers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.*
Our world needs Jesus Christ more than ever: *there is no other name under heaven by which men must be saved.*
God is commanding us to be saved, and we can only be saved in the Son, God can only really love us if we are in Christ's saving covenant.
I will remember you in my prayers, Kylie.
John
"I have personally been delighted to see both of you converse at a level which is befitting your commitment and you are most welcome to converse here (or for that matter at my other blog eclectica) as much as you like."
Thank you. I am so very pleased.
"I understood what Soupspoone meant by *narcissistic* behaviour."
I have had the good fortune of never encountering Gruel-for-Brains, but I know very well what narcissism is because I've gotten an object lesson in it every time I've turned on the news for the last four-and-a-half years, it being embodied in the behavior of Donald Trump. This is not what I see in you. What I do see--or imagine that I see--in you (if I may be so bold) is a sensitive soul whom, I suspect, hungers for a depth of communication that he finds hard to come by, and therefore jumps toward with both feet when he does find it. I, too, am much this way, and so I have often longed for such a reader as you, a reader who isn't content with a three line appreciation--or criticism--but who actually wants to explore, to delve, to listen, to reflect upon, to debate, to share, and, perhaps, to even fall out and later make-up due to the passion and directness of his utterances. In short, someone who both speaks and listens from the unfettered riches of his/her heart and intellect. So what then, you're going to be less than whom you are because some stranger diagnosed you with a psychiatric morbidity in order to avoid taking responsibility for his/her reaction to you! I certainly hope not.
I'm on my third reading of "All Quiet on the Western Front," so naturally I've been wondering if you're familiar with it. I've surely read ten to fifteen first-person accounts of war over the years, but this is probably the best. My copy dates from the first year of publication (it first appeared in German in January, 1929), and the book had already gone through fourteen English printings.
I like your line, Snow. I can reimagine it from an old Woody Allen movie.
*So, so ... you're going to be ... LESS than YOU ARE, because, because, some ... some stranger diagnosed you with a Psychiatric Morbidity Disorder?*
Yes! I am outing myself as the Secret Santa Narcissist. Guilty as charged!
Psychiatric Narcissistic Morbidity Disorder, it's hardly castration anxiety is it, but the ladies can use words like scalpels, can't they, they are born to it, being superior to we emasculated men. (Music. John Coltrane: that lovely short piece he wrote for his wife Naima.)
Today in my local Oxfam bookshop I picked up a curiosity by one Michel Onfray published by Le Livre de Poche: *Le Crepuscule d'une idole - L'affabulation freudienne*. It has a Warhol-tinted image of the elderly Sigmund Freud, Uncle Siggy, the fallen idol, but not for me.
The twilight of my own self-esteem is such that I am unable to return to the blog from which I so disgraced myself.
If not Freud I may return to Norman Mailer; I have even read Norman's bad books like *An American Dream*, a very bad book disgracefully reprinted as a Penguin Modern Classic; sad when Nelson Algren, James Purdy and Dawn Powell are scarcely seen any more in bookshops.
Furious debates, usually left-winger falling out with left-winger were very much a west of Scotland thing.
*Who do you think you are? Arthur Koestler?* a friend taunted me with.
I met a man whose Hungarian father knew Koestler; they occasionally drank in the same pub in Knightsbridge, London. Both these brilliant Hungarians fell out. In a debate on quantum physics!
Hardly on the same level, but my Father's brother-in-law, Danny Gallagher, frequently fell out with my father. In our home.
*Come on, Ena,* Danny would say to my father's sister, *get the coats, we're leaving.*
Both men were Labour voters, both were committed trades unionists, but I witnessed their disputes aged 4. Next week Uncle Danny and Auntie Ena were back. My Ma made them dinner.
I read Remarque's All Quiet as a schoolboy and saw the Lew Ayres movie in a Glasgow cinema called The Cosmo, which was built by a Hungarian emigre who loved foreign language films.
A few weeks ago I found Remarque's sequel *The Way Back*, reissued in paperback.
Horrible thought, but there is one thing men do better than women.
War. Slaughter. Carnage.
Best, John.
If you have the time Snow, try to watch a film on YouTube.
*Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry.*
2015. NFB.
Look out for legendary British publisher Tom Maschler (1933-2020) who died in October.
Maschler ran Jonathan Cape in London and edited Bellow, Cheever, John Fowles, Len Deighton.
Lowry's *Under the Volcano* is a portrait of an English consul in Mexico, a glimpse into an alcoholic's hell.
My late elder brother George, a documentary film maker who lived in Los Angeles for 30 years and said he hated the place, reminds me of Lowry in many ways. He read Lowry as an art student.
YouTube.
John Coltrane. Naima. Take 1/Audio.
"Yes! I am outing myself as the Secret Santa Narcissist."
Which brings to mind the thought that while Judaism--and the religions that sprang from it--might claim humility, they nonetheless hold that our little species represents the ultimate in God's creative potential and emotional involvement (i.e. we are the best that he could do without making us into automatons--although, as it turns out, we are no less a product of cause and effect than anything else). This is to say that we are, in fact, so darn wonderful that God--being perfect both in compassion and justice--opted to have himself tortured and killed in atonement for our sins rather than send us to the hell that we deserve for being exactly what he--a being who knows how everything that "he" does will turn out long before he does it--made us to be.
Now... given what you've said, I would like to know many things about you--your family, loves, fears, history, interests, travel, how you spend your days, and all else that you might enjoy sharing.
I can only quote the words of a favourite writer, Snow:
*Once my sight was so good I could see all seven stars of the Pleiades. I could hear the whistle of a marmot over half a mile away in the evening fields. And the smell of a lily of the valley or an old book could make me drunk.*
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin (1870-1973).
My obsession with Russian writers explains my interest in Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Irwin Shaw: their parents fled the pogroms in Russia.
I can't remember the ancestry of Alfred Kazin or Lionel Trilling. Kazin wrote a great memoir, *New York Jew* and a book about Brooklyn Heights, *Walker in the City*.
Malamud was the only one to write an actual Russian novel, *The Fixer*: his masterpiece.
He visited Russia under perestroika and wrote a short story about it.
Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) was the son of Romanian Jews: I just checked Wiki.
His great story *In Dreams Begin Responsibilities* was a favourite of my late brother.
Schwartz was the model for Humboldt in Bellow's novel *Humboldt's Gift* and for the haunted man of letters in Philip Roth's *The Ghost Writer*: Roth played with the idea of Anne Frank having escaped the death camps, and grown up to be a beautiful young woman.
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