Category: Religion

Rejecting the Right God

If anyone is going to reject God, they should at least be sure to reject the right One (or ones).

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It occurs to me that the “new atheists” are rejecting the wrong God. They are famous for saying that they don’t believe in the Christian God any more than they believe in Zeus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but does that make any sense?

Does anyone believe that a flying spaghetti monster or Zeus are possible candidates for the God of the universe? It seems to me that, if someone is going to reject God, they ought to be rejecting the right One. There aren’t that many contenders

Not all gods are “created equal”. Zeus or a “flying spaghetti monster” are not on a par with the Christian concept of God, to say the very least. The same can be said of the Islamic view of God or the view of any other major world religion. The concepts of God that are leading contenders for the “God of the Universe” title are much more sophisticated than the weak understanding displayed in a comment that likens them to flying spaghetti monsters and Roman mythology.

The ignorance of the new atheists about these things is rather shocking, though it shouldn’t be altogether surprising. They admit they find no use for such things as gods. Most of them have spent no time studying or considering a robust concept of the divine. The ignorance is, therefore, understandable, if not excusable.

Anyone can knock a flying spaghetti monster out of the air. Try taking on the transcendent of God who created the universe. That’s a more noble task.

I can’t do justice to the subject in a short blog, but I will try to summarize my thoughts. The only serious contenders for consideration as God are the candidates of the major world religions. No one believes in Roman or Greek gods anymore for reasons new atheists and theists, alike, would agree, but modern people still believe in the biblical and Islamic conceptions of God, and people still believe in Eastern concepts of divinity.

They can’t all be true, of course, because they are incompatible with each other[1], so which one, if any of them, is the most likely candidate?

I will weigh in, for what is worth, but I would like first to address the modern, western concern over the idea of an exclusive God. Some people with western sensibilities seem to believe modern people should not be so exclusive in our conceptions of God and religion. They say there are many religions, and “Why can’t they all be true?“

Having studied world religions in college, I can say that there are similarities in religious thought among the world religions, but there are significant and incompatible differences. For instance, it’s hard to reconcile the way different religions deal with suffering.

On the various conceptions of God, the various religions are fundamentally different and mutually exclusive. They may have some appearance of sameness on the surface, but they are fundamentally different.

Those differences ultimately mean something. We don’t brush incongruities aside in scientific endeavors just to be polite. We take them seriously in the pursuit of truth.

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In Need of a Raja

The story of an elephant and a group of blind men, but with a twist.

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Depositphotos Image ID: 42117413 Copyright: vverve

Most of us have heard the story about the blind men and the elephant. I heard it in a world religion class in 1978, my first year of college. The story is most often told in the context of the world religions. And, the story is most often told as an allegory suggesting that all religions are really getting at the same thing (the elephant).

If you haven’t heard the story, I will re-tell it. If you have heard the story, please bear with me because telling the story with its original conclusion is an important exercise in understanding the message.

If your antennae are up, you might have caught the hint that this story, with the original conclusion, has a twist. The story usually isn’t told with the original conclusion, so the point of the original conclusion is often “lost in the translation”. And, the original conclusion leads to a very different point than the commonly asserted message.

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Was the Jesus Story a Copycat from Pagan Myth?

Is the Jesus story just is an amalgam of pagan myths?

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The answer is pretty decisively, no! Much has been said of this popular Internet opinion by actual historians and biblical scholars of every stripe, Christian, agnostic and atheist. Very few, if any, modern scholars, meaning men and woman who have proven themselves in the world of academia, which usually means have been vetted by peer review, hold to this view today.

This is true whether the scholar happens to be a theist or atheist, believer or nonbeliever. There simply isn’t any credible evidence for it. The only evidence lives in the active imaginations of people who want it to be true, like Bill Maher. In fact, he did a movie about it.

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Rabbit Holes from Age to New Age

Truth matters. I could ignore the truth of gravity, but I do that to my own peril. The same is true of spiritual matters.

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From the Steven Bancarz YouTube channel

I have never been into New Age religion. I swerved close to it at one time. I was intrigued by Buddhism and tended toward Eastern religion in college before I became a Christian.

New age philosophy was also intriguing to me in those days, though I didn’t have a label for it. Buddhism has made for a good entre into New Age religions in the west, but my path took a turn away from New Age philosophy and Eastern religion a long time ago.

I have been a student of religion since I took a world religion class in college. For what it is worth, I have never thought that scientific truth and religious truth were incompatible, but I have never felt that one necessarily leads to (or excludes the other) the other.

Further, it seems self-evident that all truth is harmonious. Any contradiction between the science and religion, or one belief and another, is likely due to an errant interpretation of one or the other, or both.

Science deals with the realm of the natural world, matter, energy and all the things that we can touch, feel, measure and quantify. Religion deals in the metaphysical. Metaphysical reality is no less true for being hard to “grasp” (physically). Beauty is no less “true” than gravity, but they cannot be approached in the same way.

We all put our faith in something; though materialists don’t want to believe that. A materialist is someone who believes simply and only in the natural, material world and science, which reveals the truth of the natural world. So they say.

The materialist puts his confidence in the premise that nothing exists but for the time, space, matter and energy and entrusts himself to that proposition. Such a statement, ironically, is a metaphysical one for which the materialist can provide no scientific proof.

Such a premise and commitment to it is belief and requires faith as sure as anyone who believes in a god.

Truth matters.

I could ignore the truth of gravity, but I do that to my own peril. My disbelief in gravity at some point is likely to get me into trouble, and it might land me in the hospital.

Spiritual truth matters as well, though it is much more difficult to grab hold of for obvious reasons. So I am attracted to people who are able to reach some clarity in the realm of spiritual truth, like Steven Bancarz, a former expert in “spirit science”.

Steven Bacarz was the owner and editor of the Facebook page, Spirit Science and Metaphysics. He wrote for the largest New Age website on the Internet. Steven’s website was so successful that he had 150,000 to 200,000 views every day and “was making a killing off of ad revenue”.

Then, he terminated the webpage and now advocates a different way. He describes his “journey down the rabbit hole” that led him into the New Age movement and his change of direction in his own words in the following video:

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Religious Pluralism Sounds Nice, but Is It True?

It should be no surprise, if there be such thing as truth, that people all over the world would have some knowledge and understanding of the truth. Thus, we should not be surprised at all to find aspects of truth in all the world religions.

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(c) Can Stock Photo / rolffimages

One expression of pluralism is the idea that all truth claims are equally valid. (Pluralism doesn’t necessarily require this.) So does that include the truth claim that all truth claims are not equally valid? Think about it. This expression of pluralism that is quite popular today is already in trouble right from the start.

Religious pluralism is “the acceptance of all religious paths as equally valid, promoting coexistence”.

Religious pluralism sounds nice, and the motives for wanting to believe in religious pluralism are largely nobles ones. The idea of religious pluralism is born out of a desire for unity, respect for others and harmony, but can we live by it?

That we want religious pluralism to be true doesn’t mean it is true. We would like for gravity not to be “true”, especially while climbing a ladder, but wishing it so does not make it so.

My thoughts today are spurred on by a presentation by Vince Vitale on religious pluralism. You might want to listen to what he has to say about it before or after considering my thoughts.[i] He addresses several bad assumptions and several good desires that lead to pluralism. I only address two of the three assumptions here.

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