It seems that every month or so someone is knocking at my door to inform me that I’m going to hell or that Armageddon is coming or something along that line. Being a person who does not have any particular religious faith, I often argue with the people who find it so important to tell me these things. And I have found some fairly interesting points that religious people might like to consider when going out into the world to spread their gospels.
The first, of course, is that it is a most monumental task to convert someone into a religion. Various sects have enough trouble trying to pull members from other groups of the same basic religion. Although all Christian groups use the Bible as their source book, Baptists are trying to convert Lutherans; Jehovah’s Witnesses are trying to convert the Nazarenes. And for all their efforts, few people leave their chosen or inherited religions for another. When this is the case, think about how much harder it is for Christians to convert people either of completely foreign religious tradition or those who have no religion.
In the foreword of a Christian apologetic, Ravi Zacharias’s Can Man Live Without God, Charles Colson wrote, “What good does it do for us to say the Bible tells people, ‘The Bible says...,’ if two-thirds of our listeners don’t believe the Bible is true?” This is a perceptive point. It is one that seems to evade the understanding of many people who go out and try to convert people. It is why there is very little civilized talk between Christians and the unconverted masses. It is why I really hate it when people come to my door and try to preach. It is why I generally don’t even like to talk religion with anyone other than close friends. To demonstrate the point, let me recall discussions with those who wanted to convert me into their faiths.
One fine day this elderly woman came to my door from a local Baptist church. She greeted me kindly and told me why she was out: she was spreading the good word of the Lord. She asked me, “Do you know what will happen to you when you die?”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Well what do you think happens when you die?”
“Well,” I said, “You’re buried, and your body decomposes.”
She said, almost eagerly, knowing that she had a skeptic before her, “The Bible says that we are to be judged. God blesses those who believed in him and worshipped him. Those who denied him are condemned.”
Now obviously this discussion was doomed. We were operating from two completely different paradigms. She had complete faith in the veracity of the Bible. I had little. With this type of situation, there is unlikely to be any kind of productive dialogue. And usually emotions come into play, and it just gets worse.
Later in this same discussion, I asked her what proof is there that the Bible is divinely inspired. She told me that we shouldn’t care about proof, that we must have faith and leave everything to the Lord. The discussion became instructive here, because a point that I wanted to make is the contradictory nature of the Bible. I quoted Paul, who said to prove all things. If the thing in which you believe urges proof for that belief, you must go back and validate that belief. But the nature of religion is that it requires faith or belief in something without evidence. You cannot prove Christianity just like you cannot prove Islam or Hinduism.
The woman seemed unnerved by my reasoning, and she wanted to just dismiss my remarks offhand. She said, “Well I can't prove to you what I’m saying, but I know I’m right.” I asked her why I should accept this argument from her as opposed to the same argument by a Bhudist. She said, “Because it says so in the Bible.”
I said, “But that’s just it. I don’t believe that the Bible is the word of God.”
She was obviously disturbed, and I could see that her concern was genuine. She didn’t say it, but I knew that she was thinking that the Devil had really made a mess of my mind. I said to her, “Let me tell you the most valid argument I have against the Bible being divine. I’m not even going to consider the statements that are factually erroneous, but only a major logical and philosophical error.
“God gave Moses and Israel the Ten Commandments. Among those Ten Commandments was one which said, “Thou shalt not kill.” That was a divine edict. Don’t kill anyone. Notice that it doesn’t make provisions and exceptions. It’s a straightforward rule, one that has no ambiguity to it whatsoever. It means that I can’t kill someone to get his land or wife; no one can kill me for anger. We’re just not allowed to kill each other for any reason.
“But then, just a few years down the road the Israelites come to a place called Canaan, a place that was designated as the Promised Land. Now Canaan was already inhabited. But because God had promised this land to Israel, it was theirs to take. The Israelites came in, and we find in the Bible total disregard for the sixth commandment. Israel destroyed Jericho. Then Ai. “Do not fear or be dismayed,” God told Joshua, “take all the fighting men with you, and go up now to Ai.” All the people of Ai were slaughtered, male or female, old or young. According to the account, twelve thousand fell. And Ai was only one of many cities to fall to the conquest of Joshua.”
The woman listened politely. She did not see any discrepancy. When I finished for the moment, she said, “God was only punishing the Canaanites for sin.”
I felt that this was a bad way for God to do it. Why would he punish sinners by having others sin? Why wouldn’t he do it himself? Perhaps with a lightning bolt from the sky, or an earthquake.
I said, “It seems to me more like the people in charge used God as an excuse to go to war; that the writers of Joshua made it seem that God endorsed a war that God had nothing to do with. The Bible says, ‘Now Joshua was old and advanced in years; and the Lord said to him, “You are old and advanced in years, and very much of the land remains to be possessed”.’ Then He describes all the land yet to be conquered. Seems a little suspicious, wouldn’t you think?”
She said, “I don't know about the Bible saying what you’re saying. I’ll have to ask my pastor about that. But we still need to have faith in Jesus Christ and God and His word, which is the Bible. We’re not supposed to question his word.”
I said, “But I haven’t even finished making my point. The conclusion to this thought comes in the New Testament when Jesus says that he was alpha and omega, beginning and end; that the laws of the old testament were not to be changed one “jot” or “tittle.” Jesus said that not only the physical acts of the laws were to be kept, but the spiritual intent of them as well. So it was wrong to kill, but also equally sinful to even think about killing. How could we have a God that never changes his law, say that it is wrong to kill, then order the slaughter of thousands of people, and then say that the thought of murder is murder? It doesn’t make sense.”
The poor lady was very disturbed by now. She was disappointed that she had not opened my mind and heart to the glories of Jesus Christ. There was more to our talk, but nothing more than a repetition of things already said. She assured me that she would remember me in her prayers, and she asked that I consider all the things she had said. She told me that I needed to read my Bible to find answers. I did not tell her that I was thinking the same thing about her: I did not want to upset her.
I have recently been attending my cousin’s church in order to play basketball in the church league. Part of my obligation is to attend services, and although I am an adult and a father, I have also attended some youth group meetings. Now I happen to be, as perceptive readers will notice, somewhat skeptical about religion. But I’m not rude, and no one other than my cousin had any clue as to my views—though it was a major effort on my part to not speak up on various issues during discussions.
One point that the youth group leader made was this: it is impossible to be really happy without continual, devoted prayer to God. Now I understand that Christians are usually sincere with their feelings toward their faith and God, and I do not doubt that their religion brings security and happiness into their lives. But that’s just it—their lives. It’s a bit conceited to speak about the emotional content of another person’s life, let alone the vast majority of people’s lives.
I sat there and listened to this claim all the while knowing that I do not regularly pray, and that I am very happy about life. I know for a fact that prayer is not essential for happiness. But the possibility of this is denied by Christians because they cannot see how they would be happy without God. My sister once accused me of unhappiness because I am not religious, but as far as I know she hasn’t been inside my head experiencing my feelings and thoughts about life. At its best, the idea that one can dictate the feelings of others is amusing; at its worst, it is rather annoying.
Larry King once said that if he could interview people from history, one of those named was Jesus. He said, “I would like to ask Him if He was indeed virgin born, because the answer to that question would define history.” Now there is a major assumption in this passage, one that seems to ignore reason. There is an assumption that Jesus is divine, hence the capitalization of “Him” and “He.” The assumption is made explicit when the nature of the question is surveyed: only a person who has omniscience will remember his conception. No “normal” human being could recall and positively answer that question. So if Jesus answered that he was indeed virgin-born, it does not solve our mystery—if he was, then he is telling the truth, but there is no way for us to know that he is telling the truth. He could say that he was virgin-born even if he was, in fact, not: if he genuinely believed it because others, such as his mother, lied to him, then his affirmation is still dubious. And there is also the possibility that he would say, “Of course I wasn’t.” This obviously would be instructive, being his only response that would answer our questions. Jesus never wrote anything himself, and there is no concrete evidence that he actually believed all the things that were put in his name.
A few questions that would have given more credence to the authority of Jesus would be whether he could explain general relativity, quantum mechanics; how many moons does Jupiter have; who is Adolf Hitler; how many continents are there; what is an internal combustion engine; why is Venus so hot? Now these are things that would speak loud and clear for the genuine nature of Jesus. But asking him questions that assume the answer would do little good. But the fact is that we are presently incapable to travel back in time to ask him that, and the only people who can talk to him are those who currently believe that he is alive right now in heaven. So the debate here won’t end I guess.
For the past couple hundred years Christianity has taken a few blows from science, resulting in the loss of authority. This has naturally culminated in Christianity's wariness of science and scientific reasoning. Religion feels threatened.
While there are blatant differences between science and religion, and while there is always going to be a degree of conflict between the two, there is not an inherently impenetrable gap between the two. Both seek truths, answers about life. Religion happens to find truth in ancient texts while science looks for answers by asking questions in the present. Religion assumes that God gave the answers to our “forefathers.” It assumes that they understood God.
I happen to have scientific proclivities. To me science is the most able mechanism to delve into nature. The religious mind alone could never find out about atoms or special relativity. Only a man of science could know these things, and he could know them whether he were religious or not.
I do not despise religion. It is not the only world-view with assumptions that are inevitably unanswerable; even science has its limitations. Science has one and only one assumption, one that is proven empirically but not to the point that it is eternally final: all things, be they events or states of being, are results of previous actions abiding by physical laws (excepting quantum mechanics, which I do not personally understand). Is it true or not? We weren’t around a hundred million years ago, so how do we know what the world and universe were like? Well we don’t know in the way that we know things that we experience directly. We know because it answers so many of our questions about our present time to a higher degree of fidelity than anything else we can think of. Science gives us more capability, also, of predicting the future than any previous mode of thought. But comparing Religion and Science is moot anyway, since they are not even dealing with the same questions. Religions are essentially systems of belief about the world that were devised ages ago, and they are static. Science is not a system of belief, but a method of forming beliefs.
Christians have faith that the Bible has the answers. Scientists trust that nature has those answers—and they have been consistently right. Which one is better? For humanity at large, this question will never be answered. It has to do with the fact that the questions science and religion ask happen to be fundamentally different. But an instructive point is that we do have the natural world around us: we are a part of it, and we cannot ignore its reality. In the realm of physical knowledge, there is no evidence of another realm designated spiritual that blatantly waves its existence in our faces. Looking for divinity in the physical universe is useless, and anyone who claims to see a divine plan in this world has little understanding of our current and growing scientific knowledge. This does not say that science precludes God or spirit, but that no reason presents itself to believe in it. The only reason a person really has to believe in divinity is an emotional fear of a universe without purpose for us and fear of not meeting our loved ones again in the future; religion makes us feel more snug, more meaningful. Faith is the only source of belief in religion; our world does not validate it. Of course, this will not make religion irrelevant to those who want it.