Appetizer #4: The end is nigh

The message of the book of Revelation is that before lost souls are deposited into hell forever, the world is to be judged. The popular phrase ‘Judgement Day’, however, would appear to be a misnomer because, if the book of Revelation is anything to go by, the period of judgement will extend over at least a thousand years (Revelation 20) - a period of great tribulation and suffering known as ‘The End Times’ or ‘The Last Days’.

Interestingly, mainstream Christianity is very hesitant to name a date for these End Times, although a large number of Christians, perhaps even the majority when looked at globally, believe that it will occur within their lifetime. Of course, there are countless examples of individual amateur prophets, parading around with placards proclaiming that “the end of the world is nigh”, but there are various denominations who peddle this view on a much larger scale. For instance, the Jehovah's Witnesses have, on a number of occasions, argued, or at least implied, that a specific year would mark the end of the world. Needless to say, their track record in this area is not all that it could be. Nevertheless, the Jehovah's Witnesses still hang on to the idea that we are at least living in the “Last Days”, such having begun in October 1914. This conviction is based on a rather convoluted reading of scripture, from both Testaments, together with some arbitrary number juggling, in order to arrive at this specific date.

Please now join me on a journey into the weird and wonderful world of Christian eschatology:

• In the Gospel of Luke (21:24) Jesus says that Jerusalem will be ‘trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.’ Furthermore, Luke (1:32) and the Old Testament book of Ezekiel (21:27) make it clear that the times of the Gentiles will be fulfilled when Jesus becomes King. This trampling of the Gentiles, argue the Jehovah’s Witnesses, began when Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians in 607 BCE, and its end will signify the return of Jesus and the end of the world.

So, this trampling is crucial it would seem. We know when it began, but how long will it last?

• The book of Daniel (Chapter 4) details a prophetic dream, that King Nebuchadnezzar has, involving a tree being cut down and “seven times”, or in some translations “seven periods of time”, passing over it. Daniel interprets this dream, explaining that the tree is representative of Nebuchadnezzar himself. Turning back to Ezekiel (Chapters 17 and 31), Jehovah’s Witnesses interpret the scripture to mean that trees can be considered as representing rulership. Therefore, they say, the cutting down of a tree can be seen as an interruption of rulership, or a trampling of one.

So the trampling will last for seven periods of time. But how long is a ‘period of time’? How long is a piece of string?

• Chapter 12 of the book of Revelation, verse 6, tells the story of a woman fleeing into the wilderness, and being protected by God from a dragon, for 1,260 days. Verse 14, however, describes the same period as “a time, and times, and half a time”. Jehovah's Witnesses evidently take this to mean that “time” means “one period of time” and “times” means “two periods of time”, because they argue that, based on this passage, 1,260 days equals three and a half periods of time! This means that a period of time is equal to 360 days (or roughly one year), and so seven periods of time must therefore be equal to 2,520 days (or roughly seven years). But, the argument goes, this cannot be the whole story, because seven years is not long enough—obviously the trampling of God's rulership did not stop in 600 BCE—Daniel's prophecy must be talking of a much longer period of time than seven years. (Note that this is not the obvious conclusion to draw here but let’s go along with it for now.)
• In order to square this circle, the Jehovah’s Witnesses return to the Old Testament and the books of Numbers and Ezekiel. In Numbers 14:34 we find God punishing the Israelites for 40 days; one day for each year of faithlessness. In Ezekiel 4:4-6 we find the “son of man” commanded to lie on his left side for 390 days and on his right for 40 days, in order to bear the sins of Israel and Judah respectively; again, one day for each year of sin. These scriptural titbits apparently prove that “one day” can also mean “one year”. Therefore, 2,520 days can be taken as meaning 2,520 years!
• Finally, this in turn means that seven periods of time beginning in 607 BCE would come to a close circa 1914! Phew, got there in the end! By this reasoning, if you can call it that, Jesus Christ was appointed as King in 1914 CE, marking the beginning of the “Last Days”.

Hardly a QED is it? Believe it or not though, the plot thickens...

From these “calculations” various Jehovah's Witness tracts produced over the years have gone out of their way to imply a specific year for the end of the world, revising the date as each prediction fails. The most recent of these 'predictions' implied 1975 as the year to watch out for, and since then they seem to have stopped making predictions (and who can blame them?) Their forecast of the beginning of ‘The Last Days’ however, remains in their literature presumably because it corresponds quite nicely with the onset of the First World War, hence the specific claim of October 1914.

According to the Gospels (e.g. Matthew 24:7, Mark 13:8, Luke 21:10), Jesus said that he would return only after the world had witnessed times of international warfare, famine, earthquakes and plagues. The First World War was obviously unlike anything that had gone before in terms of scale and the Second World War surpassed even that. Accordingly, these conflicts are seen as fulfilment of prophecy, and the plight of starving Ethiopians and events such as the Indonesian tsunami in 2004 can only have served to cynically fortify that position. That is certainly the impression that I get whenever Jehovah's witnesses call at my house and ask me if I am worried about the state of the world by referencing the big news story of the week and then tying it to Matthew 24:7.

This ghoulish evangelism is just a tad too close to schadenfreude for my tastes, but the “1914 theory” also has a number of more common sense objections, both scriptural and secular. For a start, most historians agree that Jerusalem fell to Babylon in 587 rather than 607 BCE. Furthermore, there is no indication in the book of Daniel that his prophetic dream about the reign of Nebuchadnezzar had any wider implications that would necessitate a second fulfilment of the prophecy. Finally, regarding the theory that a day can also means a year, we could just as easily take a different passage from scripture, perhaps one from 2 Peter 3—‘that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’—and use the above 'reasoning' to argue that the end of the world will begin circa 2,500,000 CE!

So, witnesses to the Jehovah incident, it might be time for a rethink...

…and while your at it, you might want to re-evaluate a few other things. Read my book for some suggestions.

Appetizer #3: Sacrifice

Jesus Christ was seen by many to be something of a rascal and even a threat to the political powers at the time by spreading sedition and insurrection. He was forever criticizing the religious leaders of the day, calling them hypocrites and cheats, and likening them to 'wicked farmers'. By gaining a large following he threatened their position. He forgave people’s sins, performed healings on the Sabbath, desecrated the Temple and claimed to be the Messiah. There was nothing else for it; he had to go. Jesus was arrested by Roman soldiers on the orders of a Jewish high priest, charged with blasphemy, sentenced to death and subsequently crucified. Pretty open and shut. Yet Christians claim that through this ‘sacrifice’, Jesus somehow atoned for the sins of humanity.

The first thing that springs to mind is that there are two main premises here. On the one hand you have Jesus the trouble maker, the enemy of the state, executed on charges of blasphemy. On the other hand you have Jesus the Messiah, Saviour of all humanity, who gave up his life so that we might be saved. These two ideas are at odds with one another. That is to say, according to scripture, it does not appear that Jesus was giving his life at all; rather he was having it taken away. Far from ‘offering himself as a sacrifice’ (Hebrews 9:14), I cannot see that he had much of a say in the matter. The condemned man does not usually get to choose whether or not he is executed.

No choice: no sacrifice.

To illustrate this, imagine that an unemployed friend of yours breaks the law and is slapped with a hefty fine. With no income she has no hope of paying the fine and, even though you might not approve of what she has done, you feel sorry for her and want to help. You are in a position to pay the fine but it will considerably hurt you financially, and you know that it is practically certain that you will never see that money again. You are faced with a dilemma: keep your money and your friend goes to jail, or, pay the fine and put yourself in financial dire straits. You decide to support your friend and the fine is paid.

Let’s try another one: Imagine instead that it is you who have committed the crime and are liable to pay the fine. You are on a small income and it is decided by the court that your wages be arrested and an amount taken each month until the fine is paid. As your income is modest, this result is costly to you, but the court makes a ruling and that, as they say, is that. This time there is no dilemma: the court takes your money and the fine is paid.

The difference between these two situations is obvious. In the first scenario you could choose to pay the fine but in the second, there was no such choice: the decision was taken out of your hands. The first scenario involved a sacrifice, the second did not.

Once again - No choice: no sacrifice.

Not surprisingly, apologists often make desperate references to scripture in order to get out of this doctrinal nightmare. For instance, in the Gospel of John (10:18), Jesus says of his life: ‘No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again’. Later on, in 19:11, Jesus tells Pontius Pilate that he only has power over him because it was issued ‘from above’. The argument being that if Jesus/God had wished it, he could have avoided death by being spirited away or otherwise escaping. Therefore, by ‘choosing’ not to intervene or escape, Jesus/God made the decision to die and so there was a sacrifice after all.

This really is a pitiful argument. For one thing it is the ultimate in ‘get out’ clauses, as empty and fallacious as the desperate plea of “God did it” that we encountered earlier, except in this case it is rephrased as “God didn’t do it”. Moreover, it is easy to see quite how inadequate an argument it is, if one applies it to the real world. Consider the case of a condemned man—not necessarily the son of God, any condemned man will do. It is always possible, no matter how secure a prison is, to attempt an escape, and it is also possible that such an attempt will be successful, no matter how remote that possibility might be. Are we then to accept that, if the possibility of escape exists, any condemned man who does not take advantage of that possibility, but instead ‘chooses’ not to attempt escape, could be said to have made a sacrifice? I don’t think so; it doesn’t quite work does it?

Appetizer #2: Apartheid in Eden

The basic premise of the first three chapters of Genesis is that God created everything, including Man and Woman in six days, and having done so he puts them in a garden – the garden of Eden - and gives them one rule: don’t eat that fruit over there. They eat it anyway, and are duly punished with labour pains, misogyny, horticultural difficulties, exile and mortality.

Mainstream Christian doctrine also maintains that as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the garden of Eden, a curse was put on the whole earth; the world we live in is a broken world, a cursed world, cursed because of sin. This, we are told, is not what God had intended. Humans are supposed to be living sinlessly in the Garden of Eden for eternity, communing with God, naming all the animals (Genesis 2:19) and generally living a blissful life. It is only because of The Fall that the world has become rotten and corrupt; damaged and corroded; an unholy shadow of its intended form. (Well, perhaps Christians don’t usually put it quite like that, but you get the general idea). With this in mind, let us for the moment grant as true the Genesis account of the Fall and ask some important questions: What if the Fall had never taken place? What would have happened if the divine plan had actually worked? What if Adam and Eve had managed to ignore the sneaky snake and had retained their sinless status?

Well, presumably, if Adam and Eve had not succumbed to temptation and had refrained from eating the forbidden fruit, then they would have remained without sin and the world would not have become broken. Likewise, any offspring they had would have been born in a state of sinlessness, just like them. Now, as the bible says, following The Fall, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, so presumably, without The Fall Adam and Eve and their progeny would have been allowed to stay in the Garden of Eden forever. This picture of humanity living together peacefully and sinlessly in the Garden of Eden is presumably what it would mean for the world to have remained unbroken and perfect....

…but it is not quite as simple as that is it?

The Fall of humanity cannot be seen as simply the result of failing a ‘one time only’ test. The bible indicates that Adam and Eve did indeed fail this ‘test’, but what if they had passed? Surely the test would have had to continue, if for no other reason than to demonstrate their continued obedience. Remember also that, had they passed the test, Adam and Eve’s progeny would have been subject to the same kind of temptation as they were, and perhaps they would have succumbed where their parents had resisted. Perhaps not, but every generation that came after Adam and Eve would have been subjects of the test, and, sooner or later one of them would have succumbed. Then what? Would the curse have been placed on all of humanity from then on? A tad unfair don’t you think? Or, perhaps, the curse would only have been placed on the Fallen and their descendants. In that case we would have two castes of humans, the sinless caste within the Garden of Eden, and the sinful without, with the latter group gaining new members whenever somebody else gave in to temptation.

Obviously, this isn’t meant to be a serious suggestion of what might have happened if Adam and Eve had obeyed God, but it does serve to highlight that the original plan, as intended by God, would have relied on everyone steering clear of temptation. Given humanity’s innate curiosity, not to mention the notion of free will that we hear so much about, this would seem to be an unlikely proposition.

In short, when considering this so-called ‘divine plan’ for humanity, it is worth remembering that it took only one indiscretion to compromise, whereas it would have required countless acts of restraint to succeed. That appears to be monumentally fragile and disastrously unstable; hardly the work of omnipotence. 

The Great Crucifixion Challenge

This is a challenge that I posted a few years ago on a local web forum with interesting results, so I thought I would try it here as well. Please make a comment if you have an opinion on this. I would purely love to get an answer to this challenge:

For quite some time now I have been puzzled by Christianity and one subject in particular heads the field by quite a long way: The Crucifixion.

As I understand it Jesus Christ, in his day, was seen by many to be something of a rascal and even a threat to the political powers at the time by spreading sedition and insurrection. According to the bible Jesus was arrested by Roman soldiers on the orders of a Jewish high priest and charged with blasphemy. He was then sentenced to death, and subsequently crucified. Am I right so far?

The entire basis for the Christian faith centres on one simple premise. Namely that by his death, on the cross, Jesus somehow atoned for the sins of humanity. This in a nutshell is where I have the problem.

The first thing that springs to mind is that there are two main premises here. On the one hand you have Jesus the trouble maker and enemy of the state, executed on trumped up charges of blasphemy. On the other hand you have Jesus the Messiah, Saviour of all humanity who gave up his life so that we might be saved.

It seems to me that these two ideas do not gel with each other. That is to say, it does not appear that Jesus was giving his life at all; rather he was having it taken away. I am not entirely sure that he had much of a say in the matter.

The second thing that springs to mind is that the idea of Jesus sacrificing himself in order to pay for our sins might be a case of post facto rationalisation whereby his followers crow barred in this whole saviour story after the event.

I digress. All of this is largely irrelevant to my main point because it is the belief of Christians which has prompted this challenge, and Christians certainly do believe in the whole ‘dying for our sins’ thing. The question is: Why?

Let us, for a minute, assume that Jesus did die upon the cross in order to pay for the sins of mankind. First of all, this idea is actually quite scary. I think I am right in saying that there are about two billion Christians in the world today. Two billion people who believe that in order to live their lives correctly they must accept the ritual blood sacrifice of their Messiah. Am I alone in finding this just a tad disturbing?

Of course, mainstream Christianity would not put it this way, but all the hallmarks are their. A sacrifice of a person’s life in order to appease a deity, what would you call it?

Furthermore, and here is the crux of the matter (if you’ll pardon the pun), how does the death of Jesus atone for our sins?

I have thought about this for a long time and I cannot for the life of me figure out why God would need somebody to die in order to forgive us our sins, and when you consider that Christians believe Jesus to have been the physical embodiment of God on Earth, the story takes on an even more bizarre twist. That would mean that God had himself crucified so that he could forgive us!!??

The other point to make here is: Whose sins were atoned as a result of the sacrifice? Was it just the people alive at that time? If so what about all the poor souls who went before? Or was it everybody who had lived up until that point? If that’s the case, how does the crucifixion affect us today? Or perhaps it is everybody who will ever live. In that case, we’re already forgiven and worship becomes superfluous.

My challenge then is this: Is there anybody out there who can explain to me the reason for the crucifixion?

It should be apparent that merely saying “Jesus died for our sins” simply will not do. I need specifics here. I need a cogent explanation for the practical purpose of the blood sacrifice; otherwise Christianity appears to have no more substance than ritual occultism.

As I mentioned earlier, the crucifixion is at the centre of Christianity and so I am expecting quite a few responses. It should be an easy task for a Christian to succinctly answer my questions. However, I do find it odd that one the most important concepts in the Bible is so nebulous and murky. After two thousand years of writes and re-writes I would have expected the style to have settled down a bit by now and for all the creases to have been ironed out. Perhaps it needs a bit more work.

Appetizer #1: On god and science

In arguing for the existence of God, many apologists are fond of appealing to scientific discoveries that, they maintain, support their view of a divine prime mover. I'm thinking here of arguments such as the Cosmological Argument which, although primarily a philosophical argument that is presented as logically deductive in the form of a syllogism, nevertheless relies on an interpretation of cosmology for at least one of its premisses. I am also thinking of the various arguments from design, either those that have to do with biological complexity or the fine tuning arguments concerning the fundamental constants in physics.

Already we have touched upon three of the major sciences – cosmology, biology and physics - but apologists will often press other scientific ideas into service in order to further their arguments, ideas such as causality, logic, the origin of consciousness, even mathematics and the nature of infinity.

These appeals to science strike me as ironic because when apologists are forced to move away from hijacking scientific terminology in order to make their case, they invariably switch to a position that relies on the tiresome old complaint that science cannot explain everything; that there are gaps in its knowledge, and that scientists are arrogant if they assume that methodological naturalism is the only game in town.

I mention all this by way of preface, not because I want to rebut these arguments here (I deal with them in another section of the book), but because I want to suggest that these issues, all interesting and absorbing no doubt, become dull and puerile once a supernatural deity is inserted into the equation.

It seems to me that issues such as causality, logic, biodiversity and the fundamental constants of nature, as well as unsolved problems like the origins of the cosmos, life and consciousness, are issues that only become interesting subjects, or absorbing intellectual problems, when one discards the notion of God. As soon as one posits the supernatural, not only is one bereft of an explanation—because the supernatural explains nothing—but one is also left with nothing left to investigate. The invocation of the supernatural stultifies any further discussion, for it is not open to any analysis. So, purely from an aesthetic point of view, the concept of God is mind numbingly dull.

On the other hand, science is enormously interesting. If the last 300 years had taught us anything it has taught us that science works. It is capable of producing testable, repeatable results, it makes accurate predictions and, by its very nature, is the one mode of discourse where an individual's biases are systematically corrected for. It is also the one mode of discourse, or so it would seem, where it is perfectly acceptable to simply say “I don't know”. I ask you, since when has saying “I don't know” been arrogant? It seems the very antithesis of arrogance, especially when set against the certainty propounded by the religious amongst us.

It is certainly true that there remain gaps in scientific understanding, indeed it may well be the case that those gaps will endure for a long time to come. It may even be the case that they will never be closed. However, as many others have pointed out, what reason have we got to imagine that scientific ignorance can be usefully or justifiably replaced with religious certainty? The assumption made by many that any gap in scientific understanding can be filled by the invocation of a deity is as wrong-headed an assumption as it possible to make. It has a name in fact, it is called the God of the gaps argument, and it is not qualitatively different from simply waving a little white flag and surrendering to ignorance.

There is, I submit, a much better way, to regard the nature of science and the gaps in its understanding, and conveniently enough it brings us back to the concept of god. I offer you a very short extract from my book to illustrate my point:

"It is important to recognise that whilst it is possible for a layperson to go to a library, pick up a book, and educate themselves on a particular aspect of scientific understanding, there is no shelf in any public library which contains the unvarnished truth about the Laws of Nature. Nature's laws are fixed and immutable, whilst scientific understanding is always in flux, always playing catch-up. This is not a criticism of science, far from it. It is precisely this flexibility that gives science its strength, its integrity, and its honesty.

"Science proceeds on the basis that, barring outside intervention, the universe operates to certain laws. These laws are observable and, when understood, predictable (the peculiarities of the quantum world aside). By processes of observation and experiment, scientists can form explanatory frameworks or theories, for the various aspects of the material universe. Theories can be rigorously tested over a long period of time, and over a wide range of conditions and variables. Of course, such a process cannot be exhaustive. That would require observation and experiment in all possible times, places and circumstances and obviously this is impossible from a practical point of view; much of science is indeed inductive. Accordingly, one of the main tenets of science is that experiments must be repeatable and theories must be subject to peer review and susceptible to falsification should contrary evidence be presented. This in a nutshell is the scientific method, and it is a truly remarkable achievement.

"So, with the Laws of Nature on one hand and scientific understanding on the other, it is the job of science to keep the differences between them as small as possible; the ultimate, but possibly unreachable, goal being that they one day become one and the same thing. Should that happy day ever dawn then one could imagine it as a time when science would, in a sense, be complete; there would be nothing left to find out. On that day humanity, or a subset of it, with total knowledge of the universe and everything in it, might even be described as a race of Gods!

"Well, perhaps that is over egging things slightly, but hypothetical playfulness aside, the point to be made here is that if God belongs anywhere at all, then it is at the end of a natural process and not at the beginning of one."

A response to advice

I have recently received some very good advice from Ophelia Benson. (I don't know her you understand, I just follow her on Twitter.) I had asked her, as I have been asking everybody, to retweet a link to my blog, this blog in fact, in the hope that it would lend some much needed exposure to my book. She has suggested that if I were to post something a bit more substantive on this blog I might enjoy better results. I agree.

I must say though, that I am quite embarrassed by this, especially since I have been given very similar advice before. It's obvious to me now of course, that looking at my posts so far there is nothing of any substance here. All I have really offered so far is half-hearted posts about the the fact that my book is available for Kindle, or my facile observations about my various exploits in self marketing. I'm enormously grateful for the wake-up call, and I intend to do something about it in subsequent posts.

In my book, I identify five main themes that I argue are the most important and fundamental cornerstones of Christianity. They are: God, Sin, Atonement, Judgement, and Faith. Over the next few days and weeks I intend to make a series of substantive posts that set out various ideas that I tackle under these umbrella terms. I have previously posted a brief synopsis of the book, but just to set the scene as it were, here is a more substantial adumbration of the themes of the book:

God

This topic is mainly addressed in the first chapter of the book which begins with an analysis of the main arguments and counter arguments for the existence of God – the arguments from design, cosmic origins and morality – and touches upon aspects of science, simple philosophy and logic. Having touched upon all the major arguments for God, and demonstrating that they are all lacking in some way, the chapter finishes by waiving all objections and ‘accepting’ that God exists. This sets the tone for the rest of the book and a similar concession is be made at the end of each chapter, save the last.

Sin

This theme is covered in the second chapter, where I am concerned primarily with establishing whether or not the Christian idea of an ancestral, inherited curse of sin is scriptural, and the various objections to the dogma of ‘Original Sin’ are discussed. This chapter includes sections on the Genesis account of Creation and The Fall, the transmission of sin from one generation to the next, the logical implausibility of the dogma in stories such as the Great Flood; and the bizarre circumstances that might have been expected had the Fall not taken place.

Atonement

The third and fourth chapters of the book deal with the person of Jesus of Nazareth and his so-called sacrifice on the cross. The topics discussed range from Old Testament Prophecy and biblical inerrancy to the concepts of choice and responsibility, and questions the whole idea of blood sacrifices, their morality, or lack thereof.

Judgement

The concept of divine judgement is dealt with in chapters five and six where the mismatch between the Old and New Testament treatments of the subject is explored, as well as the amusing lengths to which certain denominations of Christianity go when predicting when the final judgement will actually take place. The chapters also discusses the much anticipated Second Coming of Christ, and attempts to define the different types of unbeliever or infidel.

Faith

Finally, chapter seven tackles the concept of faith, the various definitions of the word itself as well as its role in religion, science and public education. The second half the chapter seven also acts as a kind of coda for the rest of the book. Drawing upon all of the arguments made so far, all of the objections to Christianity are stacked up, one after the other, stretching the credulity of the reader to breaking point. The chapter ends by questioning the morality of Christianity's overall message, as well as drawing some final conclusions.

__

So there we have it. That's the book. What I thought I would do now is to take one aspect from each theme and rework them into less formal blog posts, appetizers if you will. I'll submit the first one in the next few days, and it will be about the clash between science and god. Wish me well and watch this space...

Thank you Deluded Students

Deluded Students