I was on a camp once, it involved cycling about 1000km to raise money for the church. I did 4, 2 as a Christian and two as a non-Christian. I still respected Christians for their morality and desire to do good, which we might call altruism. Of course a few months later one of the Christians on one of those cycle tours became embroiled in that Kovsie Kampus Skandaal, where they made domestic workers eat either urine soaked food or pseudo urine soaked food, amongst other obscenities. That's not the point though, the point is that one night a jeugleier asked as to each come up with a fact about 'the Lord'. And they went something like this:
God loves us, and that's a fact.
God protected us today, and that's a fact.
It's a fact that Jesus died on the cross to save our sins.
It's a fact that by God's grace we are saved.
It's a fact that Jesus is my saviour.
After about 5 minutes of this, I decided to say something. I was quite uncomfortable doing so, because I didn't go along to cause trouble, or to stir. I loved the cycling aspect, the community, meeting new people, the singing, the fellowship. I just found the God aspect stretched too thin. Anyway, so I said: "Ummm...a fact is something known to be true: something that can be demonstrated to be true, to exist, or to have happened. But I'm hearing opinions here. We can't prove that God loves us any more than we can prove there is a God."
To his credit, the jeugleier agreed. he suggested we not use statements that include emotions such as 'love'. But the facts that flowed from there were no different: "I know that Jesus has saved me." "I know I'm going to heaven." "I know the only way to be saved is through Jesus, and that's a fact."
Reheheheaaaally?
I might feel very very strongly that I am hungry, but it doesn't mean I can say: "I'm hungry, that's a fact." Because it is relative to others perceptions of hungriness. Someone starving on the streets might welcome the slight hunger pangs you're experiencing. Also, you might be an incredibly overweight person who has just eaten a huge meal. How factual can it then be to say: "I'm hungry, that's a fact."
You might say that this is becoming pointless shenanigans about semantics, but, my friend, the bible is all about semantics. This is why preachers and believers have the bible handy at all times, and instead of offering you their God inspired insights, they quote bible versus verbatim. This assumes that no new insights have come to light, that possibly needed to be written down, since the bible was first written.
And that's another faulty assumption. The bible evolved through many centuries, many periods, many permutations. There are the apocrypha after all, and revelations came dangerously close to being relegated to the apocrypha. The apocrypha provide a hint at the inherent mythology - in the same way that a fairy tale is myth - that the bible is.
But let's get down to business, shall we:
What is sin? And here we want to look at facts, at evidence, at what this thing really is. Here's what WIKI says:
Sin is a term used mainly in a religious context to describe an act that violates a moral rule, or the state of having committed such a violation. Commonly, the moral code of conduct is decreed by a divine entity, i.e. Divine law.
Sin is often used to mean an action that is prohibited or considered wrong; in some religions (notably some sects of Christianity), sin can refer to a state of mind rather than a specific action. Colloquially, any thought, word, or act considered immoral, shameful, harmful, or alienating might be termed "sinful".
Wikipedia really sums it up in the first few words. Sin is a term used mainly in a religious context. On an every day basis, children don't accuse one another of having sinned - they'll say someone hurt them, or parents or teachers will say they behaved badly. 'Sin' is a preachers word. Even ordinary Christians only refer to their own sins in a church or in inner monologues with God. It's not conventionally accepted, while other words: crime, unacceptable, indecent, misbehaved etc. is used far more often.
The idea of sin means essentially that you need a unique set of circumstances of scenarios to liberate you from it. Unlike a crime, which is the domain of the courts, sin is different. You can commit sin for thinking an unsavoury thought. You can commit a sin by masturbating. You can commit a sin by not loving God with all your heart, soul and mind [quite a tall order]. And yet the 10 commandments aren't the sort of things we needed to hear from God. Not only are they biased towards men [thy shalt not covet they neighbour's wife, well what about thy neighbour's husband, is that okay?], but any rational human being, Christian or not, knows not to murder, steal or lie. We don't need God for that.
Here's a quick aside. Christianity is based on the minority idea that although people at the time rejected Jesus, he was actually the real thing, and all the Jews who had him crucified were wrong. I don't get a sense that Christians or anyone else notice the little guy, the unpopular or scorned, and treat them as though they could be Christ. If someone is popular he's made even more popular, shunned, he gets shunned even more.
Anyway, back to sin - sin is a wonderful tool to convince people why Christianity, after all, is necessary. The wages of sin is death. Actually, all of us die [ apparently because all of us are sinners]. So if we don't commit sin we escape death - well Jesus didn't, but he saved us. Right.
Here's the rub though. A man who killed a bunch of women in a health club rationalised the killing in advance, in fact used the bible and God to get the courage and motivation to do it after chickening out the first time. He wrote this on his blog:
August 3, 2009:
I took off today, Monday, and tomorrow to practice my routine and make sure it is well polished. I need to work out every detail, there is only one shot. Also I need to be completely immersed into something before I can be successful. I haven’t had a drink since Friday at about 2:30. Total effort needed. Tomorrow is the big day.
Unfortunately I talked to my neighbor today, who is very positive and upbeat. I need to remain focused and absorbed COMPLETELY. Last time I tried this, in January, I chickened out. Lets see how this new approach works.
Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them.
Sodini then lists as the number 1 idiot, a religious person:
Andy Pulkowski – I have been in barrooms and church groups. The worst people by far are the religious types. Especially a right-wing, stiff-faced fundie like Andy. A condescending, demeaning, passive-aggresive person. Frigid, rigid, linear and totally inflexible. Being a very serious person, he cannot hide his frown-lined face. He better not try to smile; lest his face might crack. I knew children of parents who grew up in strict religious homes. Religion has a certain stink to it of guilt, shame, fear, and that moral standard that always contradicts the natural tendencies and desires of a person. Therin lies the conflict. Young person cannot experiment with things to decide on their own and establish their own parameters. So they tend to cut loose and really rebel much worse than the average young person. Ma and Pa never know what goes on. They easily BS their parents because they want to believe their little one is an angel.
Sodini also placed his priest on a roll of honorable mentions, right on top, above his mother, on his blog fully detailing his criminal intent and psychology behind it:Tetelestai Church in Pittsburgh, PA – “Be Ye Holy, even as I have been Ye holy! Thus saith the lord thy God!”, as pastor R— K—- [redacted by raincoaster] would proclaim. Holy shit, religion is a waste. But this guy teaches (and convinced me) you can commit mass murder then still go to heaven. Ask him. Call him at [redacted by raincoaster]. If no answer there, he should still live at [redacted by raincoaster]. In any case, guilt and fear kept me there 13 long years until Nov 2006. I think his crap did the most damage. Their web site: http://www.tetelestai.org.
So in the end Sodini rationalised his way to doing what he did, which was walk into a women's class in a gym and open fire on them, with three handguns, before shooting himself. And he was able to do this, because of the tricky dick idea in the bible, of sin. You're guilty of sin, but the bible has a neat trick to get you out, no matter what you've done! That to be accused of being a sinner, and believing in that tripe, you need God, but once you do, you're saved and free of it. But you can't have one without the other. As any flesh and blood person would be, contemplating what Sodini was, he was afraid. Of his own death. But he rationalised it beautifully:
Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid.
I am guessing he is quoting a preacher. But there it is. It's a flawed psychology, and here is a single instance of it. Try Charles Manson and countless monsters for more, and if you don't like the exotic, then google some of your favorite priests and personalities to find out how they frolick with sin and forgiveness. Billy Graham, Hansie Cronje - there are hundreds, and probably fistfuls in your own church and own community. But that's sin for you, done and dusted. It's a pretend sickness with a pretend cure.
The Soul
First, a small experiment. I'm going to demonstrate how the brain works. When you look at an object, nerves in your brain fire. They fire once, and tell you what you are seeing. Even though you might still be looking at something, the brain has done its job. Shift your view and neurons in your brain fire to life again. Now. I want you to do an experiment. Scroll down and look at this word:
FIRE
No, really concentrate on it. Or choose a different object. But here's what you do. Stare at the object and feel your brain recognise what it is [neurons firing] and continue staring at it. You might become aware that it is almost like you are looking but without focusing. It's because your brain has registered what it is.
The purpose of this experiment is simply to show that while we think our brains are amazing, there is a simple system at work. Recognition. Cognition. Re- cognition. Something else interesting about sight is that we only really see a tiny area in our field of view in focus. Everything else is a blur, but as soon as you look elsewhere, that part is in focus, and so the brain fills in the picture, creating an impression that what we are seeing is all sharply in focus. Actually, very little is.
Now, a step further. You may think that what you see outside of yourself you're seeing outside of yourself. In other words, your fingers are being seen by your eyes and that's being relayed to your brain. So the outer world is being displayed...but how is it being displayed? Well, what you are seeing are sensory outputs firing in your brain, inside your head. So everything you see in the world outside is actually visualised [re- presented] inside your brain by an amazing dance of neurons firing and the brain con-figure-ing it into something that makes sense. This is why babies struggle to see the world or make sense of it. It takes time for their eyes to adjust, for them to differentiate between light and shadow, movement, temporary stationery objects and ordinary movements. It takes some time for the brain to make the connections between what it is seeing and what it actually means. And as we should know by now, the brain can be fooled. Sometimes we see things that suggest a certain shape etc., but then reality turns out not be what we're seeing, but a different order of reality.
These are examples of the brain filling in the space that we think is there, but making an error.
Our brains have over time evolved to deal with many sophisticated visual stimuli, but we are still easily fooled. We have what is known as a blind spot, and what we see, may not be happening after all. None of the above picture are moving. But usually these configurations are associated with movement. A moth is a good example of a perfectly evolved creature who could not have been expected to anticipate the sudden introduction of light bulbs. Evolution taught the moth to navigate using distance to infinity - to the stars, the sun or the moon - and so moths fly at a particular angle to these lights. But flying at 30% to a light bulb means you're going in circles. The circuitry that is generally effective now leads to the demise, the downfall of the moth.
It's a similar scenario, but more subtle, with us. And while sin is how we rationalise our needing God, it is the soul that we are trying to save. Because if the wages of sin is death, and we all die, then why bother being saved from death [which we aren't, we die whether we are saved or not] if there isn't some vessel that remains. That vessel is the soul. 95% of people believe it exists. Yet no soul, among the billions that are out there, has ever returned to provide us with useful information about heaven, or earth for that matter. Where is heaven? Is global warming real after all?
Wiki defines the soul as follows:
In many religions, spiritual traditions, and philosophies, the soul is the spiritual or immaterial part of a living being, often regarded as eternal. It is usually thought to consist of one's consciousness and personality, and can be synonymous with the spirit, mind or self.[1] In theology, the soul is often believed to live on after the person’s physical death, and some religions posit that God creates souls. In some cultures, non-human living things, and sometimes inanimate objects are said to have souls, a belief known as animism.[2]
The terms soul and spirit are often used interchangeably, although the former may be viewed as a more worldly and less transcendent aspect of a person than the latter.[3] The words soul and psyche can also be treated synonymously, although psyche has relatively more physical connotations, whereas soul is connected more closely to metaphysics and religion.[4]
Unlike the word 'sin', the word soul is used quite often. Spirit is used perhaps more often, and consciousness even more often. Soul - I am sure all will agree - is something internal, something inside of us. Wiki saysthe soul is associated with the mind and the self. That's very close to the truth. And preachers would have us believe that our thoughts and ideas, our dreams and hopes, are embodied in a separate living entity inside us called a soul. When we die, those thoughts and dreams and hopes remain embedded in an invisible ether, which is branded with your personality and identify. Thus, after your body dies, your soul is released into the universe. In a sense this is true. The energy that comprises us - heat, electric etc is released when the body dies and decomposes. The sticky part comes when foetusses die, when people consider abortions, and also when our pets die. It is comforting to think that our favorite dog has a soul and has gone to heaven. Of course the bible says nothing about this. And each person makes up his own mind, particularly when in the situation, whether life in a womb, not yet born, has a soul.If you want to understand the brain a little better, read a somewhat difficult but also extraordinary book, byFrancis Crick, called The Astonishing Hypothesis:
In the quote above you refers to your soul. Who you are, in every detail, amounts to the symphony of detail buzzing in your brain. Thus we define death [medically and legally] as the moment the brain dies. We even commonly allow people to die who are still alive, when we see the brain is dead. Why do we do that? Because without a brain in operation there is no personality, no identity, no life and soul to the person. Do we imagine that a person who is braindead and one who is dead is any different? Is a braindead person a person with the soul hanging around? If we're honest with ourselves we know this isn't true, which brings us to an unpleasant truth."The Astonishing Hypothesis is that you—your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules"
Death
Death is the end my friend. Whether you believe in heaven, or whichever religion, you will die. And it is true, nobody knows what happens after we die because all of us here who can read are alive, for now. What we do know, though, is what it was like before we were born. And before we were born we were not alive. Do you have any recollection of where your soul was then, or what it was doing? Do you have any emotional feeling about that period when you were not alive? No. Because you weren't there, you didn't exist.
Death is the same, but it is understandable that being alive, being on the side of life, we can anticipate what it is like to not be alive. It tends to have negative associations, but we forget that death comes to some who are old, and many who are suffering. Some welcome death and call it rest. From life. Life at times can be unbearable. Cancers and sicknesses and loneliness can at times be hard to deal with. Some people kill themselves, their experience of life is so painful. So don't be too quick to judge death as worse than life. Is night worse than day? It is simply part of the universe of all things.
God is not. Sin, is not. Guilt and the soul are all childish imaginings. They may be useful to you to make sense of the world. And people who believe in God will say to those who don't:
"If all of life is meaningless, and ultimately absurd , why bother to march straight forward, why stand in the queue as though life as a whole makes sense?" —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There
The answer is because life does make sense if you take the time to try to understand it. There are systems in place that took ages to evolve. With time they became more complex. In the same way we started off as one fertlised cell and became very complex. Is who you are resident in one cell or in the continuum of cellular activity that you are? No, life does make sense, let's not rush to convenient answers because we are too lazy to contemplate, or too busy to read difficult books.
If there is no God, on what basis is there any meaning or hope for fairness, comfort, or better times?
The answer is that without God we still have common sense. I don't need God in order to know that dishonesty harms relationships. Experience informs us what works in society, and that anti-social behaviour leads to society rejecting you.
Without a personal Creator-God, how are you anything other than the coincidental, purposeless miscarriage of nature, spinning round and round on a lonely planet in the blackness of space for just a little while before you and all memory of your futile, pointless, meaningless life finally blinks out forever in the endless darkness?
Well, evolution is hardly purposeless. The genealogy of just one family is an epic story of survival across hundreds, thousands of generations. How meaningful or pointless your life is decided by you, and none other than you. If you sense your life lacks meaning, it is because you seek greater meaning. But then it is up to you to find it. Is God the convenient answer, or the inconvenient question?
Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker:
"Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning."
Dawkins goes on to say that God is the ultimate Boeing 747, and using an analogy used by Christians to defend the idea of design [and a Designer]. They say that for the world to have been created, as completely and perfectly as it has been, on its own, by accident, is as improbable as a hurricane sweeping through a junkyard, and assembling a fully functional Boeing 747. Hawkins goes on to say that just because something is improbable, does not mean a license is provided for the more improbable, which is a personal God who, let's be fair, is neither very personally involved in maintaining his experiments nor needs to involved in self-sustaining and correcting systems [that have evolved without his help].
The idea of a hurricane in a junkyard also pretends that systems and processes are not part of the evolutionary activity. That a once off, momentary explosion [like creation, but random] can create everything. Once again, it ignores the experience we ought to have of ourselves. That we came from simple beginnings us as individuals - as one fertilised cell, which then replicated and specialised, and became increasingly sophisticated over time. Even when we were born we could not see properly, or speak, or have control over our bodily fluids, or walk. In our own personal evolution there was a long process involved in growing and developing. We tend to be especially ignorant of the vital first 9 months, and the following 5 years, when we learned language. Our knowledge,instead, pertains what we know, and becomes slightly erratic of the humbling fact that we were bumbling babes once. Apparently incoherent, apparently unaware of the world.
It says a lot about ourselves, our beliefs. Because we imagine somehow that we also just someone came to exist. One day we were here. Our imagination and memory and desire to actually think even about our experience of ourselves coming into being - has become exceedingly rusty, and associated with that is a certain arrogance as we claim some of our collective human endeavours as our own. But once upon a time, there was no road, or t-shirt, or sandwich, or sugar or village. Fancy that - the idea of staying in one place and farming. Fancy that - the idea of a road - one route to get somewhere. Fancy that - the idea of owning property, of owning things at all. Fancy that - the idea of a village, where people don't farm but live together and do different things, and are able to have extra food thanks to the efforts of farmers in the area. Fancy that - sugar, something to put on our food and the things we drink. It is useful to remember our history, for what we see around us, was not always so.
I personally believe that what made human beings so sophisticated, what spurred our brains to grow was language. The combinations of words we are cabpable of stringing together in sentences is infinite. The number of symbols we have to communicate the subtle variations of the world to each other is massive. In truth there are only two feelings - love and fear. Both we have a massive vocabulary that finds the finer variations in those feelings, for love it may be affection, liking, enjoying, hoping, smiling, laughing, cuddling, wonder, awe, calm and so on. For fear it might be horror, shock, terror, dislike, unhappiness, discomfort, distrust and so on. It took a long time to develop a sophisticated set of permutations on simple emotions, to cover almost ever subtle emotion. Some languages have words for an experience or a combiantion of things that another language doesn't have. One languages uses zones of the mouth in waves another simply does not.
It is ironic that the very thing that gave us consciousness and boosted the size of our brains, and made us as smart as we are, language, was the same thing that evolved into various religion. Our words enslaved us, forcing many to believe in outlandish ideas like sin, the idea of a soul, and 'going to heaven'. I suppose that is the other side of the coin. Language gave us a gift, but in religion, we used it to curse ourselves.
To read the other 2 Christianity Chronicles, click on the CHRISTINAITY CHRONICLES tag immediately below.
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