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gjm comments on Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points - Less Wrong
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Can anyone point out the weakest points in christianity? You need to know enough about it and you need to give it considerable thought.
(I am christian. As long as I can remember I have adopted a mindset of skeptical thinking and self doubt, but since I in real life don´t know many people who are smarter than me and knows enough to say anything about christianity, I ask you. My mom is agnostic and pretty clever, but she can come up with better arguments for a God than I can. A fair warning, I doubt that many here knows enough about christianity to actually come up with something, but I would be positively surprised if someone did. I have some weak points of my own, but it would be very useful to see if I have missed something instead of just sticking with that.)
Depends on what sort of Christianity. For instance, much of blossom's list is clearly addressed to those who believe that God designed earth's living things (directly or less so) but some Christians don't believe that.
Would you care to say a few words about the variety of Christianity you favour?
(In case the answer is no, here are a few suggested weak points for different varieties, all probably expressed too tersely to be more than the barest gesture towards an argument. Hardcore inerrantist fundamentalism: internal inconsistencies in the Bible. More mainstream but still fairly "traditional": arguments from evil and silence. Varieties that stress God's love over his power and suggest that for whatever reason he largely has "no hands on earth but ours", but still see him as exerting moral influence: the fact that Christians are not spectacularly better morally than everyone else. Highly sophistimacated apophatic theology that refuses to say anything definite about God: impossibility of actually having any evidence to speak of for a being so vaguely defined; lack of continuity with the Christian tradition whose existence and longevity are pretty much the only reason for paying any attention to such ideas. All but the last: general shortage of evidence and tendencies for the more impressive sorts to evaporate on closer inspection; maybe complexity penalty for introducing into your model of the universe a god whose properties are so hard to pin down.)
I don't know how LW compares with other places occupied by large numbers of intelligent atheists, but my experience generally is that a large fraction of atheists are former theists, many of them former serious and well informed theists. I don't know whether we will come up with anything you find impressive (and of course you may be strongly motivated to find anything we do come up with unimpressive...) but if not it probably won't be out of sheer ignorance of Christianity.
Thank you for your answer.
I am an evangelic christian and within my belief the gospels override everything else that is or can be seen as contradictory. (I don´t read the Torah since I am not a Jew and I do not seek wisdome in the old testament even though I have had a surprinsingly wise teacher who taught me how to interpret that old rubbish in ways that actually made sense to me.) See, if I believe Jesus was divine, I have to value the words of Christ higher than the words of his followers and mortal predecessors.
Yes, my hope was and is that someone like that will answer my question. You are right, your answers do not impress me, you seem to fail to understand important things about christianity. I can come up with much better counter arguments myself, but I really appreciate the honest try. If you would like me to tell you about what I think might be wrong in your picture of what christianity is about, you can PM me or ask me to answer here.
Really? Name the two best examples of people here misunderstanding.
I don´t understand what you mean. Examples of people?
Examples of misunderstandings by people.
Examples of misunderstanding. (Though I think Jiro may have misunderstood your statement that I fail to understand important things about Christianity as saying that the LW population at large fails to understand important things about Christianity.)
Besides the entire Old Testament, do you also disregard the books of Acts, Epistles and Apocalypse?
They have lower priority than what could be the words of God. I do not disregard the New testament, I just "like" the gospels more than the rest of it.
Do you agree completely with the Church's opinion on which books should be part of the Bible and which books shouldn't?
I take it you refer to christian churches. No. But I haven't fully read any non-canon gospels yet. Do note this is off topic, PM me or continue our old chat instead, you have not answered there yet :)
I take it "evangelic", as you're using it, is not identical to the fairly common term "evangelical" despite its obvious shared etymology? Evangelicalism as generally understood is hard to reconcile with calling the OT "old rubbish". I guess you're using it to mean something like "centred on the gospels".
I'd have a pretty good idea of your likely position on lots of things if you were an evangelical in the usual sense (inerrancy of scripture or something close to it, salvation sola fide, strongly substitutionary theory of the atonement, relatively more stress on personal faith and relationship-with-God rather than more corporate things, inclined to skepticism about anything that could be labelled "tradition" or "ritual", etc., etc., etc., etc.) but unfortunately what you've said here isn't terribly indicative.
They weren't answers, they were (as I said in so many words) brief gestures in the direction of possible answers. If you think I would think half a dozen words would convince you of anything, then I think you must think I think you're either much cleverer or much stupider than is at all plausible.
I honestly do not know how you could possibly be justified in leaping to such a conclusion from what I have written here. I wonder whether you have perhaps misunderstood the nature of my response.
Perhaps it is necessary to say some of the following things explicitly. 1. Christianity -- like any religion -- is not simply a body of propositions; it is also a community, a way of life, a set of attitudes, allegedly a personal and/or corporate communion with God, a rich stream of traditions of many kinds, etc., etc., etc. My comments are addressing some of the propositions because that is what you appeared to be interested in (e.g., talking about "arguments for God") but that doesn't mean I am unaware of the other things. 2. To any simple argument, whether good or bad, there is generally an almost-as-simple counterargument, to which in turn there is generally a counter-counter-argument one notch less simple again, etc. Of course when I say e.g. "argument from evil" I am not suggesting that on hearing the words "argument from evil" a Christian should deconvert on the spot. I am suggesting that there are lines of argument, briefly alluded to by that term, for which at any given level of sophistication the atheist has the better case. I have not actually made any such argument here, and of course I do not expect anyone to be convinced by the mere mention of a family of arguments. Similarly for all the other things I mentioned. 3. I am well aware that there are varieties of Christian thinking that attempt to sidestep some of the arguments I mention -- e.g., denying that introducing God into your understanding of the world makes it more complex, because by definition God is supremely simple. For each such, though, (a) there are other varieties that don't attempt the sidestep, and further (b) disagreeing with something is not the same as failing to understand it.
Or perhaps none of that helps. Who knows? Anyway, I would be interested to know a few examples of things you believe I fail to understand about Christianity. I think it would be more productive to tell me here out in the open, but if you prefer to PM me then feel free.
(I was a Christian for -- depending on exactly how you count -- at least twenty years. I have held (minor) leadership roles in Christian organizations. I have a few shelves of theology books, maybe 90% of which I have read. My wife is still an active Christian. It is of course possibly that I completely fail to understand fundamental things about the religion that was central to my life for decades (either because I never did, or because abandoning the faith exposed me to some kind of demonic possession, or whatever) but I would suggest that you consider the possibilities (1) that you have arrived at your conclusion prematurely and/or (2) that you would consider that, say, 80% or more of serious Christians fail to understand important things about Christianity. Which, of course, might be true.)
[EDITED to clarify a sentence in which I inadvertently used the word "common" with two quite different meanings.]
Wikipedia Yes, it may be confusing but I tend to use words in their original meaning. It is good to check anyway, since english is not my native language.
Perhaps I arrived prematurely at the conclusion, but as I said, I think you might have misunderstood, I didn´t say you actually had. If I mean to say that you are wrong, I say that you are wrong. Okey, so you only hint at stuff. Well that don´t help me, is that a more political azccurate term?
Okey, I will point out the hings I saw as weird. 1. "Hardcore inerrantist fundamentalism: internal inconsistencies in the Bible." Why would a christian need to be a hardcore fundamentalist and interpret the whole Bible literal? You don´t interpret science fiction literal. I guess you mean that this only apply to SOME christians. 2. "the fact that Christians are not spectacularly better morally than everyone else." Well, this seems like an ambitious statement in my eyes. Compare all the countries with a cross in their flag with countries that don´t have it. Compare BNP and corruption, crime rate and wellfare etc etc. Now think about this: Why WOULD christians need to have higher moral? Where do you find that premise in the NT? It seems to me like that isn´t based in christian theology at all, but if you have 20 years experience as an active christian maybe you know something I don´t. 3. "Highly sophistimacated apophatic theology that refuses to say anything definite about God." Hah! Like we have been very successful at definitely defining the universe for hundreds of years of scientific struggle. Anyhow, here are something to consider; * The holy trinity * Jesus saying: I am the way and the life * The statement that Jesus is the son of God and God and all his teachings showing what he valued and who he was and how he acted, which is kind of the whole point of christianity. * First Epistle to the Corinthians, verse (?) 13
Now if we compare this with other religious teachings, I think we will find that we can see differences between the deities.
Not a bad policy. The trouble is that saying "my version of Christianity is rooted in the gospels" doesn't really do much to distinguish you from everyone else, because pretty much all Christians consider that their version of Christianity is rooted in the gospels. So describing your variety of Christianity as "evangelic" tells me rather little.
Well, your actual words were "you seem to fail to understand important things about christianity". But it's OK; I'm not offended.
Well, you know, I did consider just asking you "so what kind of Christian are you?" and refusing to say anything about what might be the strongest arguments against any kind of Christianity until the kind is precisely specified. I thought it might help us move forward a bit quicker if I gave some indication of the kinds of arguments that might be appropriate, so that we could work in parallel on figuring out (1) what kind of Christianity to look for good arguments against and (2) what those arguments actually are.
They wouldn't. My whole point was that there are different kinds of Christians with different kinds of Christianity. One kind -- by no means the only kind -- is the hardcore fundamentalist who claims to believe everything in the Bible (not necessarily literally, but I never claimed otherwise). If I were looking for good arguments against that kind of Christianity, one thing I'd look at is inconsistencies between different bits of the Bible (that appear to be intended as straightforward history or doctrinal teaching rather than any kind of metaphor).
Yes. If I hadn't already made that clear enough, I apologize. (I thought I had.)
Really? You think a good default position is that Christians are spectacularly better than everyone else, morally? OK.
(I think the cross-country comparison you suggest is totally invalidated by lots of other things that historically happen to correlate a bit with Christian heritage.)
Christians are supposed (at least according to some varieties of Christianity, the ones I'd be taking aim at if I were making that kind of argument) to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God, who is the source of all goodness and value in the world.
Christians typical pray frequently (both individually and if following standard liturgies of various churches that have them) for their hearts to be purified, to be cleansed from sin, to be enabled to live righteously. This seems like very much the kind of prayer that the Christian god might be expected to grant, if he were real (it is clearly in line with his stated goals; it doesn't require "interference" with the world beyond people's minds; the minds in question are of people who have already declared themselves willing for him to change them, and are specifically asking him to do it.)
Well, actually, we have. Spectacularly so. Do you really disagree?
[EDITED to add a few other things since I had to write the above in a bit of a rush, which is one reason why it's too long:]
Some suggestions in the NT that Christians should be much better morally than they generally are: 1 Peter 2 says that Jesus "bore our own sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin but live to righteousness"; one can read that as talking about some kind of "imputed righteousness" that doesn't actually involve acting righteously, but I think it's a stretch and more to the point a Christian of the particular kind I said this might be a good response to wouldn't take that position. 1 John 1 and 2 similarly talk of being "cleansed from all unrighteousness" and again I don't think it's likely that the author means some purely formal transaction that doesn't involve actually becoming morally better. He seems to admit only reluctantly that genuine Christians might continue to commit sins at all. In chapter 3 he goes further: "No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him." Now of course 1 John paints with a very broad brush, but there it is in the New Testament and even if the author is overstating his case he must mean something by it. That famous chapter that you recommended I should consider, 1 Corinthians 13: read it in its context; it is saying that love (with that whole extravagant litany of virtues it brings along with it) is the most important gift of the Holy Spirit that is supposed to be present and active within every Christian's heart. Galatians 5 has a lengthy list of "fruits of the Spirit" (which Christians are supposed to exhibit) and most of them are moral virtues (and the corresponding "works of the flesh" opposed thereto are mostly moral vices).
I'm afraid it's not obvious what sort of conclusion you're hoping I'll draw from your list. Rather than guessing, I'll comment briefly on the individual items in it. I may very well be missing your point, though.
Just a note: I see your comments in this thread are getting downvoted, but it's not by me.
I know.
Just out of curiosity: How? Has someone else been boasting of doing it?
You have yet to tell us what you believe, apart from the tribal/political reassurance about evolution. What do you mean by "divine" (this is important for prior probability), and what evidence do you believe you have for this variety of Jesus?
I assume you know that scholars largely consider the Gospels unreliable. The earliest one dates from during or after the war that destroyed the 'Second Temple', and we know of no Christian leader in Jerusalem who survived it. Shortly before this Nero supposedly persecuted the Christians in Rome. We know nothing about the history of Christianity at the time when the Gospel of Mark likely appeared, which weakly supports the claim that all the leaders were dead. We can't name anyone who definitely had the power to insist on points of doctrine or prevent innovation.
On the assumption most favorable to the reliability of the early Gospels - that someone in the know wrote them to preserve original Christianity in this difficult time - we should still conclude that they have a lot to do with theological/political disputes of the time which we know nothing about. We should expect to misinterpret something in the text through not knowing this context.