Jesus the Atheist?

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Jesus the Atheist?

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1picklesan
Mar 25, 2010, 7:46 pm

I was reading this blog entry about “Christianity Doubt and Atheism” http://www.nathancolquhoun.com/2010/03/15/doubt-journey-and-dirt-a-sermon-on-our...

The writer of the blog said something that struck me as very interesting. He wrote the following:

“Atheists have an easier time with the honesty of uncertainty than Christians do. We talked about this already, but its crucial that we allow doubt and honesty to be part of our expression as Christians. God probably does exist is much better than God exists no matter what you say and I’m not even interested in what you have to say.”

This got me thinking. I’m not exactly convinced that Atheists are necessarily any better with doubt than Christians. Certainly there are many Christians where doubt is seen as some kind of demonic plague, but this could be said equally of many Atheists. Alot of my Atheist friends and the atheists that I listen to online or read their books often seem to be completely convinced of themselves. On the other hand with Christianity you have something unique to any other worldview or system of thought…that is the idea that God became, or at least flirted with atheism. We see this on the cross when Jesus cries out to God “Why have thou forsaken me!!” For a moment in time God questioned his very existence. This is something that G.K. Chesterton points out in his book “Orthodoxy”. Chesterton writes:

It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” No; but the the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed himself for an instant to be an atheist.

~Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 145

Solvenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (an atheist by the way) also picks up on Chesterton when he writes:

Chesterton is fully aware that we are approaching ‘a matter more dark and awful that it is easy to discuss … a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific rule of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but also through doubt.’ In the standard form of atheism, God dies for men who stop believing in Him; in Christianity, God dies for Himself. In his “Father, why hast thou forsaken me,” Christ himself commits what is, for a Christian, the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith.

~Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf; the Perverse Core of Christianity, p. 15

I think with Christianity you have something very unique and special. Faith by it’s very defination is all about trust. A Christian trusts in the person of Jesus Christ. That he loving, that he has our best interest at heart. As Kirkegaard points out in his book ”Fear and Trembling” Abraham experienced INTENSE doubt when he believed that God was asking to sacrifice his only son Isaac. Abraham must have questioned God’s existence. Real faith from time to time will question the existence of God. We see this from Abraham to Job, right down to Jesus crying out on the cross.

2jahn
Mar 27, 2010, 3:06 pm

The Christian gods being seen as walking around somewhere can not be a problem in itself to any atheist, only the consequences of such a belief here on earth can have any serious relevance. As in the observance that if you want people not to trust the likes of Hitler, you must deny them seeing anything not demonstrated as had it been.

Belief in authority is not a method for discrimination between possible positive or negative outcomes of acts, but the necessity of such discrimination, at least momentarily, denied.

I’d much rather have Christians as neighbours than most who elevate other authorities, and I suppose that removing churches and bibles would make the world a worse place – leave a vacuum for the emergence of even worse beliefs.

But if we are to get rid of wars, then what makes Christianity a possibility must disappear. The problem with elevation of authority is that the only relevance in it is favours obtained for ones obedience, which makes the non believers deserving of its opposite. Burn in hell, rot in jail or being bulldozed into mass graves.

It is, it should be understood, only Christians that doubt their Christian gods, and that battle that doubt. If you are a true atheist the only thing that can be discussed is belief as belief. And so Jesus or Abraham doubting is of no more relevance regarding the believability of Christianity than the doubt of any other fictive or historical person.

I’ll mention that noting as doubt provoking that Abraham was getting ready to put the knife to his son’s neck on orders from above, and that such tests were part of the perfection of the big one, this I find commendable.

Reading the Old Testament one might find that that story was not particularly gruesome though… so don’t try believing the worst, stick to the New Testament and believe only in the nicest things there.

3bas615
Mar 27, 2010, 5:31 pm

I think that the blog's author has done a bit of a disservice to his argument by setting up Atheists as his strawmen. It is not altogether difficult to believe and argue that one must have as much "faith" to be an Atheist as to be a Christian. Agnosticism is then set up as the evil that both Atheists and Christians love to bash. I think that it is possible that in agnosticism one can find a much greater deal of flexibility in terms of doubt. When you fail to take a stand in either direction then essentially your doubts have been gracefully turned on their heads and are no longer problems.

The question of doubt within Christianity is for me a different issue and one that i find fascinating. It has become a standard these days to say that doubt of anything is a sign of weakness. Whether one is talking about faith or health care to honestly acknowledge the positives and the negatives is to be potentially shunned by those on either side. However, I feel rather strongly that unless doubt is allowed to play a part in every decision we make then we can never truly discuss anything. What good is to find a person fundamentally lacking because they do not believe as I do? This only closes debate and allows us to avoid those issues in our own minds. There is not a person alive that does not have doubts about almost everything. Only through exploring these doubts can one grow in knowledge and "faith". If we dont question whether or not Daniel was written by Daniel or who wrote 1 and 2 Timothy then our faith becomes stagnant and, worse, brittle. We can no longer honestly answer these questions thoughtfully in our own minds and thus we certainly cannot have thoughtful discussions of what that means for our faith.

Well I have gone on for too long, but I do feel that there is strength in embracing uncertainties and doubt in every subject. This allows for open discussion and potentially growth.

4jahn
Modificato: Mar 28, 2010, 7:58 am

I think there are two definitions of doubt running around here, both contrasting with their particular form of belief.

Peirce said that thought exists between irritating doubt and belief defined as what you are willing to act on. This might be a belief solely in what at the moment seems the most profitable way to act; it does not preclude the emergence of better ways to deal with the relevant problem in the future.

Idolisation, the elevation of authority above demonstrable competence, is another sort of belief completely, although it is surrounded by the first sort of doubt. Namely in the accuracy of the representatives of the elevated one: a lieutenant claiming to speak directly on behalf of Chairman Mao or the Pope may be doubted, without doubting the infallibility of the big bosses themselves.

This can be paralleled with hardly anybody among the Christians believing that the Bible was written, or even edited, by the chief Christian god himself, and so a doubt in every word there as accurately representing his intentions is not a doubt in Christianity. Quarrels among experts on the Bible, about how this and that sentence is to be read, what or what not should be included etc, is as old as the Bible.

One could perhaps make a distinction between beliefs in replaceable solutions, and what is above testing for workability. Ordinarily what we mean by doubt is merely that what is presented as, or has so far been believed to be, the best solution, may be doubted as being so. When we say someone is knowledgeable above examination for constructive relevance in what he says though, this sort of belief could be seen as a factual dismantling of ones intellectual capacity, a disbelief in the value of thought’s natural function.

Another way of disentangling the two beliefs is the direction of their relevance; on the one hand what will be proved by functioning in the future, on the other what will be proved by correspondence with demands made, that is with history.

In the Middle Ages truth was almost uniquely defined as authority’s demands, and due to practical knowledge of what is demanded as entrance "fee" still being more valuable than any real understanding of how things work, that is still very much the dominant meaning of truth.

Interestingly, I found on a Wikipedia page on Charles S. Peirce the opinion expressed that Peirce’s definition of relevance (meaning) as possible consequences did not work with the sentence: The King died in 1957. Of course it does, the only relevance that sentence has, is in having it accepted as correct answer to this answer demanded, as goes for much of the Bible – the relevance is external to the logical content.

(Ps. I know that Peirce believed in God, also that although he rejected truth as authority’s demand, he tried to replace it by some sort of scientific consensus, instead of seeing his own definition of relevance as a limitation on the knowledge possible. I don’t believe Peirce could walk on water.)

5JGL53
Mag 9, 2010, 1:55 pm

> 1 - 4

To quote Tyrone Horni, all "very interesting".

The Brahma has a quite a sense of humor.

Please continue.

6wildbill
Lug 12, 2010, 9:54 pm

My first reaction to atheism is that it is a belief system that involves the same type of faith as any other religion. We can't know that there is no God any more than we can know there is a God. Christians simply have an accepted method for dealing with doubt. I guess it is harder to deal with doubt if you are an atheist. My favorite essay on the question of atheism vs. belief is "The Will to Believe" by William James.

7OccamsHammer
Lug 12, 2010, 10:15 pm

Penn Jillette wrote this about his view on God.

For those who prefer to type the link manually.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

8WholeHouseLibrary
Lug 12, 2010, 10:24 pm

Bill,
You miss the essence of atheism. It is NOT a belief system at all. It is a rejection of a belief system (whichever one is prevalent, generally speaking). A hindu is considered an atheist by christians because that person doesn't believe in their god, and vice versa. But a hindu ~does~ believe a different deity myth.

An actual atheist (me, for example) does not believe any of the deity myths. That doesn't mean an atheist can't appreciate the others - a lot of us enjoy getting caught up in fiction series and such - but we know that when we close the book, we have to get back ti reality.

The best analogy I've come across goes something like: Atheism is as much a religion as not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Not sure who to credit that to...

9JGL53
Modificato: Lug 13, 2010, 5:06 pm

I also like "atheism is a religion similar to baldness being a hair color."

I think most self-described atheists are materialists/physicalists/naturalists, as defined in any good philosophy dictionary.

So there is a positive ontology that is opposed to religion or superstition, e.g., theism, deism, animism, psychic powers, or any ideology based on the assumption of a supernatural/natural duality of reality.

10ylferif
Lug 13, 2010, 5:27 pm

Hi WHL,

What a funny idea that Christians would consider hindus atheists. I've known a few Christians (growing up in church will do that to you!), and they would all agree with dictionary.com:

a·the·ist
   /ˈeɪθiɪst/ Show Spelledey-thee-ist
–noun
a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.

Can't speak for what Hindus think... :o)

Best regards.

11WholeHouseLibrary
Lug 13, 2010, 7:57 pm

Hi right back at you ylferif!

I've known hundreds of christians, having grown up in a profoundly catholic family, very active in their Parishes. I also have to add that I know hundreds more (even) non-catholic christians. By and large, I'm willing to acknowledge that your premise is more likely to be probably more true than what you derived from mine. I don't have any empirical knowledge in that respect either way. What I ~do~ know, however, is that a large number of them feel that way - If you don't believe in MY god, you are doomed. Believing in a "false" idea of god was tantamount to not believing at all.