What's Wrong With "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus"?

Modern culture runs at a pace faster than ever before. Unfortunately, some important practices fall victim to all that acceleration. One of the more concerning things I have seen is the proclivity of Christians to jump onto nice, neat slogans about their faith instead of really knowing what their faith is about. This is what I would call bumper-sticker Christianity, where people affirm phrases like "God said it, I believe it, that settles it." Well, cannot a Muslim make the exact same claim?

My concern is highlighted by a new video that is catching fire around the internet seeks to draw a distinction between religion and Jesus. ;Entitled "Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus," street rhymer Jeff Bethke starts off with a bang, claiming that "Jesus came to abolish religion." He then begins a nearly four minute contrast between the problems of religion and the true faith expressed by Jesus and others in the Bible. Obviously, the video has struck a chord in the greater Christian community. The YouTube page shows over six million hits in just over two days. But I think Bethe not only is fostering a wrong view, he may actually be doing more harm than good in certain instances.

In the video's description, Bethke writes "In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it's core Jesus' gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered." And this highlights the problem with the video--Bethke is simply wrong in his definition of religion.

When most people talk about religion, they understand that it involves an entire system of thought, including what God is like, what it means to be moral, and what kind of worship practices are acceptable, and when you talk about worship, you are specifically talking about relating to God in some way. So relationship does come into play when we are talking about religion!

Many of Bethke's examples are not of religion, but of hypocrisy. "They might preach grace but another thing they practice" and "It's like sayin' you play for the Lakers because you bought the jersey." He draws from Jesus' rebuke of the Pharisees in Matthew 23:27 in saying that "religion's like spraying perfume on a casket." But that's not what Jesus said. Earlier in the same book Jesus says explicitly, "“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill".(Matt 5:17). Jesus was denouncing the Pharisees abuse of Jewish law, not the Jewish religious system as a whole.

Other claims, such as "If religion is so great, why has it started so many wars? Why does it build huge churches but fails to feed the poor?" are not only patently false, it shows how prevalent the influence of the New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have been to even those inside the church. Clearly, Bethke knows nothing of the history of Christendom and hasn't thought his statements through. And if other Christians concede the New Atheists' point on religion being only about starting wars and big buildings with no care for the poor, then doesn't it make it that much easier for people to abandon all faith altogether?

The video culminates with Bethke claiming “One thing is vital to mention. How Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums. See, one is the work of God, but one's a man made invention. See, one is the cure, but the other's the infection.”  These are incredibly strong words. The problem with such an oversimplification is that I know people who will affirm that statement and still be in the very predicament he's trying to warn people against. As I've previously written (you can read the whole account here), I had an encounter at a Starbucks with a woman who very definitely said she felt we shouldn't "over-complicate our approach to God and make it all about religion. I think that people try to make things too hard, when it's all about relationship." But while affirming the "it's not religion, it's a relationship" line, she couldn't tell me why such a relationship was necessary. She held onto the slogan, but had no idea of the nature of the atonement. So, the relationship is one that she understood as a feeling between her and God, not Him dealing with our sin and our proper response to that act.

The phrase of "It's not a religion, it's a relationship" is one I've heard countless times and from many pulpits. The nature of the atonement is a little harder to boil down into a catchy saying. However, no one will understand the true nature of salvation without understanding the atonement. Grace is found in the cross, and we must be diligent to make that the main message of our witnessing. But it means we need to do some hard work; we need to study and make sure that what we say is accurate and we don't misrepresent another's views. I applaud Bethke's desire to see more people be genuine in their faith. However, such desire should never lead us to rely on slogans over proper theology. You never know who may agree with the slogan but still go away lost.

The Most Penetrating Critique of New Atheism - Written by an Atheist

A lot of people have taken to critiquing the New Atheists. Some of the most eminent apologists (Craig, Copan, and Lennox among others) have written books cataloging the errors of their screeds. However, the most poignant review of the movement I've seen comes from an older article written by a fellow atheist. Physician Theodore Dalrymple provided this article for the City Journal wherein he examined the posturing and pronouncements of Dennett, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. His observations are keenly insightful.

Dalrymple writes:

The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design).

He then goes on to show some of the foibles of each of the main contributors to the New Atheist movement.  He notes, "One striking aspect of Dennett’s book is his failure to avoid the language of purpose, intention, and ontological moral evaluation, despite his fierce opposition to teleological views of existence." In other words, Dennett keeps using language of purpose and design in trying to sell the argument that there is no designer and no ultimate purpose for life. In a parenthetical statement he writes:

And Dennett is not alone in this difficulty: Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto, so rich in errors and inexactitudes that it would take a book as long as his to correct them, says on its second page that religion prevents mankind from facing up to "reality in all its naked cruelty." But how can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or transcendent purpose?

Dalrymple notes that Dawkins "quotes with approval a new set of Ten Commandments for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist website, without considering odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely ten of them; nor does their metaphysical status seem to worry him." Brilliant observation. He also looks at Harris and Hitchens with equal insight.

However, the most amazing part of the article is how Dalrymple compares the modern atheists to the writings of a forgotten seventeenth century Anglican bishop. He writes, "But looking, say, into the works of Joseph Hall, D.D., I found myself moved: much more moved, it goes without saying, than by any of the books of the new atheists." After quoting from some of Hall’s writings, Dalrymple goes on to observe:

This is the language not of rights and entitlements, but of something much deeper—a universal respect for the condition of being human… No doubt it helps that Hall lived at a time of sonorous prose, prose that merely because of its sonority resonates in our souls; prose of the kind that none of us, because of the time in which we live, could ever equal. But the style applies to the thought as well as the prose; and I prefer Hall’s charity to Harris’s intolerance.

The article may be a bit long for some, but it is an excellent read, if for no other reason than to expose you to the writings of Hall! I thank Dr. Dalrymple for his care for the human condition and his honesty and clarity in one more problem with the New Atheist movement—for all their sound and fury, they fail at elevating the human spirit.

Image courtesy Richard001 and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Scientists Clinging to Blind Faith for All to See

I've had several recent discussions with folks who hold that science is superior to religion because science is all based on experimental evidence and facts while religious people just cling to "blind faith." Richard Dawkins recently reiterated this view in a debate held in Mexico City when he made the statement:

[Those who believe in God] like to point to the origin of the universe and say ‘Well, science can’t explain the Big Bang or scientists can’t explain where the laws of physics come from.’ Physicists are working on that. That’s what scientists do. They don’t lie down and pathetically say ‘Oh, we don’t understand it so God did it."

Somehow, those who hold to this view seem to forget that scientists are people, and as such they are subject to the same faults and biases as the rest of humanity.  Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than in a recent panel discussion of leading scientists on defining life (see video below).  Held at Arizona State University and hosted by The Science Network, this panel was comprised of luminaries such as Dawkins, world-renowned genome expert J. Craig Venter, Nobel laureates Sidney Altman and Leland Hartwell, NASA planetary scientist Chris McKay, and physicists Paul Davies and Lawrence Krauss.  A stellar group to be sure.

The discussion starts by moderator Roger Bingham asking if it is necessary for us to agree on a proper definition of life before we go looking for it in space, so that we can know what we're looking for. McKay almost flippantly dismisses the idea and says we should just start looking! Imagine using that same criteria in medicine — we don't need criteria as to whether a person is still alive, we'll just make it up as we go! This is why excluding philosophers from these discussions is so detrimental.

But the more interesting parts happen starting around the 9:00 mark of the video. As Evolution News pointed out, Dawkins and others have claimed that all life uses the same DNA vocabulary for living creatures. In the video, Venter disagrees with this statement and says that science is showing the concept of all life stemming from one standard DNA vocabulary is not accurate. "The tree of life is an artifact of some early scientific studies that aren't really holding up...So there is not a tree of life." (See the article linked above for the specifics on this claim.) Dawkins is aghast at the suggestion and Paul Davies tries to understand how this could be, but Venter sits calmly and confidently by his statement. This is a pretty earth-shattering admission by Venter, but it's not my main point.

Dismissing Scientific Evidence in the Name of Science

The very next question to the panel is if science were to discover the origins of life and the origin of consciousness, would that sway religious believers or would they continue to cling to their concepts? Dawkins and Krauss both respond that it wouldn't matter; religious people are going to believe what they've been "indoctrinated in childhood" to believe. Dawkins even says that "Well, it obviously ought to have the effect that the questioner says, but I don't think it will." Immediately after that exchange, Chris McKay at the 14:50 mark states that he doesn't believe Venter's view that the tree of life is obsolete, but he still holds to Dawkins' 1980's claim that all life uses the same genetic vocabulary.

I want you to catch that. McKay, whose specialty is geophysics and not genetics, is dismissing the findings of one of the pre-eminent geneticists in the world because he doesn't like where it would take him. The scientist is ignoring the findings of science because the findings threaten his views on the origins of life. McKay is guilty of exactly what Dawkins and Krauss were poo-pooing religious believers about!  As the Evolutionary News article points out, we know that Mycoplasma DNA uses the UGA codon not as a stop as in human genes, but to code for the amino acid tryptophan.  That's like the difference between the saying "Mama die!" in English and saying "Mama die!" in Dutch, which means "Mom, I want this one!" It's a different vocabulary, a different message.

So, the next time you hear that scientists are bias-free and  objective while religion leads to only blind faith, don't you believe it.  The evidence is available for all to see.

What a New Testament Church REALLY Looks Like

I’ve listened to many pastors and church leaders talk about how they model their church after the early Christian churches.  They want “a church that looks like the church of the New Testament” they say. The idea that we are closely aligning ourselves to the model that James, Peter, Paul and others had of church is appealing to the modern mind, especially as a reaction to the formal, liturgical structure that had become prevalent for so many centuries.  Indeed, even cults like Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses make the same claims, following the Restoration Movement of the early 19th century.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to align ourselves with the teaching of the apostles as closely as possible; in fact I think it’s laudable.  But for all the talk about modeling ourselves after the early church, I don’t think many truly capture what those early Christians had to give up for their Lord.  A good example of that early Christians did face can be found in the story of Said Musa. Musa is a citizen of Afghanistan who converted the Christianity about eight years ago and is now sentenced to death for the “crime” of his conversion. While serving in the Afghan Army, he had one leg amputated, an experience which he then used to counsel other amputees while working for the Red Cross.

A recent National Review article paints his picture well:

He was forced to appear before a judge without any legal counsel and without knowledge of the charges against him. “Nobody [wanted to be my] defender before the court. When I said ‘I am a Christian man,’ he [a potential lawyer] immediately spat on me and abused me and mocked me. . . . I am alone between 400 [people with] terrible values in the jail, like a sheep.” He has been beaten, mocked, and subjected to sleep deprivation and sexual abuse while in prison. No Afghan lawyer will defend him and authorities denied him access to a foreign lawyer.

Any and every human being who is imprisoned, abused, or tortured for the free and peaceful expression of their faith deserves our support, but Musa is also a remarkable person and Christian. In a letter smuggled to the West, he says, “The authority and prisoners in jail did many bad behaviour with me about my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. For example, they did sexual things with me, beat me by wood, by hands, by legs, put some things on my head.”

He added a thing much more important to him, that they “mocked me ‘he’s Jesus Christ,’ spat on me, nobody let me for sleep night and day. . . . Please, please, for the sake of Lord Jesus Christ help me.” (View the full letter here)

He has not, in fact, even appealed to be released, only to be transferred to another prison. He has also stated that he is willing to give his life for his faith. “Please, please you should transfer me from this jail to a jail that supervises the believers. . . . I also agree . . . to sacrifice my life in public [where] I will tell [about my] faith in Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, [so] other believers will take courage and be strong in their faith.”

To me, this is the true face of Christianity. Musa’s story reads like something right out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. I laud him for his faith and his willingness to die for it, but it shouldn’t be this way.  You see, this is no longer the first century and Christians are no longer in the minority.  The United States is a nation built upon Christian principles and, given our presence and influence in Afghanistan now, WE should be able to help Said Musa.  But help doesn’t seem to be coming.  President Obama felt justified to personally step in when a single pastor threatened to burn some Qur’ans in Florida, but he remains silent on Said Musa –even after Musa pleaded with him directly in his letter. The U.S.is losing soldiers trying to help establish the Afghanistan government; and yet they insist on perpetrating this flagrant violation of human rights. Does this make sense at all?  Silence by our president in such an instance is atrocious.

Said Musa’s attitude in the face of martyrdom, like Stephen’s in the book of Acts, shows what true Christians look like who have given everything for their Lord. I wonder to what degree our own government will allow the persecution of Christians and Christian ideals to continue without comment before all Christian churches start to resemble the New Testament church in ways that we may not like.

Belief is About Truth

I recently saw Inception, which was good movie that opens the door to many questions. One of those is the question of changing people's beliefs.  Can we change someone else's beliefs?  Absolutely and we do it all the time in a myriad of ways answers Ophelia Benson. Writing in U.K.'s The Guardian, She states:

"We're offered potential beliefs all the time, in news reports and advertising and conversation. We don't accept them all; we reject some, we doubt others, and even those we accept we may be prepared to change or reject if we learn more. We know perfectly well – or if we don't, we should – that it's not sensible to believe everything that turns up."

But she says there's an even more important question we must ask - how do we test the beliefs we hold?

The important issue isn't how we acquire a belief so much as how we test it, question it, evaluate it. Belief isn't a straight yes or no thing, or at least it shouldn't be. Once we're past childhood (and assuming we've had a decent education), we should know better than to believe whatever we're told.

Benson says that people treat religious beliefs as the exception to this rule.  Maybe some (or possibly most) people do. However, I do agree that it shouldn't be so. Being rational means holding onto true beliefs. And Christianity has always been a faith that challenges both its adherents and its skeptics to put it to the truth test. For examples of this, we can look to the New Testament.

Paul instructed the Thessalonian church to "examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good."(1 Thess 5:21) And in 1 Corinthians 15 - the oldest passage of the New Testament - Paul writes that if Jesus did not rise from the dead (as a real fact of history), then the Christian faith is worthless, we are deceived of God, and to be pitied above everyone else!

Christians shouldn't be afraid to face questions that ask about the truth of the Christian faith. We do a disservice to the believer and the seeker when we say that we shouldn't question faith. This doesn't mean we need to engage in any off the wall objection that someone thought of - people will many times be motivated not by a search for truth but simply want to waste your time. We should be willing to talk with those who have honest questions and show the reasons for Christianity. Christianity is not merely a belief - it is a true belief and we need to get that message out to the church and the world.

Image courtesy Mike Grauer Jr and Licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License.

Islam: Saudi Women Offer Their Breasts for a Bit of Freedom

How do we measure belief systems?  This question has been asked of me many times in one form or another, especially by those who would like to uphold a "tolerance" for all faiths, not judging any to be true or false.  However, as I've continued to say, ideas have consequences.  What you believe will determine how you approach the world and live within it. So, if a person is properly following his or her belief system (you never measure a belief system by those who violate its tenets), then you can see the outworking of that belief system and see how well it conforms to reality.

 That's why a story in yesterday's Los Angeles Times caught my eye.  Entitled "Women threaten to breastfeed drivers if they aren't allowed to drive", it shows the twists and permutations where wrong-thinking ideas lead when they are extended to their logical conclusion.

Saudi Arabia is the center of the Islamic world, a very strict nation ruled by Sharia law, and like most countries under Sharia, it subjugates its women.[1]  Women must have a male guardian at all times, they're not allowed to vote, must be covered from head to toe, legally cannot drive, and the sexes must be segregated, unless the company consists of immediate family members, such as mother and son or brother and sister.  The Saudi government says these restrictions are to comply with the laws taught in Islam which is the basis of the Saudi government.  As you can imagine, it becomes pretty hard to function when women and men cannot be in the same public place at the same time.

Given that Islam is a legalistic religion (your worthiness is judged by how well you perform against the requirements placed upon you), people have sought to study the laws and find "loopholes" to see if they can circumvent some of the consequences following from the law. One of the most interesting of these was a proclamation made by Saudi cleric Abdel Mohsen Obeikan, who on May 22 said that if a woman had breastfed a man, then she and the child would have a "maternal bond" and the grown man could be found with the woman, even if he is not a blood relation.  Obeikan did not invent this idea; it is stated clearly in the Islamic Hadith that Mohammad was the one who first taught the practice.[2]  So, any man who wants to avoid a charge of "illicit mixing" of sexes merely needs to drink the woman's breast milk, thereby creating that maternal bond. [3]

Saudi women who are now seeking the right to drive have now taken Obeikan's thoughts one step further.  According to the Times article, "if they're not granted the right to drive, the women are threatening to breastfeed their drivers to establish a symbolic maternal bond. ‘Is this is all that is left to us to do: to give our breasts to the foreign drivers?' a Saudi woman named Fatima Shammary was quoted as saying by Gulf News."

Although the statement seems ridiculous on its face, it follows naturally from the law and the cleric's previous reasoning. In order to maintain modesty and purity, women would have to allow strangers to suckle them so that they can get around if a family member isn't present. They cannot mix sexes in a car, and since all women cannot drive, there are no chauffeurs or taxis that would allow them transportation.

In looking at all this, the absurdities of the law become apparent.  Granted, the legal ban on driving is a reaction to a group of protesters some 20 years ago, but the traditional view was in place long before that. The fact that in Islam women are seen as the sole problem in men's sexual temptation, thus men must be shielded from their looks and their company at every turn, is at the root of all these issues. And to think that just by passing a bodily fluid, all that temptation is somehow dissipated is as ridiculous as the former concept.

The bigger reason I point to this story is simply to show how bad belief systems not only harm real people, but they also lead the oppressed to desperation.  When oppression mix with legalism the results are tragic and the fact that Saudi women would even threaten such a move shows the poverty of the Muslim viewpoint on women.

References:

1. See Katherine Zoepf. "Talk of Women's Rights Divides Saudi Arabia." New York Times.  5/31/2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01iht-saudi.html?pagewanted=1&src=me
2. The Isamic Hadith, Book 008, Number 3424 records this exchange between Mohammad and a follower who raised an adopted boy, who would be considered a stranger in her home.
   
   
   
   A'isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported that Sahla bint Suhail came to Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) and said: Messengerof Allah, I see on the face of Abu Hudhaifa (signs of disgust) on entering of Salim (who is an ally) into (our house), whereupon Allah's Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: Suckle him. She said: How can I suckle him as he is a grown-up man? Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) smiled and said: I already know that he is a young man 'Amr has made this addition in his narration that he participated in the Battle of Badr and in the narration of Ibn 'Umar (the words are): Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) laughed.
   For the full text, see http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/hadith/muslim/008.smt.html
   
3. Sandels , Alexandra "Cleric in hot seat after calling for women to give men breast milk to avoid illicit mixing." Los Angeles Times. 6/10/2010 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/06/saudi-arabia-clerics-call-for-women-to-give-men-breastmilk-to-avoid-unislamic-mixing.html

Salad-Bar Truth: When the Critic Commits the Crime

The LA Times recently ran an op-ed piece by Barry Goldman taking Americans to task for mixing and matching various belief systems. However, Goldman makes the same basic mistake that is at the root of his rebuke towards the public.

Goldman opens his op-ed piece by quoting from a recent Pew study that states:

Large numbers of Americans engage in multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions. Many also blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs such as reincarnation, astrology and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects. And sizable minorities of all major U.S. religious groups say they have experienced supernatural phenomena, such as being in touch with the dead or with ghosts.

Goldman then sums up the findings by writing "What is striking about the Pew study is not the prevalence of superstition and hocus-pocus, alarming as that is. It is the feeling that we are free to choose from a broad, cafeteria-style menu of superstitious hocus-pocus. Charles Blow in the New York Times called it the construction of 'Mr. Potato Head-like spiritual identities.'"

It's true that Americans DO take a cafeteria-style approach to beliefs – often holding contradictory beliefs as both being true. This has been a big problem in our culture, primarily because people just don't think through the implications of their belief system. However, Goldman completely crumbles in his analysis. He tries to make a distinction that facts are not things based on preference by referring to the story of elementary class that couldn't tell whether their pet rabbit was a male or female, so they decided to vote about the rabbit's sex. He then opines:

We no longer trust the guys in the seminaries to determine which ideas are inside and outside the community of faith. We feel entitled to make our own decisions. Fair enough; the facts with respect to spiritual matters have always been somewhat elusive. But now many of us feel entitled to decide which scientific ideas to accept. Scientists have their ideas about, say, the age of the Earth or evolution by natural selection, and other people have other ideas. According to this new view, neither has any more claim to legitimacy than the other. There is no fact of the matter."

Goldman concludes his article by saying "We used to be a nation with a broad consensus. If you had a religious question, you asked a religious leader. If you had a scientific question, you asked a scientist. Today, if you have a question (about your enthusiasm for a belief) you ask another enthusiast." Here's where Goldman shows that he doesn't know what he's talking about. He seems to think that expert consensus is the determining factor whether or not we should believe something. That position is ridiculous. If an individual holding to a belief doesn't make the thing true or not, then an expert consensus doesn't make it true either.

There have been many times where "asking a scientist" has given a wrong answer just as asking a religious leader did. Two examples I can think of right away are the science of genetics – where Gregor Mendel's findings didn't achieve widespread acceptance for some 40 years, since Mendel's theory collided with the Darwinian view of blending inheritable traits from parents – and the age of the universe, where the desire for an infinitely old universe was so strong, it caused Einstein to add a fudge factor to his equations.

Goldman really stumbles here. What he should have said was that we hold to certain ideas because we believe them to be true. We have knowledge because we have justification for a certain belief. If a belief that we hold is contradictory – either internally (such as a Christian believing in reincarnation) or externally (such as calling a male rabbit a female), then that cannot be true – we must rethink our position. Experts can help, but that presupposes that they have also critically examined their field of study. However, it may very well be that the experts are wrong. It's quite possible the public could see this and choose to reject the belief.

Rational examination and holding to a belief because its true are the golden standard. Goldman may dismiss matters of faith as "the facts with respect to spiritual matters have always been somewhat elusive." This shows that Goldman has never investigated faith matters seriously. If there is a God, then dismissing the hard work of finding Him out is like the class who would rather choose the rabbit's sex than work to find the answer. Goldman is committing the same crime he's accused us of – choosing which beliefs fit his worldview and then running with them while he sanctimoniously rebukes everyone else.

Image courtesy "RELIGIONES" by ReligijneSymbole. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons