“Do not make a treaty with the inhabitants of the land, or else when they prostitute themselves with their gods and sacrifice to their gods, they will invite you, and you will eat their sacrifices. Then you will take some of their daughters as brides for your sons. Their daughters will prostitute themselves with their gods and cause your sons to prostitute themselves with their gods.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
One of the best explorations of the law of cause and effect currently on the market is the series of books, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Each book takes the reader deep into a thought-provoking exploration of piercing questions like, what would happen if you gave a mouse a cookie? Or a dog a donut? Or a moose a muffin? Or a cat a cupcake? Or even a pig a pancake? As you will soon discover upon reading one of these classics is that a whole lot of things will happen. The mouse will probably ask for a glass of milk to go with the cookie (who wouldn’t?). Then he’ll want a napkin and a straw and a mirror and all sorts of household adventures will potentially unfold from there until he winds up asking for a cookie, and the whole thing starts over. This is all silly, of course, but the books really do help young children begin to understand that like one domino striking another, actions have consequences which is an essential insight to have when navigating our way through this world. It’s an insight that lies at the heart of our passage for today. Let’s keep digging into one of the major guardrails God gave Israel for life in their new home.
Yesterday, we started exploring the idea that…well…ideas have consequences. More specifically, we took a look at God’s instructions for Moses to share with the people that when they finally got to the Promised Land (something which should have only been a couple of years in the future at this point but which, of course, wound up taking much, much longer than that), they were not to make treaties to simply live among the people groups who were already there. They were not to establish warm and friendly relationships with them. They were not to engage in cultural exchange programs. And most of all, they were not to learn to appreciate their religious beliefs and practices. They were to destroy and root out those in their entirety.
The reason for this was that their religious practices were abominable. They included various sexual rituals that Israel was not to touch with a million-foot pole. They included child sacrifice. They resulted in all sorts of injustice. The gods those people worshiped were not good, and as a result of worshiping them and the fact that we become like what we worship, the people were not good either. This doesn’t mean that Israel was uniquely good because they worshiped Yahweh. They weren’t, which was something God reminded them of remarkably frequently. But the God they worshiped was good and that was an important foundation none of the rest of these people had.
Furthermore, God was using Israel as a means of bringing judgment to the peoples already living in the land of Canaan that He had been planning for at least 500 years. Now, the scope and form of that judgment is an open question, and we know that Israel mostly failed to do the full extent of what God seems to have intended them to do (although even the extent of what it seems He intended for Israel to do is debated). But as an instrument of judgment in this moment (which, again, wasn’t something that made Israel unique; God would later use other nations to bring judgment to them when they were due for it), for them to make treaties with the people would have been the opposite of what He was leading them to do.
That’s all reasoning about this instruction that comes from an observation of the rest of the Old Testament narrative. For this moment, God gave the people two reasons to stay away. The first we talked about yesterday. He is jealous for His reputation. He didn’t want the people making treaties with these other nations that would result in their mixing His character up with the character of these other gods such that they began to worship a kind of hybrid god that didn’t exist and wasn’t worthy of worship anyway all the while thinking they were worshiping Him. He didn’t want them developing any false ideas about who He was by this.
The second reason is what we see here. The people weren’t to make any kind of a treaty with the pagan people they were to drive out of the land because if they did, there was a better than decent chance that they were going to get roped into their worship practices. That’s what God was getting at here. If you make these treaties, they’re going to invite you to join them in worshiping their gods. If you do that, you might participate in those awful rituals with them. Then, you might decide that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal for your son to intermarry with their daughters. Their daughters are going to bring their worship practices into those relationships with them, which will probably result in your sons joining in the pagan worship with their wives. This will then result in the pagan practices being passed down to their children, and now you’ve got these religious practices that I am trying to get rid of baked into the foundation of your people. Instead of getting rid of this evil stuff, you’ll just appropriate it.
We’ll come back to that idea in just a second when we talk about what this has to do with us. Before then, did you notice the word God uses to describe participation in these pagan practices? It was pretty hard to miss. The word is prostitute. Now, we shouldn’t necessarily hear this word through a modern understanding of prostitution. But the idea being expressed is of a person who engages in extramarital sexual conduct in order to gain something. The Hebrew word often referred to cultic prostitution where a person would engage in sexual conduct of some sort with an officially recognized individual (usually a woman, though not always) at the temple as a means of engaging with the god or goddess being worshiped. Many ancient religions practiced this kind of thing. Going to the temple was little more than going to a brothel. It was simply spiritualized rather than being seen as rank carnality as it later would thanks mostly to the impact of the Christian worldview.
Now, there was certainly a condemnation of the physical acts that would have been a part of the worship rituals of these pagan religions in the choice of this particular word. But there was also a spiritual condemnation as well. God is making a claim on the lives of not just Israel, but of all people. Gods in that day were generally understood to be regional. The most powerful gods like Baal tended to have pretty large regions, but they were still essentially regional. What Israel claimed about their God was that He was the Lord of heaven and earth. He was the Lord of all creation. His purview was everywhere. This was different than what was claimed about other ancient gods. Because the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, He has a right and proper claim on the devotion of everyone, everywhere, all the time. Worshiping anything or anyone else other than God is always an act of spiritual adultery. Thus the language.
Let’s get back to us. We touched on this a little bit yesterday, but let’s dive in a bit deeper today. Is what we see in God’s instructions for Israel here something that we have to abide by today as followers of Jesus? Speaking in strictly technical terms, no, we don’t. This is part of God’s old covenant with Israel. That covenant was fulfilled and replaced in Christ by the new covenant. We don’t owe an allegiance to it at all. The New Testament authors all make that pretty abundantly clear.
Okay, but does this mean anything for us? After all, we see Jesus regularly hanging out with people who didn’t believe the same things He did. He rubbed elbows and even partied with the worst sinners in His culture. His critics called Him a drunkard. He prayed for His followers to be in the world while maintaining a distinction from it. It seems like learning to live alongside the various worldviews around us is part and parcel to being a follower of Jesus. Yes, but we have to do that in a way that doesn’t weaken or compromise our own.
That was God’s concern for Israel here. They were still in a foundation-building mode as far as their understanding of Him was concerned. There was much they didn’t know or understand yet. That’s why so much of the revelation we find over the course of the Scriptures is progressive. God revealed things in the ways and at the times He knew we were capable of understanding it. If they let weaknesses slip in the door at this critical juncture, these were going to create major headaches for them later on down the road. As it turns out, they did let in these weaknesses, and they did create major headaches for them on down the road.
By the time Jesus was sending out His followers to engage with the world, while they were still learning and growing in and understanding of just how broad the implications of loving like He did really were, they had the abiding presence and help of the Holy Spirit to guide them and help them stay on track. God had done the foundation building at that point. Now was the time to go out and build the structure that was meant to sit on it (that is, the church), by telling all the rest of the world about it. In order for this engagement to be what God intends for it, though, the people doing the engaging have to be confident in what they are proclaiming. It is incumbent upon the church to make sure it is providing the opportunities for its members, and especially its youngest members, to learn what they believe, why they believe it, and how to defend those beliefs against a whole variety of challenges from the unbelieving world around them. Churches who don’t do this are setting them up to walk away from the faith when they encounter a bit of real resistance, probably sometime in college.
This kind of thing is not unique to Christianity, though. Every worldview, religious or otherwise, does something similar. At least, the people who are committed to it do it. Jewish parents send their kids to Jewish school before regular school to learn what it means to be Jewish so they will maintain that identity throughout their lives. Muslim parents put their kids in programs hosted by their mosque to teach them how and why to be a faithful Muslim. They don’t send their kids to places where they will encounter ideas they don’t want them to have before they are ready or without inserting themselves into the conversation to interpret it in a way they want their kids to understand it. Even secular parents who want to raise their kids to be secular do this. They don’t send their kids to Sunday school at the local conservative Christian church. Instead, they raise them to be secular. Or, if they do that in the name of giving them an exposure to various religious groups for the sake of being what they see as well-rounded, they make sure to help them interpret what they are learning through a secular lens.
If you have a worldview that you want someone else to share, this is how you do it. If you don’t do this, the odds that your worldview will gradually fade out is pretty high. There is not a worldview position that is automatic. All of them are learned. This doesn’t mean that all of them are right or true, but they are all learned. The real question is which worldview lines up the most consistently with reality. That’s the one to choose. And then to help others choose it as well.
The Nexus 
“The real question is which worldview lines up the most consistently with reality. That’s the one to choose. And then to help others choose it as well.”
And what metric do you use to decide which worldview best aligns with reality?
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Given that you’ve already decided to mock this post on your own blog, indicating that you’re not really interested in any kind of serious engagement, I’ll just leave this one alone.
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Hi Mr. Waits.
As long as you remain Christ-like in your dialogues with non-Believers such as Tamar and Ruth or those today, i.e. with never-ending compassion, patience, and love (Matt 15:21-28, but all through Matt; Luke 7:1-10; and of course the enormous commission set forth Matt 28:19 cf. Acts 1:8; 11:18), then your message is complete. Once you’ve done these things superbly Christ-like over sufficient time, then you must leave everything else to your God showing your exceptional faith in Him and in those “mustard seeds” that you turned over to your God (Mark 4:30-32; Matt 13:31-32; Luke 13:18-19).
There are so very few Christos “Believers” today Mr. Waits that actually follow Yeshua bar Yosef’s explicit commission and therefore demonstrate very little real faith in their own God to do all of the final work. American Christian Nationalists (not unlike Antiquities’ radical Zealots and Sicarii) are the prime example today using exactly the opposite of Christ-like compassion, patience, love, and most of all faith in their own God’s omnipotence and omniscience.
In my decades and decades of first-hand experience, both in the real world, the Gentile-Pagan world, and inside Christian ministries, church staff, missionary tours domestically and abroad, and finally in seminary—Reformed Theological Seminary, Jax, MS—I see or witness very, very few luke warm(?) Christians even grasp what Scriptures and Yeshua bar Yosef was/is trying to teach them to do and how to behave, much less model it daily 24/7. I’d even go so far as to say that of the some 2.5-billion publicly professing Christians in the world, not even a quarter of them truly know Christos, or Yeshua bar Yosef. Perhaps this is why Christianity is significantly on the decline every year compared to other world-views? 🙂
Best regards
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Hi Prof. I’ve seen your work over on Ark’s blog. Thanks for the visit and sharing your thoughts. By observation, “Christian” doesn’t seem to be a label you would even begin to claim for yourself any longer. (What prompted that switch?) But you do seem to have a pretty keen familiarity with Christianity itself. In your understanding, then, what does it look like to really grasp and model Jesus’ teachings in such a way that would betray a true knowledge of Jesus?
I’m inclined to agree with your take on American Christian Nationalists. I found Christian Smith’s observations that the dominant religion in the U.S. – including in the church itself – is not Christianity at all, but instead a kind of syncretistic hybrid he called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to be piercingly accurate. I worked through that book in a fair bit of detail with my previous church.
I agree that far too many claim devotion to Christ without actually demonstrating such a thing. The general de-Christianizing of America’s public spaces has certainly been most inconvenient for those who had been accustomed to the cultural benefits of such a thing. But in giving people the cover to, in many cases, finally be honest about what they really believed (my English teachers would be cringing at that split infinitive…apologies), it did a kind of service both to the culture and to the church. It was a hard service from the standpoint of many Christians, but a necessary one all the same. Personally, I think the culture is worse off for shedding that worldview allegiance with numbers to bear that out, but I’m by no means the majority opinion on that question.
At the end there, you note that Christianity is significantly on the decline. How do you define significantly? You also note the decline is relative to other worldviews. Which ones and in which places? Islam, of course, because of the relative birthrates of Muslims to just about everyone else (except Israeli Jews…they’re leading the world), but what else? Christianity is growing rapidly in many places around the world outside the West. Secularism, at least by the self-identification as a “none” on religious belief surveys, appears to have leveled off and even perhaps declined just a bit in the U.S. I’d be curious to see how it is fairing in comparison to various other forms of spirituality in Western Europe.
Interesting thoughts. Interesting thoughts indeed.
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Thank you Mr. Waits for your polite and considered reply. Lots to unpack there in your response. Please allow me some leeway on time to respond, perhaps in blocks or chunks to your questions and thoughts. I am the full-time/overtime Caretaker of my Early Alzheimer’s Mom and handle ALL of her affairs now as Durable PoA and Medical PoA, and housekeeper, accountant, chauffeur, etc., etc.
Thank you in advance for your understanding and patience in this. I shall return very soon. 🙏
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Take all the time you need. I’m not going anywhere.
That is important and difficult work you are doing in caring for her, and it’s far more important than a conversation with me. Maybe you don’t maintain a belief in Jesus, but that kind of work reflects His love for the most vulnerable in our midst that we see consistently on display in the Gospels better than a whole lot of other things. Keep up that good work and we’ll talk more in the days ahead of us.
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I can at least start off with that answer. The quick short answer is that a fellow footballer/soccer player who I was after for several weeks to come to our very informal Wednesday night bible study (our Outreach Program) at my big apartment with fellow church singles, finally said he’d come IF I’d answer him one simple question:
That began the collapse of the House of Cards so to speak; the unreliable (as a whole) Greek New Testament about actual historical events. That’s the super quick fast answer, BUT obviously an answer very much lacking substance, right? Therefore, if you are interested in the extensive elaboration of my fast quick answer, I give you these two blog-posts of mine to begin with:
If the second post doesn’t show up here due to your Spam/URL settings, I will post the link in a following comment-reply from this one.
Hope you find some time to read them thoroughly IF you are really interested in a portion of “Why I switched” or gladly deconverted. 🙂
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Since my two blog-links worked(?), I will offer a third that would round out well the reasons—out of multitudes—why I happily deconverted:
Thank you Mr. Waits. 🙏
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Thanks for these. I’ll give them a look. It may take a few days, but I’ll get there eventually.
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Btw Mr. Waits, I was curious about your education and which seminary (or seminaries) you attended and completed; also your family parental background of influence, i.e. how you were raised/taught by your parents and/or extended family. I was unable to find any of this info on your blog menus.
Whenever you have the chance. Thank you.
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Like with the links, give me a bit and I’ll be glad to share that part of the story. I’m chaperoning a middle school trip to the park today followed by meetings and then a fall festival. Many hours yet to go. I’m not even sure I’ll get a post up today. That’ll be the first Friday I’ve missed other than when I’ve been out of town in a very long time. Alas, how will the world survive it ;~)
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Sounds good. Thank you.
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Here’s the quick version before I get started on a busy day.
I graduated from Truman State University with a degree in chemistry. I was planning to be a high school chemistry teacher until God very clearly (to me) called me to ministry instead. After graduating and getting married, I went to Denver Seminary and graduated with my M.Div. I’ve been a pastor ever since.
I grew up in a wonderful family with great parents who loved each other and my sister and me. We were active in our church throughout my growing up years. Faith was assumed in the rhythms and conversations and activities of our family, but it was never forced. We didn’t do family devotionals. I made a profession of faith when I was 8 and grew into it slowly from there. I didn’t fully grasp what I was doing then, but I came to better understand it on my own as I read and study the Scriptures myself. Never, though, was I pressured into any decision about much of anything related to faith or life. It was a really healthy environment that I hope I am gifting to my own kids.
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I skimmed through the last link on the G Man. Honestly, I didn’t read most of it as it was a really, really long post and I’m short on time. I’ll do my best to go back and read the whole thing, but that may take me a while. I noticed at the end, though, that you cite Richard Carrier as perhaps your most primary scholarly source for the article. Carrier doesn’t believe that Jesus existed historically at all but is entirely a myth. I’m sorry, but that’s just not an historically or intellectually credible position in my view (and in the view of other scholars, not all of whom are Christian, like Bart Ehrman). Do you really support Carrier’s work about the historical Jesus? I mean this without any disrespect and hope it comes across as such, but if he’s someone you consider a real authority on the historical Jesus, we probably aren’t going to have much to talk about of substance and we definitely won’t be likely to find much in the way of common ground for productive conversation. If you want a really good presentation of the position I accept, Blomberg’s work, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament is worth your time.
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Why on earth for?
It seems that you have stepped in a huge metaphorical cow pat up to your ankles and do not have the wherewithal to acknowledge this fact.
🐔🐔🐔
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Do you call them merely cow pats? I’ve always heard them referred to as cow patties. Different dung slang for different versions of the language?
And, no, you’re just not interested in serious or meaningful engagement on the matter, so I’m not going to bother with it.
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Do you honestly consider you have anything remotely serious to engage?
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“There is not a worldview position that is automatic. All of them are learned.”
Yes, as I have said all along.
Your worldview has to be taught, or in truth, indoctrinated.
Your god, Yahweh plays no part.
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Which is itself a statement of worldview.
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Which part?
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The last part. As well as your perspective on the third part.
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You have no evidence to support your god’s involvement.
If you are pitching the notion that your worldview is the one to choose that most aligns with reality then surely you need to demonstrate this assertion with evidence?
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From the standpoint of your worldview commitment, that is the position you would take, yes. But I’m talking about things broader than whether a global flood or mass migration were historical events. Much broader. Do the ideas of the worldview when applied consistently all well lead to now flourishing or less for the most people? Do they accurately describe what a person is? Do they provide the meaning, hope, and purpose all people need? Do they strengthen or weaken relationships? And so on and so forth. If you answer all those comes from the standpoint of a secular worldview and are satisfied that it best lines up with reality, by all means. Stick with it. I find that the Christian worldview provides the best and most accurate picture of reality, so I hold that one. You did notice that I didn’t specify which worldview did that, but rather left it open for others to decide for themselves? If you don’t think Christianity is true, don’t accept it. I do, and so I have.
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Fictional tales such as Adam and Eve, the Noachian Global Flood and the Exodus myth are foundational building blocks of your faith-based worldview.
These tales are directly linked to the the assertion we live in a broken world because of sin and only the bible character Jesus of Nazareth can sort it out.
You asserted as much with your outrageous claim regarding Hurricane Helene.
Nothing about these claims comport with reality. Absolutely nothing.
Therefore the worldview that best aligns with reality is most certainly not Christianity, and I challenge you to prove otherwise.
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For those who don’t know, Jonathan is my pastor. I enjoy reading his blogs not just to learn more about my bible readings but also he has a knack for making the scripture entertaining. For those who have read Leviticus, it takes a god given talent to make that scripture come to life. No pun intended.
Now on to remarks from my buddy Ark:
You have no evidence to support your god’s involvement. If you are pitching the notion that your worldview is the one to choose that most aligns with reality then surely you need to demonstrate this assertion with evidence?
No, he doesn’t. I think you may be confused about his blog so let me help you.
It’s a Christian blog.
He’s not an attorney in the Skopes Monkey Trial. He’s not trying to convince his audience that God is real. His target audience already knows that God is real. Do you know why we read this blog? New flash….to learn more about God, not whether he’s real.
It’s a Christian blog.
Ark, if you feel this way why do you continue to read this blog? If you are trying to change any opinions I’m pretty sure we can agree that it’s a waste of time.
It’s a Christian blog.
If you’re trying to denigrate people of faith, not sure why. You don’t believe in God, I get it. But why do you continue to disparage those who do? Unless you are God then your opinion is no more important than anyone else’s. Do you go on Jewish blogs, Islamic blogs, Hindu blogs and also trivialize their beliefs?
Maybe you do, though I’m not sure why.
You can totally disagree with someone but still show respect. For some reason in today’s society it’s become accepted behavior to belittle others who don’t believe what they believe. Not sure why, but it’s getting old.
Jonathan, thanks for all you do.
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If Jonathan did not want an open forum all he has to do is make access limited.
As a Pastor for his faith-based religion he is called to spread the word; to proselytize.
I find religion interesting and being familiar with Christianity I enjoy engaging.
I do not search out other religious blogs as most seem to be hosted by Christians.
Why is this an issue for you?
It seems from your comment you feel the need to run to Jonathan’s defense for some reason?
Are you not confident in his ability to defend the faith, Thomas?
After all, this is what he is employed to do?
I consider respect is earned not deserved. His target audience do not know their god, Yahweh us real. They merely believe it. This is because they are indoctrinated.
Christianity deserves no respect whatsoever. It is a vile religion based on supersticious garbage and has no evidence whatsoever to support the outrageous and unsubstantiated foundational claims it makes.
Jonathan’s recent absurd admission that he believes Hurricane Helene is the result of a broken world because of human sin illustrates the type of warped thinking that that rides just beneath the surface of false respectability Christianity and it’s followers try to curry.
Furthermore, as a worldview that deems humans are created beings and broken its doctrine and dogma denigrates humanity.
The history of the religion is steeped in blood and cruelty.
Endless wars across the centuries, many internecine, conquest, genocide. Advocation of slavery, then wars to abolish it. Racism, and misogyny rife throughout Christian society.
The Catholic Church at the forefront of pedophilia, although certainly not the only one.
So, if you think you can make a well reasoned case why your religion deserves respect then, please, let’s hear it.
I am all ears
By the way, thanks so much for highlighting this is a Christian blog. If you hadn’t made such an effort I may well have missed the fact.
This is a Christian blog.
Amen?
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Aah Arkie, once again I don’t think you read my comments. Or maybe you just didn’t understand them. Why should Jonathan have to defend Christianity on a Christian blog? If you had a baking blog should you have to defend baking? If you had a music blog should you have to prove the existence of music?
It’s not just that, I’m sure no one has an issue with readers of blogs disagreeing with the viewpoint of another. But your posts often get personal. I saw you tell Jonathan one day his children would hate him because he’s teaching them there is a God. Really? Your posts are disrespectful, hateful and sadly, repetitive. You posts questions for Jonathan, ask for rebuttals, get the rebuttals, and then ask again for the rebuttals. It’s like you know how to write, you just have yet to grasp how to read.
I guess what confuses me is you state Christianity is vile yet you continue to read the blog. I think Nazism is vile. Thus, if I see that Stan Hitler has a created a blog extolling the virtues of “the good ol’ days” I will probably pass. Not sure if you know what vile means..
My suggestion is to find a blog about the tooth fairy, post your beliefs that the tooth fairy is not real and evil, and get all the children to cry. That should put a smile on your face.
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Aah, Tommy, once again I understood your comment perfectly.
If you run an open blog and make unsubstantiated assertions then it is quite natural that readers who disagree with said opinion are going to offer pushback.
Perhaps you don’t pay close attention to some of the responses Jonathan makes when I do call into question some of his unsubstantiated opinions?
He regularly asserts I do not know what I am talking about. Of course he fails to provide evidence for such claims, but failure to provide evidence for anything to do with faith based beliefs is par for the course when it comes to indoctrinated Christians, or other religious fundamentalists.
When religious ideology infiltrates and pollutes aspects of society it has no business even venturing into and often gets a free pass at the same time then it needs to be called out.
Or do you think idiotic garbage such as YEC and biblical literalism are perfectly harmless and should in fact be encouraged?
You have a Presidential candidate who is the epitome of hypocrisy yet he is endorsed by a large number of prominant religious people across your country.
Surely you remeber the scenes of church elders/leaders gathering round this Giant Arsehat praying for him, saying he was sent from your god, Yahweh?
One wanted to gag at how disgusting were such displays
If such examples were not true one could be forgiven for thinking they were scenes from an episode of SNL or an outtake from a Monty Python show.
Do you really think he is a good example for anyone let alone Christians to follow?
On second thoughts, something tells me you will be casting your vote for him come November 5th.
Am I right?
Perhaps you are one of those people who think calling out/ naming and shaming only applies to other religions? Islamic fundamentalism, Catholicism, and Christian sects that doesn’t toe the line your Southern Baptist Church preaches?
I suggested I hoped his children would not hate him for lying to them if they ever managed to deconvert. I meant it then and I mean it now.
To the rest of your comment…
Again …. Tommy, as vile and damaging as it is, especially toward children and other vulnerable individuals, I find religion fascinating.
And once again, Tommy, as you seem to feel religion and those peddling it are automatically deserving of respect I truly would like you to make a sincere, well-reasoned, evidence-based case for their defense.
And who knows, maybe if you also pray hard enough you might win me over?
So, without further ado, away you go, sir… With the leave of our host, of course, the floor is yours.
Give it your very best shot.
Ark.
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I think Jonathan was right in an earlier post.
If you believe there is no God, there there can be no Christianity. If there is no Christianity then there’s no reason to post about why God is vile and Christianity is evil.
Seems a waste of time, unless you are having second thoughts about religion. If so, I welcome you my brother, to a life of faith. And pray for you. Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean I don’t care.
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Never mind the fact that for such a vile religion, Christians tend to do more good in the world than the followers of any other worldview, religious or otherwise. When something tragic happens somewhere in the world, Christians are almost always the ones who show up first to help. We run most of the soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Most of the hospitals in the world started as Christian ministries. Most of the oldest universities were started by Christians. Most of the charitable giving (by volume and percentage) is done by Christians. The religion may be vile, but there are a whole lot of people who are sure grateful its followers are around when things go sideways.
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Well at least you acknowledge the religion is vile.
So, instead of all your high falluting worldview apologetics perhaps you would like to help out Thomas and offer an evidence based defense of why Christianity, and the version you subscribe to, is the best worldview choice that most comports with reality?
Unlike Thomas, a mere amateur in the ranks of apologetics, surely you as a paid Profesional, have the chops where it counts?
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Nice try there. But you didn’t address any of the points I raised.
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You’ve raised them before. So what?
Soup Kitchen Champions 1975 through 2024. Have a gold merit badge and a lie in on Monday.
We will forget the wars, slavery, racism, pedophilia, Inquisition, etc etc ad nauseum.
Now explain how the Christian Worldview aligns with reality better than any other worldview.
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Well, it would be more like AD 45 through 2024, but you were close.
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What’s a few millenia between minestrone fans, eh?
So… How about that reality aligned best worldview?
You obviously believe it’s Christian.
Why don’t you do your congregation proud and tell us why?
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I don’t like minestrone at all, personally.
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Excellent! I prefer Caldo Verde. Now that we have established our soup preferences how about that reality aligning worldview explanation of your religion?
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The fact is YOU and a great many others DO believe and you take these unsupported beliefs, indoctrinate children and vulnerable individuals and then takes these outlandish beliefs into the marketplace of ideas and as history is witness some of the most heinous crimes have been committed in the name of your god, Yahweh/Jesus.
Therefore, I reiterate, If you consider you can make a well reasoned, evidence-based case to justify your religion then instead of being a pathetic hand-waving apologist man up and show us what you are made of.
Let’s see you defend the god and the religion you seem to believe is worth everything.
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Lol. I’ve been reading your posts for weeks now. If I could reason with you with the intelligence of Socrates you would not accept it. Pass.
I will remind you the most heinous crime in the last 100 years was perpetrated by Adolph Hitler, who tried to eradicate the Jewish religion. I don’t think he was a Christian.
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You will pass because you know your position is untenable.
Most of those who comment on my religious posts are former Christians so they have all been there done that got the T-Shirt.
If you even had the vaguest idea of how to make a reasoned argument for your beliefs and your religion you would not hesitate.
Adolf Hitler was a Christian. But you were correct when you wrote “I don’t think.. ”
Perhaps you should try?
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In 1928 Hitler wrote “In the Jew I still saw only a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith.” Are you going to tell me he was also a Jewish sympathizer?
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Not at all. As I mentioned before. You really should think a little more before you comment.
He was a Christian. That his personal view of the Jews changed had no bearing on his own religion.
Martin Luthor also wrote some vile things about Jewish people.
Perhaps you should stop trying to score silly points and actually take the time to consider presenting a well-reasoned, evidence-based argument for your religion?
Surely you have one and are not simply some indoctrinated pew warmer who takes everything his pastor tells him at face value?
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I did a research paper on Hitler in college. He was not a Christian. Some considered him a pantheist but according to those who knew him that was even a stretch. His biographer said Hitler disavowed the Catholic religion in his early twenties and only professed an admiration for Christianity in speeches to appease his audiences during his bid to rule over Germany. In private he felt all religion was weak and beneath the Aryan way. Unless someone has unearthed new information since the early 90s that’s the way I remember it.
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He declared himself a Christian.
He believed the Jews were responsible for the death of the Bible character Jesus of Nazareth.
If a person identifies as a Christian who am I to say they are not?
Why not drop all the Godwin’s Law crap and offer a well reasoned argument for Christianity and your god, Yahweh?
That would be much more interesting.
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Hold on, I’m still chuckling over the fact that you seriously think Hitler was a Christian.
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Knock yourself out
I suppose you laugh out loud when you read all those stories of the thousands of kids who have been abused and systematically raped by Priests and Pastors. You know, proper Christians.
And what about those Crusades, eh?
All those Muslims slaughtered. Oh, yeah and lots of Jews too!
Yes, Christianity is a hoot and a half!
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Study the history of the Crusades a bit more. I don’t agree with the thinking that led to them at all, and gladly argue that they were not consistent with New Testament theology at all, but from the way you are throwing about the accusation, it leads me to the conclusion that your historical knowledge on the matter is suspect at best. The grotesque, systemic abuse of children shares no reflection with a single teaching of Jesus or the apostles, so, no, someone who would do that is not someone I would refer to as a follower of His at all.
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Doesn’t matter if you agree. They happened and were sanctioned by the Church, even the one known as the Children’s Crusade
I suggest you study them a little more.
There seems to be some very suspect worldview holes in your history.
I never asserted that any sort of child abuse is in line with the bible character Jesus of Nazareth. But those Christians who commit these heinous crimes self-identify as Christians, just as Adolf did, and your fellow Priests and Pastors are often considered upstanding members of the Church. Like I said Proper Christians.
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You seriously believe that Hitler was a Christian?!? No wonder you hate Christianity so much. I mean, that view is absolute historical nonsense, but it sure would explain a lot.
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He was baptised, Catholic, declared himself to be Christian. All his troops had belt buckles with the words Gott mit uns.
Or do you consider he was not Christian on the grounds he was also a maniac?
Your ignorance is one of your best features, Jonathan. Is this why Thomas is so. enamoured? Soul mates, perhaps?
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Just good friends. But I just can’t take you seriously anymore if you are going to insist on historical nonsense like that. I guess we’re even there now is what you might be itching to reply with. Oh well.
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According to Jesus the 2nd greatest commandment for a Christian is love thy neighbor as you love thyself. Believe or not, if more people followed this commandment the world would be a better place.
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Mr. Waits, I’m not sure what is the best way, the most efficient method for you and I to dialogue, debate, etc., our world-views—strictly on this one single post and endless comment threads within—or some other way, but it might be something to seriously consider due to the fact that many/most of your (biased?) followers here will not equitably give my viewpoints, my arguments much or any consideration. They’ve made their decision before I even introduced myself here. You might have a better idea, but it has been my long experience that staunch Faith-believers will refuse to remove their self-imposed blinders or rose colored glasses from their eyes and earplugs from their ears.
I say this because there might be a more efficient method to discuss and debate our differences than on one single blog-post that most likely will have no effect for anyone and possibly waste both our valuable time and efforts. Does that makes sense?
Neither of us want to recklessly throw away our pearls among swine, correct? And this goes for Christians and non-Christians. 🙂
Nevertheless, I will answer or address below one more of your many questions/points from your first reply to me.
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The blog has a comment page. If you go there and leave a comment, that’ll send me an email directly. If you’re interested, do that and we could move the exchange to email instead of the comment thread of this one post.
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But what good does that private hidden dialogue do for your audience?
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Well, I wasn’t thinking in those terms at all. I was trying to find an easier way to engage back and forth. I’m happy for things to play out here if you’re okay with it. Long form tends to be out I operate. It’ll take some time to engage with everything, especially as the number looking for engagement is suddenly growing of late, but I’ll do my best.
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You asked me…
Simple. His deep Jewishness and all his comprehensive familial and educational background steeped heavily in and surrounded by Late Second Temple Judaism/Messianism that consumed his entire life, certainly his last 3-4 years in and around Jerusalem… is far too often ignored by modern Christians today and by the pastors, apologists, and seminaries.
In other words, Jesus’ deep Judaism is lost almost all the time. THAT is a betrayal of true knowledge of him.
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Interesting. So, if Christians looked more like, say, Messianic Jews their knowledge of Jesus would be more genuine in your opinion? What do you make of the many positions He staked out that flew rather directly in the face of the major teachings of the Jewish religious leaders of His day?
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No. They would have a much more accurate, more intimate understanding of their Yeshua/Jesus.
An excellent question Jonathan. If modern Christians knew intimately the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Tannaitic Rabbinical literature, both during Yeshua/Jesus’ lifetime, and the many non-Canonical testimonies about Yeshua/Jesus, then their overall understanding of their Greek Christos, heavily distorted by Saul/Paul, would have to be modified, even overhauled. 🙂
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So, if they spent more time studying works that largely predated Jesus and otherwise didn’t have anything to do with Him or else were deeply influence by Gnostic thinking (which was way more Greek in its origins) and have been rejected by orthodox Christians as possessing any relevance to the Christian worldview, they would understand Jesus better?
I’ve read or skimmed a couple of the links from your blog that you shared with me. You seem to place a lot of emphasis on the supposed Greek thinking that somehow makes the New Testament documents unreliable. Color me unconvinced.
To quote from my New Testament professor, Craig Blomberg, from his excellent book The Historical Reliability of the New Testament, “A sizable body of popular and pseudo-academic literature recently has tried to revive the notion that significant portions of the Gospels’ portraits of Jesus were invented based on ancient Greco-Roman mythology. This view, associated with the ‘history of religions’ school of thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was debunked a hundred years ago. Responsible historical Jesus scholarship from at least 1980 to the present is united in its affirmation of the thoroughly Jewish origins of the Gospels and the Jewishness of the historical Jesus, whatever else they may disagree on. . .While elements of first-century Judaism were Hellenized, others were not, and the Jewishness of Jesus includes a number that were not.”
I still need to read the third piece, but you haven’t yet raised any points in the other two that strike me as even remotely threatening to a belief in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. I’m curious why these issues were so devastating to your faith.
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First off, I will have to breakdown your packed, flawed comment-replies for the sake of truth and facts. So please bear with me.
Second, I must respectfully correct you Mr. Waits. Your biblical history is quite sketchy in this comment-reply.
That assumption is simply wrong. The majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written between 150 BCE and 70 CE. The Rabbinical Tannaitic literature was written between 10 CE and 220 CE. And many of the non-Canonical testimonies, gospels, letters, etc., were written between 200 BCE and 100 CE. Jesus/Yeshua lived from approx 4-6 BCE to approx 32 CE, give or take about 2-yrs on either end.
Therefore, the primary extraneous sources available to us to better know and understand Jesus/Yeshua and his surroundings and heritage are essentially right smack in the middle of those invaluable written sources! You can double-check all of this yourself. You will find I am right.
You are partially correct there, but also partially wrong in your implied “influences.”
Yes, Gnostic (Greek) thinking was very popular between say 180 BCE and 400 CE, but I ask you are there any extant Hebrew or Aramaic writings—Jesus’/Yeshua’s native tongue for public teaching and reformation—which survived or were ever written? No. Where must one go to learn about Jesus’/Yeshua’s actual Torah-loving Jewishness? Certainly NOT to the Greco-Roman earliest Church Fathers or today’s Catholic and Protestant New Testaments. Those are very truncated and Greek distorted.
Therefore, yes, by doing more extensive homework/legwork modern Christians will indeed get an accurate understanding of the real Yeshua/Jesus, or at least a much expanded more accurate Yeshua.
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Take all the time you need, as always. Keep first things first.
I appreciate the information. That being said, you still haven’t demonstrated that any of those writings would have had any impact on Jesus and His ministry. All of your arguments strike me as little more than speculative. I’m still struggling to see how any of this is relevant to the question of the historicity of the Gospels and the historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead, much less how any of this will help us get a more accurate understanding of the “real Jesus.”
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😆 Wow. My goodness. We JUST started Mr. Waits! Surely you weren’t expecting this complex, often convoluted subject (by modern Greek Christology) to be fairly evaluated in just a few comments. Remember, I warned you earlier that tackling these widely unknown sides of Yeshua were not going to be easy-peesy in this format. WordPress isn’t set up like that. Therefore, you are going to have to have great patience and genuine curiosity to step out of your long engrained teaching (indoctrination?).
It took me almost 3-yrs to deconvert and deprogram my Greco-Roman theology and Pauline Christology and then start on Yeshua’s deep Jewishness these last 32-33 years. So I hope we can be realistic on this subject and do it fair justice, yes?
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You are right that the limitations of WordPress for this kind of dialogue are somewhat oppressive. You’re right, though, that we don’t need to rush. I’ll settle in for an interesting journey.
I will say that I have no problems with accepting Jesus’ deep Jewishness. And I’ve seen at least some of the arguments for the supposed Greco-Roman or Pauline corruption of Jesus’ teachings, although it has been many years since I’ve interacted with them. I remember their striking me as profoundly unlikely and not at all compelling. And, if Richard Carrier is going to be one of your main sources, I’ll confess that you’ll find me a highly skeptical interlocutor to your cause.
That all being said, have at it! :~)
And I’ll do my best to be patient along the way. I will say that my time is limited given the demands of pastoring a growing church and raising three busy boys and being a good husband. I suspect you’ll have patience with me as well.
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Yes, I will try my best to have patience with you and your life-demands. In that regard, given both of our life-demands, it might turnout for the better if our dialogues, debates move slow. 😉
With that being said, I’m going to go way out on a limb here…
I’m guessing (prematurely of course) that there is a 1% to 0.5% chance you will (completely?) change your Christian world-view? 🤭😉
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Slow and steady is the way.
But, yes, you are correct. I would be lying if I said I had much in the way of positive confidence that you are going to be able to make a sufficiently compelling case to get me to change my mind on matters I’ve been studying and growing in confidence about for most of 30 years. But, I’m always interested in learning more, so I’ll at least be glad to hear your perspective.
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Well, I appreciate your honesty there. It is very hard to remove the dark, one-way sunglasses or goggles. I know, I was in your position of biasness too between 1982 and 1991. They are very thick chains. 😉
Also, your candor reflects the often underestimated grip of assimilation reinforced by a watchful, vigilant, judging(?) membership of other Faith-followers. 🙂
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Spoken like one who has walked away from it and is confident in where he stands now ;~) At least there’s a mutual care here, if in different directions from one another. As Deep Blue Something once observed, “Well that’s one thing we’ve got.”
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True. And I should be equally fair that in my opposed viewpoint and world-view of your, for lack of a better word, “condition” and posture, can be observed differently than my own self-evaluation. 😄
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By the way, I saw a comment that I never responded to asking for evidence on the claim that genuine secularism at least in the U.S. may be starting to decline a bit. The two main articles I’ve read on that recently are behind a paywall (I know…that seems too convenient), but check out the work of sociologist of religion, Ryan Burge on the subject. He’s got some pretty interesting work. And he’s a numbers guy. He is a believer, but his first goal in research is to simply present the numbers as they are whether they are encouraging for his “side” or not. And they most definitely are not always encouraging for believers in the U.S. these days.
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“Skimmed” is probably the more operative word there. 😉
That’s because Greek-thinking did and does make our current canonical New Testament unreliable for the simple reason of transliteration by average or less than average Hellenic bishops and scribes. If you equitably read—with suspended personal learnings from your Christian education (seminary?) and Christian reinforcements—you would see and understand that Yeshua’s Torah-loving, Torah-keeping Jewishness cannot be found in your Greek canonical New Testament. I would therefore strongly recommend you start with Dr. Nehemia Gordon’s (PhD) fine book, “The Hebrew Yeshua vs The Greek Jesus: New Light on the Seat of Moses From Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew.” ISBN 0-9762637-0-X January 2005.
See also: https://www.nehemiaswall.com/
Dr. Gordon’s excellent explanation of the near impossible methods of 2nd- thru 4th-century Hellenist transliteration going from Mishnaic Hebrew to Aramaic to Koine Greek by the earliest Hellenic Fathers and scribes have gravely distorted Yeshua’s Hebraisms and Idioms, rendering the/your Greek New Testament unreliable on Yeshua’s actual theology. Other outstanding Jewish-Hebrew scholars on this problem are Dr. Lawrence H. Schiffman and Dr. Robert Eisenman, to name only two of a multitude of acclaimed Hebrew-Jewish scholars.
I researched, albeit for one whole day, the educational background of Dr. Craig Blomberg and I was unable to determine with certainty whether he had/has ANY background or education in Mishnaic Hebrew, ancient Syro-Aramaic, and intensive Late Second Temple Judaism & Messianism from a highly accredited Hebrew university and Hebrew scholars, but could only determine his education and family background are strictly (narrowly) confined to mainline Protestant family and Protestant schools, seminaries, and Lutheran Church and Evangelical Covenant Church. This is nowhere close to being an expert on Yeshua’s/Jesus’ Torah-loving, Torah-keeping teachings and reforms. Sorry. Not reliable. Therefore, the rest of your comment-reply isn’t relevant if your starting point is flawed and/or wrong. 🤷♂️
To be respectfully honest, my three blog-posts I offered were only an introduction. Within them are further links to further in-depth study and consideration. More broadly I have several decades of study, research, and scholarly references/citations that are just too in-depth and lengthy to put in one or two comment-replies. All of this work combined, digested, and thoroughly understood does NOT derive or result in sensationalism and “pseudo academic literature,” especially if the one criticizing has no background in or education in Yeshua’s Jewishness like Dr. Blomberg does not. That is analogous to a person claiming they can pilot an Airbus A220 or Boeing 777X and merely having remote-controlled miniature model-plane skills. Sorry, Dr. Blomberg is not a strong reference at all to my points.
It will likely be tomorrow or Wednesday before I can get to your additional comment-replies.
Best Regards Mr. Waits. 🙂
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Interesting. I’ll read the rest as you get time for it.
One point of curiosity that was raised for me. Do you consider yourself a follower of Jesus in any sense? Also, what do you make of modern Messianic Jews? (I’m just trying to get a better sense of where you are coming from.)
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If you mean “follower” in your definition, no. Why not you might ask? Because of John 14:6…
According to the Hellenists that remembered and the scribe who wrote the Gospel of John (90-110 CE) and Yeshua’s teaching approx 68-years later, those parameters are incredibly restricting with no room for exceptions.
However, if I am a type of follower in any sense, then perhaps I am a student of the sectarian Rabbi-Reformer Yeshua bar Yosef, the failed Messiah, and his teachings, reforms, dissent, and general kindness that are based upon many more sources than just the Greek Synoptic Gospels. But he is no longer my “Lord and Savior” in the mainstream Catholic and Protestant sense or in the Pauline Christological sense.
Today’s Messianic Jews still have (significant?) elements of Evangelical Protestant theology. I am not onboard with any of that and would not subscribe to their belief-system, not with what I know now.
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So, would it be fair to say that in spite of our different approaches to thinking about Him, and our different understandings of precisely what we can know about Him with any kind of confidence, you are a fan of Jesus in some capacity?
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No, because “fan” implies fanatic. I am by no means whatsoever a fan(atic) of the Greek-Apotheosis made Jesus/Iesous. I am, however, a student of the historical Rabbi-Reformer Yeshuah bar Yosef, the 1st-century CE failed Messiah.
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Fascinating (on the second part). What is so attractive about Him to you?
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As I address in my December 2016 blog-post, “Mind and Matter,” the intrigue is the hypnotic spell, or cult-like attraction of Pauline Christology or classic traditional stories/myths about Christ, the one and only Son of God/Man, that via the Placebo Effect and hypnotic assimilation of Christian congregations, in particular the Evangy-Fundy movements beseeching their very emotional “Holy Spirit” and popular trending Prosperity Theology that I find intriguing and even very dangerous in the 21st-century for some 2.5 billion humans. How are so many tranquilized and hypnotized by the obvious Placebo Effect and church assimilation—brainwashing? And of course, for over 12-years I too was sucked into that psych sales and marketing. 🙂
P.S. In order not to get unnecessarily bogged down with so many questions you could find over on my blog, let’s try our best to stay focused on our current dialogue topics. Yes? 👍
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I feel like you kind of deflected as far as an answer to my question there. And, no, I will make no promises not to ask questions as I have them. That’s how I learn. And I’d much rather ask directly than go searching for answers on your blog or any other blog.
So, what has drawn you to being a student of Jesus in the way you understand Him is that so many other people throughout history are so drawn to Him? Or is there something about Him that makes you a student of His?
Relatedly, what do you think it is about Jesus and what you identify as Pauline Christology that has been so profoundly attractive to so many countless millions or even billions over the span of the last 2,000 years? What is dangerous about it?
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Not at all, no. I’m trying to respect BOTH our busy lives and time constraints in dialoguing on this subject. It sort of seems to me (right now) that you might want to bog me down with unnecessary tangents while ALSO not giving equal effort on your part to better and more fairly understand where I am coming from with my challenges, dialogue, and debate over on my blog. That’s okay; I will simply keep referring you to the 100’s and 100’s of posts where I have already adequately dealt with many of your questions… that I KNOW will come from you. Because I’ve already been deeply on your side of things. Hope that makes sense.
We can quickly and easily save each other a lot of (wasted?) time and effort if you are not the least bit equitably interested in my counter-viewpoints and arguments to your Baptist Christian world-view. I have no problem at all doing that. For decades that is really the pat response, reaction I always get from staunch Conservative Christian apologists.
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That does make sense. So, you have a post somewhere that explains why you are a student of Jesus?
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Actually more than one single post. They can be found first under this Parent Page: https://professortaboo.com/about/
And then under that main page:
And their sub-pages. 🙂
When I find that all your very specific questions are already answered under another separate blog, I will give you that direct link. That will save me a LOT of time, especially if you go reading it with an open-mind and not already biased before you’ve read the first three words. 😉 Fair?
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That’ll work. I’ll do my best to be as open minded as I can.
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Thank you Mr. Waits. Also, my Main Menu tab “My Library” will also have significant, relative content to where I stand today on Pauline Christology and Greco-Roman Apotheosis of Iesous/Jesus…
But I suspect you won’t spend much time reading every single line, but merely “skim” to use your word. 😉
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I’ll give it all the attention I am able to afford for it.
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With respect, that particular post doesn’t even remotely explain why you consider yourself a student of Jesus. I’ve seen that particular YouTube video before and thought it was a joke at best. I’m still curious then as to why you are a student of Jesus. What is it about Him that attracts you to Him?
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As a whole, with all the other posts and pages, they do, quite clearly actually. It is called comprehensive inference Mr. Waits. 🙂
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Yeah, I’d rather just have the simple answer. What I’ve read or otherwise skimmed so far from what you’ve linked to me hasn’t come anywhere in the universe of close to getting me to an answer to the question. That particular post just included a video that you attaboy’d to say why you don’t like religion. Nothing there about why you consider yourself a student of Jesus.
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Respectfully, sorry… you are wrong there.
Hey, just let me know at anytime that your “skimming” isn’t getting YOU anywhere close to who I truly am. I can’t force you to put forth that effort. Just say the word Mr. Waits. 🙂
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If you aren’t going to be willing to offer simple answers to simple questions, I’m afraid we aren’t going to get very far in any kind of a conversation. As you noted on your blog, you write long-form posts. Honestly, I don’t have the time to give to reading what appears to be your average-length piece. I wish I did, but I don’t. If you are going to keep pointing me to long pieces (which so far have been so opaque regarding the questions you keep insisting they answer that I have yet to feel like you’ve actually answer any of them) when I ask questions, then trying to move forward with wherever it is you’re trying to take us probably isn’t going to be worth either of our time. I’ll leave continuing up to you.
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See my latest below comment to close out this first stage of Q&A.
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The one with the video link?
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Just posted. It is in Moderation.
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My reply is in Moderation due to my two links within my answer. FYI.
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I’ll fix that.
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Is it possible that you could jot down your tangential questions for later so we can stay precisely on topic? This might help greatly. Thoughts?
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I don’t have any planned. They come up as you share thoughts and I want to know more about one thing or another. How about this: I’ll ask as things interest me, and if you know you have a blog on it, just say, “There’s a blog for that.” I can then try to find it for myself. Good plan?
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I’ll just give you the direct link so you don’t have to put yourself out any. 😉
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Also Mr. Waits, you have yet to fully disclose your academic background and education I asked for a day or two ago. Thank you.
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I did exactly that Sunday afternoon. Let me see if I can easily find where and direct you to it.
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👍 Patiently waiting sir.
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This is just a cut and paste from wherever it got posted…
Here’s the quick version before I get started on a busy day.
I graduated from Truman State University with a degree in chemistry. I was planning to be a high school chemistry teacher until God very clearly (to me) called me to ministry instead. After graduating and getting married, I went to Denver Seminary and graduated with my M.Div. I’ve been a pastor ever since.
I grew up in a wonderful family with great parents who loved each other and my sister and me. We were active in our church throughout my growing up years. Faith was assumed in the rhythms and conversations and activities of our family, but it was never forced. We didn’t do family devotionals. I made a profession of faith when I was 8 and grew into it slowly from there. I didn’t fully grasp what I was doing then, but I came to better understand it on my own as I read and study the Scriptures myself. Never, though, was I pressured into any decision about much of anything related to faith or life. It was a really healthy environment that I hope I am gifting to my own kids.
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Thank you. I don’t remember that reply to me at all, but nonetheless, thank you for answering. I appreciate it. 🙂
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Your wrote in your initial response to mine:
About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated
Self-identified Christians make up 63% of U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago.
— The Pew Research Center, December 2021
I would consider a 12% drop over just 10-yrs to be significant. And I think both you and I would agree that these broad obtuse numbers are generous based on our agreement earlier about too many luke-warm public Christians. This percentage is probably more like 14%–17% or thereabouts over just 10-yrs.
Which places? Most of your higher educated nations such as the Nordic countries, such as the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Australia, the U.K., France, Iceland, and of course the U.S. to name only 12 or 13.
— Most Educated Countries 2024, World Population Review
Islamic countries, yes. But you didn’t share ALL the reasons why Islam is and has been outpacing Christianity. It isn’t just the birthrates solely, it is also the low level of education in those areas; illiterate except in the Quran.
You stated:
Perhaps, but the same about Islam’s illiteracy you point out can be equally said in poorly educated nations/areas for Christianity’s growth as you claim. The best prime examples are in/on the African continent or the Asian continent—barring the Koreas and Japan—where very poor primary and secondary educations are missing or non-existent. And post-grad levels are worse than non-existent there.
You stated:
Do you have one or three credible citations for that claim? Thanks in advance for those citations.
You concluded with:
Me as well! And also again in the Nordic countries, and the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Australia, the U.K., France, Iceland that I mentioned. I’m not so sure your perception is identical to those nations’ reality regarding secularism. But that might be a topic of research for a later time.
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There is one thing I would like to correct you about regarding your interpretation of my deconversion. You wrote that “I walked away…” from the faith. That is not accurate in what happened. Please allow me to set the record straight and true.
I would ask you Mr. Waits, What is so extraordinary, so phenomenal, so earth-shattering about the birth of Jesus and his first 12-years? Why is Jesus so “historical” in the history of all humanity?
Referencing again my March 2018 blog-post, “The Incarnation of G-Man,” I will safely assume your answer would be very similar (identical?) to Robert Deffinbaugh, Th.M.- Dallas Theological Seminary and Bible.org:
Pretty certain this will be your answer, I can truthfully tell you that it was NOT me who “walked away” from the faith. On the contrary, God, your God, and Jesus, your Jesus walked away from me… not fulfilling their promise to me:
Denver Seminary’s core commitments are stated on their website. One of those core principles is “Biblical Authority.” It states:
I would also say that my own seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary – Jackson, MS campus, essentially believes the same principles and practice a very high level of excellence teaching this core value to their students. And one of the critical core parts of “committed to the inspiration, inerrancy, and authority of the Bible” is its (supposed) “inerrancy” or its veracity. I’m sure you are quite familiar with the concepts of Divine Revelation and Divine Participation, yes? Well, this basic Christian concepts means that God shows us Himself via General Revelation and Special Revelation. The latter emphasizes His direct revelation to an individual or a group. This sort of revelation includes dreams, visions, religious miracles, experience of extraordinary events, and prophecy like manifestations of “tongues.” It also includes holy scriptures like the Old and New Testaments or the Bible. Hence, one of the supposed most reliant avenues to know God and Jesus are Scriptures. The Greek Bible is paramount to say the least, right?
Yikes! But this theological doctrine is not true. The Bible is indeed quite errant and mostly not based on significant, real historical facts.
So how did your God and Jesus walk away from me?
He and his Yahweh/Father abandoned us/me when Jesus disappeared at the age of 13 and was completely invisible, useless, doddling around somewhere for a staggering 17-years. That is over HALF his life, or very NEAR half his life! What a waste for sinful humanity and their dire need! Or is that simply the unreliable Gospels’ fabrication and/or cover up of something they did not want the world to know about their Son of God/Man!?
Or more practically and logically, Jesus NEVER WAS all the miraculous and prophetic things the unreliable Gospels record. Jesus was NEVER all the hoopla and paranormal stuff the Gospels portray of his birth and first 12-years. This is indeed the most probable, the most plausible reality of Jesus’ 17 missing years of uselessness. For myself, I am certain Jesus was never all the remarkable things of a Son of God/Man the Gospels intentionally deceive us with because they had to sensationalize the factual FAILED Messiah into a completely different, bogus caricature of a super divine god from well-established Greek Apotheosis, as the Hellenistic world had always done, e.g. Alexander the Great, et al.
Furthermore, if anyone, especially Christians, had an exceptional understanding of the relentless methods the Romans used to hunt down, arrest, imprison and/or execute usurping Kings against the Emperor and Rome, then they would also know that it is IMPOSSIBLE that Jesus was merely right under their noses in Galilee the whole time, and yet, no one, not a single person would give up Jesus’ whereabouts for a hefty reward… for 17-years! That never happened in 1st- or 2nd-century Rome or its provinces. Period. They always got their high profile criminals and treasonous would-be kings/emperors.
Let the record show I did not walk away from the faith. God/Jesus walked away breaking their promise(s). Soon I will return to our original dialogue of Q&A. For the sake of our valuable times, there’s no need for you to reply to this and dive into many tangential questions for me. I simply wanted to set the record straight about my happy deconversion, that’s all.
Best regards Mr. Waits
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So then, you do believe in God?
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Whether I do or do not isn’t relevant… not relevant to me, to you, or to anyone on Earth.
As I’ve clearly stated on my About page submenu, Freethinking Humanist, that’s what I am. To simplify that even more, I am just an Earthling like you and everyone else on this marvelous Pale Blue-Dot of a planet, to quote the acclaimed Carl Sagan. 🙂
Now, moving on and back to our original initial dialogue…
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But you said God walked away from you. That implies a current belief in God. If you don’t believe in God, how could He have walked away from you? And, if you do believe in God, what do you actually believe about Him? What’s more, what is it about Jesus that makes you consider yourself a student of His. You still haven’t answered that one, and the post you gave me in response to my repeating the question didn’t even remotely answer it. I’m curious that you don’t seem inclined to simply answer the question about your belief or disbelief in God. I find it to be exceedingly relevant to our conversation.
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I was talking/writing in your language and terms. Much of what you try to interpret about me is strictly in YOUR language and terms. Not mine. Hope that makes perfect sense. 🙂
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I’m just responding to the words you used. So then, you don’t feel like God walked away from you?
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🤷♂️ No, that is wrong and not what I said.
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So, you do feel like God walked away from you? A straight answer would be far more helpful here for the sake of clarity than whatever this run around is supposed to be.
You said: “Let the record show I did not walk away from the faith. God/Jesus walked away breaking their promise(s).”
That implies a belief in God. Is that what you meant to imply or not?
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Let me put it to you this way, in your pathology-thinking…
That is how I would assess you and I only know a little about you right now, but enough—based upon your family, your background, your education, and your present occupation. Is that evaluation by me of you fair? 🙂
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I’ve watched that video before. I found the reasoning to be bad then. I’m not interested in giving the time to watching it again. And, more importantly, that doesn’t answer any of the questions that I’ve asked you. I feel like you’re kind of avoiding actually answering the questions I’m asking for some reason.
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Of course you would find it “bad” or useless because you are unable to step out of your deep indoctrination or as I explained earlier, your Mind and Matter via the Placebo Effect and Peer Assimilation at church. 🙂
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Or, I’ve thought through the questions raised and found them not only uncompelling, but so stuck in their own bias that they don’t even begin to paint a full picture of why someone might believe. The trouble with the atheistic worldview is that it can only countenance a handful of reasons why someone might believe and none of them are ultimately legitimate. That’s a worldview issue, not a faith issue.
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See my latest comment at bottom. Thnx.
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@Jonathan.
If you consider the reasons for belief offered in the video express undue atheist bias and do not encompass certain criteria for believing what reasons over and above any of those offered in the video would you say we’re the ones that caused you to give over your life to Christianity and become not only a follower of the character Jesus of Nazareth, but also enter ministry and become a Pastor?
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I’d have to watch the video again to remember the full range of specific questions in order to give you the best answer possible, but personally speaking, I took time over many years to examine the arguments for and against Christianity, and came away reaffirmed that my initial decision to commit my life as a follower of Him was a right and reasonable decision.
Now, was I perhaps predisposed some in this direction because of the Christian environment in which I was raised? Perhaps. But I did the work to make it my own faith rather than merely a parroted version of my parents’. Additionally (and you’re just going to have to take my word for it on this one), they didn’t put any kind of pressure on me one way or the other. My sister pursued a different path for her life for several years (although she has come back to a path of faith more recently), and they never treated her any differently because of it.
As for my decision to enter the ministry and become a pastor, I did that because God called me to it. I know that sounds weird given your framework, but I’m not less sure of it because of that. I was not planning on that. I was not expecting it. It came fairly well out of the blue. It was a spiritual experience that I could not begin to prove to you (or anyone else) using empirical means, but it was nonetheless as clear as it could be for me.
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@Jonathan.
Re:The video.
I cannot recall if I asked: what was the specific evidence that caused you to become/remain Christian?
Also, what prompted you to opt for the Baptist sect in particular?
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Perhaps the most significant evidence was a presentation a colleague of my dad (who is an attorney) made both to my youth group and a Christian club at my school offering a legal defense of the resurrection. That is, he presented a case that would have been sufficient to convince a judge and jury that the historical nature of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the most reasonable conclusion based on the available evidence. As an attorney himself who had argued before the U.S. Supreme Court at least once at that point in his career, he had a pretty good idea how to construct such a case and what evidence would be accepted and successfully argued and what wouldn’t.
I was raised in the Baptist church (and just FYI, in the Protestant world, we tend to call groups like Baptists denominations, not sects). That had the most to do with why I settled there. But, through seminary I was exposed to several different Protestant denominations and given the opportunity to think through what they each believed and why and came to the conclusion that the Baptist tradition was where I felt the most comfortable still.
You have to keep in mind that with Baptists, there are just two key distinctives. I think we’ve talked about this before. I can’t remember if it was with you or Gary or Prof. Baptists practice believers’ baptism by full immersion and are pretty fanatical about the autonomy of the local church. I think those two ideas are pretty important, so I’m a Baptist.
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So, no evidence, just argument. Or more, accurately, unsubstantiated claims.
You were, young, part of a primed, captive audience and immersed in a thoroughly Christian environment with little or more likely no pressure or information from other religions or religious ideas to raise or cause any sort of meaningful critical thinking or doubt.
I reckon that, and the fact you were raised Baptist is as near as dammit to being indoctrinated as one will likely find.
Seems pretty standard.
Are the views held by your branch of Southern Baptism the same as other branches of the Baptist Church?
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Or Ark, in Pastor Waits’ words to me… “just speculation.” 🙂
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I see what you did there ;~)
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Here’s more 😉
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Oh, and I even got credit in name. Wow.
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No, he presented evidence as would be acceptable in a court of law to make a positive case for the resurrection.
And as a matter of fact, our youth minister at the time organized a series of presentations for us with representatives from other religious groups including an Iman, a Rabbi, and a Mormon theologian that I remember.
To your last question, it depends. Some largely do, others don’t. There are two things that make a Baptist church a Baptist church: baptism by full immersion and church autonomy. Beyond that, just about anything goes. Baptist churches are like the wild, wild West. It’s actually really hard to know what a particular Baptist church believes until you get on the inside and find out for yourself. If it happens to be part of a larger denominational body, that’s going to give you some pretty important clues, but even then, there are going to be some differences that won’t become apparent until you get on the inside, ask questions, and find out for yourself.
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No he did not present evidence as there is none. He didn’t even do it in front of a bona fide jury. What he did do was present a very clever, presuppositional apologetic argument designed to quell the tremolous hearts of young, highly impressionable Christian children.
Kudos to your youth minister.
What about the presentations of other religious reps did you find unconvincing?
So you opted for the particular Baptist denomination because of familiarity rather than any sort of critical analysis.
Seems like a milder form of indictrination.
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No, your worldview commitment prevents you from accepting that there is evidence. He presented the evidence as would have been acceptable in a legal setting to demonstrate the reasonableness of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead.
I don’t remember the presentations now well enough to be able to answer that question. And on the second part of that, you seem to have missed where I said I took the time to critically analyze various Christian faith traditions and decided after that to stick with the Baptist denomination.
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Again no. He presented an argument.
There is no evidence to support such a claim and no court anywhere that would accept such claims.
If you took the time to genuinely critically analyze the tenets of your faith let alone your particular brand of it you would deconvert.
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To close out this initial Q&A regarding modern Christians NOT knowing the actual Yeshuah/Jesus due to the heavily Hellenistic, mythological Synpotic Gospels—g-John does not deserve to be considered due to its glaringly obvious irrelavency to the historical Homeland Jew Yeshuah/Jesus; g-John is primarily a very Greek theological retort written between 90-110 CE for Yeshuah’s/Jesus’ divine nature—I will further elaborate for you Mr. Waits and your readers why they cannot possibly know the real Yeshuah/Jesus only from the Synoptic Gospels or from the 1st- or 2nd-generation Roman Catholic Church Fathers.
For starters and for well over two millenia, the fact that there was historically stark, drastic contrasts with high levels of xenophobic sentiment in ancient Syro-Palestine and surrounding Judea and Jerusalem between Hellenistic people of the Greco-Roman Empire and that of Homeland Jews/Judaism during Late Second Temple Judaism (hereafter “LSTJ”). This known verifiable fact has been essentially ignored by modern traditional academia, by 19th–21st century scholarship, and most of all by Christian-American theological seminaries everywhere. It is frankly unforgiveable. This ignorance, whether innocent or willing, is a monumental travesty if not a catastrophic blunder by Christendom and its centuries of apologists.
When one fully understands the comprehensive historical context of Homeland Torah-loving Jews living within the Hellenistic Roman Empire between 200 BCE, up to 70 CE with the total destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by General Titus and his Legions, it becomes ever so clear there was serious animosity between three major, unyielding cultural groups: 1) Romans/Gentiles or Pagans, 2) Hellenistic (Herodian?) Jews or Diaspora, and 3) Homeland Torah-abiding Jews such as Jesus or Yeshua in Hebrew. These three groups clashed often with severe consequences employed by Rome’s Provincial authorities.
Today, far too many Christians naively or willingly ignore the stark major differences between Homeland Mishnaic Judaism/Hebrew and Hellenistic or Diaspora Judaism and those (Herodion?) Greco-Roman Jews who wrote much or most of the now canonical New Testament.
Dr. Bart Ehrman addresses the many grave problems of copying earlier copies of verbal “stories,” i.e. not recorded, about Yeshua bar Yosef (Jesus) forty to eighty years after his execution, and thornier still (pun intended) throughout some of the most unstable, tumultuous decades of the Roman Empire and the Jews of Palestine. Whether the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Miqra (מִקְרָא) in Hebrew, was changed intentionally or unintentionally by scribes, it’s almost certain that personal projections were written into the Gospels we have today. Problematic questions also increasingly apply to the Yeshua/Jesus stories better known as the canonical Gospels of Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John, in that order. Ehrman states:
Let me reiterate the active timeline of the Masoretes and their standardized copied texts: 500 — 1,000 CE. That is more than four and a half centuries after Yeshua’s/Jesus’ death; c. 467 years to be more exact! This poses many more suspicions about what was done with the Hebrew Bible stories prior to 500 CE? It gets worse…
The rest of this clear explanation of the impossibility of 1st- or 2nd-century CE Hellenist Jews—who were very unfamiliar with Mishnaic Hebrew—telling Greco-Romans what Yeshuah/Jesus publicly spoke or even Saul/Paul wrote in his epistles, can be found in my blog-post, The Failures of Koine Greek & Christianity under the header: More On the Linguistic Cultural Troubles of Greek Transliteration Post-70 CE.
As Dr. Nehemiah Gordon continued his research career on the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran and ‘the writing, erasure, and correction of tetragrammaton in Medieval Age Hebrew Bible manuscripts,’ Gordon was discussing with a colleague who explained to him “some scholars were of the opinion that parts of the first three Gospels of the New Testament were originally written in Hebrew.” Asking how and why that was his colleague answered, “Because they are full of Hebraisms.”
Dr. Gordon elaborates on this…
In the ancient shops, forums, and streets of Athens, Rome, or Alexandria the vast majority of Greek Athenians and Romans could not comprehend the Septuagint. To them the Septuagint was disjointed and perplexing, ironically foreign. Dr. Gordon expands too on this alien dynamic between the Homeland Jews and the Hellenistic worlds that I have been arguing for many years. Gordon says:
As a footnote to this explanation of bad Hebrew-to-Greek transliteration, Gordon states:
These types of translation and transliteration mishaps are frequently found throughout the Septuagint, and by descending default, found as well in the canonical Synoptic Gospels. Dr. Gordon describes the regular mistakes by the scribes, but also their personal projections upon the Hebrew and Aramaic sources:
Additionally, through ten editions (1896–1960) of A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, compiled by German scholar and philologist Friedrich Blass and Swiss linguist Albert Debrunner, both renown scholars expound further on just how poorly the Greek New Testament was translated from Hebrew-Aramaic sources by the earliest Church Fathers and their Greek scribes:
My final section-header at the bottom of The Failures of Koine Greek & Christianity labeled Saving the Hebrew Yeshua from the Greco-Roman Christos will round out this very real fact of impossible linguistics in the Greco-Roman canonical New Testament that has come down to us for over 2,000 years to the present. I’ll close with this…
It is very much worth noting that a less known early Roman Church Father realized even in about 90–95 CE that some of the Gospel translations were inaccurate and problematic. Papias of Hierapolis, as quoted by Eusebius, stated this:
“Each interpreted them as best he could!” Wow. So not only was it known by Roman Church Fathers that the gospels Mark and Matthew, sometimes referred to as the most Jewish of gospels, but also widely recognized among the 1st– and 2nd-generation Fathers that the Greeks and other non-Hebrews, i.e. Gentiles, Roman pagans, Greeks, notably had difficult times understanding, translating Mishnaic Hebrew and Hebraisms into Greek and other languages. That is a damning smoking gun if not a serious red-flag for the Septuagint and the descendant Codex Sinaiticus and later renditions of “Jesus Christos.”
All this above MORE than adequately explains why the/your Greek New Testament canon is so very unreliable to who the REAL Yeshuah/Jesus was. This is not debatable.
Best regards Mr. Waits
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That’s an awful lot of speculation there. The scholarship itself is fine, but in terms of assessing what Jesus would think or believe, it’s little more than rank speculation resulting from the worldview biases of the ones making it. The only actual evidence we have of what Jesus would believe or think about this or that is found in the Gospels. If you want doubt those in terms of what we can know about Jesus from them, that’s fine, but you’re running out into speculative grounds the moment you leave the text. And, personally, I don’t see how any of this is really relevant to the historicity of the Gospels. Consider me thoroughly unconvinced.
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It is not speculation, it is heavily researched and studies by a broad range of biblical scholars. So at minimum it is highly plausible likelihoods and near facts based upon EVERYTHING we know and can verify from Antiquity thru to the 4th-century CE. Sorry that you are not trying to suspend your biasness Mr. Waits. That is disappointing for our discussion.
Hahaha. 😄 That’s why I asked you earlier when going out on a limb, you answered very honestly. I do appreciate that. At least you admitted yourself that no matter WHAT I presented to you… you were never going to change your mind/heart or seriously consider the perspectives outside of your own geographical and personal biasness and extreme tunnel-vision. That prohibits you from being, even to a mynute degree, objective. But I did guess this about you at the beginning.
Perhaps this was all wasted time to you. That’s fine. I tried my best to get you out of your bubble. 😉
P.S. I do hope you will keep up all that I’ve commented here for any who CAN see the light and the heavy, cult-like chains Evangelical-Fundamentalist Christianity holds on people, people who are typical afraid of the probable ostracizing if they start asking more and more questions about Christianity’s REAL factual origins.
Best wishes Mr. Waits 🙏
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But it is speculation. The only available evidence we have regarding what Jesus said and thought about various topics is in the Gospels. You may reject much (or all) of that as reliable, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s all we have. The rest of what you present may be well-researched, but it’s still ultimately speculation because we don’t actually know. And, it’s speculation that is rooted in worldview considerations. You may put more faith in this speculation than you put in the traditional understanding of the text, but that is a worldview dependent, faith-based decision.
I didn’t say I wouldn’t change my mind no matter what you presented to me. I said you would find me hard to convince. I’ve spent a lot of years studying questions of faith and thinking through what I believe and why. I’ve examined all sorts of arguments for and against the faith. And while I haven’t encountered the particular line you take here, it’s similar to others I’ve seen. They weren’t convincing then. They aren’t any more convincing now. You are free to explain why I won’t accept your arguments however you’d like.
I do not, however, consider this wasted time at all. I’ve gotten to encounter another argument against the Christian faith. I’m always up for that.
And, to your last request, I am not in the practice of taking down comments I don’t agree with. Just ask Ark. I’m confident enough that the arguments for the Christian faith will win out and stand out as the most reasonable that I am always glad for folks who don’t accept it to make their best counter arguments. So, fear not, I’ll leave your comments right where and as they are.
Best wishes to you as well!
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See my latest comment at bottom. Thnx.
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Oh! Yes, I did make it a LOT because I am 99% sure you “skimmed” and had no interest in comprehending. You had already made your judgments BEFORE I even visited here. 🙂
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See my latest comment at bottom. Thnx.
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“I am not in the practice of taking down comments I don’t agree with. Just ask Ark.”
In the parlance of the urban youth…
“True Dat!”
“I’m confident enough that the arguments for the Christian faith will…”
Will not!
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I suppose we shall see ;~)
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The evidence is already out there.
The Christianity, along with so many faith based religions, won’t suddenly roll over and die, but as with almost every religion throughout our history, it will take time.
But it will eventually go the way every other has gone and no doubt those devote worshippers of every other god were equally as convinced of their god and their religion.
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As I said, I suppose we shall see.
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And as I pointed out the evidence is already there…
What exactly are you not seeing?
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I was wondering the same thing about you. People have been predicting the demise of the church for a very long time. They’ve all been wrong before. Call me a skeptic that you are suddenly right this time.
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Again, the evidence tells a different story.
Which democratic developed nations are moving toward religion rather than away from it?
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It has before and was wrong then too. Why do you limit your search terms to merely democratic and developed nations? And, are you talking about Christianity or religion generally?
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When was it wrong?
Developed and democratic nations are generally more socially advanced than their non democratic or more tribalist orientated counterparts.
Consider much of Africa and China ( which is slowly emerging from under the yoke of communism)
Oddly enough the US has tended to be an outlier, but it is getting there.
It is ironic that for true freedom of religion there needs to be a democratic, secular leaning environment.
Of course, this inevitably leads to less and less religion.
While Christisnity still uses subtle abusive techniques to hold its believers in thrall it cannot openly threaten them in the same way a theocracy does. Saudi or similar Islamic nations.
Although it once ruled with an iron fist in many countries. And the iron rack, and the iron maiden, iron boot, the pear, the strapido, the Inquisition and of course, the ever reliable burning at the stake.
Such a beautiful and loving worldview you have!
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It’s been wrong every time the demise of the church has been predicted. And you didn’t specify if you are talking about religion generally or Christianity in particular. You have a tendency to go back and forth rather fluidly which weakens the points you are attempting to make.
The U.S. is an outlier because we were founded on more explicitly Christian ideas. We’re steadily leaving them behind, but the departure is tending to give rise to more problems than pluses.
Religious liberty is a Christian idea. It has never meaningfully existed outside of cultural contexts that have been sufficiently shaped by the Christian worldview. And when you take away religious liberty, all the other liberties tend to soon follow. It is often called the first freedom for a reason. True freedom of religion does not require a secular-leaning environment at all. In fact, the more secular the environment is, the less inclined toward true religious liberty it becomes. Your home nation has now started arresting people outside of abortion clinics who are doing nothing but standing there quietly to themselves praying. That’s the kind of tolerant environment secularism creates.
As for that final list of things, none of those have the slightest thing to do with the Christian worldview.
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I was referring to the demise of all religions. But in context with certain references Christianity at the fire. I thought this was fairly obvious?
The notion of freedom OF religion is a secular idea.
Brush up on your history. The need to practice freedom of religion was one of the reasons your forefathers left Europe.
Secular democracy is the ONLY reason you have religious tolerance.
The last paragraph illustrates exactly what happens in a society when religion rules the roost and it was secular ideas that ensured the church lost its grip.
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Re the arrest ofUk woman. Out of interest exactly how did praying help?
In fact can you identify a single instance where intercessory prayer has been effective?
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Whether or not the prayer mattered is irrelevant. We’ve covered that topic before, and I’d rather stay focused on the question at hand. Also, it wasn’t just one woman. A guy was recently arrested, and I believe there’s been more than just those two. If secularism is the source of freedom of religion, how do you explain these actions on the part of Britain’s almost entirely secular government?
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So we are dealing with two isolated incidents in the UK. Not something I gave followed to be honest.
The woman was released and compensated by the police am I right?
Whereas in the States there was an epidemic of incidents of abortion clinics being bombed and a doctor being murdered am I right?
If you are trying to show how loving and tolerant you Christians are then I really don’t think this is a hill you want to die on Jonathan.
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You’re changing the subject to avoid having to deal with the fact that secularism is not the source of religious liberty as you insist it is.
When there were a handful of abortion clinics attacked in the U.S. and one doctor murdered, a great many Christian leaders spoke up loudly denouncing those actions and the people who committed them as utterly inconsistent with the Christian worldview and the teachings of Jesus. And, by the way, the number of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that have been attacked by abortion supporters dwarfs the number of abortion clinics that have been attacked. Either way, that’s not a religious liberty issue at all. It’s a crime and punishment issue.
Meanwhile, in the UK, these two “isolated incidents” were the result of governmental policy mandating that a person cannot stand and quietly pray on a public sidewalk in a certain part of the city. The people weren’t interacting with anyone. They weren’t screaming at people going in and out of the abortion clinic. They weren’t even meaningfully trying to persuade anyone to do anything. They were standing there quietly with their eyes closed (presumably) praying. And the state said they didn’t have the right to do that. Now, explain to me how this is consistent with even the narrowest definition of religious liberty?
Our conversation wasn’t about demonstrating how loving and tolerant Christians are. It was about the source of religious liberty. Secularism doesn’t give rise to religious liberty. That’s a Christian idea.
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“The term was conceived by George Holyoake in the mid-19th century as a way of denoting an ethical framework independent of religion…”
The enlightenment gave rise to separation of church and state.
True religious freedom can only function in a secular democracy.
How else can the tyrany of theocracy be avoided?
One only had to consider the Islamic states to see the results when the filth of religion dictates.
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So, still no comment on how a modern, secular democracy passed what is essentially an anti-religious liberty law?
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The UK government passed such a law? Really?
Please link me to said law.
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You can look it up on your own. You’re still avoiding the issue. Are you okay with a law passed by a secular government that allows for government-supported limitations on the religious liberty of private citizens?
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Not avoiding the issue at all. I am genuinely shocked the UK governemt actually passed a law over this.
Therefore before making answer I am interested what is the context here, if any?
What exactly should I research?
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The law creates a buffer zone around abortion clinics in which any activity that can be construed as obstructing access or otherwise impinging upon the ability of a woman to freely access the clinic is punishable by a large fine or even jail time. And while there was a carve out in the last administration for inherently non-threatening activities such as silently praying nearby (thus the case of the woman you mentioned who was compensated by the police department that arrested her for it), the current administration removed those protections resulting in yet another arrest of a man this time (and veteran) who was doing nothing more than standing within the buffer zone praying quietly without saying a word to anyone else. Just search for UK government passes law banning prayer outside of abortion clinics. While supporters of the law will downplay the religious liberty implications of it, they are nearly impossible not to see because of the vagueness of the statute combined with the secularity of the government officials enforcing it.
In the bigger picture, secularism does not and cannot guarantee genuine religious liberty because it necessarily doesn’t accept truth claims that there are authorities higher than human authorities which religious groups inherently make. While the government should absolutely not prioritize one worldview position over another (with limited exceptions where certain worldviews, if lived out, would cause active and real harm to innocent people), if it is not at least somewhat informed by a Christian worldview, it will not value or protect genuine religious liberty. Case in point: China, North Korea, pick your favorite Muslim nation, and etc. All the Western democracies are deeply influenced in their thinking by ideas which come out of the Christian worldview and thus don’t offer any kind of counterargument in your favor here.
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As prayer is presumably okay outside these buffer zones why can’t those who wish to pray simply stand outside?
By the way what did your god Yahweh/Jesus say about praying in public and hypocrisy? gMatthew I believe, yes?
Truth claims? Oh dear… 🤦
While certain values may have been inherited from Christianity ( although this could be argued) how much of the foundational tenets of the religion do you truly consider society needs today?
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Why restrict the religious liberty of free people when there’s no harm being done by its free expression?
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Out of curiosity, how would you feel if a Muslim or a Hindu started one of their prayer rituals outside or close to your front door?
I notice you didn’t address the issue about Jesus and praying as described in gMatthew. Or is this also outside the purview of my worldview?
Hypocrite anyone?
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Your example falls flat because we aren’t talking about private property, but equal access to public spaces. If I lived in an apartment building whose entrance was a public sidewalk, that would be public space to which they were as equally entitled as I am. Thus, while I may personally not love it, it would be their right just as much as it would be mine. And, no, I didn’t address that because it’s a distraction from the matter at hand which you are still for the most part avoiding.
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I found this in an article on the subject.
Considering what type of harassment many women suffer I think this is a good thing.
My wife was forced to abort our second child. It was traumatic enough as it was without having to deal with farking religiously motivated do-gooders, thank you very much. I might well have been tempted to bloody the nose of anyone who tried to interfere at that time.
“Under the law it would be illegal for “anyone to do anything that intentionally or recklessly influences someone’s decision to use abortion services, obstructs them, or causes harassment or distress to someone using or working at these premises,” the department said.”
So, to the verse in gMatthew.
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I’m so sorry you two had to go through that. That must have been unbearably difficult. May I ask the circumstances that put her into that terrible position?
And, I should perhaps add that while I disagree deeply and strongly with the practice of abortion, I also tend to agree that Christians’ protesting outside of abortion clinics often presents itself as unloving and unhelpful whatever the intended motivations may be. I know of several area pastors who lead their churches to be active in that regard. I steadfastly refuse to do the same with my own church.
But it remains nonetheless true that the law is a restriction on religious liberty. The language is vague enough to allow selective and biased enforcement. In the two major cases, the government actively and literally sought to regulate what was happening in a person’s mind. The broader implications of legally allowing such a thing are staggeringly bad. If the government can restrict what and when and where a person thinks certain things, what else can it do? Without robust religious liberty protections, there’s really no limiting agent here.
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The law was implemented NOT to restrict religion but for the emotional and physical protection of any woman seeking an abortion.
How selfish, callous and arrogant that you would put the pithy needs of indoctrinated religious people before that of a woman facing the decision of having an abortion. How dare you!
And no, I don’t want to share such personal details thank you very much!
You want to prayer for a woman NOT to undergo an abortion. Good for you.
Stay at home and do it like Jesus suggested. Or put it on X. Maybe your god will read it and send you a cookie for being a good Christian?
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And yet it does restrict religious liberty. It has been used for exactly that. And, the philosophical and legal implications of it point to far broader and more restrictive measures that could be pursued in the future in a variety of other situations. Precedent matters, and this law sets a bad one.
If the two who were arrested were doing things to attractive undue attention to themselves, that would be one thing. They would still be entitled to religious liberty protections, but I for one would disagree strongly with their approach. But they weren’t doing that. I’m very comfortable arguing that their approach, based on the reports I have seen, fit well within the guidelines for prayer Jesus gave us in Matthew 6 (which weren’t meant to be taken literally the way you seem to be interpreting them).
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Again, the law, was implemented specifically because the personal freedom of those women who seek an abortion was being threatened.
The law identified emotional intimidation as part of the reason for creating a buffer zone and I wholeheartedly support the move.
If the law is there to prevent verbal or even physical abuse then all forms of intimidation should be legislated against.
If you want freedom OF religion then you should respect the right of people who want freedom FROM religion.
If your god, Yahweh, wants to stop abortion let him do it himself.
Who says Matt 5/ 6 was not meant to be taken literally? It reads very clear cut.
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You are okay, then, with restrictions on religious liberty if they achieve secular ends. That’s fine for you to believe. But don’t pretend that secularism is the source of religious liberty. And, what is intimidating or threatening about someone standing quietly to him- or herself with their eyes closed and head bowed (assuming for the sake of argument that was the posture of the two individuals who were arrested)?
And the trouble with your second to last statement, is that people who want freedom FROM religion don’t tend to respect the freedom OF religion. Thus is has to be advocated for my people who do respect it to the benefit of those who don’t. But again, that kind of a statement is why your assertion that secularism is the source of the idea of religious liberty is so ridiculous.
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No, I consider the law is there to look after everyone as best as it can and anyone intimidating women who are seeking an abortion is breaking the law. Period.
As I said, if someone had exhibited such behaviour because of the filth of your religion when my wife was forced to abort our child they might well have received a bloody nose.
Your idea of religious freedom is for you to be able to impose your beliefs in any way you see fit.
Well to quote life of Brian “Tough titty for you, fish face”, because it does not work like that in a democratic society.
You don’t get to impose your brand of religious morality on society at large.
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You would have punched somebody in the face then who was standing at a short distance not saying anything to you or looking at you or otherwise engaging with you in any way?
And, no, that’s not my idea of religious liberty at all. That’s a convenient straw man for you to beat and feel good about yourself for doing so. As it stands with the stance you are taking here, that’s more in line what your position appears to be.
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The problem with your position is you only see one supposedly innocent harmless individual praying silently AGAINST the idea of abortion outside of a clinic who, on the face of it, is merely exercising their right to protest and/or their right to freedom of religion.
However, if others thought this was such a good idea and joined in before long there could very well be a crowd of Christians standing outside said clinic praying silently.
“Ooh, this looks like a great Idea,” thought the Pastor of the local Baptist church, upon seeing a solitary woman holding a silent prayer vigil against those who would kill the unborn. The following Sunday during his lengthy highly charged sermon about murdering unborn babies in the womb he organized for most of his congregation to turn up outside the local clinic on the Monday morning.
Unfortunately, this was the same morning that a highly distraught and traumatized 14 year old Jane Smithers, a victim of rape, had an appointment and upon seeing the crowd collapsed, had a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized.
Yep… Gotta love them Christians!
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Still won’t tackle the obvious hypocrisy Jesus pointed out I see?
Typical.
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I did. You just didn’t like my reply.
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No, you said it should not be taken literally.
Funny thing though, Jesus did mean it literally.
But of course, traditionally Christians have never liked taking Jesus at his word which is why they had the church to interpret his words for them.
Probably for similar reasons the bible was traditionally not allowed in the hands of the the plebs.
As JC said… Hypocrites.
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Well, again, as much as I appreciate your telling me as an atheist who believes it all to be hogwash anyway (except when it’s convenient to attempt to taunt believers for not behaving how you think they should) how to best understand the Scriptures, you’ll have to count me unconvinced on the point. Taking Jesus (or any of the Scriptures) seriously and taking Jesus literally are two different things. The former is correct, the latter often is not.
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Except there is no room for interpretation. The command was crystal clear.
All you have done is make an erroneous assertion. You didn’t even bother to outline what this motto be taken literally meaning is.
I’m just shocked you didn’t simply resort to your asinine jibe about my worldview.
As JC said… Hypocrite.
And if you find it galling or even hilarious in some way that an atheist has to tell you your own religion, well, I will point you to the previous quote I included from the film Life of Brian.
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Well, your worldview has everything to do with all of this, but that wasn’t germane to mention right now. As for the rest, you are entitled to your opinion on the matter.
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It isn’t an opinion. It is exactly what the character Jesus says.
Where do you see any other interpretation?
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Go find a few good commentaries on Matthew’s Gospel, read those carefully, and then we can go further down this road. The good ones, though, won’t be free online. Until then, this just isn’t a debate worth having.
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I see, so because YOU don’t like the words of your god, Yahweh/Jesus which are explicit and NOT in fact open to interpretation, you however, consider you DO get interpret them to suit your own personal feelings /agenda
So you are as those as described in this part of his discourse a hypocrite. Okay, I shall bear this fact in mind going forward.
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Just to remind you of what Jesus apparently said.
“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men … but when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your father who is unseen.”
When it comes to prayer, do not be like hypocrites, go into your room and close the door.
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Funny, the more times one reads this the more narrow becomes the meaning.
Don’t make a show in public, in synagogue(Church in your case) or on the street(corner). Go home and do it in private. Don’t be a hypocrite. YAHWEH will hear your prayer .
No matter how one reads or writes this I don’t see any wiggle room here. You’re the Pastor, Yahweh’s earthly rep., where does this verse lend itself to any form of public displays of prayer?
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In case you have forgotten…
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.”
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Yep. I’ve preached on that more than once. And we spent most of an hour on it when we covered it in Bible study a couple of years ago. I’m very familiar with the passage.
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And Jesus’ command in Matt 5&6 was clear cut. As I said earlier, Hypocrite anyone?
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And how much of the foundational tenets of your religion does a modern democratic secular society need?
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Mr. Waits, I will ask you one last time to suspend (temporarily) your lifetime of influences from family, both immediate and extended, and your lifetime majority of environment(s), especially the majority inside Evangelical-Fundamentalist circles, education, and occupation. And try to think in MY terms, in MY language, in MY thinking. I really hope you can do this for a moment as you read this. Thank you.
Inside every head of every human, and inside every residence on Earth is the most complex object we have discovered in the Universe: the human brain. That marvel of biology in the cranium might seem alien to us, but the fact is… it is us. For our entire lives hundreds of billions and billions and billions of cells have quadrillions and quadrillions of electrical synapses fire trillions of trillions signals every second of ever minute of our entire life. For many decades (hopefully) those gooey electrical sparks make up what we experience in life as us.
So what shapes who you become? It is about how your life/environment shapes your brain and how your brain shapes your life.
For a few millenia humankind believed a soul or a spirit, something more than mere matter made up who you were in life. Today, that is no longer the case. Extensively understanding our identities in-depth can only be done by understandinng that 3 lbs. organ in our head. Before you start getting prematurely upset at me Mr. Waits, for seemingly reducing us humans to mere biological mechanics, hear or read me out please.
When any of us are first born we are born helpless. However, we are born with adaptable brains. For about the next two years our brains are unfinished, so human babies are born much more dependent than other mammals who are often born able to walk, swim, or stand just minutes after birth. Not human babies. Yet, after those first two years of learning very basics of our immediate environment, our infant and toddler brains allow us to develop and make connections based on the child’s environment. This biological and physiological strategy has made human beings one of the most adaptable and malleable species on the planet in order to first survive then hopefully thrive based on our immediate and extended environment(s).
Since at least August 1966 with Charles Whitman up inside the University Texas Tower, Austin, TX, but really going back to 1885 with Sigmund Freud, humans have learned that our survival and our growth (or death) and life experiences are just as dependent on our individual brains (or brain tumors as with Whitman 1966) as they are on our environment(s). We cannot escape the two forces, ever. Life wires up the human brain with few or many experiences in order to adapt, survive and/or thrive in most of Earth’s and familial environments and tune it up on the fly. It’s really that simple.
A newborn’s brain has the same number of neurons as an adult. However, after those first two years the neurons are quickly forming connections relative to their environment. This continues well into adolescense and young adulthood. The developing young brain’s neuron connections have more than quadrupled—as many as 2-4 million new connections every day—by their mid-30’s all relative to that individual’s environment(s), i.e. life experiences, AND how their brain developed genetically in the womb.
After year two we become who we are not by growth or new neurons created, but by pruning back or removing what is unnecessary in order to survive, adapt, and hopefully thrive. We learn how to make our life and identity happy and happier according to our individual brains and endocryn systems; all very influenced by our immediate and (slightly?) extended environments.
Our conscious experiences in life are guided NOT by monism, or even by binary constructs, but by a plethora of pluralism. Everything around us on this planet, including with all humans, is evidenced by immeasurable pluralism to the point our brain’s struggle with the possibilities. This is also true beyond our planet. To cope, many of us prune down or toss out what is perceived as unnecessary, or harmful, or even lethal… in their own brain based on their past and/or present environment and individual life experiences.
Therefore Mr. Waits, if you have the courage and curiosity, I challenge you to greatly expand your life experiences OUTSIDE OF what you’ve grown up in the last 25-35 years. And do it equitably with suspended presuppositions and learned biases. I promise you, you’ll be stunned, thrilled, and very much made more alive from “all the marrow of life” as Henry David Thoreau famously penned.
Best regards
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Well, none of that was upsetting as you feared. It was interesting, but I”m missing what your actual point is.
You take a philosophically reductive approach here by equating human beings with their brains. If we were really nothing more than our brains, though, we wouldn’t have a third person sense of self. Similarly, if our thoughts are nothing more than the result of environmental inputs, we don’t have any reason to trust they are rational. I prefer the much bigger world offered by the Christian worldview to the far more limited one you seem to be promoting here.
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I have published a blog-post on my WordPress site about our dialogues here. If you’d care to step over in the spirit of fair, gentlemanly sportsmanship, I’m sure that an excellent conversation with you and my readers/followers could be accomplished and be exponentially beneficial to a lot more readers and followers interested in our topics of discussion.
I sincerely hope you will do this, gentleman to gentleman. Thank you.
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I am proud to be an inspiration to a growing number of atheist bloggers ;-). I’ll come check it out as soon as I can.
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Don’t mistake me for one of them. 😉
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You wouldn’t have written that particular post if it wasn’t for me. Inspiration. I just didn’t say what kind.
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😄 Now now, calm yourself down Mr. Waits. Careful, you’re in danger of becoming quite full of yourself. That’s isn’t very Christ-like. 🤭
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So, I should cancel the newspaper announcement?
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😄 I seriously doubt you’ll get any mention in a major publication Mr. Waits. But you can certainly try your local, small-reach Christian publications such as Baptist News Global—which actually isn’t very global 🤭— or your own church’s newsletter.
Nevertheless, I realize you are trying to be funny and a bit “competitive.” But be forewarned there sir. I have had a 32-year career in soccer/futebol where I was relentlessly and rudely heckled every game, especially BIG games of championships and local or regional rivalries on 4 different continents. I am impervious to little smarty-pants remarks or much worse. I quickly learned in my long, high-level career how to even laugh or applaud some really clever heckling, cussing, name-calling, and every verbose insult imaginable. 😁
No matter how much you may try, you’ll never be able to get under my skin Mr. Waits so don’t bother. And don’t bother with poor reverse psychology either. Remember, you have to remain Christ-like and show stupendous Faith in your omniscient and omnipotent authority-power, letting Him complete whatever you think He may do. I open my arms gladly to that mythology and your mental constructs. 😉
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Nah, I’m just having fun. It’s good to laugh together even when we don’t agree on everything…or even most things. It reminds us that even divided, kindness and compassion and generosity of spirit still matter, that a person’s a person no matter how small, as one wise elephant once put it.
By the way, I wrote as an opinion contributor for the Baptist News Global several years ago. I started when they were just the Virginia Baptist’s Religious Herald, stayed on as they became the Associated Baptist Press, and lasted for a year or so of the Baptist News Global. They finally cut ties with me because I was too conservative for the direction they were heading.
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Couldn’t agree more. My world travels and experiences have taught me exactly that, no matter the small trivial differences many seek out to change via evangelism. 😉
Very interesting and revealing. 🤔
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Revealing, perhaps, but probably not like you imagine it to be. After reading the umpteenth news piece that was critical of the SBC while observing a total lack of any sort of even the mildest criticism of the CBF, I gently called the editor out on his obvious bias. He didn’t much care for that.
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👍
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