Where do you put religion in your lives is my question for the week. Mind you, I am talking only about the true religion Christianity, with an honourable place for Judaism. I am not talking about the nonsense that goes under the name of Islam, or for that matter any of the Eastern religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, or Shintoism, etc.
Most people in the West I suspect seldom think about God. Even less do they think about our Lord Jesus Christ. I have been wrestling with an issue at church which I recently mentioned in a Catallaxy post. A Christian friend asked me whether I had prayed for guidance. I hadn’t. I subsequently did but it wasn’t my first port of call.
We busy our minds with material things and forget God. But, and to my point, why bring God into our lives at all. Richard Dawkins doesn’t (or didn’t see below) except to scoff: “A popular deity on the internet at present – and as undisprovable as Yahweh or any other – is the Flying Spaghetti Monster…I am delighted to see that the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has now been published as a book.” (The God Delusion)
Let me say that we cannot bring God into our lives. I simply don’t buy it. Throughout my adult life I have mixed with a wide variety of people most of whom, it’s fair to say, don’t not believe; that would be too affirmative. The matter never crosses their mind. There is a wall which contains all that is material which bounds their total existence. The transcendental beyond the wall is a wasteland.
My conclusion: the transcendental is so foreign to our modern Western minds that only God comin’ a-callin’ can do the trick. Unless He comes, forget it. We won’t do it on our own or by being proselytised by the local vicar.
Here is the great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892] on the matter:
I believe the doctrine of election, because I am quite sure that if God had not chosen me, I should never have chosen him; and I am sure he chose me before I was born, or else he never would have chosen me afterwards; and he must have elected me for reasons unknown to me, for I never could find any reason in myself why he should have looked upon me with special love. So, I am forced to accept that doctrine.
What does it all mean? What’s it all about Alfie? Who knows? However, what is clear is that where the Christian God of the Bible is absent all kinds of lies and damaging dross fills the breach. Think about globalism and wokeism, transgenderism and maiming teenagers, climate cultism and destroying reliable energy, identity politics and meritless preferments, superstition by proxy and Aboriginal crocodile men and rainbow serpents stymying resource development. The answer?
The answer for atheists of goodwill is to pretend. To act as though they believe in order to preserve protect and enhance all that Christianity has brought to our peerless civilisation. In the absence of the real thing, that will have to do. It’s is far better than the hell in store if we allow Christian culture to continue to crumble. Like Dawkins, reflect, and at least become a cultural Christian.
I am a cultural Christian but I cannot pretend to be a believer, it would be dishonest.
I can and do give support to Christians and Jews who are under attack.
This is a form of quietism or passivity that is not scriptural, Peter.
The Bible teaches that faith comes by hearing and apprehending the word of God, and the word ordinarily comes by means – preaching, to which we may add baptism in the case of proselytes.
Now, if Wesley, for example, or the above-mentioned Spurgeon or Whitfield or Edwards in British north America had contemplated the general state of humankind in their eras and concluded that there was no point preaching the gospel, one should simply try to persuade sophisticated unbelievers to act as though it were true, the great revivals associated with them would never have happened. It is a self-defeating proposition.
Pretending is lying. No thanks.I have managed nearly 71 years without religion and have no need nor intention to start believing. That does not mean I will not support Christians, Jews, Hindu nor Buddist. I certainly appreciate the benefits from all but just because I don’t believe does not mean I embrace the dross and lies you mentioned. The only gap in my life is a dead child. My sister is a devout Christian, has lost two children. We see life through very similar eyes apart from religion.
We are to God what ants are to us.
Man made religion is an unfunny joke.
Religion was always about the promise of a better life in the so called afterlife. For humans existing in poverty, or tyrannised by evil idiots (or both), it was a seductive fraud.
It is no surprise that as humans became more prosperous, the less likely they were to adhere to religion. Unfortunately, the belief systems that replaced religion were in many ways, infinitely worse.
However, there is no belief system I regard as more obscene than islam – a stone age collectivist totalitarian idiotology masquerading as a religion, adhered to throughout history by the most stupid violent uneducated and inbred of humanity – and spare me the preposterous horseshit about some golden age of islam – there never was one, nor will there ever be one.
The three most evil idiotologies in human history are communism (including “socialism”), nazism and islam and the third is worse than the first two combined.
Unfortunately, it is also about to become ascendant in what remains of the so called western world.
A new dark age (of indeterminate duration). Again.
Unlike collectivists, who are too stupid to realise what a “marriage of convenience” is, I have never tolerated or accommodated islam, nor will I tolerate moozleys in my life, especially my personal space.
If humanity is to survive, let alone prosper, it can no longer afford to indulge islam.
It needs to be erased from both the face of the earth and human history, starting with its existing adherents.
The equation is simple. They want to kill you. There is no point in attempting to accommodate them – it is submission (the true meaning of the word islam) or death.
I will never submit, much less go willingly or otherwise to my death at their grubby paws.
I disagree. Eco-fascism is the greatest threat.
JC – moozleys will hold a great big fat beheading ceremony of all the eco-fascists on this planet before the latter have even realised what they’re being marched off to. Which the former will then celebrate with a mass pleasuring of many, many goats.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn said “the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.”
I believe in the line between good and evil, and that Christianity is on the side of good. That is where I stand.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster presumably made them men who want to be women and women who want to be men…
Biologist Richard Dawkins Says Facebook Nuked Account After Posting That Male Boxers Shouldn’t Fight Women (11 Aug)
Btw the other tranny boxer also won a gold medal yesterday. That’s two out of two.
I’m not religious, but I do acknowledge the Christian basis of western civilisation.
My experience has been that some of the most self-professed devout Christians regularly attend church, yet outside of those walls are less-than-Christian in their behaviours. Yet they can repent on their deathbed and still be admitted to heaven. Yeah, about that …
As to the biggest threat to the west … I’m unsure. I’d edge towards JC’s nomination of eco-fascism (destroy the economy and social dislocation follows), but I also agree with Rabz about ‘submission or death’ regarding Islam. The delusion we can debate rationally with the irrational, or come to a clichéd win-win outcome as the result of better negotiation, is dangerous.
Richard Dawkins is a lot like Christopher Hitchens, since both slouched in the general direction of God. Mr Hitchens never got there, I don’t think, although his brother is a Christian.
Dawkins also has been edging reluctantly in the direction of Christ. Again I don’t think he will get there, but God has called all sorts of people. Maybe he will get a Damascene boot up the arse.
This intro is for the following article, which also records an arc towards Christ:
How One Liberal Theologian Found Jesus – The Enduring Testimony of Eta Linnemann (1926–2009) (7 Aug)
RTWT if you are inclined to. Interesting life story, she became a Christian long after becoming a theologian.
The Second Reading at Mass today – Ephesians 4:30-5:2
KJV:
And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.
Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice:
And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.
Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children;
And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.
I believe I will meet my mother and father after I die. I will explain to them my life and ask forgiveness of my stupidities and enjoy their loving comments. As to Jesus, I am happy to include him in my belief. As to the Catholic Church and all the rest. You have nothing to do with this.