Here's A Good Way To Arouse Your Suspicions

Here's a tip I find useful in life. While of course it's necessary to examine the content of people's claims to check for faulty reasoning and factual errors, it is also quite informative to examine their accompanying attitude too. In other words, if a certain claim is being made, it's always good to ask: what would be a reasonable concomitant attitude be alongside that claim? If the claim and the attitude seem commensurate, there is often, but not always, a good chance that the claim being made is a reasonable one. However, if the claim and the attitude seem not to be commensurate, there is often, but again not always, a good chance that the claim being made is an unreasonable one.

A couple of examples spring to mind. Suppose you meet someone who likes to go around preaching hellfire, believing the majority of the world's population is damned to an eternity of torment. What would be a reasonable concomitant attitude alongside that claim? An obvious one would be deep sadness, another would be mournful regret - after all, if you believe much of the world is currently going straight to hell, surely that's about the worst thing imaginable, so why would you be anything other than terribly upset and heartbroken about such a proposition?

 

Yet you'll notice most hellfire preachers are not like that - they appear to exhibit a smug satisfaction hardly consistent with the terrible news they are sharing, which makes me think their view isn't reasonable. This extends more broadly to any kind of Christian faith built around humility. How strange to find so many people paying almost no regard to the biggest crisis in the world, people who don't have enough food, drink and shelter to survive, yet obsessing all the time about the so-called 'disgrace' of two people of the same sex loving each other in a stable relationship.

Another example I find is green people who treat fossil fuels as though they are comparable to some kind of ghastly bodily secretion. Yes it's good when technological advances wean us off the current dependency of fossil fuels for so much of our industry, but to be so averse to these raw materials in the way that exhibits not even the faintest appreciation for how important they've been in our achievements is a dead giveaway that the person is probably not a reasonable one on this matter.

The reality is, we are not actually running out of resources - the greens are making a mistake in their analysis (as I explain here in this blog post). But even getting into the head of a green person and pretending they are right about the imminent shortage of fossil fuels, a proper attitude to this should not be what you usually find, it ought to be sorrow that such a vital resource is in the last stage of its utility, gladness that humans have been able to use this resource as such a vital vehicle for the progression-explosion we've seen over the past 150 years; and appreciation for how the free market of trade and competition is continually engendering more and more efficiency in a way that resembles nature's law of least effort (most parsimonious energy expenditure).

But generally greens evince none of these attitudes - they instead have a disproportionately doleful attitude to fossil fuels, focusing only on the comparably exiguous amounts of bad that have come from our increased progress, standard of living, and well-being.

So while I'm highly unlikely to make unbalanced blanket claims about what is a peculiarly large number of people, it is at least reasonable to consider that if the vast majority of these hellfire preachers and greens have such different attitudes to the expected ones, we ought to be suspicious not just of their motives, but of their conclusions too. Credible attitude indicates credible conclusion is not an unimpeachable heuristic - but it's one to which we are wise to give proper consideration when simple logical and evidential correction won't quite do the trick.

Christianity & The Legalisation Of Prostitution

One interesting question I sometimes ask is; "Is there any moral position you hold as a Christian that you wouldn't hold as a non-Christian?". There are probably a few cases, but one that springs to mind today is the recent debate about legalising prostitution (and by prostitution let's just refer to the act of trade between a willing buyer and a willing seller - not exploitative or abusive or non-consenting areas of the sex trade).

As a libertarian I think people have the right to do what they want in terms of a mutual transaction between two willing agents, providing that action harms no others - so on those terms I wouldn't be too against legalised prostitution.

However, as a Christian, I understand God's biblical intention for sex and marriage, so I would not want prostitution legalised, because that would legitimise and make more socially desirable an act that I believe God wants to be implicitly between two beloveds in marriage. For that reason I'm against legalising prostitution.

 

A Terrific Passage From C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce

Today I feel in the mood for sharing what I think is one of C.S Lewis's best passages from his terrific work The Great Divorce. This is the scene in which a woman has arrived in the afterlife and anticipates seeing the son she lost in death. If you have a few moments to carefully digest what is being said, I'd say this is so good it makes most other Christian writers seem ordinary:

‘One of the most painful meetings we witnessed was between a woman’s Ghost and a Bright Spirit who had apparently been her brother. They must have met only a moment before we ran across them, for the Ghost was just saying in a tone of unconcealed disappointment,

‘Oh, Reginald! It’s you, is it?’

‘Yes, dear,’ said the Spirit. ‘I know you expected someone else. Can you…I hope you can be a little glad to see even me; for the present.’

‘I did think Michael would have come,’ said the Ghost; and then, almost fiercely, ‘He is here, of course?’

‘He’s there——far up in the mountains.’

‘Why hasn’t he come to meet me? Didn’t he know?’

‘My dear (don’t worry, it will all come right presently) it wouldn’t have done. Not yet. He wouldn’t be able to see or hear you as you are at present. You’d be totally invisible to Michael. But we’ll soon build you up.’

“I should have thought if you can see me, my own son could!’

‘It doesn’t always happen like that. You see, I have specialised in this sort of work.’

‘Oh it’s work is it?’ snapped the Ghost. ‘Well when am I going to be allowed to see him?’

‘There’s no question of being allowed, Pam. As soon as it’s possible for him to see you, of course he will. You need to be thickened up a bit.’

‘How?’ said the Ghost. The monosyllable was hard and a little threatening.

‘I’m afraid the first step is a hard one,’ said the Spirit. ‘But after that you’ll go on like a house on fire, you will become solid enough for Michael to perceive you when you learn to want Someone Else besides Michael. I don’t say “more than Michael”, not as a beginning. That will come later. It’s only the little germ of a desire for God that we need to start the process.’

‘Oh you mean religion and all that sort of thing? This is hardly the moment…and from you, of all people. Well, never mind. I’ll do whatever’s necessary. What do you want me to do? Come on. The sooner I begin it, the sooner they’ll let me see my boy. I’m quite ready.’

‘But, Pam, do think! Don’t you see you are not beginning at all as long as you are in that state of mind? You’re treating God only as a means to Michael. But the whole thickening treatment consists in learning to want God for His own sake.’

‘You wouldn’t talk like that if you were a mother.’

‘You mean, if I were only a mother. But there is no such thing as being only a mother. You exist as Michael’s mother only because you first exist as God’s creature. That relation is older and closer. No, listen, Pam! He also loves. He also has suffered. He also has waited a long time.’

‘If He loved me He’d let me see my boy. If He loved me why did He take Michael away from me? I wasn’t going to say anything about that. But it’s pretty hard to forgive, you know.’

‘But He had to take Michael away. Partly for Michael’s sake…’

‘I’m sure I did my best to make Michael happy. I gave up my whole life…’

’Human beings can’t make one another really happy for long. And secondly, for your sake. He wanted your merely instinctive love for your child (tigresses share that, you know!) to turn into something better. He wanted you to love Michael as He understands love. You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God. Sometimes this conversion can be done while the instinctive love is still gratified. But there was, it seems, no chance of that in your case. The instinct was uncontrolled and fierce and monomaniac. (Ask your daughter, or your husband. Ask our own mother. You haven’t once thought of her.) The only remedy was to take away its object. It was a case for surgery. When that first kind of love was thwarted, then there was just a chance that in the loneliness, in the silence, something else might begin to grow.’

‘This is all nonsense—-cruel and wicked nonsense. What right have you to say things like that about Mother-love? It is the highest and holiest feeling in human nature.’

‘Pam, Pam—-no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.’

Be Careful About Getting Offended On God's Behalf

America has just legalised same-sex marriage, and while this makes lots of people happy, it is bound to be a real affront to many. My advice to those affronted is quite simple: stop getting offended on God's behalf about things that are none of your business. People suffering in poverty is your businesses - why not focus more attention on that?

I find it quite peculiar that so many Christians are consumed by issues like homosexuality, women bishops, divorcees remarrying, and those kinds of issues with which so many church members are preoccupied. I don’t know why they get so uptight about these things, because virtually nobody that peddles this propaganda really believes it - it’s just the case that they have been swayed by the impetus of the cultural power that underwrites these issues. 

Christians think they are against them, because it’s so easy to create a mental label and then proceed to attack that label – but I think it’s simply the case that the belief that they are against them is more empowering than their actual level of objection. One is reminded of Coleridge’s criticism; “You do not believe; you only believe that you believe”. 

I believe, based on what my recesses tell me, that I went to a Middle School disco in 1985. I haven’t given the matter much thought for years. If someone asked me how sure I was that the disco was in 1985, I’d say I think it was, but I might be a year or so out. If you proved to me that the disco was in 1984 I wouldn’t be very alarmed to find out I was one year out, because I don’t hold the belief rigidly.

That’s what I think the issues of homosexuality, women bishops, divorcees remarrying, etc are like for those who get upset about them – they believe their beliefs are honestly felt, but I think if you asked them to subject themselves to some brutal self-honesty you would find that those beliefs are more culturally driven – rather like an infection that gets passed on from Christian to Christian. Put it this way – if you’d have given these people a Bible and left each of them alone with it from childhood on a desert island with a lifetime supply of food and drink, I don’t think you would find when you returned in 30 years that they had adopted all these prejudices.

I think the reasons are fairly straightforward – why on earth should you be bothered about whether a homosexual couple decides to express their love for one another with a civil partnership? Why should you care if a once divorced woman finds love again and wants to express that love by getting remarried in a CofE church? Why get so uptight about the many talented women who demonstrate their gifts and abilities in church leadership? Why should Catholics care if a couple wants to use contraception, or if a non-Catholic wishes to take communion in a Catholic Church when visiting the church? These people aren’t doing any harm to you. 

What does anybody actually gain from condemning a woman bishop or a homosexual couple?  Nothing, as far as I can tell.  What they lose though is a lot, because humans really ought to minimise suffering as much as possible – and believe me, people who are ostracised or marginlised do suffer the effects of this stigmatisation. They are made to feel like they always have to be on the defensive – and many times they come away from church life quite hurt and despondent. 

Here’s the other thing; no one is saying you have to accept homosexuals or divorcees or women bishops – if acceptance really isn’t in your constitution then you are free to think as you see fit. But I think you would be more blessed and emotionally renewed if you could find it in your heart to accept those you denounce. Your hostility isn’t going to make a gay man straight, nor will it turn a female vicar away from the church. But your refusal to publicly condemn and your willingness to keep it as a private frustration will be a good thing – because it admits the humility of saying ‘I might be wrong about this issue, so I’ll err on the side of caution’. By all means let us speak out against things we feel called to challenge; but let’s use some sense of prudence is working out what the real core problems are. Then it might become clear that people’s gender or past mistakes or sexual orientation are none of our business.

In order to give yourself the best chance of making a sound judgement, try this little exercise.  Whenever you are arguing for or against what you feel to be one of the big issues, pretend you have to put yourself in the shoes of the person with whom you disagree. Next, use all the knowledge and brainpower you have to argue his (or her) position for him on his behalf. One cannot easily fail to appreciate the other person’s position once one has made an honest and persuasive effort to defend it. There is something quite noble in trying to defend the position opposite to one’s own; it will certainly help the formation of a balanced view, and will either give you better reasons to justify your original belief or it will give you a perspective of the opposite belief that you didn’t previously have. Either way your position is strengthened, and your life journey will be more enriched.

When Ignorance Is Sometimes Best

In a week of mourning over the tragic deaths of the Christian members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, we have also seen the most powerful earthly example of Christian love there is - showing love, grace and forgiveness to someone who deserve condemnation - just as Christ did for each and every one of us.

I think it is in these wonderful acts of Christian faith that we'll find the answers to some of those difficult Bible verses, like the one where St Paul says we are to be like infants when it comes to evil (1 Corinthians 14:20). I think we must place this alongside Jesus saying that we must become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3), as there are clear parallels between the two. Children have many excellent qualities, and it is those child-like qualities that we should emulate in our faith. We should be reliant on God in the same way a child relies on a parent, and we should always be enquiring just as children are always enquiring about the world they live in.

But being told to be like children in our love towards God is in no way to be taken that Christians are to be innocent and unapprised of worldly things. For we all know that Christ also says to be as 'shrewd as snakes' as well as being innocent as doves" (Matthew 10:16). We should search and rely on God as a child searches and relies on a parent, but we should also be shrewd and wise on our Christian journey too.

Perhaps the grace-filled response of forgiveness we are seeing by those who lost loved ones in Charleston is a perfect example of how, and why, it is better for us to be like infants in being innocent and unapprised of evil. This has parallels with St Paul's instruction in Romans 16:19, to be "wise in doing right" and to "stay innocent of any wrong". In remaining innocent of the motivations of the evil mindset, the victims' families are steering well clear of any motivations of their own to respond quid pro quo. In other words, they are allowing the power of Christ's love to subsume their motivations to the extent that evil is always giving way to love and grace.

And it's in those microcosmic demonstrations of Christ's love and grace on earth that we get the hint of what the world would be like if we all behaved that way and had the same motivations - the template for which was laid down by Christ himself on earth, with His teachings, miracles, death and resurrection.

Christianity Used To Be Like Islamic State

Ok, well not all of Christianity used to be that way, of course.  But the title is attention grabbing for a very good reason - that Christianity, despite being (in my view) A) true and B) the best hope humans have of genuinely understanding goodness, turned up some of the most ignoble fiends in history committing some of the most ignoble acts in the name of their faith.

BBC News had an account this week of what life is like in Mosul, Iraq's second city, a year after it was captured by Islamic State. It's sobering to think that Islamic State's ethos - violence, sexual perversion, forced conversion, oppression of women and megalomaniacal aspirations of global dominance - were once not much of a departure from certain factions of the Christian church in the Middle Ages (between about the 11th and the 16th centuries).

Living in Britain in the 21st century it's hard to imagine divisions of the Christian church once doing things comparable to what Islamic State is doing now. Yet they did, and one can't escape the irony that Christ's love and grace came to earth precisely because of the ignoble things we humans would get up to - including, sadly, those who claim to do those ignoble things in His name.

What to do about Islamic State?

It's a particularly perturbing spectre this Islamic State business. They are such an evil, ideologically-driven regime that any of the West's available options are troublesome. What are the options? One option is to have another Iraq situation circa 2003-2008 with thousands of mobilised troops, tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and no real forecasted plan for the future. That sounds like hell all over again. Another option is to deploy ground troops in a more strategic way, picking them off with on the ground combat. That's better than option one, but still futile because Islamic State is growing and spreading more quickly than our ground forces could manage to quell. Further, terrorist groups that spring up all over the place in different regions are particularly hard to subjugate.

Peace talks are obviously hopeless because Islamic State has no peaceful intentions - its intention is dominance and murderous establishment of their cause. This leaves two other equally undesirable options, both centred around a more detached approach - otherwise known as doing very little. Given that Islamic State will be nigh-on impossible to defeat, and that any military mobilisation will come at the cost of servicemen and women, and lots of innocent civilians, not to mention financial cost and cost of political unpopularity (apparently the USA has already spent more on bombing Islamic State than they did Iraq and Afghanistan), it may well turn out that any major involvement we have will turn into a quagmire that will be lamented for years to come.

A detached approach will probably bring about the eventual establishment of some kind of post-Iraq Islamic state region, with its people being utterly oppressed and maltreated - a nightmare state resembling an Islamic version of something between North Korea and Nazi Germany. That cannot be allowed to happen, particularly with the oil and gas in the Middle East, and the issue of the stability of all its other nations.

So resolution of this Islamic State business is an absolute horror to contemplate - it's in a region that is too culturally and politically complex for Western politicians to understand (as Iraq 2003 showed), and against opponents unbound in their scope of wicked and backward ideological aspirations - aspirations we just cannot allow to come to pass.

My gut instinct is that what will happen is a combination of many Islamic State fighters being picked off by Western/Iraqi armed forces, and that there will be enough implosions in the Islamic State camp with individuals and subset groups breaking away or dissolving to the extent that the terrorist group becomes a fractionated adjunct to its former self.

Whatever happens though, Islamic terrorism is here to stay, and in all likelihood we're going to have decades of hell before there are any signs of things getting better.

The Trouble With Humanism Is Humans

We often hear talk in the UK of injecting more humanism into our society in an attempt to rescue us from the archaic social cancer that is religious belief. Humanism is a non-religious ethical life stance that commits to development and human wellbeing on the basis of reason and naturalism.

The upshot is, humanists are a group of people that want to cut the supernatural out of ethics and decision-making. The problem with being a humanist is that it involves the tricky business of trusting human beings - which is ultimately going to leave us in trouble.

There are two ways we can trust humans: one is in what we can achieve, and two is in how we behave. It's quite easy to trust humans in the first sense. Our achievements are phenomenal: we've built big cities, travelled into space, mastered global travel and communication, learned how to treat the sick, lifted millions out of poverty - and with the Internet we have all the world's knowledge at our fingertips.

Alas, it's in the second sense, in our behaviour, that humans are so very hard to trust. However much we advance our scientific achievements and improve our material living standards we are always going to have to face up to the reality that at our worst we humans are pretty selfish, ignoble, inconsiderate and unkind creatures.

That's why even if I wasn't a Christian I could never be a humanist - I think humans are as much of the problem as they are the solution. We are so incorrigibly wretched inside that we can never be the solution to the problems of being human, just as gravity can never be the solution to a skydiver having difficulty opening his parachute. Gravity of course is the reason he needs his parachute just as our human brokenness is the reason we need so much more than humanism. We need Christ, in fact.

Scripture: When The Literal & Non-Literal Seamlessly Blend

Most Christians - at least in the circles I roll - do not think that Adam and Eve were real people. This is quite a rational viewpoint: human evolution has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, and given that any so-called speciation that would make proto-humans distinct from humans would have occurred at the population level not at the individual level, it is highly unlikely that there were two first humans.

What's interesting though is that when one holds this view, they are struck with a corollary question: how far should our belief of non-literal people extend in the Old Testament? What about Cain and Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, Job, David and Solomon? Anyone who believes Adam and Eve are not literal people must then ask themselves something like this - "Which of these do you think are literal people, and if you think some are and some aren't, where is your conceptual cut-off point?"

If we read the Old Testament from Genesis to, say, to 2 Chronicles, then if taken all literally we can more or less map the genealogies from the Adam figure to the David figure. But in not taking it all literally we then find ourselves having to engage in some conceptual demarcation, and this involves getting right to the heart of that tapestry of conveyance and maybe sorting through various lenses of conception simultaneously.

When reading the Bible, do you have to assume a point at which symbolism becomes history? For example, if taken literally the genealogy of Adam can go all the way to Joseph, which includes Abraham and Isaac - the 'seed' that leads to Jesus. Also, you can read into the scripture that Moses is the 7th generation from Abraham. Some will say they believe it is literal from Abraham onwards, but what about Terah his father, and Nahor his father? One can't just cut it off at Abraham without considering the rest of the lineage that preceded him. It's easy to say we believe x is non-literal and y is literal, but if we take the Old Testament in book order we need to consider what it is we're doing.

So, how do we manage our reading of the Old Testament and conceptually demarcate our history from our non-history? I have a suggested answer - one that points to a few truths that are bound to seem utterly strange to a post-Enlightenment person steeped in the logic of the Greeks and the empiricism of Bacon, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

Part of the understanding required is the understanding that in ancient traditions, particularly oral traditions, the narrative being conveyed is a blend of fact and fiction, where profound truths are disseminated in a way that requires interpretative qualities beyond the headlights of the kind of rigorous historical and scientific analysis we moderns are used to. Given that life itself is so richly analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden it is no wonder that we are insistent that a deep understanding of the Bible won't come to anyone who trivialises its dynamic nature and is blind to its analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden power.

Thus I would contend that Old Testament figures like Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, Job, David and Solomon are such an agglomeration of history, myth, legend, analogy, metaphor and theological aetiology that we can't hope to pin them down to simple historical/non-historical analyses. That's not to treat them all the same, of course - there are evidently different extents to which the above applies to Adam than, say, David.

What's clear, though, is that while God 'breathed' His influence onto the writing of scripture over the many centuries of its composition, He allowed His word to be subjected to the limitations of creation, and the concomitant human fallibility that comes with it. The Bible is, of course, a created artefact, not to be seen as co-equal with God - and as such, the very notion of scripture being God's word is abstractly analogical to illustrate His power and influence over the written dispensation of Divine truths in language we can understand.

Don't Put The Cart of Religion Before The Horse of Morality

On the BBC's The Big Questions last week, human rights activist Peter Tatchell proclaimed that while religion has done some good in human history its overall contribution to society has been negative. Even if that is true, which I doubt, that's not the question I want to address here (I did once write something roughly to do with that issue here in this article). No, what I wanted to address was what a religious commentator (I forget her name) blurted out by way of response: she reproved Peter Tatchell by insisting that humans depended on the Judeo-Christian religion for the processes of moral codifications to be created at all, and that all of contemporary humankind has religion to thank for the fact that our morality evolved in such a developed way.

It's a common view posited by many people of faith, but it just isn't true - and such claims give a bad impression of theists' ability to understand the evolution of morality. It is impossible for religious codifications to be the basis of morality because, as anyone who understands the problem of the criterion would know, it is not possible to construct any kind of moral codification without an already existent evolved moral awareness by which to judge those constructs. Or to put it another way: you can't assess the rights and wrongs of ethical codes without first having an understanding of rights and wrongs.

Even as a person of faith I repeatedly find myself reminding fellow believers that morality is a humanly constructed phenomenon that evolved to aid us in survival and reproduction. It's true that religion did get in first in our historical attempts to codify that evolved morality into a set of ethical laws and practices, but it's rather misjudged to suggest that without it we wouldn’t have evolved all the refined notions of rights and wrongs. Of course we would - as humans continued to culturally evolve we would always further enhance our moral philosophies and ethical sensibilities - it's part of our natural assent towards bit-by-bit improvement. It's through understanding that morality is a human construct that we have the best chance of understanding why Christianity is something altogether superior to mere morality.

How Can We Forgive People Whose Crimes Are This Bad?

Have a good look at this group of men above. This is the convicted gang who raped and abused babies, toddlers and children under five in attacks that were then streamed on the Internet for other paedophiles to watch.

There’s no doubt that this is some of the most repulsive and wicked behaviour imaginable. Just thinking about it makes one go through the predictable gamut of emotions: anger, disgust, outrage, sadness and hate.

As expected, the mass reaction to this on social media has been an outpouring of vilification, expletives and calls for these ‘horrible scummers to be tortured slowly until they die’. As a human being I have no trouble seeing the appeal to these criminals getting their just deserts. With such horrific crimes, it’s easy to feel an ‘eye for an eye’ mentality well up inside of us.

The Christian faith encourages a radically different response – one that, it has to be said, causes lots of discomfiture. We Christians are instructed not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good. As St Paul says in Ephesians, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you”. In saying this, St Paul is echoing Christ’s commandment that in loving God we are compelled to love and pray for our enemies.

I can’t deny that, in cases like the above, it is difficult to write an apologia calling for these people to be shown love, grace and forgiveness. Many of you will think their crimes are so heinous that they are beyond forgiveness; many others will insist that it’s not for us to forgive, as only victims and people personally affected by it can really do the forgiving. Others, perhaps even many Christians, will be adamant that forgiveness can only take place when the perpetrators are truly sorry for what they’ve done. In all likelihood, many of you reading this will assert that even sorrow isn’t enough for these wretched individuals to be forgiven.

For all of the above views I have sympathy. Furthermore, I can’t be in the least bit sure that I will be able to justify your forgiving the perpetrators of those awful crimes. But I’ll have a try – not in a way that demands you are compelled to forgive them, but simply in a way that tries to explain why I think the God we see in Jesus endorses our forgiveness.

The condition under which we Christians forgive others is on the basis that we have all been forgiven by God. As much as it punctures our ego to hear this, in the eyes of God we are loved no more or no less than the men you see in the article above. In the eyes of human beings it is easy to see that most of us are not anything like as dangerous and perverted as them. But through God's eyes there is a brokenness to being human that can only be fixed by the power of God's forgiveness - forgiveness that comes from the fact that God is love and keeps no record of our wrongs. Christ forgave all those who beat Him to within an inch of His life and then finally killed Him on the cross - and He impels us to mirror that response. In doing so it will do us little good if we pick and choose who qualifies for that forgiveness and who doesn't.

At a human level every single one of us can come up with some kind of personal gradation for our ability to forgive. Tony can forgive burglary and vandalism, but not murder. Diane can forgive murder, but not rape. For Jessica, most things are forgivable, including rape, but she just won't extend that forgiveness as far as Hitler and Stalin. Christ encourages us to throw away all our attempts at gradation and forgive everyone - not just for the benefits it confers on us, but for the benefit it confers on the world. The challenge that comes with that - and I warn you it's a big challenge - is twofold.

In the first place, it's a challenge of forgiveness on the basis that in terms of human brokenness we are all capable of just about any act of evil given the wrong circumstances (for more on this see my blog posts here and here) - and that in relation to God's awesomeness none of us can claim to be any better than anyone else. That is to say, the best of us and the worst of us are all equally forgiven sinners benefiting from the love and grace of Christ on the cross. Any attempt to set ourselves apart from those we consider the worst people in the world is simply to construct an illusory version of ourselves that is easily shown to be deceptive the moment we start to examine what lies unchecked beneath the outward personality we reveal to others.

In the second place, and this is really a development of the first point - the reason awful people can be forgiven is because love and grace are the main qualities that transform us from our awful state to a better one - just as an absence of love and grace is so often the main catalyst for turning people bad. Nobody is born bad - they are made bad; by the weaknesses and brokenness of other humans, and by their own failings. Picture those men above as new-born babies. You would not be calling for those babies to be 'tortured slowly until they die’.

The babies are only tiny humans awaiting the mix of goodness and badness that is going to befall them. All babies will grow up to sin, but equally, like us, they will all grow up to be forgiven sinners. Due to an absence of the qualities that lead to goodness, some of those forgiven sinners will go on to be pretty wretched adults. But the antidote to their wretchedness is never going to be to respond with even more of a lack of goodness - it is only by showing them love and grace that they can see how much of a solecism their wretchedness is from human goodness.

Perhaps the key to this difficult issue is the realisation that as we get older and wiser we see more clearly how people's selfishness, thoughtlessness, perversions, and, let's be frank, down right wickedness that we observe on the outside is down to the subterranean hurts, fears, guilt, weaknesses and insecurities that lurk beneath on the inside. It's the historical legacy of pain that we never get to see. Think about the things you've done in life that make you most ashamed. I'll wager that when you did those things you were not at your best. You were fighting inner battles that the rest of the world never got to see. And if anyone was going to judge you on those actions, wouldn't you rather that they had access to the whole picture - the picture that can add proper extenuation to the guilt and shame you were compelled to face?

As it happens, this is the access to you that God has - but not only the full access to the inner self, He also knows all the extenuations and the indictments of which your inner self is not even aware. If with this omnipotence His decision is to forgive us all our sins, and suffer and die for us as a man in order that that forgiveness can be tangible to everyone who will ever live, it's a pretty good bet that when He tells us to forgive everyone, we are actually hearing perfect advice. Instructions from God are the only times that we ever do get perfect advice.

My hunch is that those awful men in the above picture would have turned out very different if they had been shown more love when they were growing up. Forgiving them doesn't for one second trivialise the absolutely disgraceful things they have done, it simply strives to avoid dehumanising them in the way that they have dehumanised their victims and been dehumanised by those who let them down.

It’s no use insisting – as one might be tempted to insist – that many of us have been hurt and damaged by others but we don’t go on to be paedophiles. For it is no doubt the fear, pride, insecurity and ignorance that prevents them from responding as you or I might that necessitates our love and grace towards them – it is the medicine of agape that counteracts the poison of their evil.

Christian Libertarianism

On a couple of occasions I've had Christians I value highly query how libertarianism can be consistent with the Christian faith. The general gist is 'But how can you be both; libertarians believe that anything goes, don't they?' The thing about libertarianism is that, like many things, it's not binary, it is a spectrum, ranging from hard libertarianism to soft libertarianism. Generally libertarians are to the right on economics and to the left on social issues. Some hard libertarians do believe that pretty much anything goes as long as it doesn't encroach on other people's well-being. Some even go so far as to insist that there is no need for any state or taxes whatsoever.

Libertarianism, like Christianity itself, has a mainstream with sensible moderates, and it has extreme ends with fundamentalists. The aim, as ever, should always be as Pascal identified it - that one "does not prove greatness by standing at an extremity, but by touching both extremities at once and filling all that lies between them".

I'm a libertarian when it comes to free market potential, and this is on the basis that it is clear that our values and our talents are formed through our inter-personal relationships, not from on high by top-down State micromanagement. The State is best when it acts to protect our liberties, our relationships and the fruits of our labour.  The free market is the canvas on which the colours of commercial co-operation are expressed, and on which our skills, ideas and efforts are co-ordinated - and all this is bootstrapped by abidance to rules, as well as harnessing honesty, trust and good economic relations.

As a Christian, my economic principles are based on the successes of the free market - trade, innovation, supply, demand, prices, labour, productivity and consumerism - but also in using that framework to take it to an even higher level of personal responsibility towards others. That, I think, is the biggest challenge in the modern globalised market, where the world is interconnected and economically unbound by national, cultural or ethnic boundaries; it is to conflate the qualities of the free market with the Christ-like virtues of loving God and loving one's neighbour as oneself, on top of charity, prodigious generosity, and helping the poor become self-sufficient and with a greater standard of living.

Christianity to me simply means getting one's faith right. Libertarianism to me simply means getting one's economics right. They are not in the least bit incompatible, as long as one doesn't become so extreme that the virtues of being caring, kind and responsible humans are compromised in favour of an espousal of freedom that divests us of love and grace towards fellow human beings.

A Christian Defence Of Atheism

Introduction
You’re probably wondering why a Christian would write an article in defence of atheism. This may seem unusual, but it is not without good reason. From a long history of engaging in debates I’ve found one of the big stumbling blocks people have is a failure to see things from their opponent’s perspective. This is strange because part of the strength one has in one’s own position is based on the fact that the opposing contentions have been honestly and rigorously considered and rejected. Failure to understand your opponent’s position is to equally have a failure to understand all the strengths and weaknesses of your own position.

Therefore a very good exercise I’ve found useful in the past, and one I have often encouraged others to do, is to formulate a defence in favour of the views contrary to your own – not because you are necessarily likely to change your mind (although sometimes you might), but because you’ll probably compound the strength of your original position as well as obtaining an even better understanding about where your opponent is going wrong. And if you do end up changing your mind – great – it’s always good to learn new things and improve your understanding.

So, for example, libertarians and socialists would be advised to each write an article trying to argue in defence of the other’s position; the same goes for any rival group you can think of: young earth creationists vs. evolutionists, Hayekians vs. Keynesians, pacifists vs. non-pacifists, free will proponents vs. determinists, big bang proponents vs. steady state theorists, and in the case here in this article, Christians vs. atheists.

As long as you’re a genuine fact finder and truth seeker (and they aren’t as common as you might imagine) your worldview will be enriched if you sit down at a keyboard and type out an honest and rigorous attempt at defending a position to which you are opposed or with which you disagree.

Out of the above rival groups, my position would be most closely defined as libertarian, evolutionist, Hayekian, non-pacifist, semi-free will proponent & semi-determinist (they are not actually at odds, as I describe here and here), big bang proponent and Christian. In the past I have written defences of all the positions I disagree with, and tried my best to argue in their favour to test the strength of my own position. Each time I have come away stronger and more confident in my views than I was before I started.

So with that in mind, let me present a defence of atheism by saying that if there is an atheistic worldview that makes some sense to me, and one that would most likely cause me to wonder if the Christian faith is actually false, it is along these lines. I might just add at this point that despite considering it the strongest objection to the Christian faith, and the one that can most undermine the claims of Christians, it is one I've not really seen a single atheist ever posit - at least not in the way that I'm going to lay it out.

A Christian defence of atheism

Humans have been evolving for a long time. The first members of the human family (hominins) lived approximately 6-7 million years ago. They lived in Africa, were probably bi-pedal forest-dwelling creatures that very slightly resembled humans in form. While the bigger-brained Homo group (including our own species, Homo sapiens) began arising over 2 million years ago, the species most closely resembling the humans of today evolved about 200,000 years ago. Needless to say, much of Homo history has been replete with hardship, suffering and early death.  It would be hard to get to grips with just how many proto-humans (pre 200,000 years ago) suffered and died as they made often futile attempts to live to an old age, with their early years from infancy through to teenage years perilously precarious due to risks posed by disease and injury. I've often wondered where God and His relationship with creation was involved all those millions of years. But let's make it easier for ourselves and leave them aside in this analysis and just focus on relatively recent human history for the past 200,000 years.

For about 199,800 of those 200,000 years the human struggle was rife. We had low global populations, and humans lived in meagre conditions, with lots of primitive hardship, low life expectancy and frequent infant mortality. Most of those 200,000 years involved no hope for any recordable progression. Even for the majority of the past 10,000 years progression has been slow. After the inceptive stages of trading, for the most part people's earnings stayed around the subsistence levels (save for a tiny minority of aristocracy and ruling classes). For a long time in our history we've been worshipfully inclined; inventing thousands of gods and religions - even some pretty sophisticated and intellectual ones like Judaism and Christianity.

Even when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire, progression was still relatively slow. Fabulous cathedrals and temples were built in reverence to God, but yet as as people gazed at those great buildings the vast majority of them were still barely subsisting. Nothing built or designed or written from worshipful inclinations changed human prosperity or enabled our standards of living to progress with any real significance. In summary, then, for 199,800 of the aforementioned 200,000 years human progression moved at a snail's pace.

Then a couple of hundred years ago something big changed. From the 19th century to the present day, people started to become more scientific, more empirically minded, richer, and populations began to increase more rapidly. What caused this sudden cheetah-like sprint of progression was primarily two things - science and capitalism. The human history of progression resembles something close to a hockey stick - a long period of a straight-ish edge, then right at the end (the present period) a huge upward slope of progression after the exponentiation of free trade, science, engineering, and population increase, as well as other types of concomitant progress like improvements in rule of law, human rights and political stability.

Now let's be clear; science and capitalism haven't created a materialist utopia (far from it), nor a panacea against moral ills, and they are not without their negative spillover effects - but their prominence has seen an exponentiation effect that has brought more progression in the past 200 years than in the previous 199,800 years. In those 200 years, earnings, health, wealth, knowledge, scientific and technological capacity, and overall well-being has improved at an astronomical level not seen in any period of time that predated it, including any of the ages that engendered religious belief, philosophy or empire.

Consequently, then, when asked to look at reality from an atheist's perspective - I can quite easily appreciate the narrative that says religious belief may have been extremely valuable to individuals and communities at a devotional and communal level, but it would be false to say that in the past few hundred thousand years religious belief had any significant impact on people's health, wealth and standard of living, or on their economic and scientific development, or on technological and industrial progress, or on their knowledge of how the world works, particularly not when compared with the effect that science and capitalism had in the past two centuries. Purely on the record of all those things, it cannot be denied that the 200 years when science and capitalism have been most prominent have provided a much better record for humans than the thousands of years prior to that when religious belief was the most prominent phenomenon.

With such information in one’s arsenal it is not wholly unreasonable to see the above picture as a picture that may be absent of an all-powerful, loving God. It’s not just that the primary tools for engendering human progression are tools that evidently have occurred without the need for religious belief. It’s also that the proposition of a God presiding over that lengthy hominin-human history seems to involve millions of years of suffering and hardship with not much of a hint of God’s involvement in their lives. Moreover, despite the progression-explosion of the past two centuries, it is difficult to deny that if one takes the whole of human history, even including a vast proportion of modern human history, the sheer level of and intensity of hardship and suffering that has occurred and still is occurring in this created world can easily make one wonder whether an all-powerful, loving God would have created a world with quite that amount of pain.

The upshot is, there is a picture of reality that fits quite neatly with the notion that human beings can learn, grow, develop, improve, innovate, and progress fairly nicely without the need for God, and that the key to getting where we have has not been Christianity, but the ability to trade, innovate and be scientifically-minded creatures of empiricism.

 

* Addendum: This would be the point in such an article at which I'd then explain all the ways I think the above defence of atheism is flawed or inadequate, but given that's not been the intention here, it's a temptation I'm going to resist, and one we'll save for another day in the future.

What The Bible Is & What It's Not

Surprisingly (to me at least), many Christians exalt the Bible above its true nature. Some will claim it is inerrant; some will claim it is perfect; some will even claim it has co-equality with God. In holding these views they often believe their devotion to scripture is giving them a superior understanding. I think they have it backwards - in treating the Bible in this way they are missing out on some of the things that can be distilled from the power of scripture. That is to say, ironically, in this situation, more is less.

 

We'll save why they think as they do for another time, but suffice to say, I think there is only one reasonable way to view the Bible - that although the Bible is 'God-breathed' it is nevertheless an object of creation, not to be treated as perfect or inerrant, and certainly not to be worshipped or given primacy over, or equality with, God.

Looking at what the Bible is for a contemporary person, this leads us naturally to two questions:

1) Does the Bible contain enough content that, by itself, makes it sufficient for understanding one's sin and the need for salvation? In other words, can one find the path to Christianity with the Bible alone?

2) Does the Bible contain the maximum written content that can most comprehensively explicate the Christian faith?

The answer to the first question seems to be an unequivocal yes (see 2 Timothy 3:16, for example). That is to say, the Bible is sufficient to lead someone to understand the Christian faith and the need to act upon that understanding. But to the second question, the answer is clearly no - otherwise no conversations, commentary, Christian literature or personal prose would add anything to the process of Christian thinking, learning and understanding.

Clearly practicalities dictate that everything can't be contained in one book, and also that cultures change, minds evolve, perspectives alter, and values are augmented. Thus I think the best way to see the Bible is as a blueprint that contains all the necessary content for understanding one's sin and the need for salvation (and how to act upon that understanding), but also as a driving force that underpins and enriches all the other things necessary for our journey (conversations, commentary, Christian literature, personal prose, and so on). It is the point at which the eternal and the temporal interlock through the Incarnation, where, along with the Holy Spirit, scripture is the surrounding power that conveys this interlocking.

So the Bible is not maximally informative, nor can it ever be written at the optimum time in any one period in history - as it would inevitably be constrained by the limitations of the people that conveyed it at the time. Hence it seems to me that to make a sub-universe out of the Bible, and call it 'perfect' or 'flawless' or 'inerrant', is to miss the true power of it. To do so is rather like saying that a recipe is literally delicious or that it can literally feed the homeless. No, it only shows its power when seen as a created artefact that, as St Paul says, is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. In exalting it any higher one ends up limiting it by failing to invest in it enough of the human ingredients that bring to bear the flavour and nourishment that the recipe is constructed to produce.

The Bible works under the principle that 'less is more', in that potentially additional phrases would diminish the quality of scripture (see Revelation 22:18). But we are also told that it works under the principle that the removal of any part of it would also diminish scripture (see Revelation 22:19)*. So there is clear scriptural indication that the books of the Bible that we have amount to an optimum vehicle for our Christian development. But on top of this, we find that the majority of our Christian journey primes us to seek, learn, develop and grow under the maxim that 'more is more'. That is to say, our full personal development in Christ is inextricably linked to our being able to try to maximise our love, grace, kindness, wisdom, fruitful knowledge, humility, and overall spiritual excellence - consistent with what the book of Philippians describes, ‘imitating Christ’ and ‘pressing on towards the goal to which God has called us’.

Given the foregoing, it’s clear that the Bible is only going to be a constituent part of that - at least when juxtaposed alongside all the other extra-Biblical resources we have such as other people, other writings, and the rich variety of daily experiences, on top of the mobilisation of knowledge, imagination and culturally nuanced psychology that enable us to tap into the scriptural power of meaning in the first place.

Because of this - and what I'm going to say next often shocks people - it is actually not difficult to conceive of at least the possibility that such a thing as the best of all possible Christian handbooks (for whichever post-Biblical generation, or maybe even for any generation) would look like something different to the Bible if it were ever written. But once we see scripture for what it really is - a created object subjected (like Christ Himself) to the grumblings of earthly life and the flawed nature of human beings, scripture can more easily be seen as an optimal vehicle for learning about our salvation, but yet at the same time only an element of the contents of a full life for each of us on our Christian walk with God. 

Whenever the Bible was created, and whichever era it spanned, it would inevitably be constrained by the limitations of the people that conveyed it at the time - which rather does show that the only way to get the most out of scripture is to use it as the map for our journey.

My wife and I recently went on holiday to the North of England and saw some of the most beautiful lakes, mountains and waterfalls in Britain. It was truly wonderful to see so much of God's natural world left unsullied by human interference - but we still required a map to find our way around the different places. The reason the map works is because it is a representation of the territory we wished to explore. With the Bible we find we have a map, but of a different kind - because in analogical terms, if the Bible is the map, the territory we are trying to explore more of is God Himself. To make a god (small 'g') out of the Bible is rather like confusing a map of The Lake District with the real experience of those beautiful lakes, mountains and waterfalls.  It's a temptation that should be resisted.

 

* I think it's true that John was certainly speaking specifically about Revelation here - but I think our forefathers were guided by the Spirit to set it as an application to the whole of scripture (there are echoes of it in Deuteronomy 4:2 for example). Jesus echoes some of this too with His warnings about false teachings.

Is Christianity Testable?

Is Christianity testable? Yes and no. Certainly no in the sense that perceived miracles are sporadic and unforeseeable - but yes in the sense that one's own personal journey is constantly being examined in light of experience. You see, to the outside observer there is a hiatus between the first and third person perceiver, which conflicts with the practice of evidential scrutiny. To the person building the decked successions of experiences, religious belief is a construction of personal narratives and logical examinations with a hard-thought medley of post-hoc experiences to arrive at a set of beliefs and views that sit on a well-balanced fulcrum between our theories and our experiences.

Proclaiming that religious belief is irrational is useless without a simple demarcation as to what constitutes rational and what constitutes irrational - and you'll always find this part lacking. Even the most ardent religious sceptic can't fail to concede that religious faith, while not as accessible as science, amounts to a personal narrative that assimilates much of the same kind of material available to the atheist into his explanatory endeavours. It's no use simply to say that rationality means assenting to empirical evidence, because the relationship between empiricism, theory and narrative involves further explanatory strategies, which themselves tap into issues of metaphysics and ontology, as well as emotional assessments of reality that amount to a whole worldview.  

Patterns that one believes to be God-inspired are always going to be sparse compared with the wide fabric of empiricism available to us - but the human propensity for narration and investment of meaning in those patterns ensures that, as long as one doesn't over-cook one's theorisations, one needn't be constricted only by views and beliefs that can withstand scientific scrutiny. The experiences of Christians that make them Christians are not often experiences that are going to be demonstrable or evidential to non-Christians. I've a long history of examples where atheists have been infuriated by this - but infuriation or not, it happens to be true, which means there will always be an exploratory hiatus for those that can't appreciate this.

Christianity - A Trick Of The Mind?

Some people claim that Christianity is merely a psychological trick that our imagination plays upon us - and sometimes it does look as if it is a replacement or substitute for the real contentment we have failed to achieve on earth. At times it seems so very likely that our rejection of the atheistic world is only the disappointed cat's attempt to convince itself that there is no mouse in the hole.

 

To many, the theory that Christianity is simply a replacement has a great deal of plausibility. Faced with this proposition, the first thing I would do is try to analyse the realities for which things are replacements - for in doing so I'd find the proposition needs to be questioned a lot further. Here are three illustrations that will show what I mean.

When I was in my early teens I knew two rogues who secretly drank their stepfather’s alcohol. Their stepfather had a fridge full of cans of lager which he would drink on a daily basis, and he had one or two bottles of whisky in his cabinet which he would usually keep for visitors or special occasions. The two boys liked lager very much more than they liked whisky. But every now and then there would come a day when their stepfather had let his supply of lager get so low that the boys thought the theft of even one or two of the cans would inevitably be detected. 

On such days, they would drink the whisky instead, and the eldest would say to the youngest, ‘We will have to put up with whisky today’, and the youngest would reply, ‘Well I suppose whisky is better than nothing’. This is a true story, and one that provides a very good example of the value to be attached to anyone’s first reckless ideas about a reality and a replacement. To these boys whisky was simply an inferior replacement for lager. And, of course, the boys at that stage were quite right about their own feelings; but they would have become foolishly wrong if they had therefore inferred that whisky, in its own nature, was merely some kind of makeshift lager. On that question their own innocent childish experience offered them no evidence; they had to learn the answer by being told differently, or else wait until they were older and mature enough to appreciate both lager and whisky.

Here is another example. When I was growing up I never went to see live music; I would listen to all the music I liked on tape, vinyl and (later) compact disc. I had become so used to the songs recorded in the studio that when I did eventually go to see some of these artists live I was disappointed with them because they did not produce the same sound that they did when played through my hi-fi. The live music lacked the polish I had come to expect. I felt that the live music was not ‘The real thing’. This is an even better example than the first, because recorded sound is precisely a replication, and live music is the real original thing. But given all that I was used to at the time, the reality appeared to be a replacement and the replacement a reality. 

And finally, during a mayonnaise drought at my local supermarket in my teenage years, I had to use salad cream instead for about a week. Now at first I would have been reluctant to call it an inferior replacement because initially I was enjoying something different to mayonnaise. But as soon as the stocks were replenished and I had mayonnaise back on my plate I never wanted to see salad cream again. This is different from the previous examples because here I started knowing, which, in fact, was the replacement. The mere immediate taste of salad cream did not confirm that it was a replacement as such, because at first it seemed just as nice as the mayonnaise. It was only after a period of time that the salad cream revealed itself to my senses as inferior to mayonnaise.

Just about every department of life furnishes us with examples of how the reality and the replacement can deceive. To the philanderer, faithful love appears at best a mere bread and water replacement for that exciting and tumultuous world of infidelity that has become the main source of thrills. The young ears that are delighted with manufactured pop music are often deaf to the exploratory delights of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. And great literature can seem at first, to inexperienced taste, a pale refection of the superficial or trashy pieces of fiction which it prefers. 

The upshot is, cursory impressions are often of little use at all in deciding which of two experiences is a replacement or second best. At a certain level all those sensations which we could expect to find accompanying the real satisfaction of a fundamental need will accompany the replacement, and vice versa. The key is in finding out which is which.

If those two rogues I mentioned earlier had really wanted to find out whether their view of whisky and lager were correct, there were various things they might have done. They might have asked a grown up who would have told them that whisky was actually regarded as the greater luxury of the two, and thus had their mistake corrected by authority. Or they might have found out by their own investigation - that is by asking a shopkeeper which of the two were more expensive, and having found out that whisky was more expensive than lager, they could have inferred that whisky could not be a mere replacement for lager. Finally they might have practiced obedience, and waited until they were old enough to drink - in which case they would have drawn their own conclusions from an adult experience of the two drinks. 

With these illustrations I am simply trying to put the whole problem of psychological trickery the right way round; to make it clear that the substance or value given to experiences depends on the increased widening of our perceptive tools to try to capture all the realities those experiences may inhabit. Believe in God and you will still have troubling moments when it seems that this material world is the only reality. On the other hand, disbelieve in Him and you will still face hours of serious, deep contemplation when this life seems to shout at you that it is not all there is.

People who have become Christian are people who've found out that what at first seemed like an ersatz replacement to the real truth is, in fact, the real Truth with a capital "T". They are in some way analogous to people who've discovered The Beatles and Bob Dylan after ditching manufactured pop; or who've discovered Charlotte Bronte and Fyodor Dostoyevsky after ditching Mills & Boon; or who've discovered the delights of faithful love with a beloved after ditching the life of being a cad. It's true that those examples are subjective, whereas Christianity's Truth is objective - but subjective experiences are so often compelling precisely because they are signposts to Christianity's Truth.

How Can People Like Hitler Be Saved?

There is one often-cited question by unbelievers which gets to the heart of what's so perplexing about Christian grace: "How can wicked people like Hitler ever be saved?" Christians are usually not so perplexed, because their faith is based on two fundamental truths that contain the answer to this question:

1) As much as we like to think otherwise, we humans are all capable of the most wretched sins, and we are all equal in the extent to which we fall short of the glory of God, which makes all of us as much in need of grace as Hitler.

2) Anyone who recognises their sins and Christ as their saviour is saved, because salvation is not based on our moral deeds, it is a free gift given because of God's love and grace on the cross.

Not only is it the case that salvation is gift-based not merit-based, it's also the case that even some of God's greatest spokespeople had notoriously tarnished pasts. Take three of the most famous - Moses, David and St Paul: Moses killed an Egyptian to defend a Hebrew; David, after sleeping with Uriah's wife Bathsheba, gave military instruction that he knew would cause the execution of Uriah, freeing up him to marry Bathsheba; and St Paul (when he was Saul, before his conversion) persecuted Christians to their death.

If some of the Bible's most roguish characters can be not just saved, but be chosen as key exponents of the Divine truths, then it's unsurprising that there's an ease with which all repentant sinners can be forgiven and have salvation, even people generally perceived to be the worst in human history.

What I Think Is Really Behind The Intellectual Objections To Christianity

I've wanted to write this for a while, and today seems like as good a time as any to get the words down. What I want to speak about is a particular kind of rejection of Christianity - the so-called intellectual one. Now, of course, there are many other reasons why people aren't Christians - apathy, unawareness, emotional pain, subscription to other faiths, and being too busy to give it the time it warrants (to name a few) - but they are not my principal concern here.

My principal concern is the view that Christianity suffers defeat when face to face with what some atheists like to call 'free-thinking' - by which they mean some kind of rational, intelligent scepticism that sets them apart from those 'dumb' enough to believe in God. They'll happily tell us they are too smart and enlightened to believe in God, but yet every one of them almost certainly knows (or knows of) dozens of intelligent and thoughtful theists that evidently have considered their Christian faith very deeply and profoundly.

Why, then, the brash confidence in atheism? The real reason, I think, is a twofold truth - but it is a painful one, and one to which many over-confident unbelievers will scarcely give much acknowledgement. The first part is to do with pride and the second part is to do with courage. You see, we humans are proud creatures - and although we try to suppress it, we cannot help but be seduced by admiration, praise and prestige.

Religion-bashing is a peculiar phenomenon - in the first case it is either thoroughly justified (in the case of criticising religious fundamentalism), and in which case, a proprietary duty not just of unbelievers but of believers too. Or in the second case it is thoroughly lacking in depth and profundity (in the case of the facile arguments and brazen posturing we see too often in social media).

The thing about the second case of religion-bashing I'm talking about is that it's the one that most enchants the ego, because it is of a lowest common denominator discourse that attracts hoards of impressionable people or people damaged by their bad religious background (sometimes, of course, the damage adds to the impressionability). People who are scarred by church-shaped wounds will easily find comfort and sometimes even hero-worship in figures like Richard Dawkins and (the sadly deceased) Christopher Hitchens if they appear to offer an intellectual emancipation from some of the religious nonsense and cruelty by which they were once beset. And, of course, from the vantage point of the emancipator, the continual prestige and praise cannot fail to seduce and enchant, as well as often proving to be financially rewarding and career enhancing too.

Now if there's one thing that Christianity does to the unbeliever and believer alike, it proceeds to shatter any such illusions we may have about self, about impressing other humans, and about courting status and prestige. Don't misunderstand, the Christian faith has no discouragement towards conferring praise or admiration on individuals who do good and noble things - it just frames goodness in its wider context of God's love for His creation, and His grace bestowed upon creation.

Or to put it another way, if there is one irritating thing about God (or even considerations of God) from the atheist's perspective, it is that He cares not one jot for our attempts to monger status and lionisation from other people. He couldn't give two hoots about our ego-stroking or the ways we court prestige - He sees right through it all, into the real self, and He knows, as do we deep down, that such grasping is really out of weakness, not strength. For although we enjoy the transitory moments when we are admired and praised, we know all too well how much they mask the real drawbacks and limitations of being human.

Now we begin to see why courage is the second part of the resistance - for it is only being courageous that enables us to face our weaknesses and limitations. As such, it takes tremendous courage to make concessions to a worldview based on the abnegation of ego, and to properly face up to our human limitations and weaknesses.