Rational Dreaming
Simple question.
And there’s a simple answer if, like me, you don’t believe Hell exists.
But for “Bible-believing” Christians the answer isn’t so simple, if Todd Friel of Wretched Radio is any guide.
How can that be? After all, it’s well known that Steve Jobs was a Buddhist, not a Christian, and according to the fundamentalists who believe in an inerrant Bible, there is no leeway for non-believers, no matter how great a positive impact they have had on the world. Steve Jobs has got to be in Hell, right?
But, according to Todd Friel, on Tuesday’s edition of Wretched Radio, the correct answer is “We don’t know.”
Hmm. His argument seems solid enough:
“What we do know is that if you have Jesus in your heart, you will go to Heaven. If you don’t have Jesus, then you won’t. We don’t know what was in Steve Jobs’ heart [the moment he passed away].”
Agreed, but I think you would also agree that the odds of Steve Jobs having a death-bed conversion after being a Buddhist almost all his adult life, are pretty slim. If the Christian fundamentalist concept of Hell is true, then Steve Jobs is almost certainly just getting settled in for an eternity of unbearable torment and pain in the Lake of Fire–agonies that will have him yearning for the days when all he was suffering from was terminal pancreatic cancer.
As the world mourns the passing of an undoubted giant in the computer and consumer electronics industry, it seems that everyone has an opinion about the legacy Steve Jobs has left behind. There have been plenty of excellent retrospectives about his career and the impact he made on the industry, but some commenters did get a little carried away:
Everyone’s an Apple guy, whether they know it or not. Home computers, GUIs, the world-wide web, smartphones… would any of these exist now without Jobs? Well, maybe, but certainly not in the form we know them today.
Clearly, this is hyperbole, but the comment did get me thinking. What would a world where Steve Jobs never became the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation look like?
Ray Comfort has gotten a lot of mileage out of his approach to witnessing to people on the street using his well-worn tactics of quite literally putting the fear of Hell into them.
His lengthy sequence of leading questions is designed to convince people that unless accept Jesus as their savior, God will send them to Hell when they die. If that sounds like a threat, that’s because it is, but it only works if people believe that Hell is real, and that everyone who is not a “born-again Christian” will go there when they die.
The problem for Comfort is that more and more people (including many Christians) are rejecting this medieval–and thoroughly evil–concept of Hell. Why? Because it simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If Comfort’s claims about Hell are true, then there isn’t a greater example of injustice to be found anywhere on Earth in all of history.
In order to illustrate just how abhorrent the doctrine of Hell would be if it was true, I thought it would be fun to take a leaf out of Ray Comfort’s book and come up with a series of questions that will lead inexorably to this conclusion.
Before I get to the questions, please remember that this format doesn’t allow for a lengthy debate over the finer points of arcane theological doctrine. It’s a rapid fire session where the target of the question is under pressure to supply quick sound-bite answers. If you believe this is unfair, then by all means tell Ray Comfort that you object to his tactics too.
So here goes, with the likely answers interspersed: Continue reading »
Presenting Tim Minchin’s wonderfully witty and subversive love song “If Didn’t Have You”
“Why do bad things happen to good people?”
A simple question, yet one that has wracked the minds of millions of religious people throughout history.
Why me?
Books have been written on the subject. Theologians have wrestled with this question for their entire careers.
Why my kind, faithful, beautiful wife?
Theodicy, a completely new term and field of study, was even invented to examine the question.
How could God let such an evil thing happen to my baby girl?
But, take God out of the picture, and the answer to this question is self-evident. It’s also short and concise–so short and concise that it fits on a tee shirt. In fact, you may have already seen someone wearing one with this answer printed on it:
Sometimes, it really is just that simple.
It will come as no surprise to those familiar with Ray Comfort’s methods, that his latest “award winning” movie (which somehow won that designation before it was released to the public) is a masterful work of emotion-twisting propaganda.
The 33 minute long movie is called “180″ and Ray promises to “will rock your world” and that you will see “what changed their minds, in seconds.” Whose minds and what it was they changed their minds about is curiously absent from both the movie web site home page and its YouTube page. But that’s no accident, it’s all part of the diversionary and manipulative plan to lead the viewer exactly where Comfort wants them to go.
The narrative of the movie begin with this statement:
“I’m Ray Comfort, I’m Jewish, and I’m deeply concerned that a generation is forgetting one of the greatest tragedies of the human race. Adolf Hitler sanctioned the murder of 11 million people, including 6 million Jews, in what’s commonly called, the Holocaust.”
Given the dramatic music and horrifying images of the Holocaust that flash across the screen, along with a number of interview snippets of clueless young Americans who don’t even know who Adolph Hitler was, one could be forgiven for believing that indeed Ray Comfort is deeply troubled by this lack of knowledge and wants to do something about it.
Unfortunately, it’s all a feint. The first part of Comfort’s opening statement is, at best, deliberately misleading and, at worst, a lie. Perhaps he is personally deeply concerned about the failing memories of the Holocaust, but the movie isn’t a serious attempt to address the problem. Indeed, the first 13 minutes he spends on the subject is purely setup for the real purpose of the movie, of which there isn’t a whisper in all that time.
A couple of months ago, leaders of the Southern Baptist Conference reiterated their belief in Hell, calling it an “eternal, conscious punishment” for those who do not accept Jesus, in response to a controversial book from Michigan pastor Rob Bell that questions traditional views of hell:
Citing Bell’s book “Love Wins,” the resolution urges Southern Baptists “to proclaim faithfully the depth and gravity of sin against a holy God, the reality of hell, and the salvation of sinners by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.”
Several leaders during the Baptists’ two-day meeting in Phoenix coupled warnings about hell with pleas for evangelism — especially in areas where there are no churches or missionaries.
“Is hell real? Is hell forever? Did God really say sinners would perish in eternal torment forever and ever?” asked pastor and author David Platt of Birmingham, Ala. “Oh, readers of Rob Bell and others like him, listen very carefully be very cautious, when anyone says, `Did God really say this?”‘
Bell’s book, released in March, criticizes the “misguided” view that “select Christians” will live forever in heaven while the rest of humanity will suffer eternal torment in a punishing hell.
Those Southern Baptist leaders are right to be concerned. The Pew Forum polled belief in Heaven and Hell as part of a larger survey of American religious beliefs back in 2008 and found that while 74% of Americans believed in Heaven, only 59% believed in Hell. More strikingly that number had fallen from 71% in just seven years. Clearly, fear of Hell isn’t what it used to be.
This should come as no surprise to those who have spent more than a few minutes considering the traditional Christian doctrine of Hell, which states that unless you have been born again in the blood of Jesus Christ, that’s where you end up, for eternity–countless trillions of years–suffering unimaginable torment without end. In a time when even hardline conservatives generally accept that punishments like stoning to death for major crimes and fifty lashes for minor crimes are cruel and unusual, the concept of torture without end for not believing something you might never have heard of in the first place, begins to pale.
Currently featured on the front page of Conservapaedia is the following short article:
Christian taunts to atheist Penn Jillette
Below are Christian taunts to atheist Penn Jillette concerning a debate challenge. Penn Jillette has been contacted via Twitter, YouTube and email.
“He’s watching. trust me. Most Atheists are obsessed with the TRUTH, they just don’t like it.”
“Come on Penn, you even WANT people to debate because our opinions on the existence of God are too important to keep private!”
Who could this bold, confident creationist challenger called “shockofgod” with over 18,000 YouTube subscribers be? Interest piqued, I clicked on over to watch his video challenge: Continue reading »
I was surfing the inanity-insanity that is the ultra-conservative Christian website, Conservapaedia, when I came across this brief conversation that sums up the site far better than any lengthy essay could.
In response to the posting of the news story about a group of physicts at CERN may have detected neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, a contributor by the name of DavidZa initiated this exchange on the main Conservapaedia page’s talk page:
“We don’t allow faster than light neutrinos in here” said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.(A rather good joke that’s going around) DavidZa 18:25, 24 September 2011 (EDT)
- [T]hat’s a joke for a relativist. If relativity is false as long shown here by the Counterexamples to Relativity, then the joke isn’t funny.–Andy Schlafly 23:34, 24 September 2011 (EDT)
I think you’ll agree that it is a rather good joke, but apparently, the founder and main force behind Conservapaedia, Andy Schlafly, fails to see any humor in the quip.
You see, to Schlafly, the well-established scientific Theory of Relativity is synonymous with relativism, the philosophical belief that there are no absolute truths, and Einstein’s landmark discovery in the early part of the twentieth century is one of the major contributors to the rise of relativism in America today and the consequent decline in religious faith and values.
This, of course, is arrant nonsense, and Shlafly has been told this time and again by the less deluded denizens of the site. But it makes no difference. He still believes that one of the most tested and confirmed theories in physics has already been counterfeited and, naturally, Conservapaedia’s content is required to reflect his personal belief.
But even if by some bizarre coincidence Schlalfy is correct, and relativity is disproved (and faith in God is rescued?), the joke is still pretty funny, but of course, he can’t allow himself to admit even this.
No doubt every fan of “Lost” who saw the finale last night has an opinion on what they saw. Some people loved it, others hated it, and many more were somewhat ambivalent about it. I am one who falls into that last category.
I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t exactly love it either, although I was greatly moved by the reuniting of lost loves with their shared memories. That was a masterful payoff for the viewers who have been so heavily invested in the lives of those who inhibited the mysterious island for the last six years.
But, in the end, I feel that the “sideways time line as purgatory” reveal was a bit of a cop out. Indeed, one can imagine concluding any number of shows the same way—a bunch of characters meeting up in the afterlife and chewing the fat over old times and shared experiences before “moving on” to their final destination. Thus, while the ending allowed for the main cast of characters to attain ultimate closure, it felt completely detached from the events that were rapidly rushing to a conclusion on the island-based half of the show.
Indeed, I felt that the emotional power of the afterlife time line (to call it what it is) overwhelmed the rest of the show, making the final battle, the final flight, and the final sacrifice all seem rather perfunctory. It certainly made it hard to appreciate the depth of Jack’s sacrifice when you have already seen him being joyously embraced by the ones he cared for. The desperate battle for survival and the constant struggle to do the right thing that made up life on the island was overshadowed by the final group orgasm of happy reunions, and that’s a shame.
And, as many other reviewers have already pointed out, we didn’t get any closure at all relating to the true nature and origin of the island. I am a great fan of ambiguous endings. There is nothing worse than a show that tries to spoon-feed its viewers a happy ending where all the threads are tied up in a neat little bow. But, come on guys, you could have given us something! I guess, given that one of the central conceits of the show was the blatant and incessant non-answering of questions revolving around the central mystery of the island, we should have expected something like this, but it’s still deeply unsatisfying all the same. It certainly leads to the suspicion that the writers really could not figure out a decent back story for the island and decided to take the easy way out.
All in all, I think it’s disappointing that they didn’t try harder to tie the ultimate ending in with the history, nature, and fate of the island. And there was at least one way they could have done that without losing the power of those moments of joint recollection.
The show had already established the power of the island to influence and alter the course of people’s lives, no matter where or when they lived. We saw how Jacob harnessed that power in a life-long effort to draw suitable candidates for his replacement to the island. So, why not have Hurley—as the new “number one’—make use of that vast power to bring about a happy ending for his friends? The alternative time line could be exactly that, an alternative reality—a parallel Earth—in which the Oceanic flight 815 did not crash, but one that Hurley can use power of the island to influence.
The alternative-reality characters would still be the flawed, purposeless losers that Jacob had sought out, but instead of being transformed by living on the island, Hurley could have “rescued” them by using the island’s power to transfer the memories of their parallel selves into their minds. Thus their lives would be transformed for the better as their shared memories awoke, and their fate would remain coupled with the events as they had played out on the island. It is certainly something a character like Hurley would have done given the chance as protector and guardian of the island.
As a footnote, in a bizarre coincidence, “Lost” was not the only major drama on TV to conclude this weekend by revealing that the show was, at least in part, set in a kind of afterlife purgatory. The BBC drama “Ashes to Ashes,” along with it’s prequel “Life On Mars” concluded a five year arc Friday night with the revelation that all the characters in the show are dead too, and living out their daily lives in a kind of policeman’s version of purgatory, where they can work out their issues in preparation for moving on to their final destination. The ending does make more sense for the British pair of show, because the two stars involved were victims of serious head trauma and were assumed to be hovering between life and death, but it’s still a fascinating coincidence that two completely unrelated teams of writers should have plumped for exactly the same final conclusion of their show several years before they ended on the same weekend.
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