This is my reply to an article at Triablogue entitled
Posted by Hawk at 3:03 PM
Do we truly seek to conform our thinking to reality, or do we also seek to conform reality to our thinking?
Fallacy of loaded question. Humans are routinely guilty of both.
Is this clash between truth seekers and truth twisters merely a problem for intellectuals and those who enjoy the life of the mind?
It would seem so, given that the vast majority of humans shy away from intellectual jousting and simply run on autopilot...more worried about Twitter and Trump than truth.
Or are all humans double-faced, "dissonance in human form," as Nietzsche expressed it?
I agree with Nietzsche, and so does the bible. See Romans 3:4, 7:18, 1st Cor. 2:14
What does Kant's view of the "crooked timber" of our humanity mean for our thinking and understanding?
Not much, its just an overstatement about humanity's negative tendencies. Not much different than the pissed off man who says "this world is a nut house".
And what is it that W. H. Auden glimpses when he writes that "the desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews"? Is this merely a colorful metaphor, or is there more there that we should take seriously?
same answer.
The Bible's answer takes us to the very heart of its diagnosis of unbelief, for in the biblical view the central core of the anatomy of unbelief stems from its willful abuse of truth.
Which means you are a fundamentalist, and nothing about the obvious reality of Semitic exaggeration (Copan and Flannagan, 2010) makes you fear such tendencies infected the bible's
theological statements. When in fact is Copan and Flannagan are right, they are opening the door to the stark possibility that many bible passages, whose literal interpretation has been the basis of Christian doctrine for centuries, were never intended to be taken that literally.
In our treatment of truth we, and all human beings, are at the same time both truth seekers and truth twisters, and in a deep, mercurial, tenacious and fateful way. Sometimes we seek to conform our thinking to reality, and just as often we try to conform reality to our thinking.
Then you might wish to have a talk with that other guy who posts regularly at Triablogue...Steve Hays. he is a staunch 5-point Calvinist. His acceptance of the 1st point of Calvinism forbids him from saying anything morally good about non-Christians. Sin has blinded them, and if predestined by God to go to hell, any "good" about them is purely temporal and thus too insignificant to be worthy of discussion.
As Sir Thomas More's protagonist Hythloday argued in his Utopia, and the seventeenth-century Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole argued later, human beings "not being willing to render their actions to conform to the Law of God,
Then these men apparently never read Luke 1:6, they weren't inerrantists.
have endeavored to render the Laws of God to conform to their actions."
again, typical overstatement by a conservative Christian with Reformed leanings.
From Genesis and the story of the fall onward, a host of passages convey this understanding,
And a host of passages show the sinner's ability to actually please god by obeying the law. Luke 1:6, Luke 19:8-9, see also Moses' statement that obeying the entire law is
not too difficult (Deuteronomy 30:11), and King David's boast that God approved of him
because David was actually righteous in conformity to God's law (Psalm 7:8, 18:20-25, etc). It is precisely the "earn your salvation by conformity to the law" stuff in the bible that forced millions of inerrantists to recognize that the only way to maintain biblical inerrancy is to become a dispensationalist (i.e., God's rules for salvation of humanity changed several times between Adam and Paul). Whereas a better explanation is theological evolution...later generations of biblical authors became dissatisfied with the old way and created new ways.
but one of the deepest is in the first chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Romans.
Seems much wiser to build one's doctrinal foundation upon the one authority that is least likely to be wrong, Jesus, then argue that because the word of the undisputed Lord is sufficient, the complexities and potential for heresy brought about by trying to trust theological teachings more distant from Christ than the gospels, justifies shitcanning them.
Unfortunately, while the synoptic Jesus obviously thought people to be sinners, he didn't believe this made them wholly incapable of pleasing god apart from "grace". The Jesus of John's gospel is mostly fictionalized history, and in the judgment of most Christian scholars, historical truth about Jesus is less secure in John and more secure in Matthew, Mark and Luke. That much should have been obvious immediately after one reads the esoteric first verse of John. And his belief that you've seen all you need to see to get saved, after you merely read his words (John 20:31) is in sheer contradiction to today's Christian apologist, who denies that your reading of the gospel of John is perfectly sufficient to render you inexcusably accountable to God. If they seriously believed that, they would find studies in the historical reliability of the gospels and all of the more complex issues that attend modern Christian apologetics efforts as utterly unnecessary and likely to introduce more complexity and confusion into the picture.
Bursting with gratitude and pride at the glory and power of the gospel and its way of righting wrong in the world, the apostle turns to consider human disobedience and its consequences. Among the many claims he makes in a famous passage on sin and cultural degeneration, he asserts that those who disobey God "suppress the truth in unrighteousness" (Rom 1:18).
Sort of like saying that if you disobey the posted speed limit, you are suppressing the truth of the speed limit. Yet you don't know of any Christians that have ever drawn such extreme negative conclusions from disobedience to speed limit laws. But Paul's argument for the entire worlds' accountability before god is worthy of dismissal since he premises his conclusion on his prior recounting of how a small portion of humanity once knew god and then apostatized. The truth of ancient Israelite apostasy does not dictate what's true about every human being, and Romans 1:21 sets the context as the humans
who once knew god, a description that is not true for the vast majority of human beings in history. So Paul's induction from a small sample to a large generalization at this point is utterly fallacious. You may as well conclude from the Calvinists that live in the United States, that everybody in the world knows that Calvinism is biblically justified..which would then, under your logic, compel the conclusion that Arminians secretly believe Calvinism is biblical, sin just makes them wish very hard that it was wrong. Little else could represent prideful blindness than the Calvinist who is so cocksure in his imperfect theological opinions.
The Bible uses many strong terms to describe unbelief, including hardening, twisting, blindness, deafness, unnaturalness, lies, deception, folly, rebellion and madness,
The bible also uses absolute terms when recounting God's demand that his people slaughter children. In Deuteronomy 20:13-17, the command to destroy all of the people in the nations near Israel is set in contrast to the prior command to spare the woman and children of the nations further away. If we must nevertheless agree with Copan and Flannagan (2010) that such absolute terms were a case of typical Semitic exaggeration (i.e., God didn't want the Israelites to kill off every last man woman and child in the nearby nations), we have to wonder just how many other words in the bible, whose surface meaning has been the basis for Christian doctrine for centuries, are in reality just more mere Semitic exaggeration. You can start with Paul's out-of-context quotes in Romans 3:10-19.
but none repays reflection more than Paul's phrase in Romans. At the heart of sin and disobedience, Paul says, is a flagrantly deliberate and continuing act of violence to truth.
But common sense says not every transgression is willful.. Given how much the case for God and Christianity sucks, I have no fears that maybe the common sense is false merely because it contradicts the bible, I'm rather inclined to say if it contradicts the bible, its chances of being truthful are dramatically increased.
Sin and disobedience lay hold of truth, grasp it roughly, and will not let it be what it naturally is or say what it naturally says.
Or maybe human beings are just intelligent mammals and when they steal bubble gum from the corner store at 6 years old, it is nowhere near as complex as you dream, its about as simple as a dog stealing food from another dog.
In this way, the deliberate dynamic of unbelief is to suppress truth, stifle truth and hold truth hostage.
I can do that better that you: When you disobey god's law, you are using a red hot steak knife to vaginally rape the innocent baby of truth while using a hammer to claw out its eyes while gleefully laughing at its groans of pain and misery...all while on national tv as the parents look on and die from grief alone.
If you are going to engage in obvious overstatement to make your readers remember whatever lesson you intend, why set limits? The more shockingly gross the metaphor, the more likely your intended audience will get and retain the message, amen?
What may be known about God, Paul says, is quite evident still, but it is adamantly denied by the determined act of will that is sin and unbelief.
Only because he engages in the fallacy of induction and uses the apostasy of the ancient Israelites to broadbrush all of humanity.
The phrase grasp the nettle is too weak to picture what Paul is talking about, but it does begin to capture how the sheer force of a grip can be enough to counter the normal thrust of the nettle's sting. The experience of a hijacking comes far closer. When a terrorist hijacks a plane and holds the passengers hostage, he can put a gun to the head of the pilot and force him to fly wherever the terrorist wants, anywhere other than its intended destination. Just so, says Paul, unbelief looks at the undeniable truth of God's universe and at the unbeliever's own nature made in the image of God, but then denies their true force, suppresses their real meaning and turns their proper destination into a different one.
I have to wonder how many asshole Christian parents will use such glowing metaphor while scolding their children for typical disobedience. Is little johnny holding his mother's imposed 9 p.m. bedtime "hostage", with a gun to its head...(!?) What a fucking fool you are to imitate the ways of the deluded biblical authors.
The prophet Micah had charged that Israel's false leaders "twist everything that is straight" (Mic 3:9 NASB), but Paul goes deeper in analyzing that the heart of unbelief centers on its active abuse of truth.
It would be a mistake to hurry past this phrase or dismiss it as only a dramatic metaphor, for Paul's point grounds and underscores a variety of themes that run throughout the entire Scriptures when describing sin.
Only if you are sure that the typical Semitic exaggeration that Copan and Flannagan (2010) say inhere in biblical statement, do not inhere in Paul's admittedly Semitic styled writings. But once you allow that Semitic exaggeration might also be true within Paul's theological statements, it assures the death of conservative Christian theology. Every time the bible talks shit about non-Christians, this is likely just typical overstatement by an ancient Semitic author, or ancient Semitic NT author clearly trying to imitate the OT author.
Four prominent emphases recur most frequently, and together they form a multilayered view of the dark willfulness of sin, disobedience and unbelief.
First, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of suppression. Unbelief seizes truth, grasps it roughly, silences its voice and twists it away from God's intended purpose. By itself, truth speaks naturally and clearly, but its voice is censored, blocked and silenced, so that it is no longer allowed to speak as it does naturally:
They say to God, "Leave us alone; we do not want to know Your ways." (Job 21:14 NLV)
You who hate correction
and turn your back when I am speaking? (Ps 50:17 NEB)
They have denied the LORD,
saying, "He does not exist." (Jer 5:12 NEB)
For crime after crime of Edom
I will grant them no reprieve,
because, sword in hand, they hunted their kinsman down,
stifling their natural affections. (Amos 1:11 NEB)
Second, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of exploitation. Unbelief not only suppresses the real truth and twists it away from God's true ends, but wrests it toward its own ends and its own agenda.
The men who now live in Jerusalem have said, "Keep your distance from the LORD; the land has been made over to us as our property." (Ezek 11:15 NEB)
But you trusted to your beauty and prostituted your fame. (Ezek 16:15 NEB)
O Tyre, you said,
"I am perfect in beauty," . . .
they hung shield and helmet around you,
and it was they who gave you your glory. (Ezek 27:4, 10 NEB)
Your beauty made you arrogant,
you misused your wisdom to increase your dignity. (Ezek 28:17 NEB)
Listen to this, leaders of Jacob,
rulers of Israel,
you who make justice hateful
and wrest it from its straight course. (Mic 3:9 NEB)
Third, unbelief goes further still and abuses truth through a deliberate act of inversion. Unbelief not only suppresses truth and exploits it for its own ends, but seizes it and turns it completely upside down, inside out and the wrong way around, and then holds it there for its own purposes. Above all, through inversion we as creatures put ourselves in the place of our Creator, and we believe our own lie rather than God's truth. We make ourselves gods instead of God, so that proper self-love becomes prideful self-centering love. As Niebuhr states bluntly, "In an ultimate sense the self never knows anything against itself." In terms of truth, we are always self-right. In terms of goodness, we are always self-righteous. And in terms of God, we are always our own gods.
In John Milton's "Paradise Lost," Satan is unequivocally clear: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" or "Evil, be thou my good." Sartre expressed this dynamic famously when he said, "To be man means to reach toward being God." And before him, Nietzsche declared in the same spirit, "If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god?" Carl Gustav Jung recognized that this was the heart of Nietzsche's assertion of the Superman. It is "the thing in man that takes the place of God." After the triumph of the Russian revolution, Lenin even had "God-defying" towers designed to demonstrate his Babel-like and Promethean pretentions, though most of them were never built. As these examples show, sin is essentially and willfully narcissistic, and it includes both a truth claim ("God is dead") and a task ("I am now out to be God in my life").
Dismissed.
Sin, then, is the claim to the right to myself,
And I'm guessing you think it fallacious for a human being to assume they have a purely naturalistic right to themselves. What's next? Presuppositionalism? The unbeliever cannot even cough without thereby proving by his actions that Jesus rose from the dead? LOL. Or maybe you aren't really sure exactly how much time I should spend responding to Jeff Durbin and Steve Hays, or how much time I should spend reading Christian evidentialist critiques of Van Til?
and all our worldviews as unbelievers are in part a shrine to ourselves.
But since the bible's warning against idolatry are about as serious as a toddler's warning to "gimmie", it really doesn't matter if non-Christian views constitute idolatry.
This can be seen most clearly when atheism declines naturally into its religious phase, as it so often does (as in Auguste Comte's "religion of humanity," Alain de Botton's "religion for humanity" or Sam Harris's atheistic "spirituality"). We humans then become both idolater and idol, though we mask the folly from ourselves. The absurdity betrays itself, however, in various odd developments that take place. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, pointed out that the same people who scornfully dismiss the doctrine of three persons in one God as irrational, think nothing of worshiping seven billion persons in one God.
then count me out. As an atheist, I don't view anything as a "god". That's not going to become fallacious merely because you ascribe to some asinine theory that equates one's efforts to survive and thrive, with "idolatry". You may as well say I have turned a piece of dust in to an idol shine because I chose to wipe it off the table without asking God's permission to do so. But we already knew you weren't writing for anybody except those who already agree with your beliefs. So you are forgiven for the absurd weakness of whatever you are "defending".
Such statements are only the modern corroboration of the biblical view of sin, and the reason why John Calvin spoke of our human hearts as an idol-making factory.
According to 1st Kings 9:4, you'll have to exempt King David from that criticism (despite the fact that he was a polygamist and guilty of the capital crimes of adultery and murder). Unless you wish to create disaster by committing to the premise that
this bible verse is a case of typical Semitic exaggeration? Gee, I wonder how many other bible verses, whose literal surface meaning is the basis for the most ancient Christian doctrines, were also mere typical Semitic exaggeration? Might we start with biblical statements that Jesus is God?
St. Paul made the same point centuries earlier. Unbelievers reject God and, in an act of absurd inversion, worship the creature rather than the Creator.
What would you say to a crazy unbeliever who was intentionally starving themselves to death? If you had any Christian compassion, you would encourage them to eat something. But according to your above-cited logic, you'd be encouraging them to commit idolatry, since without more, their taking your advice would result in their eating
before they accepted Christ as savior, and according to your logic, doing ANYTHING in absence of faith amounts to worshiping the creature more than the creator. The sheer stupidity of your logic is precisely why i occasionally exclaim "FUCK YOU" to the person I'm critiquing. I have no patience for fence posts who pose as theologians.
They swap the splendor of the immortal and infinite God for breakable images of things that are puny and mortal like ourselves,
You are assuming the bible-god is infinite. Many Christians, called open-theists, would disagree. What materials on the open theism/classical theism in-house Christian debate do you recommend I read, and how much time do you recommend I spend studying the subject before you'll agree it's enough to justify me in starting to draw ultimate conclusions about the issue...and how do you know your recommendations are reflecting God's desires? (or do you get around that by simply being a Calvinist, and like Steve Hays, conveniently ascribe to God's infallible predestining decree just anything that pops out of your mouth?)
and they exchange the natural, God-given view of sexuality for unnatural forms.
that doesn't describe me. I'm an atheist and I argue that all forms of male homosexuality are no less a deviation from nature than sexual intercourse between an adult man and a two year old girl.
Earlier still, the Hebrew prophets focused on this same inversion, and excoriated the skeptics and the enemies of God for the ludicrous absurdity of what they were doing in worshiping idols.
Shall the axe set itself up against the hewer,
or the saw claim mastery over the sawyer,
as if a stick were to brandish him who wields it,
or the staff of wood is to wield one who is not wood? (Is 10:15 NEB)
How you turn things upside down,
as if the potter ranked no higher than the clay!
Shall the thing made say of its maker, "He did not make me"?
Shall the pot say of the potter, "He has no skill"? (Is 29:16 NEB)
In your arrogance you say, "I am a god; I sit throned like a god on the high seas." Though you are a man and no god, you try to think the thoughts of a god. (Ezek 28:2 NEB)
Semitic exaggeration, you are building your doctrines on an incorrectly literal reading of those texts.
Fourth, unbelief abuses truth through a deliberate act of deception that ends in its own self-deception. Unbelief seizes God's truth, twists it away from God's purposes and toward its own, and is therefore forced to deny the full reality of the truth it knows.
Steve Hays, a Calvinist, would disagree. In his word of absolutely infallible predestination, a world where God has secretly willed everything people do, including their violations of god's revealed will, any notion that somebody acted contrary to god's will, is logically impossible. But if you more correctly stated that by sinning we disobey God's "revealed will", we will naturally point out that because you didn't say our sin violates god's secret will, it remains possible that our sins are considered good by the god who wanted us to sin that way, in which case God has no moral right to bitch at us, lest you stupidly commit yourself to the premise that your god condemns and otherwise bitches at people for doing exactly
what he wanted them to do,
when he wanted them to do it,
how he wanted them to do it, and
where he wanted them to do it.
But in the futile act of trying to deny the undeniable, it both deceives others and deceives itself, and so becomes self-deceived.
But since this was in conformity to the (secret) will of God, God's condemning such activity is akin to the parent who disciplines and condemns a child for doing an act that the parent took great pains to make sure the child would commit. God is like the parent who instructs the teen to avoid drinking alcohol, then leaves her alone for a week in a house stocked full of her favorite liquor, then pretends to be all upset when the inevitable happens...then the parent pretends she herself cannot be blamed for facilitating the sin because she didn't reveal her "secret" will that the daughter disobey mom's "revealed" will. FUCK YOUR GOD. See
here.
Unbelief therefore manufactures not only idols but illusions.
And if these are in conformity to God's secret will, your god would have to be insane to be angry that people manufactured idols and illusions. You will say God doesn't get "angry" but the OT passages that say different must be interpreted in the light of how the originally intended largely pre-literate goat herders would have understood it. Deuteronomy 9:19-20 says God has hot anger toward sinners, and NT writers themselves take the same type of language in literal fashion to prop up their own theological opinions. See Hebrews 10:28-29, 1st Corinthians 10:6-11.
The philosopher Marar writes, "As our hearts can't stop pumping blood, so our minds can't stop pumping illusions."
and under Calvinism, who wanted human minds to operate this way? The same god that condemns them for acting according to the sinful nature
he wanted them to be plagued with? How about the nurse who intentionally infects a child with AIDS, then condemns the child for exhibiting the symptoms that naturally attend having AIDS? FUCK YOU. No wonder you fucking idiots have a doctrine that god's ways are mysterious. You already know biblical bullshit doesn't wash.
26 In that sense, all unbelieving worldviews are not only a shrine to those who hold them but a shelter from God and his truth.
The logic behind this drive to deception and self-deception is simple. If sin is the claim to "the right to myself," it includes the claim to "the right to my view of things." And since we are each finite, "my view of things" is necessarily restricted and simply cannot see the full picture. We therefore turn a blind eye to all other ways of seeing things that do not fit ours, and especially to God's view of things. As theologian N. T. Wright points out, trees behave as trees, rocks as rocks and the seas as the seas, but "Only humans, it seems, have the capacity to live as something other than what they are."
That's total bullshit and philosophically contradictory. There is no such thing as living different than what you are. The man who dresses and acts like a woman cannot do a successful job of it. Not even God can do this, therefore, he would not have the power to create any life form that could do it. But since you Christians believe in other similarly contradictory theology, like Jesus being a single person composed of "two natures", I guess we should expect such ignorance to seep into your other beliefs.
There is therefore a close link between the prideful love of self, its aversion to the full truth and its creation of illusions. Kierkegaard wrote, "But spiritually understood, man in his natural condition is sick, he is in error, in an illusion, and therefore desires most of all to be deceived, so that he may be permitted not only to remain in error but to find himself thoroughly comfortable in his self-deceit."
Something the Calvinist god is pleased with because its exactly what he ordered.
St. Augustine and his later disciples, such as Pierre Nicole, developed the same point. A key part of deception and self-deception is the fact that evil must imitate good, unbelief must copy truth, and vice must mimic virtue. Thus whereas properly ordered love relates everything to God in trust,
In which case, the little girl who gets mad at god for not protecting her from rape, is inexcusably guilty of idol worship.
gratitude and humility, improperly ordered self-love relates everything to itself in prideful self-love. Such pride works constantly on behalf of its own body and its own mind in two ways. First, it serves the self-love of its body through the pursuit of pleasures; and second, it serves the self-love of its mind through the pursuit of approval and honor.
Needless to say, the latter is fateful as the source of our human hypocrisy. If we can act so as to produce the appearance and effects of proper love in spite of motives that are quite contrary and come from improper self-love, we can appear to be honorable and generous before our fellow humans. Just so did the Pharisees love to pray on street corners in the sight of all, and just so many big givers have loved to have their benefactions trumpeted to all when there is little real love behind their generosity. Just so, as we shall see later, does sin's imitation of good deeds provide a stalking horse for hypocrisy. We may despise blatant self-love when we see it in others, and we certainly do not want others to see it in us. So we mask our own motives to produce the consequences that will win us the approval and admiration of others. In Nicole's words, this is a "Traffick of Self-love," but one in which we "find satisfaction in this lovely Idea of ourselves."
The indissoluble link between prideful self-love, aversion to truth, self-deception and hypocrisy is one of the great themes of the Bible—for example, the drumbeat repetition that "the way of a fool is right in his own eyes" (Prov 12:15). Sinful minds therefore claim both self-rightness in terms of truth and self-righteousness in terms of goodness. This theme is prominent in St. Augustine's Confessions, and comes directly from his own radical self-scrutiny in light of the teaching of the Bible. "Falsehood," he wrote, "is nothing but the existence of something which has no being." But if this is so, "He who utters falsehoods utters what is his alone," for nothing is more private than a newly minted lie. There is therefore a lie at the heart of each person's unbelief, and Augustine speaks of it as "the huge fable which I loved instead of you, my God, the long drawn lie which our minds were always itching to hear." Augustine brings all the themes together in one extraordinary passage in book 10 of Confessions:
Man's love of truth is such that when he loves something which is not the truth, he pretends to himself that what he loves is the truth, and because he hates to be proved wrong, he will not allow himself to be convinced that he is deceiving himself. So he hates the real truth for what he takes to his heart in its place.
Once again, your god is a fuckhead, which seems to be the only logical explanation for why he pretends that the perfect fulfillment of hisd (secret) will by humans, makes him "angry"with them:
---Dad: "Son, you took out the garbage in the exact time, place and manner that I
secretly intended. But in my revealed will, I told you to take out the garbage in a different time and manner. Now shame on you for conforming perfectly to my secret will and for disobeying my revealed will! You are grounded for a month and you should feel guilty for doing something in the exact way I actually wanted you to".
---Son: Why are you finding fault if my acts were in perfect conformity to your secret will? Would you have been pleased if I had disobeyed your secret will?
---Dad: Silence! Who are you to talk back to me? Romans 9:20"
LOL... and FUCK YOUR DOGSHIT CALVINISM.
Some people scoff at this passage as the jaundiced thinking of a Calvinist before Calvin. But there has never been so much evidence for the omnipresence of deceit, and there has never been an age like ours that offers so many inducements to deception. For a start, this is the era of the "looking-glass self" and of "impression management," an age that is bursting with multiple reinforcements of our capacity for deception. These range from the lack of face-to-face reality in the new social media to the proliferation of modern enhancements, such as cosmetics, Viagra, Botox and plastic surgery, to the improved science of selling, propaganda and manipulation. But even these are beside the point, for modern thinking has only deepened our understanding of how human and how common deception is and always has been. As Pascal wrote centuries ago, "Human society is founded on mutual deceit."
Consider the whole treatment of the unconscious, mixed motives, rationalizations, white lies, "cognitive dissonance," alter egos and "shadow personalities." Consider the place of "active forgetfulness" and deliberate "inhibition" in Nietzsche and postmodern thinking, and the former's view of humanity as "incarnated forgetfulness." Think of the enduring appeal of books such as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Or consider D. H. Lawrence's reflections on our human capacity for self-deception. Human knowledge, he argued, is broadly of two kinds—the things humans tell themselves and the things they find out. The trouble is that the things humans tell themselves are nearly always pleasant, but they are lies. Why?
Man is a thought-adventurer. He has thought his way down the far ages . . . which brings us to the real dilemma of man in his adventure with consciousness. He is a liar. Man is a liar unto himself. And once he has told himself a lie, round and round he goes after that lie, as if it was a bit of phosphorous on his nose-end. The pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire wait for him to have done. They stand silently aside, waiting for him to rub the ignis fatuus off the end of his nose. But man, the longer he follows a lie, becomes all the surer he sees the light. . . . Ahead goes the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, through the wilderness of time. Till man tells himself a lie, another lie. Then the lie goes before him like the carrot before the ass.
In Marar's survey of the modern understanding of deception, he summarizes the situation simply: "Our minds are equipped with a convincing knack for cooking the facts, whether future, present or past." Can there, then, be any quarrel with the diagnosis of the Bible, which has long seen deception and self-deception as an inescapable part of human living and a core feature of unbelief? Deceit and the folly of trusting deceit are core themes in the prophets.
I'm not seeing why you are apparently trying to motivate people to disobey god's secret will that they engage in idolatry and deception. If you already believe God predestined all sin, you are a fool to carry on as if sinners have any ability to control anything in their lives, the attitude most other people have when trying to teach.
For example, Jeremiah:
The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it? (Jer 17:9)
Typical Semitic exaggeration. Your theology is built on a falsely literal interpretation of ancient rhetoric.
Realism about deception and self-deception is a hallmark of the Christian mind.
more accurate to say "conservative Christian mind", because liberal Christians go nowhere near the theological house of burning cards you've constructed with this pathetically unnecessary detour into useless theologizing.
Reinhold Niebuhr was fearless in applying it to thinking about foreign relations, but how much more is it relevant to apologetics. Niebuhr argued that the folly of the modern mind is to make the precision of scientific thinking the model for all human thinking, and so to forget the bias, self-interest and moral defect at the heart of all thinking—sometimes even in thinking about science. According to his analysis, which makes St. Paul's diagnosis central, human thinking has caught itself in a triple bind. First, all human thinking is sinful. As finite, fallen and sinful creatures, our thinking can never be other than self-interested to some degree. Second, all human thinking is idolatrous. As humans made in the image of God, we still have a spiritual and rational power that can inflate even our worst and most self-interested thinking beyond its natural range. And third, all human thinking is hypocritical. Rather than acknowledging the bias and self-interest in our thinking, we are able to hide our dishonesty by aligning our ideas with higher ideals and more general interests—so that we can appear nobler and more generous than we really are.
So the moral defect perpetuates itself down through history, but we refuse to admit that our problem is much more than ignorance.
A refusal that god intended for us to engage in...leaving him no moral right to bitch, except perhaps on the condition that god's mind truly does appear to fulfill all elements humans require to be confident that the person at issue is authentically insane. Getting mad at us for doing
exactly what he wanted? FUCK YOU.
It turns on the impossibility of genuinely disinterested thinking because of the demonic twisting of sin.
What the demons do is morally good, because the hyper-Calvinist god secretly willed it...and whatever God wants, must be a morally good thing...right?
Sin insinuates itself into all human thinking, so that even the loftiest and most high-minded thinking of both individuals and nations displays certain common features. There is, Niebuhr writes, an "implicit idolatry," a "constitutional self-righteousness," a "lurking dishonesty," a "stupidity of sin" and a "spiritual source of corruption" in history that leads to a "vain imagination" and finally to "spiritual impotence." This is the reason why human ideals are never able to fulfill the soaring visions of which they dream. It is also the reason why these recurring features stain all our thinking and sow the weeds of the ironies and unintended consequences that grow alongside our better ideas. Behind the crooked timber of our humanity are our crooked minds, and that crooked timber now warps even the brightest and best visions that flow from it.
If all this is so, can there be any question that our Christian advocacy must never be a matter of trundling out tried and trusty one-size-fits-all arguments and surefire proofs? Pascal described the challenge well. "We think playing upon man is like playing upon an ordinary organ. It is indeed an organ, but strange, shifting and changeable. Those who know only how to play an ordinary organ would never be in tune on this one. You have to know where the keys are."
Your post was a complete waste of time, since under Calvinism, god intended for humanity to engage in all the sinful behavior you describe...and if god willed it...then by logical necessity it MUST be morally good...so why are you trying to dissaude people from doing that which is morally good? Because that sadistic lunatic you call a god simply burped and you felt obligated to bow? LOL.
So, is it objectively morally good when a man rapes a little girl to death in conformity to God's secret will, yes or no? Look at the logical syllogism that Calvinism and "god's secret will" implies:
Everything god wills, is by definition objectively morally good.
The Calvinist god wills men to rape children.
Therefore, the Calvinist god thinks men raping children is objectively morally good.
I thus reject Calvinism as a horrifically absurd example of the stupidity that can be put in motion when one takes bible inerrancy and bible canon further than the bible itself actually does.
