4 posts tagged “atheism”

Bertrand Russell, a famous 20th century logician and self-described rationalist, writes in his essay called "Liberal Decalogue" the following interesting observation:

...every opinion now accepted was once considered eccentric.

Further on, Russell elaborates on an aspect of eccentricity, namely, the ability and freedom to dissent; this bit is phrased as a command:

Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than passive agreement...for if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

This reminds me of the way we find truth wherever we go, whether we're looking for it or not. Clearly, Russell's assumptions and the starting point for his purported "rationality" is different than mine. But he's captured truth here, clear, biblical truth. How is this?

I think the answer is that God has traced His grace with an indelible pen across all of creation. This autograph of God includes the thoughts of unbelievers, non-believers, and former-believers. Folk like Russell.

So, while much could be made of dissecting Russell and his arguments against Christianity, and against theism, for the moment, I'm relishing in his golden insights.

(A good summary of Russell's career as a logician and philosopher can be found here. Go here for Russell's essay, "Why I Am Not a Christian." Here, for his essay, "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?"

It has been seriously argued that a monkey with a typewriter, given enough time, could produce all the works of Shakespeare. But have you ever heard of someone arguing that the monkey could also build the typewriter with enough time?

Leslie Newbigin makes this point in his book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, and adds, "a machine is precisely that which can never be explained without invoking the concept of purpose."

Sam Harris's new book, Letter to a Christian Nation, is a rant against Christians, specifically, and all theists, generally. It is not deeply argued. Harris gets away with ad hominems ad nausea, and fails to demonstrate that his assumptions (as an atheist) are better than mine (as a theist).

A central theme in the book is his definition of morality as the alleviation of suffering and the promotion of happiness. Interesting definition given the fact that Harris offers no basis for the belief that suffering is bad and happiness is good.

So, while he charges God-believers with all manner of evils, including the "evil" of circular reasoning, Harris fails himself to rescue himself out of his own circularity. (Sam, let us know if you ever catch your tail.)

On the whole, it is a good book for a Christian to read as it presents at least the basic problems that unbelievers and atheists have with the Faith. It is also a good book for unbelievers to read, as it shows that ranting does little to quench the thirst in the human soul for transcendent truth. Sorry, Sam. It is the way you were made.

It was a revelation for me (little "r") when I realized as a young believer that heaven isn't just the sky. Heaven is in fact the created realm in which God has condescended to dwell. Furthermore, this created realm is characterized less by vacuous and cottony clouds and more by mysterious metaphors like sapphire walls, golden streets, and nightless skies. (The image to the left is from a Chinese photoblog website.)

What is heaven really like anyway?

Belinda Carlisle's famous 1987 hit, "Heaven," was the song my Turnabout date, Lisa, and I danced to when I was a junior in high school.

I mention it is because the song was mentioned by my friend who led a group of university friends in a discussion about what heaven is like. My friend started out by asking, "What would you want heaven to be like?"

Good question.

One of my favorite movies, in the "disturbing" movie category, is The Black Robe. There's a great line from that movie where a First Nation Canadian Native was asked by a Catholic priest if he wanted to go to heaven. His answer went something like this: "Why would I want to go to a place where there is no sex, no earth, no trees, and sit on a white cloud and play a harp?"

My answer to the question, "What do I wish heaven to be like?" would fall out along these lines: feasting without fat, work without toil, love without regret, intimacy without danger, female companionship without fear of sin--true sisterly companionship, that is--and something like sex.

I add something like sex because I'm not prepared to say there is sex in heaven, though like the golden streets, if there is, its beyond whatever we can imagine here.

I was surprised in my friend's discussion that no one mentioned the seventy virgins of the Muslim hope. Martyrs, according to the Qu'ran, get the blessed hope of seventy black-eyed virgins in the great heaven. (Joking, I heard one woman say recently that seventy virgins would hardly be heaven--but that's a bit off topic.)

Back to Belinda. She says heaven is a place we make. There are two ways to make heaven, as I see it: either to get the good stuff now (as she implies) or to push the good stuff off into the future.

As an example of the latter, have you ever noticed how every hope, every aspiration, every dream, every wish gets stuffed into heaven like a messy closet? Heaven is after all where we'll see our dead goldfish and beloved Fido again, where we'll be reunited again with friends and loved ones, where we'll get the equivalent to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's rivers of chocolate milk and whipped cream daisies (that was my friend's childhood fantasy).

Other, less noble, thoughts of heaven have been promoted through the years. Mark Twain once wrote that you go to Heaven for the climate, and Hell for the company. Neitzsche said something similarly interesting: "Hell is where all the interesting people are."

Christians have deserved this with their often strict, and even gnostic, expressions of the Faith. Immanence falling prey to Transcendence. Basically, we push everything good into heaven; one wonders, are we afraid?

Sting took a potshot at the Beatitudes somewhere in the early nineties with his song that suggested that the inheritance of the earth was not that great a reward for the meek. But, seeing Heaven with a wider, more comprehensive view, being meek sounds like a good investment to me.

Be that as it may, it was observed in our discussion that we too easily forget that the chief delight of heaven is the companionship and intimacy with God. Heaven is supremely about the unhindered, unimpeded presence of Almighty God, our Triune Creator: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Of course, the key, or, in line with Charlie's Chocolate Factory--the "golden ticket"--is Jesus. Jesus is the key to heaven; His perfect life exchanged for my wretched and twisted one. His perfect reward becomes mine by believing the unseen and impossible truth: God is and can only be my Companion through the death of His Perfect Son.

Belinda Carlisle is correct that we "make" heaven a place on earth, but it isn't by losing ourselves in a "wave of love" but it is as we receive, by faith, the life and joys of the Coming Age here and now with a transcendent, immanent faith in Jesus. Then it is really true: "ooh, heaven is a place on earth." But this place is a foretaste, the foyer, of the Real Heaven, when what we know now in part, whether wine, women, or song, is then Fully Experienced.