My atheist friend, back for more, writes:
Atheists don't crib from "Judeo-Christian morality" but try to follow the Golden Rule, something that existed in human thought and morality long, long before Jesus or even the Hebrews and is taught by all religions and philosophies in one form or another.
My reader is apparently unaware that there is a distinction between the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you') and various forms of natural law which prescribe a sort of rough and ready sociableness that can vary widely from culture to culture. It is simply not the case that all cultures "basically say the same thing" and it is emphatically not the case that the Golden Rule is the same thing as, for instance, "Love your friends and hate your enemies" (which is really what my reader means).
I replied:
Um. No. It wasn’t. And atheists don’t believe the Golden Rule any more than most humans do, since the Golden Rule ultimately means “love your enemy”: a development that absolutely required the Christian revelation to be articulated and which is hard even for most of us Christians to buy, much less live. The notion that the Golden Rule is self-evident is adorably naive. Atheists have a rough and ready awareness of the natural law, as do almost all non-sociopaths. But there are a hundred refinements on the natural law that are deeply and uniquely Christian which ignorant atheists take for grant (as you do) as “taught by all religions and philosophies”. Among them, for instance, are things like “judge not” and “be humble”. Whole religious traditions exist which ignore such details–and which regard love for enemies as utter folly. You are, I repeat, amazingly insular and provincial.
And you are blissfully ignorant of the difference between relying on natural law (which anybody can do) and being able to account for natural law (which ultimately requires a transcendent God). You haven’t even caught up with a real atheist like Richard Rorty.
At this point, an atheist with his wits about him would have tried to insist that examples can be found of non-Christians who have behaved with love (or at least respect) for enemies. One thinks of Saladin or King David showing mercy to enemies, for instance. Or Socrates speaking calmly in the face of his unjust execution at the hands of a kangaroo court. A case could be made that, while nobody besides Christ really formulates "Do unto Others" as including "enemies" in the class of "others", nonetheless there are examples outside the Church of people who live the command as though it is written on their hearts if not in their literature.
But no. Instead my atheist reader, fresh from telling me that Christianity's ethics are completely cribbed from the Great Pool of Indistinguishable Religious Traditions Who All Have the Same Ethics, now blurts out:
The Golden Rule is "do to others as you want to be done by", taught by all religious teachers, not so much "love your enemy" which always struck me as a ridiculously impossible and self-defeating commandment.
If you want to love Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden, or Dennis Rader (the BTK serial killer) go right ahead, but that strikes me as little more than high-sounding masochism.
And "judge not"? It seems to me Christians do an awful lot of judging, especially in sexual matters.
Once again, I feel despair for the state of atheism. He claims Christians stole the Golden Rule from All the Religions and Philosophies of the World and there is no difference--and then immediately contradicts himself by saying that there's a huge difference because Jesus understood the Golden Rule to mean "love your enemies" which is crazy and wrong and no other religion says that. In short, all religions are equally superior to the Christian faith. Or maybe he just means "I will say anything to win an argument, no matter how incoherent". At any rate, I write:
Enemies are included in the class "others". You are refuting yourself. Make up your mind. Does Christianity say the same thing as everybody else or not?
Try to pay attention. I'm not claiming Christians aren't judgmental. I'm saying there's a real difference between a tradition that condemns judgmentalism as a sin and one that commends it as a virtue. Your moral code, because it steals from Christianity, assumes that judgmentalism is a sin. But there are whole religious traditions (like the people in that link above) which frankly and openly commend judgmentalism and do not regard it as a sin at all. Result: when you--in your provincial, insular, suburban, and ignorant assumption that all religions are the same--condemn those people for their judgmentalism it has no effect because they could not care less about your assumption that hubris, pride and judgmentalism are sins. Why? Because they do not take for granted the Christian moral code that you are ripping off and presuming to be universal.
After this, my atheist reader then contributes to a discussion about this article by switching gears without benefit of a clutch. Whereas earlier he had condemned the Church for its judgmental violence, now he was suddenly railing the the Church for being pantywaists who are afraid to hate and kill:
It isn't like the Christian solution to these thugs isn't lacking. What are you going to do? Tell them you love them? Im sure that will make them quake in their boots. The most outspoken opponents of radical Islam have been secularists and atheists, and we don't have any guilt about hating our enemies and defeating them.
He then went on by disgorging himself of this considered opinion:
The Soviets were petty damn effectictive at de-Islamizing central asia. Burning burkas and veils public bonfires is more effective than kissing disgusting books like the Koran.
Yes. You read that right. He actually appealed to the experience of a mass murdering utopian totalitarian regime which broke itself on the rock of Afghanistan as the model for a truly rational response to Radical Islam. Because, the Soviet Union in the 80s was such a massive success story for atheism vs. that fool John Paul II. It was, at least, refreshing to see an atheist frankly and openly admit to the worship of violence in his construction of Utopia and not, like Christopher Hitchens, try to pretend that the great atheistic regimes of the Commies were not atheistic.
Still and all, after decrying the "nasty brutish" behavior of Old Testament Jews and medieval Christian crusaders earlier in the week, it was rather comical to hear my atheist reader, full of that Golden Rule of his, solving the Problem of Evil with the simple declaration, "if they’re jihadists that want to bomb skyscrapers putting a bullet in their head or dropping a cluster bomb sounds like the right answer to me. If they’re not violent, deport them to their ancestral craphole before they turn us into a carbon copy of it. A little more effective than praying for them, for sure." In short, he is quite as willing to resort to violence to deal with a mortal foe as any Crusader or ancient Israelite; he just doesn't want to be bothered with those parts of the Christian tradition which regard violence as a regrettable last resort inflicted on fellow sinners for whom Christ died. He prefers violence done in frank and open hatred of the enemy without even the restraining factor of a hope of redemption for them. And this, he believes, is the Golden Rule, not to mention the wave of the secularizing future and not the immemorial room temperature attitude of fallen man since the dawn of time, contradicted by the author of the real Golden Rule, Jesus Christ. It all reminded me of something Chesterton remarked on a century ago:
It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.
Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian," especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting. The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile. Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way, were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem tenable that there was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels. The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different. I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never was angry. And now I was told to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun. The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did. The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape every instant.
This whole contradictory project of trying to say "Nothing about the New Testament is new" coupled with the cry that the New Testament is entirely new and outlandish in its moral demands to love enemies (among numerous other outrageous claims such as "This man is very God and raised from the dead") was already white-whiskered a century ago. But New Atheists--whose intellects often retain a pristine innocence of such knowledge owing their being worshipped instead of used--tend to say such things while remaining stone blind, not only to the contradictions in their own position, but to the fact that they are the umpteenth person to voice the contradiction. Chesterton again:
The one real objection to the Christian religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is a big place, full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies--I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of all humanity founded on the omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense. It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing "Thou shalt not steal." It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be "Little boys should tell the truth." I believed this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still-- with other things. And I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had. We could trust the ethics of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two hundred years, but not in two thousand.
So it goes.
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A couple of these are not really the golden rule, and a couple are surely after Christ, but your friend is right about the golden rule predating Christ, if only accidentally.
“You are, I repeat, amazingly insular and provincial.”
If you’re going to insult your opponents, you ought to at least be witty about it ;)
Erik, old son: If you’re going to comment on a blog, you should at least read the post first.
He acts as if Christians/Christ simply invented/stole the idea of loving your enemy. God is eternal. That “law” has always existed. It might not have been revealed, but it is the original plan. So if anyone stole anything, it’s every other religion who stole the concept of love one another/do unto others. They just didn’t get the entire memo. None of us did. But Jesus didn’t suddenly come up with the addendum “love your enemies”.
He only revealed what was there all along. We were always supposed to love our enemies. We just didn’t know it.
Also, there is a HUGE difference between judging behavior and judging persons. It is noble to call out sinful behavior, which is different from judging souls. For a guy that complains about us being judgmental he sure does a lot of judging.
It’s like the “CHOICE” crowd. Everyone must be free to CHOOSE, provided they choose what they are told to choose. Do they really not see how they contradict themselves? Stay our of my bedroom/pay for my birth control. Don’t judge, he judges. My Body My Choice they cry as they destroy someone elses body. *sigh*
The Tao Te Ching has a fair amount about humility and I think some Stoics did too.
“Love your enemy” is rarer and I tend to think almost non-existent outside Christianity. The closest I can think offhand is some forms of Tibetan Buddhism that emphasize “compassion meditation” to encourage compassion toward “disagreeable persons.” Although it’s possible “disagreeable persons” is as close as they get to believing in the notion of “enemies.”
Not to deny the unique or great things about Christianity. It is weird how many atheists are so poorly informed about culture, history, or humanity in general.
“whose intellects often retain a pristine innocence of such knowledge owing their being worshipped instead of used-”
I find this especially true in secularists regarding their children. They commonly brag of a child’s intellect but insist it not be used for actual thinking, debate or even worse, disciplined through any type of memorization.
Nothing better than beating an “inconsistent atheist” except for burning a straw man…
Mr. Patton:
Straw men are invented. My atheist is quite real. Will you now invoke the No True Scotsman fallacy to claim that my reader is not a True Atheist since true atheists would never say such silly things?
“It was, at least, refreshing to see an atheist frankly and openly admit to the worship of violence in his construction of Utopia and not, like Christopher Hitchens, try to pretend that the great atheistic regimes of the Commies were not atheistic.”
I once, before discovering Chesterton in my personal life, kind of resembled this remark- but I claimed that the great atheistic regimes of the Commies were not Communists, as opposed to not atheists. I took my definition of communism from the Book of Acts rather than from Karl Marx even then.
Mr. Patton- go to Mark’s blog, Catholic and Enjoying It, and read the comments by the poster “An Atheist” for the past three months. It’s a real eye opener. ALL of the quotes in this article, come from a single mind.
Atheist ethics tends to yield what game theoreticians call “the tit-for-tat” strategy, which may be summarized as “Do unto others as they have done to you.” Thus, punish lawbreakers and defend yourself against invaders. This attitude, akin to the “realist” school in foreign policy, is probably the best we can hope for from civic institutions in our fallen world. Indeed, when God laid out the Law for the Israelite people, this is largely the strategy he gave them.
However, Jesus Christ calls us to counsels of perfection. It is impractical for republics to submit to their enemies. Without grace, it is impossible for individuals to love them. With grace, we are called to love our enemies and turn the other cheek. In the strictly natural order of Darwinian evolution, this would be a losing game-theoretical strategy—the “dove strategy.” But in the supernatural order of grace, it is the strategy that wins the greatest victory of all, that over sin, death, and the entire sin-corrupted order of nature red in tooth and claw.
Chesterton lives! Chesterton rocks!
Good piece, Shea.
Has anyone converted an atheist by arguing with him? It seems like trying to get your enemy to love you by beating the crap out of him.
I know that we are supposed to “give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Pet 3:15) but honestly, I’ve never heard of anyone converting due to an argument.
There is Jesus of Nazareth, true God and true man, or there is this:
OUR SUPPER
The mass murderer is one of us
The key at the end of a long keyboard
That is only played but once -
The great lament’s unspoken word
Sometimes briefly uttered
He is no mutant and no alien,
He is the curse that Judas stuttered
He is not if but when
Long may the monster be suppressed
But when the laws of grace are broken
He the unwelcome dinner guest
Sits down at the bloody table
Says to all: This is your body
Which I with gluttony devour,
This flesh of yours is plenty,
The taste of blood is in my power
Name the false god that we chose
Now the tree of death which grows
Pavel
April 20, 2012
I mean that as a comment on a trial now ongoing in Norway. Here is an example of Dostoevsky’s “Anything is possible.”
The faith of Christ and in Christ is a renunciation of this evil that lurks within human beings, perhaps even within all of us. It calls out to those other instincts for love and self-giving which also live inside human beings, God willing within all of us.
Faith in Christ is a rebellion, perhaps a desperate rebellion, against the violent emptiness of Man without God, and the rage which dwells inside it.
didnt Christ say , “love one another as i have loved you..”?
and didnt He say ” it is Mercy i desire….” ?
and didnt He say ” if someone strikes your cheek, turn the other cheek…”
my take on this is that we have an obligation to love each other as a Christian Community, to care for, protect and defend each other, yet not take insults personally, but to show mercy and forgiveness to those who are in need of it, whether it be the poor who ask for help. or those whom we have power over such as a defeated enemy. Just my opinion
Has anyone converted an atheist by arguing with him?
Arnold Lunn and CEM Joad are two examples of atheists who succumbed to argument. However, they hail from a time when atheists used, rather than merely worshipped reason. I argue with the atheist here, not because I think he will listen, but in the hope that third party observers will compare the case he makes with the case the faith makes and conclude the Faith has the better part of the argument.
You are an atheist. You come from nothing, you are nothing, and you go to nothing. Everything you say is nothing, and everything you do comes to nothing. Therefor, anything is possible. Your only positive act of self-affirmation is suicide, which self-ratifies your nothingness. Your existence comes from God, or from nowhere.
The atheists we read in these comment boxes are atheists without guts - thank God. They divert themselves with tracts and screeds which don’t matter, not even to themselves.
Chesterton reads like he is talking about America’s own: Utah Mormonism.
Catholic altars and robes are red and abominable. Mormon altars and robes are white and delightsome.
Et cetra… I could take nearly every line from that highlighted Chesterton paragraph and abscribe it to claims made against the Universal Faith by my neighbors.
Rome is evil because (insert whatever you want) and I know Mormonism is true because (insert the exact same thing as lobbed against Peter).
I wish I were at least surrounded by Baptists and Presbyterians! At least they are consistent and not so muddle-headed and given to ancestor worship, thus sayeth Aristides the Philosopher.
Jim,
People can SAY anything. That’s the whole dang point of Mark’s article. But what do they point to to back up what they say? Why should we believe some guy, ONE guy, who claims he was visited by an angel? Why should we believe that we all become one with the universe, absorbed into some world spirit as they do in Buddhism?
I can tell you WHY the Catholic Church believes what She believes. Because there is boatloads of historical evidence and tons of eyewitnesses to back up the claims. Not so in these other religions. No, not even the Presbyterians!
Atheism is sooo boring… Myself, I’d rather take opium (religion) than a laxative (atheism).
The witnesses who saw the Resurrected Jesus were so convinced of the reality that many of them suffered very painful deaths at the hands of the authorities of the day rather than deny Jesus.
This type of witness seems powerful to me.
TeaPot562
It’s been said many times, but it needs to be said again: The early Church was either a suicide pact that went horribly wrong, or it was indeed supernaturally guided from a Roman outpost (where its Messiah was tortured and killed and dumped in a stranger’s tomb) all the way to the seat of the Empire, where, in spite of horrific and unrelenting attempts to destroy it by the greatest human power on earth, blossomed into the greatest institution on the face of the planet, and proceeded to go on a 2000-year winning streak. The odds of such a ramshackle operation surviving (much less becoming the rock of Western Civilization) beyond the first speech in front of the Temple after the Resurrection, are so infinitesimal, to even contemplate the possibility begs for some kind of cosmic laugh track.
“Cast not pearls before swine.” (Matthew 7:6)
Or, better said, “to contemplate the possibility She is not who She claims to be…”
It takes only a few lines to deduce the awful logic mistakes that about to be unleashed by the average genX/Y anti-christian. It takes only a few lines for my mind to be exploded by the likes of Chesterton. I admire your tenacity, wading through the modernist nonsense parroted by your friend. Understanding the mistakes of modernists and understanding the brilliance of Chesterton requires equally concentrated mental effort, and yet the genius is so much more pleasant and enlightening than the regurgitated drivel.
Mark Shea wrote: “Straw men are invented.”
No Mark, that is a false statement.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html
Mr. Patton:
Ah! So you prefer the No True Scotsman fallacy when a fellow atheist says something stupid. Yes, that is a common ploy with those who worship, rather than use, the intellect.
As I see it, what really is new in the New Testament is not only forgiving your enemies, but being willing to help them and suffer and even die for them, in imitation of Christ. When we do it, empires and atheists tend to convert. Even the angry sort of atheists are impressed by St Maximilian Kolbe…
Mr Shea, you really do have a great wit. It’s nice to get a little humor in the mix, the way things are nowadays.
Dr. Eric: “Has anyone converted an atheist by arguing with him? It seems like trying to get your enemy to love you by beating the crap out of him.”
—
I have managed to convince a couple atheists that Christianity isn’t completely stupid and useless and self-contradictory. It may be that argument alone will not convert anyone, but unless you can break down the idea that the thing makes no sense whatsoever, then no other method has any chance at all. Despite the fact that it is a rather silly thing to think, your standard issue new atheist thinks the phrase “God loves you” is on the same lines as “the tooth fairy loves you,” so the first order of business must be to make it clear that God is not just another tooth fairy.
—
Or in short, argument may not be sufficient, but it is necessary.
Mark Shea, I have not made any claims about the atheist in question. So to suggest that I did, is a straw man that you are easily burning down. Does this establish your intellectual prowess or just a licentious inclination that you enjoy?
Mr. Patton, do you know what a straw man is? The straw man fallacy is exaggerating your opponents view to the point where it is a view that your opponent does not in fact have, then attacking this new view which no one has because it’s an easier target.
—
But at least one person, and in fact many people, do in fact have the view which Mr. Shea presents. Ergo, he is not doing the straw man thing.
—
(And, as a matter of interest, by saying that he is arguing against a straw man, you are claiming that the position he is arguing against either doesn’t exist at all, or exists in such a small minority of people that it might as well not exist. But a specific person holds the view. So you are in fact (assuming you know what a straw man is) claiming at the very least that this person’s view is held so rarely that it’s not worth addressing, which is a claim about this person. So you’re wrong.)
Hi Mark,
When we place these “golden rules” side by side, we see their differences:
In Christianity the command is “all” positive, “all” inclusive in circumstance and parties involved, and requires action, not well wishes: “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets.” Matthew 7:12
Compare:
#Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowman. This is the entire law: the rest is commentary. Talmud, Shabbat, 31
#Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah
#Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you. Mahabharata 5 1517
#Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself. Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5
#Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. Udana-Varga 5:18
#Taoism: Regard your neighbors gain as your own gain, and your neighbors loss as your own loss. T’ai Shang Kan Ying P’ien.
#Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of lovingkindness : Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you. Analects 15:23.
God gave us free will to choose to acknowlege Him or not. Atheists are a blessing in that they keep us paying attention in our faith discernment. We all are in danger of being pulled away by our physical world. We know Atheists are loved, though they don’t yet appreciate what that means. If they acknowlege love as a goodness, they have a Theist belief, but just don’t know it yet. They are caught up in the physical “tooth fairy” belief. We pray for you!
“Faith in Christ is a rebellion, perhaps a desperate rebellion, against the violent emptiness of Man without God, and the rage which dwells inside it.”
This is why being a Christian is personally hard work for the individual and certainly a counter cultural act for the individual in the public square.
Thanks for those links Mark. Co-incidentally, or not, I scrolled through the link to Lunn’s book and landed exactly here:
“Nobody is ever converted by argument” is a popular slogan with Christian appeasers, but unilateral disarmament is as foolish in theological as in international disputes. Communists and atheists do not act on the principle that no Christian can ever be perverted by argument.
Nobody, of course, is ever wholly converted by argument, but if we exclude supernatural factors, argument is the decisive factor in many cases. It certainly was so in mine. I did not pray for guidance because I had abandoned, with relief, the practice of prayer while at Harrow. The Empty Tomb was a fascinating problem but—to me at that time—less interesting than those problems of snow and avalanche craft which I was trying to solve. My writings on snowcraft have emerged with credit from the test of scientific research, conducted in the main by Gerald Seligman, because I tried to practice what Huxley preached in the famous maxim “an assertion which outstrips the evidence is not only a blunder but a crime”, and for the same reason I was slow to commit myself to any definite theory about the Resurrection. The problems of snowcraft were scientific, the problem of the Empty Tomb historical, and in the latter case as in the former I tried to reach a solution by means of rational deductions from the available evidence. The mental process in both cases seemed to me much the same.
Whatever may be the influence of rational argument on conversion, it is certain that lack of rational argument is an important factor in perversion. Had I known what I now know I should not, as a boy, have been perverted by the specious arguments of Leslie Stephen’s “An Agnostic’s Apology” (Faber and Faber). I have just reread a symposium, “Public School Religion,” which I edited and to which the Bishop of Bradford, and the head masters of Eton and Westminster contributed. Many of the points discussed would have been equally relevant in a wider setting than the public schools, as for instance the ingrained resistance of the average boy to anything which is taught as a school subject. But experience proves that where apologetics is intelligently taught, a surprisingly large number of boys are thereby inspired to propagate the faith.
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