Richard Dawkins — erstwhile captain of a veritable army of lost souls — has posted an extensive interview with Pastor Mark Roberts, the renowned New Testament scholar

…and a wonderful interview with Professor Alister McGrath.

(Concerning the Alistair McGrath interview, it needs to be noted that this was omitted from Mr Dawkins TV series “Root of All Evil”. I watched some of that disappointing series — a cynic might say this excellent interview with a great Christian intellectual was excluded because didn’t fit Mr Dawkins’ Mike-Moore-esque style of pseudo-documentary film-making.

This is what I had to say on Mr Dawkins’ comments page:

Mr Dawkins, you’re certainly right when you say that Christianity is more rational than atheism. Despite the archaic poetry it uses to express itself, there is a level of understanding in the Bible that no materialistic philosophy can approach.

As you pointed out, the proof of this is that the logical outcome of a purely materialistic atheistic ‘cult’ belief is profoundly at odds with what we we intuitively know to be true and right. Whereas Christian thought, despite its unfashionable tendency towards mysticism and an understanding that certain things cannot be understood on our plane of being (hence the need for Faith), is both logical; internally consistent; and, most importantly, consistent with our experience of the world (not to mention our experience of the presence of God, but sadly most of your readers have been denied that that).

I guess atheism is just too solipsistic to have anything useful to offer. The idea that just what ‘I’ can see and touch is enough to know the universe — apart from being philosophically risible — is so grossly unscientific that the rational mind rebels with the heart.

Thanks for your link to Dr Roberts web site. There is some very interesting material there. Isn’t it extraordinary to realise that by all objective standards the New Testament is actually the most reliable document to reach us from ancient times!

Thanks again Mr Dawkins, and I’m delighted that you have found Christ at last after all these years.

This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.
–Che Guevara

The revelation of the logical anti-gospel of no-god, as triumphantly proclaimed by the great secular preachers of our time — the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens — is abuzz the world over. I have been a bit harsh in my reaction to the devangelists of Atheism, because of course, if you study the evidence logically, they are exactly right.

All Christians are either luke-warm or mad; and all are scoundrels — pass the collection plate, God tells me He wants you to give us loads of money, Jesus loves you, please come back again. They pass their brother bleeding on the road, and puff their chests out in the house of worship. They just bend with the wind and intone their sombre utterances to whichever political master flatters them best.

As for the Catholic Church, for most of the last millennium, they were basically a totalitarian dictatorship. Yep, that’s right. I won’t deny it. Protestants, too. Luther, Calvin, Mother Theresa, all were crazed fanatics, as is anyone who assumes there is more of the world than the random movements of atoms and photons.

The Buddhists and Muslims are no better, the Jews are worse. In fact wherever you look you will see proud, wicked, self-serving hypocrites, both religious or otherwise.

Beyond the flickering cone of light provided by established science, the masses stumble in ignorance and superstition.

All humans are wretched. Even the seed of truth sown by science falls ever on barren ground. Whatever philosophy or belief, humans excel at only self interest and satisfying their urges. Any pretence of philanthropy or compassion is simply evidence of an unhealthy craving to be admired.

The Bourgeois — liberated from religion, but still smugly shackled in their imaginary moral code — still persist in the the delusion that morality can exist. In their conceit they repackage the corpse, calling it Humanism or Natural Morality. But humanism might as well be dog-ism or mud-sim. No bright wrapping can stifle the smell of an idea that is dead and decomposing. Nietzsche was right. There is no natural basis of morality. Morality is what Man creates, so let him create and destroy it freely to gain whatever advantage he may. Even the Bourgeois will embrace this bloody truth when their lives or livelihoods are threatened.

Who then can argue with the promoters of infanticide, euthanasia, abortion or eugenics? Their logic is irreproachable. No person’s life deserves special status. A life can and ought to be freely taken if the loss of it can bestow a net benefit to others. You have no soul, and nor do I. What is your life to me if by your death I might benefit?

Besides, if none will stop me, why should I care?

As for the great tyrants, let them be called Great Prophets of the the Misangelion! The prohibition of murder is just an archaic human construct. Human Elimination is the most efficient way to bring material benefit — the only benefit that exists — to the greatest number of people. So why not? The greatness of a man can only be measured by his impact on the living. Once the dead pass into non-existence, they are immediately irrelevant (even before the grass has grown over their mass graves).

What is it to stamp out human life anyway? If the Greens are to believed, and their argument is entirely logical, humanity is a destructive plague (and if it suits us, let us believe them one week and feed them into the ovens the next).

Here it is then, the logical conclusion of a purely scientific approach to life: Nothing is valid and nothing is true. There are just shifting theories; our drives and urges; and untamed nature. None of us deserve life, and everyone will die one day. Happiness and affection, love, hope, awe and sadness are worse than mere sentiment, they are chemical-induced hallucinations. There is no purpose to life, and nothing has any meaning. Do whatever gives you stimulation, and answer to no one and no thing.

The devil spreads wide his arms, saying ‘Welcome, my children. At last it is settled. I am the Way, the Warmth and the Darkness. Come, the road is wide and the way is all downhill.

The only true and correct philosophy is nihilism.

…just as I suspected when I was seventeen years old.

But there’s only one problem; I’ve tried nihilism, and there was nothing in it. Apart from anything else, I do indeed have to die one day, but between then and now I want to live. I raced towards that grim rendezvous at far greater speed as a nihilistic young man than at any time since. And even that dispirited youth came to realise a cold heart and a cold sneer — dressed in black and looking out for number one like a Wild West gun-fighter — were a poor investment for his fleeting hours.

If that’s the outcome of a logical approach to the truth of life, what use is logic to me?

I want to live an world, that contains the warm glow of Joy; the delicate precipitation of Hope; the burning ecstasy of Love; the sweet pain of shared Sadness; the cool breeze of Forgiveness; and the uplifting and vivifying stimulation of that distant light on the hill — Truth.

So the question must be, having arrived at nihilism, how does one get to that other location from here?

It’s all over the news of course — Dawkins, Hitchens, ‘religion is superstition’, ‘there is no god but Reason’, you know the sort of thing.

It’s grimly amusing to see these atheists, in trying to twist facts to suit their theories, categorise Nazism and Communism as forms of religion, in order to inflate their case that religion is the cause of the world’s woes. What all these godless beliefs — atheism, Nazism, Communism, Jacobinism, Greenism, you name it — have in common, is that they are philosophically materialistic.

One of the characteristic delusions of the materialist is that they think they can find a materialistic means to fix the faults of Man. You know how it goes:- Things can be made perfect… …if only we can change how people think, …if only we can eliminate this superstitious belief, …if only we can liquidate this class of people, …if only we can exterminate this race.

One of the things that first drew me towards Christ (a long journey), was realising that, behind its archaic expressive style, the Bible holds a more accurate, insightful and enlightened understanding of humans and human nature than any amount of Darwinism or Psychology.

The Bible explains that Man is imperfect, and no amount of self-improvement or social engineering can fix him. No amount of murdered class enemies, or race enemies, or evolutionary rejects can be enough to fix Man. If you could reach into his heart and mind and set every dial to the ideal, he would still be imperfect. And the Devil would still be out there waiting to tempt him.

The Bible explains all this. Despite its ancient poetry, it is still the authority on the soul of Man.

Incidentally, Dawkins, Hitchens and their kind never properly describe anything close to Christian belief. They paint a picture of a superstitious pagan-style deity — the ‘invisible friend’ or ‘the macaroni monster’, ‘the old man in the sky’ — and then say ‘how absurd’. Well, I agree. There are no false gods with flowing beards living on Mt Olympus or anywhere.

But that also goes for the false gods of our new ruling class — the gods of Reason, Science, The Self, The Environment, Freedom– or the king of all the new gods, Politics. These false gods truly are what their followers claim, human constructions with no existence outside our own imaginations.

But as King David said,’My soul thirsteth for the living God’. The Bible teaches that God is mysterious, His nature unknowable, that life and all things come are of Him and from Him. This is the enlightened truth. And the more I learn of the universe — with its multitude of miraculous coincidences, its intelligent and self-organising nature, its simplicity and complexity; and the more I see of living things, how exceptional and unbound Life is by the laws of the material world; the more logical and obvious seem the philosophies of true religion, and the more sadly benighted those of the materialist.

With this, I know every free thinking reader will agree.

I had lunch with Luke and Martha the other day.

I like Luke and Martha a lot, they’re lovely people and great committed Christians who’ve dedicated the best part of their lives to Christ and to ministry. We disagree on one or two issues, and unfortunately — prompted by Al Gore staring at us from the cover of ‘The Melbourne Anglican’ — our conversation immediately turned to the most contentious of these, the supposed problem of ‘Human Induced Climate Change’.

I began to explain the reasons why the correlation between human activities and observed climatic variations is at best an extremely speculative and unlikely theory, and at worst a deliberate fabrication — an outright lie — but we were unable to engage in any interesting debate of the topic, because merely questioning this theory was making Luke and Martha angry.

Their reaction: horror and pity, that curious combination heretics against any of the doctrines of the times quickly get used to.

To change the subject

So I changed the subject, which is what I’m about to do here.

Despite us being friends there is no prospect of me convincing Luke or Martha any time soon even to listen to any of the arguments against the Human Induced Climate Change doctrine, let alone to seriously consider whether the theory could be false. And if I can’t persuade my friends, certainly I can’t persuade a reader of this story, so I won’t try.

But there is one point that I would invite readers to consider, especially those — which is probably most people these days — who believe humans are destroying the Earth.

During our conversation, Martha said something I think was very telling. She said (and I’m paraphrasing this rather roughly from memory) that as Christians we need to accept that humans have to take responsibility for the effect we have on the planet. She stated this is supported by scripture — because God made us stewards of the world.

Presented cleverly, as it always is presented cleverly (not to mention passionately, fashionably, incessantly, ubiquitously and continuously from early childhood onward), the Green philosophy can appeal to Christians. It seems to connect with so many things we know to be true, that God placed us over the rest of Creation, but that Man is fallen and contaminated by evil, and so we must control our innately destructive nature.

But this is a subtle and seductive alteration to Christian wisdom. By rewriting the Genesis revelation into an environmentalist narrative, it transposes the spiritual message of the Bible into a purely materialistic plane — a plane in which God is absent.

And it is immensely seductive. I was there too. I also grew up with the songs, the books, the movies, the slogans. ‘Where will the children play?’ ‘We have to get ourselves back to the garden.’ ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.’

I love all that stuff!

But it’s not my religion.

Please consider this

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

There is an ancient spiritual belief that sees man as an inherently negative being, whose very existence is destructive, a blot, an insult to God and an assault on God’s creation, but it is not the Christian view.

Christians know that Man is fallen, but that he is also a higher spiritual being, and is also saved. Man has wedded his higher nature, his intellectual gifts, with love for God’s creation curiosity for the secrets of creation.

Man — divorced from God — gave us Communism, Nazism, the Mongol Horde and the French Revolution.

But Man is also he who has solved world hunger (although not yet the deeper problem of tyranny). Man is he who currently drives disease from the world like a routed enemy fleeing before a victorious army. Beasts kill and rend each other without conscience. Man is the only one whose heart cries out in love for all living beings. Man doesn’t pollute like the beasts who drop their waste on the ground. Man is he who replants the forests, who constructs great projects of public health and welfare. He devotes the power of his intellect to improve the well being of human, animal and plant. It is he who created a garden where there was wilderness; in the Nile valley, the two rivers, the terraces of Asia, and in the beautiful, green and leafy suburbs of every Western city.

Man tends the roses and sweeps the driveway.

Man is he who built a whole culture on the bond of family love, and the spiritual quest for righteousness (for what are freedom and justice if not manifestations of righteousness).

This is the Christian understanding of Man, made in the image of God.

If you want to get metaphysical, there is one who says ‘Man is that low creature of dust and clay, unworthy of God and unfit to rule God’s creation’. That being is Iblis the proud!

Think about this.

I don’t ask you to deny your dearly held beliefs on Human Induced Climate Change or even throw away your Joni Mitchell albums (I kept mine), but just give some thought the philosophical assumptions that underlie such theories, and consider how much of what is believed about Man’s influence on the environment is simply premised on these assumptions rather than proven by solid evidence.

The rest will follow.

Update:

Ezra comments:

Technology isn’t a neutral thing which is self evidently good. It’s morally qualified by the philosophical commitments of those who use it.

My reply:

Technology is an abstract term, so necessarily generalised statements about it will rapidly break down in specifics. Furthermore, I agree that philosophical commitment — as one aspect of spiritual awareness, the essential component of a meaningful life — is very important. Wicked tyrants can twist any good thing to evil purposes, as the Communists have proven on countless occasions.

Even then, however, the tyrants who deny the benefits of technology to their people — such as the Maoists, with Pol Pot their most infamous example, Saddam Hussein withholding food and medicine to his population, or the many Communist slave-masters who ground their people down to near mediaeval subsistence — cause harm more often than the technologically sophisticated exceptions like the Nazis, although with the latter the power of technology makes them more lethal.

But such abominations aside, is starvation a moral good? Or disease? Or childhood mortality or premature death? Perhaps an extreme Green would see these as necessary, justified or even righteous, but no sane individual. What about destitution? Ignorance? Unfulfilled potential?

Technology represents the fruits of Man’s intellectual gifts — given to him by God. And on balance it is indeed an enormous moral good, both to ourselves and ultimately all living things.

This is a very nice short history of how Christians ended the slave trade. I read it in printed form at church a while back. An uplifting and enlightening piece.

It veers off into nonsense right at the end — something about climate change — but that doesn’t detract much from this very good essay.

I just posted an essay I really like on my political Blog — littletinsoldier.net.

These are the main historical characteristics of Christian/Muslim history:

• 1500 years of peace
• brothers in honourable combat
• a bulwark against invasion
• a zone of tolerance
• allies against the real monsters

…

Only in recent years has a brand of terrorist totalitarianism thrown on the fleece of the Islamic religion. And a handful of shabby bandit leaders and their rabble of cut throats have presumed to declare war on the West on behalf of the great Religion of Peace.

Is that really enough for us to forget what beloved cousins the Muslims have been to us all these centuries?

Read it here.

And he came to Capernaum: and being in the house he asked them, What was it that ye disputed among yourselves by the way?

But they held their peace: for by the way they had disputed among themselves, who should be the greatest.

And he sat down, and called the twelve, and saith unto them, If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all.

–The Gospel of St Mark, 9:33-35

Have you ever wondered exactly what the disciples said to each other during that argument? Well, wonder no more, I can tell you!

One disciple said, “I and those like me will be first in the Kingdom, because Protestants are heretics, who are damned because they do not receive the sacraments.”

Another said, “I and those like me will be first in the Kingdom, because Catholics are damned because they do not understand Paul’s letter to the Galatians and the doctrine of justification by faith alone.”

Thus saith the LORD, After this manner will I mar the pride of Judah, and the great pride of Jerusalem. This evil people, which refuse to hear my words, which walk in the imagination of their heart… Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud: for the LORD hath spoken. … But if ye will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret places for your pride; and mine eye shall weep sore, and run down with tears, because the LORD’S flock is carried away captive.

Jeremiah 13: 9,10,15,17

And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

The Gospel of St Luke 10: 31-32

Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.

The Gospel of St Luke 11: 52

And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.

But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.

The Gospel of St Luke 12: 47-48

[T]he sheep follow him: for they know his voice. And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.

The Gospel of St John 10: 4-5

The worst heresy

Why do we live in a world of sin that has fallen away from God? Because the churches are full of pride and iniquity.

Knowledge — including doctrinal knowledge — is like money. It’s not a bad thing in itself, used wisely it can do a lot of good. But you only need a mite of doctrine, and to know the Shepherd’s voice and follow Him, to be worthy in the Kingdom. And you could be as wise in doctrine as Caiaphas the high priest, but if you have a proud and cruel heart it will avail you nothing.

The Gnostics of the late Roman Empire (of ‘Judas Gospel’ infamy) were the true heretics in Christian history. Not because they followed a butchered form of Christianity — although they did — but because they believed in salvation by knowledge, that a soul was saved by a mind knowing the right magical secrets. This is an evil thing to teach and a destructive thing to believe.

It separates us from God, and imprisons us within our own minds.

How many Christians make the same mistake? They trust in the products of human thought — doctrine and philosophy — instead of the power of the Holy Spirit.

A good tree doesn’t produce evil fruit.

We hacked each other with halberds, and perced each other with pikes. Catholic monarchs conducted a 30 year massacre across what is now Germany that killed as many in that region as the Black Death. Protestants committed acts of similar wickedness in Ireland.

And as a consequence this, the people of the West turned away from God. We Christians drove the flock into the arms of the devourer. In the aftermath of this long period shameful behaviour, atheistic philosophies flourished.

Rationalism, Madame Guillotine, Slavery, Marxism, Communism, The Final Solution.

All these things follow from Christian wickedness — our wickedness.

God have mercy on us.

I’ve moved this post to my other Blog Little Tin Soldier.net

Introduction

I’m a conservative, an inhabitant of the political Right. I support Prime Minister Howard here in Australia, and I’m a great admirer of President Bush. However, there are a number of schools of opinion on the political Right that I passionately hate. The one in particular I would like to discuss here is the widespread irrational hatred of the French.

On the whole, this is a product of the following:

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Love thy enemies

But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
The Gospel of Saint Luke 6:27

Satan wants us to hate Muslims.

After the incomprehensible atrocities of September 11, there were spontaneous street parties in towns in the West Bank territories and Lebanon. The followers of Yassir Arafat overflowed with such obvious and overwhelming delight at the death of so many innocents, that even the intimidation apparatus of a gangster state could not prevent images of their revelry escaping to the West.

Yassir Arafat himself, before his death, was someone whose humanity was dead, more a bloodthirsty beast than a man. He was a communist trained by the KGB; a reputed pervert; the individual singly most responsible for the Lebanese Civil War and all its misery and mortality; a known psychopath; and the world’s foremost terrorist, responsible for the deaths of more innocents than Osama Bin Laden himself, including probably hundreds killed by his own hand. And yet this depraved being was held up by Muslim nations as a statesman and a symbol of all they held to be fine. And his sick followers presented to the world, by the Autocrats of the Muslim world and the Leftist elites of the West, as noble victims and fine examples of Mohammedism.

Satan is so skilled. How could anyone short of Christ himself feel love for such a people.

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