Mailbag: Consider Jesus...

From: "Harrel"
Subject: A LETTER TO AN AGNOSTIC

The agnostic knows there is a God - he must face the possibility that this God who created the order, the laws of nature, the structure, the DNA code, symbiosis relationships between other organisms - must be a God of intelligence, morality, purpose, and principle.

It's always vaguely amusing to encounter a person who insists that people who are described by a certain label are actually characterized by just the opposite sorts of attributes. Thus, while "agnostic" specifically means a person who doesn't know if any gods do or don't exist, they are, according to Harrel, people who actually do know that a particular god exists. One must wonder what the point of using the term "agnostic" is to begin with.

It's not unlike saying that "males" actually bear children, "white" is the absence of all color, and "theist" is a person who disbelieves in the existence of any gods. Perhaps there is a Bizarro world where labels like this mean the opposite of what they do on our planet - after all, they are just collections of letters that could in theory be applied to anything - but if such a world exists, why was Harrel let loose and what did we do to deserve to have him unleashed upon us?

Speaking as an agnostic atheist, I don't personally know that any gods exist and have no particular reason to think that any gods might be responsible for things like DNA, the laws of nature, and so forth. I would grant that Harrel is convinced that such a god must exist, but that doesn't mean that anyone else necessarily is as well.

Therefore, consider Jesus... NOT the Mormon Jesus NOR the Jehovah Witness Jesus NOR the "New Age Oprah Winfery Shirley McClain Louis Farra Khan Jim Jones David Koresh Jesus." The real Jesus was sent form heaven, fulfilled hundreds of specific prophecies, healed the sick, lived a blameless life, performed signs and wonders that declared His Deity, died on a roman cross, buried in a tomb covered by a two ton stone, in three days rose from the dead. All to show us that the God of the Bible is personal. You see... RELIGION is mans way of searching for, evaluating about, critiquing on, and tolerating things pertaining to God.

At least, those are the things Harrel believes about Jesus. The question is, should anyone else believe them as well? Harrel never was able to demonstrate the truth of his assertions - for example, that there hundreds of prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. I would want to see real, actual prophecies - statements made by people who were very clear that they were making prophecies about a messiah in the future, not vague statements that are interpreted to be prophecies by Christians but are interpreted to be something quite different by Jews or others.

I don't personally find Harrel's Jesus to be any more believable than the other Jesuses he advises me not to consider. Harrel wasn't able to offer any reasons to regard his as superior or more credible, which is unsurprising because the inability of religious believers to demonstrate the superiority of their own faith over the religions of others is one of the fatal flaws in their attempts to claim exclusivity.

The fact is that God came down from the heights of heaven to save us from our own sins (wrongs, guilt, disobedience, and destructive tendencies.) Our sin makes our life now hell and our life when we die actually hell. Hell itself was never meant for mankind but for Satan and his demonic crew. Men and women go there because they did not choose God's salvation plan. The God of the Bible changes us, loves us, renews us, satisfies us, heals us, knows us, reveals Himself to us, and relates Himself to us. God did not create the problems of the world - our Sin did. He (Jesus) takes it from our life. Now, believe that what He did on the cross was for you. God can ONLY be known through Christ Jesus. For Jesus is the revelation of the personal and living God. "All who call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved."

One of the things that can be interesting in Christian discussions about Heaven and Hell and Salvation is how often all of this is described as if God were simply a passive spectator of the whole affair - or maybe just the hotdog man wandering through the bleachers.

There he is, shouting out to the people about the great hotdogs he has, and it's up to them to accept or not. If they do, he tosses them one and that's great. If not, they go to Hell - either way, God has nothing to do with it. You'd never know that God created Heaven, created Hell, created Humans, created Evil, created the connection between Sin and Hell, created the connection between Belief and Heaven, and so on.

This god of the Christians is the author of all things - not just objects and places, but connections as well. There is no logical necessity for there to be a blood sacrifice for people's sins - that's what God wanted. There is no logical necessity for there to be a Hell - that's what God wanted. There is no logical necessity for sinners to spend eternity in Hell - that's what God wanted. God, the author of all things, could have constructed things very differently... but didn't.

This god of the Christians, if it existed, wouldn't be a passive spectator - it would be personally responsible for everything that occurs in any place and at any time.

It is written, The fool has said in his heart 'there is no God' They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. Where were you when all living things allegedly evolved, do you know what power holds the atom together. Perhaps you say that you are merely a conglomeration of random aimless chemical reactions. Therefore, so would your thoughts. Your thoughts - aimless, without purpose, without meaning. So how can I believe you, your interpretations of reality; it is one complete accident.

I wish I had a nickel for every time a Christian quoted this Pslam to me - and another nickel for every time they tried to disavow any responsibility for it, telling me that they are just quoting God. Harrel here doesn't go quite that far, but he does seem to think highly of that verse. I wonder, though, why he thinks he knows me well enough to accuse me of never doing anything good and only being responsible for corrupt, vile deeds. Isn't that just a little arrogant?

At any rate, Harrel here commits the Fallacy of Composition in his little argument where he attempts to show that collection of random chemicals can only produce random thoughts (not that I believe that the chemicals that make up my body came together randomly, but that's not important here). The Fallacy of Composition occurs whenever we assume that anything true of the parts of an object must also be true of the object as a whole.

Thus, it is wrong to say that because an atom cannot be seen with the naked eye, therefore anything made up of atoms cannot be seen with the naked eye. The fact that atoms move without purpose and meaning does not allow us to conclude that, therefore, anything made up solely of atoms also moves without purpose and meaning. The two arguments are basically the same and commit the same error - but while no one would dream of seriously offering the first, it's not unusual to find Christians offering the second. There are lots of Christians who recognize how awful that argument is, but there are a bunch who don't. It's kind of sad.

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