Response to a secularist (2/2)

With a few added comments on the good news of God manifest in Christ

This part will include some more direct quotes from Ivan M. Paton’s comments, and will look into the following topics:

The genocidal and tyrannical nature of the Old Testament God

Truth and the evidence of truth

Jesus Christ as the truth

The origins of Christianity in the Roman Empire

The failure of secularism

These are standard topics in the theist / atheist debate, but sometimes one basic consideration is overlooked. That is, a God who created and sustains the entire universe; who invented all of the laws of physics, mathematics, geometry and science; who designed the human body and gives us the breath of life, the gift of consciousness found nowhere else in all of nature - such a Being must necessarily be far beyond our comprehension.

That being so, he does things that we do not understand and may not approve of - but he created and judges us. We did not create him, nor do we sit in judgment upon him.

As the creator and the giver of life he has power and authority that we do not have, and many things that he does are beyond our comprehension. Yet, they are not completely beyond our comprehension. Because we have mental and creative powers that (though fallen and corrupted) reflect our divine origins, we can understand as much of God as he sees fit to reveal.

This, too, is part of the good news of God in Christ: that God exists; that the universe was not created by accident; that there is higher meaning and purpose; that our lives do have value; that right and wrong, good and evil truth and evil do have real and independent meanings apart from our own personal preferences.

Returning to last week’s topic, the next heading is:

The genocidal and tyrannical nature of the Old Testament God

In discussing these biblical matters, we invariably come to secular objections to the Old Testament God. As Paton sees it (and his is an increasingly common view):

And regarding your “God” of the Old and New Testaments, a greater evil and genocidal tyrant cannot be found anywhere else - any casual reading of the Old and New Testament shows countless stories of genocides and tyranny imposed by Yahweh, hell the GREAT FLOOD was the first GLOBAL GENOCIDE which was the hand of your ‘God’ - if that is God I want nothing to do with him.

First of all, this does not show the full biblical picture of God. It omits the infinite power behind the universe, behind the galaxies and the solar systems, behind all of the wonders of nature, who created day and night, sunrise and sunset, all of the creatures of nature. His rule is not tyranny but right, necessary and good, even if his rule includes righteous judgments on the wicked, even their destruction if he should so decide.

Such negative judgments as those expressed above assume that we are basically good, and that happy, peaceful prosperous lives are our due - but if we are capable not only of goodness and virtue, but also evil and sin, and God wants to judge and punish that sin, he is right and just in doing so.

Furthermore, we can expect yet further judgments from God as the world sinks ever deeper into the darkness and evils of modern secularism. The dark clouds of God’s anger are even now gathering and intensifying over us, and whatever economic or political dislocations, wars, famines, or disasters God chooses to visit on us merely by withdrawing his hand of protection are his right and our due, if we persist in mocking God and despising his commandments.

People make the common mistake of thinking that God is like us, and so can be judged according to the same criteria, as if he were only another human being. However, God is the giver of life, as we are not, and as such he has the authority to take life, as we do not. As Hannah, the mother of Samuel, said:

The LORD killeth (kills), and maketh (makes) alive: he bringeth (brings) down to the grave, and bringeth (brings) up. The LORD maketh (makes) poor, and maketh (makes) rich: he bringeth (brings) low, and lifteth (lifts) up.

God has the right and the authority and the power to take back, anywhere and anytime, the lives that he himself has given. If he wants to decree that after centuries of sin the Canaanites shall be removed from the land, he can do so. Even the removal of almost the entire population of the earth is his prerogative, and his condemnation of the world for its wickedness was just.

As to us deciding whether or not we will have anything to do with God, that is not a choice we can make. We have been given some space in this life to ignore God and defy his laws. God does not appear in the heavens as a blazing ball of fire with a sepulchral voice to terrorize us all into submission, and he has not preprogrammed us so that we have no choice but to obey his laws. He gave Adam and Eve real freedom, and their rebellion plunged us into servitude to selfishness, ignorance and sin.

So, we have a space to follow our own minds, but in the end we will have to give an account. So, it is better to be reconciled to him beforehand through the person, teachings and work of the Lord Christ – not that this requires diligent attendance in church or Sunday school. It is an unfortunate fact that many churches today are best avoided. Going to church for many becomes an obstacle to finding and growing in Christ, which is too bad. Paul’s instructions in I Corinthians for worship in Christian gatherings are consistently ignored even by churches that are not totally apostate and advertise their belief in the Bible.

Truth and the evidence of truth

All of this depends on the truthfulness of the Bible, a point which IMP (and many millions of others) are unwilling to concede. This was discussed earlier, but it comes again, this time with regard to the Christian message itself, as opposed to merely ancient history.

Paton says:

I did mention ‘truth’ - and then you say to me that ‘the truth is…..’ - well once again you are either guilty of not being able to understand the word ‘truth’ or you are simply so enamoured of your own ‘BELIEFS’ that you think you can shout them out as TRUTH - Wrong. Dead wrong. You have faith and [6] belief and that is your ‘truth’ but it is not EVIDENCE of truth.

This is a critical point. We notice that the apostolic writers, and Christ himself, did not try to prove many things. Christ did not try to prove that God existed, or had such and such a character, he stated it. He presented it. Some people believed, and some did not.

Likewise with Peter, James, John and Paul. Much of their message was declarative, written to people who were Christians already.

There is a place for argument, reason and logic, but those are not the determining factors in whether one decides to believe in the revelation of God in Christ or not. The Bible itself teaches, that people are alienated and separated from God, and they cannot respond unless God himself takes the initiative, awakens their interest, and draws them. It is sometimes a lengthy and roundabout process  – sometimes over a very lengthy and roundabout process – to a knowledge of himself and his manifestation of himself to us in the person of Christ.

Furthermore, I suggested to Paton that he objected to my saying “the truth is” – so he must have his own idea of truth on the basis of which he rejected mine. And what makes the secularists’ ideas of truth more valuable than mine? Nothing other than the fact that they personally prefer them.

These are not scientific questions of facts, logic and evidence derived from material subjects that passively submit themselves to our testing and observation. They are questions of the human spirit, its needs, its emotions, its virtues and its faults. None of these can be seen under the most powerful microscopes, or weighed in the most delicate of scales. They elude observation and experiment – but they are real. They involve questions of good and evil, of love and hate, of meaning and purpose about which science qua science has nothing at all to say.

These are aspects of reality that transcend science, and elude the materialist – yet they are foundational to the human experience.

Jesus Christ as the truth

He asks how I know that Christ is the truth – a fair question, and a good one – but I can also ask, “How does he know that Christ is not the truth?”

I know that Christ is the truth (a) by his own words, as accurately recorded in the Bible: “ I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” I also know it (b) through the experience of the risen Christ by faith. This gift is given by God to some and not to others – not to anyone because of their innate virtue or intellectual or spiritual superiority, but because of his own purposes, determined before the world began. It says in Ephesians 1:4 that God has chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world – a spiritual mystery revealed by God to some, but not to all.

I understand that my assertions or biblical teachings are not EVIDENCE of truth according to conventional standards of worldly logic and experience, but this is reality and truth of a different nature and on a different level. It cannot be presented in a human court of law or dissected in a laboratory, but it is real nevertheless.

Yet the question is pressed:

So how do you know there was a man named Jesus Christ who even walked on the earth. There is EXACTLY zero historical evidence for his existence. ZERO.

Now, Christian apologists have a certain response to that. Tacitus mentioned Christ, Josephus mentioned him in his works, the four gospels claim many people saw Christ, he lived, taught and walked among them. That is credible eyewitness testimony to those who accept the Bible – but there is no specific historical evidence, outside of the Bible, that Christ was born of a virgin; lived and taught as the Bible said he did; died as a sacrifice for the sins of the world; rose from the dead; and will return a second time as God manifest.

Why, then, do we believe as we do? Paul did not believe in Christ, and persecuted Christ’s followers. But then, explaining his belief, he said in his public trial that he was going on the road to Damascus, and a bright light, greater than the sun, appeared and shone around him and those with him. They fell to the ground and a voice came speaking in Hebrew and Saul said “Who are you,” and the voice said “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. I am appearing to you to make you a minister and a witness to me,” along with other instructions.

Festus, the Roman governor, said “Paul, you are beside yourself, you are mad.” If I were to say that Jesus appeared to me as a bright light and spoke to me wouldn’t people say I was crazy? Even Christians who believe in the Bible would doubt my story.

Yet, if we are really Christians, is it not because some sort of experience, to a much lesser degree, of the reality of the risen Christ?

Does not the Bible say, “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (Ephesians 5:14)? Can we say that we have been awakened and arisen from the dead, and that Christ has given us light, both through the Word and through the operations of his Spirit by which he communicates truth (Acts 1:2), and John 14:26, to mention only two places?

There is the evidence of a completely new religious faith which spread with unprecedented speed throughout the Roman Empire – an odd phenomenon, for someone who never existed, though many people said they had seen and known him. I accept the historical evidence of the gospels by faith, just as you reject that same evidence by a different sort of faith – yet still a faith that you cannot demonstrate by historical proofs either.

Actually, the power of proof is very limited. Even scientific proof is capable of being questioned, since what we now take to be scientific fact may later have to be changed.

The origins of Christianity in the Roman Empire

It’s all hearsay by those who wrote the Bible - which was written by the elites of the Roman Empire. For political power to create a cult to enslave people. Like you.

No, the Bible was not written by the elites of the Roman Empire. There is no evidence for that statement – and a great deal is known about that Empire.

It was only with the fall of Rome to the barbarians that the church began to take on many of the basic roles of government. Prior to that, the marriage of the church to the government in the 4^th century gave the church much greater influence, but for the previous three centuries the church had been an object of hostility, scorn and persecution. Some Roman emperors were virulently opposed to it and sought to wipe it out.

The church came in the end to have great power and influence, and as such was attractive to the elites, and viewed by some in power as a useful means of consolidating and solidifying the empire – but many today believe that was a very bad development for the church. It diverted many people from the true nature of Christ’s message, and opened the door to the later medieval abuses of the papacy, which had nothing to do with the Bible at all.

Also, the idea that Christianity is a false cult created to enslave people was one of the pet theories of Nietzsche, a certified lunatic. He made that very charge in The Antichrist, the last book he finished before collapsing into complete (as opposed to partial) insanity. No, the truths of the Bible were not the inventions of men, but were revealed by God from heaven to mortal men like Peter, James, John and Paul – truths about the meaning of life, the nature of God, and the nature of the afterlife of the immortal human soul.

As to be being enslaved by it, I am not enslaved at all. Before I discovered the truths of biblical Christianity I was enslaved - enslaved to loneliness, fear, guilt, anxiety, tension, and a complete misapprehension as to the meaning of purpose of life. But now I am free from many of these false things of the world that divert us from true, inner spiritual fulfilment – though some attachments to this false world that passes away still hinder my spiritual progress and I am very far from where I should be.

The failure of secularism

And here we are, after more than 250 years of appeals to rely on reason alone. How well is that working? Is it not the case that even some well-known atheists are coming to the realization that abandoning religion in general and Christianity in particular has not led to a secular, rationalist paradise, but rather to an increasingly virulent moral breakdown?

Crime, poverty, homelessness, mental illness, drugs, crazy transgender ideologies, out of control governments, social collapse, malfunctioning schools, mindless political zealotry and intensifying social divisions and political hatreds – not to mention two world wars, and the emergence of vicious totalitarian ideologies far more cruel and destructive than anything previously seen in all of human history.

And science? Has it taught us the meaning of life, eliminated poverty, injustice and crime? Or has it only placed the planet in jeopardy unknown in all the previous millenia of human existence?

You mentioned towards the end a mysterious and overseeing mind control matrix. I do not believe in that. There is a conspiracy of globalist elites to seize power and impose their evil visions on the rest of this, but to the extent there is some overarching spiritual system of deception and delusion I believe it is orchestrated by Satan. Liberation from it is found in the liberating truth of the existence and the reality of God, who brought this cosmos into existence and will end it in his way and in his time, nullifying all of the schemes of the forces of darkness, be they supernatural or human.

But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up . . . Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.  (2 Peter chapt. 3)