"Earth is not the Center of the Universe" - Response to Common Bible Attack

Have you heard this comment? I've heard it many times. It's getting pretty tedious. You can almost predict with 100% certainty that if you're in a discussion about Christianity that touches on science, it's only a matter of time before a self-professed "intelligent atheist" tries to lecture the 'ignorant Christians' on how backward their beliefs are. This comment is one of their most favorite ones.

"People used to believe the earth was the center of the universe, but now we have science! and we know that those old Christian superstitions about a God who loves us and makes us the centerpiece of His creation are just old, unscientific stories from a long-lost age of backward ignorance" 

or something like it. Doesn't it sound familiar? Doesn't it sound dumb? Wait, it gets better:

Chronological Snobbery FAIL

The atheist snobbery goes like this:
1. Christians believe God made the universe for them (this is false, by the way)
2. Therefore, Christians used to believe the earth was in the center of the universe, because the center is obviously the most important (importing 21st century assumptions, here)
3. Those idiots thought we were in the center, but SCIENCE has shown that that's not true! har har!
4. Therefore, since SCIENCE leads to truth and Christianity does not, atheism is the rational belief system and Christianity is something to be ashamed of believing.

The problem is, the fundamental premises of the argument are false.

"A common thought in the Middle Ages was that the centre of the universe was the worst place to be. For example, Dante’s Divine Comedy(c. 1310) has nine circles of Hell inside the Earth, getting worse as they approach the center. Satan was right at the centre of a (spherical) earth, at the centre of the universe. In the opposite direction, the nine celestial spheres of heaven increased in virtue and closeness to God as they got further from the center. We certainly do not hold to Dante’s vision, but in this light moving the earth away from the center was a promotion in the eyes of people in the Middle Ages, not a demotion, as 21^st century anachronistic skeptics claim." Creation.com, "Refuting Absolute Geocentrism", bold emphasis added.

In other words, 

1. Christians never assumed that their relationship to God meant that they occupied a special 3-D location inside the universe
2. They therefore never assumed they were at the center.
3. Therefore, the fact that we are not "at the center" is not a scientific contradiction to Christian beliefs, whether theological or historical.
4. Therefore, any atheist or other person who makes this claim is blinded by presumptuous arrogance, and they are the ones who are truly ignorant.

Q.E.D.

~ Rak Chazak

PS God made the universe for the demonstration and maximization of His glory. If your reason for rejecting Christianity is that you think it's a belief that coddles people's desire to feel important by saying that everything God does is for your sake, then check yourself. You're even less important than you think you are.

Becoming a Christian Takes Work. ( Criticism of "Intellectual" Atheists and Others)

Staying atheist is certainly the more convenient option, if you are lazy. And let's face the facts, most people who live in the West and don't have faith in Christ are definitively lazy.

You have access to more knowledge in a day, without leaving the chair you're sitting at right now, than most people prior to the printing press had access to in their entire lives. A daily newspaper nowadays would be a month's worth of word-of-mouth overheard from travelers as they passed through your town.

The amount of time it took to copy a book just once was the amount of time it took for a person to gather together enough blank pages, ink, not to mention also a copy of the book, and then for him to rewrite every word on the blank pages, before binding the book and starting anew. Knowledge spread very slowly in a horizontal fashion (from one person to contemporaries, people alive at the same time), and knowledge spread through tradition, from parents to children (vertically) was much more effective. Consequently, a person's ideas could take a century or more to catch on, and they'd never live to see the effect of their work. But now history has come to a remarkable place.

We can access anything that anyone anywhere has found out about the past or found written in the past, so long as it has been transcribed or photocopied onto the Internet -- which is to say, any computer or database connected to the Internet information highway, so that anyone else can access the information as long as they are also connected.

And despite all this, the vast majority of people REFUSE to use the Internet to learn anything important!

You there, o atheist. You who have the knowledge of all the world's history at your fingertips, day in and day out, do you go looking for information that confirms and points to the Bible being true and its admonitions having the force of an ultimate Lawgiver behind them? Do you try to prove the Bible and do you go looking for evidence to utterly convince you that Jesus Christ is God, you are a man of sin, you need to repent, and you deserve His judgment but are utterly at the mercy of His unmerited favor in order to escape?

You can't make this claim. And I know from experience (the other benefit of the Internet is that it allows you to sample large amounts of people at a time to see how they think and consider their personal testimonies) that most people who are atheists are not so from being scholarly, studious and disciplined. They took the first lame reason to reject faith they could find, and clung to it, and now they're monstrously irrational and as a consequence of choosing not to think, CAN NOT think.

"No Man Is As Polite As You"

Ehm. Not to toot my own horn. I wasn't expecting such a compliment, but that's what made it stand out when I heard it. I'm going to attempt to draw something valuable out of it.

I just began working at a fast-food chain restaurant, and each of the days I was there, there were also two or three Ukranian girls at the fry-station, sandwich area and drive-thru station. I worked the cash register. In the middle of the day, there would tend to be a 'rush,' where there's more than two or three people in line at a time, for an extended period of maybe an hour or more (at our establishment, at least)--this prevented us from being able to talk much initially, not that you should be doing too much of that when you're on the clock, anyway. But over the 5 days we were there at the same time, we had the opportunity to trade some words back and forth. I "impressed" them with showing that I knew the words 'spaziba' and 'dobre utre' (I'm spelling them as they sound to me, not according to any actual standard), which mean 'thank you' and 'good morning.' I learned 'dobre veche' (good evening), 'bon scheuye spaziba' (thank you very much) and was reminded of the word I'd forgotten, 'izviñi,' which means both 'excuse me' and 'I'm sorry.' It' a very utilitarian word, thus. 'Parschallista' means both 'please' and 'you're welcome,' making it very easy to get the words right if you're just learning the language! Specifically, this language is Russian. There is a Ukranian language, but Russian is widely spoken in the country and it's the only thing I heard them speak while they were there.

They were there doing a student work-exchange over the summer. I've run into Russian college students doing that before, when I worked at a summer camp. There was a girl named Vicka who was really motivated to try to experience everything (rock wall, swimming pool, biking) while she was there, and I had the most opportunity to talk to her. Some of the other guy staffers suspected us of being interested in each other, romantically. That wasn't the case. In February, there had been some Thai girls doing a similar exchange at the same restaurant. So it seems that this is a widespread thing, where other countries send students here to work and live for a short amount of time, to have the opportunity to practice their English, interact with actual Americans, and of course see the sights. Always surprised that my small town ever gets the interest of people from far away, I nevertheless enjoy being a part of the impression that these people get of the place when they leave.

Free Use, Wiki Commons

The above graph on the left shows the religious diversity in the Ukraine. White is atheist, and the rest of the colors are mainly sects of the Orthodox Catholic Church. This is typical of European countries of the present time--there tends to be more nontheists than any other individual group in these countries, though there are long histories of the influence of traditional religions, mostly Christian or nominally christian, in those places. I bring this up because while I'm not assuming what the girls I worked with believe, it's nevertheless a reasonable inference to make, that what I was asked was influenced in part by the national spiritual landscape of their home country, irrespective of their personal beliefs.

The "more American" of the girls (spoke better English, not that the others were unable to communicate or anything) spoke up when they were all standing together and we were talking. She said, midst giggles from the other two, that 'no man can be (or is, I forget which she said) as polite as you.' This was after first asking why I was so polite. To me, I was just behaving normally, not putting on an act in order to speak with customers, although maybe putting in more effort to appear cheerful and friendly than usual, but other than that, 'what you see is what you get.' I tried to think of a reason, and gave her that it's just natural to me to be respectful like that, that it's genuine. "No men are as polite as you," she said. And now I come to the twofold impression I gained from the experience:

1. It struck me that this has happened before. It isn't something that contains itself based on geography. I've met many an American girl that treated me with suspicion for no readily explainable reason. Through the grapevine, it's come forth that people sometimes have the impression that I'm putting on a front, not being genuine, that maybe I'm hiding something. They think I'm too nice. Of all the things to have for a problem, right? People think I'm faking my personality because they can't see why I should seem so happy or pleasant to others, particularly strangers. It hurts a little, but I'm more happy that it's because of being too friendly and nice than because I come across as the opposite. I wouldn't be surprised if a great number of potential friendships or romantic relationships were prevented in the past because my demeanor motivated people to be suspicious of me. It's a loss, to be sure, but on the other hand it's inadvertently screened for people who are more confident in themselves and less judgmental of others to be the sort of people that I eventually get closer to. And lest I be remiss, this all is directly tied to my faith--or rather, my regeneration. You can really tell the difference between a saved and unsaved person by whether they have joy or whether they do not. In general, of course. I simply want to affirm that I have the outward personality that I have because I have the inside satisfaction and joy that comes from knowing the answers to the tough questions of life, and having relief in the knowledge that I know where I'm going, I know what my purpose is, and I have a healthy relationship with my heavenly Father. It isn't any more complicated than that. Which brings me to my next point.

2. Shortly after that, the young girl (they were all about 19--at 23, I feel fairly old) asked me if I was religious. For simplicity's sake, I didn't argue about the meaning of the word, and decided to answer 'yes.' I wanted to make myself understood and not confuse her. She responded, "ah, that explains it." A little while after, she asked me if I went to church and I explained that I hadn't had the opportunity to visit during college and currently didn't have a car (see earlier blog post). She said, 'aha, well you're not *really* religious, then,' and this may have been her teasing me and possibly attempting to bring some jocularity into the conversation to draw it away from the serious topic, which people can find uncomfortable, because the other girls laughed at her and implied she was messing with me. I did respond that 'well, if being religious just means you go, sit, and leave, once a week, then yeah, I'm not really religious.' So there you see that I did make a slight attempt to define the term and not imply that I was just your run-of-the-mill lame churchian, or whatever she might have had in the back of her mind because of her prior experience, when she asked.

It was a short but fascinating exchange, to me. My surprise at the declaration by the girl (and the two others emphatically agreed on that point) that I was inhumanly polite can be explained by the fact that there's very few Christians (capital C) around, and consequently most people live the bulk of their lives without really getting to see the fruit of sanctification in another person. So what's the reason why I was so polite and why they were so confounded by my behavior so as to comment on it -- and to declare that no other man on earth was as polite as me, no less? It comes down to Christ and His grace. His gospel. It always comes back to that. He is at the root of it all. 

So that was a little way in which I might have 'witnessed,' recently. Not something extremely remarkable, since I didn't exactly have (take?) the opportunity to share the full Gospel with them, but I'm hoping God will take that memory and use it to bring fruit in their lives when the moment is right in the future.

~ Rak Chazak

The Unfairness Trap: BSA On A Collision Course

The BSA National Council held a secret ballot vote to decide if the organization would allow openly gay boys into the organization. 757 voted for, 475 voted against. 

Timeless Values?

Albert Mohler summarizes this succinctly (link at bottom):

In 2000, the B.S.A. prevailed at the U.S. Supreme Court when the nation’s highest court ruled that the Boy Scouts had a constitutional right to exclude openly gay boys and leaders from the organization, so long as that exclusion is based in one of the organization’s core convictions — an “expressive message.” The B.S.A. won the case because that is exactly what they claimed. They argued that excluding openly homosexual boys and leaders from Scouting was necessary and required by the Scout Oath. [emphasis added]

In my previous article about the BSA policy change, I said this:

If the Boy Scouts of America lifts the ban on homosexuals, then it will be saying that its rules were not based on timeless values, but on arbitrary prejudice. Arbitrary prejudice can be arbitrarily abandoned. Timeless values cannot. If the BSA is built on values, then it cannot compromise those values. If the BSA compromises on homosexuality, it will be admitting that it does not stand on values but will give in to pressure. An interesting consequence is that the BSA will open itself up to lawsuits alleging wrongful discrimination, since lifting the ban would necessarily mean that the organization discriminated against homosexuals in the past without any reason to do so.

So now we know the answer to that. The BSA National Council has decided that its creeds are not timeless, but arbitrary. It is thereby implicitly admitting to wrongful discrimination against homosexuals for over two decades, since the policy was enacted. Let the litigation begin!

A Time to Tell

The BSA commissioned a video in the '80s which at the time I joined was required watching for all boys entering the program. This was called "A Time To Tell," and acted out 3 specific scenarios which were introduced through the context of a conversation between three friends after school. Its purpose was to educate the young boys (ages 10-12 when entering the program) to "Recognize, Resist and Report" sexual molestation. I think it might be worth introducing to the general public. It largely speaks for itself.

More info: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/boy_scouts_and_sexual_abuse_what_will_happen_to_it_happened_to_me.html

Unfairness

Now that the BSA has opened up its doors to homosexual youth, it's unfair to keep the doors shut to atheists any longer. It's actually ludicrous to allow the former and not the latter. Atheists can, at least in theory, be just as moral as any monotheist, with the only difference being their rejection of belief in a deity. Meanwhile, homosexuality is an evil in each of those religions, and so if those who break the law should be allowed in, by what standard do you aim to keep out those who do not break the law? Maybe one could suppose that even if "morally straight" has been abandoned, the BSA will still attempt to uphold "duty to God" as a point of the Scout Oath. This would exclude atheists, certainly. But isn't moral straightness part of one's duty to God? To purport that active homosexuals honor the God of any faith--Christianity, Judaism or Islam; even the Eastern religions (Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism) seem largely to oppose the notion that homosexual activity can coexist with religious piety -- to thus purport that homosexuals can honor the "duty to God" aspect of the Scout Oath is ludicrous, and therefore if they can be allowed into the program while rejecting this "timeless value," then so can atheists, by the same standard. We have thus utterly destroyed the Scout Oath. All that's left is this:

"Oh my honor, I will do my duty to my country, and to keep myself physically strong." 

Permit me to scoff derisively.

Prediction: the BSA will soon have to give in to further pressure and allow atheists to join. 

The question is, will atheist boys be allowed in first, or homosexual leaders? We could start a betting pool. Anyone interested? I'll stake my claim on homosexual adults. Any takers?

Further Reading 

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2013/05/25/BSA-and-gay-phase1
http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/05/22/boy-scouts-at-the-brink-the-moment-of-decision-arrives/
http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/rip-boy-scouts-of-america/

~ Rak Chazak

Don't Die Twice for A Straw Man

Who would die for one of those, anyway?

I was having an online discussion with an atheist I've had occasional back-and-forths with for a few years, and he trotted out this line:

I don't want my philosophy to comfort me, I want it to tell me the truth at all instances. 

When I see a dying, starving person, I don't want to see a person going to heaven. To me, that is one of the most sinister lies and I wouldn't want my children to believe this about a person in strife. Strife is a REAL thing, and for me, it is something that does not end in heaven or hell. Truly, I am only comforted by atheism to know that the REALITY of life, including a dying and sick world, is a real one. I can't do anything about this dying and sick world except be my best, but at least I know it isn't a fight of devils and angels--rather in humanity's control.

I believe life comes once, I don't want to be a good person because I will be tortured and my skin burned off if I don't. That's not morality for me.

You know, I suspect he thinks this would upset me most because it supposedly reveals the hypocrisy of people of faith. Namely, that of supposedly being concerned with people's "greater good," to the point of ignoring their earthly needs. He thinks faith breeds fatalism, with regard to making the world a better place. What really upsets me is that he still has this wrong view of faith, despite months and years of telling him the truth.

Here was my full response:

I can tell you what, [opponent], when I see people dying it doesn't comfort me to see people going to hell. That's what motivates me to reach out to them with the Gospel lest they perish in vain.

[Opponent], being a good person won't get you into heaven. You're already going to hell because you're INCAPABLE of being a good person. This is what you don't get. We Christians don't behave morally because God threatens us. We do good in grateful response to the fact that He saved us from hell even though we did not deserve to go to heaven. If you think we do good to bribe God you are mistaken. That's not Christianity, that's works-righteous false religion. Don't die twice for a straw man.

Every day, 200,000 people die. Realizing that so many people are slipping into eternity without you having even the slightest opportunity to do anything about it is distressing. It's not comforting at all. What is comforting in moments of realizing that, is that God is sovereign. Simply, He's in control. You don't have the responsibility over all those people. God will ensure that there are Christians strategically placed just where He wants them, to be salt and light for a dying world. And guess what? You are the one that He's handpicked to do just that, where you are. 

So the understanding that the world is perishing and I have a part to play in saving it motivates me to be more aggressive in spreading the Gospel. I'd gladly take the risk of being seen as "one of those crazy Christian nutjobs," than to make people feel comfortable even as their eternity is in peril. My conscience won't let me accept quietness. I must speak.


What saddens me so much is when guys like him say that they don't think it's legitimate to be good because otherwise you'll be tortured. I TOTALLY AGREE! That IS illegitimate! And it isn't the Christian way! We don't do good because God is threatening us. We do it to repay Him with gladness for everything He has given us. We honor Him out of love, not out of mortal terror. I wish my opponent would understand this...

I think he chooses to believe that because it makes it easier to reject the Christian faith. But if you're offended by something that isn't actually Christianity, and you turn around and reject Christianity, you've made a terrible mistake. 

The Straw Man Fallacy is the logical misstep of misrepresenting what you're arguing against. Then you defeat this 'straw man' and claim to have defeated what you were arguing against. But if you don't ever attack the actual position, you can't ever defeat it, and so you're never justified in rejecting it. That's the mistake my opponent made above. He's right to reject what he describes, because a belief system that makes God out to be an extortioner is clearly false. Sadly, he makes the error of asserting that this is the Christian faith, and this is not so.

I said 'don't die twice for a straw man,' because hell is referred to as the "second death." (Revelation 20:14)

It's not worth it to go to hell because you insisted on believing a lie. The character Yossarian in the novel Catch-22 was having a debate with a lady friend of his, and though they were both atheists, the woman was upset at how Yossarian characterized God--angry, mean, stupid, evil, etc. Yossarian reaches a compromise by saying, "the God you don't believe in is not the same God that I don't believe in." (That's paraphrased).

My atheist friend, the god you don't believe in is not the God I believe in. Repent and live.

~ Rak Chazak

The Atheist Fallacy of Imputing Motives on Actors Motivated by Religious Ideology

Sounds like a pretty good dissertation title, dunnit? Yeah. Well, this article is going to be short by comparison.

I'm a biology major, but because I need to round out my degree with 45 "upper-level" (that is, in the 300 and 400 range) courses in order to graduate, I've chosen to take Dynamics of the Arab-Israeli Conflict because I'd rather have something interesting than something guaranteed to be easy. As it is, it is one of my more enjoyable classes, when it comes to the workload.

In class today, I briefly spoke with another student on the topic of the final paper. The professor wants each of us to choose a situation in recent history where there has been an ongoing rivalry between a sovereign state and a terrorist state or pseudo-state entity -- examples include Al Qaeda, the IRA, Pakistan-India, North Korea-USA, Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO, etc, but not terrorist groups that are too amorphous to easily finger, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the Weather Underground.

We have to write a paper on our selected rivalry and address, among other questions, whether the defensive state has successfully employed a deterrence method against terrorism by the other group, by making the latter "learn from their mistakes" and decide not to challenge the sovereign state again in the same way.

The other student I spoke to made a comment, in passing, that Hamas "isn't learning," that is, learning to stop challenging Israel lest it get 'punished' again and again. I challenged his assertion by saying that the assumption that every terrorist organization actually cares about self-preservation or other selfish things like power, money, influence, etc, is fundamentally flawed. In my view, Hamas is ideologically motivated by the political-religious system of Islam, and that this ideology supersedes what Western, humanist mindsets would consider "rational self interest."

The other student disagreed, responding that we can't assume that the other group is irrational. But he misunderstood me. I didn't mean that Hamas was irrational. Hamas is very rational, if its goals are indeed the destruction of the State of Israel at all costs, as its charter declares. If Hamas is just using religion as a means to an end, and doesn't actually care about ideology, then none of what it's doing makes any sense. If it wanted to exact concessions out of Israel, it wouldn't sabotage the latter's attempts to bargain with it by initiating new hostilities whenever possible. But if it is truly driven by not much more than an insane bloodlust for Jews, then its relentless animosity is perfectly well explained.

My peer wasn't having it. He was insistent that political organizations like these are not truly ideological, but only pretend to be religious. They, like atheist totalitarians of years past, merely use religious rhetoric as a means to an end, to justify its acts or drum up support among the masses. But I believe this is a severe mistake on his part. He, as an atheist, is unaware of his own biases. Not recognizing the insidious arrogance of his own view, he is projecting his own philosophy on others. Because all religion is man-made for the purpose of controlling people, surely then that must be the only use that Islamic terrorists have for religion as well. His inability to recognize that other people are not like him is unfortunate. It must also be recognized that the prevailing philosophies taught in American public education is one of the root causes of this lack of critical thinking ability.

Contrary to the misconception of my fellow student, religion plays a much larger role than just a means to an end, in many cases. For many people, it is not a means, but the end in itself. So failing to see that as even a possibility is a tremendous weakness in the atheist's analysis, and it hinders him from correctly interpreting world events. Even if the atheist is right and all religion is false, his hubris numbs him to being able to understand that others who take religion very seriously simply can't compromise on their ideological positions, even if it might seem more rational in that it would offer them more power, money, influence, or even personal safety.

The atheist fallacy is the subtle assumption that all other people in the world are really atheists at heart. It isn't explicitly spoken, but it shows itself when the atheist can't fathom how religious convictions can trump selfishness--because he foolishly sees the former as an outgrowth of the latter.

That is why foreign policies built on an atheist framework -- the West's, in general -- will never adequately understand the Middle East, and will never correctly predict the consequences of present and future meddling. In more than one way, then, for a proper foreign policy to develop, religion is the answer.


~ Rak Chazak