Fifty Questions part Two
Continuing:
Letter of 22 Sept
Q: Would it be correct to say that it would take *more* faith for you to believe you *didn’t* really experience something supernatural?
A: No. It would merely take less reason, but not more faith.
Faith is a word that is often abused, but it fundamentally means to trust someone whom you have good reason to trust, despite the temptation or fear which, during a moment of weakness, makes mistrust seem the better idea.
I say it would take less reason because, in order to explain all the events that happened to me using nothing but naturalistic causes, the explanation would have to be ad hoc, would have to assume facts not in evidence, would have indulge in speculations without warrant.
One dogmatic atheist it was my misfortune to meet told me that my subconscious mind created to triggered the heart attack in response to my ‘Pascal’s Wager’ type prayer I described earlier, and then my subconscious mind halted the heart attack on cue when my wife’s Church prayed over me, and then my subconscious mind offered me a series of dreams and hallucinations over the next few days, and the subconscious mind selected the content of those dreams and hallucinations in order to have them match or meet with Christian literature and doctrine.
One of the things that happened to me was that Christ told me that God does not judge any man, but that He, Christ will be my judge. This was surprising to me, since what little I remembered of my Bible stories showed that the Old Testament God was clearly full of wrath and judgment, or else what was that whole Deluge of Noah all about? I have debated with Christians not one or twice, but many and many times in my life, and none of them mentioned this odd division of labor.
As one might expect, after I recovered from the hospital, I sat down to read the Bible from cover to cover, including the several books in it I had never read. To my absolute astonishment I came across a passage in the Book of John which not only confirmed what Christ had said to me, but was almost word for word the same. The vision had told me something I had not known which appeared in a book I had not read. This indicates eitherthat my vision was giving me true information, or that I have weird mind-powers that allows me to know the words I am going to read before I read it.
I asked the dogmatic atheist how it was that my vision told me words in a book I had not yet read. He said the vision had not said anything, but that, when I read that passage in the book a month or so later, I only (without knowing it) retroactively re-wrote my memories to make it look to myself as if I had known something before I could have known it.
Boy, howdy, I thought it was cool beans that I now had magical mind-rewriting powers, like Gilderoy Lockheart from Harry Potter! I am sure I have some unpleasant memories I could re-edit to have better outcomes, assuming I somehow lost my reverence for truth and accuracy—I just wanted to know how to turn them on. But, alas, even though my dogmatic atheist friend somehow had enough mind-reading powers himself to sense that I had a subconscious mind, or like Sherlock Holmes crossed with Sigmund Freud, could tell, even without ever speaking to me, exactly what the buried and hidden sections of my mind were up to, he could not tell me how to do what he said I had done. Got that? My subconscious mind and its mind-powers tended to pop into existence when and only when the dogmatic atheist needed a convenient excuse to explain things away, but the mind-powers would always somehow vanish again when it would have been convenient for me. Hmmm …. And this guy was presenting himself as a paragon of rationality, when his excuses were as flimsy as those of a professional rainmaker standing beneath clear, dry skies.
I told him my wife remembered the sequence of events in the same order I did. Had I somehow rewritten her memories too?
His other theory was that I had read the Book of John previously, but my sinister subconscious mind erased the memory, and then prompted me to read the book, so that I would, right after recovering from the self-imposed heart attack, self-imposed miracle healing, and self-imposed hallucinations, be deceived into thinking the vision was able to tell me something I did not myself know.
I asked him why my subconscious mind (which he seemed to be on a first-name basis with) waited until I just so happened to say a prayer, have a heart attack, be cured apparently by prayer, and then fool me with hallucinations then and only then at that moment in my life, but not earlier and not later? Was it all a big coincidence? His theory was that the heart attack was both caused and cured by the strange mind-powers my subconscious mind has, sort of like how a Jedi can move objects with his brainwaves, I guess.
At this point, since my sub-conscious mind not only has the powers of a supernatural being, able to cause and cure heart attacks at will, and to deceive me by manipulating evidence and memory —and perhaps even the memories of bystanders— I did not see how one could fail to believe in the supernatural. Believing that your subconscious mind has psychic-style ‘mind-over-matter’ powers is not the sign of skepticism in action. It is gullibility, if not rank intellectual dishonesty.
So, no. The dogmatic atheist who is willing to invent any explanation or every explanation no matter how far-fetched in order to avoid the obvious conclusion staring him in the face is not using more faith, not if that word is properly defined; he is merely using less reason. He is simply un-skeptical, and willing to believe anything, in order to avoid challenges to his dogma. He is gullible.
Q: (quote) “Occam’s razor cuts out hallucination or dream as a likely explanation for my experiences. In order to fit these experiences into an atheist framework, I would have to resort to endless ad hoc explanations”
Did you specifically mean a *naturalistic* framework, or *any* atheistic framework?
A: I mean a naturalistic framework. For the vast majority of cases, atheism and naturalism overlap. As a far as I know, no atheist I have ever met disbelieved in God for any other reason than that God cannot exist within the naturalistic model of the universe.
There may be atheists who believe in the supernatural, but merely who do not believe in God, such as, for example, a theosophist who believes in reincarnation and in psychic powers but not in spirits or gods or God.
I regard that stance as intellectually incoherent, and see no need for a lengthy examination of it.
It would be like believing in elves, and believing in Alfhiem the Elfland, but not believing Oberon the elf-king, even though the elves speak of him, and every other human who has caught a glimpse of elfland confirms the report. If a ghost appears to you and tells you that there is life after death, it is really hard for me to imagine how you (or any man whose beliefs are not merely arbitrary) can believe the ghost is actually a ghost, but to disbelieve the ghost is truthful when he tells you of an afterlife. People who believe in the magic of Yaqui shamans but who dismiss tales of saintly miracles as mere priestcraft have a double standard.
Q: (Quote) “If it is a daydream, why wake me up? My neighbors will not thank you if I stop believing in the mystical brotherhood of man.”
Are you implying that your belief in kinship with your neighbors depends on your Christianity?
A: Yes. Christians say all men are brothers because we are all created by one Father in heaven. It is a supernatural statement. Atheists who say all men are brothers are speaking rank nonsense. From a natural point of view, all men are not even cousins.
Indeed, if we accept the Darwinian account of the origin of the human species, the conclusion is forced upon us that the various races of mankind are in deadly competition with one another, and one race, a master-race, will prove superior, better fitted by nature to survive, and out-breed, outfight and out-compete the other races, peopling the earth with their progeny and wiping the other, lesser, breeds into extinction. According to an atheist and Darwinian view of the life, it is slowing the evolutionary process to preserve the weaker breeds.
You might object that not all atheists are Darwinians, or that an atheist can adopt a moral code which does not place a high value on the evolutionary process. Perhaps so: it is an open question. But all men cannot be brothers in a naturalistic universe. At best they can be allies in the War of All Against All of which Thomas Hobbes writes, on the ground that an innate harmony of interests does or should exist between all rational beings whatsoever. That is not the same as being brothers.
Just on a practical level, the statistics show that Christians give more to charity and spend more time with charitable causes than atheists and agnostic. Where the real work of charity goes on, in soup kitchens and prisons, the number of non-Christians devoting time and effort to the poor and needy really thins out.
I did not give money to charity when I was an atheist. Why should I? It was my money, and I was not rich. I certainly would not have adopted a Chinese daughter had it not been for my Christianity. Why should I? She is not of my race. Her suffering causes me no pain. To adopt a child is a lifelong obligation with no limits. Tell me a convincing reason why an atheist is under a moral obligation to do such a thing. I am not asking whether an atheist might not be stirred with compassion—they are human, after all—I am asking for a logical and intellectually coherent reason to demonstrate a moral principle.
Speaking as one who was, until quite recently, an atheist, I assure you that I never came across (and never expect to come across) an intellectually defensibleposition that could justify both (1) a belief in atheism and (2) a belief that all are under a moral duty to practice self-sacrificing charity. Looking carefully through the writings of Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Frederick Nietzsche, and I did not find not a single logically coherent argument favoring self-sacrificial charity, and hardly remember the topic being addressed at all. I do recall reading an article by Isaac Asimov favoring the sacrifice of the wealth and time of other people toward a political policy to help the city where he lived. Ayn Rand regards self-sacrifice as the paramount moral evil. Karl Marx was consumed with hatred as if with fire until there was nothing left: his writings are an ash-heap of evil nonsense, calling for revolution, bloodshed, destruction, and death. He might have had a fine mind, had he not devoted himself to the darkness. Nietzsche despised charity.
Look around the world. How many Non-Western anti-slavery societies are there? How many atheists are in the Red Cross, or the Salvation Army?
The atheists who believe in charity are like those who quench their thirst from the fumes of an empty bottle. Born and raised in a predominantly Christian culture, they have adopted its values while rejecting the logic that underpins those values.
When challenged, they have no coherent answer to give.
The pagans thought weakness and poverty was despicable, not sacred, and the warrior-heroes used and abused women and children as their chattel. We never do hear from Homer of Chryse’s opinion of Achilles, do we? Her wrath is of no concern to the poet. The world is returning to paganism in its theology, and therefore it must return to paganism in its indifference to human life, its pagan cruelty, in short order. I direct your attention to the public debates over euthanasia and abortion. We have also seen a return to pagan tribalism: it is commonplace in political discourse these days that no sympathy nor admiration can exist between the different breeds of man: blacks follow black leaders, whites follow whites, yellow follow yellow, and so on. The cosmopolitanism of the Roman Republic is lost. We are all Greeks, to whom any outside ethos is barbarian.
Atheists react with anger and annoyance when someone points out the obvious, that Christianity has a high moral standard that the atheist worldview has no reason to support. But common experience bears this out. In my own life, I live noticeably better than I once did. I do things now I never had the least motive to do as an atheist, including forgiving people who offend me, and giving to strangers who can never repay me. My roommate in college used to be a Christian, and is now an atheist, and he lives noticeably worse than he once did. He now whores around. The atheist nations of the Earth are famed only for their unimaginable bloodshed, and for re-imposing and re-inventing the slavery that the Christian nations abolished.
Suppose you were in a coma on life support, and there was a small but real chance you might survive and recover. Suppose the state wanted to pull the plug and remove your feeding tube and have you slowly, ever so slowly, inch by inch, die of starvation and dehydration. Whom do you think would be more willing to speak out to defend you from this slow death—the ACLU or the Pope?
Letter of 24 Sept
Q: (quote) “Tell me a convincing reason why an atheist is under a moral obligation to do such a thing. I am not asking whether an atheist might not be stirred with compassion—they are human, after all—I am asking for a logical and intellectually coherent reason to demonstrate a moral principle.”
…are you speaking rhetorically or to all readers, or do you really want me to answer that?
A: It was a rhetorical question. I have read many attempts (Lucretius, Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel,Ayn Rand, John Rawls) to erect a coherent metaphysic and ethics absent a theology: none of them defend the concept of self-sacrifice as a moral good, even if now and then some acknowledge it as a good that helps the tribe or the bloodline.
Q: You had studied the Bible but never read John? (Or had you read it in the new English but not the original Greek?)
A: I have read John in the Koinic Greek, at least the first few verses. We read part of this Gospel in English for school. My study of the Bible outside school, however, was contrarian in nature: I was looking for absurdities and enormities to shock the conscience or befuddle the reason of the faithful. The Old Testament is a richer source than the New.
Q: Can you give more examples of Bible passages that were part of your experience but that you hadn’t read before?
A: No. My visions were not a Sunday school. We were not discussing Biblical criticism.
Q: (quote) “I am Christian because I had a religious experience with specifically Christian elements in it, albeit the mystical unity of other religions was not absent. What I saw was as simple as Love itself, and as mysterious. It was not some vague light or misty sensation I met, but people to whom I spoke, a ghost, an apostle, the Madonna, the Paraclete, the Messiah, and the Father. The Holy Spirit entered my soul, I felt it happen, and something changed inside me: grace was poured into my like wine into a tin cup, alchemic wine that turns tin into gold. “
Did you think of (or did the spirits remind you of) 1 John 4:1-6 when this happened?
A: An amusing question. No. I was an atheist when this happened, remember? Atheists do not think of 1 John 4:1-6 when they see spirits. They think of Carl Sagan or James Randi or episodes of Scooby Doo.
Q: Are these apparitions the visions you previously referred to when you said you "received three visions like Scrooge being visited by three ghosts"? If so, did you have three before and three later, or did the apparitions come in pairs or groups?
A: No. That sentence was referring to several events, not just the visions. One event was in the hospital, when I spoke to beings in a vision like speaking to a person. One was a week or so later, a religious experience like ecstasy, when I grew aware of the mystical unity of the universe, and saw the fine structure of time and space. One was an experience I am not sure how to classify, when I felt the Holy Spirit enter my soul. The apparitions did not necessarily come in pairs or groups.
Q: In a later comment, you said these experiences were in different locations. Does that mean the apparitions came to you in the hospital (or in your home?), not somewhere else in out-of-body experiences? Where were they?
A: One was in the first hospital, where I was checked in. One was in the second hospital, where I was recovering from surgery. One was at home. I mention the difference in locations only because one skeptic tried to convince me that I was breathing in fumes from a faulty radiator—he did not bother to discover whether or not there were any radiators where I was.
Q: Can you tell a little more about the apparitions?
A: No. They asked me not to speak of them (which I thought odd, I admit. Later I discovered several passages in the Gospel where Jesus made the same request, or a similar one, or one he had healed by miracle.) The wisdom behind the request (or command) becomes clearer to me as time goes on. By telling the details of my experience, I run the risk of making the Christian religion seem less reasonable and less real than it really is, and give the skeptic more reasons (specious reasons, but reasons nonetheless) to disbelieve it. I would not have been convinced by hearing a report such as I give you now, so I assume no one else would be either.
So I will merely say that I am neither a prophet, nor someone given any message meant for anyone but myself, nor was I told or shown anything that in any way contradicts traditional Christian teachings. People who are not stubborn and blind about these things can get to where I am now by far less dramatic means, by opening a Bible or bending a knee in prayer. Events like mine are no doubt meant for the remedial class, the spiritually retarded.
I can clear up one assumption, however. Your questions seem to assume I saw something with my eyes, standing in the room with me. It was not like that. The experience was entirely spiritual and non-material: or, if you like, you can say it was all in my head. No one standing next to me would have seen anything.
If you receive a revelation, like Buddha, telling you the material world is not real, it does no good to ask if there is any material evidence left behind to support it.
Letter of 25 September
Q: I just realized my last message may read as if I am trying to persuade you to tell me more about the apparitions. Don’t get the wrong idea; I realize that is your private information, and I respect that.
A: Rest assured, I did not interpret your question in that way. You were asking if there were physical effects in the room, and if the sights and sounds were accompanied by flashes of light and so on. The answer is no: when I used the words "I saw" or "I spoke to" it because English does not have a word for this. It was not something that happened with my eye and my mouth. The closest thing for it in English would be to say "I saw in a vision" or "I spoke silently."
I suppose I could describe the thing as if it were telepathy, but then people would be mislead to suspect my science fictional imagination were merely running away with me.
There is no clear way to describe the indescribable. One might as well try describing falling in love to a child too young to know what romance is. When it happens to you, you’ll know it, but before then, you can only know it as hints and shadows.
Letter of 25 Sept
Q: But bending a knee in prayer is what you did, isn’t it? I can see why you said you don’t like to talk about this, but maybe if you do, other nonbelievers will relax their minds and give prayer a chance, too.
A: I don’t understand this question. My prayer when I demanded God show himself to me was hardly a prayer, it was a gauntlet flung into the face of God.
Q: And you weren’t in the ICU when these events happened, so he couldn’t say it was ICU psychosis, right?
A: Correct. When I was in the ICU, I watched an episode of Kim Possible on the telly, an episode called ‘A Sitch in Time ‘ if I recall correctly.
Q: (quote) “. I have seen visions and experienced miracles, seen prayers answered, and had things even stranger happen. One supernatural event would be enough to convince an honest atheist that there was something in the universe which could not fit into the materialistic, scientific model. I have had half a dozen such experiences “
Can you give some examples of the miracles and strange happenings? (Exclude this one if the answer is the same as to my previous question about the nature of the apparitions.)
A: There are none which, taken in isolation, would convince a skeptic. For example, once I had a toothache of overwhelming pain. I prayed, and the tooth was cured in a day or two.
Q: By saying the tooth was cured, are you implying that it had been infected? Did the pain go away immediately (as with your heart attack), whereas the infection took about a day to heal?
A: I am saying that I went to the dentist and he looked at the tooth and said I needed root canal surgery. Instead of agreeing to surgery, I went home and was in agony for two days. I prayed. At the end of that time the pain slowly receded and vanished. When I went back to the dentist, he examined the tooth, and he was simply baffled, since he could find nothing wrong with it.
No, the pain did not go away immediately.
Q: (quote) “if this is an hallucination, it more useful than sanity. For one thing, this ‘hallucination’ resolves certain philosophical conundrums that have haunted me for years, such as the mind-body problem or the determinism-freewill paradox. “
You mentioned before that some nonbelievers (unbelievers?) you knew tried to tell you that you had hallucinations or delusions, but that they did not ask about your medical records relevant to this matter. Were you ever tested for any conditions that cause hallucinations or delusions?
A: No. However, any of the many tests I was given while in the hospital had shown, for example, foreign substances in my bloodstream, or unusual brain activity, it would have no doubt been detected. Please keep in mind the point of my comment. I am not offering the lack of medical proof of hallucination as evidence that the hallucinations were visions: that would be a logical error. I am offering as proof of the lack of intellectual integrity on the part of so-called skeptics that they do not bother to become acquainted even with the basic facts of the case before leaping to a conclusion, and once comfortably fortified at their conclusion, they simply resist or ignore the facts. A real skeptic looks at facts without gullibility.
Q: (quote) “…the saints are more sagacious than the sages, the martyrs more stoic than the Stoics, the schoolmen more rational than the Rationalists, the ghostly catechism a good deal more human than the Humanists, not to mention more humane. If this is illusion, why is it the only thing that gives deep meaning to an otherwise dull, dead, paradoxical and futile reality?”
This sounds odd coming from an SF writer. Did the natural world seem dull and dead before you were a Christian?
A: Of course. The scientific world view is that the universe is an inanimate machine, a mechanism of stars and worlds made of lifeless atoms acting according to lifeless laws of nature: and nowhere in the vast blackness is any hint of a governing or benevolent rational intelligence behind nature. Patterns in nature are accidents, and beauty in nature is in the eye of the beholder, and when you die, the same oblivion that claims a snuffed candleflame claims you, and time erases all the monuments and all memory of you, and just and the unjust alike.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then to see beauty in the natural world is merely a past-time, a pleasing self-delusion, the dilettantism of aesthetes, and therefore of no use, revealing no truths, curing no ills, accomplishing no ambitions, helping no sufferers, and therefore, yes, dull. I am frankly surprised, nay, astonished by the question. Do you know any atheists who think the universe is a living beast, as, for example, Socrates held, or who thought the beauty in nature reflected and lead to a divine beauty, as the Neoplatonists did?
The attitude that the cosmos is a machine is so widespread that I doubt the average person has even contemplated any other possibility.
Letter of 28 September
Q: (quoting) ”Do you know any atheists who think the universe is a living beast, as, for example, Socrates held, or who thought the beauty in nature reflected and lead to a divine beauty, as the Neoplatonists did?” You said: I once encountered someone who, from what I understood, did not believe in any gods but believed that our desire to know the universe is (or manifests) the universe’s desire to know itself.
A: I suppose that is pretty close, but mylogical atheist brain would have rejected that someone’s statement as muddled thinking, misleading, perhaps even deception.
Merely calling human beings “The part of the universe that is self-aware “ admittedly allows one to describe the act of human investigation of the indifferent and inanimate machinery of the universe with the phrase “The part of the universe that is self aware is investigating itself” but this phrase is misleading in the extreme, because it overlooks the fact that the other parts of the universe, i.e. everything outside the human skull is neither self-aware, nor concerned for human life, nor aware of human life, nor has any value, purpose, nor serves any final cause. It is still a cosmos-sized machine made of nothing but mindless atoms in motion.
That someone’s comment is anthropomorphism (on the same order as primitive savages who ascribe anger to thunderstorms and happiness to good hunting grounds) and in that sense is an idolatry even more simplistic than that of the savages.
Q: In the previous version of your story, you mentioned feeling "puffed up with pride." Did the sense of humiliation and condemnation (I believe you’ve mentioned more than once feeling "condemned" and having felt more comfortable as an atheist) come later, or were you simply in a better mood when you wrote the first story?
A: I fear I do not recall the context of the statement. I doubt that the difference, if it exists, is due to mood, rather than to what purpose the statement is meant to serve.
Q: Occasionally, I’ve talked to or read about nonbelievers who found it in themselves to ask God for a revelation (probably talked into it by believing friends and family), but didn’t get results like yours. Do you think they were all closed-minded, or is it possible that some were not, as you put it, "foolish and stupid," and thus were not given obvious revelations because they should have found God in more subtle ways?
A: I am in no way qualified to answer, or even to speculate about an answer, to that question. I have not talked to or read these nonbelievers, I am not in a position to speculate about the hidden contents of their minds and souls, and I am certainly not in a position to speculate on the purposes of an infinite and divine mind of God.
To the contrary, what I have read from believers leads me to think that what happened to me is a fairly ordinary occurrence, at least among the faithful. I do not think I have ever heard of it happening to an enemy of Christ before, except (of course) for St. Paul on the road to Damascus.
Q: Do you have a favorite argument for God?
A: No. I will point out that I was not convinced by an argument, but by a miracle. Christians do not believe that faith comes via argumentation, but is instead a gift of the Spirit. Having received that gift I can, with argument, perhaps defend Christian dogma from the accusations that it contradicts itself, but I cannot, with argument, grant another person a divine gift.
Q: (referring to the visitations) Would it be correct to say that it would make little sense to ask what they looked like or what language they spoke, because what you received were not images and words, but ideas, and your cognition converted them into images and words? as opposed to what happens when two people meet and speak physically, and the listener’s mind converts the speaker’s words and signs into the ideas they represent (albeit with the risk of loss in translation)?
A: I would not necessarily make the assumptions you are making when you phrase the question that way. You are asking me to describe a mystical and otherworldly experience in worldly terms. It cannot be done.
Suppose I were describing falling in love to a Benedict who had never fallen in love. If he asked me whether my love was a tender as the feeling between brothers and friends, I would say yes. If he asked me whether I lusted for her the way a starving man lusts for food, I would also say yes. If he asked me whether I adored her the way a pagan adore the idol to which he bows, I would again say yes. And yet eros, romantic love, is neither friendship nor hunger nor adoration. It happens to belong in a different category and share some properties or parallels with these other things.
What happened to me shares some parallels to what you describe as ideas being converted by consciousness into images in words, but it also shares some parallels with seeing real things and hearing words spoken clearly in English.
29 September
Q: When you found the passage in the Gospel of John that matched what Jesus told you, what version of the Bible were you reading?
A: King James translation. However, the passage is there in the original Koinic Greek as well.
Q: (quote) “The Incarnation makes the Christian God more human and humane than the God we see in the Old Testament or the Koran. The God of the Trinity is not alone.” Does this mean that the God of the New Testament is not the same as the God of the Old?
A: Actually, no. That is not what the sentence means. If the sun we see at sunrise is dim and red and the sun we see at noon is blinding gold, the sun has changed its nature, merely that the turning of the World places us in a different position in regard to it. Christianity is built on Judaism, but does not reject it.
Q: On the subject of children and human life, I believe you’ve said that you came to the conclusion, independently of religion, that killing a human zygote is the moral equivalent of killing a human infant. Has anything you have learned from your religious experiences (or learned about Christianity after your experiences) further reinforced this conclusion?
A: Actually, no, my conclusion specifically was that killing an unborn human organism is an abrogation of the parental duty to care for and nurture one’s offspring, whether the child is human or pre-human. I do not accept the conclusion that my father’s duty toward my children is tied into the accomplishment or developmental stage of the child. Whether or not he is my child is a biological fact, established the moment the fact exists. The duty exists as of the first moment any action of mine can affect or influence the child, and ergo the duty can exist before the child does (as when a prudent bachelor takes steps to provide a house and sustenance for any children he might have hereafter).
So I consider that it is actually morally far worse for a mother to kill her offspring in her womb, than to kill a grown man. It is an abrogation not merely of a moral duty, and not merely an abrogation of humanity, but an abrogation of nature itself. Even the brute beasts take some provision for their offspring: the dumb and coldblooded sea-turtle who abandon her eggs takes care to bury them in the soft sand. This is not based on the developmental stage of the egg, whether it has ‘turtle rights’ or not, but based on the simple and natural fact that the eggs are hers. The answer to your question is no.
Nothing I learned about Christianity further reinforced this conclusion, even though to discover human life is sacred to Almighty God the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Creator of Life lends additional gravity to the conclusion, and bathes it in the roseate light of divine wrath.
However, one thing that deeply impressed me once I began learning about Christianity was that aborticide has always been forbidden by this religion, in sharp contradistinction to the surrounding culture of the Romans, where both abortion, and contraception, and exposing infants were commonly practiced. Those who claim this is a recent addition to Christian doctrine are mistaken (or are liars). There is a document called the Didache, which comes from the same strata of writing as the Gospels and Epistles, from the First Century, which condemns abortion.
If abortion was ever outlawed and condemned by some other religion, such as the Jainism or Buddhism, it has not come to my attention previously. I assume all civilized peoples would recoil from the practice. There imagination fails even to envision anything more against nature than convincing a mother to kill her own helpless child while in the womb. Even the pagans, whose laws allowed for such things, told stories about Oedipus and Paris, and other children left out to die, who rose again and destroyed their destroyers, and even the pagans held up Medea, who murdered her children, as a witch to be condemned, not as an example to celebrate. The modern ‘progressive’ mind is sunk much lower on the moral scale than the ancient heathens.
Q: (quote) “The Christian world-view is not only NOT incompatible with the scientific and logical one, they reinforce each other. You must imagine my befuddlement when I see science presented as somehow being the enemy of religion. Science is the enemy of Taoism or Buddhism, perhaps, but not the enemy of a religion that combines the rationalism of Athens with the mysticism of Jerusalem. We invented the University, for God’s sake.” When you wrote this, were you aware that the Dalai Lama had said Buddhism had no trouble with science?
A: Actually, no. The ‘perhaps’ in that sentence was meant deliberately. It was a short hand way of saying ‘one could argue that’ for example, a mystical religion like Taoism or Buddhism rejects the empiricism on which modern science is based. Obviously the Dalai Lama must have heard such arguments, if he speaks to quell them. I wonder what the Dalai Lama means by ‘no trouble.’ If he is saying that Buddhism believes that the world is not Maya, illusion, and the source of Dukka, suffering, to be escaped by quenching the self, atman, in the serenity, Nirvana, then I would conclude only that Tibetan Buddhism has a particular nature of its own removed from other Buddhists.
But I freely confess that I know very little about Buddhism. I have read one or two Sutras, and stayed at a Rinzai-Zen Buddhist retreat one weekend in my youth. Like Toaists, their primary concern is not with the aspects of life that can be put into words and analyzed. Rinzai Zen is a rigorist otherworldly movement within the religion, whereas Tibetan Buddhism is almost Caesaropapist in theme, and much more worldly.
I was speaking of Buddhism of the type I had come across.
Are you really concerned with my opinions on Trinitarians, Aborticides, and Buddhists? Most of my opinions on most things are not changed before and after my conversion. Conversion is like suddenly being able to see in three dimensions what previously was flat. Being able to see things in three-dimensions rather than two changes one’s perspective, and makes one a better judge of depth, but does not change the location of objects in one’s field of view.
01 Oct
I should hasten to add, I do not mind going off on tangents. Some of the most interesting parts of a conversation are the detours. It is not as if we know before the conversation starts where it will lead.
I want to emphasize again that the old canard that Christianity is unscientific or antiscientific is misleading, perhaps false: science makes no sense except in a rational universe, and a secular worldview (such as Marxism) offers no particular assurance that the universe is rational and open to human knowledge. Absent one rational Creator who created both man and man’s world, there is no particular assurance that the logic inside the human mind and the logic of the outside universe correspond. Philosophyfrom Hume onward has grappled with this issue, and without convincing success.
And again, a mystical or esoteric worldview (such as Zen Buddhism) arguably undermines empiricism. There is no point in seeking truth through the examination of the senses if the truth is that the sense-impresions deceive and the world is Maya, an illusion. I do not know what the Dalai Lama said or in what context. The statement you report however is merely that the Dalai Lama thinks science will not disprove the doctrine of reincarnation.
Now, I am sure there are rigorists or literalists in every religion. A literalist from the Hindu religion might insist that Mount Sumeru is the axis of the world, surrounded by nine concentric oceans, and to the north of it is the square continent of Uttarakuru, where hyperborean immortals live. Science finds no evidence of such mountains, oceans, continents or peoples. Likewise, those who take the account of the seven days of creation in the Book of Genesis as history rather than poetry are confounded by the geological evidence of the age of the earth, not to mention the theory of Darwin. The rigorists or literalists are not representative of any religion, which deals with the complexities of truth both natural and supernal; but it is to the rhetorical advantage of the modern pseudo-religions of secular political movements to portray religion in this light. The modern pseudo-religions are a modern manifestation of the most ancient heresy of all, which is Gnosticism, and they also have their literalists and rigorists (Richard Dawkins comes to mind) who insists upon absurdities, such as selfish genes dictating human conclusions, as easily refuted by science, and more easily by logic, as the seven literal days of creation circa 4004 B.C. of a young-earthian from an Evangelical Church.
Q: (quote) “The absence of reincarnation, the horrible doctrine of hell, places a certain urgency beneath the question which Eastern religions, for all their manifest glories and good works, do not share. “
Is "the question" you refer to here the God question, or is it something else, such as the question of how we ought to live this life?
A: I mean here the question to which the various religions and philosophies of the world offer an answer, the great question of the meaning of life. The Christian urgency is that, in the absence of an endless cycle of endless incarnation, one has only one life in which to answer the question correctly, and eternal bliss or eternal sorrow hangs on your answer.
Q: (Quote) “She is more celebrated now than any queen, and lives where joy lives forever, and bright spirits like votive candles surround her, but I wish I could do something, anything to undo the sorrows she knew in life. Poor woman. “
Do such sorrows persist after death?
A: Actually, I was expressing my sorrow, not hers, at what she had endured in life. Mary is in the presence of the Beatific Vision. After death, for those who accept the divine love that is God, that love wipes all tears from our eyes, and there is nothing but ever mounting joy forever, and ever greater wonders to know. Those who reject love exist unloved, those who reject life embrace death, those who reject light are in darkness, a condition we who are alive can barely imagine: it is best represented as a lake of fire, or an outer darkness filled with screaming.
If there is any doctrine I would change if logic allowed it, it would be the doctrine of the eternity of hell. Unfortunately, reality is the way it is, and we created creatures do not get a vote. One believes what one believes because reason and evidence compel assent. We do not pick our beliefs like a debutante picking a dress, because they flatter us or follow fashion.
Whether the bliss of those at rest in perfection is marred by the suffering and wickedness of loved ones left behind on Earth is a delicate question, easily prone to misinterpretation: when Jesus is called the Suffering Servant or the Man of Sorrows, or Mary called Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, I do not think they weep for themselves, but for us.
Q: (quote) “I still conclude that there is no empirical evidence to require a belief in the supernatural. That conclusion has not changed.” Is that conclusion still the same today, or has it changed since you wrote this?
A: Unchanged. Empiricism deals with natural phenomena. The supernatural is within the realm of the noumenal, not in the realm of the phenomenal.
If a scientist, acting in his capacity as an empirical scientist, saw Moses part the Red Sea he would seek for a natural and mechanical cause for the motions of the water. The meaning of the sign, and the wonder of the wonder, might speak to him in his capacity as a rational soul, but would mean nothing to him in his capacity as a scientist. If he found no mechanical cause, he could only conclude, in his capacity as a scientist, that the mechanism is unknown, but not that the mechanism does not exist. This conclusion is forced by the limitations of his method. In his capacity as a scientist, he takes on faith that all phenomena have natural and mechanical causes.
Of course, if he does not step outside his capacity as a scientist and look at it with the eyes of a man, he will miss the meaning entirely. Imagine a scientist trying to measure the properties of the soundwaves issuing from the voice of his wife yelling at him with an oscilloscope, and paying no attention whatever to what she is saying, whether shrilling in anger or calling for aid: science investigates one thing, and ignores all other things.
To conclude that those other things which science does not investigate do not exist is as foolish as if a homicide detective, using the tools and methods meant to autopsy murder victims, were to conclude that, since bank fraud produces no corpse red with death-wounds, ergo a swindler is not a criminal.
Q: You’ve explained how the relationships between the mind and body and between determinism and free will relate to theism, but what about these other questions–"Why is nature reasonable?" and "Where do thoughts come from…?"?
A: Christians say nature is reasonable because a rational creator created a rational creation rationally. This doctrine, the doctrine of the Logos, as far as I know, is unique to the Judo-Christian tradition. Neither Islam nor Eastern religions have it, and, at least in some passages I have read of their sacred writ, go to some pains to deny it.
The secular materialist has no means to address, much less answer, the question. “Reasonableness” is not a material property, and has no empirical manifestation. Much nonsense has been written about modern physics, much of it by modern physicists, because they attempted an empirical answer to a metaphysical question, and so they came up with an image of the universe that lacks certain properties, cause-and-effect, being-versus-nonbeing, reality-versus-statistical-approximation, upon which not only the physical sciences but all rational thought must rest. This reinforces my prejudice that physicists should not speculate outside their areas of expertise, but should leave philosophy to philosophers, and theology to the Church.
The origin of thought is a strange question. You are aware of your thoughts. But you are not aware of those thoughts before they arise in your consciousness. The axiom of cause and effect says they cannot arise from nothing.
Saying that your thoughts arise from the mechanical motions of brain atoms would rob those thoughts of meaning. It would not explain how thoughts are related to each other through logical and thematic relations. It certainly would not explain where a poet gets his inspiration ora playwright gets his ideas. It would not explain why jokes are funny or why stars are sublime. It would not explain why I put a robotic rocket penguin in my first published novel. Where did that penguin come from? You can say I made him up, but that is not what it looks like to me.
Saying your thoughts come from subconscious thoughts, like water from the buried river Alph, merely raises the same question again at one remove. If thoughts come from subconscious thoughts, form whence come subconscious thoughts? Who or what decides the content of the subconscious mind? If the mind is designed by accident or by a blind natural process, then the decisions of our conscious minds cannot be decisions properly so called: they are merely processes without meaning which we observe but cannot determine. If the mind arises from the subconscious mind and the subconscious mind arises from nothing for no reason, then we ourselves are nothing, and nothing we think, nothing at all (including this thought expressing in this sentence you are reading now) has any reason, any reason at all.
So where do your thoughts or mine come from? Nothing comes from nothing.
Mystics, and I count myself as one, say that all minds are part of the divine mind. For mystics, there is an easy and obvious way to account for the origin of thoughts. Thoughts come into our minds from the divine and eternal mind in which we are all participants or creatures.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
