In a previous post, I commented about the movie Red Lights, which (I argued) was apparently promoting pseudo-skepticism in Hollywood. I was only partially wrong, but I won't tell you the story of the movie, you should watch it by yourself (it is a very good movie, by the way... you are going to enjoy it a lot).
I'm going to comment only that one of my top favorite actresses, Sigourney Weaver, features a nice but tough-minded, highly intelligent woman and very experienced and trained experimental scientist, whose professional experience dealing with "psychics" has made her a hard-nosed skeptic. She fully knows the fake psychic's bag of tricks and how to design experiments to expose them.
I suspect that Weaver's role was inspired in professional skeptic Susan Blackmore. Although less eccentric than Blackmore, Weaver's role is very similar in her scientific approach and moderate manners (not a Randi-like type of rhetorical skeptic), specially regarding the fact that her skepticism is based on her own personal scientific experience.
In fact, when a student questions her about whether she thinks that all paranormal claims are false, she answers that she's not saying such a thing, that her point is that most of them can be explained in conventional ways, according to her experience.
Remember that Blackmore has said that she didn't find any convincing scientific evidence for psi (this is not exactly like that, because she has admitted in Confessions of a Parapsychologists that "The other major challenge to the skeptic's position is, of course, the fact that opposing evidence exists in the parapsychological literature. I couldn't dismiss it all." (p. 74), so actually she knew that positive scientific evidence did exist for psi, only that she couldn't find it in her own experiments).
The end of the movie is, for a large extension, very unexpected. I think this movie should be watched by all fans, students and reserachers of parapsychology and psychic research, and even pseudoskeptics will surely like it, except for...
PS I ask all the readers that, while watching the movie, ask themselves: Am I more sympathetic to DeNiro (the psychic) or to the researchers (Weaver and Cillian)? This test will tell you a lot about your own prejudices...
Even though my Spanish is far from perfect, I've been reading some of the scholarly material and hearing some lectures and audios by Spanish New Testament scholar Antonio Piñero, a liberal scholar who is expert in Greek philology and the original texts of the New Testament, and probably is one of the leading specialists in the New Testament in Europe. He teaches in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (Spain).
To be honest, my impression is that Piñero is a serious, brilliant New Testament scholar. He's an agnostic and skeptical scholar (i.e. he doens't believe in God and hence he doesn't believe in miracles, let alone in Jesus' resurrection), but his approach (contrary to other liberal scholars like some of those in the Jesus Seminar) is intellectually honest, fair-minded, objective, technically competent, extremely erudite and serious.
In this post, I'd like to comment in just one of professor Piñero's views on the historical Jesus: Jesus' predictions of his own resurrection in Mark.
According to Piñero, careful observers and readers will realize a kind of inconsistency or contradiction in Mark regarding the resurrection. He says that in Mark 8: 31 (and in chapter 9 and 10 too), Jesus informed his disciples a prediction about his future resurrection. However, in Mark 16: 6-8, it is written that women, when informed by the angel about Jesus' resurrection, were victim of fear and panic and didn't tell anybody about the resurrection.
According to Piñero, this reaction by the women is inexplicable, because they received a very good news (Jesus' resurrection) which confirmed Jesus' own prediction about it, and it doesn't make any sense to react with such a panic, let alone to keep silence about such a good news.
Piñero's explanation is this: Jesus' prediction of his own resurrection in Mark are a later addition (created, perhaps, with basis in certain words of Jesus) AFTER the resurrection, i.e. a later addition after the disciples became convinced of Jesus' resurrection, and from there they made the Christian theology which eventually coloured the Gospel narratives (in which Jesus' life was interpreted in the light of such theological convictions of a risen Jesus).
There are (in my view at least two) fatal objections to professor Piñero's position:
1-What we need to be explain first is WHY hard-core monotheistic jews (who considered that God is only one and the resurrection will be a general one in the end of the days to all the chosen people) became strongly convinced of Jesus' resurrection (before the general resurrection).
The disciples had every theological and religious predisposition and bias AGAINST seeing any person (specially a Messiah who was humilliated and defeated by his opponents and in addition crucified and hence cursed according the Jewish law) as God or as the only resurrected Son of God.
2-Moreover, the evidence in Mark shows that the disciples didn't understand what Jesus meant in his predictions about his "resurrection" (Mark 9:10 and Mark 9:32; see also Luke 18: 33-34), which passes positively the criterion of authenticity known as "historical fit", because such lack of understanding fits with the known Jewish belief that no person is resurrected before the general resurrection. So, they couldn't understand exactly what Jesus was talking about in his prediction.
We cannot simply, as Piñero does, accept unproblematically the resurrection belief by the disciples, and from there to try to explain Jesus' predictions of his own resurrection as later additions, because the origin of the resurrection belief itself is more problematic, antecedently unlikely and inexplicable (if the resurrection didn't occur) than any record about a previous prediction of it. (In fact, note that you cannot explain the origin of the disciples' belief in the resurrection as a theological colouring or invention by the early Christian church, because such a Church simply didn't exist before the belief in the resurrection was formed).
As a rule, liberal scholars try to explain (or perhaps, explain away) any evidence suggesting divinity in Jesus (e.g. Jesus implicit claims of divinity, or his resurrection) assuming that such reports are later additions created by Christians. But as explained above, such liberal approach puts the cart before the horse: What need to be explained is why the disciples became convinced of Jesus' divinity, and an explanation for this is precisely the one that the reports say: That Jesus' life and teachings explicitly or implicitly claimed a divine status (which would explain the Jewish instigation against Jesus as a "blasphemous" and eventually led to his crucifixion), which culminated with the resurrection as the ultimate vindication by God of Jesus' claims of divine authority.
After several decades of skepticism regarding Jesus' teachings implying divinity, in the last 20 years or so (as far my study of the literature goes), an increasing number of scholars in America and Europe, including liberal, are accepting that Jesus' teachings included elements implying a sort of divine status or authority or condition, which set him apart of any other prophet or teacher.
Even a member of the Jesus Seminar (in my opinion, the most honest, serious and rigurous member of that group) agnostic scholar James G. Crossley has written that on historical grounds he believes that: "Famous terms for Jesus such as "son of Man" or "Son of God" really were being used by or of Jesus when he was alive. Jesus did really practised healing and exorcism; and Jesus really did predict his imminent death and probably thought it had some atoning function." (How did Christianity begin? p.1)
If you add the resurrection to Crossley's picture (which he doesn't accept for philosophical reasons, see below), the you have the essentials of Christianity (or "mere" Christianity as C.S.Lewis called it).
Liberal scholars tend to dislike the above conclusions, because it sounds too Christian. Hence, they try to undermine the status of Jesus' teachings, making them a kind of popular sage or mere teller of stories, in order to make the resurrection even more improbable and attribute the whole origin of Christianity to the amazingly strong powers of invention, wishful thinking and fabrication of the early Church.
Fortunately, there are exists some serious liberal scholars like Piñero or Crossley (even if I disagree with them on many points) who are more honest and balanced in the treatment of the evidence.
For Crossley's view on the resurrection of Jesus, see his debate with William Lane Craig:
The above two lectures show two wholly different perspectives, one in favor of religious pluralism (Borg) and other in favor of religious exclusivism (Craig). Both authors have in common that they're Christians (even though I strongly doubt that Borg is a Christian), but besides that they disagree in almost everything.
I agree with Borg in this: I would like that religious pluralism were true. Why? Because I'd like that all the roads lead to God and that most people, of whichever religion, be saved.
However, I find no convincing evidence at all for religious pluralism and have not idea if it is true.. But I am strongly opposed to a religious pluralism regarding the historical Jesus, because I think the best evidence for Jesus' teachings doesn't support such a view. On the contrary, I think the evidence support an exclusivistic view of Jesus' self-perception (I've briefly discussed some of the reasons here).
I agree with Craig in this: If Jesus' resurrection happened, then (contrary to Borg's inexplicable view that "the bodily resurrection doesn't matter") it tells us a lot about him, if read in the socio-religious-historical context in which his teachings were provided. Also, if Jesus' resurrection didn't happen, then Christianity is false. Period (no sophism about "metaphors" is going to change that). Therefore, an objective investigation about Jesus' resurrection and teachings is absolutely necessary.
Finally, I want to say that the liberal portrait of Jesus by liberal schoalars is, in many cases, a new and astute way of atheistic deception. Many of the most influential liberal scholars ara demostrably atheists(despite of their misleading use of the language of Christianity), and they have found in religious pluralism a politically correct way to destroy and undermine mainstream religions, making them all basically equivalent. This is the basic purpose of atheism and secularism.
Since such liberal scholars don't believe in God, their claim "all roads lead to God", means that your religious beliefs are purely subjective, a personal choice. Since all such a religious claims about God are factually false, their only content is purely metaphorical and autobiographical, that is, they express the believer's own religious experience and spirituality. Hence, there is not reason to be an "exclusivistic" regarding one person's religion over another.
Note that the whole approach is dangerously misleading. Many religions and New-Age Spiritualities make factual claims about the spiritual world, and they contradict each other. Therefore, on pure analytical grounds, we know for sure that at least some of them are false.
You cannot accept the Urantia Book account of the reincarnation while accepting Neale Donal Walsh's Conversations with God, because they contradict each other about it. You cannot accept Eastern philosophies, some of which are impersonalistic (pantheistic, panentheistic or atheistic), while accepting Christianity which is a personalistic worldview.
You cannot accept deism (which excludes revelation) while accepting a religious worldview which is based on a revelation or miracle.
The above matters are obvious, but many people cannot see it because they have a purely emotional, feelings-based approach to religious matters, and these are the feelings exploited by religious pluralists and believers in New-Age religions and spiritualities.
But what is true or false about any objective matter cannot be settled alone by how such a doctrine "make me feel", or based on a bunch of personal nice feelings or how much a given idea is "appealing to me".
In the above video, well-known "Christian" scholar Marcus Borg debates William Lane Craig about the resurrection of Jesus.
From the 17 min of the video (in Borg's opening speech), Borg explains what he understand by Easter. Let's write down his own words (although I ask you to watch the entire debate by yourself). Please, read carefully the following of Borg's words: "For me, whether the [Jesus] tomb was empty doesn't matter. Whether something happened to the corpse of Jesus doesn't matter. For I understand things, Easter is not primarily about something espectacular happening to Jesus on a particular day in the past. It is about the continuing experience of Jesus after his death. This in my judgment is the historical ground of Easter. And to relate this to the stories of Easter in the Gospels, I don't think of the stories of Easter as reporting of kinds of events that could been photographed or videotaped or seen by a desinterested observer who happened to be present. As seen them as metaphorical narratives expressing these kind of experiences and these convictions. Some other may reflect specific experiences, some other may be paraboles of the resurrection."
Some comments:
1-Borg's position represents the triumph of liberal ideology and personal convictions and opinions over factual evidence.
What kind of person would say that "it doesn't matter" whether Jesus' bodily resurrection (and its logical consequence, the empty tomb) was historical or not? Even an atheist, who for whatever reason would become convinced of Jesus' physical resurrection, would tend to revise his atheism and probably will become a theist and even a Christian.
Do you really (honestly) believe that Jesus' bodily resurrection, if historical, "doesn't matter"? Really? I doubt any honest and objective person would say that.
2-When Borg says that the stories of Easter don't report events that could be photographed or videotaped by "desinterested observers", he's saying that Jesus' resurrection is NOT an objective historical event. The reports would be only autobiographical (i.e. reports about the personal biography and psychological convictions of the "interested" people there, i.e. Christians).
I'm sure that most of my readers will agree with me about the obvious meaning of Borg's words. But if you disagree, let's use an analogy palatable for you:
Suppose that a world's leading Spiritualist, when asked for his interpretation of physical or materialization mediumship, tell you this: "Well, I don't think that the stories about materializations in the spiritualist literature report the kind of events which could be observed by desinterested observers, nor photographed nor videotaped. They're metaphorical narratives expressing the experiences of spiritualists, they report the "continuing experience" of deceased and dead persons among spiritualists and other believers in the spiritual world".
The above words sound more like a James Rand-like kind of assessment of the spirutalistic literature than the words of a convinced, serious spiritualist.
What would you think of such "spiritualist"? Evidently, such a person is claiming that the cases of physical or materialization mediumship are purely illusory or subjective, not objective events. Written stories about such evidence don't report any objective, physical afterlife materialization through a medium, but the subjective psychological "experiences" of "interested" parties, namely, spiritualists who believe in mediums and the world of spirits.
Would you take such a spiritualist seriously? Would you even consider him a TRUE spiritualist? Obviously not. He CLAIMS to be a spiritualist, but in FACT he is NOT. He doesn't believe in the objective existence of all of these events, but he uses the language of spiritualist in order to convey the impression that he is one of them.
3-Borg's comments tend to give a misleading impression to people unfamiliar with the evidence for the historical Jesus. When he calls Christians who had experiences of the risen Jesus as "interested", he bypasses the fact that the early Chrsitians were MONOTHEISTIC JEWS who had every predisposition AGAINST considering any person to be God or to be resurrected before the ends of times. What need to be explained is precisely WHY that profound change was produced in such a people.
Moreover, you cannot explain the purely subjective "continuing experience" of Jesus in people who weren't believers in Jesus (and hence, with no interest in favor of Jesus) like Paul.
Borg's position is not only without evidence. It is actually contrary to the evidence, which is common in many liberal scholars when addressing the teachings and resurrection of Jesus.
4-Given all the above, we can ask: If Jesus' resurrection was merely metaphorical, not historical, then WHY IN THE WORLD DOES BORG CALL HIMSELF A CHRISTIAN? Why does he prefer (his idiosyncratic interpretation of) Christianity instead of Islam, or Buddhism, or contemporary revisionistic information from paranormal origin about Jesus in the Urantia Book, Conversations with God or A Course in Miracles? It is not clear why Borg buys into an anti-realistic view of the resurrection, but still insists in calling himself a Christian.
The answer (and the key to understand Borg's whole position) is RELIGIOUS PLURALISM. Watch the following lecture by Borg on religious pluralism:
5-After minute 18 of the above lecture, Borg continues speculating on the "meaning" of Easter. Please, notice carefully, how Borg uses the same TERMINOLOGY of Christianity, but with a wholly different meaning. For example, he says: "The second central truth claim of Easter (all of those based on the New Testament): God has vindicated Jesus. Easter is God "yes" to Jesus and God's "know" to that which crucified him".
Traditional Christians obviously claim that God vindicated Jesus, but in the sense that a PHYSICAL resurrection provided the ultimate objective proof that Jesus had an exclusive authority, an unique position among all other prophets, a special status regarding the kingdom of God, vindicating Jesus' exclusivistic and radical personal claims of being the Son of God and the only mediator between God and humans beings (claims which in the Jewish ears were clearly and straightfowardly blasphemous and eventually caused Jesus' crucifixion). The resurrection was the evidence that the blasphemous charge against Jesus was false, and that his claims implying divinity were, at the end, TRUE. This is the traditional understanding of Jesus in Christianity.
But note how Borg, while using the same phraseology, devoid it of any reasonable meaning and plausibility, in particular:
If the resurrection was not historical, but only subjective experiences of the believers in Jesus, how the hell does Borg know that such bunch of subjective experiences were God' "yes" to Jesus?
Believers in the Urantia Book have "experiences" of a new Jesus and a spiritual world which denies reincarnation, but this fact provide us with any evidence for thinking that such experiences imply God's "yes" to the Urantia Book and anti-reincarnation?
Followers of Neale Donald Walsh's Conversations with God have gained a new sense of spirituality and meaning of life. How the hell does such subjective feelings imply that God's "yes" to Walsh's teachings in favor of reincarnation (which, by the way, contradict the Urantia Book). Is God saying "yes" to mutually contradictory spiritual claims?
Finally, I don't want to seem too harsh against Borg. I've heard that he's a nice, very nice guy, and perhaps having a conversation with him while watching a basketball game or sharing acouple of beers would be fun.
My opposition is against his ideas, which I find extemely misleading, historically unreliable, philosophically objectionable and spiritually very dangerous.
In the fashion of New Age spiritualities, Borg tells what anti-Christians want to hear, what feels good to them, what is politically correct and palatable in a secular society which has undermined Christianity and other religions in such a way that discussing whether only one of them is true is politically incorrect, a secular society which only allows a room for religions in the context of religious pluralism in order to undermine them, making them equivalent and a matter of personal feelings, preferences and opinions (this secular and religious pluralist strategy astutely bypasses the most important and crucial point: if the claims of religions in question are true or false. This secularist strategy of promoting religious pluralism in order to make equivalent all the religions has caused a lot of spiritual damage and confusion and has to be exposed for what is: pure atheistic charlatanism and deception).
Borg's words are full of "inspirational" messages, emotionally nice words, refreshing positive feelings about the value of people's "experiences" and God's vindication of them (who would not like to having God validating and saying "yes" to our particular feelings and personal experiences, even if they're contradictory with other people's experiences and opinions?). You actually (and I include myself) will feel very good when hearing (and reading) Borg's inspirational lectures and scholarly work.
What is largely missing in Borg's words (and scholarly work) is convincing EVIDENCE to think that his opinions and speculations about the historical Jesus and Easter are likely to be true.
And this is the aspect of Borg's position which I find objectionable, misleading and spiritually dangerous.
Mariano Grimbank (aka. True Free Thinker) is a Christian who for years has fought the new atheism on the internet. In the above video, Grimbank presents evidence for the decline of online interest in atheism, naturalism and materialism. From this evidence, we cannot conclude anything about whether the number of atheists have increased or decreased, but certainly we can conclude that the online interest (i.e. the interest shown by people who connect themselves to the internet in order to search information about atheism) has decreased in comparison with previous years.
In my opinion, there are a bunch of factors which could explain this phenomenon:
1-The extremely bad and sophomoric philosophical arguments of the new atheists.
In their self-contragutalory, arrogant, ego-centered, "smarter-than-you" kind of mindset common among atheists, specially among the new atheists, they didn't realize that taking a public stance in favor of atheism (in a world in which over 90% of human beings are theists of a kind or another) could backfire: Leading and sophisticated defenders of theism would appear to defend theism and expose the sophomoric fallacies of these new atheist "intellectuals".
The result has been that the main arguments of the new atheists have been shown and exposed to be clearly fallaciousand even destructive ofscience itself (if such arguments were consistently employed), not only by theists, but by sophisticated atheists too. Consider Richard Dawkins' main argument against theism:
2-The moral poverty of atheismas a worldview:
Most people, including atheists, have not reflected objectively on the implications of an atheist worldview for topics like morality, consciousness, free will and so forth. They simply take for granted that all of these phenomena are independent of a God-based worldview (this underlies the common sophomoric objection that "You don't need to be religious to be good", or "atheists can be good too", which is clearly irrelevant and not in dispute: What is in dispute if whether the non-personalistic, purely mechanistic-materialistic and blind naturalistic Darwinian worldview of contemporary atheism can ground person-relative properties and phenomena like free will, rationality, consciousness, objective moral values, moral responsability and so forth, which are clearly spiritual in nature and hence in home with theism but strongly at variance with the naturalistic-materialistic metaphysics of atheism).
And this is NOT an insight discovered by theists or "religious" people, but something fully recognized and conceded by atheists themselves (when they are not doing public relations or propaganda for atheism), as I've shown with irrefutable evidence.
So, you can watch (and expect) that Richard Dawkins will concede not having non-arbitrary moral grounds for rejecting rape:
The transcript of the above video:
Justin Brierley: When you make a value judgement don't you immediately step yourself outside of this evolutionary process and say that the reason this is good is that it's good. And you don't have any way to stand on that statement.
Richard Dawkins: My value judgement itself could come from my evolutionary past.
Justin Brierley: So therefore it's just as random in a sense as any product of evolution.
Richard Dawkins: You could say that, it doesn't in any case, nothing about it makes it more probable that there is anything supernatural.
Justin Brierley: Ultimately, your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six.
Richard Dawkins: You could say that, yeah
.
End of the transcript.
Sophisticated atheist philosophers have articulated Dawkins' insight in a more careful way. So, atheist philosopher of science Alexander Rosenberg comments: "One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours)... Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. Alex Rosenberg, in his article "The Disenchanted Naturalistic Guide to Reality". Emphasis in blue added
3-The public debates in colleges and universities (and made public on the internet) among atheists and theists have shown not only the extremely bad arguments of atheists, but the intellectual sophistication of theists, who tend to win those debates.
Theistic debaters like William Lane Craig, John Lennox and others tend to win clearly their debates against the new atheists and other atheist professors.
Craig for example has debated all of the new atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, Wolpert, etc.), and in some cases has forced them to make painfully ridiculous objections and concessions which reveal their pseudo-intellectualism, irrationality, moral deficiences and dishonest sophistry, for example:
Or (look at Wolpert's arrogance and self-assurance while defending a clearly stupid, inept, mentally retarded argument, which was instrumental in my discovery of Jime's Iron Law):
Or:
How can you expect that such kind of atheists would pose a serious challenge for sophisticated forms of theism? They simply have not the intellectual level nor competence for matching it.
Since most people, including some atheists, are smart enough to realize these expressions of intellectual and moral poverty, many have begun to question the basis of their atheism, or at least, if the "new atheists" are the best representatives of the atheistic worldview. So, the decline of online interest in atheism is not surprising.
If you (like me) think that atheism is false and morally dangerous, you have an ethical obligation to help to support this anti-atheistic cause (regardless of your spiritual or religious beliefs). You have to help that these kinds of atheistic charlatanism, pseudo-intellectualism, irrationalism and sophistry be exposed and widely rejected.
The best way to help this cause is sharing in your blog or website the internet debates between leading atheists and the best theistic debaters, and let the people to draw their own conclusions.
They will see by themselves the intellectual and moral poverty of contemporary atheism.
In the lastest posts, I've analyzed and criticized some New Age Spiritualities and Religions, specially the ones which pose themselves as revisionisms of Christianity.
As far I've noted, these revisionistic spiritualities have many more features in common (besides misleadingly using Christian terminology in order to convey the impression that it is Jesus himself who is providing the information):
1-They tend to accept the Indian religious concept of "Maya" (illusion), according to which the reality is a projection of consciousness, an illusion. Such illusion is characterized by "dualisms": good and evil, God and the devil, love and fear, etc. This is a key concept in mysticism.
2-They tend to undermine the authority of God (which is essential in monotheistic religions) and exalt the "individual self" as the key to unlocking the TRUTH. It is the individual, in its interior, who will find the answers, the inner teacher or guide.
An obvious moral problem with the "illusion" concept, interpreted in terms of duality, is that if the objective reality has not dual aspects, then it is hard to see how objective moral values can be justified. After all, moral values implies anti-values (e.g. the good is opposed to the evil, justice is opposed to unjustice).
If all of duality is an illusion, then the dual distintion between good and evil is also an illusion. Therefore, there is not objective basis (i.e. a basis in reality) to judge that certain actions are objectively (not merely illusory) bad or evil or wrong.
Ironically, this is the mioral view implied by metaphysical naturalism, as Richard Dawkins has summarized: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference"River Out Of Eden p.155. Emphasis in blue added).
The New Age believer perhaps would challenge Dawkins's last point about everything being ultimately "blind, pitiless indifference", but he would agree with Dawkins that the duality of "good and evil" is illusory and hence not objectively existing.
Part of the appealing for this "anti-duality" mentality is that it makes the believer to feel good, and vanishes the feelings of guilt and fear connected with Christianity. After all, if there is not duality, no sense can be made of the distinction between justice and unjustice, and hence there is not point in talking about divine justice. Therefore, not possibility of being "punished" by sins or evils committed in this life exists, and the feelings of fear and guilt dissapear.
Another problem that I see in these New Age spiritualities is that they tend to undermine God's authority and power on creation on behalf of the "Self"' own powers. It is not God, but the "self" which determines almost everything. As consequence, the believers in these systems tend to have a watering down view of God (at least, in relation with the concept of God in monotheistic religions and analytic philosophy in which the distinction between God and the created universe is sharp and ontologically essential).
This position may make sense if you assume the non-personalistic ontology of many branches of Hinduism and Buddhism, but not in theism which is grounded in fundamental and ontologically senior person called God.
But the New Age revisionist won't be bothered by that.
In previous posts, I've mentioned that the choosing of a given worldview has a LOT to do with emotions and feelings. According to my observation, in USA it is very common that certain negative emotions and feelings (specially feelings of guilt, fear and anger) are connected with Christianity. Depending on the degree and intensity in which such negative emotions have affected a person, we will have a strong, militant atheist or "skeptic" (like the fans of Richard Dawkins, Randi, etc.), or a more spiritualy oriented anti-Christian person (the latter is the kind of person who will tend to like New-Age literature, oriental philosophies, the Jesus Seminar and other revisionistic views about the historical Jesus which depict a pluralisitc Jesus palatable to anti-Christian ears whose teachings fit what the anti-Christian person wants to hear).
This is a conclusion based on my careful observation of American people and the spectrum of their spiritual-religious preferences. I cannot say if the same applies to people of other countries, but I suppose that, mutatis mutandis, something similar applies to them, since the human nature is the same along all cultures.
It has to be said that my observation has been confirmed, at least to a certain extent, by other independent observers. For example, after his investigation (as an insider) among professional "skeptics" (specially the skeptical group PhACT, most of whom are militant atheists and secularists), agnostic David Leiter comments in his article "The pathology of organized skepticism": "I may have detected the reason, but only because I have continuously and closely observed and engaged so many of PhACT’s members. Sometimes that engagement has been adversarial and, thankfully, sometimes collegial, but mostly neutral. The theme that has emerged time after time, as I become closely acquainted with individual PhACT members is this: Each one who has disclosed personal details of their formative years, say up until their early 20’s, has had an unfortunate experience with a faith-based philosophy, most often a conventional major religion.
Very often, their family or community has (almost forcibly) imposed this philosophy on them from a very early age; but then as they matured, they threw off this philosophy with a vengeance, vowing at a soul level never to be so victimized again. Less often, it appears that they have instead voluntarily and enthusiastically embraced, for example, a New Age cult, or have become say, a born-again Christian. Then after a few years, they become convinced of the folly of that infatuation with the same basic result.
A person who has been duped frequently in everyday life might learn by bitter experience to be cautious and wary. The reaction of those who have joined PhACT is however more dysfunctional. They have been wounded at a deeper level, to the extent that what was purported to be a valid philosophy of life, and in which they were heavily involved, turns out to be empty and useless, even damaging, in their eyes. Thus, they gravitate to what appears to them to be the ultimate non-faith-based philosophy, Science" (emphasis in blue added).
This "wound at a deeper level" is exaclty what I suggested has affected many anti-Christians in USA. It is the level of the wound which will determine if the individual in question will tend towards extreme (or moderate) forms atheism or rather (if the wound is superficial) towards anti-Christian spiritualities and New-Age based religions. (Remember that we have using Christianity as an example, because this is the leading and most influential religion in USA and hence it is the one to which wounded people will tend to react against).
I explained too that Americans have been familiar mostly with a version of Christianity which tends to be anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, dogmatic and obscurantist, and that they tend to be ignorant of the brilliant minds in the history of Christianity and the intellectual sophistication of classical and contemporary Christian theology and philosophy.
As consequence of this ignorance plus the negative emotions associated with Christianity, Americans anti-Christians tend to have a strong prejudice against Christians in general and will apply a double standard in their evaluation of Christian literature. For example, when evaluating scholarship about the historical Jesus, they will tend to consider the liberal scholars to be more reliable and objective than the Christian ones (a prejudice similar to the atheist's lack of confidence in serious professional parapsychologists like Dean Radin and in turn will give sympathetic credibility to what professional skeptics like Randi or Wiseman or Blackmore publish or say about psychic research. The double standard guarantees that the skeptical atheist will be confirmed in his belief that ESP doesn't exist).
Holly Ordway, PhD, was a telling example of this kind of atheistic mindset. She is an academic and scholar (with a doctorate in English Literature), who thought that Christianity was a purely faith-based and anti-intellectual blind faith belief system, with not rational basis at all. However, after carefully studying Christianity and its most sophisticated defenders (like CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, John Donne, William Lane Craig, NT Wright, Gary Habermas, etc.) she has had a completely different view of theism, and eventually became a Christian theist.
Her atheism was of the extreme, arrogant, condescending, "I'm-smarter-than-you" hostile type. For example, in a typicaly arrogant, ego-based, self-congratulatory atheistic fashion, Ordway thought "It was fun to consider myself superior to the unenlightened, superstitious masses, and to make snide comments about Christians". Her academic credentials deluded ther into the belief that she was intellectually superior than other people, specially the supposedly ignorant and intellectually inferior Christians.
Since wishful thinking is extremely common among atheists, Orway wasn't an exception. She confesses "I thought I knew exactly what faith was, and so I declined to look further.... Easier by far to read only books by atheists that told me what I wanted to hear – that I was much smarter and intellectually honest and morally superior than the poor, deluded Christians"
The tendecy of reading or hearing only what one wants to hear is a very dangerous one as I've explained in previous posts. This tendency explains, for example, Ordway's atheistic confidence that atheists were morally superior than other people (a common delusion among atheists, which itself is evidence for Jime's Iron Law), even when the ideological champions of atheism are the main defenders of moral nihilism, relativism and subjectivism, because they fully realize that the atheistic worldview cannot provide any grounds for the objectivity of moral values (nor of moral responsability or moral free choice). On the contrary, atheism, in its contemporary naturalistic-materialistic version, positively excludes any objective moral values or other person-relative properties (like free will or consciousness).
Ordway's book Not God's Type is an interesting book explaining his journey from atheism to Christian theism. I highly recommend this book for people who want to study the factors which make a person to change her worldview.
Watch this lecture by Ordway about his journey from atheism to theism:
