Civil Commotion

An ER doctor is presented with the victim of a knife fight — a Jehovah’s Witness who has affirmed his refusal of blood transfusions.

It was around that time that his parents showed up and informed us that the patient was a Jehovah’s Witness and would not accept blood products under any circumstances. Even if that meant his death. They were adamant on this point even after I explained that we were not in hypothetical territory any more — that his injuries were quite life-threatening and the blood loss might be the factor that caused him to die. They were firm and well-prepared and even showed us a piece of paper signed by the patient, fairly recently, expressly refusing blood transfusions.

He likens the parents’ behavior to that of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, adding this:

The fact that it was God’s funny little joke and Isaac wasn’t murdered doesn’t really redeem the story.

I think this is so repugnant because it runs counter to humanity’s deepest instinct, to love and care for our children. It’s appalling to consider that abstract notions regarding the dictates of a probably nonexistent deity can over-ride this fundamental human impulse, to put the life and welfare of your child above all else.

Longtime readers will not be surprised to learn that I’m in total agreement. Recall, now, this passage from Jonathan Kirsch’s magisterial history of the Inquisition.

Confession was required before the sin of heresy could be forgiven, for example, and yet confession alone was never enough. The confession had to be abject, earnest, and complete, which meant that it had to include the betrayal of others, including spouses and children, friends and neighbors. That’s why the naming of names was rooted in both the theology and the psychology of the Inquisition — the will of the victim to resist had to be utterly crushed, his or her sense of self eradicated, and the authority of the interrogator acknowledged as absolute. The best evidence that an accused man or woman has been utterly defeated, then as now, is the willingness to betray a loved one or a trusting friend.

The entire aim of Christian teachings is to utterly destroy the normal human instincts. Y’all are no damn good, y’all were born that way — Remember?

I say again, then: Most people have too much sense and decency to be ‘good’ Christians; it’s the ones who don’t that you have to look out for.

That is the idea — that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian

The pastor of a Houston megachurch abruptly scrapped his planned Mother’s Day sermon this year in favor of denouncing President Obama’s support for same-sex marriage. It’s about what you’d expect, but the unusual frankness allows us an uncommonly close look at the disturbed worldview of the evangelical right.

“When you lift man higher than God, human choices are higher than God’s commands,” Matte said. “And so the issue of gay marriage has become a civil rights issue when it is truly a theological issue.”

There are two obvious problems with that highlighted part. First, the deliberations of a secular state should never consider theology; the American revolution was premised on the moral claim that the state exists to secure the natural rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness — not to compel us all to live as Baptists. Second, the claim that theology, or more generally Christianity, has anything to say about what is a proper marriage relies wholly upon the Genesis tale of Adam and Eve. They never existed, however, and every educated man knows that. We should not take recourse to childish fairy tales when making public policy.

Matte said Christians have a responsibility not only to pray for their government, but also to vote. “We’ve been given an opportunity to vote so that we can make our views and our expression known,” he said. “We must first vote our theology. Then we vote our preferences on policy.”

As I remarked here, the Southern Baptists have rejected the traditional Baptist support for separation of church and state; they are not Baptists any more. They are now following the blueprint of Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto, aiming toward a bottom-up theocracy created by the demand of the populace. If you’ve never read that book, you should — and you should be scared.

Pious Albert is hawking a new anthology about preaching which includes a chapter by him and is entitled — I am not kidding you — Feed My Sheep.

albertmohler: RT @Ligonier: Feed My Sheep (eBook) with chapters by @JohnMacArthur, @AlbertMohler, @JohnPiper, R.C. Sproul is now 99¢ http://t.co/jry8iG0Z

This short essay by Victor Stenger — “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.” — a retired particle physicist now associated with the University of Colorado, rejects the argument that religion’s reality claims can’t be tested scientifically.

However, while supernatural entities may not be directly observable, any effects these entities might have on the material world should manifest themselves as observable phenomena. Anything observable is subject to scientific inquiry. On the other hand, if the supernatural has no observable effects on the natural world, then why even worry about it?

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Teams of scientists from three highly respected institutions — the Mayo Clinic and Harvard and Duke Universities — have performed carefully controlled experiments on the medical efficacy of blind, intercessory prayer and published their results in peer-reviewed journals. These experiments found no evidence that such prayers provide any health benefit. But, they could have.

If a supernatural entity acts in the material world, it should leave fingerprints behind; so far, none have been found. This doesn’t prove that there is no supreme being, of course. If there is such, however, it is not the god of the old theisms; that is a failed hypothesis.