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The Friendly Atheist alerted me to a cartoon on Atheist Cartoons:

This proves that, no matter how many times an issue is explained to the atheists, they ignore us and move on. I’ve addressed the issue before, and I know that many other apologists have also addressed the issue as well. Here we go one more time:

Atheists, listen up! Christians are NOT polytheistic. We are monotheists. We believe in one God. The Bible affirms that God is one being. Father, Son, and Spirit are separate persons, functionally different but ontologically the same being. No one understands or can explain the doctrine of the Trinity fully. So no one expects you to understand it. But to repeatedly mock it as polytheism is childish. Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean that you get to explain it the most convenient fashion for you, and ignore everything that knowledgeable people keep telling you about it. To do so impedes rational discourse.

Since no one fully understands the Trinity, atheists assume that it must be false. Permit me to draw a parallel. No one understands how life began on this planet. It could have been seeded from outer space says one theory, or it could have originated from non-life says another theory. God could have created it says a third theory. Just because no one fully understands the origin of life doesn’t mean that it never happened. Atheists permit that we will understand this mystery one day, but mock theists who say the same thing about the Trinity. For now, like the origin of life to an atheist, the Trinity remains a mystery to the Christian.

As for praying to angels and saints or the Virgin Mary, praying to anyone other than God is expressly forbidden in the Bible. Only Catholics practice this. Christians pray only to God.

Why is it that no matter how many times it is explained that Christians are monotheists does the charge of polytheism remain?

Regular readers know that I’ve been working out rebuttals to the sites Why Won’t God Heal Amputees and God is Imaginary. I have discovered recently that those sites run a blog where a person going by the moniker “Johnson” posts regularly about religion and all of its “evil.” The focus of the sites WWGHA and GII is, purportedly, all monotheistic religions. But when a person looks at the categories of the blog and the numbers of posts within each category it becomes readily evident that Christianity is the prime, if not only, target.

Recently, Johnson critiqued the newspaper advice column “God Squad” for their answer to this question:

I’m having a hard time keeping my faith. I was raised a Christian, yet we didn’t attend church regularly. I consider myself blessed, yet I’m having trouble accepting that God had anything to do with it.

I can seemingly explain my good fortune by a combination of science and hard work. I very much want to believe and have God be a daily part of my life, but my heart doesn’t feel the same way. Can you help?

Almost Godless in Florida

The God Squad concluded that this person’s real problem was a lack of gratitude for the blessings that God has dispensed upon him rather than a lack of belief in God. Johnson makes this a deeper and more philosophical proposal than it needs to be by reversing the coin: If God blesses some people, it means that he also withholds blessings (or curses) others. Johnson says:

Here is where rationality comes in. According to the God Squad, God is the cause of all blessings. There is no reason to thank God if he is not the cause. Therefore, all the people who live in an unblessed state – the thirty thousand children who will die of starvation today, for example, or the thousands who will die of cancer, or the billions who live in stark, abject poverty – must of necessity be in those situations because God has cursed them. If you happen to live in Ethiopia and starve to death today, it has to be because God has failed to bless you.

In other words, God curses everyone who is suffering on earth. The suffering must come from God’s withholding of his blessings of health, food, rain, etc. Meanwhile, over in the United States, God blessed Bill Gates with another billion dollars today, and Bill should be grateful to God for that since God made it happen.

When you think about it rationally, you cannot escape this obvious problem. If we are supposed to thank God because he is the cause of all blessings, then it means that the lack of blessings (starvation, cancer, poverty, etc.) is caused by God as well. And this means that God is the most twisted, capricious, biased, despicable creature in the universe. 30,000 innocent children will starve to death today specifically because God withheld blessings from them. (source)

What this assumes is that equality of possessions is the ideal condition. We call that communism, which is not an ideal condition at all, as evidenced by the catastrophic failure of the regimes that used it. Instead, the ideal condition on earth is the inequality of possessions, so argues Wayne Grudem in Business for the Glory of God.

Grudem says that because of the Fall and the curse on the productivity of the earth, inequality of possessions is necessary. Grudem also echoes the biblical teaching that to whom much is given, much is expected. That those who have a lot of wealth and possessions are expected to give a lot to serve the needs of his fellow man.

Now what do we actually see on earth? Do we see those having a lot giving a lot, or do we see the opposite? That the haves horde for themselves and the have-nots just end up with less? Yes, I’m afraid that is exactly what we see.

Inequality of possessions gives people varying levels of accountability, which is exactly what God intends. This means that inequality of possessions in and of itself is a good thing, and is intended by God for his own glorification. What the WWGHA Blog is talking about is the distortion of that good; the hording of wealth by people and the callous evil that the haves display in allowing the have-nots to starve to death. Grudem cautions:

But the distortions of something good must not cause us to think that the thing itself is evil. The evils of poverty and excessive, self-indulgent wealth must not cause us to think that God’s goal is total equality of possessions, or that all inequalities are wrong. Inequalities in abilities and opportunities and possessions will be part of our life in heaven forever, and they are in themselves good and pleasing to God, and provide many opportunities for glorifying him.

The obvious objection to this is that I’m just resorting to the Free Will Defense–man causes his own pain, not God. But I believe that, in some cases, there is something to this Free Will Defense. Not all cases. Obviously, a natural disaster isn’t explained by free will. In his book God’s Problem, Bart Ehrman’s mistake is looking for one answer to satisfy all cases of suffering. I don’t believe that there is one pat answer to suffering, but suffering in all its forms creates opportunities to glorify God. Because of the bondage of our wills to sin (a topic I’ve explored in some detail), we are bound to screw these opportunities up. Sometimes, we screw up royally.

Because of inequality of wealth, the curse on the productivity on earth, and the bondage of our wills to sin, those statistics that atheists often quote are true: 30,000 people will starve to death today. But God created this as an opportunity to glorify his name by giving these people some food from your own plate. But most people, realistically speaking, aren’t going to do that, are they? Why does that become God’s problem? Shouldn’t we make an effort to solve that problem ourselves?

We’re not going to, and we all know this. The 30,000 people dying isn’t what grieves God; the millions of people who are in a position to stop it but don’t give a damn is what grieves him.

The Homosecular Gaytheist, known to his fans as the Rev. Reed Braden, has graced my blog once again with his trademarked snarkiness. Normally, I don’t answer him because I’m afraid that it will inflate his already overly-large ego, but I don’t want to risk him thinking that he’s won again. I stopped posting during our last round of debating because his tone is too sarcastic, even for me. Not because he demolished my arguments.

I will answer his second comment first, then dive into his meatier first comment.

OH MY GOD! I just realised you’re Cory Tucholski! I had so much fun completely obliterating your arguments last time we met online. So good to see you and smack down your arguments again! Have fun with your six readers!

Six RSS readers. I generate over 1200 hits per month. And my blog has been graced with comments by “famous apologists” such as James White. This statement is just childish. Onto the real argument: Read the rest of this entry →

Lee Shelton, the Contemporary Calvinist, has an excellent visual post here. It truly demonstrates the bankruptcy of atheist arguments when it comes to explain the design of the universe.  Enjoy!

The Rev. Reed Braden over at Homosecular Gaytheist (and friends!) thinks that  he’s captured the Christian mindset with this quote from Christopher Columbus’s writings:

Many of the men I have seen have scars on their bodies, and when I made signs to them to find out how this happened, they indicated that people from other nearby islands come to San Salvador to capture them; they defend themselves the best they can. I believe that people from the mainland come here to take them as slaves. They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion. If it pleases our Lord, I will take six of them to Your Highnesses when I depart, in order that they may learn our language. […] I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased.

In its pure form, Christianity would tolerate no such mindset. This isn’t the mindset of a Christian; this is the mindset of a typical European of the 15th century.

Mentioning the conversion of the natives to Christianity is typical of what Lee Camp calls the “Constantinan Cataract” viewpoint: after the Roman Emperor Constantine, Christianity took on a rather militant manner of converting people. It tended to do conversions by force rather than allowing people to hear the gospel and pledge their lives to Christ of their own accord; trusting that God will draw his elect to himself as the Bible promises. Christianity by coercion isn’t Christianity. The apostles would be horrified. Jesus would be grieved.

I share the outrage of Mr. Braden, but I do not agree that it has anything to do with Christianity. Columbus’s mission was to evaluate foreign lands for conquering and bringing under Spain’s control. His primary goal wasn’t to be a Christian missionary. Sorry, Reed, you lose.