Category Archives: Heresy
A Few Things Atheists Should Know About Christians
Mark from Proud Atheists has compiled a handy list of things that atheists should know about Christians. I thought I’d take a peek at the list. It is an interesting way to peer into the mind of the average atheist, to see what he thinks of the average Christian. I bet that he completely misunderstands us, as per usual. Let’s see if I’m right. Read the rest of this entry
Atheists Redefining Morality
I’ve often said that atheists have a penchant for redefining terms. The most frequent use of this tactic is seen by redefining “faith” to mean “belief without supporting evidence.” Faith is trust, no more and no less. It’s repugnant to see former believers continuing that redefinition, even though they know better.
But atheists, by their own reckoning, are also free to not only redefine established terms but also free to redefine morality. This is because they are no longer “shackled to a Bronze Age mythological belief system.” The comments to this post from Daniel Florien serve to show just how far this can be stretched. Read the rest of this entry
Is Masturbation a Sin? A Disagreement with Steve Hays
Steve Hays of Triablogue defends masturbation as a good thing here. Matthew Bellisario responds to that here. I weigh in, siding (for once) with Bellisario here. Hays responds to all three of us in one fell swoop here. I’ll let Dave Armstrong and Matthew Bellisario deal with his retorts to them on their own. I’ll consider Hay’s response to me.
[A] guy named Cory also raised some objections. Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer any arguments to respond to. Just assertions.
So, Hays isn’t going to respond to me at all. Darn.
I already dealt with the “lust” objection, both practically and exegetically. Of course, I could always be wrong, but no counterargument is forthcoming from his end.
Oh, whoops! He is responding to me. I’d better start paying attention. Let’s see. He’s already dealt with the lust objection. Unless I’m missing something, he did not deal with the issue at length. This is what he said:
Traditionally, the church has frowned upon masturbation. One reason is the relation between masturbation and lust. This cannot be denied. On the other hand, lust is also aggravated by the absence of a sexual outlet. That is, indeed, in the nature of sexual tension, of a tension between sexual desire and sexual release. Unrelieved sexual tension only builds.
Interesting. So masturbation is fine as an outlet for sexual tensions because otherwise the tensions would simply build and build. This is interesting because the atheist tends to justify things like pre-marital sex, pornography, and other things I would hope that Hays categorizes as sinful by appealing to the same sort of logic. It relies on the false assumption that you can’t deny yourself sexual pleasure. Read the rest of this entry
Christian Morality
You really have to love Vjack, proprietor of Atheist Revolution. He has no concept of how to interpret the Bible, as I have shown in numerous previous posts. I’ve proven him wrong about certain specific interpretations of the passages (yet he continues to promulgate the same interpretations of these passages). Now, he has posted an article that shows he has absolutely zero understanding of how Christian morality works. Here’s the highlight:
With the idea of karma, there is a certain inevitability of justice. If one screws up enough in life, there is no forgiveness and no absolution of “sin” gained by repeated hail Mary’s. No deathbed confessions will save your ass. Your fate will be determined by your own behavior, just as it should be. The various Christian denominations seem determined to offer short-cuts – ways to get away with sin.
In a karma-based system, there are no short-cuts. However, there are plenty of second chances. One has an eternity to get it right, but one must change one’s behavior in order to do so. No amount of belief is going to cut it.
In other words, Christians can live whatever sort of life they choose, but if they profess belief in Jesus Christ, they’re going to heaven. That’s crap, and even someone with a Sunday school knowledge of theology knows it.
This leads me to believe that Vjack lacks even a basic Sunday school knowledge of Christianity. He likely wasn’t raised in it, but it seems (from reading his blog) that he has many family and friends that are Christian. It would seem that he should have a deeper understanding of Christianity. But, alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Mere mental assent to the person and work of Jesus Christ is enough to save a person, but not enough to send him to heaven. Satan and his angels mentally assent to the person and work of Jesus Christ, but they are not saved and are not going to go to heaven, as Revelation clearly states.
Paul, the one that many people “blame” for popularizing the idea of salvation by grace through faith, makes reference to judgment based on works and to not continue in sin so that grace may abound. James says that faith without works is dead–it won’t save anyone. The Acts of the Apostles portrays all of the apostles calling for people to repent and be baptized. The Gospels begin with John the Baptist calling for the same thing: repent and be baptized. Paul further declares that we are a new creation in Christ, and urges us to throw off the old and bring in the new, as well as exhorting us to offer ourselves as living sacrifices to God’s service.
Are we faced with a contradiction here? Vjack’s answer would undoubtedly be “Yes, we are.” But we’re not. We are simply confusing one’s salvation with one’s sanctification. Salvation occurs once, the moment when a person makes a sincere profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Sanctification, on the other hand, is an ongoing process that will likely last the rest of the new Christian’s life. Sanctification is the process of becoming more Christ-like; of walking in Jesus’ footsteps, of absorbing his teachings and applying them to everyday life, and of becoming closer to the Father. Jesus as much as promises that this will not be an easy thing. In fact, he predicts that this will bring persecution, much trial, and even split up families.
Christianity, therefore, is about faith in Jesus first and foremost. But it is also about understanding that humans owe loyalty to God and therefore must repent of their former sins and lead righteous lives. Not because of a promised reward in heaven, but because it is the right thing to do while on earth. God commands it, and we must do it.
I was really angry when I first read Vjack’s post. My anger was directed at Vjack himself, for criticizing something he clearly doesn’t understand in the least. But, after a short (very short) cooling off period, I asked myself, “Where would he even get this notion that Christianity teaches something like this?” And it didn’t take long to arrive at the answer: Popular Christian Preachers.
I really can’t be mad at Vjack for believing that this is what Christianity teaches when there are so many popular preachers who mislead thousands of souls into believing that this is what Christianity teaches. They teach that Christianity is, as Vjack put it, a short cut to salvation. The teach easy-believism: once the “heaven ticket” is punched by declaring faith in Jesus Christ, you’re free to live a life of your own choosing and you’ll still make it to heaven in the end because you’re saved.
As Vjack astutely observes, that teaching fits well into United States culture. We are all about short cuts. We are all about finding the fastest way from point A to point B, especially when it doesn’t disrupt anything in our comfortable little lives.
But Christianity is meant to challenge a person outside his comfort zone. It is supposed to disrupt our comfortable existence. That sort of message wouldn’t preach well in the United States, so that’s why so many preachers dumb down the message and completely leave out all components that have to do with repentance and obedience to God. It’s more about filling the pews than it is about offering a life-changing message.
Vjack’s post, more than just exposing his ignorance of the teachings of Christianity, is actually an indictment of modern pop-Christianity. Many of the most popular preachers teach just the sort of easy-believism that fuel Vjack’s uninformed perspective of Christianity.
Are we all Atheists?
Someone posting under the moniker 1minionsopinion has said the following:
Well, I’ll jump in with a paraphrase of some philosopher dude whose name currently eludes me – we’re all atheists when it comes to Zeus and Thor and Ra and Bast and Titan and all those other classic pantheon deities. People who insist on calling themselves “Atheist” simply believe in one less god than you do.
But is that true? I don’t think so. There are implications to believing in one less deity than I do.
First, we are not made in the image of God. We are merely descendants of other primates who have evolved intelligence, and that means that there is no inherent dignity to being human. We are animals (albeit smart ones), pure and simple.
Second, there is no transcendent meaning to anything; things are as they are. Though even atheist philosophers tend to agree that there are transcendent values (called “morality”), believing in “one less god” removes the ground for these transcendent values and renders everything we see simply as it is. Nothing means anything other than what value we assign to it–we become the arbiters of morality. Morality “evolved” the way it did because it was advantageous to the species. Nothing more.
Believing in one less god represents a fundamental worldview divide, and by saying it is a simple matter trivializes this difference.
Rey has the Spirit of an Antichrist
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. (1 Jn 4:1-3, emphasis added)
In this post, Rey has been arguing with me over the Virgin Birth. Naturally, Rey takes the position that the Virgin Birth never happened, while I take the orthodox position that it did happen.
There is something very subtle that I want everyone to see. Aside from the fact that Rey has to quote established heretics to make his position stick, that is. First, Jesus took on our sinful flesh according to Hebrews 2:14 (yet he remained without sin, Heb 4:15). Logically, he had to receive this flesh from somewhere. So, second, Jesus was born. He did partake of the same things, as the letter to the Hebrews makes plain. The gospels of Matthew and Luke say he was born of a virgin because Romans 5:12 says that it is man that spreads the taint of sin to the child. Third, and most important, note the snippet above from 1 John.
Rey, by saying that Jesus just one day appeared on the scene, is effectively denying that Jesus came in the flesh. According to 1 John 4:1-3, that puts him square in the antichrist camp. Rey has the spirit of an antichrist.
Now, I leave it to Rey to convince us why we should still listen to him, given this information.
A (Reluctant) Response to Rey
Normally, I just ignore Rey, but this time he brought up an interesting point. In a comment on my previous post, he said:
If we are really born at enmity to God and He is causing this to happen as his punishment of Adam’s sin, then He is as much at enmity with us by His nature as we are at enmity with Him by our nature. We both are then equally guilty, and shall not the equally guilty just mutually forgive one another if they are rational?
I agree that our natures are equally at enmity, but it doesn’t follow that we are both equally guilty. To be sure, there is a breach between the nature of God and the nature of man. We need to ask ourselves: who caused the breach?
There is a cause, and Scripture clearly reveals it. Therefore, it follows that someone caused it. Causes, and their resultant effects, follow in a logical chain. An agent caused the Fall, and we turn to the pages of Scripture to find out who caused the rift.
Go back to the text in Genesis 3. Read it carefully. As far as I can tell, humanity bears full responsibility for causing the breach between God and man, and therefore putting enmity between the nature of man and the nature of God. God, in all his wisdom, tried to prevent that and protect us by forbidding us to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It was by disobeying him that the rift was created, for up to that moment everything in nature had obeyed God’s commands. The first act of disobedience was man’s fault, not God’s. Man transgressed God, not the other way around.
God is not equally guilty with us, I’m afraid. The text won’t allow that conclusion. But it would be evil for God not to offer forgiveness, a way out of this bind.
God does offer forgiveness, Rey. All those who call on his name will be saved (Joel 2:32). Not just some, but all who call on his name. Isn’t that a glorious promise? Repent of your sins, embrace the totality of Scripture, and call on the name of Jesus (Rom 10:9), for there is no other name by which you can be saved (Acts 4:12).
Grace Does Not Give Us Free Licence to Sin
It’s appropriate that Extreme Theology would reprint this sermon from Martin Luther, since Unreasonable Faith is trying to take a potshot at the Christian doctrine of salvation by grace alone.
Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter.
Those are the words of George Sodini, the man who opened fire in a Pennsylvania gym, killing 3 and wounding 9 others. He used the above quote as his justification for the mass murder.
He’s right, of course. Eternal life is based solely on faith in Christ and not on works. However, he left the condition of repentance out of the equation. The sinner must repent of his former sins! This is a message that is left completely out of many churches today. Everyone likes the idea of eternal life with Christ, but not at the expense of the moment.
The above-linked sermon from Martin Luther points out that, while we Christians are forgiven our sins, this isn’t a license to continue to sin. As the apostle Paul put it:
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (Rom 6:1-4)
We are dead to sin through our baptism. The apostle wants to make it clear that we are not to still live in sin. What George Sodini did was a clear sin–followed by the taking of his own life. He did not die in a state of repentance. That means that he is not with Jesus, which will likely come as a major surprise to him. But that’s what happens when bad theology mixes with an unstable mind. James White said it, and I’ll repeat it here: THEOLOGY MATTERS.
I think that is simply dishonest of Unreasonable Faith to draw parallells between Sodini and biblical heroes who also killed. The biblical heroes had a clear command from God to kill when they did. God doesn’t speak directly to us today. He has already spoken fully and finally through Jesus and the Scriptures.
Any quick perusal of Jesus or Paul should be sufficient to tell that we are not to take lives in the way that this man did. This is not living peaceably with others (Rom 12:18). This is not allowing the wrath of God to take its full effect (Rom 12:19-20).
Is every encounter with God therefore false? Probably not, but if it contradicts the revelation of the Scriptures then it most certainly is.
The final objection that can be raised is that even a command from God to kill is wrong, not to mention contradictory. But that is simply false. God gave us life and sustains our existence; he is unique in that he can give life. That gives him the right to take it away when he sees fit, and his judgements in such matters are perfect. We humans are not in the position to both give life as well as take it away. We are also not perfect, and therefore do not have a perfect sense of judgement and cannot know for certain that taking someone’s life is the right thing to do.
God, however, is perfect and can make such a judgement.
So, if humans are so imperfect, how do we know that the commands to kill in the Bible came from God? Could our perceptions not have mucked up the whole thing? Well, that would play havoc with biblical inerrancy, which is something that I subscribe to. Not only that, but the ancients were much more biblically literate than we are today, so they were in a better position to know if a command from God was contradictory to Scripture. Finally, Jesus promised that we who are his sheep will know his voice (Jn 10:27). Therefore, if someone is truly of God, that person will recognize God’s direct command.
But that raises another issue. How do you know something like that for sure? Well, the answer lies with the Holy Spirit and with Scripture. If one knows one’s Scripture, and is truly indwelt by the Holy Spirit, one will recognize that direct command from God. In such cases, our hypothetical person will also recognize false commands that don’t come from God because that person will know that they contradict Scripture.
Atheist Video Misses It… SURPRISE!
In my previous post, I gave a brief outline for why Christians no longer follow the Mosaic Law. The apostle Paul condemns the Law in the letter to the Galatians, and James agrees in the opening chapters of his epistle. The Law never made anyone righteous, and therefore we are no longer bound to obey it. Christ is the end of the law (Rom 10:4).
That doesn’t mean it disappears! The Bible says that the Law is written for our instruction (Rom 15:4). We are no longer bound to its letter, but its spirit (2 Cor 3:6).
There are basically three components to the Law. The first are absolute moral guidelines. The second is ceremonial law. The third are Jewish cultural norms. Commentators agree that the second component is not with us today, as that includes things like feast days, dress for priests, and other such requirements. For the third component, we use the spirit in which it is given for a guide on how to apply it to today’s culture. But the first component, absolute moral guidelines, are very much still with us today. For example, the Ten Commandments fall into this category. No one would argue otherwise.
This video asks the man on the street to enforce an absolute moral standard with the death penalty. This is wrong, because we no longer are able to enforce the penalties, that is God’s domain (see Rom 12:17-19). It also asks us if we should enforce some of the more ridiculous aspects of the Jewish ceremonial law, which is also wrong because that component is out completely.
Saying that certain components of the Law are not to be enforced isn’t selectively ignoring the Bible. This is taking the whole Bible for a progressive revelation. The average Joe on the street would have difficulty articulating this, as evidenced by the video. Christains are the ones taking the Bible at face value, not the atheists. But the atheists have us believe otherwise.
Vjack Uses a Refuted Argument… AGAIN!
One of the complaints that I have about atheists is that the don’t pay attention to what the other side says. Vjack has proven, once again, that this is so here.
Vjack, of Atheist Revolution, argued in 2005 that the Bible requires that Christians kill unbelievers. Four years later, he has reposted the same trash, even though I refuted it here.
First, Vjack has misrepresented his proof text. Deuteronomy 17 was written to the Jews of the nation of ancient Israel–a nation which no longer exists. Therefore, the text is no longer in effect. Even it it were, the text says that if there is an unbeliever among you, that is, a Jew, that he is to be put to death. Vjack is reading into the text a general command to kill unbelievers, which is not there. But there’s another problem.
Deuteronomy is part of the Mosaic Law, which Christians are not bound to. Christ is the end of the law for believers (Rom 10:4), and the Law exists only for instruction (Rom 15:4). Remember that the letter of the law kills, but the Spirit brings life (2 Cor 3:6).
Jesus taught in the Great Commission that we are supposed to evangelize unbelievers, not kill them (Mt 28:19). Paul says that we are supposed to live at peace with everyone (Rom 12:17). It seems that Vjack is mistaken.
I have a feeling that no matter how many times I refute this point, Vjack will still bring it up. So I guess I’m wasting my time.
Back Rome Again 