UPDATE: Over at Choice in Dying, ex-Anglican priest Eric MacDonald analyzes Harrell’s nonsense, calling it “contemptible special pleading”—and worse.
_______
I can’t resist dealing with evolutionary theodicy again, for BioLogos has just put up a LOLzy two-minute video showing the Reverend Daniel Harrell explaining exactly why God used natural selection to accomplish His aims. Here it is; below it I’ve transcribed the important bits:
The amount of death and waste that evolution requires was a big stumbling block for a lot of Christians who began to dig into it . . . Why all this waste or death?
And one of this things that was so helpful to me was this realization of how death is part of the character of God. That it is—his supreme expression of love is an act of death: that he gives himself fully for the sake of us, whom he loves. And inasmuch as he does that through Christ—you see an analogy to that sort of in evolution, that all of this is spent by God, you know, for the sake of life, as we come to enjoy it and appreciate it. . .
It’s just a different thing, because we expect that what God do would be just to do everything as we would do it if we were God, you know, perfectly, and in just this straight row. But in fact what we have is, you know, a God who does things in ways we would never expect. Why would you ever save the world by becoming human and dying yourself? So, all the more—why would you ever create a world that exists, as it does, through dying and in a sense giving yourself (obscure)?
So, you know, these kinds of analogies are helpful to me because you’re able to see, you know, that theology can be writ large upon the biological narrative, even though that’s something that science itself would never write.
His supreme expression of love involves a monkey being eaten alive by chimpanzees? What kind of love is that?
When I see stuff like this, I realize that there is no limit to how tortuously the human mind can twist itself into knots to make everything in the world comport with a ludicrous faith. It’s positively Orwellian how they can turn horror and death into manifestations of God’s love. Haven’t they ever realized that it’s a lot easier to assume no god at all? Or how stupid they look when they talk like this?
I see, then a ruined life to cystic fibrosis is the way God devised to keep our chlorine channel genes in shape?
Being an x-christian I can say that from my experience it is very very hard to lose your faith. I think it is much easier for an outsider to see that the easier explanation is that there is no god, but it is not the easier answer for someone with faith. Just making that statment means admitting to yourself that you’ve been very wrong about a big cornerstone of your world view. And for me personally it meant admitting that a person I considered a dear friend and imagined looked after me and my family didn’t exist. Some people genuinely love Jesus as they would love another person. When I lost my faith I felt like I was betraying this friend even though at the same time I was beginning to realize he didn’t exist. I also felt betrayed and stupid for having had such an imaginary friend in the first place. Finally and more importantly it really hurts to lose someone you cared about, even if that person was simply imaginary. I can say I miss talking to God, miss the comfort and love I felt when I confided in prayer. It was a very painful and humiliating process to divest myself from this and I did it because I realized how stupid my position was, how little sense it made. In fact I knew it was stupid for years before I was finally able to end it. Once I did decide, it was full and complete but it was hard. I also didn’t have the added burden of being surrounded by people of faith, which would make this transition even harder for others. Most of my coworkers and friends are engineers and are atheists.
So for anyone astounded that apologists would pick a convoluted answer over a simple one, you have to see it from their position. Accepting the simple answer isn’t so simple for them. I recommend checking out exchristian.net for those not familiar with how hard it is to see some of the stories people have written about this.
Thank you for the depth of your comment.
Losing your faith is a painful and wrenching thing. It is a psychological crisis of sizable proportion, as many here who’ve experienced it can attest. You do get something very important in exchange, however, when you make your way through the process.
That’s a textbook example of cognitive dissonance if I ever saw one.
Congratulations on overcoming perhaps the biggest obstacle to rationality we humans face.
The really hard part is recognizing what’s going on in the first place. After that, it’s “only” inescapable anguish that’s only ever relieved by a return to rationality.
Cheers,
b&
Great post; I hope you post more.
Your experience reminds me very much of Julia Sweeney’s. I’m sure you’re aware of her “Letting Go of God” routine…Her and your ability to express the difficulty of this process makes it easier for people like me who never had such a “relationship” to sympathize.
I agree. The whole process is wrenching and even life changing. You aren’t simply losing a friend (imaginary or not) but you lose your whole culture and societal ties. It changes your paradigm for your life! Which is why I feel so incredibly strongly about the children that are raised in the church. They are likely never to leave their faith even though they have tremendous doubts because the culture of the church is too strong. Even if you are not in the pew on Sunday, you are still part of the club. When you leave, you are really out.
For me, the worst part of those that shield religion, like the accomodationists or liberal christians who aren’t all that concerned with belief systems, is that they keep the christian narratives alive and the norm. It never seems as out of sync as it really is. These scientists and theologians convince pastors that it’s okay to believe in evolution because maybe there was a guiding hand over the whole process. Then the pastors take it to church and make the sharp blade of science, which has always been a great challenge to religious dominance, appear dull and stupid.
Thank you for this heart felt post. I’m glad that you understand how much of your inner maps you had to replace, and how hard it is to do that (many people don’t). And pleased to hear about websites such as X-Christian.
Your post makes me feel guilty as I am afraid I DO think religious people are stupid, & I really cannot comprehend why they see the world as the creation of a [loving] god. Your self-revelation was clearly a difficult process & I salute you.
hmmmm… Maybe I am just lacking something as a human being?
Thinking that religious folk are stupid for having acquired a maladaptive meme in childhood, is as reprehensible as thinking of babies as “stupid” for acquiring chicken pox.
They are in no way the same. Telling someone they have an imaginary friend when they’re five and then not expecting them to believe it when they get older and realize these imaginary things don’t exist is not the same as someone catching an infectious disease.
I was raised Christian, attended Christian school, and once I got to middle school I was sitting in religion class and said, “what a minute….none of this makes sense.”
…it certainly helped that my religion teacher had been ridiculing those Ancient Greeks for their crazy gods….
But no. Not the same.
Oh, how close you came to re-articulating my very point for me!
Do you not see that your Greek master vaccinated you with a weaker strain of the theist meme?
(Which cured you of your Christinsanity)
Yes, the SAME.
Most certainly the same.
And you have shown it to be so.
Excellent post, and well said.
Ray (ex Christian, too)
The theists have a huge audience, of scaredy cats, who were brainwashed, (as we all mostly were,) when toddlers that there is a bad place called Hell where bad children go if they aren’t good.
So clearly, to me at least, these guys pander to this audience, and make truck loads of money, so why not?
Personally, I love this stuff. I show it to my theist friends as reasons to think.
Perhaps if given enough rope they’ll eventually come to the conclusion that god’s biggest display of omnipotence is in influencing so many people while being nonexistent.
Isn’t that the last possible conclusion they could propose if the gaps finally get too small for god to fit?
In the mean time encourage ministers that you know to preach sermons on such “love”. The more often loosely commited “believers” hear such foolishness from the “holier” in the flock, the more likely they are to decide that the flock isn’t for them and give post-theism a try.
Damned good question.
Or even the “how” question in the same format. God, who makes the rules, decides blood and pain from himself would give him the reason to follow the plan that he had from the beginning of the universe. Makes a lot of (non)sense.
“I hung on a windswept tree nine days and nights, wounded by a spear, myself sacrificed to myself.”
See, Odin did it too but he did it for wisdom!
And yet, when we call Christianity a death cult, we’re being incivil….
It sure is easier to just realize there is no god at all. Some years ago, I’m 84, when I finaly shook religion and it’s god’s, I felt likE M.L. King Jr.and COULD say,” Free at last, FREE AT LAST!”
You have my most sincere congratulations.
That “reverend” needs psychiatric help. I would be afraid to live within 30 miles of someone who mis-thinks like that.
Indeed, his god loves death. Sounds like Marilyn Manson to me. Any day now he’s going to start hearing voices telling him to kill people, you don’t want to be nearby when that happens.
Christians sometimes sweep over the ‘I come with a sword’ & ‘set the child against the parents’ bits of the new testament.
Well, we all know this conversation, I imagine:
“..his supreme expression of love is an act of death…”
“You mean he kills people out of love?”
“No, no – he gave himself fully for the sake of us…”
“So God is dead? He no longer exists?”
“No, no! Jesus gave his life for us.”
“So he’s dead – he no longer exists?”
“No! He’s God. He just gave his earthly life for us.”
“So he gave his earthly life, yet now has infinite power and knowledge and everything? Where was the sacrifice? A bit of pain he knew would end, with the result of infinite power? You really think that was a sacrifice?”
“Urrr….yeah! A huge sacrifice. Now to continue….”
…gave his earthly life for 36 hours, then came back and let Thomas fondle his innards (thank you, Ben Goren, for the visual), hung around for a while, and then teleported himself alive and fully human into heaven…
Oh right. THAT’s believable. Sure.
Yep. Uh huh.
I could see these disciples in a dark room. Thomas comes in, they tell him to close his eyes, pull out a plate of spaghetti….
And these things that feel like peeled grapes are his eyes…
Flying spaghetti!
I was going to close the page when I re-looked at the title. When I first saw it, I thought it was “the-idiocy” instead of “the-odicy”. Not sure which is actually better.
I generally spell the word in question, “theoidiocy.” I think it does a better job of describing the concept than the traditional spelling, don’t you?
Cheers,
b&
My thoughts exactly.
Actually, I was more sad to learn that Santa Claus wasn’t real until I found out I could help put out gifts on Christmas Eve!
Sort of like realizing that there’s no god, then becoming Pope!
I’m willing to bet that’s happened more than once.
“There ain’t no Sanity Clause” in religion.
How about theo-dicey.
Jerry quoting Harell:
So we’re not created in God’s image after all? Wondering “what would Jesus do” is not a good way to decide your course of action any more? Good to know. I wonder when Harell will inform his followers of that.
So we’re not created in God’s image after all?
Well yes, but “created in God’s image” can mean whatever one would like it to mean. Whatever is convenient at the moment.
Here’s how the thinking process goes: “Does God have a belly button? No, of course not. Therefore, ‘created in God’s image’ can mean whatever I want it to mean, nya nya nya, nanny nanner boo-boo, waaaaaaaahhhhh…”
How anybody can read that, especially keeping in mind the story of Doubting Thomas, and not conclude that Christianity is unabashed zombie worship, is utterly beyond me.
Cheers,
b&
Might be a good quote to keep in mind next time someone won’t believe Christianity is a death cult.
“That it is—his supreme expression of love is an act of death ”
Cool. So assassins are God’s Chosen People. And the One True God is obviously Mictlantecuhtli.
…and it wasn’t even death!
It was temporary death. Barely 36 hours of death.
Bah. David Copperfield could do a week of death standing on his head.
Don’t give David Blaine any ideas.
I’d be willing to undergo what Jesus did for a much smaller payoff than omnipotence — a million bucks would do it. Heck, as long as revivification is certain, I’d probably do the dying/resurrection bit just for kicks.
Crucifixion’s a doddle.
At least it gets you out in the fresh air.
“Well, well, what matters it! Believe that, too.” This is the only sensible response to theistic evolutionists.
Flowers are starting to bloom again. You know what that means? Time for the annual anthropocentric backslapping contest to begin … and don’t forget to grab your life jacket because we’re going whitewater rafting down a raging river of white noise.
Reverend Harrell’s god is a psychopath. No mentally sane god would do such sick things.
Yes, and since people’s gods invarialbly reflect themselves it makes me very concerned for his near and dear. I would suggest they sneak out quietly as soon as they possibly can, and go far, far away.
What a strange concept.
Its like someone coming up to you and saying that to show you how much he loves you he’s taken your pet cat and gutted it.
Any sane person would be running away and calling the police.
Implicit in this little fairy story is the complete and utter lack of imagination of the creator of everything.
So there is a god who is all-knowing and all-powerful and all-loving (at least in the context of this little fairy story). And yet the ONLY way he can demonstrate his “love” is to create a human avatar of himself and come to Earth for the express purpose of getting himself tortured and executed in the most-gruesome and painful method imaginable (yes, it was — the word ‘excruciating’ was an accurate description of the process).
Really? Torture and death (albeit temporary — it’s like a bad David Blaine magic trick, after all) is the ONLY way god can show his “love” for humans?
How about — oh, let me list a few other possibilities.
1. Destroy the malaria parasite and the tuberculosis bacillus.
2. Remove cancer from the arsenal of things that will kill us.
3. Provide free food for the hungry (after all, the avatar fed 5000 people TWICE without so much as a “TADA!”).
4. Magically destroy the ability of weapons to hurt people. No war, no murder.
Each and every one of those suggestions doesn’t interfere with “free will” in the least…you can still hate someone without trying to kill them, for example. And one can easily see that people who have more food to eat don’t just stop wanting to work and strive and learn.
But no…this is god’s ONLY solution that would let itself allow itself to ‘forgive’ mankind for — what, exactly? Oh right, for metaphorically eating the IQ-raising sin fruit at the behest of the talking snake.
Have these people never heard of the word “myth”?
Really? I’ve read child abuse cases and war crimes that seemed far more horrific, much less the horrors of various diseases (although it’s probably difficult to come up with good iconography for, say, necrotizing fasciatis).
The amount of pain, death and suffering that has occurred and is still occurring in northern Japan in the last few days makes a few hours on the cross (even without the subsequent reward) pale into insignificance.
No. Let’s be accurate. The word ‘excruciating’ was coined precisely because the process of crucifixion was so obviously agonizingly painful.
It’s one of the reasons the Romans used it almost exclusively for runaway and/or rebellious slaves.
It’s a very very slow torture, however. An otherwise healthy man, even after being scourged, would have lasted FAR longer than the 3 hours purported in the myth.
But is it really “the most-gruesome and painful method imaginable” of torture and execution? Do you really think that torture hasn’t been “improved upon” since the Romans?
Heck, there people today who willingly get crucified to show their faith. They aren’t left until dead, and granted, the recreation of the method is by no means exact, but still, I’d rather have that than various other torture/execution methods I can think of.
The Assyrians impaled people. Great artists though.
Those big crayons will write on practically anything.
Analogies can be helpful in communicating ideas, but they have limits. Trying to understand the greater universe beyond our everyday experience using only analogies is doomed to failure–when studying the very large, very small, or very fast, the reality often turns out to be rather counter-intuitive.
The truth of an idea cannot be established by analogy, and analogies are no substitute for observation, measurement, and mathematical rigour.
No matter how lovely your model is, if you want to get anywhere you’ll need a real airplane.
I listened, I read the transcript, I still have not the faintest idea what Harrell is talking about. Pointless drivel.
Next time, please provide like videos with subtitles or sub-linear translation.
How does one make sense of this crap?
Daniel Harrell quote from the time when he was being all evangelical in Boston:
“We get a lot of recovering Catholics” 🙂
How utterly obscene. How loathsome. How Christian.
Really. It’s reminiscent of “Mother” Teresa telling a guy who was in terrible pain that Jesus was kissing him. No morphine, just a sick-making fantasy.
And the response was classic: “Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me”
No kidding, that little anecdote almost made me vomit.
What a vile person.
And soon to be a “saint”, I’m sure.
Jesus christ on a stick! What kind of drugs is this guy on and I hope he does not operate heavy machinery while doing them.
That made no sense what so ever.
Thanks for the post, I needed a laugh!
🙂
My vote for the obscure part: “for it.”
Oh ugh; ugh ugh ugh. Tell all that to an animal being torn to pieces.
And besides, Knut died! Just all of a sudden, for no known reason. He was only 4. There were 400 visitors watching at the time.
🙁
“his supreme expression of love is an act of death”
Death as the ultimate act of love?
I can think of far more preferable acts to express ones love.
So, and, uhm, when a female spider bites off the head of her male mate after a sexual encounter, .. is that considered a Godly and holy act then, too?
I don’t find that among the worst of the horrors of Nature. The spider – if he could – would be feeling very satisfied, his life complete, and he is going to nourish the spiderlings he has just fathered.
The caterpillar whose body feeds the Ichneumon wasp’s larvae, that so impressed Darwin, can feel no such satisfaction.
I do not find any of these things horrific or disgusting or any other adjectival expression of similar ilk.
There is no god, life just IS, these things JUST happen, we sould not load nature with our made up human values.
“… theology can be writ large upon the biological narrative, even though that’s something that science itself would never write”
.. he’s actually right about something!
(but: biological ‘narrative’? As opposed to the biblical narrative?)
I’ve got to wonder what sort of acts would not be seen as an act of love.
By redefining all acts of cruelty and callousness into acts of love, they may destroy all meaning of the word “love” but by golly they can be sure that God still loves them! (That’s one clever way around the problem of evil.)
And inasmuch as he does that through Christ—you see an analogy to that sort of in evolution, that all of this is spent by God, you know, for the sake of life, as we come to enjoy it and appreciate it. . .
This might be the first time I’ve seen someone confuse reality with analogy. He thinks God is actually in reality doing this (incoherent) “thingie”, whatever the heck he is talking about, but he calls it an analogy. Usually you will see theologians confuse analogies with realities for the sake of dumping some ridiculous equivocation on everyone, but this guy appears to be doing it the opposite way around. Lol.
When you read the convoluted, nonsensical apologetics these guys come up with to try to explain away suffering, it gives you an appreciation for the ones who just give up and say “it’s a mystery”.
Battered wife syndrome anyone? “He only kills us because he loves us.”
If Death is Love then War is Peace and Freedom is Slavery.
This man needs help, seriously. As I’ve said in a few replies above, if he really believes this crap he is quite nuts and probably a danger to himself and those around him.
Thanks Marella – neat analogy, with references to George Orwell’s ‘1984’.
Orwell’s an apt analogy considering how much of the Bible goes down the Memory Hole when Christians downplay the horror and highlight the peace, love & mungbeans.
Whoah I just noticed that guy is a “Reverend”. That means he says crazy empty things like that and then he passes around money receptacles to the audience members for them to deposit free money into it, and then he pretends like he isn’t begging them for money. Wow!
He looks just like Jimbo Marshall, Mr. Deity’s assistant from the Mr. Deity show. They could be twins! Wow…
Huh. You’d think it would be obvious to all christians that their god is a god of death and suffering. Jesus on a stick anyone? How about those Old Testament stories in which god orders his lapdogs to murder, pillage, and rape?
I cant believe how twisted this pefsons mind is. How could anybody ever reach him?
…And speaking of suffering, death and waste. I stumbled on this video that compares the suffering of black slaves to that of Jesus. Perhaps Mel Gibson should make a gore film on this.