₦airaland Forum

I had some friends round my home last weekend for a little party, friends mainly from Nigeria, South Africa and Cameroon; I am from Cameroon myself. In the ebb and flow of conversation I made a comment to the effect that in some parts of Africa the selling of children into slavery is still rife and that the consciousness from the centuries of trans-atlantic slavery appears to have been forgotten and that desperation and destitution is compelling people into acting like they did centuries ago. Granted, this is not a practice unique to Africa, but you would have thought that the memories of the trans-atlantic trade would have strengthen the African resolve against this vile practice. Just like memories of the holocaust have united and strengthened the Jews.


Now, guess what response I got!


It was like the whole crowd turned against me, led my a Cameroonian friend I shall refer to as Mr. R. Rather that dealing with the main thrust of my comment, they rushed headlong into a long and bitter salvo of anti-White diatribe. I have know Mr. R for some time now, and I also know that this is his favoured line of reasoning (if it can be called such). He has got this tendency of blaming Europeans for all of Africa's woes - corruption, slavery, diseases, lack of development, etc, etc.

In an earlier conversation with Mr. R with respect to slavery, I had suggested the following analogy to him. Supposing a visitor walked into your family home and managed to caused discord between yourself and your wife and children. Would you say that you had a "strong and united", happy and well-balanced home to start with? Why are we Africans so vulnerable to foreign manipulations? When these relationships with the foreign party goes sour, rather than blame ourselves for our naivity, we blame the foreign party? About time we begin to take responsibility for our failures and stop pointing the finger at other people.

Most of Africa today is being sold to Chinese investors who are going round the world buying huge tracks of mineral-rich real-estates. For instance, the problem in Sudan today is complicated by the Chinese economic interest in the country. Are succeeding African generations going to start "Chinese bashing" if this dalliance with the Chinese turns sour?

The way we live today and the activities we undertake, if left unchanged, will form the culture and tradition of forthcoming generations. Likewise, parts of the culture we live in today were the regular daily activities of bygone generations. But should we accept the culture handed down to us by our forebears unquestioningly? Why must we define ourselves, and thus our lifestyle, by the artifact from the past over which we had no choice and influence?

What criteria should we use in deciding which elements from the past are worthy of preserving and respectable and which should be consigned to the dustbin of history?

Humans as a distinct species (Homo sapiens) have existed for no more than two hundred thousand years. Yet it is only in the last few hundreds of years that we have come to understand our place in the cosmic scheme of things;

We have development sophisticated technologies
We have a better understanding of the origin of the diversity of life
We have a better understand of the forces of nature
Superstitions are being tamed
Studies in human and animal behaviour are yielding beneficial result


The globe is truly coalescing into a small village due to the tremendous advances in knowledge we have achieved. In the light of what we have achieved in such a relatively short time since the dawn of modern science and technologies, what is your vision for the world in 2000 years from now?


These are my predictions for the world in 2000 years time:

1) I see a world dominated by scientific rationalism. Most of the pernicious superstitions and religions would have died a natural death with the inevitable match of understanding about the nature of reality.

2) I see the easing of all or most human tensions in areas of nationality, race, ethnicity, etc. There would be great homogeneity in the global village like things like a global language, one currency, one economic system, etc.

3) A great deal of the diseases that afflict us would have been brought under control

4) Poverty would have been tamed.

etc, etc, etc.


Can you suggest a few?

Atheism
by Michael Martin
entry in Microsoft® Encarta® 98 Encyclopedia

    * Index: Atheism and Awareness (Editorials)
    * Home to Positive Atheism

Atheism, the denial of or lack of belief in the existence of a god or gods. The term atheism comes from the Greek prefix a-, meaning "without," and the Greek word theos, meaning "deity." The denial of god's existence is also known as strong, or positive, atheism, whereas the lack of belief in god is known as negative, or weak, atheism. Although atheism is often contrasted with agnosticism -- the view that we cannot know whether a deity exists or not and should therefore suspend belief -- negative atheism is in fact compatible with agnosticism.

Atheism has wide-ranging implications for the human condition. In the absence of belief in god, ethical goals must be determined by secular (nonreligious) aims and concerns, human beings must take full responsibility for their destiny, and death marks the end of a person's existence. As of 1994 there were an estimated 240 million atheists around the world comprising slightly more than 4 percent of the world's population, including those who profess atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion. The estimate of nonbelievers increases significantly, to about 21 percent of the world's population, if negative atheists are included.


Scope of Atheism

From ancient times, people have at times used atheism as a term of abuse for religious positions they opposed. The first Christians were called atheists because they denied the existence of the Roman deities. Over time, several misunderstandings of atheism have arisen: that atheists are immoral, that morality cannot be justified without belief in God, and that life has no purpose without belief in God. Yet there is no evidence that atheists are any less moral than believers. Many systems of morality have been developed that do not presuppose the existence of a supernatural being. Moreover, the purpose of human life may be based on secular goals, such as the betterment of humankind.

In Western society the term atheism has been used more narrowly to refer to the denial of theism, in particular Judeo-Christian theism, which asserts the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good personal being. This being created the universe, takes an active interest in human concerns, and guides his creatures through divine disclosure known as revelation. Positive atheists reject this theistic God and the associated beliefs in an afterlife, a cosmic destiny, a supernatural origin of the universe, an immortal soul, the revealed nature of the Bible and the Koran, and a religious foundation for morality.

Theism, however, is not a characteristic of all religions. Some religions reject theism but are not entirely atheistic. Although the theistic tradition is fully developed in the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred text of Hinduism, earlier Hindu writings known as the Upanishads teach that Brahman (ultimate reality) is impersonal . Positive atheists reject even the pantheistic aspects of Hinduism that equate God with the universe. Several other Eastern religions, including Theravada Buddhism and Jainism, are commonly believed to be atheistic, but this interpretation is not strictly correct. These religions do reject a theistic God believed to have created the universe, but they accept numerous lesser gods. At most, such religions are atheistic in the narrow sense of rejecting theism.


History

In the Western intellectual world, nonbelief in the existence of God is a widespread phenomenon with a long and distinguished history. Philosophers of the ancient world such as Lucretius were nonbelievers. Even in the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) there were currents of thought that questioned theist assumptions, including skepticism, the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible, and naturalism, the belief that only natural forces control the world. Several leading thinkers of the Enlightenment (1700-1789) were professed atheists, including Danish** writer Baron Holbach and French encyclopedist Denis Diderot. Expressions of nonbelief also are found in classics of Western literature, including the writings of English poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron; English novelist Thomas Hardy; French philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Paul Sartre; Russian author Ivan Turgenev; and American writers Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair. In the 19th century the most articulate and best-known atheists and critics of religion were German philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and Sartre are among the 20th century's most influential atheists.


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Note: Baron Holbach was a native of the Rhineland-Palatinate (Germany, on the French border) but lived in France for most of his life and is considered by most of the historians we consulted to have been a "French Cyclopedist." He was not Danish in any sense. (This error is retained in the 2000 edition, the latest edition to which we have access.)
-- editor, Positive Atheism Magazine
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Reasons for Rejecting God

Criticisms of Theism

Atheists justify their philosophical position in several different ways. Negative atheists attempt to establish their position by refuting typical theist arguments for the existence of God, such as the argument from first cause, the argument from design, the ontological argument, and the argument from religious experience. Other negative atheists assert that any statement about God is meaningless, because attributes such as all-knowing and all-powerful cannot be comprehended by the human mind. Positive atheists, on the other hand, defend their position by arguing that the concept of God is inconsistent. They question, for example, whether a God who is all-knowing can also be all-good and how a God who lacks bodily existence can be all-knowing.


The Problem of Evil

Some positive atheists have maintained that the existence of evil makes the existence of God improbable. In particular, atheists assert that theism does not provide an adequate explanation for the existence of seemingly gratuitous evil, such as the suffering of innocent children. Theists commonly defend the existence of evil by claiming that God desires that human beings have the freedom to choose between good and evil, or that the purpose of evil is to build human character, such as the ability to persevere. Positive atheists counter that justifications for evil in terms of human free will leave unexplained why, for example, children suffer because of genetic diseases or abuse from adults. Arguments that God allows pain and suffering to build human character fail, in turn, to explain why there was suffering among animals before human beings evolved and why human character could not be developed with less suffering than occurs in the world. For atheists, a better explanation for the presence of evil in the world is that God does not exist.


Historical Evidence

Atheists have also criticized historical evidence used to support belief in the major theistic religions. For example, atheists have argued that a lack of evidence casts doubt on important doctrines of Christianity, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because such events are said to represent miracles, atheists assert that extremely strong evidence is necessary to support their occurrence. According to atheists, the available evidence to support these alleged miracles -- from Biblical, pagan, and Jewish sources -- is weak, and therefore such claims should be rejected.


Diversity in Atheism

Atheism is primarily a reaction to, or a rejection of, religious belief, and thus does not determine other philosophical beliefs. Atheism has sometimes been associated with the philosophical ideas of materialism, which holds that only matter exists; communism, which asserts that religion impedes human progress; and rationalism, which emphasizes analytic reasoning over other sources of knowledge. However, there is no necessary connection between atheism and these positions. Some atheists have opposed communism and some have rejected materialism. Although nearly all contemporary materialists are atheists, the ancient Greek materialist Epicurus believed the gods were made of matter in the form of atoms. Rationalists such as French philosopher René Descartes have believed in God, whereas atheists such as Sartre are not considered to be rationalists. Atheism has also been associated with systems of thought that reject authority, such as anarchism, a political theory opposed to all forms of government, and existentialism, a philosophic movement that emphasizes absolute human freedom of choice; there is however no necessary connection between atheism and these positions. British analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer was an atheist who opposed existentialism, while Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was an existentialist who accepted God. Marx was an atheist who rejected anarchism while Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, a Christian, embraced anarchism. Because atheism in a strict sense is merely a negation, it does not provide a comprehensive worldview. It is therefore not possible to presume other philosophical positions to be outgrowths of atheism.

Intellectual debate over the existence of God continues to be active, especially on college campuses, in religious discussion groups, and in electronic forums on the Internet. In contemporary philosophical thought, atheism has been defended by British philosopher Antony Flew, Australian philosopher John Mackie, and American philosopher Michael Martin, among others. Leading organizations of unbelief in the United States include The American Atheists, The Committee for the Scientific Study of Religion, and The Internet Infidels.

Contributed By:
Michael Martin

"Atheism," Microsoft® Encarta® 98 Encyclopedia.
©1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

In Search of God:
Is Atheism the Only Alternative to Theism?
by Bishop John Shelby Spong
from his 1998 book Why Christianity Must Change or Die

Source: http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/spong983.htm

* Index: Atheism and Awareness (Editorials)
* Home to Positive Atheism
* Mentioned in: At a Loss for Words by Cliff Walker
* Check Positive Atheism's Big List of Bishop Spong Quotes (frames)
* See also: A Criticism of My Church by Gerd Lüdemann
* See also: Ideologies, Text and Tradition by John Bowden

Some people whom I respect have decided that the Lord's Song can no longer be sung in this world with integrity. Among this number is a man I mentioned in the preface as one of my great mentors. He is an English scholar named Michael Donald Goulder, the author of some of the most provocative books on the Gospels that I have ever read.[1] Michael has now retired from his post as professor of biblical studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

As a young man, Michael was ordained to the priesthood of the Anglican Church. Because of his superior intellect and gentle spirit, his career developed rapidly. On one occasion he was even seriously considered for the position of Anglican bishop of Hong Kong.

His life, however, increasingly turned away from the institutional aspects of religion and toward an academic career, where his brilliance brought his ideas to an ever-widening audience at home and, through an increasing number of invitations to fill endowed lectureships, to a significant audience abroad. He had become one of the shapers of the Christian message for the future.

In 1981, however, Goulder startled his church associates and his reading public by resigning from both the priesthood and the Christian Church. Today he refers to himself as "a nonaggressive atheist."

Shortly after this resignation, Goulder defended his newly minted atheist position in a public dialogue with another English theologian named John Hick. The dialogue was published under the title Why Believe in God? Goulder rested his case for atheism primarily on the argument that the God of the past "no longer had any real work to do." The tasks assigned to this God by traditional wisdom, he suggested, have been slowly but surely stripped from the divine side. This God no longer fights wars and defeats enemies. This God no longer chooses a special people and works through them. This God no longer sends the storms, heals the sick, spares the dying, or even judges the sinner. This God no longer rewards goodness and punishes evil. Yet this virtually unemployed deity is still the primary object and substance of the Christian Church's faith. Goulder felt he no longer could or wanted to be identified with that understanding. In his penetrating analysis of what has happened to the concept of God, Goulder forced a new awareness into theological thinking. Unknowingly, he was calling the church to recognize that it had entered an exile. He concluded that as far as he could see the God of the past had died. He could envision no other alternative. Goulder made a powerful case and issued a mighty challenge. Institutionally, the church did not know quite how to respond. It was clearly not ready to give up its doctrine of God, and so, after seeking to caricature Goulder's ideas, it went about its business as usual, took up its position behind a veritable Maginot Line of theological defense, and hoped the challenge would simply go away.

However, Goulder had touched a nerve in many of us. Deep in the conscious minds of countless believers is the knowledge that most of the traditional God images have lost both their meaning and their power. Many who still claim to be believers know in the depths of their being that they, too, have rejected these images. The narratives in the Bible, which undergird the superstructure of doctrine and dogma, have had their literal power cut to the bone by the advent of critical scholarship. The hymns and prayers of the church use images and make assumptions that most of us can no longer make. There is an increasing sense even among believers that the word God now rings with a hollow emptiness. Clergy in the exercise of their pastoral duties discover that the pious phrases they have dispensed so frequently are increasingly empty. They are received by the people without either enthusiasm or comment, as meaningless clichés. With every passing day, the ties that once bound traditional believers so tightly to these supernatural, supreme-being concepts of God are becoming dramatically loosened. "You will be in my thoughts" or maybe "in my prayers," people say, without really expecting either to do anything or that what they do will have any effect whatsoever. Since such words and phrases once brought comfort, it is assumed, perhaps that they still can, even if we no longer know quite what they mean.

But these clichés are simply regarded as the final weak defenses against an overwhelming sense of the loss of God. The conclusion is more assumed than spoken in our society. Michael Goulder, once a priest, and still a biblical scholar of world rank, spoke that private assumption in a very public way. He was convinced that the God he once had worshiped was real no more, and he wanted his life to match that conviction with both honesty and integrity.

But the question for us must be, who or what is the God that Goulder has rejected? The answer seems overwhelmingly obvious. He has rejected the idea of God defined as a supernatural person who invades life periodically to accomplish the divine will. This deity is an intensely human figure who does grandiose and expanded, but nonetheless, human things. This is a God clearly defined in what we might call the language of theism. The shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines theism as "belief in one God as creator and supreme ruler of the universe." The Encyclopedia Britannica goes a bit further to describe theism as "the view that all limited or finite things are dependent in some way on one supreme or ultimate reality which one may also speak of in personal terms." It goes on to say that the theist "considers the world quite distinct from the author or creator." Richard Swinburne, an English theologian, defines theism as a view of God that is "something like a person without a body, who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe."[2] Assuming these uses of the word, for the purposes of this book I will define theism as belief in an external, personal, supernatural, and potentially invasive Being. That is the definition of God literally present in the Hebrew scripture. That is, indeed, the definition that has so captured the popular concept of God that no possibility for God seems to exist beyond the scope of theism. Even our language draws that conclusion. For if a person is not a theist, acknowledging the existence of a being called God, then our language suggests that the only alternative is to be an a-theist. Goulder accepted that logical conclusion, and he had the courage to act upon it.

But theism and God are not the same. Theism is but one human definition of God. Can any human definition ever exhaust the meaning of God? Are we not aware of that ancient bit of folk wisdom suggesting that "if horses had gods they would look like horses"? No creature can finally conceptualize beyond its own limits or its own being. A horse cannot think or imagine beyond the experience of a horse. Despite our human pretensions, that is also true of human beings. If human beings have gods, they will look and act remarkably like human beings. None of us can ever get beyond that. If we are going to speak of God at all, we must begin by acknowledging that limitation. Even if we admit revelation as a source of knowledge, that revelation will be received and understood within the limits of the human experience.

Indeed, a closer look at these gods we human beings have worshiped historically will reveal that they were recorded as having acted not just humanly, but sometimes in the very worst manner of human behavior. The Jewish God in the Hebrew scriptures was assumed to hate anyone that the nation of Israel hated. The gods of the Olympus, served by both Greek and Roman civilizations, were portrayed in a wide variety of what we today would call "compromised" sexual activities. Such a picture of the predilections of the gods makes it easy to understand just why these gods died.

The familiar Christian God acknowledged by almost all of our European ancestors not only blessed the imperialistic and colonial expansion of those nations in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries but also declared that this colonialist domination of the underdeveloped peoples of the world was the very will of the Christian deity. So under the banner of Christ, native populations in what we today call the third world were subjugated and converted, while the resources of those conquered nations were being extracted from their soil to bring wealth to the Europeans. That old lament of those we now call Native Americans that "when the Europeans came, we had the land and they had the Bible, but now we have the Bible and they have the land," rings with sardonic but real truth.

It becomes so clear that the God most of us have worshiped during human history has looked and acted in a very human manner. In view of this fact, my first discovery in the exile is that I can no longer approach this subject by asking, "Who is God?" Nor can I be limited to personal images for God. The "who" question and the personal images of God slide quickly together, and theology becomes an exercise not unlike staring into a mirror. The fact is that the God of Thomas Aquinas looked and acted very much like Thomas Aquinas. So, too, did the God of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Thomas Cranmer look and act like each of these theologians. Definitions of God that are personal or that come as responses to the question "who?" are therefore quite dangerous. Some would say they are also increasingly quite inadequate. Hence, in my search for a new way to speak about God in the exile, I have come to see that I must abandon both personal images and "who?" questions and seek a different starting place.

But to reach this conclusion means that I must be prepared to dismiss most of the God content of the ages. That is what Michael Goulder did. If there is no other way to speak of God, then his path might have to become the path for all of us. For that reason, the enormity of that dismissal becomes a step not taken lightly. It is in recognizing exile, however, that we see the traditional pathway to God to be no longer open to us. Exile people know that there can be no return to the past, so they must be prepared either to give up or to look in some other direction. If exile from all religious systems is not our final destination, then only one alternative is open to us, and that is to go forward into we know not what. That is where the talk of God must now be located. The future may contain no answer either, but we do not know that yet. We do know, however, that the answer surely is not contained in the theistic God concept of yesterday. The believer in exile bets his or her faith on the possibility of a new insight emerging out of a new direction.

As theism begins to crack and die, we can see ever more clearly the process of "God creation" that we human beings have always pursued. The attributes we have claimed for God are nothing but human qualities expanded beyond human limits. Human life is mortal. God, we said, was not mortal. Stating it positively, we claimed God was immortal. Human life is finite. God, we said, is not finite. When we stated it positively, God became infinite. Human life is limited in power. God is not limited. Omnipotent then became our positive word. Human life does not know all things. God is not bound by that limitation. Omniscient then became our positive word. Human life is bound to a particular space or by immutable natural laws. God is conceived of as being not so bound. Omnipresent and supernatural then became our God words.

When we unravel the theological tomes of the ages, the makeup of God becomes quite clear. God is a human being without human limitations who is read into the heavens. We disguised this process by suggesting that the reason God was so much like a human being was that the human beings were in fact created in God's image. However, we now recognize that it was the other way around. The God of theism came into being as a human creation. As such, this God, too, was mortal and is now dying.

Once we have moved beyond our rhetoric and know what it is that we are seeing, then the fingerprints, revealing theism's human creation, become almost amusingly obvious. An illustration of this is in the Noah story in Genesis (9:8-17). God was a great warrior, it was said, and occasionally the wrath of this warrior deity turned against human life. The great flood was interpreted as one such incidence of God's warfare against the sinful creation. When the rains ceased and the floodwaters began to recede, the scriptures suggested that what had actually occurred was that God had laid aside his weapon of war. In that era where the bow, together with its projectiles called arrows, was the primary weapon with which to attack an enemy at some distance, God, the distant heavenly warrior, was said to have laid the divine bow aside. Since God was conceived of as a Being of enormous size, this divine bow had to be large enough to cover the heavens. Since God was magnificent in splendor beyond human imagining, this bow had to include all of the brilliant colors of the spectrum. So when God laid down the divine weapon and ended the warfare designed to punish the sinfulness of humankind, the sign was the divine bow, called the rainbow, that covered the sky. It was an ingenious interpretation, and it lasted until scientists figured out how rain reflects and refracts the rays of the sun into the colors present in a beam of light.

Pressing this inquiry into the sources of theism further, we now need to ask, "What was the human need that caused us to create God in our own image in the first place?" When and why did theism actually emerge? Our deepening probe suggests that theistic religion was born at the exact moment when human self-consciousness first emerged out of the evolutionary process. Indeed, I would suggest that what we might call human history has never existed without both self-consciousness and theistic religion. I would go further and say that it was the emergence of self-consciousness that demanded the creation of theistic religion. Since religion was conceived in theistic terms at the very moment of the rise of self-consciousness, at the dawn of human history, theism was able to develop its powerful and exclusive lock on the definition of God. That is why the death of theism feels like the death of God. The two have never been separated before. So looking still for clues to help us into some new approach to the divine, we seek to understand what happened at the dawn of human life to make this combination so intense.

We are helped in this pursuit of insight by the great father of the psychoanalytic discipline, Sigmund Freud. In 1927 he sketched out his thoughts on this subject in a book entitled The Future of an Illusion. Here Freud probed the origins of human life and the various human creations that enabled human beings to cope with their existence. Religion was, he argued, a major one of those human creations.

The birth of theistic religion, Freud argued, grew out of the trauma of self-consciousness. For billions of years, Freud observed, the creatures who inhabited this earth did not have a sufficient intellectual capacity to raise questions about the meaning of their lives or indeed to ask whether life possessed any ultimate meaning. They simply lived and died in an endless pattern without knowing that this was either their reality or their destiny.

Finally, however, a creature evolved with a brain sufficient to be self-aware, self-conscious, and to have the capacity for self-transcendence. The shock of mortality and meaninglessness entered history at that moment, Freud contended. Now the world possessed a creature who could anticipate dying, who could understand disaster, and who could view its destiny to be nothing more than decay. This was a traumatic realization, and with that realization, definable human existence was born.

If trauma is sufficiently intense, and if it cannot be dealt with adequately in any other way, then the inevitable human response is hysteria. Religion, Freud contended, was the coping mechanism, the human response to the trauma of self-consciousness, and it was designed above all else to keep hysteria under control and to manage for these self-conscious creatures the shock of existence.

The first tenet in all human religion, he observed, was that the powers that threatened human beings were assumed to be personal. This meant that the sun, the heat, the cold, the wind, the water, and the storm were defined as the manifestations of supernatural beings or a supernatural being. If this were so, then human beings were not victims of a blind impersonal force unresponsive to their needs. As manifestations of the personal deity, these powers could be related to and controlled in the same way that human beings had always been able to deal with those who possessed authority. These powerful divine figures could also be placated, bargained with, flattered, or appeased. Frail and frightened human beings thus could ingratiate themselves with these external personal powers so that instead of being victimized by them, they could move the deity to protect or spare them instead. So it was that natural disasters were routinely interpreted to be the angry expressions of the supernatural beings or being who lived beyond this world. Those natural forces all emerged from the sky, where God was presumed to live. Therefore, they must have been designed by this deity to reward, punish, or warn according to what humans deserved. Keeping the laws of God, which were understood not as the creation of society but as the revealed will of the deity, then became of paramount importance. It was the way to keep the deity satisfied. Worshiping properly and faithfully also became the first line of defense against possible human disaster. It was a powerful system, against which few people chose to rebel. The one who had broken the rule, therefore, had to be quick to confess it, to promise amends, and even to offer sacrifices if necessary to make up for the offense. If he or she did not, the whole people might perish.

The member of the tribe who was called the shaman, the medicine man or woman, or the high priest claimed the right to speak for this God, to reveal God's rules and to be able to carry out God's plan for proper worship. When this holy figure was also believed to be able to turn away the wrath of a storm or the fury of sickness by prayers, incantations, or sacrifices or to be able to interpret the meaning of that storm or that sickness in a convincing way, then the power of the priesthood was established and the authority of such religious figures was secure.

Freud found in all of these theistic manifestations the suppressed hysteria of a newly self-conscious creature. Defense against hysteria requires that nothing occur that would destabilize the system, for only thus can the angst of self-consciousness be kept in check. The presence of that defense system in human religion was for Freud the sure sign that he had discovered in religion not the manifestation of truth but the manifestation of trauma. Religious truth was said to have been revealed by God and thus its content was not subject to debate. The community authorized to receive this revelation was said to have understood it perfectly and to be able to define it infallibly. Therefore, no one was allowed to debate their interpretations. Religious truth was thus protected by a double immunity.

Real truth, Freud suggested, does not need to be surrounded by such impenetrable barriers. Truth in its objective form can compete and win in debate in the public arena. Religious truth and theistic understandings were shielded from that debate. Religion itself was not an activity in pursuit of truth; it was rather born to be a significant part of the security system of human life.

Only when we recognize this defense mechanism in religion can we grasp the meaning of the constant presence in primitive religion, and certainly still present in Western religion, of an intense, even a killing, anger. Irrational hostility is a symptom of hysteria. Anger has always marked the religious establishment. This is why so many Christian leaders historically have justified such things as the stifling of debate with ex cathedra pronouncements, the persecution of dissenters, the excommunication of nonconformists, the execution of heretics, and the engagement in religious wars. This is also why anger is always just beneath the surface of organized religion in almost every one of its Western manifestations. The preaching of evangelists is marked by finger pointing and face-contorting expressions of hostility while they talk about the wrath of God. Anger lies underneath the glee expressed by the preachers of Christian history when they assign unbelievers to hell. Anger is the reason why many religious people act as if they will not enjoy the bliss of heaven if they are not simultaneously allowed to view those not so fortunate writhing before their eyes in the fires of hell. Anger is the reason why the Church throughout its history kept writing creed after creed to clarify just who is in and who is out of this religious enterprise so that religious people would know who their enemies were and could act appropriately against them.

It was Freud's contention that theistic religion was born as the means of dealing with the trauma of self-conscious existence. It was born as a tool designed to keep our hysteria in check. The theistic definition of God as a personal being with expanded supernatural, human, and parental qualities, which has shaped every religious idea of the Western world, came into existence not through divine revelation, Freud argued, but out of human need. Today this theism is collapsing. The theistic God has no work to do. The power once assigned to this God is now explained in countless other ways. The theistic God is all but unemployed. I am convinced that this powerful and provocative Freudian analysis is correct. That is one reason why human life in the theistic world has arrived in an exile. Human beings have evolved to the place where the theistic God concept can be and must be cast aside. It has become an inoperative premise. If there is no other possible understanding of God, then surely God has died.

It was when I reached this conclusion but still could not dismiss what seemed to me to be an experience of something other, transcendent, and beyond all of my limits that I knew I had to find another God language. Theism was no more.

* Index: Atheism and Awareness (Editorials)
* Home to Positive Atheism
* Mentioned in: At a Loss for Words by Cliff Walker
* Check Positive Atheism's Big List of Bishop Spong Quotes (frames)
* See also: A Criticism of My Church by Gerd Lüdemann
* See also: Ideologies, Text and Tradition by John Bowden

Graphic Rule

The Problem of Paul
excerpt from: The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity
by Hyam Maccoby

* Return to Historical Index
* Return to Atheism and Awareness (Editorials)
* Home to Positive Atheism
* See also: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance by Hyam Maccoby
* See also Paul's Bungling Attempt At Sounding Pharisaic by Hyam Maccoby
* See also: What Is Said Of The Persecutions Of Paul? by John E. Remsberg

Preface

As a Talmudic scholar, I have found that knowledge of the Talmud and other rabbinical works has opened up the meaning of many puzzling passages in the New Testament. In my earlier book on Jesus, Revolution in Judaea, I showed how, in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus speaks and acts as a Pharisee, though the Gospel editors have attempted to conceal this by representing him as opposing Pharisaism even when his sayings were most in accordance with Pharisee teaching. In the present book, I have used the rabbinical evidence to establish an opposite contention: that Paul, whom the New Testament wishes to portray as having been a trained Pharisee, never was one. The consequences of this for the understanding of early Christianity are immense.

In addition to the rabbinical writings, I have made great use of the ancient historians, especially Josephus, Epiphanius and Eusebius. Their statements must be weighed in relation to their particular interests and bias; but when such bias has been identified and discounted, there remains a residue of valuable information. Exactly the same applies to the New Testament itself. Its information is often distorted by the bias of the author or editor, but a knowledge of the nature of this bias makes possible the emergence of the true shape of events.

For an explanation of my stance in relation to the various schools of New Testament interpretation of modern times, the reader is referred to the Note on Method, p. 206.

In using the Epistles as evidence of Paul's life, views and 'mythology', I have confined myself to those Epistles which are accepted by the great majority of New Testament scholars as the genuine work of Paul. Disputed Epistles, such as Colossians, however pertinent to my argument, have been ignored.

When quoting from the New Testament, I have usually used the New English Bible version, but, from time to time, I have used the Authorized Version or the Revised Version, when I thought them preferable in faithfulness to the original. While the New English Bible is in general more intelligible to modern readers than the older versions, its concern for modern English idiom sometimes obscures important features of the original Greek; and its readiness to paraphrase sometimes allows the translator's presuppositions to colour his translation. I have pointed out several examples of this in the text.

In considering the background of Paul, I have returned to one of the earliest accounts of Paul in existence, that given by the Ebionites, as reported by Epiphanius. This account has been neglected by scholars for quite inadequate and tendentious reasons. Robert Graves and Joshua Podro in The Nazarene Gospel Restored did take the Ebionite account seriously; but, though they made some cogent remarks about it, their treatment of the matter was brief. I hope that the present book will do more to alter the prevailing dismissive attitude towards the evidence of this fascinating and important ancient community.

Part I
Saul Chapter 1
The Problem of Paul

At the beginning of Christianity stand two figures: Jesus and Paul. Jesus is regarded by Christians as the founder of their religion, in that the events of his life comprise the foundation story of Christianity; but Paul is regarded as the great interpreter of Jesus' mission, who explained, in a way that Jesus himself never did, how Jesus' life and death fitted into a cosmic scheme of salvation, stretching from the creation of Adam to the end of time.

How should we understand the relationship between Jesus and Paul? We shall be approaching this question not from the standpoint of faith, but from that of historians, who regard the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament as an important source of evidence requiring careful sifting and criticism, since their authors were propagating religious beliefs rather than conveying dispassionate historical information. We shall also be taking into account all relevant evidence from other sources, such as Josephus, the Talmud, the Church historians and the Gnostic writings.

What would Jesus himself have thought of Paul? We must remember that Jesus never knew Paul; the two men never once met. The disciples who knew Jesus best, such as Peter, James and John, have left no writings behind them explaining how Jesus seemed to them or what they considered his mission to have been. Did they agree with the interpretations disseminated by Paul in his fluent, articulate writings? Or did they perhaps think that this newcomer to the scene, spinning complicated theories about the place of Jesus in the scheme of things, was getting everything wrong? Paul claimed that his interpretations were not just his own invention, but had come to him by personal inspiration; he claimed that he had personal acquaintance with the resurrected Jesus, even though he had never met him during his lifetime. Such acquaintance, he claimed, gained through visions and transports, was actually superior to acquaintance with Jesus during his lifetime, when Jesus was much more reticent about his purposes.

We know about Paul not only from his own letters but also from the book of Acts, which gives a full account of his life. Paul, in fact, is the hero of Acts, which was written by an admirer and follower of his, namely, Luke, who was also the author of the Gospel of that name. From Acts, it would appear that there was some friction between Paul and the leaders of the 'Jerusalem Church', the surviving companions of Jesus; but this friction was resolved, and they all became the best of friends, with common aims and purposes. From certain of Paul's letters, particularly Galatians, it seems that the friction was more serious than in the picture given in Acts, which thus appears to be partly a propaganda exercise, intended to portray unity in the early Church. The question recurs: what would Jesus have thought of Paul, and what did the Apostles think of him?

We should remember that the New Testament, as we have it, is much more dominated by Paul than appears at first sight. As we read it, we come across the Four Gospels, of which Jesus is the hero, and do not encounter Paul as a character until we embark on the post-Jesus narrative of Acts. Then we finally come into contact with Paul himself, in his letters. But this impression is misleading, for the earliest writings in the New Testament are actually Paul's letters, which were written about AD 50-60, while the Gospels were not written until the period AD 70-110. This means that the theories of Paul were already before the writers of the Gospels and coloured their interpretations of Jesus' activities. Paul is, in a sense, present from the very first word of the New Testament. This is, of course, not the whole story, for the Gospels are based on traditions and even written sources which go back to a time before the impact of Paul, and these early traditions and sources are not entirely obliterated in the final version and give valuable indications of what the story was like before Paulinist editors pulled it into final shape. However, the dominant outlook and shaping perspective of the Gospels is that of Paul, for the simple reason that it was the Paulinist view of what Jesus' sojourn on Earth had been about that was triumphant in the Church as it developed in history. Rival interpretations, which at one time had been orthodox, opposed to Paul's very individual views, now became heretical and were crowded out of the final version of the writings adopted by the Pauline Church as the inspired canon of the New Testament.

This explains the puzzling and ambiguous role given in the Gospels to the companions of Jesus, the twelve disciples. They are shadowy figures, who are allowed little personality, except of a schematic kind. They are also portrayed as stupid; they never quite understand what Jesus is up to. Their importance in the origins of Christianity is played down in a remarkable way. For example, we find immediately after Jesus' death that the leader of the Jerusalem Church is Jesus' brother James. Yet in the Gospels, this James does not appear at all as having anything to do with Jesus' mission and story. Instead, he is given a brief mention as one of the brothers of Jesus who allegedly opposed Jesus during his lifetime and regarded him as mad. How it came about that a brother who had been hostile to Jesus in his lifetime suddenly became the revered leader of the Church immediately after Jesus' death is not explained, though one would have thought that some explanation was called for. Later Church legends, of course, filled the gap with stories of the miraculous conversion of James after the death of Jesus and his development into a saint. But the most likely explanation is, as will be argued later, that the erasure of Jesus' brother dames (and his other brothers) from any significant role in the Gospel story is part of the denigration of the early leaders who had been in close contact with Jesus and regarded with great suspicion and dismay the Christological theories of the upstart Paul, flaunting his brand new visions in interpretation of the Jesus whom he had never met in the flesh.

Who, then, was Paul? Here we would seem to have a good deal of information; but on closer examination, it will turn out to be full of problems. We have the information given by Paul about himself in his letters, which are far from impersonal and often take an autobiographical turn. Also we have the information given in Acts, in which Paul plays the chief role. But the information given by any person about himself always has to be treated with a certain reserve, since everyone has strong motives for putting himself in the best possible light. And the information given about Paul in Acts also requires close scrutiny, since this work was written by someone committed to the Pauline cause. Have we any other sources for Paul's biography? As a matter of fact, we have, though they are scattered in various unexpected places, which it will be our task to explore: in a fortuitously preserved extract from the otherwise lost writings of the Ebionites, a sect of great importance for our quest; in a disguised attack on Paul included in a text of orthodox Christian authority; and in an Arabic manuscript, in which a text of the early Jewish Christians, the opponents of Paul, has been preserved by an unlikely chain of circumstances.

Let us first survey the evidence found in the more obvious and well-known sources. It appears from Acts that Paul was at first called 'Saul', and that his birthplace was Tarsus, a city in Asia Minor (Acts 9:11, and 21:39, and 22:3). Strangely enough, however, Paul himself, in his letters, never mentions that he came from Tarsus, even when he is at his most autobiographical. Instead, he gives the following information about his origins: 'I am an Israelite myself, of the stock of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin' (Romans 11:2); and ', circumcised on my eighth day, Israelite by race, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born and bred; in my attitude to the law, a Pharisee, ' (Philippians 3:5). It seems that Paul was not anxious to impart to the recipients of his letters that he came from somewhere so remote as Tarsus from Jerusalem, the powerhouse of Pharisaism. The impression he wished to give, of coming from an unimpeachable Pharisaic background, would have been much impaired by the admission that he in fact came from Tarsus, where there were few, if any, Pharisee teachers and a Pharisee training would have been hard to come by.

We encounter, then, right at the start of our enquiry into Paul's background, the question: was Paul really from a genuine Pharisaic family, as he says to his correspondents, or was this just something that he said to increase his status in their eyes? The fact that this question is hardly ever asked shows how strong the influence of traditional religious attitudes still is in Pauline studies. Scholars feel that, however objective their enquiry is supposed to be, they must always preserve an attitude of deep reverence towards Paul, and never say anything to suggest that he may have bent the truth at times, though the evidence is strong enough in various parts of his life-story that he was not above deception when he felt it warranted by circumstances.

It should be noted (in advance of a full discussion of the subject) that modern scholarship has shown that, at this time, the Pharisees were held in high repute throughout the Roman and Parthian empires as a dedicated group who upheld religious ideals in the face of tyranny, supported leniency and mercy in the application of laws, and championed the rights of the poor against the oppression of the rich. The undeserved reputation for hypocrisy which is attached to the name 'Pharisee' in medieval and modern times is due to the campaign against the Pharisees in the Gospels -- a campaign dictated by politico-religious considerations at the time when the Gospels were given their final editing, about forty to eighty years after the death of Jesus. Paul's desire to be thought of as a person of Pharisee upbringing should thus be understood in the light of the actual reputation of the Pharisees in Paul's lifetime; Paul was claiming a high honour, which would much enhance his status in the eyes of his correspondents.

Before looking further into Paul's claim to have come from a Pharisee background, let us continue our survey of what we are told about Paul's career in the more accessible sources. The young Saul, we are told, left Tarsus and came to the Land of Israel, where he studied in the Pharisee academy of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). We know from other sources about Gamaliel, who is a highly respected figure in the rabbinical writings such as the Mishnah, and was given the title 'Rabban', as the leading sage of his day. That he was the leader of the whole Pharisee party is attested also by the New Testament itself, for he plays a prominent role in one scene in the book of Acts (chapter 5) -- a role that, as we shall see later, is hard to reconcile with the general picture of the Pharisees given in the Gospels.

Yet Paul himself, in his letters, never mentions that he was a pupil of Gamaliel, even when he is most concerned to stress his qualifications as a Pharisee. Here again, then, the question has to be put: was Paul ever really a pupil of Gamaliel or was this claim made by Luke as an embellishment to his narrative? As we shall see later, there are certain considerations which make it most unlikely, quite apart from Paul's significant omission to say anything about the matter, that Paul was ever a pupil of Gamaliel's.

We are also told of the young Saul that he was implicated, to some extent, in the death of the martyr Stephen. The people who gave false evidence against Stephen, we are told, and who also took the leading part in the stoning of their innocent victim, 'laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul'. The death of Stephen is described, and it is added, 'And Saul was among those who approved of his murder' (Acts 8:1). How much truth is there in this detail? Is it to be regarded as historical fact or as dramatic embellishment, emphasizing the contrast between Paul before and after conversion? The death of Stephen is itself an episode that requires searching analysis, since it is full of problems and contradictions. Until we have a better idea of why and by whom Stephen was killed and what were the views for which he died, we can only note the alleged implication of Saul in the matter as a subject for further investigation. For the moment, we also note that the alleged implication of Saul heightens the impression that adherence to Pharisaism would mean violent hostility to the followers of Jesus.

The next thing we are told about Saul in Acts is that he was 'harrying the Church; he entered house after house, seizing men and women, and sending them to prison' (Acts 8:3). We are not told at this point by what authority or on whose orders he was carrying out this persecution. It was clearly not a matter of merely individual action on his part, for sending people to prison can only be done by some kind of official. Saul must have been acting on behalf of some authority, and who this authority was can be gleaned from later incidents in which Saul was acting on behalf of the High Priest. Anyone with knowledge of the religious and political scene at this time in Judaea feels the presence of an important problem here: the High Priest was not a Pharisee, but a Sadducee, and the Sadducees were bitterly opposed to the Pharisees. How is it that Saul, allegedly an enthusiastic Pharisee ('a Pharisee of the Pharisees'), is acting hand in glove with the High Priest? The picture we are given in our New Testament sources of Saul, in the days before his conversion to Jesus, is contradictory and suspect.

The next we hear of Saul (Acts, chapter 9) is that he 'was still breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord. He went to the High Priest and applied for letters to the synagogues at Damascus authorizing him to arrest anyone he found, men or women, who followed the new way, and bring them to Jerusalem.' This incident is full of mystery. If Saul had his hands so full in 'harrying the church' in Judaea, why did he suddenly have the idea of going off to Damascus to harry the Church there? What was the special urgency of a visit to Damascus? Further, what kind of jurisdiction did the Jewish High Priest have over the non-Jewish city of Damascus that would enable him to authorize arrests and extraditions in that city? There is, moreover, something very puzzling about the way in which Saul's relation to the High Priest is described: as if he is a private citizen who wishes to make citizen's arrests according to some plan of his own, and approaches the High Priest for the requisite authority. Surely there must have been some much more definite official connection between the High Priest and Saul, not merely that the High Priest was called upon to underwrite Saul's project. It seems more likely that the plan was the High Priest's and not Saul's, and that Saul was acting as agent or emissary of the High Priest. The whole incident needs to be considered in the light of probabilities and current conditions.

The book of Acts then continues with the account of Saul's conversion on the road to Damascus through a vision of Jesus and the succeeding events of his life as a follower of Jesus. The pre-Christian period of Saul's life, however, does receive further mention later in the book of Acts, both in chapter 22 and chapter 26, where some interesting details are added, and also some further puzzles.

In chapter 22, Saul (now called Paul), is shown giving his own account of his early life in a speech to the people after the Roman commandant had questioned him. Paul speaks as follows:

I am a true-born Jew, a native of Tarsus in Cilicia. I was brought up in this city, and as a pupil of Gamaliel I was thoroughly trained in every point of our ancestral law. I have always been ardent in God's service, as you all are today. And so I began to persecute this movement to the death, arresting its followers, men and women alike, and putting them in chains. For this I have as witnesses the High Priest and the whole Council of Elders. I was given letters from them to our fellow-Jews at Damascus, and had started out to bring the Christians there to Jerusalem as prisoners for punishment; and this is what happened,

Paul then goes on to describe his vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. Previously he had described himself to the commandant as 'a Jew, a Tarsian from Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city'.

It is from this passage that we learn of Paul's native city, Tarsus, and of his alleged studies under Gamaliel. Note that he says that, though born in Tarsus, he was 'brought up in this city' (i.e. Jerusalem) which suggests that he spent his childhood in Jerusalem. Does this mean that his parents moved from Tarsus to Jerusalem? Or that the child was sent to Jerusalem on his own, which seems unlikely? If Paul spent only a few childhood years in Tarsus, he would hardly describe himself proudly as 'a citizen of no mean city' (Tarsus). Jews who had spent most of their lives in Jerusalem would be much more prone to describe themselves as citizens of Jerusalem. The likelihood is that Paul moved to Jerusalem when he was already a grown man, and he left his parents behind in Tarsus, which seems all the more probable in that they receive no mention in any account of Paul's experiences in Jerusalem. As for Paul's alleged period of studies under Gamaliel, this would have had to be in adulthood, for Gamaliel was a teacher of advanced studies, not a teacher of children. He would accept as a pupil only someone well grounded and regarded as suitable for the rabbinate. The question, then, is where and how Paul received this thorough grounding, if at all. As pointed out above and argued fully below, there are strong reasons to think that Paul never was a pupil of Gamaliel.

An important question that also arises in this chapter of Acts is that of Paul's Roman citizenship. This is mentioned first in chapter 16. Paul claims to have been born a Roman citizen, which would mean that his father was a Roman citizen. There are many problems to be discussed in this connection, and some of these questions impinge on Paul's claim to have had a Pharisaic background.

A further account of Paul's pre-Christian life is found in chapter 26 of Acts, in a speech addressed by Paul to King Agrippa. Paul says:

My life from my youth up, the life I led from the beginning among my people and in Jerusalem, is familiar to all Jews. Indeed they have known me long enough and could testify, if they only would, that I belonged to the strictest group in our religion: I lived as a Pharisee. And it is for a hope kindled by God's promise to our forefathers that I stand in the dock today. Our twelve tribes hope to see the fulfilment of that promise, I myself once thought it my duty to work actively against the name of Jesus of Nazareth; and I did so in Jerusalem. It was I who imprisoned many of God's people by authority obtained from the chief priests; and when they were condemned to death, my vote was cast against them. In all the synagogues I tried by repeated punishment to make them renounce their faith; indeed my fury rose to such a pitch that I extended my persecution to foreign cities. On one such occasion I was travelling to Damascus with authority and commission from the chief priests,

Again the account continues with the vision on the road to Damascus.

This speech, of course, cannot be regarded as the authentic words addressed by Paul to King Agrippa, but rather as a rhetorical speech composed by Luke, the author of Acts, in the style of ancient historians. Thus the claim made in the speech that Paul's career as a Pharisee of high standing was known to 'all Jews' cannot be taken at face value. It is interesting that Paul is represented as saying that he 'cast his vote' against the followers of Jesus, thus helping to condemn them to death. This can only refer to the voting of the Sanhedrin or Council of Elders, which was convened to try capital cases; so what Luke is claiming here for his hero Paul is that he was at one time a member of the Sanhedrin. This is highly unlikely, for Paul would surely have made this claim in his letters, when writing about his credentials as a Pharisee, if it had been true. There is, however, some confusion both in this account and in the accounts quoted above about whether the Sanhedrin, as well as the High Priest or 'chief priests', was involved in the persecution of the followers of Jesus. Sometimes the High Priest alone is mentioned, sometimes the Sanhedrin is coupled with him, as if the two are inseparable. But we see on two occasions cited in Acts that the High Priest was outvoted by the Pharisees in the Sanhedrin; on both occasions, the Pharisees were opposing an attempt to persecute the followers of Jesus; so the representation of High Priest and Sanhedrin as having identical aims is one of the suspect features of these accounts.

It will be seen from the above collation of passages in the book of Acts concerning Paul's background and early life, together with Paul's own references to his background in his letters, that the same strong picture emerges: that Paul was at first a highly trained Pharisee rabbi, learned in all the intricacies of the rabbinical commentaries on scripture and legal traditions (afterwards collected in the rabbinical compilations, the Talmud and Midrash). As a Pharisee, Paul was strongly opposed to the new sect which followed Jesus and which believed that he had been resurrected after his crucifixion. So opposed was Paul to this sect that he took violent action against it, dragging its adherents to prison. Though this strong picture has emerged, some doubts have also arisen, which, so far, have only been lightly sketched in: how is it, for example, that Paul claims to have voted against Christians on trial for their lives before the Sanhedrin, when in fact, in the graphically described trial of Peter before the Sanhedrin (Acts 5), the Pharisees, led by Gamaliel, voted for the release of Peter? What kind of Pharisee was Paul, if he took an attitude towards the early Christians which, on the evidence of the same book of Acts, was untypical of the Pharisees? And how is it that this book of Acts is so inconsistent within itself that it describes Paul as violently opposed to Christianity because of his deep attachment to Pharisaism, and yet also describes the Pharisees as being friendly towards the early Christians, standing up for them and saving their lives?

It has been pointed out by many scholars that the book of Acts, on the whole, contains a surprising amount of evidence favourable to the Pharisees, showing them to have been tolerant and merciful. Some scholars have even argued that the book of Acts is a pro-Pharisee work; but this can hardly be maintained. For, outweighing all the evidence favourable to the Pharisees is the material relating to Paul, which is, in all its aspects, unfavourable to the Pharisees; not only is Paul himself portrayed as being a virulent persecutor when he was a Pharisee, but Paul declares that he himself was punished by flogging five times (II Corinthians 11:24) by the 'Jews' (usually taken to mean the Pharisees). So no one really comes away from reading Acts with any good impression of the Pharisees, but rather with the negative impressions derived from the Gospels reinforced.

Why, therefore, is Paul always so concerned to stress that he came from a Pharisee background? A great many motives can be discerned, but there is one that needs to be singled out here: the desire to stress the alleged continuity between Judaism and Pauline Christianity. Paul wishes to say that whereas, when he was a Pharisee, he mistakenly regarded the early Christians as heretics who had departed from true Judaism, after his conversion he took the opposite view, that Christianity was the true Judaism. All his training as a Pharisee, he wishes to say -- all his study of scripture and tradition -- really leads to the acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. So when Paul declares his Pharisee past, he is not merely proclaiming his own sins -- 'See how I have changed, from being a Pharisee persecutor to being a devoted follower of Jesus!' -- he is also proclaiming his credentials -- 'If someone as learned as I can believe that Jesus was the fulfilment of the Torah, who is there fearless enough to disagree?'

On the face of it, Paul's doctrine of Jesus is a daring departure from Judaism. Paul was advocating a doctrine that seemed to have far more in common with pagan myths than with Judaism: that Jesus was a divine-human person who had descended to Earth from the heavens and experienced death for the express purpose of saving mankind. The very fact that the Jews found this doctrine new and shocking shows that it plays no role in the Jewish scripture, at least not in any way easily discernible. Yet Paul was not content to say that his doctrine was new; on the contrary, he wished to say that every line of the Jewish scripture was a foreshadowing of the Jesus-event as he understood it, and that those who understood the scripture in any other way were failing in comprehension of what Judaism had always been about. So his insistence on his Pharisaic upbringing was part of his insistence on continuity.

There were those who accepted Paul's doctrine, but did regard it as a radical new departure, with nothing in the Jewish scriptures foreshadowing it. The best known figure of this kind was Marcion, who lived about a hundred years after Paul, and regarded Paul as his chief inspiration. Yet Marcion refused to see anything Jewish in Paul's doctrine, but regarded it as a new revelation. He regarded the Jewish scriptures as the work of the Devil and he excluded the Old Testament from his version of the Bible.

Paul himself rejected this view. Though he regarded much of the Old Testament as obsolete, superseded by the advent of Jesus, he still regarded it as the Word of God, prophesying the new Christian Church and giving it authority. So his picture of himself as a Pharisee symbolizes the continuity between the old dispensation and the new: a figure who comprised in his own person the turning-point at which Judaism was transformed into Christianity.

Throughout the Christian centuries, there have been Christian scholars who have seen Paul's claim to a Pharisee background in this light. In the medieval Disputations convened by Christians to convert Jews, arguments were put forward purporting to show that not only the Jewish scriptures but even the rabbinical writings, the Talmud and the Midrash, supported the claims of Christianity that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was divine and that he had to suffer death for mankind. Though Paul was not often mentioned in these Disputations, the project was one of which he would have approved. In modern times, scholars have laboured to argue that Paul's doctrines about the Messiah and divine suffering are continuous with Judaism as it appears in the Bible, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and in the rabbinical writings (the best-known effort of this nature is Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, by W.D. Davies).

So Paul's claim to expert Pharisee learning is relevant to a very important and central issue -- whether Christianity, in the form given to it by Paul, is really continuous with Judaism or whether it is a new doctrine, having no roots in Judaism, but deriving, in so far as it has an historical background, from pagan myths of dying and resurrected gods and Gnostic myths of heaven-descended redeemers. Did Paul truly stand in the Jewish tradition, or was he a person of basically Hellenistic religious type, but seeking to give a colouring of Judaism to a salvation cult that was really opposed to everything that Judaism stood for?

Chapter 2
The Standpoint of this Book

As against the conventional picture of Paul, outlined in the last chapter, the present book has an entirely different and unfamiliar view to put forward. This view of Paul is not only unfamiliar in itself, but it also involves many unfamiliar standpoints about other issues which are relevant and indeed essential to a correct assessment of Paul; for example:

Who and what were the Pharisees? What were their religious and political views as opposed to those of the Sadducees and other religious and political groups of the time? What was their attitude to Jesus? What was their attitude towards the early Jerusalem Church?

Who and what was Jesus? Did he really see himself as a saviour who had descended from heaven in order to suffer crucifixion? Or did he have entirely different aims, more in accordance with the Jewish thoughts and hopes of his time? Was the historical Jesus quite a different person from the Jesus of Paul's ideology, based on Paul's visions and trances?

Who and what were the early Church of Jerusalem, the first followers of Jesus? Have their views been correctly represented by the later Church? Did James and Peter, the leaders of the Jerusalem Church, agree with Paul's views (as orthodox Christianity claims) or did they oppose him bitterly, regarding him as a heretic and a betrayer of the aims of Jesus?

Who and what were the Ebionites, whose opinions and writings were suppressed by the orthodox Church? Why did they denounce Paul? Why did they combine belief in Jesus with the practice of Judaism?

Why did they believe in Jesus as Messiah, but not as God? Were they a later 'Judaizing' group, or were they, as they claimed to be, the remnants of the authentic followers of Jesus, the church of James and Peter?

The arguments in this book will inevitably become complicated, since every issue is bound up with every other. It is impossible to answer any of the above questions without bringing all the other questions into consideration. It is, therefore, convenient at this point to give an outline of the standpoint to which all the arguments of this book converge. This is not an attempt to prejudge the issue. The following summary of the findings of this book may seem dogmatic at this stage, but it is intended merely as a guide to the ramifications of the ensuing arguments and a bird's eye view of the book, and as such will stand or fall with the cogency of the arguments themselves. The following, then, are the propositions argued in the present book:

1 Paul was never a Pharisee rabbi, but was an adventurer of undistinguished background. He was attached to the Sadducees, as a police officer under the authority of the High Priest, before his conversion to belief in Jesus. His mastery of the kind of learning associated with the Pharisees was not great. He deliberately misrepresented his own biography in order to increase the effectiveness of missionary activities.

2 Jesus and his immediate followers were Pharisees. Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. He regarded himself as the Messiah in the normal Jewish sense of the term, i.e. a human leader who would restore the Jewish monarchy, drive out the Roman invaders, set up an independent Jewish state, and inaugurate an era of peace, justice and prosperity (known as 'the kingdom of God,) for the whole world. Jesus believed himself to be the figure prophesied in the Hebrew Bible who would do all these things. He was not a militarist and did not build up an army to fight the Romans, since he believed that God would perform a great miracle to break the power of Rome. This miracle would take place on the Mount of Olives, as prophesied in the book of Zechariah. When this miracle did not occur, his mission had failed. He had no intention of being crucified in order to save mankind from eternal damnation by his sacrifice. He never regarded himself as a divine being, and would have regarded such an idea as pagan and idolatrous, an infringement of the first of the Ten Commandments.

3 The first followers of Jesus, under James and Peter, founded the Jerusalem Church after Jesus's death. They were called the Nazarenes, and in all their beliefs they were indistinguishable from the Pharisees, except that they believed in the resurrection of Jesus, and that Jesus was still the promised Messiah. They did not believe that Jesus was a divine person, but that, by a miracle from God, he had been brought back to life after his death on the cross, and would soon come back to complete his mission of overthrowing the Romans and setting up the Messianic kingdom. The Nazarenes did not believe that Jesus had abrogated the Jewish religion, or Torah. Having known Jesus personally, they were aware that he had observed the Jewish religious law all his life and had never rebelled against it. His sabbath cures were not against Pharisee law. The Nazarenes were themselves very observant of Jewish religious law. They practiced circumcision, did not eat the forbidden foods and showed great respect to the Temple. The Nazarenes did not regard themselves as belonging to a new religion; their religion was Judaism. They set up synagogues of their own, but they also attended non-Nazarene synagogues on occasion, and performed the same kind of worship in their own synagogues as was practiced by all observant Jews. The Nazarenes became suspicious of Paul when they heard that he was preaching that Jesus was the founder of a new religion and that he had abrogated the Torah. After an attempt to reach an understanding with Paul, the Nazarenes (i.e. the Jerusalem Church under James and Peter) broke irrevocably with Paul and disowned him.

4 Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity as a new religion which developed away from both normal Judaism and the Nazarene variety of Judaism. In this new religion, the Torah was abrogated as having had only temporary validity. The central myth of the new religion was that of an atoning death of a divine being. Belief in this sacrifice, and a mystical sharing of the death of the deity, formed the only path to salvation. Paul derived this religion from Hellenistic sources, chiefly by a fusion of concepts taken from Gnosticism and concepts taken from the mystery religions, particularly from that of Attis. The combination of these elements with features derived from Judaism, particularly the incorporation of the Jewish scriptures, reinterpreted to provide a background of sacred history for the new myth, was unique; and Paul alone was the creator of this amalgam. Jesus himself had no idea of it, and would have been amazed and shocked at the role assigned to him by Paul as a suffering deity. Nor did Paul have any predecessors among the Nazarenes though later mythography tried to assign this role to Stephen, and modern scholars have discovered equally mythical predecessors for Paul in a group called the 'Hellenists'. Paul, as the personal begetter of the Christian myth, has never been given sufficient credit for his originality. The reverence paid through the centuries to the great Saint Paul has quite obscured the more colourful features of his personality. Like many evangelical leaders, he was a compound of sincerity and charlatanry. Evangelical leaders of his kind were common at this time in the Greco-Roman world (e.g. Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana).

5 A source of information about Paul that has never been taken seriously enough is a group called the Ebionites. Their writings were suppressed by the Church, but some of their views and traditions were preserved in the writings of their opponents, particularly in the huge treatise on Heresies by Epiphanius. From this it appears that the Ebionites had a very different account to give of Paul's background and early life from that found in the New Testament and fostered by Paul himself. The Ebionites testified that Paul had no Pharisaic background or training; he was the son of Gentiles, converted to Judaism in Tarsus, came to Jerusalem when an adult, and attached himself to the High Priest as a henchman. Disappointed in his hopes of advancement, he broke with the High Priest and sought fame by founding a new religion. This account, while not reliable in all its details, is substantially correct. It makes far more sense of all the puzzling and contradictory features of the story of Paul than the account of the official documents of the Church.

6 The Ebionites were stigmatized by the Church as heretics who failed to understand that Jesus was a divine person and asserted instead that he was a human being who came to inaugurate a new earthly age, as prophesied by the Jewish prophets of the Bible. Moreover, the Ebionites refused to accept the Church doctrine, derived from Paul, that Jesus abolished or abrogated the Torah, the Jewish law. Instead, the Ebionites observed the Jewish law and regarded themselves as Jews. The Ebionites were not heretics, as the Church asserted, nor 're-Judaizers', as modern scholars call them, but the authentic successors of the immediate disciples and followers of Jesus, whose views and doctrines they faithfully transmitted, believing correctly that they were derived from Jesus himself. They were the same group that had earlier been called the Nazarenes, who were led by James and Peter, who had known Jesus during his lifetime, and were in a far better position to know his aims than Paul, who met Jesus only in dreams and visions. Thus the opinion held by the Ebionites about Paul is of extraordinary interest and deserves respectful consideration, instead of dismissal as 'scurrilous' propaganda -- the reaction of Christian scholars from ancient to modern times.

The above conspectus brings into sharper relief our question, was Paul a Pharisee? It will be seen that this is not merely a matter of biography or idle curiosity. It is bound up with the whole question of the origins of Christianity. A tremendous amount depends on this question, for, if Paul was not a Pharisee rooted in Jewish learning and tradition, but instead a Hellenistic adventurer whose acquaintance with Judaism was recent and shallow, the construction of myth and theology which he elaborated in his letters becomes a very different thing. Instead of searching through his system for signs of continuity with Judaism, we shall be able to recognize it for what it is -- a brilliant concoction of Hellenism, superficially connecting itself with the Jewish scriptures and tradition, by which it seeks to give itself a history and an air of authority.

Christian attitudes towards the Pharisees and thus towards the picture of Paul as a Pharisee have always been strikingly ambivalent. In the Gospels, the Pharisees are attacked as hypocrites and would-be murderers: yet the Gospels also convey an impression of the Pharisees as figures of immense authority and dignity. This ambivalence reflects the attitude of Christianity to Judaism itself; on the one hand, an allegedly outdated ritualism, but on the other, a panorama of awesome history, a source of authority and blessing, so that at all costs the Church must display itself as the new Israel, the true Judaism. Thus Paul, as Pharisee, is the subject of alternating attitudes. In the nineteenth century, when Jesus was regarded (by Renan, for example) as a Romantic liberal, rebelling against the authoritarianism of Pharisaic Judaism, Paul was deprecated as a typical Pharisee, enveloping the sweet simplicity of Jesus in clouds of theology and difficult formulations. In the twentieth century, when the concern is more to discover the essential Jewishness of Christianity, the Pharisee aspect of Paul is used to connect Pauline doctrines with the rabbinical writings -- again Paul is regarded as never losing his essential Pharisaism, but this is now viewed as good, and as a means of rescuing Christianity from isolation from Judaism. To be Jewish and yet not to be Jewish, this is the essential dilemma of Christianity, and the figure of Paul, abjuring his alleged Pharisaism as a hindrance to salvation and yet somehow clinging to it as a guarantee of authority, is symbolic.

* Return to Historical Index
* Home to Positive Atheism
* See also Paul's Bungling Attempt At Sounding Pharisaic by Hyam Maccoby
* See also Jesus and the Jewish Resistance

Why the Christian God is Impossible
by Chad Docterman

* Index: Atheism and Awareness (Editorials)
* Home to Positive Atheism

Source: http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/imposs.htm

Introduction

Christians consider the existence of their God to be an obvious truth that no sane man could deny. I strongly disagree with this assumption not only because evidence for the existence of this presumably ubiquitous yet invisible God is lacking, but because the very nature Christians attribute to this God is self-contradictory.


Proving a universal negative

It is taken for granted by Christians, as well as many atheists, that a universal negative cannot be proven. In this case, that universal negative is the statement that the Christian God does not exist. One would have to have omniscience, they say, in order to prove that anything does not exist. I disagree with this position, however, because omniscience is not needed in order to prove that a thing whose nature is a self-contradiction cannot, and therefore does not exist.

I do not need a complete knowledge of the universe to prove to you that cubic spheres do not exist. Such objects have mutually-exclusive attributes which would render their existence impossible. For example, a cube, by definition, has 8 corners, while a sphere has none. These properties are completely incompatible: they cannot be held simultaneously by the same object. It is my intent to show that the supposed properties of the Christian God Yahweh, like those of a cubic sphere, are incompatible, and by so doing, to show Yahweh's existence to be an impossibility.


Defining YHWH

Before we can discuss the existence of a thing, we must define it. Christians have endowed their God with all of the following attributes: He is eternal, all-powerful, and created everything. He created all the laws of nature and can change anything by an act of will. He is all-good, all-loving, and perfectly just. He is a personal God who experiences all of the emotions a human does. He is all-knowing. He sees everything past and future.

God's creation was originally perfect, but humans, by disobeying him, brought imperfection into the world. Humans are evil and sinful, and must suffer in this world because of their sinfulness. God gives humans the opportunity to accept forgiveness for their sin, and all who do will be rewarded with eternal bliss in heaven, but while they are on earth, they must suffer for his sake. All humans who choose not to accept this forgiveness must go to hell and be tormented for eternity.

These attributes of God are related by the Bible, which Christians believe to be the perfect and true Word of God.

One verse which Christians are fond of quoting says that atheists are fools. I intend to show that the above concepts of God are completely incompatible and so reveal the impossibility of all of them being true. Who is the fool? The fool is the one who believes impossible things and calls them divine mysteries.


Perfection seeks even more perfection

What did God do during that eternity before he created everything? If God was all that existed back then, what disturbed the eternal equilibrium and compelled him to create? Was he bored? Was he lonely? God is supposed to be perfect. If something is perfect, it is complete--it needs nothing else. We humans engage in activities because we are pursuing that elusive perfection, because there is disequilibrium caused by a difference between what we are and what we want to be. If God is perfect, there can be no disequilibrium. There is nothing he needs, nothing he desires, and nothing he must or will do. A God who is perfect does nothing except exist. A perfect creator God is impossible.


Perfection begets imperfection

But, for the sake of argument, let's continue. Let us suppose that this perfect God did create the universe. Humans were the crown of his creation, since they were created in God's image and have the ability to make decisions. However, these humans spoiled the original perfection by choosing to disobey God.

What!? If something is perfect, nothing imperfect can come from it. Someone once said that bad fruit cannot come from a good tree, and yet this "perfect" God created a "perfect" universe which was rendered imperfect by the "perfect" humans. The ultimate source of imperfection is God. What is perfect cannot become imperfect, so humans must have been created imperfect. What is perfect cannot create anything imperfect, so God must be imperfect to have created these imperfect humans. A perfect God who creates imperfect humans is impossible.


The Freewill Argument

The Christians' objection to this argument involves freewill. They say that a being must have freewill to be happy. The omnibenevolent God did not wish to create robots, so he gave humans freewill to enable them to experience love and happiness. But the humans used this freewill to choose evil, and introduced imperfection into God's originally perfect universe. God had no control over this decision, so the blame for our imperfect universe is on the humans, not God.

Here is why the argument is weak. First, if God is omnipotent, then the assumption that freewill is necessary for happiness is false. If God could make it a rule that only beings with freewill may experience happiness, then he could just as easily have made it a rule that only robots may experience happiness. The latter option is clearly superior, since perfect robots will never make decisions which could render them or their creator unhappy, whereas beings with freewill could. A perfect and omnipotent God who creates beings capable of ruining their own happiness is impossible.

Second, even if we were to allow the necessity of freewill for happiness, God could have created humans with freewill who did not have the ability to choose evil, but to choose between several good options.

Third, God supposedly has freewill, and yet he does not make imperfect decisions. If humans are miniature images of God, our decisions should likewise be perfect. Also, the occupants of heaven, who presumably must have freewill to be happy, will never use that freewill to make imperfect decisions. Why would the originally perfect humans do differently?

The point remains: the presence of imperfections in the universe disproves the supposed perfection of its creator.


All-good God knowingly creates future suffering

God is omniscient. When he created the universe, he saw the sufferings which humans would endure as a result of the sin of those original humans. He heard the screams of the damned. Surely he would have known that it would have been better for those humans to never have been born (in fact, the Bible says this very thing), and surely this all-compassionate deity would have foregone the creation of a universe destined to imperfection in which many of the humans were doomed to eternal suffering. A perfectly compassionate being who creates beings which he knows are doomed to suffer is impossible.


Infinite punishment for finite sins

God is perfectly just, and yet he sentences the imperfect humans he created to infinite suffering in hell for finite sins. Clearly, a limited offense does not warrant unlimited punishment. God's sentencing of the imperfect humans to an eternity in hell for a mere mortal lifetime of sin is infinitely more unjust than this punishment. The absurd injustice of this infinite punishment is even greater when we consider that the ultimate source of human imperfection is the God who created them. A perfectly just God who sentences his imperfect creation to infinite punishment for finite sins is impossible.


Belief more important than action

Consider all of the people who live in the remote regions of the world who have never even heard the "gospel" of Jesus Christ. Consider the people who have naturally adhered to the religion of their parents and nation as they had been taught to do since birth. If we are to believe the Christians, all of these people will perish in the eternal fire for not believing in Jesus. It does not matter how just, kind, and generous they have been with their fellow humans during their lifetime: if they do not accept the gospel of Jesus, they are condemned. No just God would ever judge a man by his beliefs rather than his actions.


Perfection's imperfect revelation

The Bible is supposedly God's perfect Word. It contains instructions to humankind for avoiding the eternal fires of hell. How wonderful and kind of this God to provide us with this means of overcoming the problems for which he is ultimately responsible! The all-powerful God could have, by a mere act of will, eliminated all of the problems we humans must endure, but instead, in his infinite wisdom, he has opted to offer this indecipherable amalgam of books which is the Bible as a means for avoiding the hell which he has prepared for us. The perfect God has decided to reveal his wishes in this imperfect work, written in the imperfect language of imperfect man, translated, copied, interpreted, voted on, and related by imperfect man. No two men will ever agree what this perfect word of God is supposed to mean, since much of it is either self- contradictory, or obscured by enigmatic symbols. And yet the perfect God expects us imperfect humans to understand this paradoxical riddle using the imperfect minds with which he has equipped us. Surely the all-wise and all-powerful God would have known that it would have been better to reveal his perfect will directly to each of us, rather than to allow it to be debased and perverted by the imperfect language and botched interpretations of man.


Contradictory justice

One need look to no source other than the Bible to discover its imperfections, for it contradicts itself and thus exposes its own imperfection. It contradicts itself on matters of justice, for the same just God who assures his people that sons shall not be punished for the sins of their fathers turns around and destroys an entire household for the sin of one man (he had stolen some of Yahweh's war loot). It was this same Yahweh who afflicted thousands of his innocent people with plague and death to punish their evil king David for taking a census (?!). It was this same Yahweh who allowed the humans to slaughter his son because the perfect Yahweh had botched his own creation. Consider how many have been stoned, burned, slaughtered, raped, and enslaved because of Yahweh's skewed sense of justice. The blood of innocent babies is on the perfect, just, compassionate hands of Yahweh.


Contradictory history

The Bible contradicts itself on matters of history. A person who reads and compares the contents of the Bible will be confused about exactly who Esau's wives were, whether Timnah was a concubine or a son, and whether Jesus' earthly lineage is through Solomon or his brother Nathan. These are but a few of hundreds of documented historical contradictions. If the Bible cannot confirm itself in mundane earthly matters, how are we to trust it on moral and spiritual matters?


Unfulfilled prophecy

The Bible misinterprets its own prophecies. Read Isaiah 7 and compare it to Matthew 1 to find but one of many misinterpreted prophecies of which Christians are either passively or willfully ignorant. The fulfillment of prophecy in the Bible is cited as proof of its divine inspiration, and yet here is but one major example of a prophecy whose intended meaning has been and continues to be twisted to support subsequent absurd and false doctrines. There are no ends to which the credulous will not go to support their feeble beliefs in the face of compelling evidence against them.

The Bible is imperfect. It only takes one imperfection to destroy the supposed perfection of this alleged Word of God. Many have been found. A perfect God who reveals his perfect will in an imperfect book is impossible.


The Omniscient changes the future

A God who knows the future is powerless to change it. An omniscient God who is all-powerful and freewilled is impossible.


The Omniscient is surprised

A God who knows everything cannot have emotions. The Bible says that God experiences all of the emotions of humans, including anger, sadness, and happiness. We humans experience emotions as a result of new knowledge. A man who had formerly been ignorant of his wife's infidelity will experience the emotions of anger and sadness only after he has learned what had previously been hidden. In contrast, the omniscient God is ignorant of nothing. Nothing is hidden from him, nothing new may be revealed to him, so there is no gained knowledge to which he may emotively react.

We humans experience anger and frustration when something is wrong which we cannot fix. The perfect, omnipotent God, however, can fix anything. Humans experience longing for things we lack. The perfect God lacks nothing. An omniscient, omnipotent, and perfect God who experiences emotion is impossible.


The conclusion of the matter

I have offered arguments for the impossibility, and thus the non- existence, of the Christian God Yahweh. No reasonable and freethinking individual can accept the existence of a being whose nature is so contradictory as that of Yahweh, the "perfect" creator of our imperfect universe. The existence of Yahweh is as impossible as the existence of cubic spheres or invisible pink unicorns.

Should any Christian who reads this persist in defending these impossibilities through means of "divine transcendence" and "faith," and should any Christian continue to call me an atheist fool, I will be forced to invoke the wrath of the Invisible Pink Unicorn:

"You are a fool for denying the existence of the IPU. You have rejected true faith and have relied on your feeble powers of human reason and thus arrogantly denied the existence of Her Divine Transcendence, and so are you condemned."

If such arguments are good enough for Yahweh, they are good enough for Her Invisible Pinkness.

As for me and my house, we shall choose reality.

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Graphic Rule

The Atheist Soapbox, Chad Docterman, docterm1@marshall.edu

More resources for skeptics: http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Debate.html

Thousands Flock to Revival in Search of Miracles
by ABC News


http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/FaithMatters/story?id=5338963&page=1

Thousands Flock to Revival in Search of Miracles
Controversial Canadian Minister Says He Can Cure the Sick and Weary
Controversial Canadian Minister Says He Can Cure the Sick and Weary
By JEFFREY KOFMAN, KARSON YIU and NICHOLAS BRENNAN

A middle-aged woman suffering from ovarian cancer shakes back and forth, speaking in tongues.

A young child with spina bifida and splints on his legs tears them off and bolts across the stage. He cries as he declares that his legs have strength like never before.

"The boy's been healed," says the preacher as thousands cheer him on.

Meanwhile, Bill Wise sits quietly with one arm raised to the sky, the other tightly clutching his 2-year-old daughter, who was born with her bladder and colon outside of her body.

He prays for a miracle.

Todd Bentley, a tattooed Canadian, stands with a microphone in one hand and the other stretched out to this electrified crowd of nearly 10,000.

"Bam!" He yells. "Bam, bam, bam!"

Several people onstage with him collapse to the ground.

Bentley has led a rapidly growing throng of people from all over the world in a religious revival that has transformed the small city of Lakeland, Fla., into the center of an international phenomenon.

Wise flew from Seattle with his daughter, Caelyn, in hopes that Bentley would be able to help his child where modern medicine has failed.

Like so many here, Wise believes Bentley has a special connection with God.

"He is very close with the Lord," Wise said. "He has actively and passionately pursued God. My daughter needs a miracle."

Tens of thousands of others like Wise are making a pilgrimage to this small city in central Florida in hopes of finding a miracle.

Spreading the Word

Thanks to the Internet and satellite television, word of the revival spread quickly around the world to people like Jim Carter, who came to Lakeland from Anaheim, Calif., with his wife and daughter.

"We've been watching on the Internet since it started, basically," he said. "We just wanted to come down and first-hand experience."

Carter added, "We just want more of God, more of his presence and to see God change our country and bring America back to God."

From the looks of it, Carter's daughter, Tanya, is a typical American teenager. But she is deaf.

"She was onstage last night around 11 o'clock," Carter said. "Todd prayed for her, and she said she actually felt fire and heat in her right ear."

"The crowd just keeps growing," said Bentley. "We're drawing anywhere from five to ten thousand people a night, and up to 70 percent of the crowd is brand new every night," he said. "And they're coming from all over the world, more than 130 nations, from every background."

A Dark Past

With his arms, legs and chest covered in tattoos and his lip pierced with a stud, Bentley is not the image of an evangelist most people have in mind.

Born in British Columbia, Canada, Bentley said he led a rough life before finding God.

He says his mom raised him on welfare, parading a succession of boyfriends through the house. When he saw his dad, even as boy, Bentley said it was to get drunk together and do drugs.

You know it's a cycle of destructive abuse. Alcoholism, drugs, drinking at 11, I got involved in all kinds of criminal activity and ended up in prison before I was 15," he said.

At 15, Bentley was incarcerated for sexual abuse, a crime he committed when he was 13 against a younger boy.

Bentley, however, doesn't shy away from talking about his past and takes responsibility for his crimes.

"I'm very open about my past. I've written a book and it's in my autobiography," he said. "I served time in prison for my crime."

"I'd break into vehicles, I'd steal, as I got older, I'd take your pot, I'd take your drugs. I got involved with people who were affiliated with gangs and bikers."

At 18, Bentley said he found God, something he neither expected nor anticipated.

"God found me in my drug dealer's trailer and spoke to me in an audible voice," he said. "I was instantly delivered from drug and alcohol addiction, I never had one craving, not one withdrawal symptom, I was transformed from that man to the man that I am today."

"I see myself, you know, as a sinner saved by grace the same way the tax collectors, prostitutes and sinners were saved in the Bible," Bentley said.

It's not clear if the tens of thousands who are coming to Lakeland know all about Bentley's past, but they do know that he makes a virtue of repenting and embracing the Lord.

A Town Reacts

Amidst the frenetic passion of the revival not everyone is embracing the movement with open arms.

Ellen Simms owns a small store on Main Street, and though she has seen an increase in business over the past few weeks, the whole movement makes her uncomfortable.

"Miracles may happen, but this is such theater that it bothers me," she said while sitting behind the counter of her store in downtown Lakeland. "I'm not buying it."

Others are even more skeptical.

"They're just using this as a gimmick to make money," said June Cochran, who has been in a wheelchair all her life due to cerebral palsy.

Cochran said that people from the revival have lobbied her to attend the revival so that she can be "cured." She's a deeply religious person but she is offended by the tone of Bentley's revival.

"At first I didn't know how to respond, but they're not hearing what they're saying. They're saying that there is something wrong with us and that if we do not have our self-esteem already built up, it tears us down even more. Like we're not even worthy to be here."

Rev. Jeff White, a pastor at a local Missionary church in Lakeland, heard so much talk about Todd Bentley and the revival tent that he wanted to see it for himself.

He struggled with what he saw.

"I've had to fight skepticism and cynicism because I truly believe that God heals. I really believe his powers are real and it is today," White said. "I can't say that my spirit enters in and joins in with some of the things we've seen here tonight."

Bentley said he expects skepticism and embraces it.

"I would encourage the skeptic, come to a meeting, sit in a meeting for two days, see what happens to you," he said. "I'll pray for a skeptic. I'm not afraid of skeptics, I expect skeptics."

The Healing Touch?

When asked to present evidence of the healings, Bentley promised to give "Nightline" the names and medical records of three followers who would talk openly about his miracles. He never delivered. Instead, his staff gave "Nightline" a binder filled with what he says are inspiring miracles, but with scant hard evidence. It offered incomplete contact information, a few pages of incomplete medical records, and the doctors' names were crossed out.

When pressed further, Bentley provided the name of a woman in California who had a large tumor in her uterus that shrank after she saw Bentley.

Her husband, however, told "Nightline" that it could be a coincidence because she was still undergoing medical treatment. He said she was too ill to talk to the media.

The husband did provide some of his wife's medical records from a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, where she went for cancer treatment after being turned away by American hospitals. The wife, however, insisted on obscuring the clinic's name and the names of the doctors.

Not a single claim of Bentley's healing powers could be independently verified.

Bentley, however, remains positive.

"I believe God is real and he's showing himself to his people," he said. "Yes, I believe the prayer of faith will save the sick."

Bentley's revival is filled with wheelchairs and crutches, with people of faith and people desperate for salvation through faith.

One of them is Bill Wise. He patiently tended his desperately ill baby daughter throughout the long night's revival. He listened for a call from Bentley offering a cure for his child's condition. But it never came.

Yet Wise defiantly refuses to lose faith.

"Even if we don't see any change, in the immediate run here, sometimes prayer is cumulative," Wise said.
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drrionelli:
I live in the US, which is, by definition, a republic. Having another represent us on any of a number of levels is a way of life for us, here.

I do wish to take issue with you, huxley, on your question of "race." Your posts indicate intelligence and thoughtfulness, so I trust that you will know that I'm not flaming, nor am I baiting when I suggest this.

"Race" is something that science has yet to define, largely because it is thought to be a non-existent concept. How do you define "race" and why do you define it as such? I trust that you must define it in some way as to inquire of our opinions about it.

You have put your finger on exactly the unease I also have with the word. That is why I put it in double quote because I could not think of a better substitute world and convey the same thrust of the post. So for now, I would suggest we lose our pedantry about this word and just see the deeper issues of the questions.

This post will resonate better (methinks) to people who have lived or are living outside of Africa or in areas of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

If you are Black or African do you sometimes get the feeling that some other Black or African person is representing you or speaking or acting on your behalf, sometimes unbeknown to this individual that they are carrying the whole weight of an entire "race" or continent on their shoulders? For instance Colin Powell or Condeleeza Rice or Koffi Aman - do you feel that these individuals are speaking for or representing their "race" or ethnicity in the course of their public appearances or duties?

Do you also feel that when you are out in the wider whole you are representing your entire race, ethnicity or tribe? How well does that responsibility rest on your head?

On thing that characterises humans as oppose to other animals (some other higher primates are thought to also construct cultural millieus) is the possession of culture. Broadly speakly, culture defines the relationship humans have with one another, how we occupy our time, the artifacts we create and appreciation of reality. Almost all human cultures display various forms or elements of this multi-facetted kaleidoscope of culture.

Until recently most of human history was plagued by abject cultural isolation occasioned either by fear and distrust of the foreigner (xenophobia) or by natural barriers such as language differences, deserts, mountain, river etc; or by pure and simple ignorance of lands beyond one immediate borders.

Societies developing in a region of cultural isolation have a tendency to stagnate technically and intellectually. There is hardly a society that does not think that its own local culture are not superior to other cultures. Every culture hold is mores and tradition up as being the best and tries to perpetuate this to succeeding generation.

If this is true, why is there today more cross-cultural fertilization (or contamination) than there was 200, 1000, 2000 years ago?

Where would Africa be today if African had not adopted some of the European & Middle Eastern cultural heritage (such as Christianity, I-slam, formal education, writing scripts and alphabets, etc, etc)?

Where would Western Europe be today if the Europeans had not learntr and adopted aspects of Middle Eastern culture, Greek and Roman Culture.

Where world the world be today if we had not adopted the concept of the number "zero" from the Indian culture?

How does a formally isolated culture decide on which elements of the new culture to adopt and which of its own local cultures to abandon? For instance, infanticide was common in some parts of the Nigerian culture (ritual abandonment of twins in the forest). The Nigerians who practised this at the time most have thought highly of their culture. If they did, why did they abandon the practice.

. . . . more to follow.

Interesting how those who claim to be proud this, proud that, have not dared to take the thought-experiment! I wonder, do they feel some sense of cognitive disonance when it really comes to examining their beliefs?

LASIEFAIRE:
The whole Idea of " black and proud" emanates from black is beautiful, a cultural movement aimed at reiterating that the black person was equally as beautiful as the white in an era when racism and prejudice was evident and prevalent. With the world aiming for a raceless society, the whole "black and proud" notion serves as an hinderance to this goal because the underlining factor is the belief that the black race is superior to other races in certain aspects. Notable black philantropist, activist and other noteworthy characters support(ed) the propaganda of equality of all race not a aimless proclamation of the beauty of the black race. Furthermore, in my own opinion - I stand to be corrected, this is a sign of inferiority and lack of dignity. Rarely of never do you find a white, asia person proclaiming " white and proud," or " Asian and loving it." Most people use this as a ploy to cover up certain failure in their lives. " Black and Proud," is nothing but self gratification and glorification with little or any meaningful gain.

Great response. Am glad you are getting the thrust of my post.

Consider the following:

1) Should George W Bush, the President of the USA, make a comment to the effect of "I am white and proud of it"? How do you think that statement would go down in US?

2) Should Barack Obama make a comment to the effect "I am black and proud of it"? How would that be taken in the US political field?

Anyone to try the thought-experiment?

OK, since you guys are not getting it, let me give another example:

Are you proud to a man instead of a woman? Or are you proud to be a woman instead of a man?

onyinye2:
@ huxley

did you even read my post?? because i pretty much answered your initial question.

With due respect, you did not. You simply shouted that you were proud of being black, and provided some word definitions.

Why don't you apply your pseudo-answer to my thought-experiment?

Hero:
Rubbish thread. What a silly question.

It cannot have been silly, can it. Because we know where you stand. How about your earlier response. given below?

Hero:
I'm proud not to be white.

So you have answered my question implicitly. ha dimwit. See where failure of thinking leads you?

Looks like a lot of people are not getting exactly the main thrust of my post. I repeat, at best the attributes cited by some poster are neutral. If they are neutral, why the fuzz about them. Let's perform the following thought experiment;

1) Which of the following peoples should be proud of themselves and why ?

a) French
b) Japanese
c) Namibians
d) Nigerians
e) Native Australians
f) Native South Americans
g) Icelanders
h) Egyptians


2) Which of the following people should NOT be proud of themselves and why ?

a) French
b) Japanese
c) Namibians
d) Nigerians
e) Native Australians
f) Native South Americans
g) Icelanders
h) Egyptians

3) Are you proud to a man instead of a woman? Or are you proud to be a woman instead of a man?

IT'S A GODDAMNED CRACKER!
by PZ Myers, Pharyngula

Source: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/its_a_goddamned_cracker.php#more

There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion.

Here's a story that will destroy your hopes for a reasonable humanity.

Webster Cook says he smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn't eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it.



This isn't the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church fought with him to get it back. It is just a cracker!

Catholics worldwide became furious.

Would you believe this isn't hyperbole? People around the world are actually extremely angry about this — Webster Cook has been sent death threats over his cracker. Those are just kooks, you might say, but here is the considered, measured response of the local diocese:

"We don't know 100% what Mr. Cooks motivation was," said Susan Fani a spokesperson with the local Catholic diocese. "However, if anything were to qualify as a hate crime, to us this seems like this might be it."

We just expect the University to take this seriously," she added "To send a message to not just Mr. Cook but the whole community that this kind of really complete sacrilege will not be tolerated."



Wait, what? Holding a cracker hostage is now a hate crime? The murder of Matthew Shephard was a hate crime. The murder of James Byrd Jr. was a hate crime. This is a goddamned cracker. Can you possibly diminish the abuse of real human beings any further?

Well, you could have a priest compare this event to a kidnapping.

"It is hurtful," said Father Migeul Gonzalez with the Diocese. "Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family."

Gonzalez said the Diocese is willing to meet with Cook and help him understand the importance of the Eucharist in hopes of him returning it. The Diocese is dispatching a nun to UCF's campus to oversee the next mass, protect the Eucharist and in hopes Cook will return it.



I like the idea of sending a scary nun to guard the ceremony at the next mass. But even better…let's send Webster Cook to hell!

Gonzalez said intentionally abusing the Eucharist is classified as a mortal sin in the Catholic church, the most severe possible. If it's not returned, the community of faith will have to ask for forgiveness.

"We have to make acts of reparation," Gonzalez said. "The whole community is going to turn to prayer. We'll ask the Lord for pardon, forgiveness, peace, not only for the whole community affected by it, but also for [Cook], we offer prayers for him as well."

Get some perspective, man. IT'S A CRACKER.

And of course, Bill Donohue is outraged (I know, Donohue is going to die of apoplexy someday when a gnat violates his oatmeal, so this isn't saying much).

For a student to disrupt Mass by taking the Body of Christ hostage--regardless of the alleged nature of his grievance--is beyond hate speech. That is why the UCF administration needs to act swiftly and decisively in seeing that justice is done. All options should be on the table, including expulsion.



Oh, beyond hate speech. Where does this fit on the Shoah scale, Bill? It shouldn't even register, but here is Wild-Eyed Bill the Offended calling for the expulsion of a student…for not swallowing a cracker.

Would you believe that the mealy-mouthed president of the university, John Hitt, is avoiding defending his student is instead playing up the importance of the Catholic church to the university? Of course you would. That's what university presidents do. Bugger the students, keep the donors and the state reps happy.

Unfortunately, Webster Cook has now returned the cracker. Why?

Webster just wants all of this to go away. Especially now that he feels his life is in danger.



That's right. Crazy Christian fanatics right here in our own country have been threatening to kill a young man over a cracker. This is insane. These people are demented fuckwits. And Cook is not out of the fire yet — that Fox News story ends with an open incitement to cause him further misery.

University officials said, that as for right now, Webster Cook is not in trouble. If anyone or any group wants to file a formal complaint with the University through the student judicial system, they can. If that happens, Webster will go through a hearing either in front of an administrative panel or a panel of his peers.



Got that? If you don't like what Webster Cook did, all you have to do is complain to the university, and they will do the dirty work for you of making his college experience miserable. And don't assume the university would support Cook; the college is now having armed university police officers standing guard during mass.

I find this all utterly unbelievable. It's like Dark Age superstition and malice, all thriving with the endorsement of secular institutions here in 21st century America. It is a culture of deluded lunatics calling the shots and making human beings dance to their mythical bunkum.

So, what to do. I have an idea. Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There's no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I'm sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I'll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won't be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I'll send you my home address.

Just wait. Now there'll be a team of Jesuits assigned to rifle through my mail every day.

m_nwankwo:
Hi again. Yes, transience, changeability are some of the attributes of imperfection. The entire material universe is transient and subject to change. It is subject to birth, growth, death, decay and transformation leading to a new cycle. Thus, the phases of the cycle is transient and changeable. In God lies the creative power for the coming into existence of all creations. When and where God uses his creative power, the universes, the species and creatures that precipitate from the creative power of God is also "perfect" However creatures of God can also use the creative power of God (stepped down to their own level) to form universes and worlds. Where these creatures are gifted with free will, then they serve as prisms that absorb this power of God and apply it according to their own free will. It is this application of the power of God by creatures with free will that results in imperfections in the world of matter. Thus the power of God, even the stepped down form of it is perfect but by the exersise of free will, the perfect power can be applied to form imperfect things. It is human beings with free will that apply the power of God, and the application determines wheather it will lead to the beauty of paradise or the torment of hell. However since this power does not belong to man but is burrowed from God, man is accountable to the lender of the power (God) for how he used it. Therefore imperfections arose out of the misapplication of the power of God by man. Man with the gift of free will has the ability to direct the power of God as he so chooses but is absolutely responsible and bound to the consequences of his application. Man as a specie in creation (human spirit) came into existence when the power of God has been completely stepped down to permit the coming into existence of the free will. The worlds that arose when the power of God has not be stepped down is perfect and creaturesures that arose in it are perfect beings. That world is what is refered as the Divine sphere. Human beings did not originate in the divine ssphere, we came into existence as spirit germs in the lowest planes of the spiritual sphere, the so called heaven. Just like the mango seed has the possiblity of developing into a tree bearing fruit if sown on the correct soil, the human spirit seed has the potential of developing into a human being with a self conscious spiritual form if sown on the correct soil. The soil for the cultivation of the human spirit germs is the world of matter of which our earth is just one of the essential ingredients of this soil. In order to develop the human spirit seed is gifted by the creator with the talent of free will. Experiencing in the world of matter will force this talent to develop into ability. The spirit germ or seed is pure since it came from the power of God but the spiritual tree it develops to may be pure or impure as that is dependent on the application of free will. If the spiritual form acquired is in accordance to the purity of the power of God, then a spirit seed becaomes a spiritual tree with a form and a name and will return back to heaven. What it left as an unconscious spirit seed, it came back as a developed "perfect"human spirit with self consciousness. It is then a true servant of God and from heaven, it will joyfully mediate the power of God to regions below paradise for all eternity. However if the human spirit sent to the world of matter for development misapplied his free will to create or rather form imperfections and sins, then that spirit will be chained with the world of matter and will undergo death and decay with the world of matter. That decay will dissolve the self counsious spiritual form it has acquired, a process generally refered as eternal damnation. Such a human spirit ceases to exist since it has no form and no name. Thus because the power of God is perfect, imperfections that result from its misapplication by human beings can only exist for a time. In the end the power of God trapped in these imperfect forms and worlds will liberate itself by destroying the all imperfections. Thus in the end even the world of matter will be a reflection of the perfection that exists in the spiritual planes that are closer to the proximity of God.

Perharps, you will once again ask where I got what I state above. The source I draw from is the book "In The Light of Truth-The Grail Message". Thanks

How can we verify the truth value of all these? Why is this anymore true than the claims of the Aztecs, Mayan, etc?

olabowale:
@Huxley: Sometimes, your questions are so pathetic, that I feel you. I see that Christianity have damaged you so badly that it had made you to a rubble/ a pile of mud. So why don't you try Islam? That I will like to discusee with you. My email address is aqeedahfirst@yahoo.com. That I will check at least once a day.

In the case of Jibril (Gabreil) AS, he told Muhammad at the end of the first revelation; "Am Gibreil, you Muhammad is the Messenger of God.

Let's say Lucifer came down to Mo and said to Mo, "Hello Mo, I am Gibreil and you Mo are the messenger of God". And then proceeds to give Mo some instructions. Should Mo follow these instructions? How would Mo check the authenticity of his guest?

Why would someone be proud of being something about which they had no choice? No-one had a choice about their skin-colour, nationality, tribe, gender or sexual orientation. None of these are attributes are earned by the endeavours of the individual. So why should one be proud of these attributes that are not the result of one's own endeavours?

The notion of "proud to be" should be rightly associated with one's achievements. For instance, I am proud to be a good and diligent employee, a good friend, a good husband, a good father, a good sportsman, a good citizen. These are my achievements and am very proud of them. I am not proud to be African, no more than an Englishman should be proud of being English, a Frenchman proud of being French.

What personal successes are you proud to have achieved?

Let's perform the following thought experiment;

1) Which of the following peoples should be proud of themselves and why ?

a) French
b) Japanese
c) Namibians
d) Nigerians
e) Native Australians
f) Native South Americans
g) Icelanders
h) Egyptians


2) Which of the following peoples should NOT be proud of themselves and why ?

a) French
b) Japanese
c) Namibians
d) Nigerians
e) Native Australians
f) Native South Americans
g) Icelanders
h) Egyptians

3) Are you proud to a man instead of a woman? Or are you proud to be a woman instead of a man?



4) Should George W Bush, the President of the USA, make a comment to the effect of "I am white and proud of it"? How do you think that statement would go down in US?

5) Should Barack Obama make a comment to the effect "I am black and proud of it"? How would that be taken in the US political field?

[center]Angel Gabriel, Angel Michael, Angel Peter, Angle XXXX, Angel YYYY, Angel ZZZZ.[/center]

How is it possible for one to identify angels by name? Do they carry a name badge or do they usually introduce themselves thus;

[center] Hello, I am Angel Gabriel[/center]

Read this report for a salutary lesson of the plight we face:

http://www.uneca.org/eca_programmes/sdd/documents/Knowledge%20policies%20for%20Sustainable%20Development%20in%20Africa.pdf


The problems we face are largely cultural, IMHO. Do we (Africans and African-Americans) have a culture that values intellectualism instead of the low-brow info-tainment that seems to have taken up the intellectual space in most homes.

How often do you see gathering of people of African origin talk about concrete and abstract theories in biology, chemistry, physics, economics, etc?

Do we have institutions that encourage and promote intellectual values?

Where is the intellectual output of black intellectuals? I am not suggesting that their work should be ghettoed, but with many decades of experiencing the "Western" style education, the major of textbooks used in universities in Africa and America are authored by non-Africans.

We would make great stride once we start valuing the intellectual life rather that the get-rich-quick life.

I hasten to add, that if you avoid pork for religious reasons, then to be consistent, you have to also ensure that you only consume animals that are slaughtered properly (ie, not stunned as in most slaughter-houses ).

You also have to avoid fishes without scales and fins (like crayfish, crab, lobster etc), goose, ducks, etc

m_nwankwo:
Hi again. I do not think perfection or imperfection is an illusion. By perfection I mean eternal unchangable. Only God is perfect. No, I do not believe that imperfection can come from God or from the laws of God. Thanks

Does that mean imperfection is defined as transient and changeable? Are there things in the universe that are changeable? If so, are they imperfect? If they are imperfect, are they NOT from God?

Basically, whence imperfection?