tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3879927080427718703.post-90164717512749741972008-04-26T10:51:00.000-07:002008-04-26T11:18:45.628-07:002008-04-26T11:18:45.628-07:00<div style="text-align: justify;"> By: Steve <br />When atheists criticise the more risible aspects of religion or the actions of believers, the faithful often respond with something along the lines of “your point is worthless because that’s not real religion”. Do they have a point? Or are they indulging in a peculiar form of bigotry?<br /><br />This raises an important question. Who gets to decide what is real religion? More importantly, perhaps, how do we discern which is the real Christianity, which the real Islam?<br /><br />Islam, of course, has only a handful of variants. The miscellaneous flavours of Christianity, on the other hand, are many and various. Each one of them believes it has exclusive access to the truth.<br /><br />At this point, one is reminded of the response to Christians usually attributed to Richard Dawkins but espoused by many atheists: that we are all atheists. Christians do not believe in many thousands of gods. Atheists just go one god further. This is rather well presented in this table of Christian and atheist beliefs.<br /><br />It’s all about definitions. Every faith sets its own terms. Religions are self-defining. They are not constrained by evidence, by the historical record, not even by the physical laws of the universe or common sense. Every sect gets to define what it regards as ‘Christian’ behaviour.<br /><br />The Digger mentioned above - who evidently defines himself as a Christian - had a very simple rule for determining what constitutes acceptable Christian behaviour. Give people a Bible and let them point to the section that validates their actions.<br /><br />Alas, this is simple to the point of being simple-minded. First, which Bible? Various translations have been used at different times to support widely varying behaviour. Second, the Bible, as we all know, is infuriatingly vague and frequently self-contradicting. It is not an homogeneous work but a rather slipshod cobbling together of texts with inconsistent and incompatible philosophies, ethics and narratives. Even the three synoptic gospels can’t get their story straight. So each Christian sect tends to pick carefully those sections most amenable to it.<br /><br />Third, many Christian faiths insist that the Bible is not to be read literally. Only those fundamentalist sects whose appeal is mainly to the more knuckle-dragging sections of society ask us to take every word as literal truth. The majority of Christians accept some, if not all, sections of the Bible as allegorical or metaphorical. Everything, then, depends on interpretation. And if you want to behave in a certain way, if you want to invoke divine approval for your actions, you are likely to be able to find something in the Bible that you can interpret as supporting your actions. This is why the frequently made assertion that the Bible (and only the Bible) is the bedrock of ethics and morality is so laughable. The Bible can be made to endorse anything (including slavery and genocide).<br /><br />So let’s look again at where we came in. Some self-defined Christians commit a particular act, in conformance - as they see it - with their beliefs. But it’s an act that those of us in the real world consider heinous or ludicrous, and we say so. Then some other Christian comes along and says, “hey, those guys aren’t real Christians. You’re just using their behaviour as a way of having a cheap shot at all Christians.”<br /><br />What this person is doing is using their own, necessarily narrow definition of Christianity to condemn the others as “not really Christians”. They are saying, “only my definition is valid” and “these people are not entitled to call themselves Christian”. That’s bigotry.<br /><br />It is also a cheap trick. Christians can simply keep moving the goalposts, claiming that any action or belief criticised as secularists isn’t ‘Christian’ anyway, so the criticism is obviously an egregious attack on ‘true’ Christians.<br /><br />I’m not tarring every Christian with this particular brush. There are many who state their beliefs plainly and have the courage to stick to them and take responsibility for them. When someone’s faith leads them into actions that cause harm to others, we have a perfect right to criticise not just the people themselves but the faith that coerced them into irresponsible behaviour. For other Christians simply to wash their hands of this issue by brushing off the miscreants as ‘not really Christian’ is cowardly and dishonest.</div>Snowhitehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15703234940863317371noreply@blogger.com3