Of course, nobody would try to pull a scam like that today, would they? Well, not unless they were selling apologetics and scholarship instead of trousers and jackets. And speaking of which, here’s an excerpt from JP Holding’s attempt to deal with last week’s Toons.

Dumplin’ just shows how stupid he is when he says that my observation was “trivial and superficial.” Dumbass, it’s the key to Paul’s whole argument! You’re just too stupid to understand the relevance of appeal to the example of an ingroup leader within the context of a collectivist society.

Yes folks, JP has an argument so refined and so sublime that only the truly wise can see it. You can’t find any fault with it. You can’t even point out any shortcomings. If you criticize it at all, you’re just proving that you are not wise. Obviously so, since you cannot perceive the brilliance of JP’s argument, which as we mentioned before is so refined and so sublime that only the truly wise can see it. And I don’t care what dangly bits you happen to see hanging out.

Well, I’ve got to hand it to old JP, it’s a pretty good con, in certain circles at least. Every time he puts up a flawed, two-bit analysis or rebuttal, he’s golden, because pointing out its flaws just deals him the cards he needs to claim that you’re stupid. You must be stupid, because his arguments are so brilliant that only non-stupid people can truly perceive and appreciate it. And everybody who falls for JP’s ENC scam (including JP himself) is going to count it as a big win.

Still, I think at some level JP is a bit bothered by my tiny, piping voice asking, “Mommy, why is that man naked?” You’ll notice he has prudently omitted the link back to my post this time. I’m happy to link to JP anytime, because I love to have people see him as representing the voice of the Gospel today, but I’m afraid that’s an attitude that JP does not reciprocate. The last thing he wants is more people reading my blog, and he takes quite a bit of consolation in thinking that he has more readers than I do.

No, Dumbass. Whether the Corinthian doubters were framing their doubts in terms of questions or statements doesn’t change my argument one bit and doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t grasp my point, which rests on an inconsistency in the Corinthian argument when it comes to Jesus’ resurrection in the past vs THEIR resurrection in the future. No wonder Dumbass’ blog gets only as many visitors a month as my single article on Osiris.

Unfortunately, JP’s attitude not only encourages sloppy scholarship on his part, it makes it nearly mandatory. For example, here’s his defense of the claim that the resurrection deniers did believe that Jesus rose from the dead:

Duh, Dumplin’? It’s pretty clear that the Corinthians are NOT denying the resurrection of Jesus, precisely because Paul is able to bring it to them as something they believe in! Duh ah! If they DID doubt that Jesus rose from the dead, he’d have started from a different place in his argument, you moron!

Darn, there I go failing to perceive the sublime brilliance of his argument (that only the truly wise can perceive). He’s got a point, though. If the Corinthians did have doubts about the resurrection of Jesus as well, then Paul would have needed to take a few verses at the beginning of chapter 15 to re-assert and reinforce the idea that Jesus rose from the dead, instead of being able to take the resurrection of Jesus for granted and going straight to the bit about “If there is no resurrection, that would mean that Jesus didn’t rise.” That’s why 1 Cor 15 begins like this.

1Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance^[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared to Peter,^[b] and then to the Twelve. 6After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

9For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.

Hmm, I must be too dumb to perceive the brilliance of JP’s argument. Looks to me like Paul did begin by re-asserting and reinforcing the idea that Jesus really did rise, before he could proceed to the argument that would have been the most natural and obvious starting point (vv. 12-13), assuming it were true that the Corinthian doubters had not had any doubts about Jesus really rising. And did I mention that Gentiles weren’t the only ones who denied the resurrection?

“Certain amount of scholarship” — yeah, this shows why that’s foreign language to Dumplin’. I know about Jews who denied resurrection, you dip. Did you have some evidence that modern scholarship was unaware of that the Sadduccees existed anywhere except in Palestine (and in Corinth)? Oops.

Oops indeed. No Jew living outside of Palestine knows or cares about anything happening in Jerusalem, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume, as JP does, that Corinthian Jews were completely ignorant of what Sadducees believed, and thus Sadducean teachings on resurrection had no influence on them, even when they also were inclined to deny resurrection. Or at least, that’s what I might say if I were able to perceive the mystical and ineffable brilliance of JP’s argument. But since that’s invisible to all but the truly wise, I guess it’s understandable that I might have missed it. Seems to me that theological disputes between two major Holy Land factions might come up in Jewish conversation even as far away as Corinth.

When I pointed out how JP’s explanation of the inconsistency in the Corinthians beliefs falls short by failing to explain how they managed to acquire those inconsistent beliefs without noticing the conflict, his response was to appeal once again to the superior and even unattainable excellence of  his own brilliance (which only the truly wise bla bla bla).

Duh ah…I did say “how,” moron….they were influenced by pagan ideas about resurrection. “Why” is easy even for you: The ideas were there in that social milieu and they had been influenced by them for their entire lives…duh ah….the reason you focus on this aspect is because you have Dunning’s disorder.

(“Dunning’s disorder, in case you’re new to it, is a fake psychiatric diagnosis JP made up, in fulfillment of the Gypsy Curse, in which the victim is unable to accurately assess his own performance, and thinks he is doing better than he really is.)

You may have noticed that I’m actually not buying the idea that only truly wise people can perceive the brilliance of JP’s wit and insight, and that’s because of arguments like the above. He says the Corinthians acquired the idea that there is no resurrection because people around them believed that there is no resurrection. But that’s a shallow explanation, to the point of being a non-explanation, because it ignores the question of how they could fail to recognize that this common, worldly belief was at all in conflict with their faith. If there arose, in the modern Christian church, a movement that decided there was no God, because of secular, atheistic influence, and did not realize that this conflicted with their faith at a fundamental level, wouldn’t that be worth a bit more analysis than just brushing it off by saying, “oh, that’s just the secular influence”?

It might be. Then again, if you didn’t make a slipshod apologetic, people wouldn’t criticize it, and then you couldn’t point and laugh and say, “You must be stupid, because my wisdom is so exalted that only smart people can see it.”

“Dunning’s disorder” indeed.

There are three variants of atheism that can be considered at least partly rational: these can be described as Somerset atheism, Nietzschean atheism, and Post-Nietzschean atheism.

Somerset atheism is the common practice of moral parasitism described in the previous section. It is a partially rational atheism that functions perfectly well on an individual level but cannot function on a societal level because it depends entirely on the existence of an external morality to support it.

Christianity, of course, borrows its morals (such as they are) from the surrounding cultures, which is why the only real moral innovation in Christianity is the impractical and rarely-practiced notion of loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you. In his haste to do evil to his enemies, Vox accuses them of a flaw that is actually a Christian failing, thus fulfilling the Curse and repeating the stumble that has brought him down so often in TIA. But we still have two more atheisms to go…

Now, it might be worth mentioning, just for the sake of completeness, that atheism is a lack of belief in the existence of genuine deities. It is not a philosophy. It is not a moral code of ethics. It isn’t even naturalism or skepticism or any other “ism” but a simple lack of belief in the existence of gods. Even Christians are atheists with respect to the vast majority of pantheons that have ever populated the temples and imaginations of men. Vox has never quite understood what “atheism” is, and that’s why he makes the mistake of proposing that there are different schools (or “churches” as he snidely calls them—as though “church” were a less honorable term!).

Anyway, as we were saying, Vox turns next to the second philosophy, which he mistakes for atheism, namely the philosophy of Nietzsche (and Crowley). According to Vox, this moral system “takes no account of society’s mores in stating that “do what thou wilt” based on the individual’s will to power is the whole of the law. This is entirely rational from the individual’s perspective and it is the variant to which history’s great killers have subscribed.”

Having tried to tag atheism with whatever discredit comes from being associated with Nietzsche, it’s perfectly understandable why Vox’s next step would be to try and link Nietzsche with “history’s great killers.” But I can’t help but notice how similar Nietzsche’s philosophy seems to be to the philosophy that the Christian God is described as practicing. “Do what Thou wilt based on Thy own will to power” is indeed the whole of God’s law for His own conduct, and He does indeed care little for society’s mores, commanding genocide whenever He feels like it, executing “sinners” for trivial offenses like gathering wood on a Saturday, demanding ritual mutilation of babies, and condoning slavery (including the beating of slaves to the point of death)—God does what He has the power to do, regardless of what society regards as good.

So Nietzsche, and by extension the other “great killers” mentioned by Vox, are really only practicing godliness, imitating the example and moral system of God Himself. In that light, it’s rather amusing that Vox shares with us his personal assessment of God’s manifest philosophy.

This philosophy is rational, but it is literally psychopathic in the sense described by Dr. Robert Hare, developer of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a clinical scale used to diagnose psychopathy.

I can certainly agree with the “psychopathic” bit, given God’s past history. But remember, Vox himself lends this philosophy the endorsement of identifying it as one of only three “rational” atheisms in existence. It might seem strange that Vox would use the term “rational” to describe psychopathy, but then again Vox isn’t striving for coherence and objectivity, he’s just out to twist everything into some kind of anti-atheist slander, whether it makes sense or not.

Two swings and two misses. The last pitch is what Vox calls “post-Nietzschean atheism,” typified by Michel Onfray. Once again, Vox mistakes a philosophical moral system for a simple lack of belief in God, and repeats his habitual error of ignoring the secular roots of morality.

Onfray recognizes that if one rejects the source of a moral system, one has no logical basis for retaining that which derives from it. For example, if all men are created equal, removing the Creator from the equation therefore requires abandoning the idea that men are equal unless another basis for that equality can be provided.

The idea that all men are created equal is a product of the Enlightenment, which Vox claims is the result of atheism. Christianity, meanwhile, springs from a tradition in which all men are not created equal. Kings rule by divine appointment, slaves are to serve as though serving the Lord (another rank of non-equality), the Jews are “God’s Chosen People,” and even the larger group of humanity as a whole is divided into “the elect” and “the lost.”

So it might be nice, actually, to find some other basis for asserting the equality of all men (such as, for example, considering the consequences of doing so, versus the consequences of practicing bigotry). Christian-sponsored anti-gay laws and amendments make it quite clear that basing equal rights on religious superstitions is an iffy proposition at best.

But Vox isn’t interested in finding a genuine, universal, non-superstitious source for human rights, because he does not want such a thing to exist. If we can find a real-world basis for rights, then he loses an opportunity to blackmail unbelievers into converting (“submit to God, or you can NEVER be a good person, vile infidel!”). He does not want all men to be created equal, because if atheists are as good as believers, then what’s the point in being believers? Oh, I suppose you could still believe, but from reading TIA, it’s clear that Vox wouldn’t enjoy it as much if he couldn’t presume the moral superiority Christians supposedly hold over atheists.

But I digress. This “post-Nietzschean atheism” is supposed to be the last of the three “rational” atheisms, so it might be interesting to see what Vox thinks is so rational about it.

It is social psychopathy that is an order of magnitude beyond that envisioned by the most rabidly psychopathic intellectual. Not even Leon Trotsky’s vision of an international communism is as ambitious in its ghastly grandeur as Onfray’s sociopathic philosophy of desire. Nietzsche only wished to slay God and rule over His Creation, the post-Nietzschean dreams of total destruction so that he might build a new creation from the ashes.

Goodness, if that’s what Vox considers “rational,” I think I can see why his arguments so frequently appear to be a bit out of touch with reality.

And with that last spray of spittle, the Chainsaw sputters to a long-anticipated halt. Strangely, most of the casualties that litter the field seem to have been Vox’s allies, plus the remnants of his own credibility. But whatever, we’re past this particular bit of logical carnage. Next week, we get to climb up the gang plank for the first leg of our voyage on the Omnidirigible, Hindenberg II. Stay tuned.

H. Professor’s failure to see how these two fundamental claims about the nature of the thing under discussion connect to the rest of the argumentation I made is the underlying mistake of both of his posts.  That we are talking about an entity that is both transcendent and immanent is absolutely critical to the rest of the argumentation.  In fact, H. Professor makes complaints that I already answered- but because he fails to see the relation between these attributes and the rest I said, he fails to recognize them.

The last sentence reveals the second prong of Horvath’s attempt to make my arguments irrelevant: because I considered each of his arguments step by step, pointing out the problems that require further defense, he accuses me of raising objections that he had already answered (in subsequent parts of his post). He apparently did not understand that I was following the flow of his own logic: that there must be a reason why the “God can’t do nonsense” argument does not suffice to end the discussion, and why Horvath feels compelled to seek other solutions. I simply laid out what those unresolved problems are, at the beginning of the discussion, so that we could approach the rest of the discussion with an appropriate background.

There is a lot more I could have said, of course, and I’m grateful to Mr. Horvath for having given me the opportunity to explore this topic further. He raises some interesting points, and clarifies some others, and, if you can bear with me through a longish post, I think we’ll see why his defense of the Gospel actually constitutes a full-fledged concession of defeat, and a retreat into universal agnosticism.

Just so there’s no misunderstanding this time, let’s lay out the core issue here. The apologetic claim being made, and to which I am responding, is this: “We can think of certain circumstances under which things might appear to be contradictory, when in fact they are not contradictory when seen from the perspective of a “higher” dimension or domain.” The implication is that, seen from some “higher plane” (that you and I can’t see from), the contradictions in Christian theology aren’t actually contradictions.

Despite accusing me of misunderstanding him, Horvath agrees that this is indeed the issue we need to deal with.

The purpose of the Flatland example was not to say that this was how we relate to God, but rather to show how the rules of logic can appear to be violated in one case but when taken from a ‘higher’ plane can be perceived as nonetheless sound…

The whole point of the Flatland example was that what might seem to be inconsistent and contradictory may not in fact be so.

By the way, this is actually a fairly ancient rationalization, and all the “immanence this” and “transcendence that” is just to lend an aura of sophistication and intellectualism to the old excuse that “God works in mysterious ways (and therefore doesn’t need to make sense).”

The problem with the Flatland analogy, however, is that the intersection of a sphere with a plane produces no actual or apparent contradiction, even from the Flatlander’s point of view. The sphere that intersects the plane does not produce a circle whose circumference is less than its diameter, or which possesses four corners joined at 90 degree angles, or in any other way violates or conflicts with the laws of 2D geometry. It produces an ordinary circle whose radius varies from zero to n back to zero again, over a certain period of time. No contradiction, hence no basis for Mr. Horvath’s analogy.

I don’t think a sphere is really the best volumetric solid for this particular analogy anyway. Let’s help him out a little by suggesting a more complex shape: a torus. Imagine a torus (donut shape) standing upright (like a car tire) and slowly sinking down into the plane of Flatland until its center lies within the plane. As it moves, it will first form a point, then an ellipse that gradually grows bigger, then the middle of the ellipse (across the minor axis) will begin to narrow into more of an hourglass shape (as the hole in the torus approaches the plane).

At a certain point, the “waist” of the hourglass shape will shrink until it becomes a figure-8: two ellipses touching at their tips. Then the two ellipses will separate and move apart, becoming more and more circular as they get farther apart, until at last they are two perfect circles. Again, no violations or contradictions of any laws of geometry. The curves may be more complex, but neither of the resulting circles have square corners or diameters greater than their circumferences or any such thing.

But now, something strange does happen. A Flatlander approaches and tries to push the two circles together so that they touch again. He can’t do it. Pushing one circle makes the other circle slide away. He checks all around to see if any lines connect the two circles, but they don’t. As far as he can see, there is no connection in all of Flatland between the two circles (and there isn’t), yet the behavior of the two circles is consistently linked, such that the distance between them is constant. From a 3D perspective, it all seems quite natural: the Flatlander is pushing the whole torus, and when one side moves the other side moves as well, because its part of the same torus.

Now, if all we wanted was an excuse to ignore inconsistencies in what men claim about God, we could stop right here. We could use this “mysterious” torus to justify the conclusion that the problems in the Gospel must be the same sort of thing. Of course, that would be taking things backwards: in Flatland, the observations justify concluding the existence of a higher dimension. That’s quite a different thing from mere speculation about a higher dimension being enough to justify assuming that the observations must actually have happened.

Since we don’t care to fall into that particular converse fallacy, let’s think some more about what Flatland tells us. First of all, it tells us that truth is consistent with itself. We may not understand that self-consistency all the time, and perhaps we might not even perceive it, but the self-consistency of the truth transcends and is immanent within all dimensions of reality and all domains of real existence. The two circles don’t seem to have any connection, as far as a Flatlander can see, but the consistency of their behavior reflects the consistency of the truth itself, across n-dimensional space, and allows the mathematically-inclined Flatlander to draw specific and reasonable conclusions about the 3rd dimension.

In fact, the Flatlander can even make some predictions about the behavior of 3D objects in 2D space. For example, if a sphere moves through a plane at a constant speed, producing a circle of varying radius, you can plot the radius of the circle as a function of time and produce a sine wave. If the Flatland scientist observes a number of circles exhibiting this peculiar-yet-predictable pattern of variation, it would be consistent with the predicted variations for a 3D sphere moving through a 2D plane, and the scientist’s hypothesis would have some supporting evidence.

Likewise, if God were a being from a higher dimension and were interacting with this one, we could make similar observations. For example, just as the Flatlander observed that there was a superplanar connection between two apparently unconnected circles, we could observe God’s “super-natural” existence by the connection He would make between believers. Take two believers and isolate them from one another so that God is the only possible avenue of communication between them, then dictate a short text passage to one of them, and have God relay the text to the other. When the other believer writes down the text correctly, we have the same “mysteriously-connected circles” that the Flatlander does, and there’s a reason for us to conclude, if not God, then at least some hitherto undocumented connection.

In fact, we wouldn’t even need to do the experiment, since this commonality would arise as an ordinary matter of course. All God would need to do is not take supernatural measures to prevent us from noticing the mysterious connection that consistently linked believers together in ways that were verifiably more than just the product of ordinary happenstance. And there are any number of other ways in which the transcendent existence of God could and would verifiably manifest itself even in our allegedly inferior plane. But obviously none of these things are actually happening, which is why Mr. Horvath devotes so much effort to building a case for the answers lying in some speculative and inaccessible “higher plane.”

This is a key point, by the way. If the contradictions in Christian theology could be resolved by answers that lay within this realm of existence, Horvath would have no need to seek some “higher” plane in which such answers might possibly exist. He’s not proposing this speculation because God’s behavior can be observed to show a consistent pattern of superdimensionality that would justify a conclusion of divine transendence. He can’t: God does not show up in real life to give us any transcendent behavior to find patterns in. No, the problem is that Christian theology has a number of glaring inconsistencies and contradictions for which there is no resolution in this “dimension,” and that’s why Horvath needs to postulate the existence of some other, higher, and less accessible realm in which such answers might possibly be hiding.

Horvath takes me to task for failing to address his analogy about the relationship between an author and his characters, so let me rectify that omission right now. This, sadly, is a singularly unfortunate argument for him to make, since the God we’re talking about here is one who only shows up (as far as the real world is concerned) as a character in the stories men tell. We are not observing a God who shows up in real life and whose behavior and characteristics are puzzling to our limited minds. All we can observe in real life is that men tell us things about God that are inconsistent both with themselves and with objective reality.

Horvath himself is participating in the story-building that props up the Gospel. He’s taking the story as it has been told so far, and is using his imagination to try and come up with some kind of scenario that will make the story sound more plausible. If you’ve ever participated in any kind of group fiction-writing (or role play, which can be very similar), you know that this is exactly how fiction is produced. Just imagine something, and if it sounds plausible, add it to the story, and make the story better. That’s how you make a story get better over time, and coincidentally, it’s a theologian’s job description as well.

Trying to patch up the holes in the Gospel, though, only serves to demonstrate that the Gospel does indeed have holes. And that’s the fatal flaw in Horvath’s argument by analogy. When a person creates a story, they’re not creating reality, they’re manipulating abstracted concepts about reality, in ways that may or may not reflect some of the perfect self-consistency of genuine truth. Ultimately, though, all fiction fails at some point to be as consistent with real-world truth as real-world truth is with itself. When humans imagine a story, therefore, what they are doing is not analogous to creating a genuine reality.

In other words, Horvath’s analogy is false, because fiction writing fails to parallel reality at the point where it needs to be strictly parallel in order to be valid. The real world is not merely less self-contradictory that fiction, it is non-self-contradictory. You cannot correctly use the discrepancies between fiction and reality to argue for a corresponding discrepancy between reality and some supposed “higher” plane, because reality doesn’t have the inconsistencies and contradictions that define what it means to be fiction.

Horvath would like to argue otherwise, but my goodness, I’m over 2K words already, and there’s still a bunch of misconceptions and misdirections that I need to correct! I’d better split this into two parts and come back for more tomorrow.

For example, in referring to last Tuesday’s TIA post, “Mike T” writes:

It is a very weak argument, that fails to even understand the point that Vox was making that the Golden Rule is simply not a moral statement at all because it provides no inherent, objective guidance on what we should do. If a psychopath or a sociopath were to follow the golden rule as the foundation of their moral code, it could lead to some extremely *ahem* “interesting” situations. Hence why Vox said that the Golden Rule only makes sense as a means of applying a pre-existing, objective moral system to your actions.

Mind you, Vox didn’t actually say that the Golden Rule makes sense as a means of applying a pre-existing, objective moral system (at least not in Chapter 14 of TIA), but he did say that it was not a perfect basis for determining morality, and I did agree that “Yes, the Golden Rule is not a perfect and infallible guide to morality.” But if agreeing with Vox makes my argument weaker, then perhaps I ought to revisit the topic.

There’s a lot more I could say about the Golden Rule, of course. In my original post, I wanted to focus more on the fact that Vox was using a shallow, 1-dimensional strawman to distract attention from the argument atheists actually use, which is that Biblical morality often falls short of what one would expect from a divinely inspired and supremely good revelation. But if we just want to look at the Golden Rule, there’s lots more we could say.

For instance, while it’s true that you can think up fringe cases (e.g. psychopaths) where the Golden Rule could be abused, it’s still a good moral guide in the vast majority of cases. Jesus did, after all, preach it as a guiding principle, so you’d think Christians would acknowledge that it has some utility in that particular domain. Even in the cases where it can be abused, it’s not as though any other moral system would do better—a psychopath is going to remain psychopathic no matter how many times you read Exodus 20 at him.

Mike T is wrong, of course, about the Golden Rule not providing any kind of practical guidance on what we should do. If you’re considering whether or not to punch someone in the face, ask yourself, “Would I want to BE punched in the face?” If you can answer that question, then you can receive moral guidance from the Golden Rule. Even if all the Golden Rule does is to restrain you from inflicting suffering on others (because you would not want suffering inflicted on yourself), it has served a tremendously practical and specific moral purpose.

In fact, it is revelation-based morality, and not the Golden Rule, that fails to give us reliable guidance as to right and wrong behavior. If right and wrong are determined solely by divine decree, if a thing is good solely because God permits or demands it, and if we assume that God is sometimes willing and able to speak to human hearts, then there is no behavior that is not potentially good so long as it is arguably the will of God. If someone murders someone else, and God spoke to his heart and told him to do it, revelation-based morality gives us no basis for calling his behavior “evil.” We have no way to disprove the claim that God revealed, to that one person, that murder was His will.

Nor can we claim that we know God would never reveal that murder was His will. Even without all the Biblical examples of cases where God did command people to kill each other, if right and wrong are defined solely by what God has revealed, then we can’t assume that murder (or torture or stealing or lying) would be so wrong in and of themselves that God would be wrong to want them. If you assume that there’s a higher standard to which even God’s behavior and desires are accountable, you are making moral judgments about God’s revelations based on a secular, objective moral standard. That means that God’s revelations are not the source of moral standards, since God’s ability to dictate moral decrees is itself subject to a higher, secular standard of morality. But if that’s the case, then it’s the secular standard of morality, and not divine revelation, that is really determining what is right and what is wrong.

There are also some very practical reasons why revelation-based morality actually makes it more difficult to tell right from wrong. An ethicist who defined morality in terms of what God allegedly revealed in the Old and New Testaments would have a harder time explaining why it is wrong to practice genocide, to deny a man his own wife and children, to sell your daughter into sexual slavery, to mutilate babies’ genitals, to put someone to death for the “crime” of working on Saturday, and so on.

By condoning and even commanding such actions, the Bible leaves the revelation-based moralist without any means of declaring that such things are intrinsically wrong, and forces him (or her) to declare that they are only wrong relatively and situationally. There is no objective standard of right or wrong behavior, because the behaviors themselves are neither right nor wrong. They only become right or wrong relative to God’s inscrutable and unpredictable will for a particular time, place, and situation. And since “God works in mysterious ways,” and “His thoughts are not our thoughts,” we can’t really predict what will or will not be God’s perfect will for any given situation. Unless, of course, we’ve got an objective, secular moral standard which rules over the moral decrees God Himself is allowed to make.

So I hope it’s more clear by now that I do not agree with Vox Day’s attempt to portray revelation-based morality as being somehow superior to the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule does not need the Bible to guide people into correct moral behavior (much of which consists of minding one’s own business and not inflicting suffering on others). And, sadly, the Bible does not show much evidence of relying too heavily on the Golden Rule (despite Jesus’ endorsement of it). The Israelites, for example, probably would not want to be wiped out by the Amalekites, so that fact alone ought to have guided them in considering whether or not the prophet Samuel was really telling them to do things that a genuinely moral deity would have endorsed.

There, I’ve contradicted Vox. Is my argument stronger now?

He reminds them that guys in prisons and foxholes hang on to religion because they have nothing else. And then he says, “But you guys aren’t dumb.” In other words, Maher’s point is that the truckers should know better than to believe in God—unlike all those dumb prisoners and soldiers out there who don’t know any better.

Having been in prison myself, let me speak for those prisoners. Recognizing your need for God isn’t a question of “smart or stupid.” It’s a matter of recognizing who you are; your own insufficiency, the sin in your own heart—and prisoners get that. And then you have to recognize your desperate need for a Savior.

Maher doesn’t so much ridicule believers as he simply gives them an open mike and lets them make themselves look foolish. This leaves Colson with little to complain about, other than to gripe about how this makes Maher look good by comparison, as though it were all about Maher instead of about the silly things religious people believe sometimes. “(It’s hard for a viewer to avoid the conclusion that the only higher power in Maher’s universe is his own ego.)”

But Colson is determined to make this come out as an evangelistic opportunity anyway, and he falls back on the old marketing trick of making your product’s weaknesses sound like strengths.

[Y]ou don’t have to have a gigantic I.Q. to see that it’s necessary because you cannot rescue yourself from your own mortality or sinfulness—that is, you are not God. In fact, realizing your own spiritual need is probably the wisest thing anyone can do.

I think that’s what Christ meant when he talked about God using the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, or those that most people think of as wise. Sadly, Bill Maher doesn’t seem to have come to that place in his life where he’s willing to risk that kind of foolishness.

Colson’s argument is too good. The way he describes it, it’s not foolish at all to turn to God for the salvation of your soul. But if it’s not foolish to be saved, then why is foolishness a good thing?

The reason foolishness is a problem is not because it would be stupid to save your soul and live forever in bliss, but because foolishness leads to beliefs that are inconsistent with each other and with the real world. Like all wishful thinking, the end result sounds like a good thing, but the foolish arguments used to make it sound true are just not a valid means of finding what really is true. Even Colson, though he may try to use foolishness as evidence for the Gospel, doesn’t really believe that it’s good to be foolish.

What’s foolish about the Gospel is that people don’t have good reasons for believing it, and therefore they turn to foolishness to justify their belief. It’s foolish to gullibly swallow the stories men tell about God loving you enough to die for you, when you can see for yourself everyday that God isn’t even willing and able to show up in person to wish you a good morning now and then. It’s foolish to believe that God would make your salvation depend on a book that everyone has a different interpretation of, and for which there is no objective way to determine what the correct interpretation is (as opposed to whatever interpretation seems right in your own eyes). It’s foolish to believe that, in 2,000 years of Christian history, only you and those who agree with you have actually found The True Faith.

In fact, it’s not just foolishness, but self-centeredness. The subjective nature of religion necessarily makes it personal, and God’s universal failure to show up in real life prevents it from being objective. For any one person to hold up their personal religious beliefs as though they were The Eternal, Infallible and Authoritative Rule of the Almighty, is the ultimate in egotistical conceit. If you’re not God, then you’re not infallible, and you could be wrong about a lot of things, including salvation.

So in the end, Colson falls victim to the Gypsy Curse: in accusing Maher of having an oversized ego, Colson exposes his own religulous conceits. Maher’s film exposes believers to a certain amount of ridicule because the things they believe are legitimately ridiculous. To claim that this sort of foolishness is a sign of spiritual correctness is, well, religulous.

When people can’t get yoor basic stance on things right, you know you’re dealing with some stupid. Guess what that makes poor Dumplin’ Dumbash.

His address to my material on the atonement begs to assume that I hold a view of hell as “eternal torment.” Not quite — if by that Dumpy means literal fire and brimstone.

The gypsy strikes again: Holding has garbled what I said about his stance on eternal punishment. I didn’t call it “eternal torment” nor did I say anything about “literal fire and brimstone.” I used the same term Holding uses: “eternal punishment.” But perhaps that’s also wrong? Let’s look at the link Holding has posted (twice!) that explains what he really means about hell.

To start with, Holding introduces his notion of a “shame and honor” culture, allegedly typical of Biblical times, versus a “guilt” culture, allegedly what we’re used to today. According to Holding, we misunderstand the significance of ancient Middle Eastern references because we don’t possess this esoteric and scholarly insight into cultures built on shame and honor.

In several articles we have noted that there is a vast difference in attitude between modern Western society — a “guilt culture” — and the ancient Biblical world, which was an honor and shame culture. This popular summary will fill in the details for those new to the matter, but for the present we will stress the most relevant point, that in this world, honor was as important as paying the bills is to us; that which was honorable was, to the ancients, of primary importance. Honor was placed above one’s personal safety and was the key element in deciding courses of action.

Unfortunately, the article he links to, at doceo.co.uk, makes a number of points rather different from the ones Holding is making. Some might even say that they rather contradict Holding. For example, Holding claims that the modern West is a “guilt culture” and the ancient Biblical world was an honor-and-shame culture, but the article at doceo points out that both types of culture co-exist pretty much everywhere throughout history, using Watergate as an example of the shame-and-honor dynamic at work today (as in, “Even if Nixon could prove his innocence, nobody would believe him”). Doceo presents shame-and-honor as meaning that actual guilt or innocence are irrelevant, and that all that matters is whether or not people believe you are innocent or guilty. Shame-and-honor cultures have nothing to do with actual justice, and everything to do with PR, according to doceo.

This puts Holding’s views on atonement in a rather peculiar situation, since any misdeeds you commit aren’t really wrong, provided you can get away with them. Honor is not just placed above one’s personal safety, it was placed above honesty and morality as well. And it’s a culture that’s alive and well today (look up Swift Boat Veterans for Truth if you want just one example). In fact, Holding himself gives us frequent demonstrations of the shame-and-guilt culture that makes up a vibrant part of his own apologetic. For example, he quotes Malina and Rohrbaugh as saying that

what Jesus underwent in the Passion was a “status degradation ritual” designed to humiliate in every way: The mockery, the buffeting, the spitting; the crucifixion with its symbolic pinioning of hands and legs signigfying [sic] a loss of power, and loss of ability to control the body in various ways, including befouling one’s self with excrement. We focus on the beatings and think the purpose was mainly to inflict pain. But in fact, the pain was of secondary focus to the ancients, for whom such rituals were a “process of publicly recasting, relabeling, humiliating and thus recategorizing a person as a social deviant.”

Publicly recasting, relabeling, humiliating–that’s what his “parody” web sites are all about. The purpose is not to inflict pain, but to inflict shame upon the victim, as a means of isolating them from society and social influence. That’s why the theologyweb forums fill up pages and pages of posts nominating people for “Screwball of the Month Awards” without any attempt to confront the actual issues they raise. It’s not a right-vs-wrong culture, it’s a modern-day shame-and-honor culture, and we’re all quite familiar with it. Holding can dispense with the mystical hand-waving and arcane symbols glued to his pointy cap: the shame-and-honor business is not some esoteric secret that only scholarly initiates have access to.

Let’s jump ahead to the part where Holding directly addresses the question of eternal punishment.

Is it really fair for one who does not accept Jesus to suffer in Hell forever?

Several authors, some used by Glenn Miller in his series here, have set the pace for a new look at this question by dismantling the old-fashioned conception of Hell as a place of flesh being seared on sizzling grids, of torture devices and of extreme physical pain. In contrast Miller argues — even apparently without recognition of the Biblical world as an honor and shame society – that the components of eternal punishment in the Bible are shame and disgrace.

Isn’t it interesting that modern theologians, without God showing up in real life, and without any direct access to Hell itself, are able to make “new” discoveries about eternal punishment just by rejecting what men have said in the past and thinking up their own ideas about what Hell ought to be like? One of the advantages of academic theology is that, since everything is based on what men say about God, you can construct a whole “new look” for something as basic as the doctrine of Hell, just by going back over what’s already been said, and selectively emphasizing or de-emphasizing whatever ideas need to be made stronger or weaker.

This “new look” at Hell echoes the CS Lewis story, The Great Divorce, in that it essentially blames the victim for his continued presence in Hell.

C. S. Lewis wrote a book titled The Great Divorce in which Hell is depicted as a microscopic world that is smaller than a piece of dirt in heaven (though inhabitants do not realize this except by a special “bus trip” to heaven). Within that microscopic world, people constantly get tired of the company of others and move themselves farther and farther out into the “boondocks” away from others. Napoleon is presented as having done this, and two modern travellers who go to his house arrive to find him pacing back and forth muttering over his failures, for which he blames everyone else. Lewis, we think, was on to something here, even though he did not mention an honor-shame dialectic. The person who is ashamed cannot come into the presence of God, but would indeed be driven away from it by the very nature of the dialectic, seeking to get as far away from the presence of the greatest glory and honor as possible. Literally speaking, “Hell” would be a life on the lam — always trying to get yourself further and further from God’s holiness, but because God is omnipresent, and because in Him all things move and have their being, never being able to succeed.

So not only is it the sinner’s own fault that he finds himself in Hell, it is the sinner who exiles himself there, and who drives himself further and further from all that is good and right and true. His suffering is indeed eternal, but it is self-inflicted suffering, and not a divine punishment imposed by a vengeful God.

It’s easy to see why this notion of Hell would be more appealing in modern times, since it absolves God from the injustice of imposing infinite penalty as payment for finite crimes. One can’t help but wonder, however, why Jesus and the apostles never seem to have heard of this idea, and why it takes a “new look” from modern apologists like Miller and Lewis to discover that the Christian Church has had a mistaken view of Hell for all these centuries.

Miller says of the passage in Luke, of the beggar Lazarus and the rich man: [The rich man's] “quality of life” is equated to the quality of life that the beggar Lazarus had during his lifetime (e.g. lack of getting all of his basic needs met in community). Note that a beggar was a person of the lowest social status, and therefore one of the most “shamed” individuals.

Just for fun, let’s read the part that Miller didn’t quote from Luke:

The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

Not that this is any challenge at all to a practiced theologian: he’ll just explain that the text doesn’t literally mean what it says. But it’s interesting that Jesus seems to be drawing his stories from an “old look” view of what Hell is like, rather than following the model of The Great Divorce. Meanwhile, let’s look at Holding’s conclusion, the bottom line on how he views Hell and eternal punishment.

The data would indicate that the primary focus of eternal punishment is the denial of the honor accorded to those who reject God’s offer of salvation, and who bear themselves the shame and disgrace Jesus took in their stead. Therefore there is no inequality in the “suffering” — these persons have denied God His ascribed honor; they are denied in turn the honor that is given to human beings, who are created with the intent that they live forever in God’s service, reigning with Christ and serving him. They choose rather the shame and disgrace of serving their own interests; they are also shamed in accordance with their deeds (i.e., Hitler obviously has more to be “ashamed of” than, say, a robber baron). By denying their ascribed place in the collective identity of humanity, they are placed outside the boundaries, excatly as they desire to be and to the extent that their deeds demanded.

This is a nice, neat, academic little theory: it matches the punishment (shame and dishonor) to the crime (shame and dishonor), absolves God of any guilt He might accrue from torturing His prisoners, and makes everything the sinners’ own fault. It even puts “suffering” inside scare quotes, as though Hell itself isn’t really suffering. It has all the modern, liberal sensibilities, and has shed the brutal barbarities that have so often characterized the doctrine of Hell in the past.

Really, it’s hard to fault this notion, especially since we have no real-world frame of reference for Hell itself, against which to measure the accuracy or inaccuracy of Miller’s and Holding’s claims about it. It exists in its own little epistemic reality, self-contained and self-referential, a pure-thought product of humans thinking about what other humans have said. For all that, though, if we take a step back and look at the bigger picture, the larger reality with which this view ought to be consistent, there are some problems.

First of all, as the doceo site points out, shame-and-honor is an inferior system: we ought to base social status on true innocence or true guilt, as in the “guilt culture” that is more prevalent in the modern West. Secondly, doesn’t it strike you as odd that God would be bound, by “epistemic realities” beyond His control, to punish people for sin, only to have both the offense and the appropriate punishment defined by fallible, pride-based human perceptions about what “honor” is?

Third, if both crime and punishment are to be defined in terms of shame and honor, how could humans successfully shame God? As Prov. 26:2 says, “Like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, So a curse without cause does not alight.” If God is so perfect and so good that we have no charge to raise against Him, then how can any of our actions dishonor Him? If anything, he who sins dishonors himself, not God. Fourthly, what kind of loving Father casts His own children into the outer darkness as eternal punishment for dishonoring Him?

Fifthly, if you deserve to go to Hell for dishonoring God, and if God the Son must suffer even more humiliation and degradation on your account, why should anyone wind up in heaven? Even if we accept Holding’s “patronage” view that the Cross only applies to believers, doesn’t that mean that believers are responsible for shaming God twice? And lastly, if it’s merely a question of shame and honor, wouldn’t it be possible to escape from the punishment by just swallowing your pride and returning like the prodigal son, bearing your own shame? People do that sort of thing, you know.

Hell is a topic for which our only sources of information are the things that men have said about it. It’s a fairly malleable doctrine, becoming brutal when times are brutal and civilized when times are civilized, but in the end we find nothing in the real world that corresponds to any such place or condition (except metaphorically). Holding’s views may not be typical, but they do share the common weakness of being based solely on the things men say about things that don’t really match anything we can observe in the real world. Gullibility doesn’t have to be naive: you can achieve great heights of gullibility by constructing intricate, well-researched, and carefully footnoted rationalizations for believing what men tell you despite the lack of real-world consistency. And when you’re done you can tell yourself that you are smarter than a whole bunch of other people.

For whatever that’s worth.

It’s so much easier to attack the person than attack the argument…

Of course, true to the spirit of the Gypsy Curse, he intended that as a personal attack on me. Nor did he stop there: the full sentence reads, “It’s so much easier to attack the person than attack the argument; but to be fair, Dumpy isn’t competent in even knowing what the arguments are, or even who is making them, so who can blame him?”

Jesus must really have ticked off that poor old gypsy.

Holding starts off by making a big deal out of my original mistaken impression that Holding himself had written the paper summarized on the nutshell page, and by my assumption that Holding affirmed the usual conservative Christian views on hell.

Dumplin’ Dumbash doesn’t do himself a whole lot of credible good when he makes mistakes like these:

1. He criticizes my article on the atonement on the basis of a view of hell which I don’t even hold;
2. He criticizes an article as allegedly mine which is actually Glenn Miller’s (who also doesn’t hold the view of hell he criticizes)

Some people might question whether these two errors are really that big a deal. After all, the main point is that I was addressing the arguments being made, not that I was hung up on who originally came up with them. And if Holding has been wise enough to reject the popular Christian notion of hell, that’s a step in the right direction, but it’s rather a minority opinion among evangelicals, and my remarks are still a valid critique of the popular concept of Hell.

Nevertheless, for people like Holding, it is a big deal whether I demonstrate a certain scholarly infallibility. Theologians and apologists have staked out their careers on the study of God, who does not show up in real life to be studied. This leaves them dependent on the authority of human scholars as the source for their information about God. There’s no real-life observation you can make to determine whether or not some theologian is correct about God, and therefore the whole thing depends on how much scholarly authority he has. When you have to just take man’s word for it, it’s very important whether or not that man is likely to be mistaken. Or at least, whether or not he is perceived as likely to be mistaken.

Hence Holding’s insistence on portraying me as a man who lacks that scholarly “infallibility” that would justify having people just take my word for things. By failing to give the appearance of infallibility, I automatically disqualify myself from membership in that elite group that Holding regards as worthy of being believed just because they say so. And that’s fine with me: I don’t particularly care to be an authority of that stripe, which is why I try to “show my work” so that my readers can check it out and correct any mistakes they may happen to find. The true authority that we ought to be deferring to is Reality itself, not some individual’s fallible impression of what Reality ought to be.

Moving on, Holding tries to grapple with my main points, and once again fails to even give an accurate report of what I’m saying.

But really, it’s all just whine and more whine from Dumplin’, as he uses the excuse that we don’t see God doing what he thinks God should do in the world, like erase all evil RIGHT NOW. Not later, at judgment, but right this instant.

My point, of course, was not that I’m disappointed because we don’t see God doing EVERYTHING, but that we don’t even see Him show up to do ANYTHING. Holding’s rebuttal is a classic: when God fails to behave as advertised, blame the customer:

As I have noted, people who use this complaint seem universally to not be doing all THEY could to erase evil and suffering RIGHT NOW, so by their own logic, this means they are evil themselves, that they do not want to do good or are not able to, etc. Or don’t exist. It doesn’t matter that they are not omnipotent — they DO have some power, and as the argument runs, if they are not using what power they have right this instant to correct evil and stop suffering, they themselves are incorrigibly evil.

That’s a rather unfortunate argument to make in this case, not only because I never claimed that a failure to stop evil made you “incorrigibly evil,” but because people do show up in real life to try and stop evil, relieve suffering, and even prevent it when they can. And that’s better than God’s scorecard in this particular arena. The people who do nothing to stop evil, even when they could, even when they know better—these are the people we would see as deeply flawed, morally, and yet it is these people whose behavior is the most accurate imitation of God’s.

People aren’t supposed to be perfectly good and moral; God is. Yet when we look at the real world, we see that the good is actually done, and the evil is actually opposed and/or prevented, by imperfect, morally ambiguous people, not by a perfect and omnibenevolent God. That’s a significant inconsistency between the Gospel and real life, and Holding’s free guilt trip only highlights the problem instead of deflecting attention from it.

Holding moves on with another admission of the limitations on God’s power, with an inadvertent hat-tip to my God, Alethea.

That said, once we wash away the two mistakes above, Dumplin’ still can’t get what’s left right. For example, Glenn answered the question, “Can’t God just forgive sins?” in the negative. Dumpy plows right into indiocy with the duh-ah response that this “denies God’s omnipotence.” Say WHAT? This is the classic error of the ignorant, who define “omnipotence” to mean the ability to do illogical and contradictory things. News flash: Making 2 + 2 = 5 is not a “power” issue. It is an issue of logic and coherence.

In other words, due to circumstances beyond God’s control, God cannot forgive sins. God didn’t make those rules, you know. It’s like math: the laws of mathematics are what they are, and God has no control over it. God exists within a context where such things are already pre-defined, and enforced by constraints that even He cannot break. And that, folks, is my God Alethea. Reality itself. Even the Father, Son and Holy Spirit together cannot overcome Her. They have to do what She says, like it or not.

This has interesting implications for the Fine Tuning argument, since it means it’s no longer a given that God would be capable of changing the fundamental laws that make things work out such that the universe has the characteristics we need to exist. There are rules out there that God did not make, but must obey. He’s not the supreme authority, He’s just a bigger authority that a lot of others. With God, all things are possible, except the things that are not. And this, folks, is what they call “omnipotence,” at least in Holding’s circle of respected authorities.

This leaves one last problem: if God can’t just forgive sins, if the “epistemic realities” compel even God to exact punishment for sins committed, we still have the problem of the Gospel claiming that God can and does forgive sins. The Bible doesn’t say that God just “paid the fine” and let the laws of Reality take their course, it says that God actively forgives. It’s a volitional act, which implies that He has some choice in the matter, and is not bound by some exterior laws over which He has no control. Then again, the people who wrote the Bible never read Miller, so maybe they were just mistaken, eh?

Besides, even if we suppose that the “epistemic realities” could be satisfied by Jesus dying for our sins (a questionable proposition in itself), there still remains the question of why God does not apply the benefits of that sacrifice to all of His children, and not just those who happen to be willing to believe whatever men tell them about God in His absence. If the Cross is able to bring salvation to anybody, why wouldn’t it work for everybody, and why wouldn’t a loving Father want to extend its benefits to all of His beloved children?

Any way you slice it, the problem is still there. You don’t have to take my word for it, or accept what I’m saying on my own authority. Look at the real world and see for yourself. The Gospel has deeply-rooted inconsistencies and contradictions, and though apologists have built up some very well-polished arguments over the past couple of millennia, if you look past the aura of authority at the underlying data, the problems are still there. A hole with an expensive and elegant patch is still a flaw in the original material.

We close with Holding’s excuse for why he declines to offer anything better in place of the arguments I addressed above.

It is doubtful that Dumpy would have much use anyway for our explanation of atonement in terms of patronage (he’d think that was “bolting on a context” anyway, as uninformed as he is) so maybe it is just as well he never read anything further from me before he mouthed off.

Commentary on this remark is left as an exercise for the reader.

And, Dumplin’ Dumbash on why he responds to me, and why he therefore has Dunning Syndrome:

The reference to “Dunning Syndrome” is apparently a reference to an Ig-Nobel-award-winning paper (available in PDF here) in which authors Kruger and Dunning discuss people with very low mental aptitude (e.g. 12th percentile) having impaired ability to assess their own intellectual performance. Wikipedia has an entry for this phenomenon under “Dunning-Kruger Effect” (not “Dunning Syndrome), and describes it as “the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think they know more (or have more skill) than they do.” Holding wants to accuse me of suffering from this problem, but in his rush to accuse, he mistakenly calls it a “syndrome” and gets the name of the authors wrong, thus demonstrating that he really doesn’t know as much about this condition as he thinks he knows. The gypsy curse strikes again!

Back to Holding’s trilemma defense. One of the points I made in my original post is that the term “god” is one of those concepts for which there is no real-world standard of reference we can use to give it a concrete definition. Consequently, there are as many different definitions of “god” as there are people who didn’t like the definitions they were given. After all, with no real-world point of reference to refute you, why not define “god” however you feel like imagining Him/Her/It/Them?

Holding mistakes this for an epistemological problem, calling it “an epistemological train wreck.” Notice, however, that I am not making an epistemological argument here. I’m not raising any questions about how we know what we know. I’m merely pointing out that God’s failure to show up in real life has significant consequences. One of those consequences is the lack of any fixed, verifiable definition for God, which is a consequence that has some significant implications in questions like “Did Jesus claim to be God?”. Even leaving aside the question of metaphorical usage, you have to know what “be god” means before you can talk about whether Jesus did it and/or claimed to do it.

Holding tries to avoid this problem by arguing that “it seems unlikely that these folks have no idea what we mean by ‘God’ any more than they are confused when we say ‘George Bush’ or ‘Bill Clinton.’” But that’s a smoke screen, since the question isn’t “What did Holding mean by ‘be God’?” but rather “What did Jesus mean?”, and more importantly, “Is it true that Jesus was God?” If we don’t have a real-world standard for what a genuine God is, it’s going to be difficult for Jesus to live up to that standard. Fortunately, we do have another standard to rely on in such circumstances: the principle that truth is consistent with itself.

I applied that principle to the “Lord” part of the trilemma, and determined that Jesus was not God, on the grounds that the kind of involved, caring, intimate God that Jesus preached is not consistent with the lack of divine parental involvement we find in real life. Apparently, though, it’s against the rules to give an objective assessment of each of the three “horns” of the trilemma individually—we’re supposed to look only at the “Liar” and “Lunatic” alternatives, and surrender to the “Lord” alternative by default (i.e. without looking too closely). And this is where the Emperor’s New Clothes comes in.

Christians today enjoy a unique privilege: they have been proclaiming Jesus as the source of all goodness and virtue for so long that to criticize Jesus in any way is tantamount to criticizing goodness and virtue. “All good people can see that Jesus is above reproach,” and therefore seeing the virtues of Jesus is like seeing the Emperor’s latest regalia, while seeing Jesus’ flaws is like seeing the Emperor’s nudity. You call Jesus good because that shows that you yourself are good, just like calling the Emperor’s clothes “fine” shows that you are wise and intelligent. Hence the Liar, Lord or Lunatic argument: you have to call him Lord, because people will look down on you if you say “Liar” or “Lunatic.”

But for this approach to work, you can’t address the “Lord” possibility head-on, as I did. The trilemma only works if you limit yourself to looking at the “Liar” and “Lunatic” alternatives. Since I declined to play by those arbitrary rules, Holding accuses me of having “come to the debate on false premisses [sic].” In other words, he wants to accuse me of avoiding the trilemma debate by switching to a different debate about God’s existence. I was not switching to a general debate about God’s existence, however (though the same argument does apply to the more general question). I was talking about the specific question that is the whole point of the trilemma, i.e. “Is Jesus God?”. It is not a change of subject to address the main point of the argument! Holding is simply wrong.

Holding does clear up something I misunderstood.

Dumpy is mistaken when he says, Holding concedes that “honestly mistaken” is also a valid alternative that Lewis somehow failed to consider. No, I do not. I say that it is an invalid alternative that Lewis either wisely ignored or should have if he thought of it.

You have to wonder what kind of “wisdom” recommends simply ignoring possibilities that might upset your conclusions. It is entirely possible that Jesus said what he said out of a mistaken conviction that he had achieved some kind of mystical unity with God that made him merely a vessel through whom God worked His will. His references to deity could have been referring to the God Who was working in and through him, rather than being references to himself. By failing to consider this possibility, Lewis only reinforces the point that his trilemma is a mere contrivance built on artificial and arbitrary stipulations, and not at all a real-world dilemma.

Meanwhile, I did go on to consider the “Liar” and “Lunatic” alternatives as well, pointing out that Jesus’ behavior gives us a certain amount of evidence that is consistent with the possibility that his drive to build up a grassroots power base might have made use of deception and/or self-deception. Holding dismisses this as “comical for its ignorance of the political realities of the day,” by which I suppose me means it would be silly to think a first century Jew could gain a following by giving out the impression that he was the Son of God. Or something.

Holding also disagrees with my speculation that Jesus enjoyed having power over people, and having them submit and obey. The gospels, however, tell us that Jesus’ behavior was indeed consistent with that of a man enjoying his influence over people, and seeking to expand it. For example, he praised people who abased themselves and exalted him, like the centurion in Matthew 8. When a Gentile woman came to him for help, he at first did not want to help her, because she was the wrong race (incidentally referring to Gentiles as “dogs”). When the woman grovelled and begged and agreed that she was a dog, however, he gave in and said he would help her, (Matthew 15). And let’s not forget his “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem, when (mindful of an OT prophecy about a king entering on a donkey) he “borrowed” a donkey and, for once in his life, rode in to town while the crowds shouted hosannas. Did he mind the adulation? Did he try to stop it? No, on the contrary, he actually refused to stop it, even when asked point-blank by the authorities to do so. (Luke 19).

So I stand by my assessment, speculative though it is. After all, what god doesn’t like to be worshiped? Whether his god was intentionally manufactured or innocently embraced, I rather think Jesus enjoyed all the attention and obedience, either as God’s representative or as God Himself. The “Liar/Lunatic” alternative isn’t really all that different from the behavior we see in believers (and televangelists) today, so it’s not all that implausible that Jesus was just one more of the same, whether or not he sincerely saw himself as God (or as God’s vessel).

Holding doesn’t seem to grasp this point.

It’s hard to know what the point is here, since the issue is not “distinguishing between your own value judgments and God’s Eternal Truth” but a specific claim of personal identity. That is not a question that lies upon a spectrum of complexity. If you claim to be person X, there’s no issue of “trying to be the best at being X as you can.” You either are or you aren’t. And that’s a question concerning Jesus that Dumpy has not answered, but dodged.

Boy is that a loaded gun. Jesus was talking about his own personal identity when he said “I and the Father are one?” If he’s claiming not just unity of purpose and values with the Father, but that he, personally, is the Father, then 17-plus centuries of Trinitarian theology have been way off! That’s about as toonish a defense as you can offer.

The bottom line is that the trilemma is an overwhelmingly flawed argument. It’s flawed in its premises, it’s flawed in its selection of premises, it’s flawed in its evaluation of the evidence and in its selection of which evidence to examine, and above all it’s flawed in its contrived conclusion. Jesus said a number of things that, like so many of his other teachings, are ambiguous and/or metaphorical/spiritual in intent, but which might be interpreted as a possible reference to his own alleged deity. Certainly his subsequent followers interpreted them that way (though not all of them, of course).

But regardless of what Jesus might have meant, if his claim to deity had been true, the clearest way to say so would be to come back from the dead and stay back. It’s also the way that would have been most consistent with what Jesus taught about God’s nature, character, and desires. It’s just not what happened in real life. Could it be coincidence that his behavior since the first century has been more consistent with the behavior of a dead man than with a living God of the motives and character that Jesus taught? Maybe, but I doubt it.

I’m not the only person to see this curse in action. PZ Myers has a post about a reporter, in Salon no less, who falls prey to the old gypsy’s revenge. According to the reporter,

Myers has earned notoriety with his blog, Pharyngula, in which he reports on new developments in biology and indiscriminately excoriates those he views as hostile to science, a pantheon of straw men and women that includes theologians, journalists and churchgoers.

Having accused Myers of excoriating straw men and women, he then goes on to attack a bizarre version of Myers’ views which he seems to have defined by taking the opposite of whatever Myers actually said, and calling it “what he really means.”

And in the background, thin and distance, you can almost hear a gleeful cackle.