How Sincere Belief Decays into Dollars

Doctrines fitted to make the deepest impression upon the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, never stimulating imagination, feelings, or the understanding.

An example is the way in which the majority of believers hold the doctrines of Christianity—the maxims and precepts in the New Testament—considered sacred, and accepted as laws, by all professing Christians. Yet not one Christian in a thousand guides their personal conduct by reference to those laws. Their standard is that of their nation, their class, or their preferred newspaper. They have a collection of ethical maxims, which they believe to have been uttered by their God incarnate in His infallible wisdom as rules for Christian living, and a set of everyday practices, which meet some of Christ’s maxims, deny some, and otherwise may go some way to meet them or to deny them. They are a compromise between the Christian creed and the interests of worldly life. Christians pay homage to Christ’s standards, but owe their real allegiance to worldly standards.

All Christians profess to believe that…

• the blessed are the poor and humble, and those who are ill-used by the world
• it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven
• they should judge not, lest they be judged
• they should swear not at all
• they should love their neighbor as themselves
• if one take their cloak, they should give him their coat also
• if they would be perfect, they should sell all that they have and give it to the poor.

When they say they believe these things, they do believe them. They are not insincere but believe them in the sense that they believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed, but they do not believe them in the sense of a living belief which regulates conduct. They believe Christian doctrines until they get to the point where they are meant to act upon them. They believe them as worthy doctrines useful to pelt adversaries with, and like to cite them as the reasons for anything people do that they approve of. Then they are Christian things to do. But anyone who reminded them that the maxims require them to do things they never think of doing is considered as expecting Christians to be saints, though they themselves are not. They forget that these are the requirements of God Himself!

Christ’s doctrines have no hold on ordinary believers. They have negligible practical influence on their minds, or on their actions. Christians have an habitual respect for the sound of them, but feel no obligation to God to apply the words to the things signified—nothing that forces their mind to take note of them, and make them personally conform to what are meant to be God’s own teaching, directly from his own incarnated mouth. Whenever conduct is concerned, they look round for for a pastor to assure them they do not have to go far in obeying Christ. A few regular dollars for the church and its minister is enough.

John Stuart Mill wrote most of this 150 years ago in On Liberty. It is even more true in America today.

Proving God: A Christian’s Arguments

A Mr Dale writes online:

1. Any declaration of truth, like: my hair is brown or God exists or there is no God requires evidence.

   Not so. These are apples and pears. “God exists” requires evidence, as does a statement about the colour of something, but “there is no God” neither requires evidence nor can there be any other than the absence of evidence that there is a God. When something is imaginary, it does not exist in the material world and so there can be no material evidence of it. When there is no material evidence of something, then the skeptical attitude at the base of science declares that it does not exist. If material evidence arises, then science is corrigible. It can change its previous conclusion. Meanwhile God does not exist because there is no evidence He does. If Christians demur then they must produce the evidence for God.

2. What evidence does anyone have for atheism? What evidence could be provided to support it? How do you measure spirit? It’s impossible to measure fully the states of an atom, which is a material construct. How then can you disprove something which is immaterial?

   Something immaterial, like spirit, can have no effect on the material world. So far as we material things are concerned, spirit does not exist because there is no material evidence for it, nor can there be unless spirit is in some sense material, in which case we can detect it. No one has, and the skeptical view is that it does not exist. See 1.

3. As pointed out, time and again. There are many arguments for God’s existence. There is physical evidence to support the general historicity of the Bible, esp. the New Testament. And there is God’s promise of self-revelation to the earnest seeker.

   None of the “many arguments” are given. The historicity of a book is no proof of God, and God’s self-revelation is not a self revelation at all but merely a statement of certain authors and preachers, all men.

4. But even if you could dis-prove the theist’s arguments that’d still only lead you to agnosticism.

   Not so. Agnosticism is sitting on the fence. The skeptical conclusion from a lack of evidence for God is that there is no God.

5. Consequently one has to ask; how can anyone hold the strong belief: there is no God, in the absence of any suporting evidence. Surely the best any rational person can do is say. I don’t know if God exists.

   Not so. See 1 and 4.

6. On the other hand the Christian can look at the argumentation. Can balance the evidence and can receive God’s self-revelation and consequently, rationally state: God exists.

   Not so. Mr Dale proves that the Christian does not look at the evidence, or the arguments, and does not balance the evidence but counts as evidence that which is not evidence and that which is irrelevant. In short, they are indoctrinated and deluded.

7. Considering human beings are pre-programmed to believe, something long, argued for by Christians and the rationality of Christian belief as opposed to the no-God hypothesis, would it not be rational to actually look for answers to some of these questions?

   Rationality is something Christians like Mr Dale should try.

The Book of Jasher is Deuteronomy

Anyone who is familiar with the Judaism directory at AskWhy! will know that it argues that Judaism began when the Persians sent colonists to Judah (Persian, Yehud) with a law that they were obliged to follow. Ezra is described as delivering this law in the bible itself sometime in the fifth century BC (417 BC can be inferred). The law was what is now called Deuteronomy. The bible seems to deliberately imply that Deuteronomy was accidentally found in the temple by Josiah, who used it to justify the reformation he introduced, or so most biblicist scholars think, but they think the bible is supernaturally true.

In fact, the myth of the accidental discovery of a book is one created by the Persians to make their own imposition of the new law more palatable to the local inhabitants who were Canaanites. The colonists, told they were descendants of Judahites and were “returning” to their proper home, were actually a ruling elite from somewhere else in the Persian empire—the clues suggest Beth Eden—and were being punished by deportation from their homeland to settle among and pacify the local Canaanites by instilling into them Persian ways and creating a temple state for the collection of tribute. If they succeeded, they became the ruling class of Yehud, and respected priests of the regional temple set up for people conquered by the Persians who were cooperative with them. Only the colonists originally were Jews. They were a nation of priests.

Of course, the bible does not actually name the Josiah law or the law Ezra read out. Another law for the followers of Moses must have been superfluous, one would have thought. Quite so. The supposed discovery of a law book and its implementation by Josiah around 610 BC, and the reading of yet another law by Ezra around 417 BC show that the story of Moses and the Exodus is mythical, a myth devised at a later date, in third century BC Egypt!

But the law given by the Persians was not called Deuteronomy, which is Greek for Second Law, the first supposedly being that of Moses. The new Law could simply have been called The Law, as it still is by the Jews. The attribution to Moses of course came with the later myth. But did it also have a name of its own. Perhaps so. The bible refers in several places (Joshua 10:12-13, 2 Samuel 1:19-29, 1 Kings 8:12ff LXX) to the Book of Yasher (Anglicized to Jasher). “Yasher” means “upright” or “righteous”. Jewish scholars will doubtless know this, but I have just come across confirmation that this was a name for the Law by this passage from the Babylonian Talmud:

R Eliezer says (Babylonian Talmud, Tract Abuda Zara) the Book of Yashar is Deuteronomy because there it is is written… “And thou shalt do that which is right (Yashar) and good in the eyes of the Lord” (6:18).

The point is that the measure of righteousness or uprightness for a Jew is the Law, and that was originally Deuteronomy.

Of course, what is now Deuteronomy is hardly likely to be what the Book of Yasher was at first. Chunks of it will have been deliberately erased to suit the later priesthood, free of Persian influence, and then subject to the Macedonians and the Hasmonaeans, and parts of it will have been expanded and set out in the previous law books that were written in Ptolemaic times, notably Leviticus.