Hypocrisy of Atheism pt. 3

Freud and other vocal Atheists have stereotypically used the "Fall of Man" as a point of hypocrisy in the Christian faith. This is their selling point: How can Adam and Eve's choice to eat fruit in the garden curse ALL of mankind? That doesn't seem fair. They feel it is hypocritical of Christians to proclaim love and in the same breath doom people for hell at birth, just because their ancient ancestors ate some fruit.

I found something interesting while reading Freud's book, Civilization and Its Discontents, with his explanation of the origin of guilt. He says that once non-rational chimps figured out how to become sentient humans they began to form tribes. Every tribe had a leader, and every family unit had a father. You see, every son both loved and hated his father. He loved the father because the father was protector and provider. However, he hated the father because every son loved his own mother (See Oedipus Complex); every son wanted to be the father because of the father's higher status; and every son saw his father's weak points and resented him for them. The father didn't make the son happy, and the ultimate goal of every human is to be happy by fulfilling his libido. So what happened? The son killed his father. What happened next is the interesting part.

According to Freud, this is where we got our concept of guilt: As soon as the son killed his father, he remembered how much he'd initially loved the father. He also saw how the murder affected his mother--the object of his love--and he realized his premature and insurmountable tasks of both providing for and protecting himself. The feeling that arose out of all the emotions involved is what we now term "guilt." This is still the going thought for most of the Atheist scholastic world.

Since we have this guilt in our memory from our ancestors, we need redemption, so Freud explains how we, much later, created redemption for ourselves. Naturally, wishfully thinking Christians came up with the image of Jesus Christ and that fixed all the nasty guilt problem. He was at once our "Father" whom we killed and our "Redeemer" who took away the nasty sin. But since He's just a made-up guy, there is actually no hope and so we currently live blissfully on in this false sense of hope. (See my next blog for thoughts on how "no hope" isn't a logical answer.)

This is the Atheist hypocrisy in this thinking: Atheists are simply replacing one "ancestral memory" for another. Either we are sinners because we are born into Adam's curse, or we are born into guilt because caveman ancestors killed their fathers. Either way, guilt...sin...whatever you want to call it, is an inevitability. Either way, all humanity is doomed.

(Furthermore, the Christian view actually explains why women feel guilt. Freud's view doesn't. Freud never mentions women in this equation at all--except being the mother who is grievous over the loss of her husband. Doesn't that seem a little horrible for women to feel a guilt for which they weren't even responsible? Yet . . . Women are statistically quicker and more likely to admit guilt than men. No accounting for that. Oh well. Maybe I just don't have a good understanding of Freud. I've studied his theories for awhile, but this is the first actual book of his that I've read, so maybe he explains it in another book?)

Okay, so let's be fair. I suppose the Christian claim that God is Love is what upsets Atheists. How could a loving God doom all mankind for simply eating fruit? That's just silly. So...do we just replace fruit with killing a guy? Is that more logical? Does it make it easier for me to bear the weight of an ancestral sin if I say that my ancestors were greater sinners than Adam and Eve? Does that somehow make the sin more transferable to starving little babies born in Africa?

Now, I suppose one could argue that the Freudian view doesn't claim that the world was created perfect, like the Christian view does. There is more at stake in the Christian view, because the Christian view says that the world was created perfectly, and that ALL things were cursed after the Fall--which accounts not only for sin, but also for famine, flood, cancer, etc.. However, a naturally caused universe simply evolved sentient beings who act as they've always acted--with the famines, floods, and cancers always having been present.

But isn't there actually more logically at stake in the second view? Let's think about something for a moment. Freud's case states that guilt originated from ancestors killing their fathers. This means, up to that point, no one felt guilt, get it? This means that everyone went about doing things that didn't make them feel guilty. Do you see the problems here? Freud is either repeating the Christian view which accounts for something like a "perfect sinless environment" where no one felt guilty yet, . . . or else Freud's view must be that killing their fathers wasn't something our ancestors cared about until that magical point in time when they became rational enough to realize what they'd done; in which case we must abandon reason in our analysis of such a theory, because why would our ancestors have cared about an act they'd never cared about before? Either way, he's tracing sin back to a starting point and dooming all humanity to lives ridden with guilt, yet he gives no way out of this. There is vastly more at stake here. Again, no hope. (Next blog. For reals.)

As harsh as it is for a Christian to say, "We are all fallen," I would argue that it is just as harsh to say, "We are all guilt-ridden because of our murderous ancestry." Either way, it still affects the starving babies, right? That the inescapable problem.

That was Bart Ehrman's very issue with Christianity in his book God's Problem. He kept pointing out that Christianity is flawed in its promoting this concept of being "fallen" and then saying that poor little starving babies in Africa are just as much to blame for imperfection as the killer on death row. Ehrman is an agnostic and so therefore finds no answers in Scriptures, having supposedly studied them inside and out. His conclusion? He believed that if we all just band together and do our parts, we can make this a beautiful place. Of course, that is a sweet, sentimental thought, but that never happens. Why do people think that if we all put forth a small contribution, that we will eventually make this place wonderful? Does history show us anywhere where that was even close to possible? Compared to the belief that all the horrible, terrible, demonic people could somehow suddenly stop being so detrimental to the rest of humanity (And that's what it would take, you realize? Not for everyone to do some small piece of good, but rather for everyone to stop being evil.), a belief in God doesn't seem as much of a pipe dream, actually.

[A question arises: "So why have charities and helpful organizations in place, if small contributions can't fix the problem anyway?" Ah, but you see, I am not an Atheist; I am a Christian. I believe that these organizations are good, not because we can fix anything, but because we are all created in God's image, and He commands us to help each other.]

Besides all this, the Freudian view of the origin of guilt comes with no fair warnings! No one warned the cavemen that there were direct consequences to their actions. There was no "All-Knowing Being" around to tell them anything, because there is a "No All-Knowing Beings Allowed" sign on the Atheist's philosophical door. There is no hope in the Atheist worldview, because it dooms everyone everywhere to guilty feelings that cannot be ignored and can only be repressed for a short time, only to resurface tenfold later (or drive a person to insanity). Guilty feelings are unavoidable. Perhaps Freud could muse them away and blame them on Christians, yet he admitted the fact that guilty feelings are within us and cannot be escaped. A person can only live guilt-free in this world if he is blissfully ignorant of the horrors of this world, and the horrors within himself--in which case, he is a plague upon all his friends and family.

We all know Adam and Eve were warned:

Gen. 2:15-17
¹⁵ The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶ And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."

(They understood, because Eve repeats the ramifications later in Chapter 3.)

Being born into sin is not a purely Judeo-Christian worldview. It is a staunchly Atheist worldview as well. For an Atheist to claim that original sin is a mind-trap created by Christians is a huge logistical problem, let alone vastly hypocritical. This is because guilt and sin are inevitable and unchangeable by human actions and are paid for by the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

The Hypocrisy of Atheism Pt. 2

Atheists don't accept Christianity because Christianity states that God cannot dwell with sin, so therefore ANY sin, no matter how small, keeps a person out of heaven. They cannot accept that a person who generally makes good choices, doesn't kill, doesn't steal, etc. is still unworthy of heaven because of a few small sins.

yet

Most of them would agree that points like equality, respect, kindness, gentleness, fairness, integrity, bravery, love, loyalty, grace, mercy, helpfulness, faithfulness, and truth are good. These aspects are main themes of the Bible. Yet, atheists reject the entire Bible simply because of a few things like the creation account, old laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and God saying that He is supreme.

Why do they have a problem with these verses? Well, obviously, because the doctrines in these small verses are the medium through which people understand the rest of the Bible. For instance, if God isn't supreme, then loving my neighbor as myself comes from a completely different motivation. (Google search: "Freud" and "Libido")

God views our sin similarly. In order for something to be pure, it must be 100% pure. An impure diamond is actually not a full diamond. It is more like 99% diamond and 1% something else. We were made to be pure, but if we do one impure thing, then we are no longer what God made us to be. God is therefore forced to see our good deeds through the context of our bad ones. Think of this: if there were a spot of ketchup on your shirt, you wouldn't go around telling people that it's a clean shirt, even if--save for the spot--the rest was spotless. If there is a sin in your life, then you are not being 100% of what you were created to be. If you spend your day doing 90% of what God wants, but 10% of what Satan wants, then you can't say you were 90% living for God. You were either living for God the entire time, or you weren't. If you are 10% Satan's then you are actually 100% Satan's. Or think of it another way. If a wife is 90% faithful to her spouse and has affairs 10% of the time, is she faithful or unfaithful? That little 10% actually makes her 100% unfaithful. Furthermore, any faithful acts she performs to her husband, become nothing less than a lie to hide the adultery. She is not being a wife anymore but a 100% liar and adulteress. However, she was intended to be 100% wife.

Do you see? This is why God died for you, so you can accept Him and God can view you through Jesus' perfection instead of your own failures. You are GOING to fail. That's a given. But guess what, you don't need to stress out, because you don't have to be recognized a failure unless you reject God's payment.

God fixes His "discrimination" problem by dying for us. What do atheists do to fix their discrimination problem? Nothing. Therefore, their rejection of the whole Bible for some picayune details is hypocritical if they are going to further reject God because of His condemnation of unbelievers for every sin they commit.

Heaven . . . Is Not a Place on Earth

Last night, my friends and I were approached by a Korean business man who ostensibly was wanting to practice his English while at the same time wanting to discuss the flaws of Christianity. He just kind of wanted to talk and not listen . . . although, who am I to say, maybe He was listening. He was killing two birds with one stone, so we can at least applaud him for efficiency.

He just seemed to ask questions that he thought would stump us, and when we'd actually answer his questions, he'd ignore the answers and start asking new ones.

I can't get all "high and mighty" about his behavior. He was just acting normally. How often when we feel we are right about something do we actually stop and listen to what is being said on the other side? So we can't really blame him for acting this way. Not if we are honest with ourselves, at least. It's the old nature not wanting to accept that there just might be another perspective that we didn't think of initially.

Least ways, it made me think of something.

He brought up the old argument that if you are a good person, you will have a good afterlife. I brought up the old counter argument that if you had a glass of water and someone added three drops of poison in it, would you still drink it even though MOST of the water was pure? Then he told me that I was using an analogy that didn't relate to the issue at hand. That made me think about something.

While the water analogy is arguably not relatable to this issue, I think it still . . . holds water . . . not b/c water and holiness are the same, but b/c holiness and unpoisoned water both have to do with purity.

Let me explain without analogy for a second. Think of the word heaven. Do you think of:
(a) a perfect place,
(b) a place just like here where there are good things that happen and bad things that happen, or
(c) a bad place?

Chances are you would rule out "C" right away, b/c we have another word for a place like that: hell. Now, the next pass over "A" and "B" should give us the answer "A" b/c the word heaven has been integrated into our minds and even every day vocabulary as something way better than we can know now. A place of divine ecstasy. Somewhere where happiness abounds evergreen. A place of zero sadness.

However, although most people would choose "A" as the correct no-brainer answer, quite a sizable group of naysayers would say that in order to get to such a place, one merely needs to be "mostly good." While critical thinking is a necessary skill, sometimes people regard nay-saying as the same thing--which it isn't in this case. Being "mostly good" doesn't make any sense. How can anything but perfection dwell in a perfect society? The second someone or something flawed enters a perfect society, the society ceases to be perfect. Think of a diamond. A perfect diamond is almost priceless; however, just one tiny speck--not even distinguishable by the layman's eye--and the diamond is decreased considerably in value (and would actually be worthless except for "the man" wanting to take your money). You can't have imperfection in perfect or perfect would not exist. Saying that imperfection can dwell in perfection is not "deep thinking." It's the Emperor's New Clothes.

Now . . . let's assume that you immediately saw through the "A, B, C" ploy and instead of answering "A" like a naive child, you were a highly educated intellectual and answered "B." Answering "B" actually becomes a much harder problem for you, and not just b/c of what I've already discussed (imperfect does not = perfect). If you answer "B" that heaven is actually just a place much like here, then you need to explain why the word heaven has such a good, Utopian, fantastic connotation. I suppose you could explain it away like Freud does for terms like guilt. (He says it only comes from the fact that we ultimately desire power, and so when we kill those in power we actually suffer from not having protection anymore...but that doesn't actually explain why we feel guilty--we just feel bad. But it's more of a selfish "I shouldn't have done that, b/c I now need protection" bad, not a "I shouldn't have done that b/c it was wrong and I know I am to blame" bad. In other words . . . he actually doesn't answer the question of guilt at all.)

Heaven is a much harder conundrum than guilt even and here's why. If we currently live in a society of good and bad and if everything happened b/c of natural causes . . . then why would we ever expect anything to be better than it is now? How would we ever have known that anything COULD be better? How would we ever long for heaven? . . . Or intellectually: How would we ever know that heaven was something we could overcome by explaining away? This is something my mother calls the "Eden Syndrome." We all have a hidden memory of Eden and how perfect it was and how we all messed it up, and this is the reason we are all unhappy and discontent.

Anyways . . . why does heaven have such a positive connotation? Well, you have to explain that if you are going to choose "B." Are you up to it?

Personally, I'm going to stick with "A."

Fortunately, the work has been done for us. Just believe and trust in Jesus. He did everything necessary for you to get to heaven. It's really the only way. Just think about it. Get all the information you can and think about it (Proverbs 4:7).