Who are the "ungodly"?

[14] It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, [15] to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” [16] These are grumblers, malcontents, following their own sinful desires; they are loud-mouthed boasters, showing favoritism to gain advantage.
(Jude 1:14-16 ESV)

More from The Rare Jewel...

notice the many references to "ungodly" in v.15 above, then the first trait of the ungodly is "grumbling"
THAT HURTS - it is so easy to see in others, but hard to notice it in me. Is that wrong?

Contentment

This isn't from Valley of Vision, but from reflecting on The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment - ch 7

Contentment in the mundane routine things of life is an evidence of a heart that is worshiping God. When we murmur and complain (Phil 2:14-16) we are showing that we don't really trust and worship God from the heart even if our external religious behavior looks good - Matt 15:8

In what condition would secret reviews
of my life leave me
were it not for the assurance that with Thee
there is plenteous redemption,
that Thou art a forgiving God,
that Thou mayest be feared!

"The Lord's Day Eve"
If we honestly reflect on what a secret review of our lives would mean then we would see our need for a Savior. As a freshman in college a review of things made me realize that i was in trouble with life; that lead to my actually reading the Gospel of John and coming to faith in Christ. I'd thought of Him as an example, but then I saw that I needed a Savior.

I changed the name and the URL address, not that anyone cares. The new name reflects that most of the posts will be my reflections from the Valley of Vision devotional.

VoV Praise and Thanksgiving

When I think upon and converse with Thee
ten thousand delightful thoughts spring up,
ten thousand sources of pleasure are unsealed
ten thousand refreshing joys spread over my heart,
crowding into every moment of happiness

I find it odd that the author doesn't say "crowding into every moment of sorrow". What this points out is that we must know how to use the gospel and power of grace on our happiness as much as on our sorrow. Even our happiness takes on a different dynamic when the delights, pleasures, and joys of God enter our lives. Temporal happiness is put into a broader context when viewed from the perspective of God centered thoughts.

VoV The Gospel Way
Glorious Trinity, impress the gospel on my soul, until its virture diffuses every faculty;
Let it be heard, acknowledged, professed, felt.

VoV - The Name of Jesus
All searching God,
Thou readest the heart, viewest principles and motives of actions,
seest more defilement in my duties than I ever saw in my sins.

VoV - Purification
If my life is to be a crucible amind burning heat, so be it
but do thou sit at the furnace mouth
to watch the ore that nothing be lost.

VoV - Seventh Day Morning
In Christ thou art reconciled to Thy rebellious subjects;
give us the ear of faith to hear him,
the eye of faith to see him,
the hand of faith to receive him,
the appetite of faith to feed upon him

Feb 6, 2009

VoV - the convicting Spirit

the prayer shows us the work of the hs to bring us to repentance and to show us God's ability to save and his big heart and love for sinners.

VoV Union with Christ:

"No sin is greater than the sin of unbelief...

In love divest me of blessings that i may glorify thee the more; .remove the fuel of my sin, and may I prize the gain of a little holiness as overbalancing all my loses.

..the more my heart is broken for sin, the more i pray it may be far more broken. "

FEB 13 2009

VoV the All Good p 10-11

Thou hast helped me to see...

that nothing is good but thee,

that i am near good when i am near thee,

that to be like thee is a glorious thing.

This is my magnet, my attraction

Wow- that's good stuff. What is my magnet? I pray for myself, my family, our church that OUR spiritual north would be the nearness of God.

..If it be consistent with thy eternal counsels,

the purpose of thy grace

and the great ends of thy glory,

then bestow upon me the blessings of thy comforts;

If not, let me be pleased to trust thy wiser determinations.

That is the heart of faith and resting in the person of god.

VoV Third Day Evening...

...Give us fatih to believe, and believing, to have life in Jesus;
May we enter into his sufferings;
Let us see thy hand in the instruments of our grief,
rejoicing that they are from they over-ruling providence.
Let not our weeping hinder sowing;
nor sorrow, duty......

that is a tough thing to pray, and it is the movement of faith in the heart to pray it. It goes against the grain of the flesh and our natural way of looking at things. Yet in reality it is the way to come out of and to grow through grief and suffering. Bitterness and anger at God only lead to a life full of anger and bitterness. The way through the pain of grief is to embrace the hands of a Sovereign God who suffered for us.

Vov - Third Day Morning

...Jesus..who magnified the law both in its precepts and penalty, and made it honorable....

If we ever think that Jesus somehow reduced the demands of the law then we are mistaken - He MAGNIFIED the law, and he fulfilled it perfectly. He showed the reality of the true penalty of the law by dying for us, by being made sin on our behalf. Should we not seek to honor Christ by loving the law that He magnified and gave himself to fulfill?

...if blessed with prosperity may we be free from its snares, and use, not abuse, its advantages..

That prayer is such a need for believers in the country for we are certainly among the prosperous. How might we use and not abuse the advantages we have? That must be worked out in our lives in the context of community. It is a challenge that we should take on.

From Valley of Vision - Mortification
...I take shame to myself for all the sins of my holy things..

That phrase reminded me of the difference between the religous / moral person and the true Christian. The religious/moralist takes shame for his "bad things", but takes pride in his holy things.
A Christian is one who see the sin of even his/her holy things - our obedience and good deeds done for the wrong reason. As Whitfield said, "the Christian is one who repents of his righteousness, not just his sin."

Here is my Picasa gallery on the web - great pics of our recent vacation in the mountains

http://picasaweb.google.com/parisdawg

Legalism and Freedom and Obedience from the heart:

"Jesus did not confront oppressive legalism by advocating license." (Jerry Sittser, The Will of God as a way of Life, p. 61)
That leads to some interesting reflection...

While Jesus sets us free from the yoke of legalism he never gave way to license. While avoiding external performance as a way of righteousness he never lowered the standard of holiness. If anything Jesus taught that the standards of the legalists were too low. He taught that the real issue was obedience from the heart and that such obedience yielded more, not less, holiness.

If we seek to use grace as a cover for license then we're only thinking about it from the head level and not the heart level. Obedience from the heart seeks to know the heart of God on any given matter; it puts the law of love above the liberty of license.

Linda has always wanted a yellow house so this summer she got it all together and we got it painted. She really did much of it herself; she's awesome

here are some thoughts from my daughter, Katie, who let me post this.

This past week I was thinking about glorification. I love that on the flyer for RUF summer conference this year it said on one side, "GLORIFICATION", and then on the other side: "Will all that is sad become untrue?" I think that that really captures what living in light of glorification is really about. So as I was thinking about this, I wrote this poem, or free-style blank verse prose poem, or whatever you want to call it.
I thought I'd share.

At the end of it all
there is always more joy than pain,
more gladness than sorrow,
more day than night.
And at the end of it all
everything changes,
but grace remains the same.

The sun rises.
The sun falls.
Rainclouds cover the earth,
and the leaves die again.
Laughter mixes with tears
and forms the beautiful symphony
of existance and of dying.
Confusion bares its teeth
while apathy slivers by.
And day after day
the line of doubt extends.

And I have felt the world
take hold of my slippery mind.
And I have held the hand
of a thousand pretty lies
that all scream the same thing.

But at the end of it all,
the cords of love hold tight.
And so I cease to run.
There is a power greater than me
and it compels me to come;
to come with my sighs,
to come with my wounds,
to come with my bleeding heart.
There is a love that draws me near,
this irrisistable wooing flame.
It breaks my spirit,
and it frees my soul,
and it bids me live again.

At the end of it all,
at the foot of the Cross,
I stand and stand forever.
And at the end there is hope.
And at the end there is rest.
At the end of it all,
I believe.

Try this link for the Loser Letter #4

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzJjODVkOWNlYTMyMDYzYmZjYTkyZGM4MzIxNjY3ZDc=

If you're in or near the north Georgia area and want a day trip to to Tallulah Gorge State Park. It is very pretty and has great trails. You can even go down to the floor of the gorge and rock hop along the river (if you get the free permit).
My wife and I enjoyed it last weekend.

The Trouble with Good WorksWeek III of THE LOSER LETTERS.
By Mary Eberstadt

Editor’s note: Christianity has been taking a beating for years now, with one tony atheist tome after another rolling off the presses — and still no end in sight.And so far — with the exception of a Michael Novak here and a Dinesh D’Souza there — believers have largely turned the other cheek.Now, finally, comes more payback — with THE LOSER LETTERS, a Screwtape for our screwed-up time.In the latest round over God, Mary Eberstadt hits control-alt-delete on National Review Online . . .

Dear Friends Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Onfray, Stenger & etc. again,

As I explained in my first Letter, I really do believe that one of the most important contributions I can make as a newly converted atheist is to let You know what is and isn’t working for our Side when it comes to winning the so-called hearts and minds of the rest of our Species. In some areas, as I observed about sex (!), it’s definitely better for us Brights just to change the subject and not to compete with the believers at all.It’s like they keep telling me in here, some things are just bigger than you are, and there’s no point in even trying to pretend you’re in control.
The same goes for Us atheists, too! Sometimes, You just have to cut your losses and hit control-alt-delete.

One big case in point is “good works,” or the question of who is more likely to be on good behavior with the lesser members of the Species, Us or the believers. And here, as a matter of general strategy, I cannot stress enough something that some of You are just refusing to get: We Atheists are much better off emphasizing what the other Side has done wrong than anything we Brights have done right.

After all, 2,000 years of Christianity have given us plenty of ammunition to train on our adversaries without Our having to fight loser battles in the field. I mean, appreciate our resources here! Here’s just some of what can throw in the Catholics’ faces alone: any number of popes, a way higher number of bishops, much of the faculty and administration at both Georgetown and Notre Dame, and — thanks to the latest round of priest-boy sex scandals — even whole orders and seminaries (You know the ones I mean) striving day and night to undermine the Church! There are all kinds of corrupt clergy who are doing more to give the Loser a bad name, just by the atrocity of their examples, than anything we atheists could possibly dream up or execute Ourselves. Not to mention all those influential lay websites and public figures who dish out awesome piles of Catholicism Lite. You know — the ones whose Catholicism amounts to cherry-picking what they like about the Loser’s books and leaving out all the parts they don’t! Seriously, how could We possibly confuse matters among the papists any more than they already have themselves?

And if the Catholic Church has been the cake, some of the Protestants have been perfect frosting. Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, John Hagee, Jeremiah Wright — have a little appreciation for how much preachers like these help Us out! Just think how much harder it was for our Side back in the beginning, when their stupid books were fresher in the Dull’s cerebral cortexes and the Christians were actually being all pious and suffering in the Coliseum and planting their butts more firmly on the quote moral high ground! Ditto, how about another little “thank you!” to those renegades like Warren Jeffs, who pop up alongside their 20 wives and 50 kids regular as desert clockwork, leaving us atheists to hoot and holler profitably about our biggest asset, “religious hypocrisy.” Talk about getting manna from Somewhere!

Add to those any number of historical fiascos whether real or exaggerated, and You’ll see that we atheists can undermine lots of believers, simply by emphasizing how badly a few of them have behaved — and again, we don’t need to get too far off the historical reservation to do it.

And if all else fails, just repeat after me like You’re Freddy Mercury or something: Galileo! Galileo! Galileo!

But we Brights don’t need to, and in fact shouldn’t ever, take the unnecessary further step of crediting our own Side with good behavior. In fact, if I could have offered our new Movement one single bit of advice on this, it would have been: Don’t even go there. But would any of You have listened? Ahem? Unfortunately, just about Nobody has grasped the point.

Here is Mr. Daniel Dennett, for example, waaaaaay out on the very limb I’m warning about: “There is no reason at all why a disbelief in the immateriality or immortality of the soul should make a person less caring, less moral, less committed to the well-being of everybody on Earth than somebody who believes in ‘the spirit’” (italics are His). And Mr. Sam Harris, same: “The fact that faith has motivated many people to do good things does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary (or even a good) motivation for goodness.” Everybody, and not just You guys but others in the history of our Movement, seems to agree about this: the believers must not be allowed to claim that religion at its best makes people behave well — or even better than they would behave without it.

Now if You all just think for a minute, You’ll know as well as I do why this is so damaging for Us: because the actual evidence for claiming that atheism will do as much good in the world as Christianity and other religions is embarrassingly against us. As in, way.

I’m not even talking here about the tired charges made by the Other Side about what happens when atheists actually run the world — mass murder, genocide, concentration camps, and the rest of the 20th-century record. Of course plenty of people do want to rub Our noses in History, the twerps. Papal point man Michael Novak appears to have been running especially annoying defense lately. I mean, that crack of his last year about how Mr. Sam Harris tries to “explain away the horrors of the self-declared atheist regimes in modern history: Fascist in Italy, Nazi in Germany, and Communist in the Soviet Union”: Ouch! That one had to hurt, even if it was totally off the wall in any historic sense. As if any one of those governments could top the Inquisition in a body count! Right?

Equally annoying are the people who argue that the record doesn’t support Your claim that Nazis and Communists and whatnot were really somehow religious underneath — You know, as if Paula on American Idol is secretly a fat bald Male teetotaler whose skin is Naturally almost as tight as Hillary Clinton’s. If You ask me, that mathematician and non-believer David Berlinski gives the “secretly-religious” theory a real smack in his treacherous new attack on Us, The Devil’s Delusion:
What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

In one sentence, too! What a pain Berlinski is. He might as well be working under the table for the Loser. I wouldn’t be surprised. (Idea: The next time You Guys want to burn something, let’s start with his book!)

Now, I know how those trumped-up accusations about Atheist murder and genocide and whatever annoy Everybody — me, too! — so I’m not going to dwell on this any further. I’m worried instead about something related that hasn’t gotten the same attention as the little “excesses” of our recent History, but could be just as harmful to our Side if the Dulls started looking at it. It’s the Fact that the religious people in the West, generally speaking, take better care of the sick and weak than do secularists and atheists, and they know it.

Hospitals, soup kitchens, social services, charitable networks; missions, prison ministries, orphanages, clinics, and all those other institutions embodying the distasteful fixation of the believers on the Weak — now how can we atheists possibly compete with all that? The Catholics: 615 hospitals, 1,600 local agencies under Catholic Charities, over 7,500 schools and 221 colleges and universities; lay organizations like the Knights of Columbus, Black and Indian Missions, Society of Vincent St. Paul, and several hundred more engaged in charitable activity — all just in America. And that’s not to say the papists are the only ones who have it going on. So do the Jews, the Muslims, and the Protestants. Look at the evangelicals with their nonstop loser outreaches of all kinds and their foreign missions too — to which they shovel some $2.5 billion a year.

Then there are the Mormons, and I would most definitely not want us atheists messing with the LDS in any kind of goody-off contest. What’s the number one American city for charitable giving? Salt Lake City. Where are four of the ten American counties where charitable giving is highest? Right next to Salt Lake City. Oh, but you say, that’s all for the Church of Latter-Day Saints, hence suspect. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the state where volunteering — i.e. coaching, collecting food, etc. — is highest is also: Utah.

One of the worst things that’s happened lately for all those claims of Yours that believers and nonbelievers are morally equivalent in their behavior toward others in the Species is another horrible new book. This one’s by econo-brain Arthur C. Brooks and is called Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide: Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. Geeking over what he calls “the fruit of years of analysis on the best national and international datasets available on charity, lots of computational horsepower, and the past work of dozens of scholars who have looked at various bits and pieces of the charity puzzle,” numbers nerd Brooks shows beyond a doubt one fact that our Side should not want out — i.e., that American believers are more “generous” in every sense than the enlightened likes of Us.

Brooks says that religious people give more to charity than non-religious people — in fact, much more: “an enormous charity gap,” he reports, “remains between religious and secular people.”

To see this, imagine two women who are both forty-five years old, white, married, have an annual household income of $50,000, and attended about a year of college. The only difference between them is that one goes to church every week, but the other never does. The churchgoing woman will be 21 percentage points more likely to make a charitable gift of money during the year than the non-churchgoer, and she will also be 26 points more likely to volunteer. Furthermore, she will tend to give $1,383 more per year to charity, and to volunteer on 6.4 more occasions.

Brooks goes on to test the charity gap up, down, and sideways. The results are always the same: “People who pray every day (whether or not they go to church) are 30 percentage points more likely to give money to charity than people who never pray (83 to 53 percent). And people saying they devote a ‘great deal of effort’ to their spiritual lives are 42 points more likely to give than those devoting ‘no effort’ (88 to 46 percent). Even a belief in beliefs themselves is associated with charity. People who say that ‘beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good person’ are dramatically less likely to give charitably (69 to 86 percent) and to volunteer (32 to 51 percent) than people who think that beliefs do matter.”

In fact, it’s not even all dollars and cents. Brooks also reports that religious people volunteer more than seculars — and even give more Species blood!

Now leaving that nasty little bit of Empiricism aside, there’s an even bigger problem for Us in this talk of good works. It’s that the Dulls don’t only do this charitable stuff because their stupid backward books tell them to; they also think that helping the weak is good thing to do just in and of itself. And as long as they persist in believing such an Unnatural thing, it will be hard for us atheists to bring them in by promising that the unbelievers do better at this game. They’re stupid: yes. But not that stupid.

As a Dull child, for example, I personally knew a Catholic priest who left a comfortable suburban parish to start up a mission — in a part of the country of Togo so crappy that it makes Calcutta look like something out of How to Marry a Millionaire. Just the pictures of his well-digging, barefooted, pretty needy-looking African clients probably kept me in the believers’ ranks longer than anything else. I don’t know even know why, mind You! After all, I was not Genetically Related to these people closely at all, so the continuance of their DNA was neither here nor there for me. But something about that priest’s risky involvement with them got under my skin, and it also seemed somehow to reflect well on the religion in whose name he did these things.

That’s the psychological effect of this kind of selfless behavior by others on your average believer. It’s like an addiction with them. I appreciate that Mr. Hitchens at least tried to address this problem with his har-dee-har-har attempted takedown of Mother Teresa. But it failed totally. Even most of Our allies in the secular media (and they are legion as You know!) were embarrassed by it. What’s the point of arguing that You shouldn’t do good things with bad money which seems to be Mr. Hitchens’s only coherent point? What are You supposed to do with bad money — bad things only? Do You know how lame this kind of ‘Pick me! Pick MEEEEEE!’ Variation of atheist journalism looks to everyone else?

For another example, consider how things look if we compare, say, Western Europe (which thankfully is largely post-Christian now) with the U.S. (still occupied outside the major cities by Dulls). Do you remember what happened in secular France in summer 2003? How about some 14,800 “excess deaths” (I love that word “excess”!), mostly among the old, mostly in that citadel of civilization, gay Paree? That’s just an official French estimate by the way; others were higher. Some of those old bodies were never even claimed, just laid out in those plain thin wood rectangular boxes outside Paris like Pottery Barn Teen was having the biggest outdoor mattress and box spring sale ever or something.

Now, everyone official says they know the reasons “why” this happened — because of heat topping 100 degrees during a month when most of the city, including much of the nursing home staff, went on vacation. Well, there’s secular Europe for you: Granmamma’s in a “home” getting heatstroke, and her family, or what remains of it, is too busy with Eurail and Ryanair and vacation ooh-la-la to care. And so Nature got to dispose of a whole lot of Unfit people at one swoop. Now, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, any more than any other real Darwinist would. But my point is, does anyone really believe this would have happened if France were still a Christian country?

Not that plenty of atrocities didn’t happen when France was Christian! But the point is, would this particular atrocity, i.e. the totally freaky abandonment of the old and sick and weak in one of the most modern cities on earth in the name of leisure, have happened if Christianity still colored the way people behave in Europe? Was it thinkable in a world where what the religious call “the family” still had force behind it? For that matter, does anyone think it would have happened if all those geezers had been Muslims rather than post-Christian Europeans?

No, no, and no, and all for the same reason: because organized religion would have intervened. The American Christian response after Hurricane Katrina, to take one counterexample right in our Face, was as fast as the American government’s was lame.

But then again, why should the believers’ edge in caring for the Unfit surprise us atheists? After all, it’s not as if hospitals and soup kitchens abound in our inner cities in Darwin’s name. There’s not exactly a Bright network within the prisons bringing aid and comfort to the people inside. And it’s not like the sociologically Unfit show up at Los Alamos or the Natural History Museum, say, when it’s 30 below outside and they want a blanket and a bowl of free slop. Oh, and how about the many atheist families who have adopted six or eight or ten children, including those with handicaps? Right! I don’t know any either.

And that’s just my point: not only should our Side refuse to compete on fronts like these when there’s no evidence to our credit anyways; we should also be clear among Ourselves that we atheists don’t want the kind of world in which Nature’s rejects, the sick and the old and the frail of any sort, flourish anyway.

That’s what upsets me so about Your collective insistence that atheism can pick up the moral slack of religion in the matter of good works. It’s so hypocritical! Do we really want a society, say, abounding in family-minded people who take in other people’s Unfit offspring? Next thing you know after that, people might get the idea of protecting, say, crippled infants, or people in comas, or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s patients or other unfortunate parasites on our Species. And how Natural is any of that? Answer: not!

No, competing against the believers on grounds of good behavior will do our Side no good at all. I urge you with all my DNA to stay away from that game. The reason why we’ll lose it every time is simple: because their highest authority, the Loser, tells them to care for the sick and weak, whereas Ours, Nature, tells us the opposite.

The trick to end-running it is clear enough: Just keep focused at all times on the evils committed in religion’s name. Never mind how long ago they were! Try not to let the Dulls point out that you are comparing religious apples (i.e. what institutionalized religion did in Europe 600 years ago) with atheist oranges (i.e. what institutionalized atheism did in Europe 60 years ago). Mercifully, as it were, many of them are just ignorant enough of history not to call our bluffs on rhetorical saves like that.

But never, never, never, pretend that we have a code that would in any way render us as attentive to Nature’s Castoffs as the Dulls are, because we don’t — and not only don’t we have one, but in principle we don’t want one. And next, before introducing you to my barfogenic former boyfriend Lobo (!), which is where my own conversion story really begins, I want to get going on a couple other kinds of Bright chatter that need to be dialed down in the future for our Movement’s sake. Remember, I’m only here to help!

Yours Empirically 4-Ever,A. F. Christian

I don’t know if a besetting sin would be considered “a cross that we must bear” or even “a thorn in the flesh”, but even so the prayer below is instructive. To the degree that “our cross” involves dying to self and walking in obedience to God’s will and law, the last line is helpful – that the yoke would be easy and the burden light. O that that would be the reality when it comes to any area of besetting sin, that laying it aside would not be seen as a burden or hard thing to do.

From Valley of Vision..

The Grace of the Cross

Make it the ground of all my comfort
The livliness of all my duties
..the sum of all they gospel promises
The comfort of all my afflictions
The vigour of my love, thankfulness, graces,
The very essence of my religion
And by it give me that rest without rest, the rest of ceaseless praise.

O MY LORD AND SAVIOR,
Thou hast also appointed a cross for me
To take up and carry,
A cross before thou givest me a crown.
Thou has appointed it to be my portion,
But self-love hates it,
Carnal reason is unreconciled to it;
Without the grace of patience I cannot bear it,
Walk in it, profit by it.
O blessed cross, what mercies dost thou bring with thee
Thou art only esteemed hateful by my rebel will,
Heavy because I shirk thy load
Teach me gracious Lord and Savior
That with my cross thou sendest promised grace
So that I may bear it patiently,
That my cross is thy yoke which is easy, and thy burden which is light.

From VoV "The Gift of Gifts"

In the gospel we have the gift of gifts containing the pinnacle of Wonder, Love, Power, and Wisdom.
When we lose sight of the wonder of the gospel, "he came below to raise me above; was born like me that I might become like him", then our hearts become restless and unsatisfied. The result is that we "grab for all the gusto" the world has to offer. We seek wonder in things that are not truly wonder-ful. there is a lack of contentment in our lives - individually or as a society.

This is where we are in our world today. God is small and man is big, but man can't sustain the spiritual and emotional weight we put on him (us). Apart from god man is just a cosmic accident void of wonder.

We were made for wonder and its ultimate measure is found in the mystery of the incarnation and the saving grace of God in Christ. Let that capture your heart and you'll find a deep well of contentment for your soul.

Some Little Contradictions and How They Grew
Another LOSER LETTER.
By Mary Eberstadt

Dear Atheist Sirs again,
I hope that by now You’ve all gotten my first Letter and that Everybody’s had a chance to read it and think over my points and suggestions. It was about sex (!), so I figured You’d all get to it. I know from Your books how interested atheists are in that subject! And no worries: You’ll definitely be hearing more about you-know-what from me in the future, especially once we get to my own personal atheist conversion story.

For now, though, this second Letter is about something else I think we really need to talk about if we Brights are ever going to get serious about pulling other people besides me away from the Loser. One other big problem facing us is this: atheists everywhere, not just You all but going way back into the very beginning of Our evolutionary leap into godlessness, keep talking about how Reason and Logic are totally in Our corner. And for reasons explained below, I think this kind of talk runs the risk of being very off-putting to certain other members of the Species — especially those who for whatever random reason have been exposed even a little to Reason and Logic themselves.

I know; I was one.

It didn’t start out that way. Like so many other Americans, I was what you might call a cradle Dull — a regular and unthinking believing churchgoer for as long as I lived in my parents’ home. There I endured the prayers and rituals and kitschy teachings that all seemed Natural and interesting enough at the time (though thanks to the way You Guys have explained it, I’m now horrified by such ritual child abuse!). I sang in choirs; read the Bible and other religious mumbo-jumbo on my own; attended one or another of Nietzsche’s tombs on Sundays together with biologically related members of my Species. During those years, I must stress again, I was not embarrassed or ashamed of any of this (most cradle Dulls are not), still less understanding of the damage it was doing.

Then came the first, if temporary, break with all that: I went off to an American university for four years (!). There I luxuriated for the first time in the fierce light of Bright ideas, and knew briefly that happy atheist disregard for a great many things that bothered me both before and since.

So far, so American-believer typical. But here’s where my story starts to get twisted. In my second year I was assigned by sheerest Chance to an academic advisor who started me astray. An “agnostic” rather than an “atheist” — a distinction I now know to be a warning bell, though I didn’t then! — this retrograde professor saw to it that I took something that in retrospect appears to be a real potential hassle for Our side: i.e. a class in formal, symbolic logic. Some of You know might know what I mean here: the system made up of “A” and “not-A” and soundness and validity and proofs and all the rest of that superstitious stuff started by Aristotle and buffed up by the medievals.

And this introduction to logic, I have no doubt in retrospect, was the beginning of my years of sliding away from the ideas of the Brights and back into the religious wilderness. The funny thing is, I wasn’t much interested in religion one way or another during those years. It’s just that some contrarian little reflex, apparently kick-started by that introduction to logic, kept twitching inside here and there whenever the subject of god vs. godlessness came up — and time and again it seemed to say that atheism wasn’t answering some pretty big questions.

Like, one contradiction that waved its hand whenever I thought about atheism starts what looks like a simple question: Where was all this God-believing business coming from in the first place? Why was it that — with the exceptions of a few Greeks, Spinoza, and a scattering of other atheist bravehearts whom one could easily name — practically all of human history has been inseparable from belief in some deity?

Now, this question of why human beings have been like this — always leaning toward gods, or “theotropic” as some of You like to say (I love Your big words!) — is trickier than it looks for Us. In fact it’s trickier I think than any of You Guys really understand, which is why it worries me so. For either one produces a satisfying reason for why, say, 99.99999999 percent of humanity has been wrong on that big issue while You have been right; or, failing that, one simply comes right out and says that the entire rest of the Species up to Oneself was stupid as a bag of rocks till the day before yesterday — a stance which does run the risk, or so I used to think, of looking just a teensy bit arrogant.

Not that that stops some atheists from risking it! Bertrand Russell, for one, argued pretty much just that in his famous essay, “Why I am Not a Christian.” He declared religion to be based “primarily and mainly upon fear….Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.” Many other Brights believe the same, I know, including some of You. “Fear, terror and anguish,” says major French atheist Michel Onfray, are “the devices designed to create divinities.”

It’s not like I’m saying He’s wrong, of course! But once again, if You’ll just let me explain from the point of view of a former Dull, it sounds to other people like what we Brights are really saying is, “If most of humanity has turned to religion out of fearfulness, then I must be an exceptionally brave and brilliant person to reject that way out.” Well, maybe Voltaire and Baron d’Holbach and Bertrand Russell were just such beasts, and maybe some of You are too (especially that Mr. Dawkins — grrrrr!). But speaking as someone who is not, it seemed to me better to give some sort of other explanation for theotropism — I mean, something other than the “I’m a universal genius MUHAHAHAHA and I see things that other mere ordinary mortals don’t” kind of explanation. You know, just to avoid this problem of being misconstrued as some unbelievable egomaniac head case or something.

Not that there’s anything wrong with putting oneself first, as Nature intended Us to! But the egomania thing does hurt us in the Dull trenches, especially with girls; trust me.

Anyway, so if that first atheist answer to why religion exists at all doesn’t satisfy, how about the second one that some of You get behind? According to this other explanation, religion is not so much a reaction to bad things as a vain search for good ones — i.e., religion supposedly answers some deep need we have for, say, the God of the Old or New Testament. That’s what big swinging Forebears like Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud would have said — that religious beliefs “are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, most urgent wishes of mankind,” as S.F. once put it. In other words, the Loser is really just Daddy with a bigger wallet and more treats.

Now here’s why I never went along with that other big line of atheist argument, which I tell you as only a former Dull could: because nothing about it rings true. Because that kind of god, i.e. the Judeo-Christian god, is not remotely the kind of deity that I personally would invent to watch over me.

I mean, just think. In Mr. Dawkins’s much-quoted description of the Old Testament God in particular, that particular deity was “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” He’s quite a piece of work! Even when I “believed” in “him,” I’d have grudgingly acknowledged that a list like that has a point.

But don’t You see the problem here? The very character of the Judeo-Christian God that has given You such a romp with the adjectives actually turns out a pretty big problem for the Atheist side. The point Everybody’s missing is that this particular god is hard to live with — so hard that the atheist idea of his having been made up just for the supposed “consolation” of it all is just too LOL. Even at his best, he’s not the sort of supernatural easily cuddled up to. As Graham Greene’s fallen whiskey priest puts it in The Power and the Glory, making the point that even god’s “love” is pretty scary stuff, “It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.” And a Female human like me, too. That’s how I felt even back then, the few times when I bothered to stop and think about it.

So You see, this very scariness of this Judeo-Christian god is seriously bad for Us — or at least bad for the atheist claim that he was invented by people to make them feel better. Because if the human purpose that keeps calling the Loser into existence is some deep search for comfort — if he is just supposed to be some big cosmic Prozac, or a blankie in the sky — I have to tell you this god is seriously not cutting it for me, and not just for me but for a lot of other people as well.

Now on the other hand, a deity who would let me smoke and drink as much as I want, drop five pounds without going a-rex again, string up that bee-ach judge from juvie court (long story), send my boyfriend packing on the grounds that we Humans aren’t “hardwired” to be married for life (so true! But more about that later): now there’s a god this former believer could have gotten her head around! Who turns bread into iPod minis and water into Grey Goose — now we’re getting somewhere! That’s what I’m talkin’ about, if You know what I mean.

But the Loser? That pathetic deity who does nothing but talk about laws, laws, laws, just about every one of which seems aimed at thwarting what I want most at any given moment — that is, when he’s not talking about how I’m supposed to love, love, love…my enemies, of all retarded things? No, that’s not the sort of ultimate “wish-fulfillment” I have in mind at all. I mean, WTF (don’t worry, I won’t spell out the F-word, it’s a condition of my Internet use in here). I hope I’m not getting too personal or giving too much away. But again, I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks the wish-fulfillment theory is a crock because of items like this.

And so is this standard atheist comeback: i.e., that this Judeo-Christian god promises eternity, and that eternity is what the wish-fulfillment is really about; after all, who wouldn’t want to live forever? But the problem here is that the eternity offer, at least the one in Judaism and Christianity, has such crappy strings attached. Who’d want it? Ask Yourself which is more dreamy — a world with no Forever in which you can do whatever you want for as long as you live here; or one with a Forever that you might spend badly if you blow it here? Hmmm, let’s think about that…not; the answer is pretty obvious if what you want most is fun and games in the here and now. You don’t have to be a Natural Scientist to get that one right!

This brings us to one more problem that not one of You guys has addressed no matter how many Dull critics complain about it: All this atheist talk of wish-fulfillment furthermore dumps a big problem of its own down on our Side. After all, if metaphysics is something that humanity just wishes on itself for deep unconscious this-thing-is-bigger-than-the-both-of-us kind of reasons, then where does that fact leave our worldview, i.e. atheism?

As that professor Alister McGrath — a former one of Us who has gone totally over to the other side (don’t worry, I have a whole Letter about those convert traitor problem cases coming later) — has pointed out, the trouble with wish-fulfillment is that it raises the question of what atheists wish for, too. In other words, do we Brights want to abolish the Loser for reasons of our own — because that lets us off the hook to do whatever we please in this world? Is it possible that — as that totally outrageous public enemy Dinesh D’Souza has said — “the reason many atheists are drawn to deny God, and especially the Christian God, is to avoid having to answer in the next life for their lack of moral restraint in this one”?

I hate it when the believers turn Our ideas on their heads that way, don’t You? But You have to admit, there’s a kooky kind of sense in that criticism! That kind of potential embarrassment is one more reason to downplay the wish-fulfillment “theory,” or so this former believer totally advises.

Another problem with learning a bit of logic was this: just as it helped in locating where a real contradiction might be skulking, so did it illuminate other claims as being not contradictory, valid, invalid, and so on. And here again, atheism lost some points in my book for a while.

Take what some Brights have been making of the fact that there are lots of different religions in the world saying plenty of different things. Many of You have been right out front, going on and on about how all this religious diversity somehow “proves” that not one of those religions can be correct. But of course this is what’s called a fallacious inference. The presence of other religions doesn’t affect the truth value of any one of them — any more than having twelve answers to a math problem tells you which one is right, say, or having ten pairs of Manolo Blahniks tells you which ones to wear with a cheetah leather skirt.

And just as one can’t argue against any particular religion by pointing out that another one exists, neither can You really argue with a straight face anyway that god’s existence is somehow “disproven” by the complications of a bureaucracy of saints and clergy, or by the many commandments and rituals of Christendom, no matter how twisted and stupid they may be. I know C.S. Lewis isn’t anybody’s favorite writer here (mine neither!), but I have to admit he got at least this point across. The problem with arguing that Christianity is too complicated to be true, he pointed out, is that the objection doesn’t conform with the evidence of our everyday senses. In real life, just about everything of interest is complicated; why should religion be different? And not only that:
Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match — all at equal distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go farther from the sun….Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity….it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.

Now back to our Movement! I bet that after all this constructive criticism of mine You’re all really starting to wonder how I learned to love atheism and ignore the contradictions! Aren’t You? I hope so!! Well, all I can say for now is that it goes to show that there are plenty of things in life that are more important than logic — and they don’t all come from a locked medicine cabinet, either! Not to worry Guys — as Michael says to Pop in The Godfather, “We’ll get there.”

Before that though, I want to take us on another detour into some other rhetoric that we atheists need to jettison and fast, because even the Dulls are beginning to realize how We’re handing them plenty of ammunition with it: i.e., what the losing Side would call the question of “good works.”

Adaptively (and Helpfully!) Yours,A.F. Christian