Religion
Related: About this forumSix reasons why I think Stephen Fry is wrong...
I thought I would jump on the bandwagon, but with commentary!
http://www.irishcatholic.ie/article/six-reasons-why-i-think-stephen-fry-wrong
I'll skip the beginning of the article, and just go to the list of reasons, by the way, this article was written by a priest.
[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]1. I think Stephen’s wrong when he says the moment you banish God, life becomes “simpler, purer, cleaner...”[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]Firstly, not one of the problems, sufferings, tragedies and disasters that Fry would like to blame on God, goes away. Even worse, as Dmitry Karamazov says, ‘without God… everything is permitted’.
So when Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Enver Hoxha and Pol Pot ‘banished God’, they banished millions of human beings too.
OK, first things first, I don't remember Stephen Fry claiming suffering will disappear when you stop believing in gods/the God. My impression, from the interview, is that he's basically saying you don't have to justify why such suffering exists, and rather, can work on reducing and hopefully eliminating much of it some day. For example, curing or preventing disease, etc.
As far as his examples with all those characters, first off, didn't Hitler defend himself against the Jew? As he justified his hatred in Mein Kampf? As for the rest, what was the point in bringing them up, except to troll? Do we really need to list out all the tyrants that used Christianity, or any other religion, through the ages as justification for their atrocities?
[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]2. I think Stephen’s wrong when he says we “have to spend our lives on our knees” thanking God.[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]Jesus put such a priority on loving our neighbour and forgiveness that he said if there’s anything between you and your brother, you must sort that out first, then make your offering at the altar.
Malcolm Muggeridge was surprised to find out that the source of Mother Teresa’s and her followers’ tireless service of Jesus in the poorest, were their hours of prayer to Jesus.
Well, let's just say the Jesus of the Bible was not what we would call a consistent figure, The Gospel according to Luke:
14:25 Now large crowds were going along with Him; and He turned and said to them,
14: 26 "If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.
14:27 "Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.…
Here's more lovely examples, from the Gospel of Matthew:
10:31 Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.
10:32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.
10:33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.
10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
10:35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
10:36 And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
10:37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
It seems to me that Jesus, and God as well, seemed to think this whole worshiping him thing is very important, more important than your own family, much less the rest of humanity. Granted, this is, in my opinion, one of the worst ideas present in the Bible.
Oh, and a point about Mother Theresa, she and her organization did a great many things, not many of them helped to alleviate suffering, because she thought it was good. She prayed all right, prayed many of her "patients" to early graves, and in great pain too.
[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]3. I think Stephen’s wrong when he thinks God won’t be able to answer his question: “bone cancer in children, what’s that about?”[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]Chiara Luce Badano, who died of painful bone cancer at 19 in 1990 was beatified in 2000 because of how the lucid love shining through the last year and a half of her life. My favourite of her various remarks then is: “If you want it, Jesus, I want it too.”
Even though it cost her a lot, when she was still able to she spent time walking around the wards with a drug-dependent girl who suffered from serious depression.
This meant getting out of bed despite the pain caused by the huge growth on her spine. “I’ll have time to rest later,” she said.
Not all of us would have her courage, but she shows how God can bring greater good even from the terrible bad of bone cancer.
This is NOT an example of God bringing about a "greater good". I know he's reciting a belief in Redemptive Suffering, can I just point out how fucking awful that idea is? Seriously, if God actually answered with that, I would spit in his face, ugh. The problem is this, God is supposed to be Omnipotent, and Omniscience, which means he knows exactly how much suffering we are about to go through, and its well within his power to prevent it. In addition, in this example, no violation of free will takes place!
What I see in this example is a woman in tragic circumstance using her faith as both a comfort and a guide through the worst experience in her life, and she may have influenced others in a positive way because of this. That's making the best out of a bad situation, may we all do the same if under similar stresses. But no God was involved, obviously, it was all her, and the credit goes to her. Having an Omnipotent God who could have stopped her suffering, perhaps even let her live longer to do more good works, but didn't, lessens the God, does it not?
[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]4. I think Stephen’s wrong when he blames God for creating a world “where there is such misery… it’s utterly, utterly evil”.[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]He’s mixing up what we can experience as bad: sufferings caused by the way our universe is set up, animal suffering, human illness – with evil. If you don’t want all the pain due to crashes, falls, earthquakes, tsunamis and so on, then you’d better head for another universe.
Our universe is kept together by gravity, so blaming God for gravity is like blaming him for creating the universe.
The same goes for animal suffering: if you don’t want animals suffering, then stop at chemical elements, because even the tiniest bacteria eat each other to keep alive, and without seals and salmon on the menu, Alaskan bears could only eat animal conservationists.
On this one, I'll give the Father a point, Fry did mix up his terms, to a certain extent, but I think that's all it is. The Father actually brought up the point Stephen Fry tried to make, he was blaming God for creating the universe this way, assuming it was created by a god at all. This doesn't make the universe evil, but it does make the god evil, assuming they are a 3O god. At the very least, its a deistic god, and that's the most positive spin I can put on this being a theistic universe.
[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]5. I think Stephen’s wrong when he blames God for the injustice that’s in the world.[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]n Dostoevsky’s great meditation on the cause of evil in the world, The Brothers Karamazov, it’s quite clear human beings not God are at fault. But if Stephen would prefer not go beyond the level of say, giraffes, fine, since from a Christian point of view, all animals are still in the Garden of Eden.
Once you accept that human beings are free, part of the bargain is that they’re free to hate as well as to love.
God could have stopped with the animals, but as the Book of Job tells us, he preferred to take the risk and bet that some of us, at least, would return his love with ours.
OK, the interview I saw seemed to have restricted Stephen Fry's answers to those involving the natural world, a worm that burrows in eyes, bone cancer, etc. In other words, things that humans have little to no control over, at least not until recently, and as problems to be solved.
I will say that yes, people are responsible for their actions, and also responsible for their inaction insofar as they have the power to alter things, and chose not to. If, through inaction, harm was visited upon someone else, are we not held responsible? Why would a god, who is omnipotent, rather than limited, such as ourselves, held to a lower standard?
[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]6. I think Stephen’s wrong when he invokes the Greek gods as rationally superior to the God of Christianity.[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]From Homer to the great mystic philosophers Xenophanes, Heraclitus and Parmenides, the tragic poets, Aeschylus and Sophocles, and later, to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the 400 year long Greek odyssey of spirit is a purification of the mythic Greek gods.
Just as Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion never mentions the Greeks discovery of God’s existence by reason, so Stephen seems unaware of the God they called ‘the One’, ‘Logos’, or with Plato and Aristotle, simply ‘the God’, ‘the True’, ‘the Good’, ‘the Understanding of Understanding’.
No one’s making him accept Jewish or Christian revelation, but if wants to claim it’s reasonable to be an atheist, then he’d better show that wonderful Greek tradition the same respect Christian thinkers have done from Justin Martyr to Thomas Aquinas to Edith Stein.
OK, so this one is interesting, I must have saw a different interview, because this was NOT the argument put forward, what I saw was Stephen Fry saying that the Greek Gods were more logically coherent as entities of this world because they were limited, they were not all good, they had the same desires and flaws as humans, the difference is they were immortal and powerful(but not all-powerful). Think of Thor, from either the Marvel Universe or Norse Mythology, either works.
To be honest, I expected more from a priest, oh well.
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edhopper
(33,573 posts)but, "To be honest, I expected more from a priest, oh well." Really, why?
I would expect a priest to misunderstand Fry's arguments, this one did not disappoint.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)Always a letdown though when they promise that theology is so much more advanced and nuanced than what atheists are criticizing... and then never state what that advanced, nuanced stuff is.
rug
(82,333 posts)Humanist_Activist
(7,670 posts)being someone with a greater than remedial education in theology, that a priest would be able to give an answer, any answer, that didn't fall back on logical inconsistencies, misinterpretations, and outright lying.
edhopper
(33,573 posts)He is not trying to win the argument. Just reassure those that believe.
Humanist_Activist
(7,670 posts)Catholics.
I actually found it through link chaining with the author of the piece rug posted, he's a contributor at "The Irish Catholic".
ON EDIT: I sometimes do that, as opposition research or out of curiousity, go to conservative and religious websites, and see what they are arguing, its a source of amusement and frustration, in equal amounts.
edhopper
(33,573 posts)much more frustrating than amusing.
More of the religious ideas that atheist argue against that don't really represent "real believers". As they say.
rug
(82,333 posts)
Iggo
(47,550 posts)Period.
("Period" equals "I stopped reading right there."
Humanist_Activist
(7,670 posts)Mary I and all that.
I mean, Stalin was an evil man, but not because of atheism, and he sure as hell didn't use it to justify his persecutions.
