"The Doublethink of Liberal Theology "

I was a Christian for 20 years and I did the doublethink too. I think the increasing cognitive dissonance over it helped me in my journey back to my natural state of atheism.


The Doublethink of Liberal Theology

<snip>

I’m not trying to alienate my friends that adhere to liberal Christian theology, but as much as I think fundamental Christian theology is riddled with plot holes, contradictions, morally vacant teachings, cognitive dissonance and doublethink; the liberal version of the religion has these detractions as well. Why? Once you start admitting that the Biblical stories that were once held as absolute truth are not historical, are instead allegorical, and admit that certain tenets are actually harmful if not immoral; then what do you have to stand on? What is the foundation of the belief? What is the rock? If the Christian belief system is based on scripture; which it is, then once pieces are removed from that scripture by discarding them or changing them to suit modern morals (that evolved away from biblical morals via secular reasoning, thank you), then the basis of your belief system is weakened. It becomes more and more unstable and untenable. I have previously likened this to a Jenga game. The outdated and undesirable blocks are pulled out from the tower, altered or explained away via convoluted rationalizations otherwise known as “theology” and the whole thing starts to sway. Pretty soon it’s going to fall over.

I can hear the apologist line now saying I am throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Well...yeah. When talking about religious scripture it is an all or nothing proposition if you are claiming an ultimate universal truth. If Adam and Eve didn’t exist then where does Original Sin originate? If there is no Original Sin then why did Jesus need to die on the cross? If Jesus didn’t need to die on the cross, then YHWH really is an immoral monster. It’s a domino effect.

<snip>

The intellectual dishonesty arises when in any conversation that turns to belief it is perfectly OK to question an atheist or other beliefs, but any question of their religion turns into a circular argument of soft philosophy that can be used to justify anything! There is a readymade excuse for any critique. It’s all allegory. It’s just parables. It’s not meant to be taken literally. All religion could be correct. None of this is defensible and yet none of it is provably wrong. It’s all invisible pink unicorns and teapots in orbit. They have gone in the opposite direction of fundies that hang onto every last word of the Bible as literal truth and ignore obvious contradictory facts. The liberal Christians just make it up as they go along because why not?

<snip>

Maybe this. Maybe that. The above scriptural quotes would disagree. Unless they too are only allegory. How much of scripture is allegory? Is it allegory if Jesus “said” that the only way to God is through Him? How much is considered true? Apparently for liberal Christians only what your reason allows you to find palatable with minimum cognitive dissonance. That’s when the doublethink kicks in.

<snip>

:popcorn:

I can see why they don't want to even acknowledge them, let alone provide some answers.

I'm surprised I haven't had, at bare minimum, the customary accusations that I'm "attacking" people's deeply held beliefs. They'll probably surface at some point.

commentaries atheists and skeptics have been making for generations. Nothing new there.

:shrug:

And the article isn't mine, though I agree with the author.

Your posts are a case in point.


A prime example.

Proof positive.

QED

Just thought I would post it before someone else does! I think we know who the usual suspects are.

No wonder r/t is a sorry joke to most DUers

that the places where the Bible presents God as violent really just cover up and sacralize human violence, among other things. My liberal Christian friends cling to ideas I can no longer accept.

about god, what are the parts of the bible where god is otherwise?

1. Fundamentalism
2. Atheism
3. Living in the tension.

The first two require minimal intellectualism. The third is where true faith lives.

1. Those who oversimplify.
2. Those who actually know what the fuck is going on.
;)

Are guilty of using logical fallacy to prove their point like, oh, false alternatives.

Or do you mean the faith that allows people to readily act in opposition to their alleged beliefs?

it seems to me that "True Faith" however you wish to define it is the one that requires minimal intellectualism, in addition, who are you to question fundamentalist faith? What makes it not a "True Faith"?

The first two require minimal intellectualism. The third is where true faith lives.

True faith requires intellectual dishonesty. I speak from experience.

Atheism is entirely consistent with known facts. For example nothing about atheism contradicts evolution, cosmology, sociology, and functional idea or ethics or morality. Religion contradicts all those things. One point of view is right and the other is wrong.

Living in tension means being unwilling to admit your faith structure is simple untenable because you are afraid of the implications.

That seems to be your M.O. when you lose an argument.

There's no room for anything else is what you're saying.

Because claiming such an intellectually sophomoric position means the foundation of it is that humanity's understanding of God must equate to the ANE culture's understanding and anything past the 1st or 2nd Century (or even 4th/5th if you start with the Canon) doesn't count.

It's a ridiculous position.

It doesn't HAVE to be anything.

Not sure what you mean by ANE culture. But there is no understanding of god, only imagined understandings of gods. How can you claim to understand something when you have consistently failed to show it exists? The ramblings of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and the rest of them are all based on guess work with no basis in fact.

Sophmoric is continuing to insist Santa Claus is real after your folks admitted he isn't. Stop living in "tension" and accept reality.

And if you want to discount Augustine, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, etc., then you'll also have to discount

- The pilgrims and the puritans
- The colonial preachers who rallied the faithful to the revolution
- The abolitionist preachers
- The social gospel movement of the late 19th/early 20th century
- Women's suffrage
- Dr. King and the religious civil rights leaders

But, since you stick to a literalist interpretation...

- Slave owners
- The Confederate South
- The Klan
- Fred Phelps
- Pat Robertson
- Falwell and the religious right

...are all valid because they read scripture for exactly what it says and no more.

"And if you want to discount Augustine, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, etc., then you'll also have to discount

"- The pilgrims and the puritans"

I do dismiss their religious beliefs.

"- The colonial preachers who rallied the faithful to the revolution"

Wait, what? I'd be curious know their theological justification since the NT says to obey ones master and to obey Christian masters especially well.

"- The abolitionist preachers"

Admire their humanity, dismiss their theology which, in point of fact, directly contradicts their purported religion.

"- The social gospel movement of the late 19th/early 20th century"

Yup.

"- Women's suffrage"

What the hell does THAT have to do with Christianity? Christians were the most vocal and persistent opponents of women's suffrage. The NT pretty much tells women to STFU. Christianity and the other Abrahamic religious have to be the most misogynistic ideologies of all time. Women's suffrage happened despite Christianity, not because of it.

"- Dr. King and the religious civil rights leaders"

The odds that an anti-segregation activist was motivated by Christianity were about even. Those in power who agreed with segregation to a man justified it based on Christianity. As with women's rights, civil rights happened despite Christianity, not because of it. King was a Christian minister, to be sure, and he relied on the lingua franca of the Bible for metaphores. But his message was secular, humanist, socialist even. King and the abolishionist preachers are examples of people who put humanity before theology and such people occur far to infrequently.


"But, since you stick to a literalist interpretation...

- Slave owners
- The Confederate South
- The Klan
- Fred Phelps
- Pat Robertson
- Falwell and the religious right

...are all valid because they read scripture for exactly what it says and no more."

No, they are not valid for the simple reason that the scripture they rely on is not valid. Christianity (and the others) are based on a fantasy. But they are all canonical, and far more so than eccumenical Christians. The only point where I think they deviate from canonical Christianity is in greed and possibly hypocrisy, both of which are pretty generally condemned in the Bible, if not by subsequent followers who are always eager to accomodate Earthly power.

While the ANE culture did lack understanding in science, physics, etc., their spirituality was much more advanced.

You see, they lived in the tension between mythos and logos and understood that there were multiple levels of understanding to the stories passed down through oral tradition.

Fundamental literalism really didn't come into vogue until the confluence of two events, the sacking of Rome in the 16th Century and the invention of the printing press.

So, you see, it's actually the all true/all false position of the literalists that's the aberration, not liberal Christianity.

All that is fine for literary criticism, but by saying people can read into it what they want, it deprives it of any authoritative meaning. At that point I have to ask in what way is it a holy book? History shows at least parts of these texts were taken as authoritative for centuries before printing.

I'm not taking about fundamentalism. I'm talking about the basic factual assertions of religion, the main one being that there is a god of some kind. That proposition is either true or false. A universe governed by supernatural deities is fundamentally different than one with out them. For the thesis to be correct, the antithesis must be wrong. And until that question is answered in a way that does not require faith, any myths based on the assumption that gods are real is speculative. Besides the counter-indications are such that we can pretty definitively conclude that gods are nothing but figments of human imagination. The remaining gaps in our knowledge are simply too small to accomodate gods.

It would just seem that way to those who see the world as being only black or white.

"A universe governed by supernatural deities is fundamentally different than one with out them."

How so? Do you have empirical evidence to back this up?


And I did say that literalism came into vogue after that time, not that it didn't exist beforehand. It just was a minority position until science brought the printing press.

...and Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris do far more thorough jobs explaining them than I have time for here. Suffice it to say that the universe and especially the world would be entirely inexplicable if we were to assume that a benevolent, powerful, creative force were behind it. A naturally occurring universe and naturally occurring life require no such assumption. We know for a fact that god had no part in the development of terrestrial life. Evolution, depending at once on random chance and the pitiless editing power of natural selection is an unintelligent, deterministic process. It could not work the way we see it if it were being directed. And if god has nothing to do with the development of life, in what way is he god? (BTW, there are similar explanations for how life got started, so there is no refuge there.) The only way liberal believers get around that is by constantly changing definitions to accomodate new information that invariably excludes god from this area or that.

It's not a question of how I see the world. It's a question of how the world really is. Questions of existence are black and white. Sometimes, if something exists a little, then it exists. If there is one drop of water on a planet, then water exists on that planet. Other things require a minimum level of existence to exist. A car does not exist unless there is enough of it to function as a car. God is of the latter variety. As his functions get whittled away those who understand the implications of scientific discovery, at some point those functions drop below the threshold of what a god is. My own view is that happened with the discovery of natural selection. Once it became clear that we were not created, god outlived his usefulness. Think about it. In classical times, god lived in heaven which was literally the sky and hell was underground. All weather, geologic events, diseases, the harvest, reproduction, morality etc. etc. were all run by god. As time wore on discoveries replaced divine explanations for natural ones, god's purvue became smaller and increasingly theoretical. Now there is nothing for him to do at all.

Accusations of "heresy" and "heretics" go back to the very beginning of Christians scripture. The idea that there is only one true interpretation of the text and that those that hold a different view are fundamentally wicked is as old as Christianity itself.

Also, I'm interested in the "confluence" of two events that occurred eighty years apart.

Overall, I think you are presenting a false dichotomy between those who believe literally in the text and those who don't. You are leaving out the vast majority of people, those who don't think the bible is a source of knowledge and truth at all. What about Muslims, Hindus, Parsi, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Shintos, and aboriginal animists/pagans? Do they reject Christianity because they are literalists? You are completely disregarding the entire spectrum of human belief and custom that lies outside of your own holy book. These people are neither liberal theologians nor those damned literalists - they don't regard the Christian Bible as a source of knowledge at all, and it likely didn't enter into their religiously formative experiences in any way.

For my part, I am not an atheist because of what's in the bible. It doesn't come down to what is in your text. There is a whole world of views out there, and yours is not the end-all be-all of the discussion. In truth, it doesn't really matter what the bible says. The evidence just doesn't stack up for the god hypothesis. The universe is far older, far more vast, and far grander than we knew when we came up with this "God" notion, and it doesn't cut it anymore. The human race is of vanishingly small significance and the sightings of god resemble simple projection too much. In short, it doesn't matter whether your god really, truly murdered the whole world in a flood, or incinerated two cities in a towering inferno, or commanded Joshua and David to commit genocide and crimes against humanity. There is so much more to the discussion than that, and to insist that atheists have an overly narrow view on those insignificant points is, I think, to miss the point.

Thereby proving the point of the article.

...reject reality.

...or rather what I wanted to believe just did not square with reality. Either God loves us and is watching out for us (badly) or else we evolved by natural selection. Either faith was a virtue and doubt a vice or else investigation and verification (doubt) was the virtue and reliance on authority was a fallacy. Both cannot be true.

Either/or does not give you an exhaustive category. What bout neither/nor? What about three or three hundred other possibilities. What if there is growth and evolution in religious thought? If as ine every other rational discipline, what is said in one generation is refined or even discarded in the next? That is how science works. So Jesus said, "You have heard it said of old, but I say to you....."

you are sunk already.
Both higher rand lower biblical criticism, and the understand that religion, like everything else, is evolutionary is critical to understanding . I doubt you would take the same line about any other discipline, history, science, for instance, and hold that to question any of its past statements nullifies the whole thing. This is why we have Biblical scholars. Why not try reading what is really being said in America's best seminaries and journals.

Do you believe that jesus was the human form of god, that jesus performed supernatural miracles, that jesus was killed on a crucifix and that jesus was literally resurrected from the dead?

Its a simple yes/no type of question.