Something I've seen quite a bit on Mumsnet is confusing me slightly

[GeorgianMumto5]

...I often read statements along the lines of, 'I'm an atheist because I there is no God,' and, 'I don't want my child to be taught about your fairy stories [religious teachings],' which is all fair enough but what's confusing me is, aren't these just people's opinions? One person can't provide definitive proof of the absence of a deity, anymore than another can provide definitive proof of the existence of a deity, surely? Or am I missing something?

This is a genuine query - I'm interested to know. I'm not trying to stir up arguments, although I'm happy to be argued with and told that I'm wrong.

As a person with a faith, I'd say it's all a matter of faith - either you believe it, or you don't. If I was without faith, I guess I'd say it's a matter of opinion. In any case, I don't get the absolute confidence people have that there is no God. I think there is, but I couldn't prove it and wouldn't think to tell another peson that I'm right on that topic and they're wrong. Where does all the certainty come from?

Whoah. Headinhands, so many questions.. all important.

Yahweh, if that's how you want to refer to him (though I don't), is love. In the OT his love is interpreted as law. Why? Because the people doing the interpreting are childlike. Not sure about your dcs, but mine when young would interpret even the kindest remark in very absolute terms; even now, anything mildly critical is often reported as 'daddy/Mummy doesn't like X'. But we make rules for our dcs and enforce them because dcs will stumble into the fire if we don't. Later, we begin to let go. So it is with humanity; god began as law, as we do with dcs, but then lets go of our hands a little, in the person of Jesus, who actually busted up and spifflicated a lot of petty laws.

The one clear rule for him was love, endless, unstoppable love. So it can be for us. Because if you love someone, there doesn't have to be law; you just want what they want. The best kind of rule is the rule of love; me last, you first.

You do this every single day with your dcs - parenthood is incredibly evolved and spiritual. So when you think of what's best for them, that's not always going to be the same as what they at this moment want. Hence the conflicts.

Any clearer now? If we just went around acting as though we loved one another, that would be the best kind of law; you don't have to have bubbling feelings of love, more the wish to just stop on your way to the shops and smile and help the old lady across the road.

Thanks for your reply. I still don't see how you can compare parenting with god's actions in the OT. I couldn't imagine drowning my children or setting bears on them or sending people to kill them for me (apart from the young women )

If we just went around acting as though we loved one another, that would be the best kind of law

Yes indeed. More or less the second of Jesus' two commandments.

Its his first commandment - and the first several of the OT's 10 - which obviously atheists can't agree with. It struck me reading your post that while parents do lovingly lay down rules for their children, I've never heard any of them say 'The most important rule of all is that you love me'. Because true parental love is unconditional. If there was a God who was a loving Father why would he need to put in the stuff about loving him and being a jealous god?

well, headinhands, we weren't talking about god's way of enforcing his laws, but about the laws themselves, and that was what I meant in using the metaphor of a parent and a child. Personally, I have never set bears on my children - glad to hear you haven't either. But while the bear story is horrible, as is the flood, all of us also enforce the rules we make for our children - don't we? If only by critical glares, in our kindly middling way..?

That said, I also see the bears and even the flood as like a folktale, about the terrible and real danger of loss of love and life in trivia, including the trivia of personal abuse (the bear story). Not a literal death, then, but the loss of the best self...

Grimma, I see exactly what you mean about the need to love god seeming alien to the need to love. I often feel that myself, and struggle with it. The best defence I can offer is that we need to love god, not vice versa. It can be and ought to be the beginning and the end of all love.

The NT challenges us with the question of how we can love those who may not be very lovable, who are rude, or ungrateful, or sullen. A thing that's distinctive about Jesus is that he said it's easy to love the people who are your friends; it gets tough when you love your enemies, the surly taxi driver and the neighbour who always parks across your driveway. One way to that might be - for some people - to think of them as friends of a friend, to remind yourself that they are infinitely precious to god.

It is rather disingenuous to define god simply as 'love' or even as the instruction to love. My own philosophical and spiritual beliefs include showing compassion or love to everyone, but I don't hold any belief in any sort of deity. Most people would say that I am not a Christian (or of any other religion). Most religious beliefs are not about general ideas of how we should behave, but are based on very select ideas taken from a particular religious text. What fascinates me is that people who hold religious beliefs can be so sure that what they believe is the 'right' thing to believe, yet people who don't believe what they do have it all wrong. Yet at the same time that it doesn't matter for them if they have got it slightly wrong, but it matters terribly if someone else has not got it right.

The best defence I can offer is that we need to love god, not vice versa. It can be and ought to be the beginning and the end of all love.

That of course is a viewpoint which we'll have to agree to differ on, since I don't believe there is a god any more and its made no difference in my capacity for love.

Treating people 'lovingly' can be done simply by remembering that each life is precious of itself. The golden (or platinum) rule is of course not unique to christianity or other theistic religions.

"I also see the bears and even the flood as like a folktale, about the terrible and real danger of loss of love and life in trivia, including the trivia of personal abuse (the bear story). Not a literal death, then, but the loss of the best self."

And I see ^ as clutching at straws.

Sending bears to tear children into bloody bits just because they have made fun of the bald head of a guy God likes... It is a shocking story, with no morals that could possibly pass as "good" in this day and age.

"Real danger of loss of love and life in trivia" but surely inexcusable when the party dealing out this loss is your God. How can you possibly reconcile your "love" for this possibly imaginary deity, knowing that He ordered and executed bloody murder of little children? (Does it even matter that it's "over trivia"?)

"If we just went around acting as though we loved one another, that would be the best kind of law"

God could have created us that way. Instead, he created humans selfish, looking out for themselves and those nearest to them at the probable expense of everyone else.

These are all paradoxes that are quite impossible to reconcile with the standard Christian party line of love, love, and more love flowing down from God to his children, and from the faithful to each other etc. The contrived stories of "Bible said that but it actually means" etc that people use to make sense of it all are quite fascinating examples of cognitive dissonance.

See sieg I'm relieved you see fit to denounce the flood and bear incident and other wanton brutality as folktales. It shows you are bringing your own independent morality to bear when reading the bible, and thank god for that! I'm not much different from you in that I think all of it is exaggerated folktales, not just the gruesome stuff. I've let go of the need to make it fit and applied the same logic for the whole shebang, not just the bits I don't like. I don't need to use terms such as context to squish yahweh into a less abhorrent character where the vile stuff needs to go through some sort of contextual laundry system. But the bits that seem nice are just taken at face value. how does that seem logical?

I appreciate that we all discipline our kids but drowning and raping are never the actions of a parent acting in a good way are they? Why would such a loving god be happy for his character to be so denigrated and vilified?

If you asked me to write an autobiography of your life so far wouldn't you be if I included several lengthy chapters on how some people mistakenly think you used to go around killing babies and setting packs of vicious dogs on small children if they upset you? You wouldn't think to get that bit taken out? Why would you be happy for that to be included?

thistledew, I'd like that explained too.

It is important 'to love God and love thy neighbour as thyself' because while love is important the existence of a being bigger or greater than oneself is even moreso. This is to counterbalance the idea that the individual is the be all and end all of everything. The idea of God here encompasses all the law and all the hope offered by Christianity. The idea of the individual does not because individuals all have 'independent morality' and the result is not always pleasant, or a world where any sort of morality gets a word in edgeways.

Again, lots of straw men making an appearance in the last few posts I see.

Headinhands, read Sieglinde's post again, She did not say what you said she said.

What about the large swathes of humanity who live wonderfully moral lives outside of Christianity? What about those inside whose morals are lacking? How are we to explain that data if Christiany has something supernaturall about it?

You'll have to point out the strawmen to me? I think some of my points are extrapolations of common Christian logic rather than a point by point critique of Sieg's post if that helps. Maybe you could address the points raised in the post?

If all the 'bad' bits in the Bible are just people getting things wrong, then isn't it as likely that the 'good' bits are just as wrong? On the one hand many Christians often talk about a direct experience of god talking to them, which should be taken as real and genuine and on the other hand they talk about other people getting so very much wrong. It just fundamentally doesn't hang together for me.

Half of my family is very religious, with several who have been 'born again'. I love them very much, but to me they appear sadly deluded. Of course they see me as rejecting Christianity which no doubt makes them a great deal more sad than my total puzzlement about their beliefs makes me. The two viewpoints are just incompatible in my experience, so we do our best not to talk about it at all.

I have no real problem with the idea that we all approach the world from our own point of view, placing self and then family first, then community and then possibly some greater community after that if we are wired that way. Evidence suggests that is how people work, I can't see that adding religious belief makes very much difference, in general people with faith (or perhaps more accurately people who belong to organized religions) behave no differently toward their fellows than those without.

"Treating people 'lovingly' can be done simply by remembering that each life is precious of itself. The golden (or platinum) rule is of course not unique to christianity or other theistic religions."

Exactly Grimma.

I think the idea of loving everyone is a bit odd. Acting well towards people surely means treating people you don't love (or even like, or perhaps dont know...) with decency, respect and fairness. Why do you need to summon up some kind of cod emotion for them in order to treat them well?

I don't think most Christians do this - they just treat people well in the normal way. I tend to give who do go round indiscriminately loving everyone a wide berth. It is either fake, or a bit bonkers.

I think the idea of loving everyone is a bit odd. Acting well towards people surely means treating people you don't love (or even like, or perhaps dont know...) with decency, respect and fairness.Why do you need to summon up some kind of cod emotion for them in order to treat them well?

'Loving' in the sense I meant, and I'm sure Sieglinde also meant isn't about emotion at all. Its about what you do for someone, not how you feel about them. Its well illustrated by the parable of the Good Samaritan - I may not believe too much else of the Bible nowadays but that one is a keeper. It demonstrates the difference between false religiousity and true humanity.

(Of course I don't mean by the last sentence that all religious people are false, just to clarify!)

Sorry for my absence - busy times. Grimma, and Hima, of course you can think of each life as precious in itself, and of course that can work - and of course it's also the case that people of every faith can fail to act lovingly towards one another. However, a religion of love is part of the history of loving kindness to one another. Think: the Romans had shedloads of slaves, who were often routinely slaughtered when their lord died. This is unimaginable in a xtian world, though of course keeping slaves did happen in some places but NEVER without criticism - by itself paganism didn't and couldn't come up with a cogent critique of slavery itself.

Yes, Grimma - I specifically said love in this sense is not an emotion at all. Love is an act, not a feeling. The whole point of making it a law is that you have to behave lovingly to people whether or not you feel affection, and no way would I express that by producing boak-inducing displays of faux-feelings over some stranger. \part of kindness/love is tact.

In exactly the same way, when people say they love god, they don't mean that they well up for him as if he was a cute cuddly lamb. Yes, exactly Grimma - the good samaritan is def. a keeper, whether or not you buy anything else in the NT - you love god BY loving each other. If we really try to do this, I honestly can't see how it can be harmful, and if I'm deluded, ok - I can't prove I'm not, though of course I don't think I am, but if it does a few old ladies crossing roads some good, ok.

Btw, headinhands, I'm not trying to defend every single individual OR xty collectively - just explaining my own pov.

Now to the curly qn of the truth of scripture... it just seems to me that there is a big generic difference between the OT and most of the NT. The NT is so much more, well, realist, largely involving believable conversations and only a sprinkling of supernatural events, almost all of them kindnesses - healing, feeding. By contrast, the OT seems laden with narratives that work - if they do work - like folklore - containing some wisdom, but often using narratives very alien to the way we see the world now, after Rome, after humanism. That's why I don't think we need to chuck out the 'good' bits of the NT with the bears. But some parts of the OT are absolutely rich and resonant too - try the Song of Songs... marriage and sex and the longing for god.

mathanxiety, your point regarding morality is interesting. An objective reading of the Bible shows a God whose morality is dubious at best and downright abhorrent at worst (perpetrating huge massacres, promoting slavery, insisting that a raped woman be married to her rapist, punishing people for what their ancestors did etc). As an example of morality, the OT at least downright sucks.

But, of course, many modern-day Christians will say that those passages are allegorical or mistranslated or otherwise not to be understood as they are actually presented. And many modern-day Christians will choose to play down some parts of what the Bible says (eg, the don't eat shellfish bits, or the sell all your stuff and give it to the poor bits) while choosing to concentrate other parts (eg, the love your neighbour bits, and the marriage is between a man and a woman bits). And then there are the people who largely ignore the Bible's teachings and, instead, work on making their own personal relationship with God.

That's all well and good. But it does seem quite a lot at odds with the idea that there is a single, overriding morality. It seems to me that every Christian has their own unique take on their religious obligations and beliefs and so each will have their own unique personal morality. Just like the non-religious do. So what's the difference?

snorbs, speaking as a xtian, though not sure about the modern day, :) I do understand what you mean about the pick n'mix feel some of it has.

I'm def. in the last class of people you name - making my own relationship with god - and for me the overriding law is love, which is why I think people who condemn same-sex marriage aren't on the same page as me.

Because love is the only law I respect, I think a basically Kantian ethical system makes sense. But then, I also think it follows that love IS an overriding law, and for all of us, all the time. I'm not a fundamentalist, but to me it's very plain in the gospels. I am delighted to note that many humanists agree that love is the law (not mushy feeling love, but love in practice).

I admit I find it fascinating that one can acknowledge the OT as a wonderfully diverse and rich piece of folklore, which I agree with, while still holding the belief that the NT is largely an honest account. Most works of fiction contain believable conversations but it's not evidence for its veracity. It's likely that the person writing those conversations like any author would have a fair idea how to manufacture a believable piece of dialogue?

If you maintain that the OT is folklore I'm intriqued as to what what your views on creation are? Jesus refers to the OT himself and doesn't seem to allude to it being a type of wisdom via folklore He seemed to think the flood was a real event.

hh, the NT is very very unlike the dialogues produced in most of the ancient world. compare it to Plato and you will see what I mean. Or to Lucian. So the idea of how to manufacture dialogue, which must be generic, actually attests to the NT's realism/truth in that the men who wrote it weren't very well versed in how to do it. Matthew's Greek is a bit ropey, for instance, like my German. IYSWIM.

On the NT's take on the OT, yy there are times when the OT is reported as fact in the NT. This basically raises the problem of how much of divine knowledge Jesus experienced when he was incarnate. My sense, which probably isn't v. orthodox, is that to be fully a man he has to share in our doubt and uncertainty - hence - eli, eli - and like most of us his knowledge of history was confined to what his culture knew collectively and what he could work out intellectually. That said, he clearly had illuminating flashes/mystical revelations, which again like most of us he may have struggled to put into the all-too-human language he spoke.

Additionally, though, those who wrote down his story were very much men of their culture/times. So they reported in the discourse into which they were born, especially Mark. You can see that Luke is a bit different, and John different again.

Yy, I see Genesis as a myth, and a v. near eastern myth too, very predictable - read Gilgamesh. On the other hand, I love Bertrand Russell, but there's an endearing moment in Why I am Not a christian where he says that we now know no evidence that the universe ever had a beginning. Just 2 years later, Hubble created the Big Bang theory. Cosmologists now say that nothing we see is real, only an image of a far vaster reality we can't see directly. So I say, we now know that the earth is not 6000 years old, but we don't know enough about the universe to be sure there is NO truth in a first cause.

NB - to me folklore and myth are not dirty words for ideas that should have been superseded; they are what we are/do. You can't altogether drive them out.

Sieglinde -

Did Romans really routinely slaughter slaves when their master died, rather than inherit them? That seems a bit odd (not because they didn't love their slaves like the Christian slave owners presumably did , but because they saw them as economic assets).

I don't really understand how you can say 'slavery' is unimaginable in a xtian world. Plenty of slave owners thought of themselves as Christians in Europe and the Americas. They had no problem imagining that slavery was morally right within a Christian framework.

Every slave who ever ran away or fought back must have had a cogent critique of slavery. Something along the lines of 'I am a human being, I don't want to be a slave'. That sounds cogent enough for me. Are you really implying that all slaves were happy with their lot until Christianity came along?

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When you say 'Love is an act, not a feeling' I think you are playing fast and loose with words and their meanings (not you personally, it seems to be the way with religious talk: words can mean whatever you want them to and then slip effortlessly into meaning something else altogether).

If 'behave lovingly' = be nice to people/treat them fairly/with compassion (right?)

Then God = the god of being nice to people/treating them fairly/with compassion.

Except we know he isn't. If he exists he could equally say he is the God of injustice, cruelty and randomness.

I get the feeling that when people talk about god's love they are talking about something emotional - some kind of feeling of connectedness, ecstasy and mental and spiritual tingling and aliveness, that you get when you are in love, at a really good rock concert, or (i imagine...) having a religious experience. I am sure this is a real feeling and a nice one and for a while you want to grininanely, hug everyone and love them.

That feeling of 'spiritual togetherness' can be a good way of getting people to want to do good, but it can also motivate people against others.

1. Yes, they did quite often do this, and nobody thought much of it. I can give references if you would like. Yes, it was silly economically, but it was also a big showoff sign that you could afford it. Bit like the czars throwing crystal glasses into the fireplace after drinking from it.

1. No of course I don't mean that SLAVERY is unimaginable in a xtian world, only that KILLING all the slaves at the master's death is.

1. But while Spartacus's rebellion and the slave revolt under the Abbasid caliphate are signs that slaves got it, they have NO effect on political thinking. Rome sought to wipe out Spartacus as if he'd never existed.

1. Behave lovingly means putting them first, yes. I don't equate that with the tingly feelings you describe, though of course I have them - for god, for the Ring, for Green Day... I think the rest of your point might be the argument from evil again, that an ominipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient god is incompatible with evil in the world? Just checking that this is what you mean.