L.B.: Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Left Behind, pp. 395-397

After hearing Rayford Steele's impassioned sales pitch for faith in "the Antichrist and all," Buck Williams is rethinking his own beliefs. At the same time, Jerry Jenkins is busy rewriting the preceding 21 chapters of his book, letting us know, retroactively, about things he had neglected or even denied earlier.

Part of that rewriting process here involves a fuller picture of the substance of Rayford's speech. Based on the rather sketchy accounts of that speech we've gotten so far, his key point was that the Trip and Die guys were a (disappointingly flameless) version of something predicted in Revelation, meaning the Antichrist would be here soon.

If one heard Rayford's speech the way it has been thus far described, and if one believed him, then the reasonable response would be something like stockpiling food and water and heading for the hills. That is, in fact, exactly what Jesus says to do. In the "mini-apocalypse" in Matthew's Gospel (Chapter 24), Jesus says:

When you see standing in the holy place "the abomination that causes desolation," spoken of through the prophet Daniel -- let the reader understand -- then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the roof of his house go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get his cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now -- and never to be equaled again.

Many biblical scholars will tell you that the "abomination that causes desolation" is a reference to Antiochus Epiphanes' desecration of the Temple and to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., but that's not important here.

What matters here is what Rayford, LaHaye and Jenkins believe this passage means. They believe this corresponds to the rise of the Antichrist as described in their End Times Checklist. The abominable Nicolae Carpathia may not yet be standing in the holy place -- Rayford and his friends may still have a little time to go back for their cloaks -- but he's quickly slouching in that direction, so what are they still sitting around for? No one heeds or even seems to notice Jesus' explicit, and very logical seeming, advice for those in what they believe is their precise situation: Run! Run for your lives! Fly, you fools!

These aren't the sorts of things the authors want Buck to be contemplating as he paces through the night. They don't want him worrying about famine, plagues, locusts, the seas turning to blood, the Mark of the Beast, or any of that. They want him to be worrying about the salvation of his soul.

From what we've seen so far, Rayford didn't say much of anything to Buck about salvation or souls. No problem, Jenkins will just go back and insert it from here in the following chapter.

Thus we get the following Standard Christian Fiction Conversion Scene. These two paragraphs could have been (and maybe even were) lifted verbatim from any Christian Brand work of fiction available at your local Christian bookstore. All Jenkins did here was insert the names of his own characters:

Buck was on a personal quest now, looking to satisfy deep needs. For so many years he had rejected the idea of a personal God or that he had need of God -- if there were one. The idea would take some getting used to. Captain Steele had talked about everyone being a sinner. Buck was not unrealistic about that. He knew his life would never stand up to the standards of a Sunday School teacher. But he had always hoped that if he faced God someday, his good would outweigh his bad and that relatively speaking, he was as good or better than the next guy. That would have to do.

Now, if Rayford Steele and all his Bible verses could be believed, it didn't make any difference how good Buck was or where he stood in relation to anybody else. One archaic phrase had struck him and rolled around in his head. There is none righteous, no, not one. Well, he had never considered himself righteous. Could he go to the next level and admit his need for God, for forgiveness, for Christ?

This is the masculine version of the standard preconversion scene, hence the football-coach lingo there -- "go to the next level." The feminine version tends to read more like something from a romance novel with lots of talk of "finally yielding" and "surrendering" and "offering herself up" (to Christ, of course).

This boilerplate doesn't fit here. It doesn't fit with Buck's character (to use that term generously) as we've seen it developed (to use that term extremely generously) over the previous 400 pages. Buck, as we've come to know him thus far, is a man whose self-concept is wholly out of proportion to his actual self. He's a 30-year-old virgin who imagines himself a worldly wise rogue. He's an unprincipled coward, willing to cut a deal with his friend's murderers to save his own skin, yet he imagines himself a hero. And he's a deadline-skipping, story-burying hack who imagines himself the subject of his peers' jealous fantasies.

That gap between who he really is and who he imagines himself to be is not sustainable. At some point, maybe just out of the corner of his eye, Buck is going to catch a devastating glimpse of who and what he really is. That will be an epiphany he may not even survive. That realization really would give him the sweaty chills and set him pacing through the long, dark night. Compared to that, the abstract argument of "Rayford Steele and all his Bible verses" is weak tea. Rayford's pitch, as described in this boilerplate insert, could never convince Buck to "admit his need" because Buck has never felt such a need. Need isn't something you can be easily talked into.

The mention of Buck's "personal quest ... to satisfy deep needs" might hint at some previously unsuggested longing for meaning on his part, but I'm not buying that either. Buck's pursuit of meaning and purpose, such as it is, has taken the form of his work, his vocation as a reporter. In Buck's case, to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, that source of meaning has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried. It's too soon for Buck to give up on his notion that being a great reporter might give his life meaning because he's barely even trying to be a great reporter.

It may be that Buck is heading down a dead end street, but he is making so little progress doing so that he shouldn't yet realize that he's going to have to turn around. Buck isn't all that different from the vast majority of those who suspect that, platitudes to the contrary, money might buy them happiness. Most such people will never have enough money to credibly test that theory. Until they do, they will never think, "Ah, I should look elsewhere for meaning," but only, "How can I get more money than I have now?" A counterfeit dream, half-heartedly pursued, is indistinguishable from a real one.

Nor does this awkwardly inserted Standard Conversion Scene fit, at all, with what we have been previously told of the actual contents of Rayford's speech. I've previously mentioned Rayford's strange confusion of evangelism and "prophecy." His idea of evangelizing, up until now, has been portrayed as offering an outline of the End Times Checklist while insisting, without ever demonstrating, that it has all been foretold in the Bible. He's never mentioned Jesus, sin, salvation, God's love, forgiveness or redemption.

That approach, as we discussed earlier, is completely unrecognizable to most evangelicals who tend to think of evangelism as presenting the gospel through some formal construct like the Four Spiritual Laws, the Romans Road, the Wordless Book or the Bridge Illustration. Rayford's "evangelism" hasn't followed any such standard approach. He hasn't even made use of the requisite Hypothetical Bus even though, if he were right about the checklist, he could point to a fast-approaching Rider on a Pale Horse and note that the current best-case scenario involves his listeners meeting their maker in less than seven years.

But now, suddenly, we're told that Rayford did, in fact, work some kind of more traditional gospel message into his speech about the checklist and "the Antichrist and all," including quoting Romans 3:10, "There is none righteous, no, not one."*

I am trying to imagine how this could work. "Jesus loves you, your sins are forgiven" is not easily combined with Wormwood falling from the sky and locusts given the power of scorpions to torture men and the plagues of fire, smoke and sulfur from the mouths of horses with heads like lions. "So you see, Buck, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Well, not for your life. Your life, the six years and 11 months that's left of it, will consist of suffering divine wrath in the form of seven seals, seven trumpets, seven plagues and seven bowls, each worse than the last. Let me describe those for you in detail ..."

The only way I can imagine fusing those two messages into one would be to promise Buck that he will experience Hell on earth and Heaven when he dies (soon, and violently). That's a connection through disconnection. It's a message so heavenly minded that it's no earthly good.

As Jenkins continues to revise and extend Rayford's earlier remarks, we learn that he also somehow worked good old Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John into his Antichrist speech:

Was it possible? Could he [Buck] be on the cusp of becoming a born-again Christian? He had been almost relieved when Rayford Steele had used that term. Buck had read and even written about "those kinds" of people, but even at his level of worldly wisdom he had never quite understood the phrase. He had always considered the "born-again" label akin to "ultraright-winger" or "fundamentalist." Now, if he chose to take a step he had never dreamed of taking, if he could not somehow talk himself out of this truth he could no longer intellectually ignore, he would also take upon himself a task: educating the world on what that confusing little term really meant.

Note again the contrast between intellect and intellectual honesty -- the two are constantly presented as opposites in Left Behind.

I'm not sure why Buck "had never quite understood" the meaning of "born again" or why he finds the term "confusing." Born. That word we know. Again. That one, too. Born again. Not terribly complicated. As the other John said, it would be just like starting over. The idea of starting over, a second chance, a clean slate -- that's not at all confusing.

What is confusing in the paragraph quoted above is what Buck takes this to mean now that, he suggests, he finally really understands the phrase. That confusion isn't specifically the authors' fault. It's part of a larger confusion in American evangelicalism that we've discussed before as the pyramid marketing scheme of the contentless gospel: "The good news is that now you can tell others the good news." (Yes, but what is that news? "To tell others the news." But this news you're going to be telling them, what is it? "That they can tell others the good news, too." Yes, but ...)

Buck nearly grasps something even more confusing. The hyphenated compound adjective "born-again" has become a label for attitudes and connotations that seem wholly incompatible with the simpler, more obvious implications of the term. Here's a group of people that chooses to self-identify with a phrase that announces that they have themselves needed a second chance. They are proclaiming that they are the second-chancers, the do-overs, the mulligan-takers, the fuss-ups and muck-ups who have had to return to Square One. We'd expect that such a group would be marked by a generosity of spirit toward others that reflected the generosity they have, themselves, benefitted from. Yet instead we find, as Buck says, a group of "ultraright-wingers" whose foremost defining characteristic for those both within and without the group -- according to the born-againers at the Barna Research Group -- is "excessive contempt and unloving attitudes."

Buck says he intends to start "educating the world on what that confusing little term really meant." I wish by that he meant that he wanted to start correcting this contradiction of being the unforgiving forgiven. But, of course, what Buck really means is that he's decided the ultraright-wingers are right and so therefore he intends to become just like them.

That contradiction -- the contrast between what it ought to mean to refer to oneself as a second-chancer and what it actually seems to mean in our culture -- somehow reminds me of this:

The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of $100,000. He couldn't pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market.

The poor wretch threw himself at the king's feet and begged, "Give me a chance and I'll pay it all back." Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt.

The servant was no sooner out of the room when he came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him $10. He seized him by the throat and demanded, "Pay up. Now!"

The poor wretch threw himself down and begged, "Give me a chance and I'll pay it all back." But he wouldn't do it. He had him arrested and put in jail until the debt was paid. When the other servants saw this going on, they were outraged and brought a detailed report to the king.

The king summoned the man and said, "You evil servant! I forgave your entire debt when you begged me for mercy. Shouldn't you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?" The king was furious and put the screws to the man until he paid back his entire debt.

That parable illustrates part of why I find Buck's soul-searching so unconvincing. As impressed as he claims to be with "There is none righteous, no not one," he still sees himself more as somebody owing $10 than as somebody owing $100,000.

That's also related to why the connotations of "born-again" are so different than what the phrase would seem to suggest on its own. The label brings to mind people who are convinced that they owe God $10, but that everybody else owes him a lot more. Those others, they seem to think, really deserve debtor's prison, or Hell, or Tribulation. Those others deserve to be Left Behind.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* St. Paul himself was quoting the 14th Psalm, so evangelists have to be particularly careful when citing this passage. If they were to open their Bibles to Psalms rather than to Romans, they might accidentally convert someone to Judaism instead of Christianity.

Comments

[Majromax]

Keith kills the small child. Keith gains 1,000 sinner points and reaches level 13!

You are in a sinful maze of little passages, all alike.
You are in a maze of sinful little passages, all alike.
You are in a little maze of sinful passages, all alike.
...

Oddly, this is a sort of meta-summary of the theology, too.

[Carl Rennie]

Dylan said:

It really depends on which denomination you're talking about whether salvation, specifically from hell, is the primary focus of Christianity.

Very true. It should be pointed out that most churches spend most of their time NOT talking about salvation from hell, since it's more or less assumed that the people going to church every week are already over that hurdle. Most of what you hear about in evangelical churches -- at least the ones I've been to, which hasn't been exhaustive, but I've been to a few -- has to do with the question, "how shall we then live?".

However:

Thus the choice doesn't have to be between salvation in the afterlife and salvation from a meaningless life; the church is only relevant if it can balance those two understandings.

If Christians truly believe that all non-believers are going to hell, then that's a mighty big stick to brandish. The question is pretty simple: does your doctrine say that all non-believers will be eternally punished for their unbelief? Then as a decent person, you should feel obligated to do everything in your power to persuade people to believe. (Remember, the Inquisitors thought they were doing God's work.) Also, you have to start wondering about the character and nature of God. If your doctrine doesn't say this, then I have no quarrel with it. But this is a binary distinction; to say that it's a balance is like trying to be a little bit dead.

[Mau de Katt]

Now that we're getting to The Big Climax of this whole horrid excuse of a novel, I've been pondering over my thoughts from these past years of exploration into this muckly swamp....

You know the End Times Novel I want to read? The one I thought that The Christ Clone Trilogy was going to be. Up until the end of book 2 -- when The Antichrist gave his very silly (it was meant to be, in retrospe) explanation of his "Real Identity," and then all of book three itself when it turned into Just Another End Times Story -- totally disillusioned me, I thought that it was actually a great reworking of the whole End Times motif from the opposite point of view.

See, I thought that it was about a person who was thrust unwillingly into the already-predicted role of The Antichrist, but that he was in fact not evil, but good. That the whole "Good God/Evil Antichrist" setup was bogus, and that the reality was actually the reverse, turning the whole thing totally upside-down.

True, it would have been massively blasphemous to RTC's, and even probably a bunch of real Real Christians, but it would have been a fascinating story to read, if it was done right... which it seemed to be up until the end of book 2.

Ah well....

[Carl Rennie]

Iorwerth Thomas said:

It's coincidence. It's the result of certain elements of Greek philosophical monotheism interacting with early Christianity, and then trickling down into the laity. (There aren't any statements, AFAIK, of big-O Anselmian Perfect Being theology in the Bible, for rather obvious reasons...)

Interesting. Care to elaborate? I wouldn't argue with that, but I would say that I think these ideas got incorporated into Christianity early enough to be included in the epistles.

Of course early Judaism didn't have that model, but early Judaism wasn't monotheistic, either; they worshiped one God but didn't deny the existence of others until around the temple period, I think. (Yeah, there were other gods floating around, but their god was GREATER.)

[movablenu]

"Right, but why is that the question? For this to be the case, we have to assume that a completely righteous God must necessarily be unable to physically stand the presence of beings who have weaknesses -- must not only be unable to stand them, but feel the need to punish anyone who is not as perfect as He (and it's always He) is. Weakness that he built into us in the first place. If I accept that premise, then yes, Christianity is great news -- there's a way out of the terrible bind that God placed us in. But if I reject the premise, what then?"

Then you reject it. And we wait and see if either of us are right. Most of Christianity is packaged up with a tag labelled 'subject to eschatological verification' (see 1 Cor 15 for Paul's take on this issue with respect to the doctrine of the resurrection). The reason why I have been convinced by the Christian view is that I can see that for people like Lewis it provides a view of humanity that holds that our aspirations to goodness are rooted in a genuine reality and not a projection of our own desires. And it sees that there is more to life than issues of power and control, that morality is more than punishment and about who we are in relation to ultimate goodness. The weakness of humanity is part of our own turning away from reality to preoccupation with ourself. Why did that happen, and why did God allow it to happen? Damned if I know, but it describes our situation very well and the Christian gospel is directed to our situation. Again, if you don't accept it, then you don't accept it, and we'll all find out sometime in the next few decades whether any of us were right.

You reject the doctrine of sin (and I mean that as I construe it, not as LB fundies do), and put in its place a two-tier universe of moral possibility - 'reasonably good' people, and 'pretty bad' people. But that is just not an accurate description of human life. The whole 'Left Behind Fridays' that Fred does is premised on the understanding that a whole subculture of people who believe that they are 'reasonably good' are actually a group of stark raving mad prophecy freaks. Can you really believe that some sort of analysis of this sort might not possibly apply to you, or are you immune to deconstruction? One of the powerful moments in my spiritual journey was when I realised that at a time when I had felt most righteous was when I was actually at my worst. There's no turning back from that realisation to comforting thoughts about how I'm 'reasonably good'.

[Iorwerth Thomas]

This of course puts Christianity in a real awkward spot because you guys have premised your faith on the laughable claim that how we act doesn't matter.

*raises eyebrow* Tarring all Christians with holding the beliefs of a very specific heresy [1] is an interesting debating tactic. Indeed, I shall adopt it. From hence forth I shall accuse all conservative Anglicans I meet of believing that a priest's sins invalidate any sacrament he gives and that the world is the creation of the Devil who is God's co-equal [2], and all atheists I meet of having a ludicrous belief in the immortality of the soul while not believing in the existence of matter [3].

Or perhaps not. I'd actually prefer to be discussing the positions people actually hold, rather than ranting at them about the principles that I imagine they hold. Your mileage may vary, of course.

[1] Antinomianism.
[2] Roughly, Donatism and Manichean Dualism as practised by the Cathari.
[3] Absolute Idealism, a Hegelian, generally atheistic school of thought popular with late 19th century Oxbridge philosophers.

[Ember Keelty]

Mary, are you my sockpuppet or am I yours? I WAS going to say just that as soon as I got through reading the comments, but you've gone and beat me to it! Of course, I don't eat meat, but that's only a tiny absolution. And there are things you didn't mention that I was going to, like the space we take up when we build our houses and cities, and all the oil we use in day-to-day life bringing us ever closer to civilization's death by a sort of small-scale entropy.

In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that there's any moral justification for my failure to simply put myself out of the way. I love life, so I keep living, and that's about it.

I recently read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time, and I identified so much with Ivan during his rebellion speech that I found it frightening. I kept waiting for Dosteovsky, brilliant as he is, to set all my fears at rest with a satisfying refutation. But the best Alyosha could come up with was, "God will forgive." But God has no more business forgiving me on behalf of however many beings my mere existence has harmed than the peasant mother from Ivan's story has forgiving the man who murdered her son on his behalf. And I'm still in the dark.

[Randy Owens]

Mau: Did you ever read Steven Brust's To Reign In Hell? As an avowed atheist, it's one of my guilty pleasures. ;) And it sounds like it might fulfill your theodicean/dystheistic needs in a book. And the writing is just a pleasure to read, by my tastes.

[bulbul]

There aren't any statements, AFAIK, of big-O Anselmian Perfect Being theology in the Bible, for rather obvious reasons...
Matthew 5:48 doesn't count? "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

Apparently the bible that proscribes eternal damnation for every sin must be a different bible from mine.
Don't you mean PREscribes, oh Temporarily Hawaiian Torture Monkey?
But otherwise, you are perfectly right. Even in Christianity, there is such thing as gradation - some sins are more serious than others. And as for the eternal damnation, well, that's a more complicated story.

This of course puts Christianity in a real awkward spot because you guys have premised your faith on the laughable claim that how we act doesn't matter.
Oh for the love of the Spaghetti Monster, J. You've been a Slacktivite for quite some time, haven't you? By now, you should know more about our faith than that. For example, you should know that the laughable claim that how we act doesn't matter is only held by a minority of Christians.

You may not like it, but every religion is going to get judged by the behavior of its' adherents.
All of them or just those in your town? You do understand that there is a world of difference between "perception" and "reality", do you?

[Iorwerth Thomas]

Interesting. Care to elaborate? I wouldn't argue with that, but I would say that I think these ideas got incorporated into Christianity early enough to be included in the epistles.

Well, I'm not much of an expert [1], but a lot of the terms we actually use to describe God are more technical ones from philosophical theology that date from a lot later than the Bible. There's a contingent relation, not a necessary one, between these terms and notions of divine perfection (and I'll admit that God is often held as being an exemplar, almighty and so forth) -- it's quite possible to articulate a theology in which God is perfect but not omnipotent (Charles Harsthorne is an example). Also, the Biblical God (making the dubious assumption, for the moment, that there is only one conception of God in the Bible) does rather a lot of things that aren't terribly easy to reconcile with Classical Theism.

This is a bit garbled; it's rather early in the morning (1:15 am) on this side of the Atlantic...

[1] And a lot is going to hinge on exactly when Christianity came into contact with neo-Platonism.

[Mau de Katt]

Mau: Did you ever read Steven Brust's To Reign In Hell? As an avowed atheist, it's one of my guilty pleasures. ;) And it sounds like it might fulfill your theodicean/dystheistic needs in a book. And the writing is just a pleasure to read, by my tastes.

No, I haven't -- thanks for the suggestion! I like Stephen Brust, tho it's been a while since I've read anything by him....

[Iorwerth Thomas]

"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

Anselmian perfect being theology is a pretty tight technical definition; it's an unpacking of a particular notion of perfection. But fair enough, God is regarded as 'perfect' in some sense in the Bible. But what that means is a contingency of history; there's no reason that it should have to take quite the form it did.

"On an “Anselmian” conception of God, God is the greatest possible being; it is in the very nature of God that he essentially (and necessarily) possess all compossible perfections. Necessary existence is a perfection, it is thought, and therefore God must possess it. One should note that denying God's necessary existence does not entail that God or anyone else can commit “deicide.” It is far more plausible to think that for any world W that is such that God exists at some time in W, God exists at every time in W. Anselmian theists also typically think that God is essentially (and thus necessarily) omniscient, omnipotent, and maximally good."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/#1

[Ian]

"Those others, they seem to think, really deserve debtor's prison..."

I call this the older brother syndrome.

In Jesus' story of the man who had two sons, the younger son takes his dad's money and blows it on prostitutes while the older son stays home. The younger son comes home and begs for a job (is this just another scheme of his?) but the dad won't even listen -- he runs to the younger son sobbing, cleans him up, loads him down with bling and throws a party for the whole neighborhood. (how does the younger son respond to this? we don't find out)

The older son won't come to the party. He's mad because he's always had to live frugally, but here his boozehound brother, that sleeze, gets a feast. His dad comes out to him and asks him to come in cuz it's his brother after all. It's interesting that we don't hear how the older son reacts either.

Let's say the older brother stays outside, and keep in mind that Biblical parties are often a symbol for heaven. (it's nice to think that there will be wine) He won't treat his brother like family, and so he's cutting himself off from the family reunion.

The upshot? Those who exclude others will themselves be excluded.

The older brother syndrome: I'm a pretty good guy. I've been a Christian since I was a kid, after all. I'm not at all like those horrible people over there. They can go to hell.

[Iorwerth Thomas]

Also, this has a bit more on the link between that popular philosophical view of God and Platonism (unsurprising, since Anselm was part of the Platonic tendency amongst theologians):

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anselm/#DivNat

[Carl Rennie]

movablenu said:

You reject the doctrine of sin (and I mean that as I construe it, not as LB fundies do), and put in its place a two-tier universe of moral possibility - 'reasonably good' people, and 'pretty bad' people. But that is just not an accurate description of human life.

First, thanks for an overall cogent and interesting reply. I do want to take exception to this; I don't think there's a sharp distinction between "pretty good" and "pretty bad" people. I think that everyone has things about themselves that they like and hate; the people they know have things they like and hate about them; for the most part, people do what they think is best in their current situation. For example, I wouldn't characterize the Left Behind readers as "...a whole subculture of people who believe that they are 'reasonably good' [who] are actually a group of stark raving mad prophecy freaks." I know people in this group, and for the most part they are kind, decent people, trying to do what they think is right on a day-to-day basis. I strongly disagree that what they think is right is actually right, and more to the point I think there's a cognitive dissonance between what they believe to be right (Christianity and the Bible) and their faith in Left Behind-style eschatology, but they're not 'pretty bad' any more than they are 'reasonably good'.

I don't object to the idea that everyone is imperfect, that everyone has varying degrees of badness or "sin", and that some people are much more heinous than others. What I reject is the idea that there is a single, perfect, objective standard for righteousness, and that that's something only people of the true faith can persue. I like the idea of Christianity as a quest to become a better person, but that also describes (among others) Islam, Buddhism, Humanism, most self-help books, etc. I don't see Christianity as special and distinct from those.

The reason why I have been convinced by the Christian view is that I can see that for people like Lewis it provides a view of humanity that holds that our aspirations to goodness are rooted in a genuine reality and not a projection of our own desires. And it sees that there is more to life than issues of power and control, that morality is more than punishment and about who we are in relation to ultimate goodness.

See, this is where Lewis and I radically part company (the difference being that people actual care what Lewis says). One of the biggest problems I had reading one of his books -- I think it was The Problem Of Pain, though it could've been Mere Christianity -- is that he started talking about cross-cultural moral absolutes, in a way that assumed that cross-cultural moral absolutes were more or less the same as the moral leanings of the Western world circa the 50s. It's an easy, easy thing to fall into that kind of cultural blindness, but for every moral absolute that he mentioned, I could think of an exception from the Bible itself. For example, murder is wrong is a moral absolute; except that the Bible encouraged the slaughter of women and children. Stealing is wrong, except when it's ordered by God. Lying is wrong, except when it protects God's people.

More generally, each of his "moral absolutes" for the most part applied to people within the cultural and broke down when you went outside the culture. Murder applied to out-groups becomes war, or raids, or strategic assassination. Stealing becomes manifest destiny. The idea of an objective righteousness, of an object absolute goodness, gets really slippery, especially when our example is as bloodthirsty as the Old Testament God can be from time to time.

Aspirations to goodness in general are an almost universal characteristic of the human experience; they are a reality regardless of the local religion or customs. There are very few religions (and few atheists) that would argue that power and control are the ultimate issues in life.

Can you really believe that some sort of analysis of this sort might not possibly apply to you, or are you immune to deconstruction? One of the powerful moments in my spiritual journey was when I realised that at a time when I had felt most righteous was when I was actually at my worst.

As a rule, I tend to be over-aware of my faults. I'm sure there are a lot that I'm blind to though; part of growing up for me has been looking back on things that I thought were right were mistakes, and realizing that I'm going to look back on who I am now and think the same thing. That doesn't make me a bad person though, and that doesn't mean I can't strive to be better, whether or not I believe in God.

[Toby]

Carl Rennie: What I reject is (a) the idea that there is a single, perfect, objective standard for righteousness, and (b) that that's something only people of the true faith can persue.

(a) What's wrong with that idea? And what do you put in its place?

(b) What place does this idea have in Christianity? Salvation is only possible through consciousness of sin. Someone who wasn't already pursuing righteousness couldn't possibly come to care about sin, and so couldn't possibly come to care about salvation (and if you don't care about being saved, you aren't). In other words, if it weren't possible for non-Christians to pursue righteousness, I don't think Christian conversion would be possible, either.

[Tonio]

The only way I can imagine fusing those two messages into one would be to promise Buck that he will experience Hell on earth and Heaven when he dies (soon, and violently). That's a connection through disconnection. It's a message so heavenly minded that it's no earthly good.

I wasn't even expecting a Standard Christian Fiction Conversion Scene in LB. I was expecting Buck and Rayford to become fervent Christians purely out of fear of God and/or fear of spending their afterlives in Hell. I wasn't even expecting them to connect the dots between the Event and Revelation, at least not right away.

[Ken]

Given how L&J screwed up Eli and Moe and the Trip and Fall guys, I'd imagine they could take torturous locusts, and horses with lion's heads that breathe fire and make that completely dull. -- MMack

Here's what other End Time Prophecy Experts have done with "torturous locusts, and horses with lions' heads that breathe fire:

Hal Lindsay: Helicoper gunships armed with chemical weapons and piloted by hippies with long hair and beards.

One of the Thief in the Night sequels: Characters huddled in a cabin somewhere in the wilderness. A knock on the door. Character opens the door; giant rubber scorpion stinger extends slowly through the doorway, stings him in the chest. He goes down screaming; the giant rubber scorpion stinger retracts back outside, closing the door after itself. Jump cut to footage of galloping horses' hooves.

[Spalanzani]

Movablenu: "Can you really believe that some sort of analysis of this sort might not possibly apply to you, or are you immune to deconstruction? One of the powerful moments in my spiritual journey was when I realised that at a time when I had felt most righteous was when I was actually at my worst. There's no turning back from that realisation to comforting thoughts about how I'm 'reasonably good'."

While I think your comment was on the whole pretty intelligent and fair, Movablenu, this particular part seems to just be a nicer version of the tendency Fred criticizes in this post. You use your personal realization that when you thought you were being good you were actually bad to assume that Carl Rennie is likewise unknowingly acting bad, criticizing his belief in his own goodness as being nothing but "comforting thoughts" that you can't return to. This implicitly puts you at a better place than him, since you at least realize your badness. Compare this with the sort of born-again Christian who proclaims their sinful nature and then looks down upon all those unrepentent sinners.

[Tonio]

The feminine version tends to read more like something from a romance novel with lots of talk of "finally yielding" and "surrendering" and "offering herself up" (to Christ, of course).

Imagine a Christian Brand variation on a cover of a historical romance novel, with Jesus as the ruggedly handsome hero. Someone must have tried to Photoshop something like this already.

[Sagra]

"This could have actually made an interesting conversion under different circumstances. If you come 30 years to realize the life that you prided yourself on has been smoke and mirrors fooling yourself and those around you into believing you are important, then where else are you going to go?"

Your local Buddhist temple?

[Ken]

Imagine a Christian Brand variation on a cover of a historical romance novel, with Jesus as the ruggedly handsome hero. Someone must have tried to Photoshop something like this already. -- Tonio

You know, Tonio, there actually ARE born-again bodice-rippers. A lot of Christian fiction are Christian romance novels. I can just hear their pitch sheets:

"Just like Harlequin, except CHRISTIAN!"

[Menippee]

Perhaps Buck's self-professed ignorance reflects what seems to be a common Evangelical complaint: You Just Don't Understand. People who aren't Christians clearly Just Don't Understand what it means to be "born again." Or "saved." Or "redeemed." Because some Evangelicals honestly can't imagine that anyone who really does understand what their message is might still not believe it.

Oh, and thanks for the reminder that Buck is a thirty year old virgin. I think he may have had some unchaste thoughts about Mike's girlfriend on "Growing Pains," though.

[Mau de Katt]

Oh, and thanks for the reminder that Buck is a thirty year old virgin. I think he may have had some unchaste thoughts about Mike's girlfriend on "Growing Pains," though.

Even more bizzare, he's married to Hattie Durham.

[Buffybot]

"Just like Harlequin, except CHRISTIAN!"

These really exist????

I find myself repelled, yet unable to resist ...

(a) What's wrong with [the idea that there is a single, perfect, objective standard for righteousness]? And what do you put in its place?

If there is a such thing as absolute goodness, there's two possibilites: 1) it exists and is unknowable; or 2) it exists and we can know what it is. In the first case, there might as well not be an absolute goodness, since an abstract concept that can't be understood might as well not exist.

In the second case, you run into problems with it almost immediately. If there is a perfect, objective, knowable standard for righteousness, then two things usually occur:
- everyone should be required to adhere to it as much as possible, and
- deviations from it start to lose their distinction.

I'm not saying that these things logically follow, but that they almost always happen. When someone claims to have absolute truth, deviations from that truth become increasingly less tolerated, and the distinction between killing people and having wrong ideas becomes blurry. Both are deviations from the absolute standard; both are punishable; and of course, people are executed for both.

Further, if your morality is based on a revealed, objective, absolute standard for righteousness, then any damage to that standard hurts all of it. If you start to question any particular part of it, then you're calling the whole thing into question; this makes enforcement of even the things that don't seem like they'd matter (e.g. homosexuality) mandatory.

I'm not going to argue which interpretation of the Bible provides the correct absolute standard for behavior; obviously, as a non-believer, I don't think it does at all, so all the internecine warfare over who's reading the Bible/understand God correctly is not my fight. The foundation of a secular society which allows freedom of religion, though, is the idea that such an absolute standard doesn't exist, or at least the absolute standards we come up with have room for error.

What would I replace it with? That's a question that many people much smarter than me have struggled with for a long time. It'd show incredible hubris to say that I think I have the answer to that. I don't know, really. I think that we can make a good start by putting emphasis on humility -- on understanding that our own ideas of what's correct and moral are just as likely to be flawed as our neighbors -- and on empathy, to try to understand why people believe what they do. I do think that there are things which are definitely wrong and definitely right, and there are things that I believe to be wrong and right, but I do my best to leave open the possibility that my understanding is flawed.

[Tonio]

You know, Tonio, there actually ARE born-again bodice-rippers. A lot of Christian fiction are Christian romance novels.

Wow. Are the heroines on the covers shown in the standard pose - eyes closed, moist lips parted, milky cleavage showing, and so forth?

[Carl Rennie]

Toby: (b) What place does this idea have in Christianity? Salvation is only possible through consciousness of sin. Someone who wasn't already pursuing righteousness couldn't possibly come to care about sin, and so couldn't possibly come to care about salvation (and if you don't care about being saved, you aren't). In other words, if it weren't possible for non-Christians to pursue righteousness, I don't think Christian conversion would be possible, either.

Salvation doesn't exist by itself. You can't just be "saved"; you must be saved from something. As I understand it, there are basically three ways that Christianity describes this salvation, and most denominations use all three (with differing emphasis):

1) salvation from hell. This is the one that we've been talking about for most of the thread. This stems from the idea that there is some sort of divine punishment awaiting everyone who fails to be perfect. Awareness of your own shortcomings and failings (i.e. awareness of sin) doesn't lead to the idea of hell and doesn't require one to seek salvation from it either.

2) salvation from the tyranny of sin. The basic idea being that those who don't come to Christ are incapable of saying "no" to their sinful, baser natures. I'm not sure if this is still much believed (my ex-church was rather old-fashioned), but in this way, Christianity supposedly supplies the power to be righteous, which one doesn't have otherwise. Again, awareness of your shortcomings doesn't imply powerlessness to deal with them.

3) salvation from the burden of sin. This is where Christianity is most useful, I think. For people who feel enormous guilt over their sinful behavior, and helpless to be better, Christianity can provide both a moral salve ("it's okay, God has forgiven you") and a path to being a better person. But it's not the only such path. A perfect, sinless God and/or a human incarnation of said God is not necessary for striving for righteousness or for relieving guilt over wrong actions that you've made in the past.

Essentially, striving for righteousness does not require a belief in a need for salvation. It can really help to quiet an overly guilty conscience, especially for people who are undergoing the realization that they're not as good as thought they were or seeing the consequences of their actions.

(btw, the post at 10:03 replying to Toby's other question is also me. I switched computers.)

[mike timonin]

Indeed, buffybot, there exists an entire subculture of bizarre fundie Christian cultural artifacts that map onto "mainstream" things. Fundie Christian books, and music - yes, obviously (in all genres, including horror, sci fi, fantasy - the whole gamut). Fundy Christian television - check. Fundy Christian diet and exercise programs - certainly. Fundy Christian boardgames - yes, and this I find absurd, because it's not just "games based on Biblical knowledge", but also "Settlers of Canan", because Settlers of Catan clearly promotes non-Christian behavior. Fundy Christian role playing games - because why should those pagan D&D players have all the fun? It's all a little scary, really.

[Keith]

My larger point was that, on the sin scale, 0 is humanly unattainable. Anything humanly unattainable is thus practically meaningless and trying to reach an unreachable goal causes frustration, alienation, the creeping willies and halitosis. Therefor, holding people to an unattainable standard is... well, there's no charitable way to put it: it's crazy. At least from outside the sort of mindset that accepts the equation 1+1+1=1 as meaningful. Perhaps ) sin and trinitarian math have some use,somewhere, but not in the day to day, existential reality we inhabit. And frankly, I'm cool with that. In a world full of Darfurs, Iraq Wars and giant carbon footprints, I'm willing to live with the little, human foibles. If you can make it through a week without cranking it up to 11, I call that a good week and you a decent person.

Now obviously, there's room for improvement, but within rational, attainable goals. Sweatshops are bad and so is not recycling but as long as you don't actively seek out the Cathy Lee Giffard Collection (does that reference date me?) or purposely crumble styraphoam into the open mouth of puppies, you're doing alright. Making an effort to buy local produce, recycle your cans and buy clothes from responsible manufacturers is actively persuing good things so, bonus!

[Alex Scott]

There's one thing I don't really see outside of Eastern Orthodox theology--and Catholic and Anglican theology, to a lesser extent. EO's don't just believe that Salvation refers to the forgiveness of sins thru the Cross, but also the further perfection and deification of mankind. The point is that God's infinite Love DOES outweigh human sin, enough that he actually wants to be a person and live among us--and by doing so, conquer sin by being the one guy whose points = 0. So Christianity--at least in this interpretation--is sort of like a system of God and man grafting themselves onto each other.

[Tonio]

When I read the title of this week's entry, I heard the Guns 'n' Roses version of the classic Bob Dylan song in head. Purely for the comedy value, I suspect, because of Axl Rose's habit of adding syllables to words..."heaven's dow-oo-owr."

[Toby]

Carl Rennie: If there is a perfect, objective, knowable standard for righteousness, then two things usually occur:
- everyone should be required to adhere to it as much as possible, and
- deviations from it start to lose their distinction.

That first point is true, but I don't see how it's problematic.

As for the second, I'm not sure how you justify that "usually". The only evidence you provide is from certain segments of Christendom, which is hardly exhaustive of everyone who assumes there is an objective, etc., moral standard. In any case, it is certainly not much like the average believer in objective etc. morality in modern developed societies -- so, for example, I don't see how the burning of heretics (which was often motivated by the love of money or power at least as much as by the love of orthodoxy) is very relevant to the here and now.

Further, if your morality is based on a revealed, objective, absolute standard for righteousness, then any damage to that standard hurts all of it.

How could the standard itself be damaged? A particular person's understanding of it could come under criticism, but that's rather a different thing.

I do think that there are things which are definitely wrong and definitely right, and there are things that I believe to be wrong and right, but I do my best to leave open the possibility that my understanding is flawed.

A believer in an objective etc. morality (like, say, me) could agree with that entirely.

Essentially, striving for righteousness does not require a belief in a need for salvation.

I guess I wasn't clear, but that's just what I was saying. Striving for righteousness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for believing in the need for salvation. It follows that it is possible to strive for righteousness without believing in the need for salvation, and without being saved. This is essential to Christianity (as I understand it, anyways). I don't think it's correct Christian doctrine to say that only the Christian pursues salvation.

I always had a hard time reconciling "There is no one righteous, not one" with Genesis 6, where it says Noah was a righteous man...righteous enough to be spared when the whole rest of the world gets flushed. Actually, hard time nothing. I could never make sense of it, and I never had a Bible teacher who could give me an answer that didn't smack of total bullshit. I suspect "righteous" in this context means something different from what it's presented to mean during the standard evangelism pitch (i.e., perfection).

Can anyone help me with this? Seriously, in all non-snarkiness. Bulbul? Hapax? Anyone?

Robb: Sweet! I've managed, over the years, to work the term "diddly" into my daily speech, so I should be set as far as salvation goes!

See, I tend toward "Giggity", but then, I'm going to hell. :)

Oh, and about Buck...
...he had always hoped that if he faced God someday, his good would outweigh his bad and that relatively speaking, he was as good or better than the next guy.

Hmm. I think that "relatively speaking" is supposed to underscore Buck's moral relativism. (Evil buzzword! Evil buzzword! Trademark! Extra bolding!)

[Tonio]

It's all a little scary, really.

If it weren't for the authoritarian theology, it would be like a Disney-owned private resort or company town, that same type of self-contained controlled reality.

[Tonio]

Sweet! I've managed, over the years, to work the term "diddly" into my daily speech, so I should be set as far as salvation goes!

You must have a cobra snake for a necktie, with a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind...oops, wrong diddley.

[Carl Rennie]

Someone (sorry, it was anonymous) said: I always had a hard time reconciling "There is no one righteous, not one" with Genesis 6, where it says Noah was a righteous man...righteous enough to be spared when the whole rest of the world gets flushed. Actually, hard time nothing. I could never make sense of it, and I never had a Bible teacher who could give me an answer that didn't smack of total bullshit. I suspect "righteous" in this context means something different from what it's presented to mean during the standard evangelism pitch (i.e., perfection).

You have to understand that the idea of the Bible as a unified statement of belief -- i.e. there's a single thesis, a single theology, a single mind driving it all -- is something that came much much later. The legend of Noah belongs, mostly likely, to a very early form of Judaism, and even when committed to paper doesn't come with the salvation baggage that is a product of the New Testament. The person who wrote that Noah was a righteous man, several hundred years before Paul used it to argue that everyone is sinful (and within a couple hundred years of the Psalmist (David) who he is quoting, using hyperbole to emphasize his point), probably would've balked at modern theology. For one thing, how're we supposed to appease God without sacrifices? And where's the role of temple in all this?

[Chris]

The consistency problem with an infinitely good god isn't his or her attitude to your sinning, it's the real theological blockbuster - why did got create the world? A perfect god by definition needs nothing else, including us. A universe containing only a perfect god is perfect. A universe containing a perfect god and a lot of scum like is is less than perfect. Why did he or she want to send things backward?

Creating anything brings us to Fulke Greville -
"Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!
Brorn to one law, to another bound;
Created vain, and yet forbidden vanity -
Created sick, commanded to be sound."

and the other great theological potboiler of grace; it's all very well to say that all sins are alike, but there's one obvious spot where the system logically breaks down.

For the fundie system to work at all, there must really be two kinds of people: unrighteous people who commit the sin of not asking to be born again and righteous people who don't. There is _one_ sin that god notices as meaningful.

Alternatively, if one holds to the view that there is no such distinction and there are none righteous, then god has to give us - or some of us - a boost to get us up to the level of asking.
The catholic tradition, and its heresies, have done a lot of (necessarily unproductive, to be sure) thinking about these unavoidable cruxes; it's the absence of any discussion of them that renders fundamentalism so inherently arid.

[Carl Rennie]

Toby:

How could the standard itself be damaged? A particular person's understanding of it could come under criticism, but that's rather a different thing.

The key word here is knowable. If it's impossible to know with certainty what the standard is, then it's more or less the same as not having a standard at all -- i.e. you can't say with certainty that a particular action is right or wrong, absolutely, because there always has to be at least a little bit of doubt. If the standard is knowable, then to attack any piece of it is to attack the whole. It's like people who believe the Bible is innerrant. Any falsehood or contradiction in the bible, no matter how small, invalidates the innerancy of it. If any part of your objective, knowable standard is wrong, then it is not absolute, or is no longer knowable. If you're wrong about part of it, then what else might you be wrong about?

If the standard is not fully knowable, then you must act as if there is know absolute standard. If the standard is fully knowable, than no part of it can be wrong.

As for the second, I'm not sure how you justify that "usually". The only evidence you provide is from certain segments of Christendom, which is hardly exhaustive of everyone who assumes there is an objective, etc., moral standard. In any case, it is certainly not much like the average believer in objective etc. morality in modern developed societies -- so, for example, I don't see how the burning of heretics (which was often motivated by the love of money or power at least as much as by the love of orthodoxy) is very relevant to the here and now.

I'm not talking about Christianity in particular. This is true of any time that any particular orthodoxy gets ahold of a group of people. It was true of a lot of communist groups (demanding purity and adherence to the party line); it's true of some Muslim groups and countries; it's true of facist Italy. When an ideology is deemed absolutely correct, the step between believing in it fully and demanding that other people believe it fully is a fairly short one, and it's been often taken.

The idea behind secular society is not that Christianity is wrong. It's that it's difficult to impossible to determine who is right. Freedom of religion depends on the idea that moral absolutes are at best a hazy notion.

That doesn't mean I want a lawless society. That does mean that I think our collective morality should probably be determined by consensus, erring on the side of freedom for the most part. That everyone needs to acknowledge that their version of the absolute truth has no more necessary claim on reality than the claims of others. To argue otherwise is pretty much the definition of tyranny.

[JBLIII]

I've always thought that the business model for the religious-themed games (Settlers of Canaan et. al.) was brilliant. License the best games out there, tweak them with some religious window dressing and *voila* you've got a quality product for a little-tapped market. And you've really got something going when you aim at the Mormons and others who advocate serious and regular "family time." Carcassone becomes Ark of the Covenant; Settlers of Catan becomes Settlers of Zarahemla. Brilliant.

I've been reading this series of posts for a long time and though I've greatly enjoyed it I've never felt compelled to jump in before. The Christian Romance novel conversation, however, is one I can't resist.

My parents became fundies when I was 7 or 8, and my mom threw away all her Harlequin novels and replaced them with Christian romance novels. When I got older, I read a bunch and they seriously might be the worst things I have ever read. My favorites were by an author named Lori Wick, who I think might be a Stepford wife, so poor is her grasp of human nature. An actual "plot" from one of her books: A young, beautiful, Christian woman moves to a small town to be a schoolteacher. She gets caught in a freak snowstorm, and the young, handsome, Christian (everyone in these books is either a Christian or becomes one just in time for the protagonist to fall in love with them)doctor finds her and takes her back to his house and saves her life. When the townspeople find out she was in his house all night, it is OMG TEH SCANDAL!!! and she's about to be run out of town like the dirty harlot she is, when he saves the day by offering to marry her. Since marrying a total stranger is obviously preferable to moving, she agrees. Oh, also, she's an idiot who is afraid of doctors because she thinks doctors killed her mother. They, of course, end up madly in love and chastely kiss each other a few times (no descriptions of sex in these books).

Seriously, this stuff could give the LB books a run for their money as Worst Books Ever Written, but at least they are not nearly as popular.

[pepperjackcandy]

The above conversation sort of underscores for me why sin has always seemed to me one of the weakest aspects of Christian (if not Islamic) theology, at least compared to Buddhism.

How is the Eightfold Path (specifically things like "Right speech," "Right action," and "Right livelihood") not in tune with the Judeo-Christian idea of "living righteously"?

[Reynard]

"This is the masculine version of the standard preconversion scene, hence the football-coach lingo there -- "go to the next level." The feminine version tends to read more like something from a romance novel with lots of talk of "finally yielding" and "surrendering" and "offering herself up" (to Christ, of course)."

Actually, it also sounds (to me anyway) a lot like what I would imagine a rape fantasy probably sounds like. (Never having read or written a rape fantasy, I *have* to do a bit of imagining here...)

Imagine a Christian Brand variation on a cover of a historical romance novel, with Jesus as the ruggedly handsome hero. Someone must have tried to Photoshop something like this already. -- Tonio

"You know, Tonio, there actually ARE born-again bodice-rippers. A lot of Christian fiction are Christian romance novels. I can just hear their pitch sheets:

'Just like Harlequin, except CHRISTIAN!'"

Romance Novels: The literary equivalent of Black Velvet paintings.
Christian Romance Novels: Worse. Much, *MUCH* worse...

[Bugmaster]

If it's impossible to know with certainty what the standard is, then it's more or less the same as not having a standard at all

As always, I am compelled to point out that absolute, 100% certainty is rarely required; and I think it would be excessive in this case. If I think that my moral standard is 99.9% certain to be better than yours, then I'd be a fool to go ahead and follow yours anyway, or to follow no standard at all. If I'm only 50% certain, though, then I might as well flip a coin...

[Bugmaster]

I think the primary difference between Christianity and Buddhism is that Buddhism is entirely impersonal. In Buddhism, there's no deity (*) who wants you to behave in a certain way, or who will fulfill your prayers, or who will punish you if you do something it doesn't like, etc. There's just the true reality, and the illusion of reality we like to call "the world". If you choose to remain ignorant of this reality, then it's your own fault, and you'll remain bound to the illusion (through multiple lifetimes) until you realize the truth. Such choice is not good or evil; it is merely unenlightened (and, perhaps, foolish). Also, once you do become enlightened, what you do from then on is up to you (insofar as there's such a thing as a "you" at all).

In Christianity, however, there exists a God who watches everything you do, intervenes in your life from time to time, and has an overall plan for your existence; after all, he created you for a specific purpose. When you die, you will go to Heaven or Hell, depending on how closely you followed God's commands; what you do there is not up to you at all, but is entirely under God's control.

Yes, I realize that I am heavily caricaturing both belief systems here, but I think I got the basics right.

(*) Ok, some versions of Buddhism do include deities, but they still have no categorically important effect on your enlightenment or lack thereof.

[Cyllan]

As a side note, I have a possible entry for Right Behind. Ecks, can you tell me what I should do?

[Carl Rennie]

Bugmaster said: As always, I am compelled to point out that absolute, 100% certainty is rarely required; and I think it would be excessive in this case. If I think that my moral standard is 99.9% certain to be better than yours, then I'd be a fool to go ahead and follow yours anyway, or to follow no standard at all. If I'm only 50% certain, though, then I might as well flip a coin...

Yes, you'd be a fool to follow my moral standard if you thought yours was better, barring under extenuating circumstances (threat of violence, possibility of great financial gain or loss, community acceptance, etc.). That's not the question. The thing that I was arguing with Toby (which he said he accepted) is that, given an absolute standard of righteousness, everyone should be compelled to follow it. That suggests the question, which absolute standard should we accept? The correct answer is always "mine, of course, everyone else is wrong." The problem comes when we try to reconcile different absolute standards.

Christianity lends itself to a lot of different moral interpretations. If we suggest an absolute goodness, an absolute morality, then either we have to pick one and say that that is correct and make it our law, or act in the same way as if there were no absolute standard at all, at least as far as setting social policy goes. In other words, to allow people the freedom to follow what they believe to be righteous, we must behave as if there is no absolute right and wrong.

Again, that's not to say that society should be lawless, or even that there is no standard of right and wrong, but the rules can't come from an arbitrary book, or else you don't have a leg to stand on logically, ethically or morally. If things are right or wrong because the Bible says they're right or wrong, and someone else comes along and says Qu'ran (or even the Bible) disagrees, then it basically comes down to whoever can beat the other into submission. Which is what has happened all throughout history.

[Technomad]

YOu know, we've been discussing Christian fiction here...has anybody here ever seen the "faith-promoting" fiction that the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) put out?

I was looking on Amazon.com once for a biography of Porter Rockwell, and when I put in the search term "porter rockwell," I got quite a few novels aimed at young people from obviously-LDS publishers.

But is that stuff better, or worse, than the "Christian romances," "Christian SF," and other things from fundamentalist publishers?

[Toby]

Carl Rennie: The key word here is knowable. If it's impossible to know with certainty what the standard is, then it's more or less the same as not having a standard at all

You are slipping rather quickly from "the objective etc. moral standard is knowable" to "known" to "known with absolute certainty". I would happily hold to the first in all cases, to the second in some, and to the last perhaps in some trite cases (I am absolutely certain that it would be morally wrong for me to kidnap a stranger and bake them in my oven in the name of scientific inquiry).

i.e. you can't say with certainty that a particular action is right or wrong, absolutely, because there always has to be at least a little bit of doubt.

That is not at all the same as "not having a standard at all".

If you're wrong about part of it, then what else might you be wrong about?

From the fact that X is fallible, it does not follow that X is entirely unreliable. Or, if that does follow, then we must conclude that we are all in the position of full-blown skepticism: my reasoning is fallible, so I must never trust my reasoning; my senses are fallible, so I must never trust my senses; etc.

The idea behind secular society is not that Christianity is wrong. It's that it's difficult to impossible to determine who is right. Freedom of religion depends on the idea that moral absolutes are at best a hazy notion.

False. For example, old school baptists (of which I believe our host is one) might have vanishingly little doubt that Christianity (their version thereof) is correct--but their version of Christianity essentially involves religious freedom and separation of church and state, so their religious certainty translates into certainty about religious freedom and church-state separation. (Same for me, though I'm not a baptist.)

[Bugmaster]

I am absolutely certain that it would be morally wrong for me to kidnap a stranger and bake them in my oven in the name of scientific inquiry

Well, obviously, scientific inquiry is a terrible reason to bake anyone. Delicious culinary inquiry, on the other hand... Hmmm...