These arguments, so beloved of the “new atheists,” like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, do not sufficiently acknowledge the uniqueness of Christianity. Christianity asserts that God became a man, like other men, and walked among other men for his entire life–men who knew he asserted himself to be God and could observe and question him. Much more crucially, these men, well known to others, and respected in their own right, testify that they observed Jesus alive, after he had died on the cross and been entombed. They report that they he told him he would be taken to Heaven and that they saw him disappear before their eyes. When these followers of Jesus went abroad in the world to report the “good news” they did not ask people to believe on faith–not in the sense of a claim to non-rational, non-sensory knowledge. This is not the meaning of faith in Christianity. Those who witnessed the resurrection and saw and touched Jesus after it, asked people to believe their report: to have faith in reliable witnesses. ALL historical events are known, in the end, because they were witnessed and reported and recorded. They are not taken on faith; they are believed because the reporters are believed. In the first decades and centuries after the resurrection, the church “fathers” went to incredible lengths to ascertain, check, and identify what they viewed as valid reports–the gospels–and to separate them from an avalanche of other reports. The four canonical gospels are by men who claimed to have witnessed personally the entire process of the death, resurrection, and ascension. These are the canonical gospels, by four known men, available for decades to be judged for their integrity, and they agree.

Now, of course, there is a resounding rejoinder to that. YES, all history is a matter of reports by a person or persons, but the first thing we do is ask: how plausible is this report? Does it contradict what else we know? Does it contradict the laws of nature? Does it relate to other human experience? Here, Christians had and have a choice. Believe the reports of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who testify to what they saw–to their utter astonishment and realization they were seeing what they never dreamed possible–and belief that at some point what occurred will be reconciled with what else we know or think we know. If you don’t make this choice, of course, you are not a Christian.

There are other distinctive, if not unique features of Christianity. It is the only significant religion–except Judaism, which is not inconsistent with the Christian story, though it does not embrace all of it–that went through the Enlightenment in the West, was scrutinized, challenged, and emerged a religion still growing and winning converts, including among the most educated. In fact, it was Christianity that introduced reason and logic into the modern world via Thomas Aquinas and the other scholastics, who systematized, developed, and spread both the philosophy of Aristotle and Christianity, claiming them to be not inconsistent and both to be embraced. And the Catholic Church adopted Aristotelianism as its official doctrine.

Islam, by contrast, did not ever pass through an Enlightenment, Age of Reason, or Age of Science, which did not occur in the Islamic countries. What is more, Islam is the report of one man that God dictated the Koran to him on a mountaintop; not one else saw this; no one else heard God’s dictation. And the Koran predominates only in countries that did not pass through the Enlightenment. Islam tends to strongly discourage science and scholarship, outside the Koran, as Christianity did not and does not.

Christianity, and Judaism, are the only religions that have passed into Western countries dominated by the Enlightenment, Age of Reason, and Age of Science. Indeed, the United States of America is a nation founded not on Enlightenment thinking but on Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, which drove settlement and dominated the colonies for two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. It is true that when it came to creating a GOVERNMENT, American intellectuals turned to the Enlightenment thinkers (among many others). And a Protestant nation had no problem whatsoever with this, embracing it and living by it for the next two centuries. It was not Christianity or Protestantism but German Idealism from Kant and Hegel that infected America in the late Nineteenth Century, infecting our graduate schools, and being adapted as America’s homegrown (!!!) philosophy in the form of the Pragmatism of Charles Sander Pierce, William James and John Dewey. This went on to infect our body politic, as did another European offshoots of the Enlightenment via Kant and Hegel: Marxism.

It is not Christian altruism that infects our culture and body politic; it is the German Idealism of Kant, Marx, and others. As long as the nation remained influenced predominantly by Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, which, after all, embraced the Enlightenment in both England and America, the U.S. Constitution and system grew stronger (most capitalist in the 1870’s-1890’s, just when Kantianism and Pragmatism were infecting all the universities). Christianity, but especially the Protestant version, has adapted completely to and been largely accepted by the Age of Enlightenment and science. This can be said of no other religion in the history of the world. NONE has passed this test.

Although I was brought up in the Congregational Church in New England, as a strictly Sunday (once in awhile) thing, I became an atheist at age 17 when I read Atlas Shrugged in 1962. I don’t think I ever will regret having read that book, but it did close my mind to much of history and culture–for Ayn Rand dismissed whole swathes of history and ideas with little more than a glance. And she was wrong, for example, about the fundamental nature of Christian faith (although through the history of Christianity there have been many statements that are consistent with a simply anti-rational view; there also are statements by great Christians rejecting those). There can be no doubt that Christianity gave rise to the culture of the West, including reason and Enlightenment. The rediscovery of Aristotle and the classical world, from the Arab libraries, certainly made all the difference: but it was the Church which discovered, embraced, developed, and scrutinized them.

The greatest influence on Ayn Rand’s epistemology probably was the scholastics like Aquinas and others (and she did call Aquinas the next greatest philosopher after Aristotle), whom she discovered through her many conversations with Isabel Patterson, who was a sophisticated Catholic thinker. She adopted their reasoning about knowledge and concepts, but dropped what they saw as the crucial premise of an Unmoved Mover or God.

For those brought up on Ayn Rand who wish to enlighten themselves a bit, I recommend “The History of Christianity” by Paul Johnson, the great British historian who wrote the one indispensable history of the 20th century, “Modern Times.”

Mark an excellent response to Pascal’s Wager

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Chapter L (AD 1782)

Paragraph 13

One God.

It is the boast of the Jewish apologists,
that while the learned nations of antiquity were deluded by the fables of polytheism,
their simple ancestors of Palestine preserved the knowledge and worship of the true God.
The moral attributes of Jehovah may not easily be reconciled with the standard of human virtue:
his metaphysical qualities are darkly expressed;
but each page of the Pentateuch and the Prophets is an evidence of his power:
the unity of his name is inscribed on the first table of the law;
and his sanctuary was never defiled by any visible image of the invisible essence.

After the ruin of the temple, the faith of the Hebrew exiles was purified,
fixed, and enlightened, by the spiritual devotion of the synagogue;
and the authority of Mahomet will not justify his perpetual reproach,
that the Jews of Mecca or Medina adored Ezra as the son of God.

But the children of Israel had ceased to be a people;
and the religions of the world were guilty,
at least in the eyes of the prophet, of giving sons,
or daughters,
or companions,
to the supreme God.

In the rude idolatry of the Arabs, the crime is manifest and audacious:
the Sabians are poorly excused by the preeminence of the first planet, or intelligence, in their celestial hierarchy;
and in the Magian system the conflict of the two principles betrays the imperfection of the conqueror.

The Christians of the seventh century had insensibly relapsed into a semblance of Paganism:
their public and private vows were addressed to the relics and images that disgraced the temples of the East:
the throne of the Almighty was darkened by a cloud of martyrs, and saints, and angels, the objects of popular veneration;
and the Collyridian heretics, who flourished in the fruitful soil of Arabia, invested the Virgin Mary with the name and honours of a goddess.
The mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation appear to contradict the principle of the divine unity.

In their obvious sense, they introduce three equal deities,
and transform the man Jesus into the substance of the Son of God:
an orthodox commentary will satisfy only a believing mind:
intemperate curiosity and zeal had torn the veil of the sanctuary;
and each of the Oriental sects was eager to confess that all,
except themselves, deserved the reproach of idolatry and polytheism.

The creed of Mahomet is free from suspicion or ambiguity;
and the Koran is a glorious testimony to the unity of God.
The prophet of Mecca rejected the worship of idols and men, of stars and planets,
on the rational principle that whatever rises must set,
that whatever is born must die,
that whatever is corruptible must decay and perish.

In the Author of the universe, his rational enthusiasm confessed and adored an infinite and eternal being,
without form or place,
without issue or similitude,
present to our most secret thoughts,
existing by the necessity of his own nature,
and deriving from himself all moral and intellectual perfection.

These sublime truths, thus announced in the language of the prophet,
are firmly held by his disciples, and defined with metaphysical precision by the interpreters of the Koran.

A philosophic theist might subscribe the popular creed of the Mahometans;
a creed too sublime, perhaps, for our present faculties.

What object remains for the fancy, or even the understanding, when we have abstracted from the unknown substance all ideas of time and space,
of motion and matter,
of sensation and reflection?

The first principle of reason and revolution was confirmed by the voice of Mahomet:
his proselytes, from India to Morocco, are distinguished by the name of Unitarians;
and the danger of idolatry has been prevented by the interdiction of images.

The doctrine of eternal decrees and absolute predestination is strictly embraced by the Mahometans;
and they struggle, with the common difficulties, how to reconcile the prescience of God with the freedom and responsibility of man;
how to explain the permission of evil under the reign of infinite power and infinite goodness.

Paragraph 19

Hell and paradise.

The reunion of the soul and body will be followed by the final judgment of mankind;
and in his copy of the Magian picture, the prophet has too faithfully represented the forms of proceeding,
and even the slow and successive operations,
of an earthly tribunal.

By his intolerant adversaries he is upbraided for extending, even to themselves,
the hope of salvation,
for asserting the blackest heresy,
that every man who believes in God,
and accomplishes good works,
may expect in the last day a favourable sentence.

Such rational indifference is ill adapted to the character of a fanatic;
nor is it probable that a messenger from heaven should depreciate the value and necessity of his own revelation.
In the idiom of the Koran, the belief of God is inseparable from that of Mahomet:
the good works are those which he has enjoined, and the two qualifications imply the profession of Islam,
to which all nations and all sects are equally invited.

Their spiritual blindness, though excused by ignorance and crowned with virtue,
will be scourged with everlasting torments;
and the tears which Mahomet shed over the tomb of his mother
for whom he was forbidden to pray,
display a striking contrast of humanity and enthusiasm.

The doom of the infidels is common:
the measure of their guilt and punishment is determined by the degree of evidence which they have rejected,
by the magnitude of the errors which they have entertained:
the eternal mansions of the Christians, the Jews, the Sabians, the Magians, and idolaters,
are sunk below each other in the abyss;

and the lowest hell is reserved for the faithless hypocrites
who have assumed the mask of religion.

Christians believe that there is only one God of this Earth. They accept Jesus as their personal Saviour and Redeemer. One God; one Earth. When you state that when “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty, he judgeth among the gods.”, I believe the verse is referring to all of the different gods that the people were worshipping. To think that He killed off all of His competition is absurd. The God being referred to made His competition!
Anyway, I do believe in the God that I know. And if He doesn’t exist as some people say, then I have nothing to lose!

Pascal chose to believe (i.e. Wager), Pascal was a wimp.

http://www.0016h.com

だって仲のいい友人にさえもバックや手帳を見せないのに、他人がって考えるとゾッとしてました私も戻ってくるのは五分以上だと信じます!!!!