PART 2. ERADICATING RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM 21 JUN 2014

Shall fundamentalists be killed? This is a continuation of my factual & rational answer to all those who hate people of faith & want to blindly kill them as dangerous fundamentalists. The first post dealt w/ point one, & began answering pt. 2. The 5 points of discussion are: 1. Christianity is anti-Science. 2. The Christian faith is irrational, an illusion, a superstition; atheism is the proper rational basis for society. 3. Christianity & faith in God is dying. 4. Christianity is evil & to blame for countless wars & crimes of history incl. the fall of Roman civilization. 5. Atheism is “morally superior” to belief in God.

PROPOSITION: The Christian faith is irrational, an illusion, a superstition; atheism is the proper rational basis for society. Let’s continue discussing this. Freud the founding father of psychology & psychiatry, whose works were the foundation of the psychiatrists of the World, who became secular priests with the power to declare someone insane & lock them up in the torture dungeons of state mental “hospitals”, believed that belief in God was an illusion to avoid facing the reality of death. In 1927, he wrote “The Future of an Illusion” (i.e. belief in God).

REASON & EMPIRICISM. The basis of atheism is that science & reason are the complete answer to comprehend the Universe, we just need to keep pushing back the boundaries of what we know ‘til we know everything using these two tools. When shown the inadequacy of reason, atheist thinkers have been known to appeal to common sense, so common sense (in a sense) is a third tool that they also assume will help figure it all out. Reason is also a Biblical concept, but the Bible believer knows that it has limits, esp. the Christians, as their faith is founded on miracles, whereas Islam & Judaism, while reporting miracles, don’t make miracles their foundation. In 1 COR 15:14 “And if Christ be not risen [miraculously resurrected]…your faith is also vain.” (cf. Acts 4:33, 17:3, ROM 1:4) Such miracles are beyond the limits of reason, and are rejected as myths by atheists.

The assumption that reason along with science will provide a complete comprehension of the Universe is delusional arrogance. The great philosophers Plato & Kant both laid out powerful philosophic thoughts showing the limits of reason & knowledge based on the experience of our 5 senses. Plato was the Father of Philosophy, & his ideas held sway for many millennia. Kant’s ideas are misrepresented & supposedly refuted, but no one has seriously challenged his arguments that sense-based knowledge & reason have limits. One scientist (Anthony Standen in Science Is a Sacred Cow) exposed in his book how science (scientism) is a worship of scientific technique. Don’t get me wrong, it is rational to use our 5 senses, hey, it is all we have, but we need to rationally & humbly admit they have limits. The purpose of faith is to discover vital truths that are of the highest importance, but out of reason’s reach.

WHY FAITH IS REASONABLE. As I have said before, we all have faith & gamble in life, whether we admit it or not, for instance, when we marry or take a new job. Humanity faces important questions: What should I live for?? What is love?? Why am I here?? What should I love & how?? Is conscience an illusion, what is it? Is the soul & the afterlife illusions, if not what are they? Our 5 senses do not provide us with answers, so humanity has employed faith to find answers. Faith also has limitations, & can be used to help & heal or to harm. But it is our next reasonable tool when our 5 senses, common sense, & reason can no longer provide us answers. Even scientists use faith. There is no way to conclusively prove that the universe is a stable orderly place with rules & laws. Faith in that condition is the foundation of science. And until the World’s mass media, education, & Freudian thought changed things, scientists had similar beliefs in God as the general public. A study publ. in 1932, “The Religion of Scientists” (by Macmillan Co. w/ Cyprian L. Drawbridge as author) confirmed this.

REASON LOOKS ON THE SURFACE OF THE WATER, FAITH DIVES DEEP INTO THE UNKNOWN OCEAN. It surprises me that my metaphor of the water surface is what we see, & faith searches the deep waters has been used throughout history in many cultures as a description of what their faith was doing. An example is the 18th century Brahmin Bengali mystic poet Rāmprasād Sen who wrote, “Upon the ocean bed lie strewn/ Unnumbered pearls & precious gems;/Plunge in, Saya Rāmprasād…” Another example is Peter Sterry, a Puritan & leading Cambridge Platonist in the 17th century, “…Divine Love; in diverse breadths & depths. With innumerable, sportful windings & turnings, flowing forth from its own full Sea of eternal Sweetness, & through all it Chanels [his spelling], hasting hither again.”

GOD IS BEYOND ALL SENSES & SENSORY THINGS. It also interests me that people searching for God, have consistently realized that they would have to give up their 5 senses & seek Him by faith. An example of this is the 12th century female Hindi saint Akka Mahadevi who wrote, “I have fallen in love, O mother, with the Beautiful One, who knows no death, knows no decay & has no form; I have fallen in love, O mother, with the Beautiful One, who has no middle, has no end, has no parts and has no features.” Friar Leo (in c. 1318) described St. Francis of Assisi’s knowledge of God as an eagle flying, & science like something crawling on its belly on earth. Is atheism giving us better answers to our important questions of life than it did in Classical Greece thousands of yrs. ago? NO, because it limits itself to reason, common sense, & the 5 senses using scientific method. Reality can be completely different than our ideas of it. Science & common sense noted that the earth stood still and the sun revolved around it. For most of history, science, our 5 senses, & common sense believed that space & time were absolute. Now we know different. Is it not possible that a miracle today, in the future will be called scientific progress. A cell phone when I was a youngster would have been a miracle then. Mankind has not discovered all the ins & outs of universal laws, and even if he had, is it not reasonable that the God who made these laws could alter them on occasion?

IS ATHEISM MORE REASONABLE? Atheism has no moral restraints, no conscience. Nietzsche wrote that the death of God would destroy all values, which would be replaced by superior humans eliminating the inferior ones. (A task Hitler set out to do.) There is no appeal to pity or decency NOR reason. All that is outdated, when we becomes atheists. And this is where we come to the big coverup. Secular writers try to coverup and ignore that atheists in the 20th century (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-II) killed over 100 million people during peaceful times. Religion inspired killing is miniscule compared to this. A handful of witches were burned at Salem, but I have numerous times heard of the Salem atrocity by people who would never mention the mass killings and mass graves of someone like Stalin or Mao. If one views atheism as a replacement religion, they were busy killing their rivals. Countless religious believers, priests and mullahs were tortured & murdered by atheistic communist regimes. Crimes of religious extremism are held to be the true face of Islam & Christianity, while the mind-boggling crimes of atheists (and there has been a consistent pattern of atheist regimes being brutal) are supposedly aberrations & distortions, while the opposite is the truth. In other words, if Christians have to answer for the Crusades, atheists can answer for Stalin & Mao & Pol Pot.

FAITH SEEKS A ROUTE TO HIGHER TRUTHS CLOSED TO REASON. It is like those who failed to summit Mt. Everest until they found a better route. It doesn’t mean the Christian who uses faith is unwilling to have reason or doubts. They do use reason & have doubts; it is not a mindless endeavor. In a great example of faith (MK 9:17-24), Yahshua says, “Oh faithless generation…how long shall I suffer you.” He tells a believer to have faith. But the man, who has faith already, says he needs help to have more faith. As one translation puts it “Help me to believe more.” So by faith, I know that God is opposed by Satan. Now some people tell me they have witnessed Satan personally. But because I know the limits of our senses, I know they experienced something, but was it in reality Satan, or something else?? We can’t see concepts like free will and the afterlife with our senses (a NDE may be an exception). But by faith we can ascertain that they exist. By faith, we can believe that miracles happen. This is really a practical humility in realizing that our 5 senses don’t know everything.

TO BE CONTINUED.