Someone's just asked me about projection. Do I believe in God cos I want to? An answer:
The problem of projection is everyone's. Actors think all the world is a stage. Footballers think life is a game of two halves. Atheists can certainly project their desires onto reality too.>
Get this from Thomas Nagel:
"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. >
"It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” TN
We all want reality to be a certain way and this leads to all kinds of cognitive biases. It's worth everyone being aware of these—believers and unbelievers alike.
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But Jesus shows up as a very surprising God. The ignominy of his death was a scandal—to everyone and especially the Jews. The physicality of his resurrection was disgusting to many, especially the Greek mind. Jesus just did not fit the mould, he broke it.
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Jesus is not, straightforwardly, the fulfilment of our hopes. Instead he disrupts our expectations radically. But stick with the man on the cross. On the far side of the disruption, you find the most unexpected God, who fulfils your longings in the most unexpected ways.
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My friend Paul Hobbs painted a portrait of a man very much like Cyril Tooze. He was dying without family or friends—seemingly of no value societally, relationally, economically… But does he have value? Inherently?
That’s what the halo is for.
2/4
Many complain that the case against Assisted Dying is contaminated by religious views. Apparently it’s illegitimate to proclaim ‘the sanctity of life’ in this debate.
Two problems:
1) It’s hypocrisy. We all have visions of life, death, value and meaning. No-one’s neutral.
3/4
Socrates was talking to Euthyphro in ~380BC and he posed this famous dilemma:
"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
Whichever way Euthyphro answers there's a problem.
1/7
If Euthyphro says the gods /recognise/ goodness in the world, it sounds like 'goodness' is a thing outside the gods—a thing calling the shots.
But if the gods simply /determine/ what is good, that sounds arbitrary (and pretty scary given the nature of the Greek gods).
2/7
There is an answer that Platonists can give at this stage. They can say that an ultimate thing called 'goodness' simply does exist and that this 'goodness', to all intents and purposes, can be called God. The dilemma is refused. But the abstraction is not hugely satisfying.
Today, among many other things, I taught the Good Samaritan and its thermo-nuclear revolutionary power. It struck me again how compassion is an almighty and outrageous /intervention/. Who does the Samaritan think he is—meddling with nature?
An ancient person seeing the beaten loser would think: seems like (the) Gods want him dead? Or the village does? It's his fate, surely? But no.
Compassion is an—often offensive—upending of nature. A transvaluation of ancient values. Apparently the world needs /righting/.
2/12
Just after teaching the Good Samaritan, I learnt that Yahya Sinwar—the Hamas leader killed yesterday—had been saved by an Israeli surgeon in 2008 who operated on his brain tumor. When you hear actual stories of "saving your enemy" it's confronting more than consoling.
Lucy, a young nursing student in our church, had fallen into a cycle of anxiety, self-harm and depression. One day she decided to write her feelings down in an email as a complaint to Jesus.
"Dear Jesus..." she wrote. But she put me in the address bar and hit send.
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So this email lands in my inbox addressed to Jesus—it's full of anguish, shame and hurt. What do I do?
Well you're going to think Australians are even more arrogant than you'd imagined, but it seemed obvious what I should do. I wrote back to her *as* Jesus. (She started it!)
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In church I'd been preaching a lot about Christ's priesthood. Verses like Job 16:18-20
“Even now my Witness is in heaven; my Advocate is on high. My Intercessor is my Friend as my eyes pour out tears to God; on behalf of a man he pleads with God as a man pleads for his friend”
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Two different models of preaching — a short thread.
Here, in yellow, is how a lot of (evangelistic) preaching feels, both to Christians and non-Christians. Call it model 1. There is a thick black line called Decision and it splits the audience.
1/6
The "ticks" are those who have Made Their Decision For Jesus.
The "crosses" are those who still haven't Made Their Decision For Jesus.
Evangelistic preaching, then, has nothing to say to Christians. It's telling other people: "Do What We've Done."
In other words it's law.
2/6
But what if we /really/ listened to the law? What if we understood that "there's no-one righteous, no not one"? In that case, the only tick is Jesus and we're all crosses. This puts the true divide front and centre. It also creates immense solidarity with all our listeners.
"Kidneys and mountains are real. Human rights are not."
Harari is a child of the enlightenment. If you begin with the fact/value distinction, how do you avoid saying nonsense like this? 👇
And if you want to avoid nonsense like this 👆 it'll be important to unpick the enlightenment myth underpinning it.
Secular? Humanist? Choose one.
And the thing is, all my secular friends know which to pick. They pick humanist. They believe in human rights far more than they believe this is a godless universe.
Harari can help. If his views seem 'blasphemous', it's only because he's identified our sacred beliefs.