agnostics don't celebrate agnosticmas

If someone uses the term "agnosticmas", then that person isn't an agnostic. Agnostics believe the "God question" is forever unanswerable. Therefore, the term "Christmas" (in the religious sense, celebration of the nativity) is neither true nor false. This means the term is also neither worthy of saying nor distorting into a shrill one-word commentary like "agnosticmas".

Agnostics don't celebrate Christmas, but by definition they also don't conclusively believe that Christmas is incorrect. An agnostic who twists a term to make a point is taking a definite stand...for atheism. There's no such thing as agnosticmas.

Christian authoritarianism

One objection to Christianity is so direct, its expression is three words: "Christianity is authoritarian." The intended meaning of "authoritarian" is straightforward: the trampling of freedom by Christian authority. On the other hand, the intended meaning of "Christianity" could be referring to any number of entities, accused of authoritarianism:

• A Christian government
• A (or The) Christian church
• Christian individuals (parents?)
  
• Christian belief systems, inherently
  

As usual, it's not hard to appreciate the objection's perspective. Nobody likes always being ordered around; slavery's most basic indignity isn't mere pain and labor. Undoubtedly, Christianity can be a powerful tool for authoritarians, within and without the actual church, to effect control. But the general, unqualified charge of authoritarianism rings a tad hollow to Christians, for a few reasons.

• Philosophically and ethically, freedom is a trickier concept than its noncontroversial popularity suggests. Therefore, as the opposite of freedom, authoritarianism is a trickier concept than its noncontroversial unpopularity suggests. Someone saying he or she "supports freedom" is not distinctive or informative. Simply put, freedom is great, but which freedoms? Clearly, the freedoms to murder, destroy, and steal should be absolutely suppressed by governmental/societal authoritarians. The extent of other freedoms, and whether the suppression of those freedoms belongs in governmental hands, are vital questions in democracies. Similar discussions occur in churches and organizations of churches: what activities should members of the church never engage in, and what activities are left up to individual judgment? (Although heavy-handed church discipline, due to its tendency to backfire like all instances of negative reinforcement, is probably less effective than earnest, forgiving, and caring correction.) Even deeper, just between a Christian and his or her God, is the question of what areas of life have the freedom of being more or less morally neutral, as opposed to what areas of life are under God's intimate concern. (Actually, the strategy of apportioning bits of lifestyle to God and self is not how to please God; seek out God and his Spirit for true, real transformation, to reflect His holiness in all situations.) In any case, calling Christianity authoritarian is a simplification of the fact that all entities which regulate behavior contain tension between freedom and authoritarianism.
  
• This may be hard for the cynical to accept, but the parts of Christianity that curtail freedom aren't solely motivated by a fastidious craving for perfection. God does want His people to be as good as Him, yet their goodness will accomplish much more than failing to offend heavenly sensibilities. Good people improve the existence of other people. Good people improve the parts of the world they touch--and this is both an intentional and accidental effect of their actions and decisions. Lastly, people who do good may be happier than they otherwise would be, because evil is self-destructive sooner or later. The point is that (ideally!) when Christianity takes an authoritarian stance on some behavior, it's in order to preclude evil and evil's corresponding negative effects, neither on a whim nor out of an obsessive thirst for domination.
  
• Humility remains essential to Christianity. When Christians bow their heads to address the supreme God, the motion should be the outer "face" of the soul's reality. Faith "walks". Any church-goer can say that God is all-knowing and sacred, then live as he or she chooses, regardless. People of faith trust that God is all-knowing and sacred, then live as God directs, because being all-knowing and sacred are excellent qualifications for an authoritarian! If Christianity is authoritarian to its devotees, such "victims" of authoritarianism aren't coerced. They have as much freedom as ever, which they use in recognition of Someone infinitely greater than they.
  
• Christ refused to become part of the societal hierarchy of power, to the point of fleeing zealous crowds who wanted Him to do exactly that. He also refused to use His reign over both supernatural and natural to destroy and punish. Not because He was never angry and disappointed, as evidenced by the "temple clearing" and His many rebukes, to Pharisees and disciples alike, but because He chose to take the less authoritarian path. People who would follow in His footsteps should take note.
  

questions I need help answering

The Web is a medium of communication. Rather than holding back from writing down the questions/concerns about Christianity that I personally struggle with, I have decided to create this blog entry to invite illuminating comments, not only for my benefit, but for blog readers. I plan to keep this entry updated.

1. What is the precise relationship between the body, mind, and soul? What is the dividing line? Related questions, which the answer should also satisfy:

• When does a soul begin existence? How?
• What is the soul doing in cases of mental impairment, or merely when someone is asleep?
• When souls become disembodied, are the "personalities" of the souls the same, despite now being apart from the limitations and regulation of the endocrine and nervous systems of the body?
• In the case of children, especially the very young who don't yet speak, is the soul fully developed? Are they suspect to judgment? If not, then at what point in life?

2. Heaven has been described as a return to an Eden-like existence, or as an eternity of worship. Related questions:

• People like to work, meet challenges, and compete with each other. Does heaven meet such desires?
• People like to learn, study, and discover. In a heaven inhabited by an omniscient being, will there be opportunity for those pursuits?
• People like to create and tweak technology. In a paradise, where would this impulse be directed?

3. If salvation is through Christianity, do the damned include everyone who hasn't been presented with the decision, as well as everyone who was presented with a "faulty" version, and even everyone who simply weren't privileged to hear the message in a form persuasive to them?


4. How does one disentangle/distinguish the effects of the Spirit from effects of emotional/mental/psychological phenomena? For instance, people who expect to feel God are more likely to report feeling Him (see table-turning). People who continually reinforce a belief are doing something like autosuggestion or self-hypnosis. What's involved in authenticating a divine vision, such that it can't be reduced to externally-caused (chemical) hallucinations or unorganized neuronal firings? If someone experiences an unexpected idea, is it surely from supernatural origins or could it be from the subconscious or nonverbal brain parts, as in a bicameral mind? When a flock (i.e. congregation) of people perceive a present proximity of God's presence, especially after an extended period of carefully-engineered worship activities, how much of the effect comes from empathy and/or peer pressure ("I see the way others are reacting, I should be feeling and acting the same")?

the bias that proves God exists

Many of people's experiences, particularly of the overwhelming forces of creation, cause them to feel humility. This is good. Many of people's experiences cause them to appreciate beauty. This is good, too. Many of people's experiences cause them to desire a dramatic, deeper meaning to life, a larger narrative than they can create. Good.

However, they shouldn't make a mental leap from these sentiments to the proposition "a god must exist". When they do, they end up looking like fools. The implication is simply not there, or if it is, it is more like a tiny, circumstantial clue than a definite argument.

To someone who is predisposed to believe in a god, "mountains are big" seems to indicate "god's vastness". To someone not so predisposed, "mountains are big" seems to indicate "cumulative geological effects occur on a large scale". Bias plays such a pivotal role in obtaining the right "conclusion" from the "evidence".

"the religious are sheep"

A sibling of the idea that Christians aren't smart (the third blog entry!) is the idea that people with religious belief systems are "sheep" who somehow lost the ability to think for themselves: under specific conditions they just don't question what they hear. This is how, according to the rest of the diatribe, they can be uncritically duped by "irrational but seductive lies", even to the point of martyrdom. The religious maxims flourish in the mind through isolation from any other knowledge.

The automatons so described obviously exist. Cults, and the top figures of those cults, exploit them. Yet not all people who have religious belief systems are "sheep". Like "Christians aren't smart", "the religious are sheep" is a bald overgeneralization, having some flaws.

• Consider the grid of four possibilities, with rows of "religious" and "secular" and columns of "sheep thinking" and "non-sheep thinking". Some of the people in the "religious" row are in the "sheep thinking" column (the cults just mentioned) and some of the people in the religious row are in the "non-sheep thinking" column (much of this blog entry will essentially cover why and how those people can exist) . "The religious are sheep" implies "non-sheep are secular", so people in the "secular" row and the "non-sheep thinking column" tend to support rather than disprove the objection. But the fourth possibility of the grid, the intersection of row "secular" and column "sheep thinking", while not strictly applicable to the objection, also has many examples. This means in statement form that "all secular people have non-sheep thinking" is false. Clearly, people can think "like sheep" about virtually anything, religious or not. That's why active parenting is so important, why trends have influence, why outsiders (any outsider relative to any group) receive scorn, why oppression often operates through media control and "loyalty-creation exercises". The point is that while this doesn't disprove that all religious people are sheep, it does disprove that "secular" and "non-sheep thinking" are one and the same. Therefore, religiosity and sheep thinking are distinct scales of measurement.
• Sometimes people (choose to) forget that their belief systems contain foundational doctrines which cannot be challenged because those doctrines are the method to structure other knowledge, yielding its meaning. Removing the foundational doctrines would leave the person with no way to comprehend, interpret, and apply. These foundational doctrines will be in the "sheep thinking" realm; someone must have gotten them from somewhere. Granted, some people have more elaborate and explicit doctrines than others. They would doubtless argue that the doctrines are thereby more effective and honest.
• The "sheep thinking" accusation glosses over the subtle, delicate relationship between ideals and particular ideas. Belief systems in general, religious or secular, have ideals/values (of almost equal importance to the foundational doctrines of those belief systems). Part of what makes human communication tricky is the easy pitfall of mistaking the ideals of belief systems and common, everyday ideas. Someone who, under specific conditions, imbibes every idea communicated, is by definition sheep thinking. However, someone who, through sharing ideals (more or less) with the communicator, understands and checks the ideas communicated, is not sheep thinking. Also, if the communicator is reinforcing ideals, nobody is learning what he or she hasn't already consciously chosen as an ideal in the past. In these situations, the participants in the communication are jointly figuring out what ideas best match the ideals. The most drastic of conversations, a switch to a different belief system, can work by identifying similarities in ideals between belief systems. Of course, the mistaking of ideas for ideals can also be put to the sinister use of luring someone to accept an idea that seems to match an ideal when it is actually opposite and/or false.
• A telling discriminator of a belief system's dependence on sheep-thinking, and the person advocating that belief system, is if the believers are (truly) encouraged to rely on more than one source of truth. Practically speaking, a belief system should make it clear that authority over truthful information isn't the province of the Person Whose Name Is ______ (what happens when he or she is no longer able to serve that function?). Centralizing authority in one regularly-swapped official isn't too convincing, either, although one must grudgingly admit absolute dictates have the benefit (curse?) of avoiding debates. In the Christian traditions I am involved in, a balanced, self-checking approach to Biblical truth is the nominal norm: a combination of tradition, reason, and experience do and should inform one's understanding. A prescription for sheep-thinking this is not! I bring this up solely to give an example.
• The desires of independence and freedom are active in people, to varying degrees in various people with their various personalities. The religious are people, regardless of a "sheep" label. They will believe what they choose, and do what they choose. In a society privileged to have religious freedom, any religious "leader" will discover how little control he or she really has. Scolding, discipline, and correction will only be effective on believers who on some level welcome it. Requests for volunteers usually don't lead to an overcrowding of applicants. Levels of commitment and participation are on a wide range. In their deepest of hearts, in the bottom of their minds, and in their locations of privacy, the outwardly "religious" can be surprisingly unwilling to carry out what they claim to believe. Honestly, the religious can be too insincere or weak-willed to aspire to be sheep.
  
• "The religious are sheep" may be connected to the assumption that religious belief systems gain believes through filling a personal, perhaps emotional, chasm, instead of through a "rational" evaluation. This assumption has some merit, since in most cases a belief system engages entire people, not just the part known as the mind. And it shouldn't be controversial to note vulnerable, damaged people are easier to influence, nor that people who are undergoing forced life transitions are more likely to take the opportunity to jump belief systems. Nevertheless, isn't it naive and unsympathetic to expect that people would act any other way? A belief system that doesn't work for someone is likely to be left behind for another. If a large number of people, the "sheep", are rejecting a belief system or replacing it with a competitor, then might that indicate something?
• "The religious are sheep" may be connected to the assumption that religious belief systems gain believers through people imitating and inculcating each other. This assumption has some merit, considering all long-lived belief systems (religious or not) are at least partially spread in this manner. But this assumption is too much of an overgeneralization of how religious belief systems spread, and applicable to too many secular belief systems, for it to be compelling. It also conveniently overlooks the fact that belief system switches also may come about through imitation and re-inculcation. In fact, it's not hard to imagine (or observe) a family in which a grandparent's religious zeal caused the parent to be anti-religious, and the parent's anti-religious zeal caused the grandchild to indulge religious curiosity.
  
• It would be negligent not to acknowledge the Bible's recurrent metaphor of the Church as sheep, still more because the quotes are from Christ. The content and context of those verses don't support the interpretation/application that people should follow each other like sheep. Rather, the relationship between Christ and the Church is like the relationship between a shepherd and a flock, as He enumerates. Shepherds guide, protect, care, sacrifice themselves for sheep. The emphasis is on the shepherd's actions, not the sheep. Note that when preachers talk about the "flock", call themselves "pastors", and so on, the meaning is (or should be) a Christ-inspired sentimental affection for the people they serve, not a way to degrade/dehumanize them.
  

freedom of speech and press is a good thing

Freedom of speech and press is marvelous. Regardless of belief system, every U.S. citizen should be grateful and zealously defensive of it. Please heed the following corrections of some all-too-common misconceptions.

• Having moral standards and respectfully expressing them is in no way "oppressing" other people, nor "inflicting" alternative points of view on the general populace. A free exchange of ideas is a benefit, not a burden. To parrot some popular clichés, "if you don't want to see it, don't watch" and "if you don't want to hear it, don't listen". Parodying and general mockery of differing ideas and media are fully permitted, of course (postmodernists hardly have any other tactic to employ), but have the reprehensible tendencies to emphasize societal division and antagonize the believers of what is mocked.
  
• Having moral standards about speech or press and respectfully expressing them is not detrimental to the freedoms thereof. The respectful expression of a moral standard for speech does not include forcibly silencing immoral speakers. Obviously, it also does not include attacks, sabotage, harassment, etc. It does include whatever means are lawful and respectful. These might be raising awareness of the immoral speech, encouraging the personal choice to avoid it, refusing to support it economically, even participating in peaceful demonstrations. The same freedoms a speaker uses to spread a message can be used by other speakers to protest the spreading of that message. The point is that all the speakers can speak; none of them may prohibit the speech of the others.
  
• It isn't contradictory for someone to believe in freedom of speech while having definite limits on what speech is acceptable to him or her. In fact, the existence of speech someone disagrees with is more or less guaranteed. People who would be generally considered as extremely permissive (and/or apathetic) about speech will nevertheless tell you that some speech or media wouldn't be around in an ideal world: at the very least, the speech or media which communicate the wrong viewpoints, as judged by him or her, and at the very most, any speech or media which have a cumulative negative effect on the audience, again as judged by him or her. Speech is a human activity. Therefore, it is possibly subject to moral consideration. Freedom of speech denotes freedom from interference in communication. As always, freedom doesn't include absolute "release" from all restrictions.
  
• Freedom of speech has come to be valued for serving many different purposes. One is the frequently-well-earned criticism of government actions and officials. Another is the frank investigation of important yet taboo topics, in the proper context. A third is the nonviolent collision of disparate belief systems. To the individualistic modernized consumer, freedom of speech allows the exaltation and exposure of the central ego, whose nurture and actualization is the goal of existence. Moral standards for speech don't, and shouldn't, stop the achievement of these purposes.
  

Worldview Fragment: restriction is freedom

Worldview fragment: one or more related ideas/viewpoints that can (and often do) serve as a component or flavor in a complete worldview held by some specific individual. The "fragment" term is not intended to be a subtle insult, but to accurately reflect the reality that the fragment is 1) not necessarily an actual, comprehensive worldview, and 2) could likely coexist with a variety of other fragments within some individual's worldview. A puzzle piece isn't worthless because it's a puzzle piece.

All of the worldview fragments covered up until this one enjoy current (really perennial) popularity, but are also misleading or unbalanced in sometimes-subtle ways. Each fragment is commonly accepted by people who have nothing to do with Christianity. However, these fragments can sometimes confuse Christians who have heedlessly picked them up...or who simply haven't heard counterbalancing truths.

The worldview fragment "restriction is freedom" is different. It isn't popular, and least of all among the anti-religious. Its downfall isn't in being enticing yet somewhat false, but in being disconcerting yet somewhat true. Some practices and branches of Christianity have deeply embraced this fragment, while others "theoretically" agree with it but typically ignore it. Like the other fragments, it has been mixed with many compatible worldviews beside Christianity. And people and cultures have discovered it more or less independently of Christianity.

"Restriction is freedom" is a short name for the tricky belief that behavioral restrictions can lead to freedom from a detrimental influence. What makes it tricky is the juxtaposition of opposite concepts. On first hearing, it sounds nonsensical, like stating greater heat will cool someone off. How can someone claim to gain freedom by allowing less?

The solution to the contradiction is apparent after admitting the ultimate freedom of all people, free will to make significant decisions, is afflicted by a multitude of bondage-inducing interferences. Personal freedom is simultaneously inviolate and continually buffeted. The most extreme case is addiction, in which someone faces pains of withdrawal that would stoop just short of making the decision for him or her. The least extreme case is a whim or hunch, which vanish when brushed aside or not acted upon.

It's singularly foolish (or, if you prefer, supremely bold) to try to live consistently without recognizing and manipulating the extent of the opposing forces. The person who seriously wants to pursue a goal should observe the interconnectedness of decisions. One shaky, not even arguably evil, decision can lead to a situation that presents a genuine good-and-evil dilemma. Christianity admonishes people to flee temptation. Some of the "hard", "unreasonable" stances some Christians assume on certain activities may be due to the attempt to preemptively avoid opportunities to sin. Naturally, those Christians who can honestly, before God and self, claim total mastery/freedom over the related temptation(s), don't need to do so. To put this into non-Christian terms, a dieter shouldn't be surrounded by no-no foods, and a recovering alcoholic shouldn't be surrounded by problem drinkers. Willpower, especially supplemented by the Holy Spirit, is great, but hardly infallible. When it's weak from lack of practice or has a dismal record in one specific area, it shouldn't be counted on.

Freedom through restriction is beneficial for preventing tough settings, but it is a still more important weapon for breaking shackles that can't be outran: the inner life, with its lusts and compulsions. Many of these desires and drives are natural, and when exercised in the proper outlets could be considered neutral or holy. Once redirected into perversions or overindulged, however, the quality of innocence is gone: all that's left is a clinging urge to do wrong. At that point, someone is at civil war within him- or herself. The situation is serious. For Christians, who believe entanglement in sin produces spiritual death, the situation is literally deadly. Seeking out God, support of others, a renewed commitment to directing the impulse properly, and thoughtful contemplation/refocusing in the midst of the struggle will all be helpful.

Freedom through restriction is a more drastic technique. It entails foregoing not only unlawful gratification, but also lawful gratification, within well-defined limits. By doing this, greater control and strength are asserted. Power is restored to the person's soul, as the very fuel and habit of the specific lust is denied. Failure in carrying out the rule of restriction is treated similar to an actual sin, though not bearing the same weight of guilt: confession, pondering on the failure's root, and repentance. The goal is to train oneself to rely more fully on God during the time of restriction, and to put the problem into adjusted perspective. Interestingly, restricting the action of one inner weakness can lead to increased freedom from other inner weaknesses too. This is one explanation for the importance many Christians have placed on fasting, whether during Lent or in more frequent intervals.

As mentioned earlier, Christianity is not alone in its use of the "restriction is freedom" worldview fragment. Self-denial as a means to self-control is widely applicable. Although it may seem ridiculous in a culture whose attention is riveted on pursuit of pleasure (no matter the time or place of that culture), it in fact makes a lot of good sense.