I recently had the wonderful privilege of being interviewed once again by Andy Olson of Echo Zoe radio. The last time I visited with Andy, we discussed King James Onlyism. This time around, we discussed my articles I recently remastered and reposted interacting with Chaz Bufe, the blues guitar playing, anarchist atheist.
Check it out: 20 Ways to Answer the Fool
Is Christianity borrowed from other ancient religions?
I come to my last post addressing Chaz Bufe, the blues guitar picking, Christ-hating anarchist, and his 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity.
Chaz’s final point argues that the key components of the Christian faith are borrowed from a plethora of ancient religions that pre-date Christianity. Most specifically, from the religious followers of Mithra, a Persian cult god that was extremely popular among the Roman soldiers during the first century. Chaz writes,
20. Christianity borrowed its central myths and ceremonies from other ancient religions. The ancient world was rife with tales of virgin births, miracle-working saviors, tripartite gods, gods taking human form, gods arising from the dead, heavens and hells, and days of judgment. In addition to the myths, many of the ceremonies of ancient religions also match those of that syncretic latecomer, Christianity. To cite but one example (there are many others), consider Mithraism, a Persian religion predating Christianity by centuries. Mithra, the savior of the Mithraic religion and a god who took human form, was born of a virgin; he belonged to the holy trinity and was a link between heaven and Earth; and he ascended into heaven after his death. His followers believed in heaven and hell, looked forward to a day of judgment, and referred to Mithra as “the Light of the World.” They also practiced baptism (for purification purposes) and ritual cannibalism-the eating of bread and the drinking of wine to symbolize the eating and drinking of the god’s body and blood. Given all this, Mithra’s birthday should come as no surprise: December 25th; this event was, of course, celebrated by Mithra’s followers at midnight.
Christianity is a faith grounded in history. In other words, the second person of the real Triune God, became a real man named Jesus, who lived in a real period of human history, walked a real geographic area, and performed real signs and wonders to demonstrate His claims of deity. This real, historical person Jesus, then gave Himself up to be falsely executed so as to die on a real cross so as to ransom a people from the penalty of their sin. He really resurrected from the dead 3 days after His execution, and will really return to judge the world at His historical second coming. There is nothing “mythical” about the person and work of Jesus Christ.
The idea that Christianity is a religion based upon composite myths and stories borrowed, or stolen, from other ancient religions is rather new in literary studies. The first critics who speculated about the “Jesus myths” began to write in the mid-1800s. Many of them were the product of the atheistic enlightenment which attempted to displace the influence of the Christian church in western society.
German philosopher, Bruno Bauer, who wrote out his views of Jesus in the 1840s, was probably the first “serious” attempt by a “scholar” to connect Christianity to pagan myths. Bauer even argued that Jesus never existed and was a total fabrication of the earliest sects of Christianity. One of Bauer’s students, Karl Marx, promoted the belief Jesus never existed and made it part of his Communist dogma.
Those “copy-cat” claims, however, were debunked early on by legitimate scholars, even by those who would be considered liberal. But the advent of the internet provides the ability for any atheist crank and his little brother to post this pseudo-intellectual nonsense without scrutiny, and has brought about a resurgence of the “Jesus myth” fallacy among the network of various atheistic groups. Uniformed Christians who stumble upon the “scholarly” looking web articles become alarmed at what they read. If it is true Jesus never existed, or that the bulk of the Christian faith is hobbled together with bits and pieces of other existing religious myths, then our faith is unfounded and we are, as the Apostle Paul wrote in I Corinthians 15:19, men to be pitied.
To begin answering Chaz’s assertions of parallel, copy-cat faiths, probably the most thoroughly written response for lay level readers is J.P. Holding’s collection of essays addressing the variety of ancient religions atheists claim are borrowed by Christians. His research does a good job of debunking some of the alleged connections and demonstrating they are more contrived by the critics than based upon genuine similarities.
More specifically, J. Warner Wallace has written a lengthy article addressing the Mithra connections that Chaz directly mentions in his point. What Wallace documents in his article, and what Chaz fails to tell his readers, is that the real Mithra scholars, not the internet cranks smoking up their comparisons, deny any myth borrowing ever happened between Christians and followers of Mithraism. When the top scholars in the world of one of the most obscure and forgotten cults flat out deny the central tenant of your thesis, you’re pretty much making stuff up in order to sustain your argument.
Wallace’s article is more than adequate to show Chaz, along with the host of pseudo-scholars he depends upon, doesn’t have a clue what he is talking about. But let’s consider a simple historical and biblical response.
– First of all, it is true mystery religions flourished throughout the ancient world around the 1st century. Yet, the one place where they were not only uncommon, but also rejected, was Israel. The practice of pagan mystery religions were non-existent in ancient Palestine. That is simply because the Jews had learned a rather hard lesson about God’s utter hatred against pagan cults nearly 500 years earlier when Babylon was used as the rod of punishment against Israel’s idolatry.
Christianity is Jewish in origin, and it began in Jerusalem and flourished in Israel for nearly the first two decades after the Spirit’s coming. The first Christians were also Jews who were raised with a revulsion toward cultic paganism. It is absurd to think that in the incubator of OT monotheism where Christianity was born and firmly rooted, that the main components of the faith were myths and symbols borrowed from a variety of pagan mystery religions that didn’t even exist in the same country.
In truth, the historical background of Christianity grounded in the doctrine of the Person and Work of Jesus was well founded before missionaries began to even encounter pagan mystery religions. This is an important point to consider. We must realize that it takes a significant amount of time for “mythology” to be established within a religion and the components of Christianity were well-founded decades before the close of the first century. Paul’s doxology of Christ he describes in Philippians 2:5-11 may well had been a citation from an early Christian doctrinal hymn. Paul wrote Philippians around 60 AD, which means he is citing an affirmed doctrine of Jesus Christ that had been believed by the faithful for at least 30 years prior to his writing that epistle.
– Secondly, Christianity was a public faith. Meaning the Gospel was proclaimed and taught out in the open to all people groups without exception. Mystery religions, on the other hand, like Mithraism, flourished among exclusive groups who are “in the know” as to the the content of the religion; individuals who have “earned” the right to be entrusted with the secrets of the religion.
In order to know about Mithra, a person would have had to at least become a Roman soldier, something that was exclusively male, and then probably involve himself in a series of initiations in order to even be recognized as worthy of learning of Mithra. Roman soldiers, then, would have no interest in “evangelizing” for Mithra, or even promoting a belief in him, because it was a faith shared only among those Roman soldiers who had been initiated into the secret order. Thus, a copy-cat religion would be extremely difficult to develop, because it is impossible to cut-and-paste together parts for a new mystery religion when you don’t even know the “mysteries” of the other religion to begin with.
– Thirdly, skeptics like Chaz reject the NT as being an historical document, but in reality it is. The first 5 books of the NT, the 4 Gospels and the book of Acts, are historical documents recording the events surrounding Jesus Christ and the spread of the Christian Church from Judea to the uttermost parts of the world at that time. When Christians began to engage the pagan, gentile world with the Gospel, it was obvious to the gentiles that Christianity presented unique truth claims that radically set it apart from the scores of mystery religions familiar to them. What made Christianity special was not that it borrowed already existent myths, but that it presented reality: it taught a belief in a living God who was active in space and time and claimed to be the judge the entire world.
Never in any of the many encounters with gentiles as recorded in the NT do the pagans respond to the Gospel message as if it was just another mystery religion.
For example, when Peter presented the Gospel to Cornelius in Acts 10, Cornelius, who was a Roman soldier, does not say, “Oh that sounds just like what the followers of Mithra believes.” Moreover, there was a supernatural move of the Spirit that fell upon Cornelius and his household in the presence of Peter and the Jewish men with him. Such an occurrence of the “Spirit falling” upon people is absent the Mithra mythology.
Moreover, when Paul was in Athens (Acts 17), a city completely given over to idolatry, cultic practices, and mystery religions, his preaching of Jesus to the people was a curiosity. His message was so unique that it caught the attention of the local authorities who brought him into a meeting to have him explain his “religion” (Acts 17:22ff.). After Paul brought up the Resurrection of Christ, most of the people mocked, because the idea of a dead man rising back to life was unheard of. No one said, “There is nothing really new about this Paul’s beliefs, this stuff sounds just like any other “mystery” religion.”
– And then fourthly, Christianity experienced periods of violent persecution for at least the first 200 years of its existence. In addition to severe state sponsored persecution, there were secular critics who wrote against the Christian faith. None of those critics ever attempted to debunk Christianity as being an off-shoot of Mithraism or a copy-cat of any other known mystery cult. If Christianity was nothing more than a collection of already pre-existent myths found in other ancient mystery religions, then there would be no need to persecute the Church or write against its beliefs.
Why would anyone be threatened by another mystery religion with similar myths already believed and practiced by adherents of other similar faiths? Secular critics of Christianity accused Christians of atheism, because they refused to acknowledge the other gods. No other mystery religion was a threat to the social fabric of the times, because no other mystery religion god told its followers to abandon idolatry and believe in an historical person, or to turn from pagan temples and religious prostitutes to serving the One True God and living a life of ethical holiness.
Conclusion
Chaz ends his lengthy screed by offering a final word. He says that his 20 points are just a smattering of the problems with Christianity. He then states that even if a half of what he wrote, or maybe even two-thirds or even three-quarters, was discounted, the fact that Christianity must be abandoned would remain. That is a rather bold claim; however, I believe my meager responses show that it is really an embarrassingly laughable claim. Moreover, what he has to offer as a suitable philosophical replacement is unworkable in the real world.
Chaz is an obscure, amateur philosophy hack who has access to the internet. I just stumbled upon his online booklet from another obscure atheist site. I took on his claims, not only for the blog fodder, but to show how Christianity can easily answer the prattlings of a fool. Chaz represents the type of Bible critic most Christians will encounter in the class room, or at work in the break room, or at the family reunions and holiday get togethers. Though I have taken a while to respond, I do hope I have offered some stepping stones for my readers to use when they encounter the Chazes in their lives.
Is the Bible a reliable guide to Christ’s teaching’s and is the basic text riddled with contradictions?
I am coming down to my final two posts responding to Chaz Bufe, the Christ-hating, blues guitar picker and his article 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity.
I put points 18 and 19 together because they have a similar challenge to the integrity and veracity of Scriptures Rather than reproducing the two points in whole, they can be read HERE and HERE.
Haters of Christianity really amuse me at times. Here you have individuals who insist that the Bible is an error-filled, bigoted, homophobic religious text, that God doesn’t exist, and that Jesus never lived, pretend to be the most “learned” scholars on those very subjects they despise. So much so they want to correct me, the buffoonish religious crank, what it is I should really know about my own faith.
If God is supposed to be a myth and the Bible an old, unreliable guide to anything relevant in our modern world, you would think the skeptic wouldn’t bother wasting time immersing himself in anything related to God and the Bible. I expect blues guitar festivals to be Chaz’s field of expertise. However, when the subjects of textual criticism, what the Bible teaches, and the historicity of the biblical record is raised, our atheist reveals he is also a “well rounded” expert. If you even attempt to defend the Bible as reliable against him, he’ll show how you’re an idiot.
For example, under point 18, Chaz throws out a number of factoids about the NT Gospels not being a reliable guide to Christ’s teaching. He writes, “These texts [meaning the Gospel narratives] have been amended, translated, and re-translated so often that it’s extremely difficult to gauge the accuracy of current editions.” Oh really? Since when did our amateur guitar player learn all there was to know about the ancient Hebrew and Greek languages and the various translations developed from them? I may be going out on a limb here, but I would venture a guess and say that Chaz is about as much of an expert in the accuracy of the Gospels as Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown.
Of course a guy like Chaz would never allow his claim to be honestly scrutinized. The fact is, the real textual critics of the world, which are many, even if they come from a non-evangelical background, all agree that the vast amounts of textual evidence we have for the NT alone is remarkably consistent in its content. That in spite of the textual variants, translations, and editions produced over the centuries. When the store house of just the NT manuscripts alone are compared together with what we hold now in our hands as Scripture, the message remains unaltered. The record of Christ’s life and teaching has not been lost or tampered with and it is most certainly reliable.
Only psuedo-intellectual crackpots like the Jesus Seminar folks Chaz appeals to as his authority are the ones who deny the factuality of the textual evidence as it testifies to the over all integrity of the NT. That is because they all have as a driving presupposition a deep seated pathology against God and the Christian faith. Those folks are dishonest with the facts and have an agenda to promote.
A more current day example is Bart Ehrman, NT professor at the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Atheists often appeal to him as a reliable critic of the NT text because he graduated from Princeton and is considered the “heir” of NT textual scholar, Bruce Metzger.
In nearly all of his popular level publications and lectures, Ehrman retells the story of how he was once a born-again evangelical who affirmed the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture. He had an interest to really knowing the Bible and attended Moody Bible Institute in pursuit of that goal. It was not until he began his post-graduate studies in NT textual criticism, however, that he “saw the light.” He realized he had been misled by his evangelical pastors and friends about the veracity of the NT text and thus he was carried kicking and screaming against his will to become a shrieking apostate. He even recounts how during his days at Moody Bible Institute none of his teachers provided any solid defense of the Bible in light of the overwhelming textual evidence against infallibility and inerrancy.
But I happen to know individuals who attended Moody at exactly the same time Ehrman did and they tell me he is lying. One particularly reliable person who attended Moody the same time Ehrman did, told me he had the same questions Ehrman claims he had about the biblical text. Contrary to Ehrman’s assertion, the NT professors did an outstanding job of dealing with the so-called over-whelming evidence against inerrancy and infallibility.
So there is certainly something else at work here other than textual evidence. Textual evidence doesn’t cause a person to lie against his schooling and twist around the historical interpretation of the manuscripts so as to misrepresent what they really tell us about the formation of the NT. That is a moral problem not at all related to evidence.
Then moving on to Chaz’s next point, the claim is that the Bible is riddled with contradictions. Out of all of the criticisms a Christian will hear from skeptics, pretty much all of them start with the assertion that the Bible cannot be believed because it is full of contradictions. Chaz even lists three to prove his point.
I remember that many of my conversations I had regarding “contradictions” in Scripture took place after dinner during the holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas while watching football. Usually it was with a snooty relative, like a curmudgeonly older cousin you only see once or twice a year. As a young believer I would quickly become discombobulated with the examples of “contradictions,” and my attempt to throw out some simplistic response never really satisfied the person. The encounter would cause me to do some studying, but when I thought I had a better answer, at the next holiday get together the person would have an entirely different set of “contradictions” to rub in my face.
I have since developed a better approach when dealing with those sorts of challenges to the biblical text.
One of the first things I learned is that folks like Chaz place an absurd literary standard of perfection upon the Bible. The standard is so ridiculously outside the realm of reality that no written historical document could comply, let alone the Bible. So when someone tells me the Bible is full of contradictions, I will ask the person to define for me what he means by “contradiction.” The number of times I have asked for a definition, the person is taken aback, because no Christian had before ever thought to ask the person to define his criteria for “contradiction.” The normal, everyday understanding of a contradiction is when two propositions are contrary to one another and produce opposite conclusions. In logical terms, “A” cannot be “A” and “non-A” in the exact same way at the same time.
The critic’s understanding of “contradiction” rarely falls under the everyday working definition. That is clearly demonstrated when he pulls examples from two separate contexts, perhaps even being written by two different biblical authors writing to separate readers during different time periods. Chaz does exactly that when he compares a passage in Genesis with one in Exodus, and then John as well as Genesis and James and declares how they “contradict” each other. The closest he comes to giving an honest comparison is with quoting from Jeremiah, but he compares passages that are 14 chapters apart without any consideration of who the prophet was speaking to and why. He does the same with quotations from Jesus as recorded by John, but again, the examples are three chapters apart and Jesus is addressing two entirely different audiences.
Once I have the critic explain to me what he means by “contradiction,” I then ask the person to show me the one hands down, undeniable contradiction he thinks utterly demonstrates the Bible is is error. The reason I ask for the ultimate contradiction is because in debates with skeptics on the subject, the person will toss out an alleged contradiction, and when you provide an answer to it, the person has already moved on to the next one on his list. Asking for the ultimate example cuts past having to put out a bunch of little fires.
Yet, even with this modified approach I always keep in mind the fact that a hardened biblio-skeptic like Chaz is not looking for answers. He is an unbeliever merely wanting to make a mockery of the Christian and the Bible, as well as continue in his rebellion against God.
With a skeptic like Chaz, it truly is not a matter of whether there are answers to his criticisms. It is a matter of whether or not he will submit himself to God’s authority as revealed in Scripture. He is operating with an unregenerate mind; one that is darkened in sin and has no interest in the truth, and what truth he is given, he will reject, suppressing the truth by explaining it away with some clever argument he devises. Hence, the Bible in the mind of the unregenerate sinner will never be a “reliable” guide to Christ’s teaching and no one will ever satisfactory answer his list of “contradictions.”
Is Christianity Homophobic?
I continue with my review of Chaz Bufe, blues guitar playing Christian hater, and his 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity.
With his next point, Chaz charges the Christian faith with promoting and engaging in homophobia. Because Chaz’s descriptions of Christian homophobia are a bit crass, I will not reproduce them in full, but direct readers here if they are interested in viewing them.
Like all of Chaz’s previous complaints against Christianity, he demonstrates an embarrassing lack of understanding of what it is he criticizes.
He begins by launching an attack against the book of Leviticus and the specific laws by which the people of Israel were to be governed. Chaz’s reaction to those laws is to say they were unnecessarily harsh rules against what he describes as trivial offenses. The “trivial” offenses he lists as illustrations from the book of Leviticus include adultery, bestiality, high-handed rebellion against one’s parents, and of course, homosexual behavior. In the real world inhabited by rational people, not some anarchist utopian dreamland envisioned by Chaz, those are not trivial offenses.
Taking a page out of the gaystapo playbook, Chaz appeals to the cliched argument that Christians are selective in which laws from Leviticus they will emphasize. How can they agree with the prohibition against homosexuality when such prohibitions also exist against eating pork and lobster?
Yep. You read that right. A smug Christian hater, who doesn’t give the slightest indication he has even read the Bible, telling me what I am supposed to believe about the Bible. Amazing.
Anyone giving a surface reading to Leviticus will quickly note Chaz draws a ridiculous imbalance from the text. The death penalty was not administered against those who ate Outback Steakhouse’s coconut shrimp or Chili’s baby back pork ribs. The death penalty was only prescribed for those individuals who engaged in behaviors, like homosexual sex and bestiality, that were extremely detrimental to society, and I would add, cut sharply against the holiness of God as revealed to God’s redeemed people.
Additionally, in regards to Leviticus, the laws against eating unclean animals were put away at the coming of Christ. See Peter’s vision in Acts 10, for the key example. Those food laws had the specific purpose of keeping God’s special people, Israel, separated from the pagan nations surrounding them at the time. The food laws were only necessary for the time Israel was a theocratic nation dwelling in the land. The laws which define, regulate, and prohibit human sexual behavior, including homosexuality, are a reflection of God’s moral attributes and thus transcend both Testaments as well as all people groups across the world.
Chaz further accuses Christians as being purveyors of general homophobia. I can certainly understand the aversion a common person, either Christian or non-Christian, would have toward homosexual behavior. People instinctively know homosexuality is against what is natural concerning human sexuality, and generally, those engaged in the lifestyle are involved with such vile perversions of the flesh that the expressions of such shock the senses with a gut churning revulsion. If one should witness the wretched scenes from a typical San Francisco street fair catering to the sexual fetishes frequently occurring in the homosexual community, a person in his right mind would be homophobic.
Chaz has made it clear that he doesn’t like Christians because they stifle sexual expression. He noted under points 9 and 10 of his booklet that, in his anarchist opinion, Christians have an unhealthy preoccupation with sex and produce a lifestyle of sexual misery. Christians are foolish, he argues, thinking they can prohibit sex among people to total monogamy because “human beings are by nature highly sexual beings. Their urges very often do not fit into the only officially sanctioned Christian form of sexuality (monogamous, heterosexual marriage).”
But I will go out on a limb and venture a guess that Chaz would be a “pedophobe,” a person fearful of adults having sex with young teens or even pre-teen children. Would he be willing to grant Jack McClellan (I let the reader Google his name), a notorious self-confessed pedophile (even though he says he never has touched a child), the freedom to indulge his urges even if it was with a consensual young teen?
Jack argued during an interview a number of years ago on local LA talk radio that his desires were really just his orientation. In fact, Jack even made the comparison of his sexual attraction for little girls to that of a man or woman’s homosexual attraction to the same sex. Will Chaz advocate for Jack against stodgy, sexually repressive Christianity? Jack even says he is an atheist with anarchist leanings, so he is a kindred spirit with Chaz.
I personally believe the Christian church can do better with ministering to people caught in the sin of homosexuality. I think Christian’s overall have stumbled in this area of outreach. But an aversion to homosexuality as a lifestyle and a conviction that homosexuals are trapped in a filthy sin from which they need to repent is hardly “homophobia.”
If anything, such a concern on the part of Christians is genuine love toward those enslaved to the sin. Statistics and real life facts show that the young men and women engaged in homosexuality live destructive lifestyles which only shorten their lives. To warn them to flee from that bondage of deceptive foolishness by calling them to repentance and submission to their creator who is the only one who can provide genuine redemption is not a phobia to be criticized, but a compassion which should be commended.
Is Christianity Misogynistic?
I continue once again examining the arguments of blues guitar playing, anti-Christian, Chaz Bufe, written in his self-published work, 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity.
In his 16th point, Chaz claims Christianity is misogynistic. “Misogynistic” is a fancy word meaning “woman hater.” This particular entry is a bit long, so I refer the reader here to read it in its entirety.
Chaz writes in his opening sentence, “Misogyny is fundamental to the basic writings of Christianity.” Really? Woman hating is the one thing that permeates all the writings of Christianity? I always get a laugh from the person who hates my faith and insists he or she would have nothing to do with such nonsense, but then pretends to be enough of an expert to educate me on what I’m supposed to believe.
Any person who genuinely thinks misogyny is fundamental to Christianity is either,
a) cherry-picking selective citations from the Bible without any thought of context within a Christian worldview or,
b) has a limited view of world history and,
c) certainly has not traveled anywhere beyond the immediate borders of his or her hometown, let alone anywhere in the world.
I would venture a wild guess and say all of those apply to Chaz, at least the first two.
In order to “prove” his thesis, Chaz moves on to quote, out-of-context of course, Paul’s words to wives in Ephesians 5, a few OT passages that speak to the “uncleanness” of women, and then lists other similar passages from the Bible like 1 Timothy 2:11,12, and 1 Corinthians 11:3. Chaz insists those passages and other like them are responsible for the oppression of women throughout the history of the world down to our current day where women are not allowed to pastor churches. He also presents some citations from the sermons of church fathers like Tertullian, who allegedly railed against the disobedience of Eve in the garden of Eden. Those sermons, insists Chaz, are filled with venomous misogyny.
One amusing part of Chaz’s point is how he buys into the inflated number of “millions” of witches burned during the Inquisition and the myth about the English common law allowing husbands to beat their wives.
First, regarding the witch burnings. Chaz leveled those bogus charges under a previous point in which he accused Christianity of cruelty. As I noted when I answered him then, the number of young women burned at the stake is highly exaggerated, more like in the tens of thousands rather than millions, and that is over a course of 300 plus years. Additionally, it was the so-called “superstitious” church who put a stop to much of the witch burning, not “intellectual” anarchist atheists, as Chaz would have us believe.
Moving to the charge about English law allowing husbands to beat their wives is also another urban legend created by feminist. Sort of like the claim more women are abused on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day. Christiana Hoff Sommers has done a fine job of debunking the “rule of thumb” myth in her book Who Stole Feminism?, and showing how it is the invention of fevered feministic anti-traditionalism. Read the section here.
Certainly there have been individual cases in history past where judges favored an abusive husband over his wife, but the true “rule of thumb” among law courts both in England and America was to punish abusive husbands who battered their wives. That protection of women is a product of Christianity elevating the place of women in God’s kingdom, and it has been Christians who have advocated against domestic violence toward women.
But the chuckle inducing part of Chaz’s point is his conclusion listing a group of women instrumental in the establishment of feminist ideology. Two are worth noting.
First is Mary Wollstonecraft who was an 18th century atheistic feminist. She is lauded as a pioneering intellectual of feminism who advocated for educational opportunities for women and other equal rights in her writings. As enlightened as she supposedly was, however, her choice of men for her relationships displays the mentality of a Hollywood bimbo. She had affairs with two notorious misogynists, one with artist Henry Fuseli, an emotionally troubled painter who had severe hang-ups and hatred toward women, and Gilbert Imlay who got her pregnant and then left her for another affair with an actress. Her daughter, Mary, who wrote the Frankenstein novel, didn’t fair too well with men either. She married the womanizing Percy Shelley who left his pregnant wife to marry her and who eventually left her as well. Those may be women liberated from the “tyranny” of traditional Christianity, but they only trade it for the piggish behavior of narcissistic, chauvinists atheists.
Then Chaz lists Margaret Sanger. He even quotes favorably one her key slogans of life, “no God, no master,” and says it is still relevant today. That is a frightening thought, because Sanger was a pro-eugenics racist who promoted birth-control for the purposes of maintaining a fit nation free of unevolved ethnic groups who would hold our society back. Chaz may want to read his previous point where he accused Christianity of racism, but I digress.
At any rate, Sanger created the American Birth Control League, what was to become Planned Parenthood, for the purposes of creating her vision of a fit nation freed from undesirables. Her group specifically targeted low-income ethnic and minority neighborhoods because the people there were considered more feeble-minded than the rest of our society.
In reality, it is Chaz’s view of liberated women that is a disgusting form of selfish sexism. That is typical of anti-Christian intellectuals through out history. Chaz is for sure a supporter of Darwinianism, but Charles Darwin himself was a sexist. Writing in his second major book of biological evolution, Descent of Man, he presented women as being less evolved than men and the reason why they need to stay home under their protection. Many of his immediate supporters also held to the notion that men were more evolved than women.
That attitude continues even to this day. Over the last few years, ideological and personal fissures have formed among atheist/skeptical groups because of the latent sexism existing among them. The alleged sexism is particularly on public display at their various, yearly conventions. On the one hand are humorless, man-hating femi-Nazi types who break out into sobbing fits or faux outrage when a Comic Con nerd atheist works up the liquid courage to ask one of them to have cocktails with him after a session to discuss continuity inconsistencies within the Dragon Riders of Pern series.
On the other, there have been serious allegations raised of sexual assault by well-known, celebrity atheists, and those crimes being ignored or covered up by the old white-male atheist club. See also HERE HERE and HERE.
In all honesty, Chaz’s concern for the rights of women in Christianity is phony. Sure Chaz decries the mistreatment of women by the hands of Christian officials over the centuries, pointing out how they have been oppressed and are not allowed to participate in church leadership and are basically told by the Bible to stay in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant. But it is all a ruse to cover up his true motive which is to have free, limitless sex with any girl of any age with impunity.
You see, biblical theology, as taught throughout the entire length of Scripture, has a profound respect for women. That profound respect is demonstrated in the fact the scriptural ethics do not allow men to use women as sexual chattel. Are there examples of men abusing women in the Bible? Sure. Is that an operating moral principle taught in the Bible for a Christian worldview? No.
One truly important illustration of genuine love and respect for women means a man does not use women solely for his own sexual gratification. A biblical morality teaches men are to take responsibility for the women they involve themselves with sexually including committing to them in marriage first, and taking care of the children who will be the product of that sexual marriage.
Chaz, on the other hand, promotes a playboy mentality under the guise of helping to liberate women that doesn’t want the hassle of the responsibility stuff. Thus, in his mind, women “set free” from the stifling life as a Christian and cut loose from the shackles of traditional Christian morality, can assuage his guilt for using them, because they don’t have those annoying, sexual mores in tow.
Does Christianity Sanction Slavery?
15. Christianity sanctions slavery. The African slave trade was almost entirely conducted by Christians. They transported their victims to the New World in slave ships with names such as “Mercy” and “Jesus,” where they were bought by Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. Organized Christianity was not silent on this horror: it actively encouraged it and engaged in it. From the friars who enslaved Native Americans in the Southwest and Mexico to the Protestant preachers who defended slavery from the pulpit in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, the record of Christianity as regards slavery is quite shameful. While many abolitionists were Christians, they were a very small group, well hated by most of their fellow Christians.
The Christians who supported and engaged in slavery were amply supported by the Bible, in which slavery is accepted as a given, as simply a part of the social landscape. There are numerous biblical passages that implicitly or explicitly endorse slavery, such as Exodus 21:20–21: “And if a man smite his servant, or his maid with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.” Other passages that support slavery include Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, Titus 2:9–10, Exodus 21:2–6, Leviticus 25:44–46, 1 Peter 2:18, and 1 Timothy 6:1. Christian slave owners in colonial America were well acquainted with these passages.
Christianity sanctioning slavery is a common objection in atheistic literature; but it is fundamentally flawed.
First, the charge is extremely narrow in its scope by only aiming to condemn Christianity for its participation in slavery even though slavery has been practiced through out all of history, across all people groups, both religious and non-religious.
Secondly, the objection is generally limited to slavery as it was practiced in the pre-Civil War era of the United States. That is important to note, because the voluntary servitude permitted by the Old Testament Torah for the purposes of securing financial stability in Israel’s society is a far cry from the slavery the western world engaged during 18th and 19th centuries when primitive peoples were kidnapped from their homes and families and replanted to other hemispheres of the earth.
Now, it is certainly true that Christians were involved with the sin of slavery, and many Christians, as Chaz points out, attempted to justify their involvement with slavery by appealing to Scripture. But the wrong-headed use of the biblical descriptions of slavery in both the Old and New Testaments by Christians, who should had been repenting of such attitudes rather than erroneously defending them, does not mean the Bible endorses the practice of human chattel slavery.
Those biblical passages listed by Chaz that he claims endorses slavery have an historical and theological context all their own, and it is beyond the bounds of simple literary linguistics to read back upon those texts a foreign context that is a couple of thousand years removed.
Putting aside a detailed exegesis of each of those passages, what needs to be noted is that Scripture records directives not only for slaves to be faithful to their masters, but also for masters who are to be respectful and merciful to their slaves, something unprecedented during the NT writing. Paul certainly did not encourage slave rebellions, for such an action would be foolish; but by laying down divine principles for living out a Christian life by addressing both slaves and masters as equals before God in Christ (Galatians 3:28), the Bible embeds within its pages the seeds of eliminating slavery all together which is what we see happen over time in societies where Christ is held high.
Chaz, like most atheist critics of Christianity, is conveniently dismissive of two important facets on the history of slavery: The impact of Christianity on ending slavery and the atheistic driven racism that followed after the development of Darwinian evolution.
First, Christians over the centuries have recognized the biblical teaching that men are created in the image of God. So even though there were Christians who attempted to justify their sinful practice of keeping slaves, there were many more who saw slavery for what it was, a defacing of the image of God in a person. Chaz is quick to ignore the work of such men as George Whitfield, Samuel Davies, John Newton, John Elliot, William Wilberforce, who campaigned nearly 16 years to have the slave trade ended, and the Moravians who sent missionaries to the Caribbean to evangelize the slaves and their owners. Many in the Church were active in confronting slavery and rebuking society for its sinfulness so as to have the practice eradicated in western society which was prominently Christian.
Then second, the atheism experiment with racism went far beyond the owning of slaves to the deliberate killing of ethnic groups. Atheistic scientists, fueled by Darwinian ideas, hunted the more backward, primitive societies in our world to locate “missing links” to be examined in their university laboratories. The Australian Aboriginals, for instance, bore the brunt of a lot of the evolutionary thinking that tribal peoples were less evolved.
Regardless of which group is the perpetrator, slavery is a demonstration of man’s inhumanity to man. However, to say Christianity “sanctions” slavery is preposterous. On the contrary, Christianity has always been on the forefront leading societies to confront the evils of human slavery. That is something the atheist, like Chaz, should be thankful.
Does Christianity model authoritarian organizations?
I continue once again considering the list of 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity compiled by blues guitar playing, Christ-hating anarchist, Chaz Bufe.
Thankfully, he provides us another short point that will require a short response:
14. Christianity models hierarchical, authoritarian organization. Christianity is perhaps the ultimate top-down enterprise. In its simplest form, it consists of God on top, its “servants,” the clergy, next down, and the great unwashed masses at the bottom, with those above issuing, in turn, thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots backed by the threat of eternal damnation. But a great many Christian sects go far beyond this, having several layers of management and bureaucracy. Catholicism is perhaps the most extreme example of this with its laity, monks, nuns, priests, monsignors, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and popes, all giving and taking orders in an almost military manner. This type of organization cannot but accustom those in its sway—especially those who have been indoctrinated and attending its ceremonies since birth—into accepting hierarchical, authoritarian organization as the natural, if not the only, form of organization. Those who find such organization natural will see nothing wrong with hierarchical, authoritarian organization in other forms, be they corporations, with their multiple layers of brown-nosing management, or governments, with their judges, legislators, presidents, and politburos. The indoctrination by example that Christianity provides in the area of organization is almost surely a powerful influence against social change toward freer, more egalitarian forms of organization.
If ever there was a more amazing example of the kettle-painting-pot cliche’! Chaz is a self-professed anarchist, so I can understand why he would have problems with any authority, let alone Christianity. Yet once again Chaz’s main illustration of Christian authority gone wild is Roman Catholicism and Catholicism does not represent the whole of biblical Christianity by any stretch of the imagination.
To a degree, Chaz raises a reasonable complaint about organized religion, Christianity specifically. It certainly is true that various sects of Christianity have had their problems with authoritarian abuse. Many independent fundamental style churches whether Baptist or Pentecostal, can be governed like a local HOA board of directors who implement some of the most odious zero tolerance policies imaginable. Ridiculously strict pastors and deacons will wield an iron rod of preference issues in the guise of “godliness” over a congregation of cowering members. They unlawfully lord over the people they are meant to shepherd.
However, in spite of those problems, biblical Christianity affirms the importance of authority structures within a church and soundly condemns the abuse of authority by leaders over a congregation. Human error does not negate the truthfulness of Christianity.
When Scripture is followed as the Lord intends it to be followed, abusive authority figures will stay checked. Of course, that is not to say members may need to be firmly disciplined, but firm discipline submitted to biblically led leadership is ordained of the Lord (Matthew 18:15-20; 1 Corinthians 5).
As an anarchist, Chaz doesn’t care a bit for any boss, or president, or leader telling him what to do with his life. But, what sort of society does Chaz the anarchist have to offer in the place of bosses and leaders? I suggest Chaz’s anarchism would be just as authoritarian and abusive as the Christianity he decries.
True anarchy desires a world where everyone is living in tribal style communities with no centralized government, working and sharing together in free thinking cooperation, friendship, and absolutely no religion. Perhaps that is the kind of anarchist utopia Chaz has in mind. People gardening, weaving baskets, gathering fruit, sewing clothes, treating each other with self-respect, living eco-friendly lives, no one being made to attend church, and of course, engaging in all the free sex a person can humanly imagine with reckless abandon and impunity. You know, the type of society that in a Star Trek universe is effortlessly assimilated by the Borg without a fight.
If only historical anarchist movements could be that benign.
The historic reality, contrary to Chaz’s visions of what anarchy should be, has been horrific and blood filled. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does human government. For when one government is overthrown, another one most certainly will fill its place. In many cases, much worse than the first, and even if the rebel rousers express good intentions to refrain from being cruel authoritarians to each other. Orwell’s Animal Farm comes to mind, here.
A present day example of real anarchy is the country of Somalia where it was the only known world state without a centralized government between 1991 and 2006. The country was a disaster in which the poor and helpless were brutalized by those individuals who were able to gain power by means of force and violence.
Though Chaz has Pollyannish visions of living in a hobbiton style community where everyone shares equally in the collective good with no one bossing anyone else around, hierarchical authority structures have a necessary function in society. For one, authority structures make sure everything operates correctly. Such things as ease of commerce, basic emergency care, and defense. It also enforces the rules upon the members of society. Authority is designed to protect the citizenry. Does incompetence and abuse often arise within the authority structure? Certainly. But a society is much better off to find a corrective for the authority structure rather than live completely without it as Chaz envisions.
Does Christianity Depreciate the Natural World?
Allow me to continue once again examining the anti-theistic claims of Chaz Bufe, the blues guitar playing anarchist.
Remember, Chaz has compiled a list of 20 reasons why Christianity must be abandoned. However, as I have been noting over the course of my series, it really is a list of Chaz’s woefully misinformed and twisted view of Christianity. Let me highlight the salient points he raises,
13. Christianity depreciates the natural world. …The Christian belief in the unimportance of happiness and well-being in this world is well illustrated by a statement by St. Alphonsus:
“It would be a great advantage to suffer during all our lives all the torments of the martyrs in exchange for one moment of heaven. Sufferings in this world are a sign that God loves us and intends to save us.”
This focus on the afterlife often leads to a distinct lack of concern for the natural world, and sometimes to outright anti-ecological attitudes. Ronald Reagan’s fundamentalist Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, went so far as to actively encourage the strip mining and clear cutting of the American West, reasoning that ecological damage didn’t matter because the “rapture” was at hand.
James Watt? Does Chaz realize how antiquated his little booklet is if he is invoking James Watt, former Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Regan? Granted, Chaz’s own list may be old itself. Maybe he wrote his list up back in the late 80s or something; but James Watt would had been relevant to Chaz’s argument about unsympathetic Christian environmental mismanagement IN 1981! And for the record, I disagree with Chaz’s assessment of Watt, but I digress.
At any rate, the charge put forth is that because Christians are taught by their church leaders to value eternal things above all else, they neglect the present world where they currently live.
I will readily admit there is some truth to that accusation. Christianity doesn’t value the physical world in the same way Chaz, or any garden variety atheist probably does. The key reason is because Chaz and his atheist friends have imposed upon themselves a limited perspective of human existence. Atheism is a fundamentally here-and-now worldview because the atheist has chosen to reject and suppress the reality of eternity. Thus, atheistic secularists live only for the moment, indulging in all the pleasures they can heap upon themselves. Oh sure, there are probably some altruistic atheists out there, but they are far and few between. Who has time to waste helping orphans when this life is all you get?
Christians recognize our world is disposable. God designed it to yield its resources to men. Additionally, a spiritual person realizes his life is short. A lifetime, even if a person lives to be 80 years old or more, is temporal in light of eternity. So it is true Christians who have been awakened to spiritual truth and reality value eternity more so than the secular atheist. That doesn’t mean Christians should be careless and wasteful of the resources our God created on the earth, or that they shouldn’t pursue conservation. It is just that our mindset is not only on the here and now.
Yet, I imagine Chaz would insist that we all embrace the non-sense junk science of the modern-day environmental global warming climate change movement. Seeing that he so readily draws our attention to James Watt from the 80s, has Chaz forgotten how the same people who are presently arguing for radical social and economic change that will bankrupt the economies of the nations in order to combat global warming anthropogenic climate change used almost the same argumentation back in the 70s to promote radical social and economic change to combat global freezing? I remember that atmosphere of hysteria when I was a kid in grade school.
In order to build their case for a global ice age, the scientific magisterium argued that man-made particle emissions from vehicles would collect in the atmosphere to block out the sun and significantly cool the earth. The media even appealed to similar “scientific” research as their current day counter parts. So called “experts” drew the same conclusions that the global ice age would conveniently happen some hundred or so years in the future, far beyond any of their lives, so as not to be held accountable if they were wrong.
As much as Chaz wishes to charge Christians with messing up the environment with their lack of sympathy for earthly things, modern day environmentalist are much more unsympathetic to the plain folk their kooky ideas, supported by governmental regulations and legislation, will harm, especially the poor. The simple-minded, bureaucratic, nanny-state officials willingly pass restrictive laws prohibiting personal freedoms and raising taxes on regular folks. In an ironic twist, a professed “free thinking,” law-hating anarchist like Chaz promotes their socio-political view point that in turn is outright detrimental to his beliefs advocated on his website.
But more importantly, unlike the Christian’s lack of concern about his world, the environmental legislation being promoted by radical, watermelon environmentalists (green on the outside, red on the inside) and willing passed by stupid politicians from state to state, has real world significance and is unwittingly cruel to regular people. For example, where I live in California, the state representatives wish to pass a massive tax (what they redefine as a “fee”) on mini-vans, SUVs, and other large, multi-passenger vehicles. The idea behind this “fee” is that multi-passenger vehicles give off more carbon emissions than smaller vehicles, plus the excessive “fee” is an incentive to invest in hybrid model cars.
Essentially, the “fee” proposed by the California state legislature is a tax upon bigger families, but will also impact disabled persons who need such large vehicles for wheel chair access, construction workers and farmers who use them to carry their tools and equipment they need for their jobs, and ironically, those people who use larger vehicles to carpool (wow, a tax on carpooling!). It is the working class at risk here; the very group Chaz’s communist values are meant to protect.
Oh, but there is more. Environmental laws even impact the mundane areas of life that will in turn increase the cost of living for everyone, especially in the area of health care.
I’ll give you an example from my own personal experience. I am asthmatic. My condition is generally caused by allergies. Thankfully, modern medicine in the form of inhalers help me, along with millions of other asthma suffers, to control the condition so I can function in life. You know, run around, be active out doors, play with the kids. The simple things we all take for granted.
Initially, my asthma medication was relatively inexpensive, maybe around 10-15 bucks, and that is even without health care. But, my asthma inhaler apparently has a negative effect upon the environment. That is because the compressed gas that pushes the medication out of the little bottle into my lungs doesn’t meet environmental standards designed to off set global warming climate change.
Think a moment: A gas I breathe into my body and doesn’t get released into the atmosphere.
Thus, in order to comply with the new regulations being imposed, the companies that make the inhalers had to come up with a new means to release the medication from the bottle. As a result, the cost of the new inhalers tripled. Thus, a poor person will be forced to go without medication because of Chaz’s “sympathetic” view of the natural world.
Now, I am sure Chaz will argue that poor man’s plight is the very reason we need universal, across the board, government paid health coverage. But why should my visit to my doctor have to turn into a visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles or any other bloated governmental bureaucratic office? The quantity of health care may be there, but not the quality certainly won’t. I don’t want to wait four months to get a CT scan. And all because to safe guard the environment based upon emotional, highly unscientific, chicken little-style, misinformation about man-made global warming climate change! Who’s being unsympathetic here?
Christians may depreciate the natural world, but at least we are not defending it at the expense of the livelihood of human beings based upon a child-like naivete in unworkable utopian principles based upon sham “science.”
Does Christianity have a narrow view of morality and ignore real evils while accepting imaginary ones?
I return once again to examining the ramblings of Chaz Bufe, atheist, anarchist, Communist philosopher, and week-end blues guitar player.
He wrote up a tract entitled 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity. I have taken it upon myself to consider each one of his reasons in turn so as to determine if it is a legitimate reason or not. So far what I have discovered is a man who is bitter against the Roman Catholic Church and has self-inflicted blindness to the severe problems of his own chosen worldview of atheistic anarchy.
Points 11 and 12 are short and contain similar complaints, so I will consider each one in turn.
11. Christianity has an exceedingly narrow, legalistic view of morality. Christianity not only reduces, for all practical purposes, the question of morality to that of sexual behavior, but by listing its prohibitions, it encourages an “everything not prohibited is permitted” mentality. So, for instance, medieval inquisitors tortured their victims, while at the same time they went to lengths to avoid spilling the blood of those they tortured—though they thought nothing of burning them alive. Another very relevant example is that until the latter part of the 19th century Christians engaged in the slave trade, and Christian preachers defended it, citing biblical passages, from the pulpit. Today, with the exception of a relatively few liberal churchgoers, Christians ignore the very real evils plaguing our society—poverty; homelessness; hunger; militarism; a grossly unfair distribution of wealth and income; ecological despoliation exacerbated by corporate greed; overpopulation; sexism; racism; homophobia; freedom-denying, invasive drug laws; an inadequate educational system; etc., etc.—unless they’re actively working to worsen those evils in the name of Christian morality or “family values.”
and
12. Christianity encourages acceptance of real evils while focusing on imaginary evils. Organized Christianity is a skillful apologist for the status quo and all the evils that go along with it. It diverts attention from real problems by focusing attention on sexual issues, and when confronted with social evils such as poverty glibly dismisses them with platitudes such as, “The poor ye have always with you.” When confronted with the problems of militarism and war, most Christians shrug and say, “That’s human nature. It’s always been that way, and it always will.” One suspects that 200 years ago their forebears would have said exactly the same thing about slavery.
As I have noted in previous entries, Chaz has what some would call “issues” with Roman Catholicism. It has impacted his psyche so much that his perspective on Christianity remains quagmired in the 15th century. Even though the Inquisition hasn’t operated for a few hundred years, Chaz still maintains a jaundiced view of reality concerning the historic Christian faith, and of course shuts his eyes to the actions taken by leaders of modern secular societies, motivated by atheistic anarchist philosophy, who “force” their views of the world upon the populace by “special” means.
Chaz’s complaint this time is that Christian morality is narrow and legalistic, and as a result, Christians have a warped sense of right and wrong. Christians focus on imaginary evils, as Chaz claims under number 12, while ignoring real evil like sexism.
Some quick thoughts in response:
First. I find his comment against Christians under number 12 to be fantastic. Chaz writes, When confronted with the problems of militarism and war, most Christians shrug and say, “That’s human nature. It’s always been that way, and it always will.”
Wait a second. I thought Chaz affirmed biological evolution? Isn’t it human nature – yea, the very Darwinian explanation about human life – that we are to fight to survive? According to Chaz’s world view of Darwinianism, how else could humanity even emerge from our primordial ancestors to be what we are today unless we took aggressive attitudes to stand and fight against those other life-forms that threatened to wipe us out? Pacifism and anti-war slogans are insufficient means to bring about evolution on Chaz’s anarchist planet.
Moreover, Chaz is an atheist. Why is he concerned with the moral right and wrong? I hate to beat the proverbial dead horse, because I’ve mentioned this a few times before, but if the world sprung into existence by random processes and all biological life, including human, is a product of unpredictable naturalism, why should Chaz even care about right and wrong? Who is it that declares what is right and wrong according to Chaz? Individuals? Societies? Cultures? Who has set the morals from which Chaz, sitting upon his anarchist high horse, can pass judgment upon us goofball Christians? I thought Chaz was attempting to argue against restricted, narrow, and legalistic morality? Yet here he is wanting everyone else to conform to HIS perspective on morality. What a phony hypocrite.
Take for instance his complaining about homelessness and those suffering in poverty. As a materialistic atheist, why should Chaz care about such individuals? For all he knows their condition is brought upon them due to natural selection. Perhaps those individuals are mentally weak, what the old eugenists termed, “feable-minded,” and their poverty and homelessness is the means by which evolution selects them out of the population so as to strengthen it? How could Chaz know one way or the other?
That is not to say Chaz is an immoral person, or atheists in general are unethical. The difficulty is with the justification of his chosen perspective on life. Sure, Chaz the atheist can live in moral uprightness toward his fellow man, but his world view of atheism, built upon the tooth and claw of Darwinian evolution, provides no sound reason as to why he should, and it certainly doesn’t provide him with a gavel to use against the behavior of those people with whom he disagrees.
Second. It is a fact of historical note that Christians theists are the ones who addressed those societal ills Chaz lists way before atheists ever did. The Salvation Army tackled homelessness, as did George Mueller when he started his orphanage. Many Christians both in the north and the south addressed slavery before the Civil War began, and it was the steady activism of evangelical Christians in England led by William Wilberforce who eventually got the slave trade abolished.
Most of the other so-called societal problems Chaz claims Christians ignore are not really genuine social problems, but matters of personal, philosophical opinion. Over-population, ecological despoliation brought on by corporate greed, sexism, and homophobia, are extremely exaggerated as products of hysterical liberals, if not entirely fictional to begin with.
Ironically, as Chaz complains how Christians ignore serious evils in the world because of their narrow morality, in reality, it is those folks who agree with Chaz’s socialist perspective on society who are the most intolerant and narrow. They are the ones who insist upon special sensitivity training of those who do not think the same way as they do on a given position. Anyone who disagrees with their views are labeled a bigot and is made to take diversity training so as to get into line. Think about the militant gays demanding everyone applaud their sodomy or else have their businesses shut down and assigned to reeducation camp.
Does Christianity have a morbid, unhealthy preoccupation with sex and produce sexual misery?
I come again to my review of Chaz Bufe, the Christ-hating anarchist and blues guitar playing atheist, and his 20 Reasons to Abandon Christianity.
He devotes two entire points to the subject of Christians and sexuality. Rather than dealing with them separately, I will combine them together with this one post.
Chaz, as with a lot of anti-theists, has an obsession with the subject of sexual ethics as it pertains to Christianity. His obsession, for example, is witnessed in the second sentence of point 9 when he writes about the numerous “thou shalt nots” relating to sex in the Bible, particular the 10th commandment which forbids coveting your neighbor’s wife. I had no idea that Chaz was a wife-swapping swinger as well.
Today, judging from the pronouncements of many Christian leaders, one would think that “morality” consists solely of what one does in one’s bedroom. The Catholic Church is the prime example here, with its moral pronouncements rarely going beyond the matters of birth control and abortion (and with its moral emphasis seemingly entirely on those matters). Also note that the official Catholic view of sex—that it’s for the purpose of procreation only—reduces human sexual relations to those of brood animals. For more than a century the Catholic Church has also been the driving force behind efforts to prohibit access to birth control devices and information—to everyone, not just Catholics.
As I have noted in previous articles, Chaz has the annoying habit of equating historic, Bible-believing Christianity with the Roman Catholic Church. That misnomer permeates his entire tract. In fact, I would say his overall pamphlet would be more aptly titled 20 Reasons to Abandon Roman Catholicism. I suppose Chaz can’t be faulted too much, because it is typical of many critics of religious faith to make this mistake either out of ignorance or intellectual laziness.
That being stated, I would agree with Chaz to an extent that Roman Catholicism has taught a warped view of human sexuality. Yet it isn’t derived from Scripture as Chaz would have his readers believe, but from a mingling of Gnostic ascetic beliefs with early Christian mysticism. That hybrid philosophical combination produced an entirely unbiblical view of Christian sexuality; one that is no where taught in the whole the Bible.
Many early Church fathers, including those who followed into the Medieval times, held to a false dichotomy between the spirit and flesh, with the spirit understood as being pure and the flesh evil. They would then impose that narrow dichotomy upon the Bible and force the text to teach something entirely different than what it was meant to convey. That in turn sadly produced two millennia of misguided Christians.
Many of them taught that marriage should not be for anything but procreation and virginity was the highest of spiritual virtues. The systems of the monastery and convent were developed as a place where single, self-imposed chaste men and women could live out their spiritual lives away from the temptations of the world. However, thanks be to the revival that took place under the Reformation, Christians broke away from that false teaching and returned to the teaching of Scripture.
One of the more common myth, as I noted in a previous response to Chaz, is the notion that Puritans were dour, sexually repressive individuals. But that is utterly untrue. It was the Puritans who recaptured a biblical vision of God ordain human sexuality as the Lord had intended sex to be. As Leland Ryken shows in his wonderful book, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were, the Puritans celebrated sexuality throughout their literature and sermons. Think about it: Puritans had massive families; obviously they had to have liked sex.
God loves sex, simply because He created it for men and women to enjoy. The only stipulation is that sex is to be enjoyed within the boundary God has set, that being a marriage between one man and one woman.
The Lord declares in Hebrews 13:4 that marriage is honorable among all, and the bed is undefiled… Proverbs 5:18,19 frankly states, Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth. As a loving deer and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times; and always be enraptured with her love. And the Song of Solomon is a long love poem expressing in parts the blessedness of martial sexual relations between a man and woman. So the idea Chaz is attempting to set forth to his readers that Christianity is sexually repressive is non-sense.
What Chaz doesn’t like is the stipulation God has placed on sex; i.e., only being between a man and a woman who are married. Chaz boasts of being a “free thinker” and historically, free thinkers are notorious womanizing sex perverts. As we will see in more detail when we come to Chaz’s complaint that Christianity is misogynistic, one of his intellectual heroes from times past, the poet, Lord George Byron, toured the European continent sleeping with countless women and impregnating a good deal of them, leaving a wake of illegitimate children. I would imagine Chaz dreams of a life like that.
In addition to the misery produced by authoritarian Christian intrusions into the sex lives of non-Christians, Christianity produces great misery among its own adherents through its insistence that sex (except the very narrow variety it sanctions) is evil, against God’s law. Christianity proscribes sex between unmarried people, sex outside of marriage, homosexual relations, bestiality, and even “impure” sexual thoughts. Indulging in such things can and will, in the conventional Christian view, lead straight to hell.
Given that human beings are by nature highly sexual beings, and that their urges very often do not fit into the only officially sanctioned Christian form of sexuality (monogamous, heterosexual marriage), it’s inevitable that those who attempt to follow Christian “morality” in this area are often miserable, as their strongest urges run smack dab into the wall of religious belief…
Even after Christian young people receive a license from church and state to have sex, they often discover that the sexual release promised by marriage is not all that it’s cracked up to be. One gathers that in marriages between those who have followed Christian rules up until marriage—that is, no sex at all—sexual ineptitude and lack of fulfillment are all too common. Even when Christian married people do have good sexual relations, the problems do not end. Sexual attractions ebb and flow, and new attractions inevitably arise. In conventional Christian relationships, one is not allowed to act on these new attractions. One is often not even permitted to admit that such attractions exist.
I don’t have much to add here except to draw out a couple of observations.
In the first paragraph above, Chaz laments how Christianity produces great misery in that it labels sex as evil and against God’s law. He then goes on to list all the “sexual sins” that could get a person condemned to hell like fornication, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, and even an impure thought life. In Chaz’s mind, rather than being condemned as sinful, people should be allowed to indulge their sexual appetites.
Oddly, pedophilia is not listed. In fact, Chaz has a book recommended on his website addressing how a person can recover from sexual child abuse. Apparently, that restrictive age of consent is the only area where Chaz agrees with Christianity. But why is that? If we should abandon Christianity because it stifles sexual freedoms, why stop with an adult-child sexual relationship? After all, why should we be restricted by age and maturity? Why doesn’t Chaz mention that? Oh sure, free thinking atheists hypocritically try to explain it away as a child not being able to consent to such a relationship. But I have met some rather sophisticated 13 year olds in my life. So why won’t Chaz advocate for the rash of female teachers seducing and having sex with teenage students?
Second, Chaz’s rant about Christians being so sexually repressed because they follow Christian morality that when they get married they have dysfunctional sex lives is bunk. That is one of the greatest lies of the a-religious: in order to have a fulfilling sex life in marriage people need to have numerous sexual relationships before hand. Sort of like test driving a car before you buy one or doing a ten day free trial with a vacuum cleaner. If you don’t try it out first, you could get stuck with a lemon.
Let me assure any single readers out there as a happily married man of many years now, to put it bluntly, Chaz is an idiot. I lived 31 years as a chaste, single man and there were absolutely zero problems transitioning into married life in the area of sex. That is not to say Christians don’t have sexual problems after and during marriage, but statistically, sex is the least problem a couple struggles with in a marriage, and it is a problem that can be easily fixed with minimal advice. The issue boils down to whether a couple wishes to love each other unconditionally, in a spirit-filled, committed relationship.
Chaz’s view of Christian sex is lopsided, and like the established habit in this long diatribe against the faith, he forgets to self-critique. The secular world tells us to be sexually free, to enjoy sex without marriage, experiment, indulge in pornography, if you pickup a disease, get a shot, and if you get pregnant abortion is the quick and easy way out.
The reality, however, is a sea of broken and used people who have a jaded, bitter attitude to any meaningful sex life with a real person. There is a reason why God told us to not covet our neighbor’s wife, because it hurts people and destroys families. Lives are ruined. The real sexual misery is the secularism Chaz is suggesting we live.
hipandthigh 