Faith is Nonsense Part IV: Obey your thirst.

Carrying on with our series on things that skeptics have honest questions about, we come to today's idea:

"Is it really sin?  Or is it just the way that the world works?"

Now if I were an atheist, I would look at the Christian faith and ask some honest questions in the area of sin.  Christianity argues that sin is that which separates us from God and introduces shame, fear and anxiety.  But is it sin that introduces that or is it Christianity that has socialized us to see these things as sin and that is what brings the shame, fear and anxiety?

For example, a young Christian woman might hear for much of her life that you should save sexual intimacy for marriage.  This is a powerful message that makes a person feel like God is happy when they wait until marriage.  So imagine the guilt and remorse that a person might feel if they fall in love with someone and become involved physically.  The Christian response is that it is sin that separates us from God and makes us feel shame.

But is it sin or is it the idea that intimacy before marriage is shameful that brings about the guilt?  If I were an atheist I would argue that the institution of the Church, the authority of the Bible and the presence of other believers in her life have made her feel horrible about something that is a natural instinct.  As humans we have instincts that lead us to reproduce and the only thing unnatural about the story is someone stopping these instincts in favor of pursuing a set of ethics committed to a book from a series of human authors thousands of years ago.

This can be said of any moral teaching in the scriptures.  What the Bible calls a sin is what gives 'sin' the power it has on people's lives.  If the same young lady had never known about the idea of 'sin' then she would never have had any guilt or shame in the first place.

To break it down, as humans we reach our greatest fulfillment when we obey our thirsts - it is when we interrupt these urges that problems begin.   Even worse, when we abstain from things because we think God will be upset is when we start having mental distress about which things are shameful and which things are not.  The difference between the two becomes a way for other people to have power over our lives and influence our behavior.  This eventually works to the benefit of the institutional church - the more people that are under their spell equals the more money in their pocket.  Religion is a sham - an emotional crow-bar religious people use on people's sense of right and wrong to get them to do what they want.

All of this is very true.

And you know who said it first?  Some famous atheist?  Nope.

It was Jesus.

I'll explain next time.  This is a good one.

Part III: Morals

And so the last part of our four part series on people of faith see what they want to see when they put their faith in God:

"People have faith in God because the idea of God brings about order - a sense of right and wrong - and people want to find that balance between right and wrong because it is soothing."

Or is that true?  Remember, good skeptics doubt their doubt.

Humans by nature notice patterns and by noticing patterns we ascribe meaning to those patterns.  There must a be purpose to a particular pattern that we see and so we are awakened to the world of art and music and all those things that involve the soul.  It is also our great undoing as a species as it unleashes selfishness, ambition and pointless TV shows like Glee.

In sixth grade, the girl that I loved with all my adolescent heart was sitting up near the front of the classroom and had looked back six times to the rear of the classroom.  I noticed this and quickly concluded that she was checking me out.  I gave meaning to something that I noticed.  It was what I wanted to notice.  I was oblivious that after lunch her bladder was full and she wanted the clock at the rear of the classroom to move quicker so she could hit the bathroom.  It became crystal clear when she bolted for the bathroom after class.  What I thought I saw was only what I hoped for.

Some would argue that this is the case with God.  That deep down we want someone like God in this world and so we invent Him unknowingly by our sheer desire.  Since we want approval we look for and eventually find a God that loves us.  Since we want to see departed loved ones again, we look for and eventually find a God that has them up in heaven.

This is the same with morals, some would argue.  Life is like a big board game with no rules if there were no God.  Since we are staring at the board and can't find the rules (but really want to play), we invent rules so that it feels like there is something we can take part in and play along.  We look for a God who gives us these rules in the game of life and so it is no wonder that we 'find' Him in faith because it is in the search that we see what we want to see.

It is a rather interesting argument and I completely agree.  Of course we are looking for a God that prescribes behaviors - but it doesn't mean we have invented Him just be our desire to find Him.  No, in fact the discovery is inherent not in the finding, but in the search.  We find God not in what we have come up with, but in the fact that we are looking to begin with.

If we are just animals, we should never have realized the point that we need law.  Regardless of the idea of a "Social Contract", community should never have been on our minds.  The fact that we pursue something external to the way we behave is . . . odd.  Do dogs try to supress their canine-ness?  Cats their feline-ness?  It is an extraordinary drive that all of us have and it goes beyond nurture, it is in our nature to seek something greater than ourselves.

So it is not in the arrival at morality that we have invented God - it is in the pursuit of it that we have discovered God's thumbprint.