Is Christianity an Utopia?

My son has been chatting on line with a guy who claims to be a Christian.                             

This individual told him that, in the afterlife, God will be my son's “worse 
nightmare”. The man felt so sorry for the unbelievers. because they were
 going to burn in hell. God, he insisted, is not all-loving, in fact He hates 
people like my son.

I was deeply embarrassed. One thing is, for example, to maintain that 
fundamentalists are wrong, because we know for a fact that the earth is 
not six thousand years old. 

A different thing is to maintain that the guy on line is wrong on the ground

that I know the nature of God and he doesn't. It's hard to argue on the basis

of a “modern” interpretation of Jesus' cryptic sayings. No wonder people

prefer to put religion aside and think about something more concrete.                          

I sat next to my son and inverted our role at the computer: As a religious 
person, I wanted to chat with an atheist. 

The first one who text-messaged me said that Jesus was crazy, or he 
wouldn't have claimed to be the Messiah.                     
I felt very tired. Once again I could only argue according with my

understanding of Christ, but it would have been pointless.
The guy was too far behind.

I wanted to scream:” Please, Jesus, do something! Come back riding on

clouds, if this is what it takes!”

Instead, I left the computer to my son. I wasn’t going to argue with people
 I don’t care about. But I do care a lot about my son, so I told him:

“Your guy was a fundamentalist. Religious people are not all full of
 hatred like he is".                                                     

 “I know,” he said, “but you both share the same mindset. Once you
refrain from criticizing propositions without evidence, where do you

draw the line? It’s a dangerous attitude, the same that can lead

to terrorism.”

“I think that morality comes before religion, “I answered.”The 
terrorist lacks moral sense, that’s why he can embrace a belief that tells

him to kill the infidels. If Jesus had ever suggested anything of that kind,

I wouldn’t believe in him.”

“Even Jesus made a few immoral statements of his own.” said my son, 
annoying me quite a bit. "The very idea of hell is immoral".

“We have been over this already. Find another one.”

“To love your enemy is immoral.”

“Really? How so?”

“It certainly is, given the world we live in. If you love your enemy, 
if you don’t defend he will destroy you".                                                                                                                                 

“So what? If I choose to be passive, that’s my own problem. Immorality
 is to hurt someone else.
You may think that pacifism doesn’t work, but not that it’s immoral.”

“Our moral sense is a product of evolution, mom. It’s a combination of 
self-interest and of a genuine desire for the ones we love to be happy.

The golden rule is an ideal we naturally strive for, because we care

for the survival of our species. But we can’t always live up to it, for

dire reasons. War should always be the last resort, but sometimes one 
must standup against injustice."

“What you don’t understand is that Jesus had a vision of a world beyond 
time,” I replied.”He saw that, in the long run, only peace will produce stability.                                                                                       

I admit that in today’s society his message seems impossible to realize.

But in a thousand years, if we don’t destroy ourselves

first, love will defeat evil.”

“Listen to you! You talk of love and evil and worlds beyond! I‘m 
interested in this one! Where is your God when evil happens?"

“He’s silent, but not absent,” I said. “We need the Christian utopia 
for the human race to survive. It's as simple as that".

A Fallacy in Sam Harris Argument

Nobody wrote to me "Enough with talking about atheism!", so I'll go on.

An atheist wouldn't believe what is obvious to me, namely that Christ has changed me deeply. He would think that I was changed by a delusion. But how could a delusion bring me so much wisdom? 

At best, he would think that I was changed by Jesus’ “philosophy”, but he would be wrong.                                                                                                                             

I’ve tried to describe my conversion in the first pages of this book. Initially, the gospels did not impress me at all, at least on a conscious level. My personality was too tainted for me to be receptive to Jesus’ message. I had to read the Sermon on the Mount many, many times before starting to absorb its meaning. The question is, why did I keep reading it? Because what emerged from the gospels was not a philosophy, but rather a person, and his presence turned my life upside down. Had I heard his voice, I would say that he talked me into reading the gospels a second time, then a third. Of course I didn’t hear it, but I felt it in my soul. 
Atheist can dismiss my spiritual experience as much as they want, yet this is the best way to describe it. 

My son thinks that, if I were intellectually honest, I would question my perception of Jesus Presence and I would find a more rational explanation for my shift in consciousness. Maybe, he says, I had simply reached the bottom and I had no choice but to take a different path. But I know that, had I questioned my feelings, I would have never, never changed.

This makes me think of another fallacy in Sam Harris’ thesis. In The Moral Landscape he argues that free will is an illusion and that, and I quote, we are no more responsible for the things we think (and therefore do) than we are for the fact that we were born into this world. I believe that this assumption clashes with his crusade against religion. If our thoughts emerge from the void, as he maintains, there must be a psychological substrate that generates them. In most cases, religion helps us grounding our inner life in goodness. Of course there are exceptions, as he tirelessly points out referring to suicide bombers, but I’m convinced that religion is a source of love a lot more than it is of hate.

Harris thinks that we can be talked into good behavior by scientific discoveries concerning our well being. But if free will is an illusion, it follows that we are unable to make moral choices that go against our impulses, even if the latter are self-destructive. We need something that touches us at the core of our being, and that is the belief in a higher power. It seems to me that Harris’ argument, paradoxically, leads to this conclusion.

Are You Tired Of Reading About Atheism?

                                                                            

 In I don’t believe in Atheists  Chris Hedges writes:                                                       

“The cult of science is used, like the cult of religion, to provide meaning and hope, to feed the illusion of moral superiority. … A belief in the limitless possibilities of science, and the belief that science will save us from ourselves has replaced, for many, faith in God.”

Atheists claim that religious people are guided by irrationality, therefore they are intrinsically dangerous. But emotions can lead to intuitions of enormous importance, and the intuition of the transcendent, which is the domain of the religious sense, is one of them. 

In existing primal religions there is continuity between mind and matter, imagination and reality, or even objects and individuals. Boundaries are an illusion. A supersensory world can be discerned by those who achieve spiritual awareness, and the shaman has this power. The spirits of the ancestors offer protection and help to the living, like how saints are believed to do in Catholicism. We can’t dismiss the common outcome of human imagination in different societies too easily, for it may well give insight into something real.

Modern atheists maintain that our moral sense stemmed from evolution, but this theory doesn’t explain our benevolence towards our fellow human beings. The struggle to survive, in fact, is more severe among members of the same species, because they fight for the same type of resources. 

In the ancient world it was custom to fight the members of a different tribe. We certainly are the children of evolution but, I believe, of something else too, or even better, of Someone else. Many of His creatures vanished  or mutated, then we are inherently worth much more than any other inhabitant of this planet.

Of course, modern intellectuals enjoy to place themselves on the same level of, let’s say, a chicken. My son made me watch a video of a deceased American comedian, may he rest in peace, who was actually wondering why we call the destruction of a human fetus an “abortion” and the one of a chicken’s egg an “omelet”. Considering the amount of omelets and the likes I’ve ingested during my lifetime, I don’t find the comparison particularly funny. But how silly of me! Chickens don’t have consciousness after all. How do I know? Well, I’ve never had a conversation with a chicken, so I’m just guessing.

The moment I find out that chickens don’t want me to eat their eggs, I won’t make omelets anymore, I swear. 

A Famous Atheist Who changed His Mind

Let's see what some Christian philosophers had to say about faith. I.M. Crombie wrote that theists, in order to express their belief, are bounded to use paradoxical statements. Some trust their cognitive faculties when they affirm the existence of God. For them, He is real and abstract at the same time, like memory. For others, He is something to speculate about. 
As we can read in There Is a God, Anthony Flew, the founder of the new atheists “movement,” speculated long enough to change his mind about God. According to him, the fact that nature obeys laws points directly to God, as it does the fact that we are conscious, purpose driven beings. We are the product of billions of years of cumulative selection, or evolution, but this can’t in any way explain consciousness. We have the capacity of thinking in concepts and we are conscious of our ability to transcend matter, yet our brain is not very different from the one of an animal. We perceive ourselves as “selves,” but we can’t analyze the self because it’s not a mentalstate that can be observed or explained in scientific terms.

The philosopher R.A. Varghese writes that science does not discover the self but the self discovers science, therefore  no account of the history of the universe is coherent if it cannot explain the existence of the self. He thinks that the supraphisical can only originate in a supraphisical source, and consciousness, thought and the self are supraphisical. Matter cannot produce thought, not even in billion years, and if this is what atheists believe, then theirs is an act of faith even more hazardous than believing in God. 

The professional atheists maintain that the human species needed religion to cope with a mysterious, frightening world. They think that modern science has ended our fears, explaining away all the things that we didn’t understand about nature, therefore religion is destined to die. True, we don’t believe anymore that lightning is the manifestation of angry gods, but our incomprehension has only shifted. Modern science has opened the door for us to unbelievable complexity and to the mystery of the universe. Our position is not that different from the one of men in Jesus‘ time. They looked at the sky, saw the stars and wondered. Today we know stars and planets but we wonder just the same about the universe, how it works, how it came into existence and why. Science still can’t answer our deepest questions.