We're not - or shouldn't be - engaging in quick-fire debate tactics, but in a serious attempt to figure out some common ground on ancient territory made fresh by the religious-political crisis of our time.-AS
'TRUTH NOW"
Good luck with that - you know how charming atheists can be, right? He's introduced his own notion of a "spiritual life" that must be "discoverable now". What does he mean by 'spiritual life', since I would suppose he would deny the existence of 'spirit'? If he intends to sever spirituality so fully from tradition, then let's have him explain how that doesn't orphan the very idea of a 'spiritual life'? Why should he get freebies?
ATHEIST OPPORTUNISM, OR RESPONSE TO "WORLD SITUATION"
Besides, what's up with "religious-political"? Sam says the problem is religious. People with more than just 'reason' realize that a lot of groups that Sam might consider "deluded" are considered "movements", in a socio-political sense of the term, precisely to point out the weak religious terms on which such movements may incorporate.
Whatever the case on that, it would be up to him to motivate an urgency of his case as writ large by the times we live in, yes? Perhaps it is telling that it has not been so quickly forthcoming from him. For starters, let's see some evidence that irreligious societies are somehow void of violence, ipso facto, and we can be off to the races.
Last, his idea that religious moderates are *worse* than fundamentalists or even himself in terms of resolving the pressing issues of the times, as much as they can be cast as the result of religious misdirection, is laughable at face value.
HA-HA, FOOLED YOU
The rest of Sam's arguments can be and have been handled, many times, yet his style often suggests that they never have been.
I refer now to the specific beliefs that would make you a Christian and a Catholic, as opposed to a generic theist.
This is a variant of the idea that somehow, because there might be more than one theism, that all of them are invalidated (on face, by contradiction), either at one time or across eons (o.k., well, maybe not eons, but millenia).
Scholars have done a great deal of work on understanding the attributes of God. The tacit argument of Sam's argument, its underlying subversive appeal, that what people understand God to be is completely arbitrary (why not believe in Jim Jones?), is probably false. One cannot just make up a fantasy world and call it "religion" - it's just not as arbitrary as all that, anymore than people would believe him if Sam started to collect followers and call himself Caliph.
What's more, the idea that revealed truth lies in contradiction to an evolving understanding of spiritual truth is probably untrue as well. When scientists understood that the world was quantum-based, does that mean that realization, that revelation, invalidated itself because there were other conceptualizations that pre-dated it (or even that a LOT of people don't know squat about quantum mechanics)? Aren't people constantly updating their interpretations of the scriptures, to meet such challenges as cloning and any number of other things, not spoken about directly in ages past?
BLUE-RIBBON TRUTHINESS AND THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF TRADITION
What if, tomorrow, a blue-ribbon panel of archaeologists and biblical scholars demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Gospels were ancient forgeries and that Jesus never existed?
This is an interesting thought experiment for two reasons, because it suggests that revealed truth is predicated on historical accident, not necessity, and because it asks what would happen to the apostolic character of Christianity if its lineage were erased, so to speak. There are so many aspects to this question that a full analysis would be lengthy!
In some ways, this is radical doubt, in the sense that few, if any, think that there wasn't an historical Jesus, persecuted by the Romans under Pilate (records exist), and saying so much is like asking what if the battle of Gettysburg turns out to really have been lost by the North, technically? Its subversive appeal is, again, to make it seem like the entire predicate of Christianity might be fantasy.
So, I suspect that the shorthand answer might be twofold. Yes, the absence of Christ on the Cross would profoundly change Christ-ianity. However, a great amount of the wisdom of Christ's teachings, as relayed in the cannon Gospels, could be judged precisely as they were in days of old, as containing truths worth living by. Blessed are those who believe, but have not seen.
I'VE FALLEN AND I CAN'T GET UP
An AS reader writes:
I was raised to believe that we must believe these things because they have inherent power and meaning, and that is why I eventually fell away, because my faith was too weak to stand up to the challenges of the rational world.
Good grief! What are these 'challenges' of the so-called 'rational' world? Some observations: What mankind collectively don't know about "the world" is far greater than what is known, and for men individually, the ratio is far greater. The "world" is mysterious and unknowable, not 'rational' in an ordinary sense of the term.
Last, why your experience in the world doesn't re-enforce your faith (as much as test it) is odd. Look around at all the people given over to love of money, abject service of those who love money, intoxication with power for its own sake, taken in by 'status', 'respectability', 'greed', and 'holier-than-thou' - how does that NOT reinforce your faith that such things are all to be rejected?
So many think that "faith" is a matter of suspending your reason - but it can be thought of as suspending your judgement, until such time as you have experience, a living truth, if you will. Or else, they find "faith" as a gift of the spirit or as a matter of a superhuman will-power, either to believe what is not believable (on some calculus) or to do what is not easy.
It really ought not to be conceived in such stark terms, I don't think. Dogma, such as it is, can win the form of rationality and faith can deepen and grow roots, if watered.
