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Newsgroups: talk.origins,alt.atheism,alt.bible.prophecy,alt.catastrophism,alt.christnet,alt.christnet.bible,alt.christnet.ethics,alt.christnet.evangelical,alt.christnet.philosophy,alt.christnet.theology,alt.religion.christian,talk.atheism
Subject: Re: Atheists are Idiots
From: paule@ix.netcom.com (Paul Ransom Erickson)
Date: Wed, 09 Oct 1996 20:07:38 GMT

penhollo@stu.beloit.edu (Steven Penhollow) failed the Turing test by
writing:

|#|There are good minds on both sides of the debate.  Name calling such as
|#|"death cult" is just as asinine as stringing people up and lighting them.  I
|#|will not say that you have not the right to call Christians the "death cult"
|#|but it appears to be a defense mechanism on your part, articulating your
|#|NEED to dismiss such metaphysical notions of a transtemporal reality. 
|#|That's dumb man!
|#|
|#|				-Rev. Aveemelech Avigdor

Well, although I agree with you for the most part, I have reservations
about the relative amounts of asininity required for insult-slinging
and for, ah, cruel murder.  Well, maybe the necessary A.Q. is about
equivalent, but the acts are certainly not.

Also, as far as the "death-cult" thing goes, there actually _is_
something to the designation, but it is not inherently more insulting
than "fertility cult", "theistic religion", or any other religious
classification.  Whether or not Christianity is true, it does center
around a particular celebrated death or suicide, and it does look
primarily toward the afterlife (or afterdeath) -- Jesus' ressurection
was not to life as we know it, but to an afterlife condition ("Don't
touch me -- I'm in the spirit" or something to that effect; and he
rose up into the clouds instead of dying again).  Other things that
tend to add to the "death cult" idea are that it _seems_ to encourage
a will to martyrdom in its strongest devotees; that it constantly
encourages such things as "death to self", "death to the flesh",
"death to the 'world'"; that its main symbol is an instrument of
death, with or without a mutilated Jesus hanging on it; that one of
its most important rituals is symbolic ingestion of the savior's
corpse (_please_, that is just a fact: I am not trying to insinuate
anything).  I.E. in general it seems to paint everything that the
non-religious world calls "death" in bright, pleasing colors -- and in
its distinguishing characteristics it seems to be _about_ death,
particularly about its trancendentally necessary relation to sin
(which is not, of course, to say that it celebrates the stereotypical
modern notion of "death" or the associated gore, ghouls, and dark
numinous dread; which is not to say that it is a religion of murder,
or of suicide, or of putrescence, or of evil -- although _some_
interpretations of the religion _are_ all of that).  Of course
Christianity could just as well be called a "life-cult", since all of
the focus on "worldly" death is just a means to a new and better kind
of life; but since that is the end of just about every religion, it is
not distinguishing about Christianity -- "life-cult" is a useless
classification.

I _think_ (though I could very well be wrong) that when people insult
Christianity as a "death cult" they mean to disparage the religion
primarily by pointing out its classifiability, and that the "death"
part is just icing on the cake.  It _is_ a little embarrasing for
adherents to a system of thought that claims to be singular,
transcendental, the one true reality, etc., when the system of thought
fits into a continuum of similar systems.  The people you're
responding to could have said "Jesus is a fertility god" to pretty
much the same effect, IMO.  

Personally I think Jesus is one of a long line of gods and demigods
who elaborate profoundly on the "basic" fertility god motif: ancestors
include Osiris, Dionysus, Orpheus (and other more primitive
agricultural gods who are basically identified with plant life, and
who die and come back to life every year).  But of course it's even
more complex than that, because the "fertility god" aspects are (IMO
again) accretions via absorption and distortion on a real person's
philosophy, which seems to have derived, if not from travel to the
East and study under gurus (as intolerably garish new-agers claim),
from at least one "satori"-type experience, which is the real essence
of all mysticism.  A few months ago I would have thought such an
opinion stupid and silly, and even now my evidence is strictly
personal (which means it still deserves to be called stupid and silly
by people without the same evidence, and that anyone who believes it
without such evidence _is_ stupid and silly): I recently had such an
experience myself, and very many "religious" sayings that had
previously seemed like obfuscation to me now make sense as references
to "satori" (I call it satori because my reaction has been closest to
that of the Zen people {in fact just like theirs, except ever-so-
much-more-so: I assign the experience no meaning, value, or
implication whatsoever, and I opine that any "religion" built around
it is nothing more than a social club} although by naming it -- and
even by calling it an "it" -- I lie in a sense).

Anyway, it seems that I'm running off on tangents, and that if I kept
talking I might wander to the subject of poisonous frogs in rain
forests, and the reasons for their bright coloring, a lot of them lay
eggs on big leaves with puddles in them, or in little pockets on the
sides of plants, all that sounds really pretty but I bet it would be
no fun to be in a rain forest, and you know this summer I saw lots of
tadpoles in drying puddles on the road, sometimes already-dried
puddles where the poles were mummified, looked like raisins, I bet you
could eat them, maybe if you put them in milk they would
snap-crackle-pop, why do frogs lay their eggs there, but in the rain
forest the puddles are refilled by the rain and besides some frogs
carry their eggs on their backs to avoid the problem, also I found a
shrivelled up lizard with his mouth open in my house last week, etc...
Well, at least I hope I have demonstrated that at least one atheist is
slightly above idiot I.Q.: if I have done that, then I've not wandered
too far off topic after all.

 
Reverend         paule@ix.netcom.com      
Paul Ransom      st86m@jetson.uh.edu      
Erickson ------------------------------------------