I was watching a panel discussion between William Lane Craig, Jim Dennison, Lee Strobel, another Christian guy I don’t know and Christopher Hitchens (you can see the whole thing here) and something that Hitchens said struck me. Not because it was especially profound (it wasn’t) or deep (it wasn’t) or even insightful (again, it wasn’t). What he said really summed up his entire presentation, and it seems from Bill Craig’s newsletter that he presented the same material in his debate at Biola a few weeks ago (I want to buy a copy of that, but Biola still doesn’t have any… :( ). Basically his whole point was that he didn’t want to be told what to do. That’s what it all boiled down to. He sounded a bit like a petulant child, actually… .
Anyway, what he said was this: when discussing God making a world with rules and punishing us for breaking those rules he likened such a world to a Celestial North Korea, with (presumably) God as Kim Jong-Il. Now the thing that really struck me about this statement was how shallow this idea is! Hitchens himself is a father, and I’m sure he set rules for his kids and punished them when they broke them. He probably knew they would fail to meet his expectations, and he set the penalties and meted them out accordingly. So my question to you is, Mr Hitchens, what makes God a tyrant when you do the same things? Things every parent must do? What the government must do? I don’t think he is an advocate of a society that has no laws or punishments for breaking them, but he objects to God making rules! “You can’t tell me what to do! You can’t set rules that I must obey and then punish me for breaking them!” The arrogance of this position is flabbergasting! But, then, what can you expect from a worldview such as his, a worldview where man is the top?
8 comments:
Don't let his boss find out, he'll get the ol' pink slip faster than I can say Jack Sprat.
Once again, it boils down to a man thinking he understands more than he does and pretends a position higher than he is capable. The entire universe works on a top down hierarchy - and clearly man is not at the top. Where do we get off thinking that hierarchy doesn't include mental and moral realms as well?
Arrogance? Pretentious? Belligerence? Perhaps just "asinine fatuity."
I think you have misunderstood to what Christopher Hitchens is referring.
What Hitchens is picutring, and actually quite neatly, is that Heaven (not the World) is "like a Celestial North Korea". In that you would spend a lot of time sitting around praising God, as they do in North Korea with Kim Jong-Il, and that we should, and are expected to be happy to do this for eternity!
It is not that he is being a petulant child, wishing for some kind of anarchistic, rule free enviroment, but more that he doesn't want to spend eternity in servile worship. This to him would be Hell rather than Heaven. Frankly I couldn't agree with him more.
Anonymous, a few points:
Firstly, welcome, and thanks for weighing in. It always good to hear from a challenger! I hope you spend some time here and consider the things we have to say with an open mind (but not so open your brain falls out... :) ).
Secondly, it may be that Hitchens has used Celestial North Korea in other places to refer to the afterlife (I have only heard it here), but it seems clear to me as I re-watch the above video that he is referring to God’s telling him what to do and how, and God (and Christians) saying that Jesus is the only way to salvation, that all other ways will lead to hell. This whole idea is what I understand him to be describing as the Celestial North Korea.
Thirdly, even if you are correct, and he is referring to a heaven in which “you would spend a lot of time sitting around praising God, as they do in North Korea with Kim Jong-Il, and that we should, and are expected to be happy to do this for eternity!” this would be an incomplete view of heaven. The Biblical data regarding what heaven is actually going to be like is too inconclusive to say that we simply “would spend a lot of time sitting around praising God”. That might be true, might even be likely (after all, I think that everyone who comes into the presence of the Living God will be so over-awed by Him that they will fall down and worship, and would be right to do!) but that’s only part of the picture. We are told that we will have physical bodies in heaven which would lead you to think we might be doing things that require bodies, and the book of Revelation describes heaven as a city, which implies living some sort of normal life, and elsewhere we are told to look forward to the “new Earth” which implies a whole planet – and that would require working in some fashion, tending plants like Adam and Eve were (maybe). My point is that nobody actually knows what heaven will be like, and to oppose Christianity on an idea that Christians haven’t even settled amongst themselves yet seems foolish to me.
Finally, I would never describe worship as being solely “servile”. We worship loads of stuff in our daily lives – money, sex, jobs, celebrities, sportspeople, etc, and our acts of worship here don’t involve servility. The Bible certainly describes what I assume you mean when you use the word servile – a sort of “flat on your face” kind of worship, but that is not the only way to worship. We are commanded to show our love for God by following His commands, by loving our fellow man, even to the point of laying down our life for another, by putting others ahead of ourselves. Since worship is really defined as showing adoration or love for something, these are all ways of worshipping God!
Glad to have you, Anonymous! (You're very prolific!)
I dunno, it seems to me that Dave understood perfectly. Hitchens' statement denotes a great misunderstanding though. Honestly, his idea of heaven is rather underdeveloped and, to me, it's as though he is critiquing a book he hasn't understood in the very least. In fact, I think it is just that.
If we want a clear idea of what heaven looks like, we need to read Matthew chapters 5-7 (and/or) Luke 6:17-49. The famous sermon on the mount/plain. Here Jesus of Nazareth gives us a glimpse of the Kingdom and its citizens and what is expected of them. The world will be upside down from what we know it, yet everything still recognizable. Then we should go through Matthew again, the end of chapter 12 and into 13. Y'eshua gives us several spiritual, political and allegorical images of what the Kingdom is like. All practical, all here and now, though difficult to understand. This isn't the place for them though. Come back for more if you have questions about those.
Revelations on the other hand gives us a classically Jewish apocalyptic poem/code. John of Patmos is writing a letter to the Christians of the area in response to the world and, in particular, Rome just as Daniel and Ezekiel wrote surrounding Babylon. For instance, Hebrew letters are also numbers and though it took a long time to work it out and is typically misused, the sign of the beast, 666, in Hebrew letters works out to give the name "Nero," the Roman emperor at the time. (See Claiborne and Haw, "Jesus for President" Zondervan - highly recommended for this entire subject) Though it is a vision of heaven, it is a vision that blends the world and the ... 'after-world.' God remakes heaven and earth, as Dave points out. In fact, Jesus said that the Kingdom of God "is at hand," meaning it's here. He heralded it in and claimed the thrown. "It is for this reason that I was born" He tells Pilate. And at His death and in His resurrection, He has "made all things new." So, voila, as Christ says, here it is, a new heaven and a new earth, amongst us now. Is the Kingdom a place we will go to in the future? Yes. But it is something for us to live in now as well, for His will to be done on earth as is in heaven. He is very practical, our God.
So much for heaven, so on to this obedience stuff.
The whole world, with all its wonder and splendor, variety and abundance is ordered. We live in a world and must obey its laws, whether one is an ameba or a human (bumblebees are exempt apparently.) These laws of nature as we call them. Gravity, for example, is not a 'law' that you can break if you are just so inclined. In fact, without it, nothing would hold together at all, not our solar system nor your pancakes; the universe as we know it wouldn't work. They are laws we must simply learn to live with.
The moral laws of God are much the same. In fact, I would even say that the natural laws are a shadow of the moral ones. The laws of God are not divine party poopers written in order to keep us from having fun, nor does God command us to obey Him out of some sense of whimsical and maniacal control complex. The Law of God is simply a description of the way things work, real things, even more real than gravity. God IS love and operates out of love. He says to love Him because He doesn't want us settling for second best. You wouldn't put milk in your car's gas tank and I wouldn't complain if you didn't want to - you would be a fool to do so! Your car wouldn't run well (or at all). God created us to basically run off of His love and His will. Anything else and we don't run right. Breaking His laws hurt us. And He hates to see anything hurt us, His creation, the one He made in His own image.
If I sleep with another man's wife, THAT MAN WILL KILL ME. God doesn't want to keep you from having fun, but He does want to keep you safe. Foolish as that is on His part, He loves us even though we go our own belligerent way. What we want, when we want it, blah blah blah: it does sound, indeed like an impetuous child. Each and every one of us do. But God has given us the command for our own good, He has asked that we sit down with Him and reason things out. He has told us, puny mortals, what is demanded of us: that we "act justly and love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8). Now that doesn't sound like the voice of a mad tyrant who wants to control my every move and demand that I do nothing but worship Him? No, but it does sound like the voice of a lover who wants the best for us and has given Himself for us that we might be with Him. Once you put your trust in Him, He calls you friend! (John 15:15) It is for that love, the love of God's mercy and His own humility, that I ask to enter the Kingdom. It is for love of Him that I do all things. For He loves us so much to give us what we want, every one. If we want Him, we can have all of Him, but even if that is for us to go our own way, He allows that and... well, then I agree with Hitchens (and you) ... you probably will dislike heaven.
The moral argument on where do our morals come from (to which I think you partly allude to), is one that can be debated ad infinitum, and probably will be.
As an atheist I find it nieve, at best highly improbable, when believers in monotheistic religions try to tell us that our morals are taught and/or given to us by God. In the Christian cult we are led to believe that a group of murderous adulterers (for that's what we would have apparently been before God revealed himself) were led to the bottom of Mount Sinai, where Moses had a deep chat with God who carved out the 10 commandments and suddenly the foundations for good moral living were born. At which point they all miraculously became able to tell the difference between right and wrong, and how to live within society.
I think it is more likely that as people we have had to learn how to live together over 10s of thousands of years and, through trial and error, have established a strong moral code. The primary basis of which would be the Golden Rule: Don't do to others, that which you wouldn't have done to yourself. I would even go further to say that I think it fairly likely that this was adopted very early on.
Sorry I haven't got time to come back to everything you said, but at least that covers a point on one strand of what you were saying.
Anonymous, you say that the primary basis of the “strong moral code” that has developed over the tens of thousands of years that we learned to live together is the Golden Rule, but that doesn’t square with my understanding of history. If the Golden Rule was really the foundation of humanities morals, then how do you account for the almost constant warring and bloodshed, the enslaving and genocide of entire nations and peoples? This doesn’t really seem to fit the idea of “Don't do to others, that which you wouldn't have done to yourself.”
Also, Christians don’t claim that you need God to tell the difference between right and wrong (although He certainly helps us re-orient our moral compass to True North), just that the existence of God provides a better reason for the existence of right and wrong than alternative explanations.
it is never really a discussion of who "told us" where morals come from but whether or not they are actually right or wrong. If one contends that there are things that are wrong in the world, anything wrong actually, even one thing, then that means there is a standard of right and wrong outside and separate from humanity. That makes it a "law of nature" so to speak, something built into the universe. something not matter, nor energy. a type of information really. Information must have a sender - one of the rules of information theory. A law that has a standard, a standard set ... by "Someone" (a personal-non-human-being) wholly (holy?) apart from the known physical universe ... someone who makes laws that seem only to apply to humans.
thats my 10:20 at night before i go to bed response, but for a further, though popular level (ie, not overly scholarly) response, i suggest Timothy Keller's The Reason for God.
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