Some thoughts on "Atheism"

What if words are just human inventions that help us survive? I believe that might be possible, but let's have a think about the implications for "atheists".

What might 'theism' mean? That a person believes in a form of divine consciousness independent of humankind? What would define that consciousness as divine? Eternal? Maybe, let's go with that. Now what if a person considers such a being or beings to exist, but feels that they are not relational gods. This "theist" feels and practices no allegiance to the gods. This would be a distinctly narrow view of theism that bypasses the social dynamics that seem to have turbo-powered the development and evolution of our human brains. True theism is always attached to a larger social religious landscape informed by the religions of today.

In parallel, you might have a person who feels belonging and relationship within the context of a faith community. The second person is governed to an equal degree by the communal values as all other members, their only difference being that this person has a sneaky feeling that actual existence of a god may not be necessary beyond the collective symbolism clearly at work binding the community in its values and goals. The values and goals are of maximal importance and the person feels strong allegiance to both the community and the values. They even can experience powerful cathartic sensations as they worship and pray with other believers. They consider life and relationships a privilege to be treasured and would never want to suggest that a person should stop their religious convictions if they were clearly the means by which a person understands, improves and fits into the world.

This last part: about treasuring life and not opposing those with literal religious convictions is key to understanding why the term generates misunderstanding. "The atheist" is commonly understood to mean opposing religious conviction: "you should not believe it, it's nothing but a bunch of lies and contradictions"!

Here, there are commonly a couple of dynamics at play. Firstly, a person may commonly have experienced, as mild as it might appear, a form of power abuse at the hands of those in charge in a religious institution and be reacting against that. Secondly, in light of plausible explanatory alternatives for the existence of all things, there is no reason given as to why the first form of theism as defined above could not be granted (an uninvolved deity). In light of these problems I want to ask:

1. What does it even mean to assert that a religion is "true" or even "real", when the adopted stories are indisputably held authentically and prove powerful to unite a community to positive action?
2. Why even bother to assert that you are an atheist? Why even enter the conversation?

In my next post, I want to address the possibility of "lies and contradictions" in the Christian faith.

Ethics of grace: the key Christian USP?

When I think about my experience of what is uniquely special to me about my Christian faith, the one thing I'd like to incarnate more and see multiplied around me, I think it might be best described as grace. That's not to say that I think that grace might trump love, but I do also happen to agree with some skeptics who consider love to run the risk of being so broad, multidimensional and cultural that it can and does leave the communicative task profoundly unfinished.  Grace less so. It too might well need some clarification, but not so much as to sideline the 100 or so competing ideas of what "love" might mean in a given context.

The best definition I can come up with is that it's like goodness on steroids! A window of hopeful confidence on a future potential good despite an unsure or even absurd human context.

The next morning I had time to read something for guidance in my reflection and installed the 2019 Bonne Semance app. 6 March was a simple testimony resting on Romans 10:9 if you believe God raised Jesus back to life and acknowledge him (Jesus) as Lord, then you'll be saved.

At first I was like, how can I fit this into my new progressive grid? Then it dawned on me. Jesus is the symbol of this raw Goodness of God, not because God is a savage endorsing child sacrifice, but because there is an historic exemplar of the group-imagined kindness of God to us. "Paying the price for us" is thus super powerful if understood through the lens of Grace. Any human can look at the great act of grace to us as humanity's new option for goodness that is not content to mete out justice and rights alone. Someone believes in me, my goodness, my inherent value, my own potential not just to live better but to love and restore as I was "designed" to do. The Christian story of Jesus gives us a powerful narrative to hang all this on and a loving gaze through which to view this exciting new twist of Goodness-perception in our species' history.

First-century Christians not responsible for solving the Tetragrammaton conundrum with kyrios

Some scholars have argued for a “later” Christian convention on naming the Tetragrammaton (Yahweh) kyrios, on the basis of a lack of extant Jewish manuscripts from the period. Unfortunately, not only is this presupposition terribly vague, but it fails to account for a) the general scarcity of pre-Christian LXX manuscripts b) the fact that this convention would have had to have been established by a very small and early pre-Pauline Jewish-Christian community for Paul to use it without any worry from 1 Corinthians onward (approx. 53 AD) contra the pattern received by Paul from his great Jewish rabbi Gamaliel, c) this community undertaking the vast project of revising the entire Septuagint with their important update to the perennial Tetragrammaton pronunciation problem, and d) this revision confusingly mimicking evidence of a more piecemeal translation process spanning many decades.

This fourfold argument is, in my view, a slam-dunk for a pre-Christian solution to the Jewish Tetragrammaton issue. I will be defending in particular this fourth point in the fourth chapter of my upcoming book Bye-Bye Lord via the Septuagint research I am presenting there. It should push Septuagint scholars instead to ask what the few desert community Greco-Jewish LXX fragments mean when they deviate from kyrios, rather than assuming that they represent the Bible the apostle Paul read and cited.

A post-Christian era kyrios innovation just does not make any sense of the data.