The Resistance

As a told some of you earlier, I'm waswriting an essay. Here's the first of three parts and I'd like your honest opinion on this first rough draft. It feels a little thin, but tell me what you think.

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE
OF ORGANIZED CHRISTAINITY

By
Christopher Aspelund

Chapter 1
FAITH IS KNOWLEDGE

Ever since the human race achieved self-awareness, it has attempted to discover
how the world works beyond its immediate surroundings. Humans have tried to
discover better ways to survive using the resources around them. Humans created
tools that helped them hunt for food, keep warm with clothing and fire, and to
protect them from natural predators.

However, human beings in prehistory, in spite of their growing awareness, were
ill equipped to discover more than necessary to survive, and sometimes not even
that. Tools for learning what the sun or the moon was, why the seasons changed,
or how the world began, simply were not available. Instead, they learned what
their effects were in relation to their lives. The sun moved across the sky in
regular intervals and disappeared on regular intervals as well. The sun brings
light and warmth that was necessary to survive; when the sun set, it became cold
and dark. They could not learn why the seasons changed, but they did learn how
long it lasted and that it changed the weather. It was far beyond their ability
to learn how the world began.

It was beyond their ability to learn that the sun is a huge ball of hydrogen
using fusion to create helium that gave off the light and heat that was
necessary for them to survive. They could not learn that the seasons changed
due to a tilt in the Earth’s axis. They could not even begin to guess that the
universe began in the Big Bang and billions of years of evolution created their
species, Homo sapiens sapiens. The tools were for learning these answers would
be millennia away.

In spite of their ignorance, humans wanted answers to why these things happened
to ease their mind. Humans were small and weak in a world that seemed vast and
menacing. Answers to how the world worked would make the world seem smaller and
safer.

Ancient civilizations around the world that never had any prior contact came up
with the idea that gods created the world. Perhaps they felt that dreaming up a
personal creator would help them survive. Gods were people like themselves only
far more powerful. Gods were something they could understand. A god was
someone they could appeal to if they learned how to appease them.

They naturally created their God to answer how the universe and nature worked.
Often their Gods personified an astronomical object, or a force of nature. Ea
was the goddess of water and floods in ancient Sumer: which was important
because the Sumerians lived in the Fertile Crescent where the Tigris and the
Euphrates rivers flooded annually creating rich soil to grow wheat and barley.
Ancient Egypt believed the sun was a god called Aton and that the air and breath
of life was a god named Amon. Many Native Americans worshipped the Earth as a
god.

In attempt to appease their gods, many cultures offered their gods sacrifices:
often through giving up things necessary to their very survival like food. A
few cultures made human sacrifices in an attempt to appease their gods. They
thought that an offering of food or life would make their gods happy and in
return the gods would give them a bountiful harvest or cure their diseases.

Did sacrificing food and flesh to appease their gods help them survive? The
answer is obviously no, but they believed it did. While their beliefs and their
sacrifices did not give them any personal security, it did give them emotional
security, albeit a false one. It gave hope, although it was a false hope.
Harvests still went bad, and diseases still killed people. Only when
civilizations learned more did their actual situation improve. The discovery of
irrigation systems and pottery increase their ability to grow and store their
food, thus reducing the chance of starvation. Discoveries in what caused
certain diseases helped them discover cures or learn how to avoid them.

If rational methods of learning how to grow food and cure diseases actually
increased the chances of life, then why did religion, a failed method in the
fight for survival, continue? The answer is that in spite of the success of
reason increasing an individual’s chance to survive, death still happened.
People still went hungry, they still fell ill, and they still died; instilling a
fear in people that faith fed upon (see chapter 3 for more details). Religion
by then had also become firmly so entrenched in the human culture that in many
places to question it meant death. People believed in their culture’s gods
because it taught their children to believe in them. Social pressures
effectively prevented descent, especially when the culture thought that belief
was so necessary for their survival.

Faith was chosen over reason as the primary source of finding answers to the
point that even words and mythical heroes that represented reason became
detested. The Greek titan Prometheus gave fire, fire being a common symbol for
knowledge, to the human race in defiance of Zeus. Zeus punished Prometheus by
chaining him to a rock where an eagle tore out his liver every day. In Genesis,
Gods forbids Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The
word demon is Greek for knowledge. Lucifer means light-bringer. The bias
against reason and for faith has been built into our language and our culture
for centuries.
The bias against reason continues into and threatens today’s culture.
Intellectualism is considered by most as a dirty word. People caution that
curiosity killed the cat. Science is losing its importance in the classroom.
Public education is looked upon more as a burden rather than a necessity.
Conservative Christians all over the United States constantly attempt to replace
evolution with creationism in the science class. People are asked to follow
their leaders without question and its called patriotism. This threatens to
lower the intellectual level of the average citizen who relies more on catchy
slogans than on reasoned debate. Complex situations are given over-simplified
explanations and long-term problems given shortsighted solutions.
What does this has to do with Christianity? Christianity, like all faith-based
beliefs, is threatened by reason. The principles of Christianity can not stand
against close inspection. Therefore, one of the principles of Christianity is
against close inspection. Faith must be a central principle, and in the end,
the alleged key to salvation. If anyone questions faith and uses reason against
them, then they must be frowned and scowled upon. They must be considered, by
definition, under demonic influence, if not demons themselves. They must be
cast out to endure torture and torment for all eternity, like Prometheus (see
Chapter 3 for further details).

Faith is possibly the most central principle of Christianity. Faith is preached
as knowledge given by God if only one will accept Christianity without question.
A common line in a church hymn is “we walk by faith, and not by sight.” Jesus
said, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29).
In spite of the fact that faith cannot stand up against reason, faith is
extremely popular. This is because faith, as alluded earlier, provides
emotional security, albeit a false one. People can use faith to create any
belief system they wish. For example, faith can create a belief in an afterlife
where one will live forever in peace and harmony. With faith, a person could
believe in an all-powerful and all-loving god that created the universe just for
the human race. Faith can allow a person to believe that anyone disagrees with
their belief must be killed or will be tormented for eternity by fire.
The problem with faith is that it can say anything is true. There is no method
within faith to decide between two contradictory beliefs. One person can
believe through faith that the world is flat, and another can believe that the
world is spherical. Both ideas cannot be correct and faith cannot decide
conclusively between the two. Reason has no tolerance for contradictory ideas.
With faith, there must be one objective answer. Either the world is flat or the
world is spherical and reason must use objective data to decide which is true
and which is false.

Since faith is sustained by an emotional desire for certain ideas to be true,
contradictory beliefs can be held within the same belief system. For example,
part of Christian doctrine states that God created everything in the universe.
It also states that evil exists within this universe. If an all-loving,
all-powerful God created everything, then why does evil exist? If evil exists,
then either God is not all-powerful or God is not all-loving. The contradiction
can only be overcome through faith. Faithful Christians will argue that Satan
is the cause of all evil, but refuse to address the fact that they believe God
created Satan. Other Christians will argue that God, out of his infinite love
for us, gave us free will and that it is free will that causes us to do evil.
However, if it is our free will that causes us to do evil things, then is there
free will in heaven? If we maintain our free will in heaven, then does not that
mean that there is evil in heaven, a place that is supposed to be free of evil?
If we maintain our free will in heaven and heaven is free of evil, then why does
not God create only heaven? The idea that in spite of God being all-powerful
and all-loving that he cannot create a universe that does not have evil in it is
blatantly self-contradictory and therefore false. Again, the only way to
overcome such contradictions is through faith.

If the human race has evolved to possess the faculty of reason, then why has not
reason overcome the emotional need for faith? Reason is a relatively new
ability for humans. It has not developed to the point where it is dominant in
the human mind. The human mind has the potential to use reason, but the basic
human instinct is still extremely vulnerable to the false promises that faith
offers.

The current debate of evolution versus creationism is an excellent example of
how faith interferes and blunts the human intellect. The debate ended in favor
of evolution at least in the scientific community over a century ago. However,
the public debate on evolution continues due to the willful ignorance of the
Christian faithful. They continue to ignore the evidence, confuse the issue,
and deny the reality of evolution as a fundamental law of nature.

It is not that evolution is not within the grasp of the human mind to comprehend
the reality, but those who are in the grip of their emotional need to believe
the Genesis myth of God creating the world in six days continually throw
misinformation and lies out in an attempt to discredit evolution. The problem,
for starters, is the fight to teach evolution in public schools. Creationists
fight to take evolution out of schools or at least place creationism along side
evolution as an equally viable scientific theory, even though creationism has
nothing to do with science and everything to do with religion. The ending
result is that while evolution is in many places part of the official
curriculum, it is rarely thoroughly covered. This lack of education on
evolutionary theory makes students vulnerable to creationist propaganda and
misinformation. Misuse of the second law of thermodynamics, transitional
fossils, and declaring that evolution is a racist theory are just a few of the
false and deception ideas creationists will use in a vain attempt to discredit
evolution. These clumsy attempts to discredit evolution shows how much the
faculty of reason has deteriorated in those who rely so much on faith.
Reason threatens the tenets of faith-based worldviews, but is making slow
progress against them. The reason is that reason says there is only one
definitive answer to the how and why the universe works as it does. Reason will
not coincide in what people wish to believe, but faith will. Faith is
ultimately decides what is right based on what a person wishes to believe. A
person wishes to believe that there is an afterlife where they will live in
bliss forever, therefore it is true. Faith allows this, but reason does not.

The desire to believe gives faith a great defense against reason. Humans are
ultimately selfish creatures therefore; they will tend to believe any system
that tells them what they want to hear. Christianity not only promises eternal
paradise, but allows believers to use their biases against others (see chapter
2). The Bible is quite clear that women are to be considered second-class
citizens and that homosexuals are to be stoned to death. Are there women and
homosexuals who are Christians? Yes. Due to faith’s ability to hold two or
more contradictory ideas to be true, it only requires one to believe in
Christianity and believe that Christianity is not misogynic and homophobic. In
fact, many liberal sects of Christianity ignore biblical teachings that support
sexism and bigotry.

The negative effect that faith has on the human mind is that faith requires a
manipulation of the mind in order to hold contradictory beliefs. This diverts
otherwise positive mental energy into being wasted trying to maintain a false
belief system. In order to maintain a person’s faith, they must ignore the
objective data that contradicts their faith.

This would not be important except there is a direct correlation between success
and knowing how the world works. A person cannot drive a car, build a house, or
discover a law of nature on faith. It through reason, not faith, that people
discovered the world was a sphere, thereby allowing us to go around the world
and discover new truths about how the universe worked. It was through reason,
not faith, that scientists learn about the human body and how to treat
illnesses. Faith has not discovered a star, a cure, or a single fact about the
universe. Reason has done all these things.
People continue to believe that they discover what the universe is through faith
because it suits their purposes. They wish to believe they can find things with
faith, because often they can not discover them through reason. Sometimes a
question is currently unable to be answered because the necessary data is an
unknown. Sometimes the question is so complicated that it is difficult to sort
it out. Sometimes the person trying to discover the answer is simply not
intelligent enough to figure it out. In these situations, many believe that
they can fill the gaps with faith.

Unfortunately, faith can do no such thing. Faith is subjective and based on
selfish desires. What happens after death is an unknown, so many use faith to
decide that there is an afterlife because that is what they wish to believe.
Besides the desire to live forever in happiness, humans feel the need to be
considered the center of the universe and their religions reflect this. Before
Darwin discovered the theory of evolution, Christians held that God created the
world in six days and created Adam and Eve on the sixth day. This belief
supports the idea that God created humanity and the world just for them.
Christianity used to believe that the world was flat and that the sun revolved
around the Earth which supported the idea of humanity being the center of the
universe.

Reason destroys the idea of humanity being the center of everything. Science
has shown that we are on a planet orbiting an average star which is only one
star out of billions in a galaxy which itself is only one galaxy out of billions
in a universe that is easily over a thousand years older that our species. The
idea is appalling to the average human mind, but that does not change the fact
that it is true.

In spite of the evidence, many continue to believe in a world that positions
humanity in the center and use faith to justify that belief. They fear reason
because it might expose their beliefs as false and foolish. In this manner,
faith is like a person sitting in a dark room. The person convinces themselves
that they already know what is in the room and nothing dangerous in there. The
rational person is the person who gropes for the light switch. The person of
faith will plead with the rational person not to search for the light because
the faithful is afraid of what the light will show. Instead, the faithful would
rather sit alone in the dark afraid of what the light might bring never
acknowledging that the light would bring anything.

This analogy, while accurate, makes the person using faith seem quite silly.
Rather than admit that faith is a false epistemology system, the faithful will
claim that reason is the true path to wisdom, not reason. There can be no
acknowledgement that there is any difference between faith and knowledge;
therefore according to Christianity, FAITH IS KNOWLEDGE.

whouprog

Pretty impressive. Are you intentionally modelling this after 1984 (The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism)? If so, and you don't have two more slogans, maybe you could use "DOUBT IS SIN" and "REASON IS EVIL". There is an error, I think: With faith, there must be one objective answer should read "With reason . . ."? But otherwise, good work! <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

abe smith

You're taking too long. Faith is NOT knowledge; why do you muddy the waters by printing-out that it izz? Abe

Boro Nut

I once had an enlightening conversation with a very sage looking foreign gentleman while waiting for a plane at Heathrow. Among other things he told me that he had come to England in search of knowledge. I asked him if he had found it, and he told me that he had, in Istangria.

I had never heard of the place myself assuming it to be some remote Welsh monastery or something, but I was quietly pleased he had found something of value to take home from his visit.

Much later he showed me some photos (they like taking photos those Japanese). They showed his relatives. They lived in Norwich. It's in East Anglia.

Boro Nut

Megatron

DAMMIT, BORO NUT! I was eating!!!

(damn, that was hilarious... <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> )

The Resistance

I most certainly am! The correlations I saw between Christianity and 1984 inspired this. Actually, I do plan on writing two more chapters. HATE IS LOVE, and DEATH IS LIFE. I just finsihed the first and I wanted to see what people thought of it.

P.S. Thanks for pointing out the error, Kanddak pointed out a couple for me as well.

Abe Smith:
Faith is not knowledge, but from Christianity's point of view, it is. That was the point of the essay. As I told whouprog, I have two others planned that are, in my mind, unoffical mottos of the Christian faith.

Did you read 1984? Then you might understand why I chose that format.

The Resistance

Did we lose a post? I saw earlier bipbaplildodap or whatever his name was with a rather silly post here earlier. What happened to it?