Re: Call me a fideist

HL Mencken:

"...They were gods of the highest dignity.... All were
omnipotent, omniscient...."

This doesn't square with Greek & Roman mythologies among others. Their chief gods were prone to foibles and neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Otherwise the fellow gods and goddesses of their pantheons could not have pulled those tricks on them.

Mencken should have been more perceptive. There's really no comparison between polytheistic and monotheistic systems. I believe from spiritual experience that all polytheistic systems are demon-inspired. --So, Glenn, if only you could accept this, you could eliminate a lot of gods in one fell swoop.

Glenn Morton:

"There simply isn't anything logical about the world in toto being unable to
reject the true God."

God's love trumps logic. If God were unable to save more than an infinitesimal fraction of his sentient and spiritual creatures, I'd say there was some serious deficiency in both him and his creation. (Basically, I guess, I've stopped believing that humans are quite the intrinsic enemies of God that Christian teaching and tradition have made of them. They can be pretty bad, and pretty ignorant, but as a rule they're inclined towards God (or gods) and not that hostile to him (or them). [--Although inclination towards false gods amounts to hostility towards the true God.] [Maybe this view of non-hostility comes from living in Orange County.]) I believe the world is the way God wanted it and that his love wins many from both past and present.

What we can't know is the exact criteria for salvation. As Burgy once implied, it's not going to be the score of a final exam on "true doctrines." Jesus says works, Paul says faith--but no one knows what those criteria mean or how they will be applied. I say it's the relationship, and that the possibility of such saving relationship extends beyond formal Christianity. (Otherwise how could Elijah have been saved?) And only God and in some cases the individual have any real idea of what the relationship is.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Glenn Morton<mailto:glennmorton@entouch.net>
  To: 'Don Winterstein'<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com> ; 'asa'<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 5:46 AM
  Subject: RE: Call me a fideist

  ________________________________________
  From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu<mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
  Behalf Of Don Winterstein
  Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 4:55 AM
  To: asa; Glenn Morton
  Subject: Re: Call me a fideist

>I find the question definitely relevant. Perhaps it has something to do
  with our
>being surrounded in our respective places of employment by confessing
  atheists and
>largely silent Christians. After a while we start to see all questions in
  the
>atheist's frame.

  Yeah, wish I were sheltered from all that like I was when I was originally a
  YEC. Life's questions were so much simpler then.

>--Although I think you too heavily weight certain obscure or dead
  religions.
>(Jupiter? You can't be serious.)

  The last known worshiper of Jupiter was somewhere around 1000 AD (can't find
  my citation). But what rule of nature requires that there be some
  worshippers of the real god? Is it not conceivable that the world enmass
  would turn away from the true God? Some eschatological positions virtually
  ensure us that the vast majority of the world will reject God someday.

  And here are some interesting observations. 500 years after the fall of the
  Aztecan and Mayan Gods Latourette wrote this:

  "Even in the twentieth century pre-christian dances were said to persist and
  with some modifications to be performed in the churches. More than once it
  has been noted that the Christian shrine which of all those in Mexico has
  most captured the imagination and affection of the Indians, that of the
  Virgin of Guadalupe, is on the spot which, in 1531, when Christianity was
  first winning its way in Mexico, the vision is said to have appeared to a
  humble Indian which gave rise to her cult, and that this site is not far
  from that of the chief temple of an aboriginal goddess of fertility. In 1930
  a traveller found in a mountain village in Oaxaca offerings, including the
  fresh blood of a turkey in front of a sculptured monolith. In the twentieth
  century, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, a church has been noted
  which was in charge of a group of twenty men who were said to be in fact
  priests of an old Maya cult. In another place images of the Virgin and of
  Christ were venerated through a priestess in a manner reminiscent of pagan
  days."~Kenneth Scott Latourette, Three Centuries of Advance, in A History of
  the Expansion of Christianity, vol. 3, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), p.
  118

  If God is who we believe he is, then surely we've
>got to believe the true religion would be a major, living religion. That
  is, I for
>one can't believe God is so narrow as to save only an infinitesimal
  "remnant." It's
>hard enough to behold all those beautiful Chinese faces or experience those
  wonderful
>Indonesian smiles while simultaneously consigning them all mentally to
  hell.

  The problem was expressed by H. L. Mencken in his essay. Here is an
  abbreviated part of it:

     " Memorial Service
         H. L. Mencken

  Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters
  their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods,
  and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an
  ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships
  Jupiter today? And what of Huitzilopochtli? In one year and it is
  no more than five hundred years ago 50,000 youths and maidens were
  slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is
  only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest.
  Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother
  was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation
  that she carried on with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun,
  stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole
  cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human
  blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen
  G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the
  peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General
  Weyler and Tom Sharkey.
  . . .[after a list of ancient gods Mencken writes]
  Ask the rector to lend you any good book on comparative religion: you will
  find them all listed. They were gods of the highest dignity, gods of
  civilized peoples worshipped and believed in by millions. All were
  omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead."

  There simply isn't anything logical about the world in toto being unable to
  reject the true God.

>And as one who's lived a long time in that atheist's frame, I'm acutely
  aware of the
>human capacity for misinterpreting one's own experience. I am skeptical of
  myself,
>but my witness is that God has the power to overcome self-skepticism also.

  Agreed.
Received on Tue May 31 08:47:31 2005