Recently a firefighter in our church was told by one of his colleagues that belief in Jesus was for weak people. I found that ironic coming from a firefighter.
I have a fire hydrant in our side yard. I have never looked at the fire hydrant and felt any shame. I drive by a firehouse everyday. I never think, “If this community didn’t have weak people than we would never have firehouses.” Every month when I pay my property taxes, that go towards financing fire departments, I never get angry at myself, thinking, “if I could just handle fire myself I wouldn’t have to write this check.”
Imagine a person whose house was on fire. The fire is raging out of control and the fire truck pulls up, sirens blaring. The person runs out of his house in a rage and says, “How dare you come to my house and think that I can’t handle this fire myself! Firefighters are for weak people, not for me.”
What would you think of someone like that? Insane.
We know that fire departments are for “weak” people because a power exists that we simply can’t deal with on our own: fire. Actually, we admire firefighters because they are people who have committed themselves to take on the power of fire at personal expense.
A Christian is weak in the same sense that a community is “weak” for having fire departments. They are people who acknowledge that a power exists that they can’t confront and live — the holiness of God. This, however, is not cause for shame, because there was one man who dealt with that power at personal expense, on a cross. And, as every firefighter can admit, when someone is rescued from the flames, they’re not thinking about their weakness; they’re overjoyed that someone would risk it all to save them.
I disagree on the fact that real threats supercede imaginary ones. If you need to make a comparison, at least take a glance at what you are comparing, and find something that holds up.
It’s obvious why you need firemen. Fire is real, it’s irrefutably real – it takes no faith to understand that exists and is potentially deadly. It is not possible to deal with fire yourself. Even FireFighters die in fires – some while fighting them, others from fires at home. As you said, at personal expense. However, if no fires ever occurred. Ever. If there was no direct evidence of Fire, if it just did not occur naturally, you can be damned sure there would not be any fire-departments. They are present because the cost of having them, on the overall, is lesser than the price of raging fires.
The problem comes when you try to find the ‘Fire’ of Jesus, this tangible threat that he supposedly intervenes at his expense to save us from. Well, what threat exactly? There isn’t even a coherent definition of what God is, as far as universal concepts go, the best you get is that he is really really big and happens to agree with whoever is telling you about him. God is an assumption and nothing more. There is no evidence, there is no reason behind it, the story is not even internally consistent.
So what is a good analogy? Nothing that actually exists seems to do the deed, since that generally leaves it with at least some practical application whatever. No, it must also lie in the realm of the fictional, so let’s go with Unicorn-Insurance is for the weak. Does having Unicorn-Insurance make you weak? Maybe not, but tell someone that you paid for unicorn-insurance, and they will show you in full technicolor exactly what that does make you. Because you can’t just make up imaginary threats, waste massive resources on them (emotionally, intellectually and economically), and then expect to be taken seriously.
The only reason it’s okay to have God-Insurance but not Unicorn-Insurance, is that so many people already paid for the God Plan. The two are equally delusional, and the longer it takes before people realize that, the greater the waste will be. People should do good, rather than pray for it to just happen. If something sucks, you fix it. I’ll bet that if your house started burning, you would call the Fire Department before praying for rain. Jesus is not a firefighter, he is a tin foil hat.
Toby thank you for your comment.
In the last part you said people should be good, but if there is no god, why should people be good? (Now I am not asking CAN you be good, I’m asking what real reason do you have to tell others to be good?). Or why fix things? or save people at all from burning buildings? Something in you is saying it is better to be good than bad, fixed than broken, life rather than death. But what is that if there is no god?
The answers to that question are complex, and by no means complete. This turned into a pretty big block of text, but here is my hypothesis:
I would say that if God is all that keeps people good, the only reason you can envision to act decently, there is no distinction between that . You’re doing what any animal will do – responding to a fear of punishment or a hope of a reward. It does not change anything, it’s just a dressed up version of what parents do, the rewards are salvation rather than kind words and neurotransmitters. Saying God did it does not explain anything. While no one can say for sure why we behave like we behave, not yet anyway, attributing it to God is just saying we can never know. I think we should try to find out. So I believe in the brain. It is a truly amazing machine, and if anything can figure it out, it can.
You have the ability to feel joy and suffering, and you prefer feeling joy. What joy is and what suffering is, is somewhat immaterial really, because they define eachother as extremes on a very gradual scale. If your cables were switched and you felt joy where I felt suffering and suffering where I felt joy, then you would call suffering joy and you would call joy suffering. That is because those feelings are older than the words that describe them. Joy is defined as whatever feels the best to you, in this case.
We have the same reward system, you and I, just like most other people, and that means we can relate to eachother on a fundamental level. This is true for many animals. We can plan courses of action individually to increase our personal joy, or we can facilitate cooperation to achieve that goal together. That reward system is in our brain, and it essentially feeds us awesome drugs whenever we fulfill one of its many behavioral parameters. For instance, we generally feel really good about our kids. That is because kids are important from a biological perspective. The people who wanted kids got kids, and their traits got passed on. That’s not speaking in purely genetic terms either, they also taught their children about the love they felt. It does not sound very romantic, but it really does not make it any less beautiful. Sunsets can be lovely no matter how predictable they are.
Consider what if not every person had the same reward system. That some people’s cables were indeed switched. Well, obviously while working with people whose definition of good is somewhat similar to yours, the two of you can relate and agree on something to work toward. Without language, you can still relate. Suppose you met someone who enjoyed pain rather than pleasure, however, and it’s easy to envision that some kind of altercation would soon follow as you patted gently them on the back and they clawed you in the face. While some things are biologically, we humans are clever animals, and can learn to behave differently.
If we take it that societies in which there is common ground, where its members can agree on what goals they wish to work toward, have a greater degree of survivability both genetically and culturally, then it’s not hard to understand how most of us ended up with the same conditions or at least similar ones. It would take a long time to cover every single one of our moral and emotional traits here now, but the trend is fairly clear.
Of course, the process of evolution has never been foolproof. It makes mistakes all the time. That is, in fact, pretty much how it works – by constantly making mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are really clever and they become the norm, most of the time they aren’t. Most of the time people end up within the same moral stratum as their environment, some people end up different – sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. I would like to specify that evolution, selection in particular, does not happen only on a genetic level. It happens to culture as well – ideas get more refined and more detailed as time passes and more people add to them. They get passed on based on their merit. The idea of cooperation has given us almost everything we treasure today, all of our accomplishments are courtesy of cooperation and the acts of more than one individual. Even wired slightly different, we have the ability to adjust our behaviour until we find something that is acceptable.
Compounding this are some more recent discoveries about how we actually learn to process information and how we acquire behaviour to begin with. It turns out when you see someone doing something you enjoy, you can actually get enjoyment from watching them. We are literally hardwired for empathy. As I said before, we can relate on aa fundamental level. We get joy, a feeling of accomplishment not only from gaining benefits ourselves, but gaining benefits for others too. That means that when we work together, and achieve something by cooperating that rewards both of us, those rewards are all the greater.
So why should I be good? Well, I prefer to be happy. I am happier around happy people, and so I work toward that end. I have biology on my side, and evolution too. I understand that I do not wish other people to think they are more important than I am, and I practice that by believing I am no more important than they. I understand that I can achieve more with cooperation than with defiance, and so I work toward that end. I understand that what is good for me may not hold true for everyone. The mission is to be good, whatever that means to you, by bettering others and letting them better you. In short, the golden rule bears merit beyond merely having been said by wise men. It was they who were wise for saying it, it was not wise simply because it was said by them. Even if Buddha had never thought of it, Jesus had never mentioned it, it would still be a really great idea. That, I believe, is why it caught on.