Here is Pat Condell's “God the Psycho” YouTube video:
I admire his wit and presentation, but felt he deserved a response. Below is the text of the response. There is a lot of information in the essay, It may be better to read it than watch it.
Response Part 1
Response Part 2
Reply to Pat Condell's “God the Psycho”
- Roy Timpe
Pat Condell, I have to applaud your video commentaries on the three major religions of the, “God of the desert.” You are correctly concerned about the threat to Western Civilization of radical Islam combined with our modern “political correctness” attitude. You also have a deep respect for reason and a gift for ridicule.
It is precisely because you have a respect for reason that I've decided to make this reply to your, “God the psycho” video diatribe. Now, you have some advantage as an atheist. You have no creed (except of course that you believe there is no God) You never really tell us what type of atheist you are.
There are several types of atheists. There are the collectivist type atheists. This includes those followers of Karl Marx. They think religion was invented by the powerful to keep the masses occupied, so the powerful could steal a bigger slice of the finite pie. They also believed in a Hegelian progression of history that would end in a proletariat utopia where the pie would be infinite. (From each according to his ability to each according to his need and all that) Never mind that their concept of the pie is both finite and infinite, that little bit of self contradiction never occurred to them. Pity nobody pointed it out, it would have made the 20th century a nicer place to live. Then there are the individualist atheists. This would especially include followers of Ayn Rand. They struggle looking for moral absolutes, derived from an empirical epistemology. It is an admirable goal, but their success is as likely as the Marxists finding a pie that is both finite and infinite. Between these two ends of atheist spectrum, there are likely many shades. You never quite tell us where you're coming from, but my guess is that you're toward the individualist camp.
Well Pat, just as with atheists, there are many types of Christians. There are Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, Roman Catholic, and Protestant just to name a few. I am not going to attempt to defend every action in church history done in the name of Christ. For example, I will not defend the Crusades. Likewise, I would not expect you to defend every action done in the name of atheism, Stalin's Gulags, and Pol Pott's killing fields being two examples.
World views are something like the Geometry we learned about in school. You remember, they started with presuppositions (called axioms, two points determine a line and all that . . . ) and progressed on to theorems like the Pythagorean theorem etc. Well, every world view starts with presuppositions. From that point it progresses on to ideas about morality, government, science etc. The thing that frustrates me about your video diatribes is you give us little information about your presuppositions. You do however, give us an idea about your morality. You are moral. You believe that all people are equal and deserving of fair treatment. You believe in freedom of speech, and other liberties in the tradition of Western civilization.
Let me identify my presuppositions: sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, sola Christus, and Soli Deo gloria. These presuppositions have been in Christianity to some degree since the fist century. They really were crystallized during the reformation that followed Martin Luther's famous 95 theses in 1517. However, men like John Wycliffe (1320s – 1384 ) and John Huss ( 1369 – 1415) were championing these ideas 150 years or so before Luther. These ideas gave rise to a better understanding of the gospel, sometimes called the doctrines of grace. It is this fruit of the protestant reformation that has made the ideas of equality, and liberty, possible.
My chief complaint to you, is that you, as an atheist, assume and appropriate most of the results of my world view, all the while denigrating where these ideas have come from.
Let's take science as an example. Before the monotheistic God of Christianity, men had many gods. All these little local gods, as you call them. Now with the monotheistic God as part of his world view, Galileo expects the universe to make sense. He expects it to have been designed by God. When he sees the moons orbiting Jupiter, he jumps to the conclusion that it is the same forces at work that cause our moon to orbit the earth. That conclusion would not be rational, given a pagan world view. How do we know that Jupiter is not governed by a local god altogether different from our local god? For a Christian it is natural to assume the physical laws transcend the entire universe. This assumption is unfounded for the pagan. Galileo is well known for the trouble he had with the Roman church. Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician famous for describing all orbits as conic sections, said, “O God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee.” as he was studying astronomy. Both Kepler and Galileo expected the universe to make sense. They expected there was a rational explanation to the motions of the planets they observed. They believed the living transcendent God designed the universe. Kepler also had the advantage of living in a country that embraced the reformation.
Perhaps there is no greater area of Western Civilization affected by the effects of the reformation than the relationship of the individual to his government. Prior to Jesus, the idea of a servant leader was unknown in Western thought. There were no such things as public servants in Greece and Rome. Today both in the US and the UK we enjoy the effects of John Locke's ideas on government. The US Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . “ Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, and the continental congress ratified them, but they were ideas grown out of the effects of the reformation. John Locke observed that the Bible had only one creation account. One Adam and Eve created in God's image. He observed that there was no second race created to be aristocrats. There was not an aristocrat Adam and a common Adam, there was just one Adam. It follows then that all men are created equal. In 1644 the puritan preacher and scholar Samuel Rutherford published Lex Rex. Rutherford argued against the ideas espoused by Charles I and his ilk. Ideas such as the divine right of kings, and the notion that the king was above the law. Rutherford showed that although the old testament David had been pronounced king by God's prophet Samuel, David continued to respect Saul as king of Israel, and in fact did not function as king until he (David) had entered into covenants with the people. To Rutherford, and to Locke, this sounded like, “ deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In the 1600s the puritans were very busy reforming government. They were expanding the application of the rights in the Magna Carta of 1215 to include common men. You know here in the USA we have the 5th amendment to our constitution. It prohibits the government from compelling you to give evidence against yourself. In earlier times you could actually be tortured to give evidence against yourself. I don't know about you, but I really appreciate the right not to be tortured by a government who wants evidence. I realize it makes the jobs of the police and prosecutors more difficult, but I appreciate that right non the less. Don't you? Well with Charles I and before, you had the “Star Chamber” They could torture and maim you to get you to give evidence against yourself. These puritans of the 1600s thought that was wrong. When Charles I was forced to reconvene parliament one of their first actions was to abolish the Star Chamber in 1641. They wrote the bill in such a way as to inject the principle of non-self incrimination into both our legal traditions.
You may object and say that Jefferson and Locke were referring to the laws of nature or Nature and Nature's God, not the Christian God. I ask you has there ever been a people who by merely observing nature have concluded that all men are created equal? To Jefferson and Locke it was self evident. If we were to ask a pagan Roman or Greek. they would say the law of nature supports predation and slavery. They would say, “If we Romans are stronger than our neighbors we will plunder their cities, take their women, and enslave their men. It is the law of nature. Is not the lion stronger than the antelope?” So as far as they were concerned, you may have some liberty as long as you were Roman, but it was not self evident that you were created equal.
Slavery was widespread in the world. The USA learned it from the old world, and it persisted here until 1865. However, your “God of the desert” had much to say about slavery. In Deuteronomy 23:15-16, God commands, “You shall not deliver unto his master a slave that is escaped from his master unto you: he shall dwell with you, in the midst of you, in the place which he shall choose within one of your gates, where it pleases him best: you shalt not oppress him.” This means that it was wrong to return a fugitive slave to his master. Paul in his letter to Philemon asks Philemon to do “ that which is befitting” by granting Philemon's fugitive slave Onesimus his freedom. The abolitionist movement in the UK and USA was largely made up of Christians who demanded that these pieces of scriptural truth be integrated into Western legal tradition.
It was self evident to M.P. William Wilberforce that all men were created equal, but the concept was not the least bit self evident to our US Chief Justice Roger B. Taney when he decided the Dred Scott case in 1857. Was it self evident that all men are created equal to Nero, Genghis Khan, Joe Stalin, Mao Zedong, or Pol Pott? You see Pat, there is a fundamental moral epistemological problem with observing nature: you can not reason from “is to ought” You can observe what is in nature. You can describe physical laws like net force equals the derivative of momentum with time, but that will never tell you that you ought to treat your neighbor as you want to be treated.
You may want to deny the effects of the reformation and make appeal to the enlightenment. You may want to credit this proliferation of liberty and rights to a secular enlightenment, rather than the puritans and the reformation. Jefferson was after all very much in the secular enlightenment tradition, however, John Locke was Jefferson's mentor, and John Locke said, “The Holy Scripture is to me, and always will be, the constant guide of my assent; and I will always hearken to it, as containing the infallible truth relating to things of highest concernment.... Where I want the evidence of things, there yet is ground enough for me to believe, because God has said it; and I will presently condemn and quit any opinion of mine, as soon as I am shown that it is contrary to any revelation of the Holy Scripture.” John Locke had a high regard for scripture and considered the Bible to be authoritative.
If you have any further doubt that it is the reformation and its effects that have secured us the blessings of liberty, consider the warning of Pope Martin V to the king of Poland. Martin V wanted to cling to the middle ages. He became Pope one year after the reformer John Huss was executed one hundred years before Martin Luther started the reformation in earnest. Martin V advises the king of Poland, “Know that the interests of the Holy See, and those of your crown, make it a duty to exterminate the Hussites. Remember that these impious persons dare proclaim principles of equality; they maintain that all Christians are brethren and that God has not given to privileged men the right of ruling nations; they hold that Christ came on Earth to abolish slavery; they call the people to liberty, that is to the annihilation of kings and priests. While there is still time, then, turn your force against Bohemia; burn, massacre, make deserts everywhere, for nothing could be more agreeable to God, or more useful to the cause of kings, than the extermination of the Hussites" Pope Martin V correctly saw that the reformation of Christianity advocated by Wycliffe and Huss would undo the medieval world he so loved.
Pat, you enjoy your liberty as a citizen of the U.K. and you are rightly concerned about the threat radical Islam and political correctness pose to those liberties. However, in railing against Christianity, you're like the proverbial man who saws the tree limb out from under himself. It is the Christian God who blesses you with the liberty of that branch. Since you can not reason from is to ought, it is God alone that supports that branch. He has blessed us with liberty, and it is my hope that he will bless you with much more than liberty. After all Jesus said, "All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.” John 6:37
For
good reading on these topics try:
Defending
the Declaration: How the Bible and Christianity Influenced the
Writing of the Declaration of Independence by
Gary T. Amos
Religion,
Reason and Revelation by
Gordon H. Clark
Without
A Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System
by
John W. Robbins