{"id":20924,"date":"2014-06-08T00:00:47","date_gmt":"2014-06-08T04:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=20924"},"modified":"2015-01-11T12:47:59","modified_gmt":"2015-01-11T17:47:59","slug":"giving-voice-to-the-image-of-the-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/giving-voice-to-the-image-of-the-beast\/","title":{"rendered":"Giving Voice to the Image of the Beast"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"God's<\/a><\/p>\n

Today I drove past another of those black billboards with white typewriter letters forming cute little remarks like, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hot now, wait\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll you get to hell.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s meet at my place Sunday before the game,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d signed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153God.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The one I saw today said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no downside to a relationship with me.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Again, God. Not only do such billboards constitute yet more trivialization of the Christian religion by Christians; they also raise more serious questions, not to mention greater ironies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyone familiar with the work of Christian apologists like William Lane Craig, Richard Bauckham, and Mike Licona knows how vociferously they resist the notion that early Christians would have coined sayings, then fathered them on Jesus to give them greater authority (anybody gets trumped by the Son of God). And the apologists have the same motivation: they want to convince you that you have to believe the statements ascribed to Jesus in the Bible. The early Christians knew nobody would believe and obey something they told you on their own authority, namely no<\/em> authority. So they used the Jesus character as a ventriloquist dummy. And today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s apologists are doing the same thing. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the megaphone for the opinions of mere mortals. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be no reason to believe them, so they hide behind the curtain in the special effects booth, thundering their dictates as if they came from God, AKA the Great and Powerful Oz.<\/p>\n

I find it hilariously ironic and very revealing that their own people are doing just what evangelical apologists maintain the New Testament Christians never did. These billboards are created by evangelicals who have no qualms about making up cute sayings of their own and slapping \u00e2\u20ac\u0153God\u00e2\u20ac\u009d under them.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh, but they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really mean that somebody, in some prophetic trance, heard the Hestonian voice of God! They figure anyone who reads the signboards will realize it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s kind of a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwhat-if\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 gag.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Really? Maybe so. But then how do we know the early Christians attributing sayings to Jesus meant it literally either?<\/p>\n

The practice of evangelical Christians refutes the arguments of their own apologists. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot bigger than that. Is there any reason to believe that any<\/em> of the things human beings have ever <\/em>said God said had a different origin from today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s billboard oracles? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just a matter of religious fanatics fighting over which set of scriptural doctrines is the true one. Even to frame it that way is to mystify what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going on. Really it boils down to two (or more) groups of loudmouths engaged in a shouting match. For them to declare \u00e2\u20ac\u0153God says so!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is just to shout that much louder. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I said it! God believes it! That settles it!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s propaganda pure and simple. And the appeal to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153authoritative\u00e2\u20ac\u009d revelation is designed to circumvent reason and logic. If \u00e2\u20ac\u0153God\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said it, well then, it must be right! \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Even if it makes no sense to me, it must nonetheless be true. God is certainly smarter than me!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d If there were one, yes, sure, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have to be. But what reason is there to think there is<\/em> a deity who issues these commandments and doctrines? What possible reason is there to believe \u00e2\u20ac\u0153his\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153revelations\u00e2\u20ac\u009d have not been cooked up by fellow mortals (and not necessarily very smart ones)?<\/p>\n

As Durkheim suggested, any society christens as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153divine sanctions\u00e2\u20ac\u009d those man-made rules and values it deems most important. The rule-making elders understand that, if people knew these rules were the invention of mere mortals like themselves, they would say to themselves, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Well, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just the opinion of those mossbacks! Who says they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re right and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m wrong?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And then, they fear, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be asking for chaos, as the Book of Judges puts it, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153every man doing what is right in his own eyes.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d So, the rule-makers think, it will be safer to intimidate the mob into believing the gods have handed down these rules and will kill us or damn us if we disobey. In this event, even if the rules and values are fine and good, the system becomes corrupted by the simple fact of deceit at the foundation of it. It is the sin of priestcraft, of pious fraud. Humans appoint themselves the Grand Inquisitor. They, like the Mullahs of Iran, are sure they know better than the rest of us and do not trust us with freedom of action and free thought.<\/p>\n

The Book of Revelation, chapter 13, depicts a scene in which the False Prophet, the promoter and press secretary of the Beast, the end-time tyrant, wows the crowd by making a statue of his master seem to speak aloud. As I read it, the point is not that the False Prophet performs a genuine miracle, albeit Satanically inspired, but rather that he is conning the rubes by using a common stage illusion. Even in the ancient world tricksters and entertainers used ventriloquism and voice-throwing to make it look like a statue spoke. What the False Prophet did was cheap priestcraft.<\/p>\n

And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what religion has always done when its spokesmen have elevated their own best (?) thoughts to the status of divine revelation. And no one stoops to this if they are convinced of the persuasive logic of their position.<\/p>\n

I think that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s as plain as if it were plastered on a billboard.<\/p>\n

So says Zarathustra.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I drove past another of those black billboards with white typewriter letters forming cute little remarks like, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hot now, wait\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll you get to hell.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s meet at my place Sunday before the game,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d signed … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}