JESUS SHOWED LACK OF WISDOM AND WHY HIS SERMON ON THE MOUNT IS DANGEROUS
Kevin Vost in From Atheism to Catholicism (My Sunday
Visitor, 2010) engages in distortions of Jesus to make it seem that Jesus'
teaching is sound in terms of mental health.
Vost correctly lists some dangerous irrational beliefs
that do psychological damage.
# It is a dire necessity to be approved or loved by the
important people in my community.
He says that Jesus countered that belief by teaching we
are blessed when we are cursed and hated and persecuted for his sake (Matthew
5:11).
But Jesus was not saying we should not mind being hated
and cursed and persecuted! If he did then he was an evil callous monster. He was
only saying God will bless us if we suffer from those who we expect to love and
approve us.
Jesus said that God alone is to be ultimately loved and
we are to love him above all things even good things. We are to love him with
all our hearts and powers. So it is a dire necessity for us to love and approve
God. And for others to do it too. If you love God and see people caring little
or not at all for the dire necessity of loving God then this will have the same
destructive emotional impact on you as if you believed it is extremely important
to be loved by the important people.
If it is so harmful to believe it is vital to earn the
love of the important people in your community, then it is worse to extend this
to everybody. If God is love and he wants others to love you, then it is a dire
necessity in the light of Christ's doctrine that obedience to the commandment to
love God comes first. This love will be a fearful love - a God who orders you to
love him instead of attracting you is a bully. Service of such a God is
unhealthy.
You will see it as a dire necessity for others to love
you if you believe that they will suffer in Hell forever if they do not.
The irrational belief that it is vital that we be loved and approved by others makes us demanding. If others do not give us special treatment we blame them for making us feel angry and hard done by. And it gets worse if we end up being demanding for God's sake too.
We can be demanding on ourselves - "I must speak like an
expert in communication at the interview". That comes from our fear that we are
not approved enough by God or others. If you feel let down by God, you can end
up inflicting your demands on other people as a kind of compensation.
If God comes first as religion says then clearly it is a
dire necessity to be approved and loved by him. Religion may say it is not a
dire necessity for he approves and loves you anyway. But it does not mean what
it says. When you say it is a dire necessity you are saying that you need his
care but also to feel that he cares. You will not feel that he approves you
completely for how can you if you believe you are a sinner?
Religion claims that life is useless without God or if
there is no God. It claims that without God there can be no morality so we must
live in fear and hope for a speedy death. This extremism is worrying but if God
is absolute and infinite good then it is quite logical. That faith in God leads
to such a horrific conclusion certainly shows that belief in God is logically
faulty. It is odd how Vost can claim wanting the approval of others strongly is
an unhealthy and irrational belief and then offer us a God who only makes it
worse. He offers us Christianity which goes as far as to say that life and
religion and faith and joy are useless if Jesus has not really risen from the
dead. St Paul said that and the Church regards him as speaking under divine
prompting.
# One must be successful and good enough in important
things or one is an inadequate worthless person.
Vost says Jesus countered that belief by teaching that
whoever humbles himself will be lifted up to be the greatest in Heaven (Matthew
18:4).
But humility means that you consider yourself worthless
if you fail to do the important things! Also, Jesus said you are still an
inadequate and worthless person if you succeed! He told his disciples that even
if they do all God asks they must still consider themselves to be valueless
servants of God who only did what was their duty.
An atheist can have the irrational belief that he or she
must succeed at the big things in life or he or she is worthless. This problem
should be stronger in the God believer who sees success and goodness as
manifestations of the goodness of God - he or she is pressured to express God by
doing well.
Vost says just as you love children just because they are
children and not because of what they do so you should love people because they
are people. But that is different. Loving children because of what they do is
stupid for they are only children.
Christianity accuses those who have sexual thoughts or
who masturbate or who miss Mass on Sunday of grave sin. The religion cruelly
manipulates you to see yourself as useless for committing such harmless sins!
Who does Vost think he is trying to fool?
We have seen how religion paints those with no belief in
God as no-hopers and apostles of despair. This is to say that unless you are
successful in getting meaning in life from religion your life is useless. To say
your life is useless is to say you are useless.
# People must act with consideration and act with justice
and are villains if they do not and they are the bad acts they do.
He says that Jesus countered that belief by teaching that
whoever is without sin must cast the first stone at the sinner (John 8:7). This
corresponds to the Sermon on the Mount doctrine that we must not judge unfairly
for we will be judged unfairly if we do.
To say you are not a villain no matter what you do is a
strange thing to say. And your bad acts are never the problem - you are the
problem! Whoever pretends the acts are the problem not you is insulting you and
thinking of you as a machine. That is worse than being maligned as a sinner.
Religion says you must love the sinner and hate the sin.
Sinner means your sin is not the problem but what you say about yourself by
sinning. So why is it not phrased as, "Love the sinner and hate the sinner"?
Because that would render the hypocrisy too obvious.
Vost explains that we cannot judge one another as persons
though we can advise them to give up sin and reprove their sins. But he only
means we cannot see a person's heart so we cannot say that they hate God and
oppose him. He wants our attitude to be, "If you deserve hate and condemnation I
would give it to you. The only thing that is stopping me is my uncertainty about
how bad you are."
Volt quotes the assertion of Mortimer Adler that God is
love but strictly speaking this is a way of saying God loves for God makes all
things and to make is an act of love. He quotes it with approval on page 131. It
is interesting to note that if God is loving then loving is something God does.
Love can then exist whether there is a God or not. Religion forbids us to accept
that - it bans the truth. It says we must rest everything wholly on God. In
reality this is forbidding us to admit that we are the creators of love and this
is what matters not God. If you cannot truly see a person as loving in
themselves and keep God out of it then you cannot expect to be believed when you
say you love them though they are sinners. You don't even know how to love them
when you see the love in them as God's work and not their's.
Volt seems to want us to deny that people are the bad
acts they do to any extent. So if you burgle a pensioner you should not berate
yourself or hate yourself because your sin did it not you. You must love
yourself and hate your sin. You may as well say morality is a load of
superstition.
# It is awful and really terrible if things do not happen
in the way you wish and it goes wrong.
He says Christianity countered that belief by teaching
that we must accept whatever God sends. See James 4:15. Jesus said in the Sermon
that we must not worry for God clothes the flowers in beauty meaning we are in
his hands so we must not fear. But he was talking to those who fear that God
will not look after them. It has nothing to do with the following: if you wish
things to go God's way and they do not then it is terrible. God is supposed to
be so good that any failure to respect him is a grave evil.
If God hates evil and only puts up with it as a last
resort then it is terrible when things go wrong. Belief in God gives you more
reason to be upset about evil than not to be.
Volt says that it is good to have such a high tolerance of people doing evil to you that you can give your life for a stranger like Maximilan Kolbe did. Kolbe could not have understood what he was choosing. He was choosing to save a life not choosing to be tolerant of people hurting him.
# It is the people around me and events that are outside
of me that are the cause of how bad I feel. I therefore cannot do much about my
dysfunctional emotions and actions.
He says that Christianity endorses Wisdom 8:7 which
teaches that righteousness makes you happy. He seems to think this verse is
saying that it is how you respond to what you have no control over that is the
cause of your unhappiness.
The notion that God controls all things and that our free
will is even under his control in the sense that we can only use it because of
him and not in spite of him completely endorses the irrational belief that it is
God and not myself who makes me feel awful.
The Christians actually believe you need magical help to
deal with your dysfunctions that you have got from original sin. So they agree
that you can do nothing much about it so you need to just let God work his magic
spells on you to make you a better person. Typically as in Catholicism, this
magic is channelled by the priests and bishops through the seven sacraments. But
is a person who is good because of magic really a good person? A good person
makes themselves a good person. Despite all Christian attempts to make God and
good a package they are not a package.
CONCLUSION: VOST HAS LIED AND CONTRADICTED CHRISTIAN TEACHING IN ORDER TO TRAP THE UNWARY. HE HAS DEPLOYED DISHONEST MEANS TO GET PEOPLE INTO THE FAITH. CHRISTIANITY IS A FORCE FOR EVIL. RELIGION LIKES TO MESH TRUTH WITH ERROR AND LIES TO SEEM PLAUSIBLE. THE CONTRADICTIONS SHOW THAT IT CARES ABOUT RINGING TRUE RATHER THAN BEING TRUE OR COHERENT.
