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A Facebook friend<\/strong> sent me a note and a link to one of my dad\u2019s old speeches he\u2019d given in 1982 at Coral Gables Church. I spoke there too back in the bad old days of my far right activism. I re-watched the talk. Dad mentioned the projects we\u2019d worked on together several times. It was good to hear his voice. But\u2026 while so much of what Dad\u00a0said was so well said, there is so much I\u2019ve grown to fear and disagree with.<\/p>\n It all boils down to this: apologetics. Dad was relying on a broken idea.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the note that got me thinking:<\/p>\n HI Frank.<\/strong> When you get a chance please speak to the video below that\u2019s been making the rounds of conservative Christianity. Myself, I embrace the civil rights of all without exclusion. However, my former tribe will be vigorously calling down God\u2019s wrathful judgement on the SCOTUS ruling. I think they have it all backwards for I believe they have been the very persecutors of gays whom they believe are condemned and abandoned of God. But by refusing to accept gay rights they wish to now extend their acrimony, their bigotry, and their discrimination all in the name of God. Rather than accepting the court\u2019s action as pleasing to God they believe it is a sacrilege to God. So here\u2019s the vid\u2026 thx! <\/span>http:\/\/www.christianworldview.net\/2012\/06\/dr-francis-schaeffer-speaks-from-the-grave-to-the-u-s-supreme-court\/<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here\u2019s my stab at \u201cspeaking to\u201d not just this video, but a MUCH BIGGER issue, as he asked. Note that in the talk Dad didn\u2019t speak to the issue of gay rights the note talks about, in fact Dad was always very open to gay men and women who traveled to his ministry of L\u2019Abri. But the note is correct: by extension the religious right and the Republicans will use Dad\u2019s words against people who embrace not only gay rights but all human rights\u2013 ahead of so-called Biblical Christianity.<\/p>\n It all goes back to something called \u201cApologetics.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Here\u2019s the deal as I see it:<\/strong> Christianity works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Islam works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Atheism works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Buddhism works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Hinduism works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Judaism works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Communism works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Democracy works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Agnosticism works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Philosophy works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Science works well\u2014 until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Apologetics<\/strong> (Greek \u1f00\u03c0\u03bf\u03bb\u03bf\u03b3\u03af\u03b1, speaking in defense of a truth claim) is the practice or method of defending a religion (or other world views) through the use of specific information thought to cast light on the argument and \u201cprove\u201d it. The apologetic \u201cmethod\u201d takes what works well in a system of belief to be used to defended it.<\/p>\n My father was an apologist. I was raised on this word. Today I distrust it.<\/p>\n For instance take Dad\u2019s claim<\/a><\/strong> that \u201cChristianity produced the freedoms we enjoy in the West.\u201d This is used by many people to somehow try to prove that Christianity itself is true. \u00a0But such apologetic proof is part of a whole system built of secondary details, a kind of sleight of hand that hides the central fact of the human condition: ultimate unknowing that I talk about in my most recent\u00a0book \u2014<\/span>WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD:<\/strong>\u00a0How to give love, create beauty and find peace<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Bluntly: to say \u201cbeing a Christian\u201d makes you happy doesn\u2019t mean the doctrines of the faith are true anymore than saying that the sincerity of a million nice and kind Muslims on a Haj makes Islam true. Something can give a shape to a life or offer comfort but that doesn\u2019t make it true.<\/p>\n The problem is<\/strong> that an attempt to defend faith or a political system by accumulating details of history into a whole argument is like saying that a surgeon who operated on you must know everything just because the operation was a success. Such \u201cproofs\u201d are bogus and the work of people desperate to project certainty about things that actually can\u2019t be proved. That surgeon may have saved your life but he may also still be an idiot in every area of his life other than surgery. Or maybe every other patient died.<\/p>\n Whole systems of thought and philosophy are spun out of thin air based on no more than a list of secondary proofs. This is the legacy of CS Lewis, Francis Schaeffer and GK Chesterton. It is what religious schools and seminaries are there for: to concoct arguments out of details that supposedly prove the whole. It is also the legacy of secular apologists like Carl Sagan who argued that because the Universe is huge therefor we are insignificant, a belief that all-too conveniently \u201cconfirms\u201d a purely material view of existence.<\/p>\n \u00a0There are always flaws to this sort of apologetic argument<\/strong> be they from Sagan or my late father. First, the whole story is never told. Second, the tangential \u201cevidence\u201d never cuts to the heart of the matter. For instance my evangelist father Francis Schaeffer, always used to site the freedoms we have in America as proof that Christianity is true because it worked so well. When pressed in discussions Dad always admitted that this \u201cfreedom\u201d also included slavery so \u201cwas not perfect.\u201d But in speeches during his right wing phase at the end of his life, not to be confused with his years of moderation that proceeded his \u201cpro-life\u201d 1970s phase, he\u2019d leave out inconvenient truths.<\/p>\n Slavery wasn\u2019t an oversite and it wasn\u2019t a minor point. It\u2019s like saying that Germany was great during the Nazi era \u201cexcept for the Holocaust and the war\u201d Or\u2026 \u201cOther than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?\u201d<\/p>\n Dad\u2019s apologetic premise was false.<\/strong> The \u201cfreedoms unique to the founding of Christian America,\u201d owed more to the Renaissance and Enlightenment than to the churches. Jefferson, the slave holder, knew that and so did John Adams, the Christian anti-slavery critic of the vile trade. Both went to France. Both read Voltaire. Both held views that were an amalgam of Christianity and secular political philosophy. Both shaped their views more according to geography than principles. Context weighs more than belief.<\/p>\n And note when the purely religious version of the sort of reformed faith Dad held was applied in the modern era in South Africa\u2014by Calvinist Christians who shared Dad\u2019s basic theology\u2014apartheid was one result. And this too was \u201cBible-based.\u201d The Afrikaners used the same biblical texts that the slave-holding South used. But Dad, like all of us would pick and choose what \u201cBible\u201d to follow while saying he believed all of it.<\/p>\n There is a bigger problem with the apologetics \u201cmethod.\u201d<\/strong> Even if the result of some action is both good and clearly based on religion or a secular ideology, this doesn\u2019t make the other truth claims of that world view true. High speed rail works wonderfully in communist China, that doesn\u2019t make the government any less oppressive, the country any less polluted and Communism any more \u201ctrue.\u201d Knowing a great man who is a Catholic priest doesn\u2019t make the Roman Catholic truth claims true anymore than being raped by another priest discredits the whole Church.<\/p>\n Where the left and right and believers and secular people all too often fail is to fail to hold their apologists\u2019 feet to the fire of the actual history of their beliefs not to mention to the fire of the stupidity of the core doctrines. For instance, liberals give a silly pass to Islam and to secularism. Conquest isn\u2019t the exception to Muslim history and identity, but the norm. Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao weren\u2019t details of history, they were one aspect of militant secularism in action that consistently defines it.<\/p>\n Conservative Christians give the same free pass to the so-called Christian West. Roman Catholic Belgium WAS genocide in the Congo. Bach\u2019s reformation Germany ended in a holocaust. These weren\u2019t anomalies but the norm when false certainty was applied to culture.<\/p>\n Race-hatred, slavery and bigotry wasn\u2019t s footnote in \u201cChristian\u201d America<\/strong> any more than it was in slave-holding and slave-trading Islam. It WAS (and is) Christian America. It was and is the Islamic world.<\/p>\n Colonialism wasn\u2019t an oversite. It WAS the Christian West. Secularism too becomes an oppressive religion when it too claims all-knowing wisdom. Just ask human rights activists in China. According to\u00a0a New Yorker<\/em><\/a> article just ask the relatives of people in Belgium who have recently been euthanized by over-eager pro-euthanasia enthusiasts who now euthanize \u201cterminal\u201d mental patients, even some who are just suffering from depression, under laws passed in the name of self-determination and \u201chumanism.\u201d These same humanists are pressing for laws now to euthanize children as detailed in the New York Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Apologetics fails on two levels.<\/strong> It\u2019s never consistent and it is a false argument anyway. That Islam produced a few nice moments in Cordoba Spain doesn\u2019t tell us anything more than say the fact that Rembrandt was a reformed Calvinist believer tells us about whether or not what he believed was true. Cordoba was nice. Rembrandt painted great art. Does that make reformed Dutch Christianity of apartheid South Africa true? Does that make the truth claims put forward by the Saudi royal family about the inevitability of world dominance by \u201cthe only true faith\u201d of Islam, true? Do the humanists in Belgium who sincerely believe they are ending the suffering of someone depressed make their claims true?<\/p>\n Conversely when the New Atheists tell us\u2014in their own version of theology\u2014that all wars are religious wars so all religion is bad they make the same mistake my father made but in reverse. \u00a0Even if religion led to war that is not an argument that demolishes all religions\u2019 truth claims.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the reality as I see it:<\/strong> human primates are violent because of how we evolved not because of religion. Assholes are assholes whatever they say. Good people are good however we label them. \u00a0And actually wars start for many reasons other than religion. Atheists too have been oppressors and not because of atheism but because of the fact that they are semi-evolved primates like the rest of us, more ruled by genetics than free will.<\/p>\n Face it: we are all in the same boat. Good things happen because we are human primates, for instance altruism evolved as a means of survival (be nice so people are nice back and don\u2019t club you) before Jesus told us to be nice. Just because he articulated this very good idea well doesn\u2019t mean everything else in the Bible is true.<\/p>\n One other thing:<\/strong> This cuts both ways. There may be a God with or without the blessing of evolutionary psychology. Reason too is not so reasonable. Deal with it.<\/p>\n Frank\u00a0Schaeffer<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is a writer.\u00a0His latest book \u2014<\/span>WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD:<\/strong>\u00a0How to give love, create beauty and find peace<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 A Facebook friend sent me a note and a link to one of my dad\u2019s old speeches he\u2019d given in 1982 at Coral Gables Church. I spoke there too back in the bad old days of my far right activism. I re-watched the talk. Dad mentioned the projects we\u2019d worked on together several times. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[659,856,1383,1094,54,1381,22,324,1380,1382,101,27,780,1793,11,248,62],"class_list":["post-7351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-religion","tag-apartheid","tag-apologetics","tag-argument","tag-carl-sagan","tag-christianity","tag-cs-lewis","tag-faith","tag-francis-schaeffer","tag-gk-chesterton","tag-hinduism","tag-islam","tag-peace","tag-philosophy","tag-religion","tag-south-africa","tag-sprituality","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"\n\nAvailable now on Amazon<\/h2>\n
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\u00a0<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\nFollow Frank on Twitter\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>www.twitter.com\/frank_schaeffer<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0See Frank\u2019s paintings\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>http:\/\/www.frankschaefferart.com\/<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0Follow Frank on Facebook<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/frank.schaeffer.16<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0Contact Frank at<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>http:\/\/www.frankschaeffer.com\/<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n