Kinslaughterer wrote:That's the funny thing about archaeology...no matter what someone wishes to hide, whoever they are or whatever banal little item it can tell us a great deal about a culture, a period of time, or even an individual.
Take the Garbage Project for instance. Bill Rathje (I think he's still with us) out of Arizona began recording the garbage of modern folks. He had grad students take the trash from suburban Phoenix and Tucson (The GP was much larger and long term, this was just a small piece) and then spoke to and recorded information about the people. One of the questions was "How much alcohol do you consume in a week?" Nearly everyone lied and underestimated some significantly. On average they were drinking 3 to 5 more beverages of beer, wine, or harder stuff.
Interestingly, virtually no archaeological evidence of the Hebrew enslavement in Egypt exists. 3500 years is a long time but the arid climate and stone, metal, and bone would remain. Its looking more likely that the Hebrews were in fact the Hyksos who invaded Egypt and ultimately defeated as the first noticable Hebrew peoples appear about 100-200 years after the Hyksos defeat.
Our science is useless if our guiding philosophy leads us to form all the wrong conclusions from the facts.
The very first thing established in TEM is the peculiar bias that Christianity experiences in the lands once referred to as Christendom - here on this thread I see the bar for what would be considered acceptable evidence of Christ's existence and the veracity of what is reported about Him set much higher than for any other historical figure. We have no problem accepting Herodotus and take his reports seriously. We have no problem with religious figures of other traditions, such as Mohammed or Siddhartha (Gautama Buddha), and much less opposition is raised to what is generally accepted about their existence.
The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts.
My apologies to those who have not seen this before (and thus, don't know the context that led to my seemingly-defensive deliveries.
My experience here has generally been that not one person has dared to even tackle Chesterton's remarks. The tactics here by all of the opponents of Christianity has been consistently to avoid dealing with these thoughts, under any pretext imaginable. As far as I know, only one person has actually essayed even reading a little of TEM (Fist), and he merely said it was "bad", and refused to discuss why. I think Dale Alquist was right when he said, "To debate with Chesterton is to lose." I'm just saying this now because I have offered these thoughts dozens of times, and they have always been met with stony silence or "you shouldn't post thoughts written by anyone else - just say what YOU think." Well, this IS what I think:
It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War--they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they are in a state of reaction against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.
Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.
www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/everlasting_man.html
This is not the only problem with the discussion of Christianity, but it certainly is the first. And that's only the opening salvo of the book.
Certainly, there are a lot of details involved in refuting the so-called science offered by KS, and the first hint that that is what it is is the incredible recentness of all of his sources. If those sources have been poisoned by a special bias against Christianity, and an unreasonable desire to prove it false (as distinct from a genuine impartial inquiry), then the truly impartial person really ought to question them. But they don't, because the desire to prove Christianity wrong is so strong - and as I said, it is understandable. If true, it demands that we change our lives, how we live, and begin to conform to a standard that really is revolutionary and would change the world, but is incredibly hard, and runs against many of our temporal desires,
aka passions.
Anyway, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that discussions here are useless, because the anti-Christians are just as thoroughly close-minded as they claim the Christians are - only they are far less aware of that fact. Probably there are a few honest inquirers. My recommendation is that they seek out the horse's mouth, a difficult task. The best help I can offer there is to carefully study the generally accepted history; that which has been acknowledged for centuries, and beware of merely modern sources - generally the most ill-educated. I've attempted to point out what you should read, and just a little of Alexander Schmemann
www.schmemann.org/byhim/index.html, Alexander Men'
www.alexandermen.com/Main_Page or Anthony Bloom
www.metropolit-anthony.orc.ru/eng/ will show up a lot of the prevailing nonsense for what it is.
And of course, GKC:
www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/index.html
Again, our science is useless if our guiding philosophy leads us to form all the wrong conclusions from the facts.
"Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one." Bill Hingest ("That Hideous Strength" by C.S. Lewis)
"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." G.K. Chesterton
