An excellent article on what Christian "morality" means.

clipped from www.breakpoint.org We do good not because the Bible says so, or out of fear of consequence, or for a utilitarian end—though, sadly, some Christians (maybe many) are motivated by those very reasons; we do good out of love for God, who not only created all persons in His image, but humbled Himself so that all could have community with Him. For Christians, the Word made Flesh is the Standard of ethics and morality that informs our Western concepts of right action, justice, equality, and human dignity.

Why are we so unhappy?

 clipped from www.breakpoint.org

Why Are We So Unhappy?

Examining a Paradox By Regis Nicoll|Published Date: February 27, 2009 "Psychotherapy is such a growing vogue today because people want to know why they are unhappy . . . " (Psychologist Ernest Becker) A PARADOX Happiness, it seems, eludes us. And it has little to do with our current economic woes. For despite the global financial crisis, we enjoy social, technological and economic conditions that would have been considered utopian less than a century ago. Yet unhappiness and even depression are at record levels. In an impressively researched book, The Progress Paradox, New Republic senior editor Gregg Easterbrook observes that, by every measure of well-being, our generation is better off than any of our forebears. We enjoy more leisure time with better health, less air pollution, higher levels of education, higher per-capita income, and greater personal and civil liberties than at any other time in history. Even compared to the halcyon 1950s, our generation has it better in terms of real income and home and car ownership, not to mention morbidity, mortality, education, environmental quality, and the fair treatment of minorities. Whereas, in the past, these benefits were limited to the rich and privileged, today they are realized by a wide spectrum of society. For example, in 1960, 22 percent of Americans lived under the poverty line, compared to 11.7 percent in 2001. All these material measures should add up to an increased sense of well-being. But they don't. Theologian David Wells notes that by 1990 there were two psychotherapists for every dentist and more counselors than librarians. And today, the incidence of depression is over 10 times that of the Halcyon Decade. Gloominess in an age of unprecedented progress is a paradox in need of an explanation. A TRADE SECRET In the ancient world of Hippocrates, mental states were thought to depend on the proper balance of four basic substances, or humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. The same notion prevails today with the emphasis on chemistry. There is no doubt that some types of mental disorders have biochemical origins. The success of medication in treating certain depressions strongly suggests the importance of chemistry in mental health. But "treating" is a clue to a trade secret in psychotherapy. As University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman admits, "Every single drug in the psychopharmacopia is palliative." Given the epidemic rate of melancholy, Dr. Seligman's admission suggests that much of what ails us has a cause beyond bad chemistry and bad genes. While negative past experiences account for some of our gloom, ideas popularized over the last several decades lurk behind much of it. Gregg Easterbrook observes, "In Western nations . . . people have become no happier, in the very period that thinkers and educators have proclaimed life meaningless." That is an important observation. For there is nary a nook of culture left untouched by the nihilism that percolated out of coffee bistros of the last century. MESSAGE OF MEANINGLESSNESS From the classroom, to the art gallery, to Friends and Seinfeld, the nihilistic message is clear: We are alone in an indifferent universe, bereft of explanation or purpose, with nothing to give meaning to our existence but the sum total of our personal experiences. And, for the throng of restless souls chasing after the "meaningful" experience, modern psychology is there to light the way. With a lump of Freudian theory, a dash of Kinseyan research, and liberal amounts of Maslow's hierarchy, pop therapy promises meaning and self-discovery through the satisfaction of felt needs, starting with the sensual. To be sure, the prospect of finding meaning through sensual experiences is exciting, even liberating—until the inflationary promises of no-fault hedonism go bust. In his book Psychology as Religion, psychology professor Paul Vitz explains that the pursuit of sensual fulfillment creates inflated expectations that cannot keep up with the demand of rising adaptation levels. The "ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure," as C.S. Lewis phrases it, leads people into more and more extreme (and destructive) behaviors which, in the end, devour, rather than fulfill, them. Those who graduate from sensual fulfillment to "self-actualization," pop psychology's summa bonum of life, fare no better. Dr. Vitz notes that popular selfist theories have "led to large-scale disappointment." Not only has the search for self often resulted in divorce and broken relationships, life experiences brought job frustrations, financial problems, and health challenges that created a yawning gap between expectation and reality. Disappointment and disillusionment, in the crucible of real life, has been the theme of some of the most critically acclaimed movies of the past decade. American Beauty (1999), The Hours (2002), and, most recently, Revolutionary Road (2008) depict, some jarringly so, our existential angst. In each film, we enter a world, our world, devoid of ultimate meaning, populated by characters whose highest aspiration is to be true to self (whatever that means) through unfettered self-expression. Casualties accumulated along the way—be they infidelity, divorce, or even suicide—are neither wrong nor tragic but, rather, the consequences of choices made by the courageous hero or heroine to avoid the real tragedy: the "counterfeit" life. It is an old storyline that goes back to a man who anguished over the meaning of human existence. TRANSCENDENT SIGNPOSTS Three thousand years ago, Solomon began a journey of self-discovery with an endless stream of variegated experiences. In an effort to tease out the mystery of meaning, Solomon pursued wisdom, pleasure, partying, possessions, grand projects, and even folly. In all those endeavors, Solomon accomplished more, acquired more and enjoyed more than any person before or since; yet he despaired over the meaninglessness of it all. Like Solomon, there are many people who feel bad amid prosperity. For them, life is bearing down, trying harder, and braving the outfall as best they can. In ignorance, or avoidance, they pass, without notice, the transcendental signposts along their existential journey. They are like the man who tries to run from his own shadow, only to keep tripping over road hazards and coming to dead ends. Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, understood the importance of those signposts. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, he wrote, "Among all my patients in the second half of life… [it] is safe to say that every one of them feel ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers and not one of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook." Jung did not espouse any orthodox religion, but he was among those who recognized the spiritual dimension of our pathology—like the late clinical psychiatrist, Karl Menninger. Menninger once said that if he could convince his institutionalized patients that their sins were forgiven, 75 percent would walk out of the ward the next day. The irrepressible sense that we stand guilty before Someone, somehow, is symptomatic of a condition that, left unresolved, sooner or later externalizes in unhealthy behaviors or internalizes in mental maladies. As it happens, Christianity is the only belief system, religious or otherwise, that promises resolution with the assurance that resolution has been attained ("If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins"). What a challenging thought to consider the potential of the Gospel for transforming mental health care and emptying psychiatric sanatoria! BEYOND SELF Solomon moved from darkness to light by coming to grips with the metaphysical questions of existence—questions that, for all time, have pointed men to God and His good news: What is our origin and nature? "God made mankind upright…" Why is there evil? "…but men have gone in search of schemes." What is our purpose? "Fear God and keep his commands, for this is the whole duty of man." What will become of us? "For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether good or evil." Solomon learned, contrary to the psychobabble of pop therapists, that life's meaning is not in discovering self, but in submission to Other. The school of life taught Solomon that sensual fulfillment, material accomplishments, and "actualizing" experiences can be sources of temporal satisfaction and enjoyment, but they are not sources of meaning and purpose. That source is God. As a creation, man has intrinsic worth whose life is imbued with lasting significance discoverable through the revealed Word of the Creator. A millennium later, the apostle Paul summed up the lesson to a group of Athenian philosophers: "For in him we live and move and have our being." Regis Nicoll is a freelance writer and a BreakPoint Centurion. His "All Things Examined" column appears on BreakPoint every other Friday. Serving as a men's ministry leader and worldview teacher in his community, Regis publishes a free weekly commentary to stimulate thought on current issues from a Christian perspective. To be placed on this free e-mail distribution list, e-mail him at: centurion51@aol.com.

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Antony Flew: From Atheist to Theist

 clipped from www.amazon.co.uk

Antony Flew's rejection of Atheism, 24 Mar 2008

By	D. M. Ohara "Dan O'Hara"

There have been some hysterical and ill-informed postings on various atheist blogs and websites about Antony Flew's rejection of atheism, and particularly his recent book There is a God (co-authored and edited by Roy Abraham Varghese - Harper One, 2007). Suggestions have been made that Flew is now senile and being exploited by Christians. 'Don't read this book!' shouts one atheistical blogger. Well, I have read the book, and I find it lucid and compelling. Much of it has been compiled by Varghese from Flew's published and unpublished writings and interviews, but every page has been checked and signed off by Flew himself, as he has made perfectly clear in print. I personally found some of Varghese's short editorial links a bit off for their jarring Americanisms, but they seem not to have bothered Flew. There are two appendices: one by Varghese himself and the other by Bishop Tom Wright, to whom I incidentally owe my own reconsideration of Christian claims. Both are excellent.

Two things can be added: firstly, Flew's dissatisfaction with Dawkins is long-standing. In Darwinian Evolution, published in 1984 when he was still a Vice President of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), Flew described The Selfish Gene as a "major exercise in popular mystification", adding "Dawkins labours to discount or depreciate the main upshot of fifty or more years work in genetics" and he gives examples of this trend. In a further passage, Flew agrees with some trenchant criticisms of the book previously made by philosopher Mary Midgley (Gene Juggling, in Philosophy, October 1979 - see also her Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism in Philosophy for 1983 - both available online as free downloads). These paragraphs have been largely included in There is a God, showing that Flew's rejection of Dawkins's Selfish Gene hypothesis, echoed by many scientists and philosophers since it was first published, is not a new departure, but a long-standing, widely-shared and well-founded objection. They expose the fundamental flaws in Dawkins's theory, which undermine almost everything he has written since. His central dogma that "we are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" removes any possibility of personal responsibility - for anything. We are simply the puppets of our genes. What a perfect excuse for all malefactors, including child rapists and murderers like Ian Brady, Ian Huntley and Roy Whiting: "It was them genes what dunnit, Guv!" An excuse, perhaps: but hardly a comfort. Dawkins was properly rebuked on Irish television when he said: "I'm not interested in freewill." How could there be any such thing in his worldview?

A second point: Barry Duke, editor of The Freethinker, has informed me by email that he has met Antony Flew (presumably some time back - he doesn't say) and he insists - without giving any reasons - "The man's an idiot". It would be interesting to know whether this opinion is based on Flew's views and writings while he was still a Vice President of the RPA, and the most prominent atheist philosopher in Britain, or whether it is a knee-jerk reaction, based on Flew's more recent rejection of the atheism which he had espoused for almost half a century. Well, I can tell you, dear readers, that I have also met Antony Flew (only once, in 1996 at an Oxford conference where we each presented a paper, and then socialised afterwards), and I have also read - over a 40 year period - practically all his published work. I can assure you that the man was not an idiot then, and neither is he an idiot now; though his memory, at 84, is admittedly not what it was. I was, incidentally, a Director of the RPA from 1989 to 1998, as well as (briefly) President of the National Secular Society (1996-97).

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An article by A N Wilson in the NewStatesman

 clipped from www.newstatesman.com

Why I believe again

A N Wilson

Published 02 April 2009

A N Wilson writes on how his conversion to atheism may have been similar to a road to Damascus experience but his return to faith has been slow and doubting

Unlike his conversion to Atheism, Wilson's path back to faith has been a slow one

By nature a doubting Thomas, I should have distrusted the symptoms when I underwent a "conversion experience" 20 years ago. Something was happening which was out of character - the inner glow of complete certainty, the heady sense of being at one with the great tide of fellow non-believers. For my conversion experience was to atheism. There were several moments of epiphany, actually, but one of the most dramatic occurred in the pulpit of a church.

At St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London, there are two pulpits, and for some decades they have been used for lunchtime dialogues. I had just published a biography of C S Lewis, and the rector of St Mary-le-Bow, Victor Stock, asked me to participate in one such exchange of views.

Memory edits, and perhaps distorts, the highlights of the discussion. Memory says that while Father Stock was asking me about Lewis, I began to "testify", denouncing Lewis's muscular defence of religious belief. Much more to my taste, I said, had been the approach of the late Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, whose biography I had just read.

A young priest had been to see him in great distress, saying that he had lost his faith in God. Ramsey's reply was a long silence followed by a repetition of the mantra "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter". He told the priest to continue to worship Jesus in the Sacraments and that faith would return. "But!" exclaimed Father Stock. "That priest was me!"

Like many things said by this amusing man, it brought the house down. But something had taken a grip of me, and I was thinking (did I say it out loud?): "It bloody well does matter. Just struggling on like Lord Tennyson ('and faintly trust the larger hope') is no good at all . . ."

I can remember almost yelling that reading C S Lewis's Mere Christianity made me a non-believer - not just in Lewis's version of Christianity, but in Christianity itself. On that occasion, I realised that after a lifetime of churchgoing, the whole house of cards had collapsed for me - the sense of God's presence in life, and the notion that there was any kind of God, let alone a merciful God, in this brutal, nasty world. As for Jesus having been the founder of Christianity, this idea seemed perfectly preposterous. In so far as we can discern anything about Jesus from the existing documents, he believed that the world was about to end, as did all the first Christians. So, how could he possibly have intended to start a new religion for Gentiles, let alone established a Church or instituted the Sacraments? It was a nonsense, together with the idea of a personal God, or a loving God in a suffering universe. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.

It was such a relief to discard it all that, for months, I walked on air. At about this time, the Independent on Sunday sent me to interview Dr Billy Graham, who was conducting a mission in Syracuse, New York State, prior to making one of his journeys to England. The pattern of these meetings was always the same. The old matinee idol spoke. The gospel choir sang some suitably affecting ditty, and then the converted made their way down the aisles to commit themselves to the new faith. Part of the glow was, surely, the knowledge that they were now part of a great fellowship of believers.

As a hesitant, doubting, religious man I'd never known how they felt. But, as a born-again atheist, I now knew exactly what satisfactions were on offer. For the first time in my 38 years I was at one with my own generation. I had become like one of the Billy Grahamites, only in reverse. If I bumped into Richard Dawkins (an old colleague from Oxford days) or had dinner in Washington with Christopher Hitchens (as I did either on that trip to interview Billy Graham or another), I did not have to feel out on a limb. Hitchens was excited to greet a new convert to his non-creed and put me through a catechism before uncorking some stupendous claret. "So - absolutely no God?" "Nope," I was able to say with Moonie-zeal. "No future life, nothing 'out there'?" "No," I obediently replied. At last! I could join in the creed shared by so many (most?) of my intelligent contemporaries in the western world - that men and women are purely material beings (whatever that is supposed to mean), that "this is all there is" (ditto), that God, Jesus and religion are a load of baloney: and worse than that, the cause of much (no, come on, let yourself go), most (why stint yourself - go for it, man), all the trouble in the world, from Jerusalem to Belfast, from Washington to Islamabad.

My doubting temperament, however, made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced. My hilarious Camden Town neighbour Colin Haycraft, the boss of Duckworth and husband of Alice Thomas Ellis, used to say, "I do wish Freddie [Ayer] wouldn't go round calling himself an atheist. It implies he takes religion seriously."

This creed that religion can be despatched in a few brisk arguments (outlined in David Hume's masterly Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and then laughed off kept me going for some years. When I found myself wavering, I would return to Hume in order to pull myself together, rather as a Catholic having doubts might return to the shrine of a particular saint to sustain them while the springs of faith ran dry.

But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers. Reading Louis Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi, and following it up with Gandhi's own autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, I found it impossible not to realise that all life, all being, derives from God, as Gandhi gave his life to demonstrate. Of course, there are arguments that might make you doubt the love of God. But a life like Gandhi's, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist "explanations" for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: "It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names."

This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah's Ark. More so, really.

Do materialists really think that language just "evolved", like finches' beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where's the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena - of which love and music are the two strongest - which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

For a few years, I resisted the admission that my atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness. I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off Thought for the Day when it comes on the radio. I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief "don't matter", that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion - prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.

I haven't mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler's neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer's book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer's serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. Gilbert Ryle, with donnish absurdity, called God "a category mistake". Yet the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . 'The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life'." And then Coleridge adds: "'And man became a living soul.' Materialism will never explain those last words."

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