Two ways to live

[nameandnature]

robhu made a post on the Two Ways to Live presentation, which summarises the important points of evangelical Christianity. That particular posting's intended to be evangelistic without getting de-railed by knowledgeable atheists, so I've move my original comment on it from there to here at Rob's request. This posting remains open for whatever discussion you'd like to have on it (as do most of Rob's), subject to my comment policy. Here's my comment:

Serious points about the video, rather than silly ones, in no particular order:

The video doesn't summarise Christianity, it summarises evangelical Christianity. You won't find many universalists or liberals agreeing with it, and I think the Catholics would at least take a different slant on it. So I think it's a mistake to leave out the "evangelical" qualification when talking about TWTL, unless you really do think those people aren't Christians (which I don't think you do).

TWTL assumes the hearer is prepared to accept that God exists in the first place, and that reading the Bible the evangelical way is a good way to find out what God thinks. This isn't a problem if the intention is to summarise evangelical Christianity, but it is a problem if your intention is to persuade other people to believe it (which is usually what TWTL is for), because you're not presenting any evidence.

There's a difference between creating an inanimate object (like a mug) for a purpose and creating a person. People develop their own ideas about what their purpose is, and we don't accord their creators (parents) the absolute right to determine it. Of course, a Christian could respond that God is supposed to be much greater than human parents, but in that case he stands in relation to us as a parent does to a very young child, or to an animal. In that case, we'd accept his right to bring us up how he wanted, but the way he ignores some children in favour of others and his eventual decision to shove those who aren't his favourites in an oven when he's tired of being patient with them would then become a matter for the NSPCC.

Penal substitutionary atonement doesn't make an awful lot of sense. God is supposed to be so keen on justice that someone must pay for sin, but not so keen on justice that it matters whether he punishes the right person. Furthermore, in the Trinitarian understanding, Jesus is himself God, so the action of punishing himself starts to look like a game of solitaire. As gjm11 says, sin is so trifling that turning to Jesus can get you off, but so grave that an omnipotent God really has to send people to Hell if they don't turn to Jesus.

The video guy repeats the claim that we shouldn't wish God to deal with evil in case he zaps us right now, making God out to be about as clever as George Bush, with shock and awe the only thing in his toolbox. As we've discussed before, that argument doesn't hold up.

Comments

[simont]

On a similar note, "Half Hour Video: Didn't Watch".

I'm not committing half an hour of my time to watching a video, when there's an excellent chance that it won't be telling me a lot I hadn't already heard in other contexts. If there were a written transcript somewhere conveniently available, I'd be prepared to read that or at least skim it, to see what sort of thing it was talking about for purposes of this discussion. I'm confident that I could get the general gist in a lot less time than it would take to watch the video, and in particular that I could skip over any section which I recognised as something I'd heard before without risking missing a new bit later on.

(I'm reminded of the LJ phone post mechanism, where the first person to encounter something presented in an inconvenient medium can type up a transcript if they're feeling helpful, so that the next forty-nine don't have to sit through the original.)

eta: sorry, that turned out more negative than I'd intended. What I meant to say was that I'd be interested to know what was going on in that video, but not quite interested enough to spend half an hour finding out, so it's a bit of a shame it was presented in that form.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

They're discussing Two Ways To Live (http://www.matthiasmedia.com.au/2wtl/).

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Time was, a link to “an interesting talk” took you to a transcript or, if you were unlucky, a set of slides. These days it almost always means a video l-(

[(Anonymous)]

Who needs a video to explain what Christians believe, when somebody already wrote Mere Christianity?

S.