Joan of Arc thought she saw visions of God telling her to lead French troops against the English during the Hundred Years War. She became a saint. But Brian Mitchell said that God gave him license to kidnap and rape Elizabeth Smart in 2002. He was sentenced to two life sentences.

Abraham was ready to kill his own son Isaac because he thought that God told him to. He is seen as a Jewish patriarch and a prophet of Islam. But Charles Manson was convicted of conspiracy in the killings of three people though he thought he was the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

In 1858, 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous saw a vision of Mary in Lourdes, France. She also became a saint. But Andrea Yates drowned her five children (aged six months to seven years) one by one because she was trying to save them from Satan. She is not on the short list for sainthood.

Ezekiel lay on his left side for 390 days to bear the sins of Israel and then 40 days for the sins of Judah because God told him to. He is a prophet. But Jim Jones, another supposed incarnation of Jesus Christ, ordered over 900 people to kill themselves in Jonestown, Guyana.

Saint? Or insane?

How do you tell the saints from the insane? One source quotes a professor of the psychology of religion who concludes that the difference between a prophet and a psychopath is “whether or not [they] can get followers.”

Can it be that we know prophets based on the number of their followers, not whether what they say is true or not?

Contrast this with the scientific consensus. Issues like plate tectonics, evolution, the Big Bang, and so on become the consensus in a similar way but with two massive differences: the consensus is built on and destroyed by evidence, and the consensus comes only from those competent enough to evaluate this evidence.

What if Charles Manson had gotten a million followers? Would that turn him into a prophet? Conversely, what if Joseph Smith had gotten only 20 followers? Would that turn him into a kooky charlatan?

The other factor separating saint from insane is harm, but it’s not that the saints did nice things and the insane did bad things. We have no more evidence that God spoke to military leader Joan of Arc than to convicted rapist Brian Mitchell, but we do know that Joan of Arc participated in more killing. The military leaders in the Bible (Joshua, Saul, David, Gideon, Samson, and so on) killed many more people than Jim Jones. But saints can’t kill good people. They can kill “them,” but not “us.”

New rule

Let me propose a rule. A saint (or prophet or patriarch):

• (1) can’t hurt people that you can identify with, and
• (2) must have sufficient followers.

Try this out on some well-known names. John Hagee and Hal Lindsey preach the coming end, and they may have enough followers to be called prophets (using a generous definition of “prophet”). But Harold Camping, though he had the guts to make specific predictions, fails on requirement 2 (I wrote about Camping here).

Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science), Ellen White (Seventh-day Adventism), and Aimee McPherson (Four Square) were prophets, but David Koresh (Branch Davidian) and Charles Manson fail on 1 and 2.

Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba was a prophet, but Ram Bahadur Bomjon, the supposed Buddhist bodhisattva who is said to fast continuously for months while meditating, fails on 2.

The pope can say that he’s the Vicar of Christ, but if I say that about myself, that fails on 2.

Though “saint” has a formal definition, colloquial forms of the labels “saint” and “prophet” are bestowed by popular acclaim. In short, you’re a prophet when people say you are. Popularity doesn’t mean that what you say is true, and there’s no requirement that it be true anyway.

This flabby definition of “prophet” is obvious for the other guy’s religion, but maybe Christians should reconsider what it means for those that they think are prophets.

If you talk to God, you are praying; 
if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia
— Thomas Szasz

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/31/12.)

Philosopher Peter Kreeft says that his Argument from Conscience (PDF) is one of only two arguments for the existence of God in the Bible. Its biblical pedigree doesn’t do it any favors, however, and it fares no better than the rest.

Kreeft summarizes the argument:

The simple, intuitive point of the argument from conscience is that everyone in the world knows, deep down, that he is absolutely obligated to be and do good, and this absolute obligation could come only from God. Thus everyone knows God, however obscurely, by this moral intuition, which we usually call conscience. Conscience is the voice of God in the soul.

Kreeft defines conscience as “the knowledge of my absolute obligation to goodness.”

Absolute obligation? Where did this come from? That’s not how I define the word, nor is it how the dictionary defines it. This qualifier exists only in Kreeft’s definition.

The bad people

What does Kreeft do with people like me who aren’t on board? He puts us into two bins: (1) those who have no conscience or a defective conscience and (2) those who know the truth of Kreeft’s words but repress this knowledge.

And what about the third bin, those who see obligation but not absolute obligation? There is no third bin. Kreeft says these people actually understand God’s will because the Bible says so. You know the kind—those people “who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them” (Rom. 1:18–19).

(Is it just me or does it seem circular to assume the existence of God in an argument about the existence of God? And is it just me or have I been labeled as someone “who suppresses the truth by their wickedness”?)

He continues with the assumption of absoluteness and says that one’s conscience has absolute moral authority. I appreciate that I’m compelled to listen to my conscience, but (again) where does the absoluteness come in?

Maybe we’re defining things differently. To me, an absolute obligation isn’t simply an important or strongly felt obligation. The key is its grounding. It’s more than grounded within me (such as, “it’s just wrong to chew with your mouth open”). It’s more than grounded within society (such as, “it’s illegal to pass a stop sign in a car without stopping completely”). It’s grounded in an absolute way that transcends both me and society.

I see no evidence that one’s conscience is an absolute moral authority. Kreeft provides none and simply asserts the claim.

Source of morals

Back to Kreeft’s argument, quoted in summary above. He imagines that he’s firmly established that the conscience is an absolute moral authority and moves on to the second premise: “the only possible source of absolute authority is an absolutely perfect will, a divine being.” But since he’s given no reason to imagine that the absolute authority he refers to exists, he has no argument.

Given the imagined absolute conscience, can ordinary people reliably access its absolute truth? Kreeft admits that they can’t but says that God has “revealed to us clear moral maps (Scripture and Church).” If our conscience tells us to reject these maps, that’s the indication of a faulty conscience.

Hold on—scripture and church are “clear moral maps”?

Nonsense. The Christian church is dividing faster than amoebas. There are now 42,000 denominations of Christianity and counting. Which one(s) are correct? Christians can’t even decide among themselves.

And let’s check the hypothesis that scripture is a clear moral map. Are Christians of a unified voice on the topic of abortion? Same-sex marriage? Euthanasia? Stem-cell research? Capital punishment? The use of torture? Any divisive social issue? Scripture is a sock puppet that you can make say just about anything you want, and Christians on all sides of these issues do just that.

I see two possibilities: (1) absolute morality exists though we can’t reliably access it or (2) there is no absolute morality but we have a shared (and imperfect) moral instinct. Kreeft’s argument has done nothing to justify the supernatural explanation. I recommend the natural one.

Secular schools can never be tolerated 
because such schools have no religious instruction, 
and a general moral instruction 
without a religious foundation is built on air; 
consequently, all character training and religion 
must be derived from faith.
— Adolf Hitler

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/29/12.)

Image credit: Hans Gerwitz, flickr, CC

The professor was standing behind his desk in the lecture hall as I came in. That was odd because he usually dashed in just as class was to start.

He looked out at us silently—also odd—and everyone took a seat quickly. He reached under the desk and took out a clear glass jar, the gigantic kind that cafeterias get mayonnaise or pickles in. He set the jar on the desk and then reached under again and took out a box.

From the box, he took out a baseball-sized rock and carefully set it at the bottom of the jar. Then he added more until he placed one last rock in the top.

“Is this full?” he said, the first words he had spoken.

No one said anything. They seemed a little stunned.

“Everyone must vote—is the jar full or not? Raise your hand if you say it’s full.”

Everyone raised their hands.

He pushed the first box aside and reached underneath for another box. This one held sand. He slowly poured sand into the jar, tipping it from side to side until sand spilled onto the desk.

“Now is it full?” he said.

He waited for a bit. When the silence had become painful he reached under the desk again and pulled out a pitcher of water. Very slowly he poured in water and tapped the jar until water spilled out.

“Okay, now it’s full,” he said as he pushed the jar forward. “Now tell me: what is the lesson here?”

I finally raised my hand. “That you can always get more stuff inside?”

“A good guess, but that’s not it.”

No one else wanted to interpret this odd Zen story.

Finally he said, “The lesson is this,” and then he spoke deliberately, “you would never have gotten the rocks in unless you put them in first.”

And then he walked out. Class dismissed.

I don’t remember much from that Philosophy course, but I remember that.

In discussing this with friends afterwards, I decided that the jar is your life. It can only hold so much. There are always enough low-priority issues to more than fill it up—television, internet, time wasting, urgent but low-priority tasks at work.

But if you want to get important things done, the rocks must go in first.

(This is a variant of a story that originally appeared in Stephen Covey’s First Things First (1996).)

The real measure of your wealth 
is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money
— Bernard Meltzer

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/22/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia