Lying for Jesus

If the ability to annoy atheists actually produced income, my personal wealth might rival that of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. I don’t even have to try hard. Merely expressing my opinion does the trick just about every time. Annoying atheists seems to be a talent that comes quite naturally, about as difficult for me as breathing.

Of course, it isn’t my intention to anger people that I’ve more than likely never met face-to-face, but often it can’t be helped. My only alternative would be to remain silent about what I believe to be truth and keep my opinions to myself.

However, we independent authors are expected to promote our own books, aren’t we? How else might readers discover my work?

A nonfiction book with a title such as Counterargument for God shouldn’t leave much to the reader’s imagination about where I stand on the subject of theology any more than Christopher Hitchen’s book God is Not Great, or The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Now I don’t consider myself a Christian apologist (even though I freely admit that I am a Christian) because I rarely if ever use theology to argue against atheism — I prefer using clear logic, scientific evidence, an understanding of statistics and probability, and good, old-fashioned common sense to illogical arguments and Bible thumping.

The (shorter) second section of my book defends my Christian beliefs (and the Bible, to some degree) against the most popular attacks used by prominent atheists like Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and David Silverman of American Atheists.

When I “attack” atheism using logic and science, it appears to have an unsettling and detrimental effect on the atheists who read my work. Many of them tend to display very childish and irrational anger. I’ve been called virtually every name in the book in deliberate attempts to offend me — one that notably included a very ugly euphemism for a certain private part of the female anatomy. These insults roll off me like water off a duck’s back.

It doesn’t seem to help matters that on those rather frequent occasions that the atheist resorts to ad hominem attacks, my habit has been to declare victory for my argument, offering the rationale that the person who first resorts to personal insults has implicitly conceded they lack a better argument. That really seems to infuriate my critics.

The cleverer atheists are subtle with the personal attacks — they will snidely ask if the science in my book has passed peer review (it has, but it isn’t “my” science) and when I should expect the Nobel Prize, knowing that I don’t claim and have never pretended to be a scientist.

But again, making an atheist mad isn’t my true objective — inspiring them to think about what they truly believe is my real goal.

For example, when I see Facebook pages that claim to foster debates and conversations between creationists versus the advocates of evolution theory, I usually provoke several people to anger simply by pointing out the title of the page indicates that the people there really don’t understand the argument. Evolution theory does not and cannot compete with the concept of creation. Evolution cannot happen until creation has already occurred, either by an act of God or by some truly incredible good luck. Those are the real choices.

Because life cannot evolve until it exists.

Now am I “lying for Jesus” when I state this rather obvious fact? Of course not. I’m simply applying logic to a problem created when science told us that our universe had an origin and something came from absolute nothingness.

Today though, I’m not interested in rehashing the science debates. Nor do I plan to revisit the philosophical debates — as fun as it might be to ponder childish questions like “can God create a rock so big He couldn’t pick it up?” or “did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?”, nothing is gained by wasting one’s time in such trivial pursuits.

I remain curious about this concept of “lying for Jesus”, though — what exactly does that mean? Would lying for Jesus be such a bad thing?

The rationale of many of my atheist critics seems to be this — the Bible prohibits lying in the Ninth of Ten Commandments, therefore “lying for Jesus” must be a very bad thing.

Of course, these same people will then ask if German citizens who lied to protect Jews from the Nazis were committing sin.

We know all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God…but the Ninth Commandment isn’t really about lying. It specifically uses language that prohibits “bearing false witness against your neighbor.”

In other words, the Ninth Commandment is about committing perjury to incriminate an innocent person.

This isn’t to say lying isn’t a sin, but every lie might not be a sin. If your wife asks “does this dress make me look fat?” skillfully avoiding the truth may be considered a shrewd act of self-preservation rather than a bald-faced lie with malicious intent.

The most recent example of my being accused of “lying for Jesus” came from the person still upset about my recounting of the NDE account of Pam Reynolds. He just can’t seem to let Pam’s story go.

Apparently his chief complaint (now) is that I won’t “correct the record” for what he describes as an error in an article I originally wrote in 2010, when I was writing for Examiner.com.

The problem is that I haven’t written for Examiner.com in more than three years. I have no desire to get reinstated to contributor status simply to edit an article that’s more than five years old now.

Furthermore, other than his opinion, my critic doesn’t have any evidence that  justifies his challenge to my veracity. Not to mention that my article was based on recorded interviews with the people directly involved in her case — Pam and Dr. Spetzler. If someone’s word is to be taken at face value, in my opinion it should be one of those people who were actually witnesses in the room.

In my blog titled “Atheism and the near death experience“, I made it crystal clear that I don’t feel a need to prove Pam’s story is completely accurate in every minor detail. Her story is only one of many examples of corroborated veridical NDE information.

In my mind, the question has never been whether or not Pam could be proven “clinically dead” beyond all doubt at any point in time during her operation, but whether or not her mind accurately recorded a new memory while separated from the brain some point. If Pam was able to accurately recall information to which her normal senses were never exposed, it would admittedly be one of the better examples of corroborated veridical NDE information, but hardly the only one allegedly created while the spiritual mind was temporarily separated from the physical brain to which it is normally connected.

My refusal to accept this person’s hypothetical scenario as the most probable alternative — that Pam had experienced anesthesia awareness and awakened during her surgery, enabling her to literally see the brain saw and hear the conversation between the doctors that she claimed to “remember” after recovering from surgery — just doesn’t seem plausible, considering the testimonials and rather convincing body of evidence we have at our disposal.

His alternative interpretation of the evidence begs this question: why would Pam protect her doctors from a malpractice lawsuit which could potentially reward her with millions of dollars in a settlement, if the doctors had truly botched her surgery? Why would she lie to protect Dr. Spetzler?

All of this said, I can think of a scenario where telling a lie can be a very bad thing. In fact, I read an account of a somewhat insidious lie cloaked by religion in Jerry DeWitt’s book Hope After Faith: An Ex-Pastor’s Journey From Belief To Atheism.

Jerry told a story about a close friend who called one night in desperation. He wrote, “NaTosha told me her brother had been severely injured in a motorcycle accident in the Lake Charles area. NaTosha tearfully explained that the ER physicians had failed to revive her brother and that specialists were on their way.” (page 237)

NaTosha never asked Jerry to pray for her brother’s recovery or on her behalf. He simply assumed that’s what she expected. His lost faith prevented him from even going through the motions of acting like a minister.

Instead, as Jerry puts it, he “turned to reason” for the first time, saying, “NaTosha, it sounds like everyone at the hospital is doing everything they can. Your brother is a young man and a strong man. They’re bringing in specialists, so we’re just going to have to wait this out and see what happens. But NaTosha, I’m telling you that it sounds like he’s going to be all right.”

Say what?

Until that last sentence, Jerry had spoken what he knew to be the truth. But he ended their conversation with a comforting lie, telling her what he thought she wanted to hear.

From his description it sounds like NaTosha’s brother might have  been dead when she called — remember that she told Jerry that the doctors had already failed to revive him?

At that point recovery would have required nothing short of a miracle, or divine intervention. Jerry’s lie offered NaTosha nothing but false hope. However, Jerry wasn’t lying for Jesus.

He was lying for Jerry.