Leah Librisco is continuing her rather intriguing "
Ideological Turing Test,"
which has Christians pretending to be atheists and atheists pretending
to be Christians, and readers of all stripes attempting to guess which
is which (the Christians also write Christian responses, the atheists
atheist responses). I still consider
the questions asked in the first contest to be the best,
since they are questions which actually can be answered by even
modestly intellectually curious Christians and atheists alike. I skimmed
the second contest, but really didn't like the questions as
much--ironically, as a matter of taste.
This year's
questions focus
on sex (specifically, polyamory), death (euthanasia and assisted
suicide), and literature. Again, interesting to see what kind of
responses people leave, but I still liked the first set of questions
more, perhaps in part because they get at the core
intellectual reasons
why people are either Christian or atheist. I will grant that I have
known some aesthetic converts to Christianity, and a few Christians
whose minds became poisoned by atheist prose to the point of apostasy,
but it is very rare that I have met a person who actually bases his
religious beliefs on the existence of the music of JS Bach.
With that said, I am largely not going to try judging
these this time around. The thing is, there are at least three sides to
the Ideological Turing Test: Atheist, Protestant, and Catholic. And
that's without getting into the differences between liberal/conservative
Protestants, faithful and faithless Catholics, atheists and agnostics,
etc. An atheist pretending to be a (theologically if not politically)
liberal Protestant is likely not going to impress a faithful
Catholic--but neither is a liberal Protestant. But there are at least a
few Protestants who really are theists, and who might even go so far as
to believe in the resurrection, but who are otherwise liberal--and from
here on I mean theologically and morally liberal, not politically
liberal per se. There are also a few self-styled Christians who don't in
the least believe in a historical Jesus, or that the historical man
Jesus was also true God, the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity made
flesh.
To be perfectly honest, I cannot tell whether a person
who opens his answer to
the question of polygamy by writing, "First, polygamy should be
legal....Second, there’s no reason to say that polygamy is a sin" and
who then goes on to justify suicide in certain cases is a liberal
Christian, or an atheist trying to play the part of a liberal Christian.
Two years ago, I would have written this response off as an atheist
doing a half-ass job, but that doesn't do justice to some of the
atheists in this game [1].
The thing is, there do exist some Protestants who might formulate their answers this way (apparently
Luther,
for one). There probably also exist some people who are baptized
Catholics who would agree. Yet, when I read a line like that, I don't
generally consider those people when trying to decide if the writer is a
Christian or not.
Maybe
it's just that I expect people to take their religion seriously. Maybe I
need to work on not being judgmental of others' sincerity--to separate,
that is, their sincerity in Christ from their sincere endorsement of
sins. Or maybe it's that in this way I view the world as those who need
to be evangelized and/or catechized, and those who don't. In summary,
those who already know and embrace the fullness of the Catholic faith
don't need much more catechesis, whereas those who don't do. I view
error as error, with some errors being worse than others--but I'm as
likely to think that a liberal Protestant (or Catholic) needs conversion
as an apathetic agnostic or an acknowledged atheists.
When
a conservative Protestant converts to Catholicism, I tend to rejoice
for the sake of Christian unity and for the sake of a closer theological
bond between us. When a liberal Christian (Catholic or Protestant)
becomes a more orthodox Christian--when he starts to recognize that sin
exists and must be repented of, that Jesus Christ is more than a mere
moral teacher, that hell as well as heaven is a distinct destination,
that some parts of the Bible--including the New Testament miracles and
the Old Testament Law--are literally true: the kind of rejoicing that I
know then is of a different magnitude of degree entirely [2]. Similarly
for the frustration and sorrow that I feel when these kinds of
conversions don't happen.
So
to return to the Ideological Turing Test, I like the concept, and find
the responses interesting. But it would be almost as interesting to make
it really ideological, to see if a liberal Christian can understand
(and mimic) a conservative one and vice-versa. As it stands, the two
groups are too broad. Or perhaps it is just the right breadth to
unintentionally teach us something about ourselves. Certainly, I wonder
if my lack of empathy for error hampers my efforts at evangelizing.
-----
[1]
Oddly enough, I was right more often than not when I did this, with the
exceptions being various Protestants and Church-hating Catholics (for
lack of a better term) who were hostile to organized/authoritative
religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular.
[2] FWIW, conversions from non-Christian to at least mere Christian give me a joy which is actually different in kind.
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