Critique One - Part Seven - The Man in the River

Mr. Russell is at the close of his presentation and so I have thoughts on his last points herein. I will summarize and give some final thoughts on the whole at the next posting. As for the matter at hand, after reading the final two sections 'Fear the Foundation of Religion' and 'What We Must Do' I could not escape feelings of pity and sorrow for Mr. Russell. I'm sure he would have demanded me not to feel that way toward him, and most likely would have thought me weak and foolish for the concern. Nevertheless, the picture of a man in a raging river carrying him downstream faster and faster toward certain destruction would not leave me. What really broke my heart and brought me to tears was the calm defiance I saw in his face. It was as if he was in this mess, racing toward his own demise, and all the while was ignorant of his surroundings and perfectly at peace with the situation. Mr. Russell passed many years ago, long since having gone over the falls, but even now I so desperately want to throw him and line and pull him in, even against his will.

In his 'Fear' section, Mr. Russell says the following: "Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear...Fear is the basis of the whole thing-fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death." I really don't feel this baseless assertion is worth a response. It is completely ludicrous to assert that all organized religion has is based in fear. For one, there is absolutely no way to prove that is the case. Secondly, it is a profoundly far-reaching and unilateral grouping of the majority of the known world (as the term Religion was used, which I presume includes Christians, Muhammadins and even the Pantheists). As easily as he can assert that Religion is based on fear (presumably of Hell or at least some sort of judgement), I could just as easily assert (without any basis in fact) that all Atheists chose their worldview out of fear that they would have to answer to someone other than themselves.

As a more intelligent option for the abject fear that was assigned to all religions without any supporting evidence, Mr. Russell offers up Science as savior. "Conquer the world by intelligence...A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage...It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future...the future that our intelligence can create." I have dealt with the issue of science in a previous post and will touch on it again in the final summary. I would however, turn to what the Bible has to say about courage. When I read Mr. Russell's thoughts the world needing courage my mind went immediately to Hebrews 11:35b-38 "Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned, they were sawed in two, they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins," these courageous believers endured all this for a belief in a way of seeing everything (worldview) that had consistent, cogent, non-contradictory answers to the most important questions in life - those of origin, meaning, morality and destiny. In other words, they knew how they got here, how they were, how to behave and what their future held. That knowledge gave them genuine and limitless courage in the face of trials and persecution that neither I nor Mr. Russell ever encountered. What more could be said except to echo Verse 38 of Hebrews 11, "The world was not worthy of them."

I mentioned Francis Schaeffer in the last post and I'd like to finish up these comments with some excerpts from his Escape from Reason.

"If you do not have the view of the Scriptures that the reformers had, you really have no content to the word Christ - and this is the modern drift in theology...Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge...We need to learn that when we begin to tamper with teh scriptural concept of true moral guilt, whether it be psychological tampering, genetic tampering, theological tampering or any other kind of tampering, our view of what Jesus did will no longer be scriptural. Christ died for man who had true moral guilt because man had made a real and true choice...This personal-infinite God of the Bible is the Creator of all else. God created all things, and He created them out of nothing. Therefore everything else is finite, everything else is the creature. He alone is the infinite Creator...In science the significant change came about therefore as a result of a shift...to the worldview of materialism or naturalism...What is wrong? When nature is made autonomous, it soon ends up by devouring God, grace, freedom and eventually man. You can hang on to freedom for a while, desperately using the word freedom like Rousseau and his followers, but freedom becomes non-freedom...The basic position of man in rebellion against God is that man is at the center of the universe, that he is autonomous-here lies his rebellion. Man will keep his rationalism and his rebellion, his insistence on total autonomy or partially autonomous areas, even if it means he must give up his rationality."

This is why I weep for the man in the river.