The Gift of the Holy Sport

Cartoonist/blogger Jason Krumbine responds to readers who complain about Christians “imposing their views” on non-Christians:

How is that any different than you sharing with someone about how awesome your favorite sports team is? Are you forcing your sports tastes down other people’s throats? Of course you’re not.

This is so obvious, but for some reason I never thought about it that way. You see, I live in Indiana, where basketball, football, and racing are venerated. Yet, I am agnostic with regard to spectator sports. I don’t deny that great teams and great athletes exist, or that sports are generally harmless, but I have never personally experienced salvation by watching sports.

They are often beneficial for their followers and the society that allows and encourages them, and people who criticize sports for being a waste of time need to realize that much of what anyone does is a waste of time. Not only that, much of what any society supports is practically useless, including salaries that are many times beyond what anyone needs to live. Anyone who has any discretionary income beyond paying for food and shelter is receiving more benefit from society than they could possibly ever “earn” through the direct transactional value of their labor.

Nevertheless, I simply have no use for spectator sports. I am alternately amused and annoyed by all the painted and dressed-up wackos who come out on game day. They hoard all their little relics, they make their big pilgrimages, they rehearse their chants and rituals, they venerate their idols, they start stupid arguments with followers of rival teams, and I just shake my head and say, “What a bunch of idiots!”

So, here I am in the middle of this religion, the Church of the Holy Sport, that I don’t like and that I think is only for losers who have too much leisure time, too much money, and not enough brains. And these nutcases are constantly evangelizing to me and preaching to me and praising their idols for all these imaginary superlative qualities.

I’ll tell you what:  I feel imposed upon. I feel like I am somehow immoral because I don’t care about their idols. Every time I see some ordinary sports fan wearing “the uniform,” I think that if someone wanted to do any crime or terrorism at all, they should dress like that, because no one would ever suspect them of doing anything antisocial. I guess this is what it’s like to be on the outside of a religious movement.

The funny thing is, that religion in the US doesn’t seem anything like sports. I know there are lots of religious performances and rallies and TV shows, but none of them are as commonplace, as widely venerated, or as heavily supported by local business and government as sports. Maybe it’s different in certain areas of the US or in other countries, but where I live, publicly supporting any sport is way more important than publicly supporting religion.

I am a Christian, but I don’t advertise it with stickers and fish magnets. I think I’ve only been “witnessed to” by a Christian stranger twice in my life. Both times they were very polite about it, and when I told them I agreed with them, they said goodbye. Maybe they just wanted an atheist to argue with, but on the other hand, only an argumentative atheist would have responded with a hostile attitude. So, I’ve always been pretty baffled by people who whine about having Christianity forced on them.

After considering the comparison to sports worship, I guess I’m willing to admit that some people may make themselves a big target with regard to non-sports religion. And if they already have some problems with society not affirming them enough or with society not looking enough like they do, they might get kind of resentful and start whining about persecution against atheists. But until their favorite atheist cartoon is pre-empted by a televangelism crusade, I just don’t think I’m going to feel sorry for them.

Why Ask Why?

Here is an in-depth report on the problem of functional illiteracy:

Published July 04, 2009 09:00 pm -

Literacy: 1 in 7 adults has problems

By Dave Stafford, Herald Bulletin Staff Writer

ANDERSON — Nearly 14 percent of Madison County residents lack basic literacy skills. It’s a disadvantage that dramatically raises their likelihood of incarceration and lowers their chances of earning a living.

It’s also a problem that affects people of all ages and in all stations in life.

“There’s just no rhyme or reason as to why people don’t learn to read,” said Ginger Mills, executive director of the Madison County Literacy Coalition. “So many of our learners have high school diplomas. … We have a lot of learners who have retired from General Motors.”

On the other end of the age spectrum, new emphasis is being placed on babies, pre-kindergartners and the building blocks of learning.

This is how those tough, insightful, professional print journalists usually work: Present the hook (a social problem); quote an expert who gives an authoritative opinion, but don’t cross-examine them; then change the subject to how the government will make everything better by starting a new program that ignores the problem.

In this case, the problem is adult illiteracy. That is, the entire population is required by state law to attend school, or obtain an equivalent education (not really the same thing), through age 16. Most of them graduate from public high school. A majority of the population has the capacity to read at an eighth grade level, but some don’t read at the eighth grade level, even though they attended public school for at least ten years and may even have graduated.

What are we to make of this? “There’s no rhyme or reason” why the system could possibly fail. It’s a mystery, and it’s best not to look too closely, or you might see something you don’t like. So, instead let’s talk about how to make sure that toddlers are better prepared before they get to public school; maybe that way they will accidentally learn something later on in the “black box” of public school. It’s a black box because we can’t actually know what happens inside it, so we must control what happens outside of it, in the home. The parents are the cause of the public schools’ failure to teach children how to read, but nobody is blaming them; the government is going to help them prepare their children for the black box, since they are understandably incompetent and irresponsible.

This weasel goes on to point out how parents can help their children  learn to read while they are in public school. Sometimes journalists even quote schoolteachers saying how necessary it is for parents to help, because without the parents’ help they can’t educate children at all. So, apparently parents’ help is necessary for the licensed teachers to perform the function of education, which only the licensed teachers are authorized to do, since it is so hard that parents cannot possibly do it. Right, I got it now.

What is the single greatest thing that public school teachers can do to help children learn how to read? Should they take more graduate classes in the discourse of early learners in proactive settings enabled by interactive technologies that affirm positive multicultural role models? Er . . . no. Here is the surprising new idea:

A key to Robinson’s success was individual attention and monitoring student progress. “It’s indescribable, really,” Cassaundra Day said of the importance of individual tutoring. Day was a reading buddy at Robinson and is also director of literacy services at the Madison County Literacy Coalition. “It makes an incredible difference.”

Day said that even schools’ reading recovery programs can sometimes fall short because students might receive individual attention for only a limited amount of time during the school day.

Although this strategy seems to work in some public schools, it is not recommended for an unlicensed, unqualified parent to try this at home. It might be dangerous for the child’s self-concept as a worker drone dependent on the beneficent government bureaucracy to compensate for the ideological shortcomings of his parents.

Todos Somos Amigos

Well, I have considered the deeper meaning of the Freddie N. quote provided by the Omnipresent Pal. Here is my loose translation from the German:

27. [excerpt]

However, concerning the “good friends” who are always too comfortable and precisely as friends believe they have a right to be comfortable:  it’s good to allow them from the start some liberty in a playground of misconceptions while you laugh; or to completely abandon them, these good friends, and laugh about that as well!

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

If we take Freddie at face value, Job’s response to his friends comes to mind:

Are not mockers with me? And does not my eye dwell on their provocation? Now put down a pledge for me with Yourself. Who is he who will shake hands with me? You have hidden their heart from understanding; therefore You will not exalt them. He who speaks flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children will fail. But He has made me a byword of the people, and I have become one in whose face men spit. My eye has also grown dim because of sorrow, and all my members are like shadows. Upright men are astonished at this, and the innocent stirs himself up against the hypocrite. Yet the righteous will hold to his way, and he who has clean hands will be stronger and stronger. “But please, come back again, all of you, for I shall not find one wise man among you.”  (Job 17:2-10)

And then there is this verse from Proverbs, which perhaps indirectly pertains to Freddie’s point:

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but deceitful are the kisses of an enemy. (Proverbs 27:6)

Yes, this is a hard saying; who can hear it? Maybe the Omnipresent Pal is smarter than he looks.

The Entelechies of Atheism

I was going to call this “The End of Atheism,” just to tease everyone, but I was afraid the joke would be too subtle. By entelechy I mean what Aristotle meant, which is given in the Oxford English Dictionary as follows:

1. In Aristotle’s use: The realization or complete expression of some function; the condition in which a potentiality has become an actuality.

The entelechy of something is therefore the perfection of it, the final expression of its true nature.

I don’t think much of the uproar over “The New Atheists” because I see them as more ignorant and less honest than the old atheists. Lacking the cultural basis of the old atheists and an honest acceptance of radical secular humanism, the New Atheist leaders will quickly burn out and the low-IQ acolytes will revert to pantheism, due to their natural propensity for superstition and idolatry:

Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, has described Pantheism as “sexed-up atheism.”  [World Pantheism]

In other words, atheists are just repressed pantheists. I have previously expressed my belief that there are three natural default states for anti-Christians who are also anti-religious:

• Radical secular humanism: “Man is the measure of all things. I am my own god and I can do whatever I want. Might makes right. PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS … Itty-bitty living space!”
• Deism: “Something created the universe and all of life, giving it order and maybe even purpose. However, it doesn’t talk to me or listen to me and it doesn’t care what I do or what happens to me. I don’t know what it was and I don’t really want to know, because I’m satisfied just contemplating what was created.”
• Pantheism: “The universe is self-created, self-ordering, and self-sustaining. Everything is cyclical and recurring; there is no first cause or final end. Humans come from nature and their souls return to the universal soul after death. Everything in nature has consciousness and everything is sacred.”

Radical secular humanism is usually considered to have its ultimate modern expression in Nietzsche’s writings, which is appropriate since he eventually went insane. Variant forms can be found among fascists, secular Nazis, Randian Objectivists, communist intellectuals, moralistic sociopaths, and atheist existentialists. In the past, Objectivists have shown up here and whined about being lumped in with Nazis; but despite the fact that they may quibble about the use of state power and who gets to be the Supreme Leader, they still agree on worshipping their own awesome selves.

I associate Deism with Tom Paine, Voltaire, John Davison, the Intelligent Design movement, the motto “In God We Trust,” politically acceptable civic religion, 19th-century Unitarians, lapsed Catholics, and a lot of almost-Christians who really hate being around judgmental pseudo-Christian WASP Republicans. Deism is for rationalists who love physical order or social order but not moral accountability; for materialists who don’t like quantum physics and string theory; and for “Pascal’s Wager” losers who don’t like Christians but are afraid to be called atheists.

Pantheism is the modern, socially acceptable form of heathenism. It encompasses New Age Spirituality, panpsychism, Green Nazis, neo-paganism, Unitarian-Universalism, shamanism, Hinduism, popular communism, Gaia-worship, Native American religion, and philosophical naturalism. It is anarcho-primitivist, irrationalist, collectivist, and morally incoherent. The numbing effect of pantheism among the general populace results in the degradation of technological ability and scientific inquiry, accompanied by the idolization of gadgets and the scientific priesthood. Furthermore, a pantheistic society devalues the individual and institutionalizes caste tyranny.

The radical secular humanists are relatively unpopular now in the USA. All their glorious eugenics plans have been disowned by their ungrateful intellectual stepchildren, and their twentieth-century projects are generally disparaged as anomalies of a perverse age.

For some reason, scientific atheists and conservative Christians seem to think that most Deists are Christians and all Christians are Deists; most of the arguing about atheism and religion involves Deist arguments. Sometimes they say “theist,” but if you don’t know who your god is, you don’t know what he wants from you, you don’t think he cares what you do or think, and you’ve never talked to him—you are a Deist. And if you don’t know or care about Jesus, you are not a Christian. Why should I care if my worldly rulers argue over whether to promote Deism as the state religion? The Christian obsession with the atheist/Deist debate is tiresome and irrelevant.

Scientific atheists and conservative Christians seem to be most resistant to the idea of atheists ultimately becoming pantheists. They just can’t believe that most so-called atheists are not smart enough or strong-willed enough to become Nietzschean alpha males, that most “freethinkers” just want to dissolve their egos into puddles of superstitious idolatry. Yet, World Pantheism is standing there with open arms, awaiting the crowds of low-church atheists yearning for anonymous Unity:

Are you sceptical about a “God” other than Nature and the wider Universe?

Yet do you feel an emotional need for a recognition of something greater than your own self or than the human race? …

Pantheism is older than Buddhism or Christianity, and may already count hundreds of millions among its members. Most Taoists are pantheists, along with many Chinese, Japanese and Western Buddhists, deep ecologists, pagans, animists, followers of many native religions, and many Unitarian Universalists. The central philosophical scriptures of Hinduism are pantheistic. Many atheists and humanists may be naturalistic pantheists without realizing it.

Scientific or natural pantheism is a modern form of pantheism that deeply reveres the universe and nature and joyfully accepts and embraces life, the body and earth, but does not believe in any supernatural deities, entities or powers.

[World Pantheism]

When some moron chooses to disable his intellect and his will in awe of the sacred cosmos, as revealed to him by a science reporter who is cribbing from a press release, that has nothing to do with the depredations of Darwin or Dawkins. Stop blaming those second-rate theologians for the adulterous irrationalism and lurching zombie mobbing of the typical “Friends of A.”

Everyone who wants to avoid accountability for their sadistic tendencies and victimization complex points to some big villain who personifies all of their own sinfulness, someone who put the “bad ideas” in their head and made them want to hurt other people, or someone who convinced them that slavery was a good thing. This denial of personal sin is sickening. If someone is vicious, immature, addicted, egotistical, malicious, thieving, hypocritical, and adulterous, it isn’t the fault of Darwin or Nietzsche or anyone else in the world; it is their own fault for seeking salvation in the world and for rejecting God’s grace, so that God has handed them over to suffer in their depravity.

Founding Fathers Quote Friday

 

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
–Thomas Jefferson
Quoted in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. 1919.

Jefferson was right, but I don’t think it means what he thought it meant. When we receive life, we receive the liberty to be what we are, that is, a natural man who is subject to the world.

In that sense, evolutionary psychology is absolutely correct: our natural behavior is not much different from that of animals. This understanding also dovetails with Jefferson’s political liberty, in that an animal is not subject to any “social contract,” but only to its physical instincts and the conditions it is born into. The newborn animal may learn that it will be nurtured by its mother or that it will be attacked by a jealous rival, but either way it reacts from instinct rather than some abstract obligation.

Human societies, on the other hand, attempt to impose prior constraints on people that may be counter to their instincts. Children learn, for example, that even though they want to just take whatever they desire, they should not. Law is imposed so that they can use reason to avoid unnecessary suffering. 

Inevitably, people take some things for granted, and they assume that they are entitled to exemption from suffering, since they always have been, at least under certain conditions. The belief that there is some loophole by which one can follow instinct and yet not suffer is the obvious conclusion from a superficial understanding of law.

At a certain age (commonly called the age of accountability), children realize that all of their experiences have been the result of their choices interacting with their circumstances. The circumstances of physiology, social structures, political events, and so forth all start to seem overwhelming, as does the enormity of the existential responsibility to choose a course of action. This is the source of “teenage angst.”

At this point it is possible for one to appreciate the significance of this verse:

 

1 John 2:16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.

1 John 2:16

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.

And these verses:

2 Cor 3:12-18

Therefore having such a hope, we use great boldness in {our} speech, and {are} not like Moses, {who} used to put a veil over his face so that the sons of Israel would not look intently at the end of what was fading away. But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart; but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, {there} is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

 And with an understanding of the gospel one can see that the law is for lawbreakers; but when we are free of the belief that we are animals and that all our thoughts and behaviors are determined, we don’t need the law to tell us what is right or wrong. Liberty then means freedom to not be what we are, but rather to be like Jesus, going into the world to do the Father’s will.

Faith-Based Science

This is why evolutionary assumptions will always have problems:

American researchers say they have uncovered a mathematical mistake made by the dinosaur boffinry community, meaning that the weight of live dinos has long been massively overestimated. In a development with devastating consequences for various much-fancied works of fiction, it now appears that in fact the dinosaurs were significantly slenderer than had been thought.

“Paleontologists have for 25 years used a published statistical model to estimate body weight of giant dinosaurs. By re-examining data in the original reference sample, we show that the statistical model is seriously flawed,” says Gary Packard of Colorado State University.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/22/dinosaur_weight_revisionism/

The “much-fancied works of fiction” unintentionally include the phony evolutionary stories. The problem isn’t that science destroys religious faith, as Dawkins et al. claim. The problem is that their knowledge is supposedly factual and empirical, but it isn’t. They need to just accept the fact that their beliefs about evolutionary history are faith-based and then move on to create their worldwide Gaia-worship church.

Founding Fathers Quote Friday

Those people who are not governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.

–William Penn

(quoted in the Citizens Rule Book, published by a now-defunct Patriot group)

Winds of Change

I’m hoping that Obama gets some socialized medicine in place before I lose my job. The last time I was out of work it didn’t matter too much, but the times before that the astronomical costs of doctor visits, prescriptions, and health insurance really burned me up.

Doesn’t that sound just like a coddled, ungrateful American who’s ready to throw free enterprise under the bus as soon as times get tough? You bet. However, considering the state of the healthcare industry and the insurance industry, I don’t really feel guilty about it.

The US healthcare industry badly needs to be rationalized, because its dependence on employer-paid health insurance has caused its financial priorities to be totally out of line with its ethical priorities. It has mutated into some monstrous freak in an effort to adapt to economic circumstances, but those economic circumstances were artificially created. Patients need to stop expecting medical miracles, doctors need to stop rushing patients into the lab and the pharmacy, and hospitals need to stop externalizing costs. I don’t know exactly what will help realign things, but I think the first step to healing healthcare is to dismantle the corrupt private health insurance industry.

The US health insurance industry is a huge scam that needs to be reduced by at least 50%, if not as much as 75%. The premise for its existence is fraudulent and deceptive, and has resulted in patients becoming addicted to wasteful services and wonder drugs while doctors have become cheap whores.

Part of the fraud, of course, involves statistics. The premise of a health insurance Ponzi scheme is that costs can be distributed throughout the entire group, thus requiring only a minimal donation from each individual, as long as they can keep drawing in young and healthy new members. However, in practice this externalization of costs results in pandering to the existing customer base by paying for worthless trendy services, while excluding necessary services to undesirable customers, who are technically known as “sick people.”

The whole concept of risk management, as found in the modern insurance industry, is also contrary to common sense for anyone in the bottom third of the income distribution. If I have trouble making enough money to pay my monthly bills, I have no incentive to contribute to an actuarial scheme that might not return commensurate benefits to me for 30 years or more.

Even if I can afford to gamble away some short-term disposable income, it’s plain to me that the game is going to be rigged in favor of the house.  Supposedly, an insurance company can get better returns on my money than I could; but considering their ridiculous overhead for staff and executive salaries, I doubt it. The fact that health insurance premiums and health insurance company stock dividends together increase at a faster rate than healthcare costs is one indication that the scheme is fraudulent.

Another argument for health insurance is that they can negotiate lower prices from healthcare providers and drug companies. Yet, for some reason this never results in lower premiums for customers. Instead, it puts pressure on healthcare providers to force patients faster through the assembly line and then recoup their costs on other products or services that they can overcharge on. Drug companies just pour more money into marketing their high-profit-margin products and paying for phony scientific research.

Meanwhile, medical students figure out that the only way to survive as a doctor is to soak the health insurance companies for trendy elective surgeries and specialized knowledge, since they know that all the costs will get passed on to patients and their employers. The artificially created demand for specialists results in wasteful concentration in certain areas and scarcity in areas of real need.

The best way to bring free enterprise back to healthcare is by eliminating the distortions and cost-shifting caused by the collectivist fantasies of health insurance, which mainly benefits a few venal bureaucrats. And that’s why I’m in favor of shaking up the system by introducing a little competition from the federal government, which has a lot more bureaucrats. I don’t have any hope of “fixing” the healthcare system; I just want to see the health insurance industry go down hard.

Now, all this is because I might be losing my full-time job with health benefits in the next few months. If things get really bad and I have to settle for a job as a corporate drone again . . . well, let’s just say I can still find my balaclava.

Crazy for the Law

So, another crazy murderer found a religious justification for his beliefs: James von Brunn. This is nothing new for evolution worship, and I still don’t think that “ideas have consequences.” That is a Platonic superstition.

This is what stood out for me in the segment from James von Brunn’s writings quoted by David Klinghoffer:

As with ALL LIBERAL ideologies, miscegenation is totally inconsistent with Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive.

Never mind that von Brunn wasn’t up on the latest evolutionary thinking; it is an error to believe that the most current scientific consensus on a particular subject would ever lead to a correct universal opinion. Science is a method for refining technique, not a method for defining Truth. But what the science worshippers want most is to know the Truth.

There is this tendency, you see, for certain kinds of people to observe regularities in nature and then derive the general form of a “law,” which they use to judge “lawbreakers,” that is, willful people. (Of course, all people are willful, in the sense that they are free to disobey a law.) Scientific laws are not really laws, they are just abstract uniformities; but because people are not uniform, they are easily labeled outlaws by judgmental, self-righteous bigots. With their religious justification in hand, anyone can then go out and start killing, without any residual guilt.

Just to be perfectly fair, I’ll drag in Scott Roeder on this one. As with von Brunn, Roeder’s homicidal urges were not “caused” by some ethereal idea that latched onto him, wrapped itself around his spinal cord, and started directing his behavior. As with von Brunn, Roeder just wanted to execute judgment on those who seemed to be violators of some law. (The musings about conspiracy in both cases don’t matter here, because the perpetrators appear to rely on private interpretations of law.)

This is one of the most useful things about law: it enables the powerful to punish the stupid, and so anytime a weak person is able to briefly acquire some firepower, they can justify punishing whoever is unable to shoot them first. (That may seem like a potent case for gun control, but really it is a potent case for mandatory gun ownership and carrying.) You see, both power and stupidity are transitory, so the real issue is not who is powerful or who is stupid, but rather why anyone believes that they should privately derive law and execute justice.

Roman Catholics love to use this criticism on Protestants, since they have the strength of centuries of institutional hierarchy helping them to denounce “private interpretations” and the priesthood of believers, not to mention Bibles translated into commonly spoken languages. Likewise, it is popular with the cult of the Science Goddess, who condescendingly bludgeon the common folk with their superior knowledge of evolutionary psychology. However, I’m not proposing a bureaucratic framework to squash troublemakers; I’m proposing humility on the part of all would-be superheroes.

If you think you know law and you think you are the designated instrument for implementing it, you are probably wrong, because only God embodies knowing law perfectly and enforcing law perfectly. Human law enforcers don’t define or interpret law, and human lawmakers and judges don’t enforce law, except in a corrupt and lawless state.

Legalism and Sanctification

Recently I read an essay comparing the “Satisfaction Doctrine” and the “Christus Victor” doctrine, and I had a shocking insight into my attitude toward law.

I had come to Christ through a very rationalistic preacher who focused on extracting doctrines from specific biblical texts. This was very important for me, since I am very systematic and I tend to analyze language closely. Before hearing this guy, I had always assumed that Christians were really stupid because it seemed like they just did what they were told and milled around looking kind of like cows on dope. However, he showed me that reading the Bible carefully was actually useful and insightful.

While still an atheist, I read the New Testament for myself and I was delighted to find all the places where Jesus insults religious people and Paul’s doctrine contradicts “church dogma.” I put two and two together and decided that the New Testament was historically accurate, psychologically valid, and a rich source of important spiritual truth, with a rational system of doctrine to back it up (which of course entailed accepting the whole Bible). I accepted at face value the elements of biblical doctrine that I first learned, including the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.

Over the years I heard and read many atheists and Christians complaining about this doctrine. Basically it sounded like a lot of whining to me. I mean, why are atheists so upset about God condemning them to hell for their sin if they don’t believe in God, sin, or hell?  And the Christians who complained about it seemed like they just wanted to avoid the whole idea of sin, and maybe they had unwisely fallen in with a bunch of judgmental legalistic Christians who made them feel bad as a method of manipulation.

I never really thought of there being two different biblical views of the meaning of the cross (I already knew about the humanist view that is typified by Thomas Jefferson). After reading the explanation of “Christus Victor,” however, I could see where legalism was inherent in the Satisfaction view of the cross. It inherently privileges Old Testament Law and Temple Judaism, as if either of those are supposed to matter to non-Jewish Christians. This parody of Satisfaction doctrine, intended to show how atheists see it, was striking:

You have broken the law because it is impossible to keep it, and so you must have broken it. And because you cannot keep this impossible to keep law you will be charged with death because “the penalty for sin is death” and those are just the rules. God must have blood because the law requires it; there must be a penalty paid. The only payment that would have been enough is sacrificing someone who was the “perfect law-keeper”, someone who could live a perfect life without sin. So God decided to kill his own Son on the cross to appease his legal need for blood. Now that Jesus has been sacrificed God is no longer mad at us for not doing what we can’t do anyway, so we can now come and live with him forever — as long as we are grateful to him for his “mercy” to us.

After reading that, my reaction would be, “Who cares about God’s Law? Let me suffer the consequences, since if God’s Law really determines reward and punishment in this world, I’ll be able to figure it out without the Bible.”

And that is precisely the point. With a legalistic relationship to God, you don’t need the Bible; you just need to know the reinforcement scheme and you need someone to tell when you’ve done enough penance.

Socrates says in The Republic that laws are useless for bad people because they will disobey them anyway, and useless for good people because they will do good without the laws. This is echoed in Paul’s writings, in which he makes clear that the Law was given only to the Jews and only places obligations on the Jews. The heathens will suffer because of not knowing right from wrong, unless they have the Law written on their hearts, in which case they will be blessed. Christians don’t need the Law because they have Christ.

That is why I never really cared about penal substitutionary atonement:  it has nothing to do with sanctification, or life in Christ. However, now I can see that it presents a stumbling block for Christians and non-Christians because they get hung up on questions of guilt and penance, instead of focusing on sanctification.