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Credo Quia Absurdum

Many a father has thought himself deprived of every hope for the future when he lost his child, the dearest thing in the world to him; nevertheless, no one was the child of promise in the sense in which Isaac was that to Abraham. Many a father has lost his child, but then it was God, the unchangeable, inscrutable will of the Almighty, it was his hand that took it. Not so with Abraham! A harder test was reserved for him, and Isaac’s fate was placed, along with the knife, in Abraham’s hand. And there he stood, the old man with his solitary hope. But he did not doubt, he did not look in anguish to the left and to the right, he did not challenge heaven with his prayers. He knew it was God the Almighty who was testing him; he knew it was the hardest sacrifice that could be demanded of him; but he knew also that no sacrifice is too severe when God demands it- and he drew the knife.
-Soren Kierkegaard

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
-Jesus [Luke 14:26]

When one contemplates the myth of Abraham undergoing the unthinkable test of faith which the Lord commanded of him, the paradoxical morbidity and optimism of the story immediately make themselves very conspicuous in one’s consciousness. We all know what ultimately happened when Abraham, the father of the 3 major monotheistic faiths, raised his hand to kill his beloved son. We know that in the end, Abraham got to keep Isaac and went on to become “the father of many nations”. But the message of the story on the value of faith illustrates a mindset that, if taken seriously enough, can have atrocious real-world consequences.
On March 23rd, 2008, the body of 11-year-old Madeline “Kara” Neumann turned from merely incapacitated to cold and lifeless while faithful believers around her, including her parents, prayed for her to get better. She died from undiagnosed diabetes and, with the proper medical treatment, Madeline could have lived. Her father, 47-year-old Dale Neumann, was convicted on August 2nd, 2009 of second-degree reckless homicide. Earlier this year, the mother of Madeline Neumann, 41-year-old Leilani Neumann, was also convicted for second-degree reckless homicide. Both parents face up to 25 years in prison when they are sentenced on October 6th, 2009. Dale Nuemann, who once studied to be a Pentecostal preacher, provided quite an interesting theological argument as an excuse for his parental neglect. He claimed that God promises to heal in the Bible and that seeking medical treatment for his sick daughter would have been “putting the doctor before God”. “I can’t do that because biblically, I cannot find that is the way people are healed,” our faithful friend Dale said to the jury. And without any shame, our piously foolish friend Dale Neumann also testified that he became a born-again Christian in 1982 and that the Holy Spirit once commanded him to burn two books in his library in order to heal a back pain problem, which had plagued him for 10 years and was unsuccessfully treated by a chiropractor. Dale claimed in court, “It was a spiritual cause of a physical ailment.” His wife Leilani Neumann also exhibited her divine idiocy and testified in court that she believed that sin causes sickness and that faith and prayer can heal the sick.

“If Abraham had doubted as he stood there on Mount Moriah, if irresolute he had looked around, if he had happened to spot the ram before drawing the knife, if God had allowed him to sacrifice it instead of Isaac- then he would have gone home, everything would have been the same, he would have had Sarah, he would of kept Isaac, and yet how changed! For his return would have been a flight, his deliverance an accident, his reward disgrace, his future perhaps perdition. Then he would have witnessed neither to his faith nor to God’s grace but would have witnessed to how appalling it is to go to Mount Moriah. Then Abraham would not be forgotten, nor would Mount Moriah. Then it would not be mentioned in the way Ararat, where the ark landed, is mentioned, but it would be called a place of terror, for it was here that Abraham doubted.”
-Soren Kierkegaard

What is remarkable about the beliefs of these 2 deluded individuals is that they are, in fact, theologically and biblically sound. Once the assumption is made that the Bible is a divinely inspired book, the doctrine of healing through faith, prayer, and miracles logically follows. And such unflinching faith in the power of God is presented as noble, good, and heroic throughout the Old and New Testament. The story of Abraham and Isaac is one of the best known myths in the Bible which presents faith as a noble and heroic value. And like Abraham, Dale and Leilani Neumann had absolute faith that through sacrificing the very best they had, their daughter, to God, they would receive their daughter back from God at the last second, along with much more. Along with their daughter Madeline, Dale and Leilani would have also received assurance that their faith was not in vain, that God does heal, and that “God’s word” is true. Imagine how much confidence Dale and Leilani must have had in their God and His Word even with their daughter deteriorating before their eyes! Imagine how, out of piety, they must have blocked every single logical, rational, and skeptical thought from their mind! Imagine the height of Dale and Leilani’s expectations as they and fellow members of their prayer group circled around Madeline’s dying body and beseeched God to make her well again! But alas, we poor souls do not inhabit the mythical realm which father Abraham inhabited, and Dale and Leilani learned the hard way (like that wise fool Kierkegaard learned with his beloved Regine Olsen) that faith is precisely the refusal to know what is true.

“Have faith in God. For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.”
-Jesus [Mark 11:22-24]

And, of course, the Old Testament isn’t the sole source of faith’s undeserved high valuation within our Christian bourgeois society. The alleged Redeemer of Mankind stated prolifically and very clearly that, with faith, all things are possible. Throughout the Gospels, the supposed Savior repeatedly informs his followers that one must have faith to be his disciple and that with faith, the deaf shall hear, the blind shall see, and the sick shall be healed.
Recount the story in the Gospels of the woman with the blood problems who told herself that if she could merely touch the fringe of Jesus’ clothes, she would then be healed. And after she touched the Savior’s garments, was healed, and confessed to Jesus what she had done, what was our Messiah’s wise response? He innocently tells her “Daughter, thy faith has made thee whole!” Her physical ailment was thus exorcised with a spiritual cure! Or let us not forget that story of our Lord Yeshua Ben Yosef walking on water towards the ship of his disciples. After Jesus tells his apostles to be of good cheer, Peter asks Jesus if he may walk on the water towards him. As Peter cautiously steps down from his ship and begins to walk on the water, he begins to commit that horrific sin of the mind, he begins to doubt. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus said he would build his church, becomes afraid, and because of his unholy skepticism, he begins to sink into the sea… like a rock! And what does the so-called Son of God say in response to this? “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”
These are but a few of the New Testament’s tributes to the value of faith. And these do not include the myriad of philistine hurrahs for faith which that demagogue and faith-monger Paul writes in his letters. This is why Fox News’ Father Jonathan is so breathtakingly incorrect in the video above when he implies that the God of Abraham doesn’t ask his poor creations to do irrational things. Abraham would snicker uncontrollably at such a suggestion! Martin Luther would spit in Father Jonathan’s face if he had witnessed such divine jabberwocky in person (from a Catholic priest, no less!). Faith and “that whore Reason” (as Martin Luther used to call it), in fact, DO NOT go together. Faith in God could never be rational or logical or scientific. God demands TOTAL faith… nothing less. And if belief in God was rational and if God’s existence was truly self-evident, then what would faith be? Merely an empty, unnecessary word!
As for the rest of the obscurantism the gushes from Father Jonathan’s mouth in reference to Dale and Leilani, I doubt that any critical thinker and free spirit does not see it for what it is. We should all know what is really meant when our good Father Jonathan innocently says that Dale and Leilani “needed a spiritual guide”, namely that they needed a mystical charlatan like Father Jonathan himself to tell them how to live! Father Jonathan may claim that his kingdom is not of this world, but we all know that it is precisely THIS WORLD that the priests want power over. And quite frankly, a God who needs doctors to do His healing for Him hardly seems omnipotent! How many times did meek and mild Jesus ever tell the sick people he met to visit a doctor? How many times did our omniscient Messiah tell the sick people that their faith will heal them? And most importantly, how many times has Father Jonathan actually read the Bible?
Thank goodness that God died long ago! Thank goodness that all those priestly commands to believe the irrational have lost their divine foundation! Thank goodness that human knowledge has accumulated to the point where the hypothesis of a God has become untenable! Sadly though, there still remain vast deserts of human ignorance where the cool, thirst-quenching oases of today’s knowledge are nowhere to be found. And in these deserts, the mirage of knowledge, the illusion of knowledge, or in other words, faith is all that the desert inhabitants have available for their parched minds.