A letter on page 15 of this issue expresses disapproval of comments that have been made in The Skeptical Review about faith in God and atrocities in Christianity's past. The writer quoted the front-page article in the first issue of TSR (Winter 1990) in which readers were told that the paper would focus on the issue of biblical inerrancy and not the existence of God. For the most part, this policy has been respected over the 11 years that TSR has been published, but occasionally the issue of "God's existence" has come up. Usually, the subject is introduced by Bible believers who have been unable to defend their inerrancy belief and try to shift the discussion to philosophical arguments that will give them more wiggling room than they have when trying to "explain" discrepancies in the Bible. The article by Michael Bradford on page 9 of this issue is an example of this. Apparently frustrated at his failures to defend biblical inerrancy, he sent what he says is a final article in which he talked about "multidimensional space-time" and "eternal noncorporal and transcendent existence." He was the one who brought this subject up, and TSR simply gave him the free space to present his philosophical views on the existence of "God." Had the article not been published, he would no doubt have thought he was the victim of more discrimination.
Because of the volume of correspondence that TSR generated, the "Mailbag" column was added in the Summer 1992 edition, and since then discussion of the existence question and other religious issues not directly related to biblical inerrancy have been allowed in it. Subscribers like Frank Calderon have used "From the Mailbag" as a forum to present their theistic views, so we could hardly give believers in "God" space to argue their beliefs without giving writers like Stephen Van Eck the same opportunity. It's called fairness.
On the matter of Christianity's checkered past, this was an issue that was drawn out for several issues by a Bible believer who objected to brief comments that were made on this page in the January/ February 1999 issue in reply to a religious article in the Peoria Journal Star, whose author tried do exonerate Christianity of all blame for acts of violence perpetrated by Bible-believing fanatics. The issue was then fanned by Roger Hutchinson far beyond the attention it deserved, as he obstinately refused to attribute any blame to Christianity for persecutions, crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, and other atrocities that have obviously been left in the wake of this religion. If TSR had not allowed him the space to present his views on this subject, he would no doubt have protested that the paper had reneged on its open-door policy.
The letter writer said he thought that articles about atrocities were "woefully out of place"in a publication whose purpose is to examine critically the biblical inerrancy doctrine (p. 15), but if atrocities are off limits, we could publish nothing about the many Yahwistic atrocities in the Old Testament. An article, for example, on the Israelite massacres of entire populations when nothing was left alive to breathe (Josh. 10:40; 11:11), presumably in obedience to Yahweh's own commands (Deut. 20:16), would be inappropriate, although such divinely commanded atrocities as these would directly conflict with biblical claims that the god Yahweh was a kind, loving, and merciful god. If the Bible describes "God" in this way but also presents him as a deity who would order the total destruction of the Amalekites, including children and babies (2 Sam. 15:2-3), there is an inconsistency here that should be pointed out to people who will probably never be exposed to tales like this in Sunday school classes.
Likewise, if Christianity has a past blighted with
persecutions, witch hunts, inquisitions, and other indefensible
atrocities, why should that not be pointed out to people who have been
overexposed to sermons about the good that Christianity has done but
have heard virtually nothing about the skeletons in its closet. If
Christianity proclaims itself a religion of compassion and love while
history shows it to be responsible for moral atrocities, why should
this inconsistency not be pointed out?
