God vs gods - Keaton Halley, Wilhelm Schmidt, G. K. Chesterton

1) God vs gods - Keaton Halley, Wilhelm Schmidt, G. K. Chesterton, 2) Why Christianity?

CMI was asked why Freud was wrong. A certain C. C. from Greece was asking a series of questions.

Keaton Halley deals with the main thing here:

CMI : Feedback 2015
Debunking Freud
http://creation.com/debunking-freud

But I will single out a certain question and give an answer:

Can you prove that hes wrong when he [=Freud] says gods are the deified ancestors that have passed away?

Keaton Hally does not need that.

Any amount of gods can be deified ancestors, that doesn't make God such a thing. The idea of God is so different from the idea of this or that of the gods.

At the utmost, when it comes to creator gods in polytheistic panthéons, we might be dealing with ancestors or an ancestor who very unwisely deified themself. Nimrod may have bragged about creating the world, even though he knew he hadn't. Odin seems to have done so in Uppsala. Though, to be fair, in difference from Nimrod, he didn't take credit for killing a monster and making earth and sky from its carcass all by himself, he credited two (absent) brothers too.

But a god like Hercules or like Romulus or like Theseus obviously has everything to do with some ancestor. And the idea of these is obviously very different from the idea of God.

The debunking of Freud is obviously the fact that ideas are different. That he can see some similarity does not make the ideas the same.

The letter, as I imagined its writing (I wasn't there, and I am not going to make Freud's claims to reading thoughts not actually expressed) was somewhat upset. How could anyone dream of Freud having been debunked? That was the feeling I got.

Letter writer:

I just read a repeatance of the atheistic claims youre supposed to answer but with no real answer, just the phrase "this has been debunked". Im not satisfied with the answer "this has been debunked". I want to see how.For example you say Freud has been outofdate, well where is there the proof that Freud is wrong? ...

Keaton Halley:

I’m not going to directly refute each Freudian claim you mention, because I think a few examples should suffice. But note that you haven’t mentioned any supporting reasons to believe those claims either. The one making a claim needs to shoulder the burden of proof, so even if we haven’t refuted those assertions, they don’t win by default.

I can think of two kinds of Greek who could say such a thing. A Communist, to whom Freud is part of the Holy Doctrine of DiaMat. And an Orthodox of the Romanides and Metallinos school. Romanides was introduced to psychiatric negative evaluation of "religion" and accepted it except for his own one. This might have included Freud.

Both are heavily Byzantine who rely on authority and to both Freud is, through Communism or through Romanides, an authority. An authority is right per default. An attack on authority is what has the burden of proof.

How Freud himself fulfilled HIS burden of proof is beside the point to this mentality.

Obviously he did, or Romanides wouldn't have admired him, the pious Romanides. Obviously he did, or the Communists wouldn't accept him and my grandfather was in the Greek labour union which was headed by Communists, I can't go against my grandpa.

So, perhaps one might cite them another authority.

Reverend Wilhelm Schmidt, a Catholic priest who fled to Switzerland when Nazis invaded Austria (yes, to some that is a recommendation, to me too, btw, "even if" he was both German and a Roman Catholic), and who accepted Old Earth and Big Cosmos nevertheless gave a non-evolutionist answer to origin of religion - and he did so by using anthropology, comparing the Biblical concepts with Greek, Roman, etc. ones.

Christian Scholar Extraordinary: The Work of Wilhelm Schmidt
Ellen Myers
http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v11n2p09.htm

He wrote his book in 1931:

The Origin of Religion : Evolution or Revelation
by Rev Wilhelm SChmidt, transl. Samuel Marinus Zwemer
[English translation, 1945 in pdf]
http://www.ciu.edu/sites/default/files/Book/2011/11/The%20Origin%20of%20Religion:%20Evolution%20or%20Revelation/the_origin_of_religion_pdf_12733.pdf

The main idea was already expressed in 1925 in Chesterton's Everlasting Man, but he goes into more detail, whereas Chesterton gets on through other historic peripeties, like fight of Rome against Carthage. And goes on to Christ and Church History. Schmidt is very clearly occupied in refuting people like Engels and Freud (and similar ones, he says the atheistic literature by far outnumbers the Christian answers on this question). Here is Chesterton, btw:

The Everlasting Man
by G.K. Chesterton(1925)
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/everlasting_man.html

Where Chesterton goes into the question is mainly in chapter IV of part I: God and Comparative Religion. Plus the following ones.

If you go to Amerindians or Australian Aborigines, you will find an idea of the supreme God, who is NOT worshipped, which is very different from the ancestors and other spirits that ARE worshipped. That is the point of both Schmidt and Chesterton.

Freud may amuse himself by claiming of two completely different ideas one developed from the other, as he may amuse himself by believing Darwin that one mode of being clearly different from life and an added perfection, not just a modification, namely mind, was after all just developed from life as a modification.

He may spend 10% or 5% or 1% elaborating this leap in logic, in his book (I admit I have not read it yet), and the rest of it by enumerating very obvious things, like Krishna worship being ancestor worship on part of Hindoos, or Hercules worship being ancestor worship on part of Greeks. And because those parts are so obviously reasonable, some unaware readers will swallow the main point of divergence, namely whether the idea of God is a different idea from a hero one worships, or whether it is just the hero worshipped by all the heros, a kind of projection on part of the hero worshippers (hero is here taken in technical sense of dead ancestor enjoying divine or semi-divine worship). That he believes so himself is not very convincing as proof. He is equally prepared to accept very wild associations as "same idea in disguise" when it comes to sexuality and his theory it is there in hidden form in nearly everything else one does too (except that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar - like when Freud is smoking it).

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Audoux
Seven Holy Maccabees
in Antioch, martyrs
1-VIII-2015