My eldest sister sent me a NY Times article the other day concerning a neo-Calvinist mega church here in Seattle.  That prompted this string of emails between the two of us and that is my blog for now.
From: Thornton 
Fascinating.  She is a good writer.  I don’t recall ever seeing any news article that used the word pablum.

Reading the article I found myself developing the questions to ask his adherents.  But as she points out, people don’t go to the church to question.  What’s the point?  Every disease has symptoms.  Christianity is the symptom of the hubris of humanity.
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From: Scianna  
And neo-Calvinism is the perfect theological home for people who don’t want to be troubled by questions. Remember Anita Bryant, who said something like “Questions are the work of the Devil; answers come from the Lord”?
When you get a chance – I wouldn’t want you to interrupt your fascinating day at work – I’d like to hear more about your comment that “Christianity is a symptom of the hubris of humanity”. It sounds clever, but I’m interested in your line of reasoning.
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From: Thornton
My own statement was rushed to byte form and it’s probably not quite right.  Christianity is just one of many responses to the human desire for something greater.
I quite accept the evolutionary idea of God-belief as a spandrel, a by-product of some other useful evolutionary adaptation.  Belief in a fanciful, omniscient being has about as much immediate evolutionary worth as believing in Santa or elves or the Great Spaghetti Monster.  But it does help fill in gaps in our understanding of the universe, our place in it, and provide a social context for us to inhabit.
But that’s where people start getting strange.  People refuse to say, “I choose to believe this because [insert reason here],” and instead insist that their respective belief is Truth (with a capital T).  Just because you believe something is true does not make it true.  And while it’s all very fine to pose that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, without evidence any respective belief is simply something you have elected to believe for whatever reason.  It is not Truth.
 
But to substantiate the belief system, they create theology and doctrine and institutions to impose those doctrines and theology.  All very impressive.  It’s impossible to underestimate the machinations of humanity and the weight of theology on, at the very least, Western Civilization.  Yet, regardless of the prowess of such great minds as Tillich, Kierkegaard, Augustine and the like, you still come down to  “I choose to believe this because [insert reason here].” 
It starts off well enough, and even follows some sort of scientific method in trying to gain answers.  “I believe this, so how do I prove it?” they ask.  And then they go through whatever process of investigation they go through and they come out the other end with some answer.  But, unlike a thorough scientific investigation where the conclusions are made based upon provable results and where the initial belief might change based upon factual results, the religious proof is a cerebral exercise that ultimately explains “I choose to believe this because [insert reason here].”  It is still a choice of belief and not a substantiated result with power to sway the uninitiated.
There is no right answer to the wrong question.  The Chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department at Montclair (a boring fellow and dreary teacher) once wrote that any questions about God’s existence or non-existence are the wrong questions.  He suggested that since in every description of God, God is defined as more than human, beyond the measure of our being, there can be no fruitful discussion about something that is completely outside any field of our reason.
And that’s what I meant by Christianity being a symptom of humanity’s hubris.  But, I think I meant the theologies that surround Christianity.  The glorified pronouncements of what God believes, does, thinks, will do, won’t do, where God lives, and how much money God would pay at a toll booth.  The evangelical returns that we have the word of God in the Bible.  But, of course, that ignores that not only was the book written by humans, it also ignores the contradictions, the fact that we don’t have ANY of the original texts, it ignores the problems of translations and the politics of doctrine and canonization, and a whole host of other issues.  And this hubris is not just relegated to Christians. 
I was reading a brief, factually correct (but uninformed by practice) history of Daoism a few days back.  You know Daoism resonates with me, but even though the Daoists don’t talk about God in the same way the Christians do, they aren’t immune from hubris.  They talk about the numbers of heavens and hells, and what immortal does what, and so on.  It may well give a doctrinal foundation to Daoism, but it still comes down to “I choose to believe this because [insert reason here].”  Hubris.
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From: Scianna
This gets into aspects of the conversation I have with my research students. In the second class, I initiate a discussion about “knowledge”, and ask them to list sources of knowledge. Invariable answers include “church” and “the Bible”, along with “newspapers”, “parents”, “friends, “books”, “TV”, and “the Internet”. At this point, I explain the difference between “revealed” knowledge – the things one knows to be true based on divine revelation or reading scriptures – and scientific, empirical knowledge, or those things that can be proven. I tell them that I do not want to challenge anyone’s faith or beliefs; in fact, I don’t want to spend any time discussing the veracity of “revealed” knowledge, because it has no place in a research class. Once I confirm their agreement, then I ask them another question: Of all the sources of knowledge they identified, which are the five most trustworthy sources? Usually – not always – “church” and “the Bible” do not make the cut.
But that is a discussion of knowledge, and not a discussion of truth. There is a wonderful piece written by Penn Jillette about the difference between faith and fact. Faith, he says, is believing in the truth of something in spite of the absence of proof. So faith – true faith – cannot exist where there is proof. Faith requires the absence of proof. 
So when the “believers” construct these awesome cosmologies based on scriptural passages detailing the levels of heaven and hell, the number of seraphim, the specific tortures of the damned, and the sins that will get them an eternity in hell – to me, that seems like the manufacture of evidence. It’s not faith. But it appears to me that it becomes a lot more difficult to maintain faith in the face of questions. I think most “believers” are haunted deep down by doubt and distrust. What if I’m wrong? What if I didn’t bet on the winning horse? So I can see that this young preacher’s New Calvinism could be very reassuring, in a dark kind of way. Of course you have doubt; you’re basically an evil and damned person.
But as for predestination, well, there’s a story that if the general tells a hundred soldiers, “Ninety-nine of you will die on the battlefield today,” each of the one hundred soldiers will think, “Wow, that’s too bad for all these other guys.” Hubris.