"It is my contention that Christianity, when it is full-blooded, is simultaneously reflexive, reasonable and faithful [repressive, irrational, and fanciful]." Those words (with my reinterpretation in brackets) from a post titled Are Christians as Inflexible as they say we are? over at one of Phil Steiger's blogs, Every Thought Captive.

I did not know this (but am not surprised) that a Mr. Steiger, a member of the world's largest Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, has somehow, by some torturous and tautologous reasoning, managed to reconcile his church's stated position "that all matters of faith and conduct must be evaluated on the basis of Holy Scripture, which is our infallible guide (2 Timothy 3:16,17)," with a statement such as the following:

"The tools of reason and analysis are actually built into and intended to be used by the faith system of Christianity. If God has given us intellectual tools such as reason, and if all truth is God’s truth, the Christian has nothing to fear by examining all things in pursuit of their faith."

Now let me be clear from the outset that I, as a critic of Christianity religion, do not by any means claim to have a monopoly on rationality as some would have it. I am grateful for our species' unique ability to reason about such things as spirituality, or tomorrow's football scores, or the innocence or guilt or an accused person in a court of law. Indeed, rationality is one of the few things that makes us human, and for good or ill, I'm glad we all possess the capacity to reason abstractly to some degree or another.

However, I have a problem reconciling rationality within a religious context when I read things like the following from a post over at Vagabond Scholar titled The Case for Writing More Accurately About Religion in America:

"a kidnapper-rapist-murderer was spared the death penalty not because of ignorance of the Bible, but because some religious people decided to inject their religion into the legal process."

The context there is that of Time magazine's late March front page article The Case for Teaching The Bible. The story goes like this:

In 1995 a federal appeals court upheld the overturn of a death sentence in a Colorado kidnap-rape-murder case because jurors had inappropriately brought in extraneous material--Bibles--for an unsanctioned discussion of the Exodus verse "an eye for eye, tooth for tooth ... whoever ... kills a man shall be put to death." The Christian group Focus on the Family complained, "It is a sad day when the Bible is banned from the jury room."

That should be enough to demonstrate why I am troubled by pastor Steiger's statement that "the tools of reason and analysis are actually built into and intended to be used by the faith system of Christianity," and the Assembly of God's position "that all matters of faith and conduct must be evaluated on the basis of Holy Scripture."

As a leader within that church, I don't see how reasoning outwards from a biblical perspective can work, using the context of the cited example of the group of jurors. How can Steiger even begin to backup such claims that "the reigning dogma of popular atheism is apparently marked by self-satisfaction, inflexibility and myopia," when compared to his denomination's reigning (stated even) dogma that the bible is infallible?

Consider this: the Assembly of God website has a page called Sexuality: Homosexuality (Official A/G Position Paper). That page quotes Leviticus 20:13 as a reason that homosexuality is a sin. But it notes later on that "While Scripture makes it clear homosexual behavior is sin and comes under the judgment of God, it also indicates that those who are guilty of homosexual behavior or any other sin can be reconciled to God." Wonderful.

The problem with the reasoning? In relying on the bible as the source of infallible truth, that page fails to finish off the Leviticus 20:13 verse, which reads fully as "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them."

Read that again.

One of the fundamentals of reasoning is that every statement, or more properly premise, must be considered when attempting to develop a valid and sound conclusion. I do not see how Steiger can maintain faith in the legitimacy of his sect whilst at the same time extolling the capacity of a "full-blooded" Christianity to reason about faith.

Indeed, I can only assume that our example of such a brand of Christianity is the Assembly of God, and Steiger I take it means to represent himself as representative of that movement's rational ability. After all, his article attempts to reason, however badly, about faith from a Christian perspective. As a leader within his church, it stands to reason that his position is one of more consequence regarding such matters than his followers, being that his profile page says "Occupation: Pastor, Educator." That brand, it seems to me, is inconsistent with itself to say the least.

Now in all fairness, I'm sure that pastor Steiger's intent is good, that his actions are taken in good faith, and that in a proper social (read physical) setting he and I could have a productive dialogue, about any number of issues, religious or otherwise. No doubt he is a role model for his community and congregation. I respect our capacity to do good as a species, and I should think that pastor Steiger would not be where he is today were it not for some innate capacity to do good, and the recognition such an ability would entail.

But I request that when attempting to reason about religious matters that intellectual honesty be placed at the fore. And this goes for any religious figurehead or person. What I mean is that the tautology upon which most fundamentalists rest their initial claims (Christian, Muslim, Jew, take your pick), the one that goes something like "it must be true because the bible says so", I mean to ask simply that we discard that circular argument as a premise for argument and proceed from a more rational foundation. A foundation where the epistemological adequacy, that is truth value, of all of one's propositions dictates a necessarily true, that is sound, conclusion, not the tautological inadequacy of an unproven assertion.

Such an honesty would actually allow inquiry free from the burden of 2000 years of inflexible Iron Age/Hellenistic mythemes and values (recall our Leviticus example), and instead allow for a freer form of ontological inquiry into matters of spirituality, a position from which an hermeneutics could then be derived and applied to that said spirituality and any sacred texts.

In closing, I'd like to point out that I recognize the criticism's that will be leveled against my perspective on the issue. Since science and Christianity both rely on external verification of truth claims, and someone can always be trotted out or cited as disagreeing with almost any fact.

The thing is, if the largest denomination of Pentecostals in the world, 51 million strong, cannot make a sound pronouncement about a core issue to their sect like homosexuality without being in disagreement with their own external source of verification (the bible), then I don't see how anyone from that group can engage in objective reasoning before sorting that issue out.

Because that's the thing about reasoning--if even one premise in an argument is invalid, then even though a conclusion may still be valid by technique/form alone (tautology), an argument's soundness, that is, truthfulness of the conclusion, is guaranteed to be false.