Posted on 05/04/2014 12:34:25 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Legendary conservative columnist George Will says he is an atheist. […]
“I’m an amiable, low voltage atheist,” Will explained. “I deeply respect religions and religious people. The great religions reflect something constant and noble in the human character, defensible and admirable yearnings.”
“I am just not persuaded. That’s all,” he added. …
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
I don't want to be my own boss when it comes to morality. I recognize the real world reasons for acting in a moral way. I don't see evidence for the unnecessary intermediary.
You don’t even understand that time itself ends at the end of this current millennium.
It must be Hell to wander around in the dark as you do.
Yehova’s love is in no way authoritarian; he will allow you to pick the Lake of Fire, and will send you strong delusion to assure the success of your choice.
I can’t know this, of course, but in looking back are you sure that none, no one, admitted up front that everything about God, or a supreme being, is about faith?
Some theists do admit that. Others claim that quantum mechanics and general relativity are scientific evidence for God.
Some theists say that evolution is antithetical to God; others claim that evolution PROVES God.
Some theists claim that God doesn't cause bad things to happen; others claim that God punishes the unjust in the real world.
Theists are absolutely all over the place. You ask 10 different random theists to describe God and you'll get 10 different answers. It's a situation that is inevitable when the majority of theists believe in the whole "personal God" concept. God can literally mean anything at any time to anyone, and when prompted on the inherent contradictions, some think that claiming "faith" solves the contradictions.
It doesn't for me though.
What evidence do you have for this?
And yes, compulsory love is authoritarian.
I agree with all of your conclusions, but people cannot simply choose to believe. Your logic is good, and perhaps if listened to, George Will may at some point believe.
Those of us who believe the Bible point to Ephesians 2:8: “By grace are you saved by faith, and that not of yourself, it is the gift of God.” We cannot even take credit for our own faith (and thus cannot blame those who have not (yet?) received that gift from God.
I don't think I would like the Lake of Fire, but I also don't like the idea of praising the Creator for trillions of years in a constant state of servitude.
I guess I'm fracked either way. Good thing there's no evidence for either.
I prefer Derbyshire because Will is low voltage.
OK. You have never read the Bible. Please stop lying. More proof of your not having read it is your “boil beef in milk” statement, which doesn’t appear anywhere in the text.
You certainly have never read the Koran either.
And your insistence on distorting words’ meanings bespeaks an agenda far beyond mere atheism.
The examples from that “Relevant” magazine are not of Christians.
The Hebrew midwives may not even have been lying; certainly Pharaoh could have checked out their story versus accepting it at face value—these were Hebrew women after all. Either way, Pharaoh changed his tactic afterwards, making a proclamation over all the people that all male babies had to be thrown into the Nile river.
Rahab was a Jebusite to boot, with little to no knowledge of Israelite religious law at the time she did what she did.
No, it’s a conflation of conclusion and argument. The conclusion might even be correct.
Your argument is not with me. I’m just a part of his creation.
Dying in front of a large number of atheists and polytheists and then coming back from the dead in front of large numbers of people is what did it for me. Good thing the Romans were such sticklers for records.
On the notion of many people having many different perspectives on God, this isn’t surprising.
I come from a family of two brothers. Our perspectives on my Dad are unique from each one of us.
Many have claimed they were God, or a god. Few had people predict it almost 700 years before it happen and then have it happen the way it did. You say you are going to die and come back, say you are going to do it so I can be with His Father, and then actually do it in front of large crowds of people, I’m probably going to believe you are who you say you are.
This, for me, is the evidence, and I believe it as it was written.
This man makes claims of an afterlife, and says that if I simply believe all of this is true, then I can keep my money and just die believing it and go to Heaven.
It is this claim that merited investigation. I am unconvinced of an internal locus of control, and of alien beings intervening, and of many other paths to ‘enlightenment’.
Christianity seemed the most ‘human’, in that the enlightenment comes to you. All that is asked if faith, not perfection, or alms, or even atonement.
Just faith.
As such, your relating how folks who believed in God tried to describe and justify it to you through KNOWLEDGE or FACT seemed, well, all too true, but way off the mark.
There are aspects of belief about God’s role in other things, such as the creation of all things, etc., that may touch on quantum mechanics, but its just speculation about other things that are, in the end, not that important.
Anyway, that there are folks out there like George Will explains the suicide rate being as high as it is. His attitude seems so Sartresque.
You are probably aware that CS Lewis and GK Chesterton were once great agnostics and went over to Christianity. It was Orwell that convinced Lewis before Orwell died at the tender age of 48.
It’s still not begging the question for me to not give you my detailed battle plans for dealing with a Bronze Age tribe.
Exactly. You’re a serf in an unalterable dictatorship. I don’t think there’s evidence the universe is set up that way.
“Bronze age” is a tenuous label, which at best implies a judgmental attitude towards perceived morals in a sweeping generalization. And again, neither of us were there.
BTW, George Will doesn’t reflect on all atheists; he’s a liberal that clearly leans towards socialism whether of the Fabian or Marx schools.
Well, there are no detailed accounts of the resurrection outside of the Bible, which themselves were written many years after. They also contradict each other in describing what happened when Jesus' followers returned to the tomb (Stone in place or stone rolled away, who was there at the tomb, where did Jesus first appear, etc.).
But let's leave that aside, let's take this point: "coming back from the dead in front of large numbers of people"
Why does resurrection make Christ a God? Lazarus was raised from the dead, as well as the part in Matthew 27 about the graves of Jerusalem opening up, and the bodies of the saints walking around the city and "appearing to many".
If the Romans were sticklers for documentation, why is there no mention whatsoever anywhere other than Matthew describing a zombie apocalypse of dead people walking around? Even in Matthew, it's just a few lines, and the passage itself makes resurrection somewhat pedestrian.
I am judgemental of Bronze Age morals, but that's because I live in the modern age and we've luckily figured a lot of this stuff out. I also don't have to pretend that these stories are timeless and by extension make all sorts of apologies for wicked acts, some commanded by God, in the OT.
We thankfully live in an age where child murder and genocide are not needed to sort out our problems, and our military thankfully takes into account collateral damage and liberates the woman and children of oppressed regimes, instead of slaughtering them.
This is what I love about theists. I give an overview of my philosophy, which is evidentiary skepticism and support for a terrestrial morality, and I'm accused of making selfish, tenuous claims.
Whereas the believer claims not only to KNOW there's a God, but which God is the real one. Not only that, they know the mind of God; they know what he wants. They know his plan, or at least claim they know he has a plan. They know his Son, they know his books. In fact, the believer actually claims to know the Creator on a personal level.
Oh, but the believer is humble. Yes, those are humble beliefs...
The Bible is, according to religious people, God's rules and lessons on morality... and it doesn't take time to speak a word against rape? Or child molesting? That's micro-managing? Listing the foods you can eat and how you can cook them is fine but it's a bit too MUCH to say "Don't rape virgins, widows, slaves, small children, etc..."?
No matter how you slice it, I am right about this and you are only defending your ludicrous stance because you're afraid if you admit I am making an excellent point you'll be forced to concede that the Muslim God is very much the god of the Old Testament, and that Muslims have just as much right as you do to claim that their book is their God-Given Objective Guide to Morality.
The three-age system is a quasi-modern notion with no real scientific or even archaelological basis. It was concocted by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (“Christian” is his first name, FTR) who based it on notions from Greek and Roman philosophers, Hesiod and Lucretius particularly. Certainly the Bible indicates antediluvian use of iron, attributed to Tubalcain; and King Og of Bashan was said to have had a bed of iron. Egypt is euphemistically referred to as an “iron furnace” in Deuteronomy 4:20.
BTW, the iron age is conceived as the point in human history when writing became most prevalent, whether with pictographic, logographic, syllabic or alphabetic writing systems. So perhaps you mean “iron age morals”?
I really see no difference between the morals of today and back then—or specifically, the lack of morals, because things are getting worse, not better (I’m aware that the humanist view is the opposite, but the evidence does not bear that out). Genocide is far more prevalent today than back then, and slavery is more prevalent worldwide than at any time in human history.
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