Atheism is to Never Have to Say Please or Thank You

THE RANT.US ^ | DECEMBER 18, 2004 | "MR. SMITH"

[wardaddy]

dang Beavus....you went way over my head there.

did you take some 5 or 600 level logic course at the university?

[Psycho_Bunny]

How does melding two informal fallacies in your first post jive with your concept of enlightened "point-counter-point".  Your prattle is boorish and transparent.

[beavus]

dang Beavus....you went way over my head there. did you take some 5 or 600 level logic course at the university?

Maybe. Shall I rephrase it for you?

[april15Bendovr]

I have been a hospital worker for 20 years and it always amazes me how many people are rediscovering God right before they die.

[beavus]

How does melding two informal fallacies in your first post jive with your concept of enlightened "point-counter-point". Your prattle is boorish and transparent.

I used no fallacies with regard to my original point, to which you still have not responded. Not all insults are ad hominems, and not all tu quoques are undeserved.

One snide remark about creeps deserves another, but the original point still remains untarnished if you can ever find it within yourself to rise above nastiness and engange in thoughtful debate.

[Richard-SIA]

I work most "holidays", and being self employed I never get extra pay.

Funny how Gov. Org. workers get EVERY holiday day off, and often the day before or after.

So much for that separation thing....

[Zeroisanumber]

Religious Americans have long taken the "you go to your church and I'll go to mine" approach to religious tolerance,

Some do, some don't.

but atheists can NOT tolerate religion

Some do, some don't. Personally, I don't care if you tear the floorboards out of your house and swing from the rafters, just so long as no one gets hurt.

[ROTB]

>>If God does not exist, then giving 10% of your income to a
>>Christian cause, will yield no blessing. If God does
>>exist, then giving 10% of your income to a Christian
>>cause, will yield a BIG blessing.

>I think this is an interesting conjecture that should be
>discussed. I give money and food and other items and also
>my time directly to people in need in my community and area
>(I never give to organized charities because of the waste
>factor and I want to know exactly who is getting the help)
>but I don't do so because of any reason of religious faith.
>It is simply that if everyone habitually acted this way
>there would be no more hunger and destitution anywhere and
>I would be a hypocrite if I "preached" such a policy and
>didn't practice it myself.

>I'm assuming by the word "blessing" that you mean a gift,
>literally, from God.

"blessing" = Ber-aw-haw (Strong's 1293)
1) blessing
2) (source of) blessing
3) blessing, prosperity
4) blessing, praise of God
5) a gift, present
6) treaty of peace

Plausibly yes.

>If so, then I guess giving to others
>in need will not bring blessings to the giver who has no
>faith, yet it is a certainty that the people in need do, in
>fact benefit and that is the whole point, isn't it?

Indeed, people in need do benefit in the name of Jesus Christ, and He is given rightful glory under such circumstances.

Bottom line is this:

1) God loves you (John 3:16)
2) God wants you to believe in and follow His Son, so that you can have eternal life (John 14:6)
3) God executes justice (Genesis 18:19)
4) God is righteous (1 John 2:1)
5) God demands faith (Mark 5:36)
6) God rewards faith in giving (Luke 6:38)

If you give to poor people in the name of Jesus Christ 10% of your income that they may eat and be clothed, and you are seeking righeousness, and not actively ...

1) running/working for the mafia
2) beating your wife
3) lying as a matter of policy (etc)

... and you're paying attention to the possibility of God existing, and trying to honestly weigh it, then He will bless you in obvious ways, so that you may come to a saving faith in His Son.

If you can scrape together enough faith to not dismiss the possibility of God existing, such that you are willing to give 10% in the name of Jesus Christ, God will reward your honest skepticism.

Guy Cramer, claims in http://yfiles.com/sign.htm that God revealed Himself to him, when he responded to God in faith. Your giving money in the name of Jesus Christ would be such an act of faith.

I belong to a ministry/mission that helps the barely clothed/fed. I would be happy to forward your tithe to the same person I give mine to, and she will make sure it gets into the hands of poor people in the name of Jesus Christ.

I realize that at a certain level, it is crass for me to volunteer as an avenue for your money, given there are so many places you can give money in the name of Jesus that will only wind up in some rich guy's pocket, or spent for an un-needed new building. I also realize that a person watching this conversation could say that I am linking your salvation/blessing to giving to the ministry I give to.

So knowing this, I am happy to speak with you on the phone, continue this conversation via private email, even meet with you halfway (we'll meet in Kansas if you are in NY, since I am in San Diego) so we can talk at length in person.

Hope this answers your question,

[ROTB]

>It's hard to tell what that book has to say since the
>website doesn't even offer one example quote.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3880.asp?vPrint=1

These 99 quotes are not representative of the 3000+, but they are a nice running start.

>But I can
>tell you that it is not a good idea to rely only on books
>and websites like this for your information.

If you're trying to infer that they have an agenda, I agree. They do. But the atheists also have an agenda:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
Richard Lewontin
Geneticist, Marxist
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9711/johnson.html

>They are
>telling you what you want to hear. The fact is that the
>big bang and evolution are both virtually universely
>accepted in the scientific community because as millions
>of new facts are discovered they fit
>within these existing frameworks.

I'm holding the 3000+ atheist quote book in my hand. I may not read everything cover-to-cover, as per this book, especially since I satisfied myself with it's 120 quote $3 cousin found at http://shop4.gospelcom.net/epages/AIGUS.storefront/en/product/10-2-035 but I at least read enough to get a feel for it.

Here are two quotes from page 30:

Few cosmologists today would dispute the view that our expanding universe began with a bang -- a big, hot bang -- about 18 billion years ago. Paradoxically, no cosmologist could tell you how the Big Bang -- the explosion of a superhot, superdense atom -- ultimately gave rise to galaxies, stars, and other cosmic lumps.

As one sky scientist, IBM's Philip E. Seiden, put it, 'The standard Big Bang model does not give rise to lumpiness. That model assumes the universe started out as a globally smooth, homogenous expanding gas. If you apply the laws of physics to this model, you get a universe that is uniform, a cosmic vastness of evenly distributed atoms with no organization of any kind.
Ben Patrusky
"Why is the Cosmos 'Lumpy'?
Science-81(June 1981) p.96

The $3 book with 120 quotes also has many like quotes by atheist scientists who were deemed publishable.

If a C14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely 'out of date', we just drop it.
T. Save-Soderbergh and I.U. Olsson

...yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.
Stephen Jay Gould

>Also Newton was a very complicated guy. He had both
>rational and irrational aspects to his thinking.

True. Despite his daily study of the Bible, he had some wierdness like attempts at alchemy. But Christianity rests on the Bible, not on any believer.

Jesus loves you, and hopes you will allow Him to pay your sin debt to the Father, by believing in, and following Him, and believing the blood He spilled on the cross washes away your sins.

Let me know if I can be of further service to you in this regard.

[xJones]

I have been a hospital worker for 20 years and it always amazes me how many people are rediscovering God right before they die.

I know what you mean, and I'm praying about my mother-in-law who is in very poor health, and is actually reading the Bible for the first time that any of her children can ever remember. Her brother was a devout Christian and prayed for her for 50 years until his death. She was fiercely independent, though, and contemptuous of "all those hypocrtial Christians" (not meaning her good brother) until her health started failing last August.