Posted on 01/26/2005 9:46:21 AM PST by 7thson
When I pulled into the parking lot this morning, I saw a car covered with sacrilegious bumper stickers. It seemed obvious to me that the owner was craving attention. I’m sure he was also seeking to elicit anger from people of faith. The anger helps the atheist to justify his atheism. And, all too often, the atheist gets exactly what he is looking for.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
"They could of said I have to die no getting out of it, I can choose to beleive I will spend eternity in the dirt or I can choose to beleive that GOD will catch me when I jump and will lead me with him in Paradise..It is a choice Mineral Man.
"
It would still make no difference in their decision whether to jump or burn. Would your deity not save them either way.
I would have the same decision to make if I were in that situation...to jump or burn. The consequences of each would be the same. I'd have no decision to make regarding believing in some deity or another, though. I disbelieve in all of them.
What I meant was that what a person believes determines their choices and actions in life. It is very powerful.
You rephrase my original thesis, more or less: atheists have no ability and possibly less need to glorify their worldview and the little need that they have is in the bumper sticker domain. When they get too obnoxious, force would be justified to enforce public decency.
> I don't think you know what a Christian is.
Turn it around: I don't think you know what an atheist is. I also don't think you know what *I* am.
> people don't trust atheists because your values aren't rooted in anything.
People may think that, but they'd be wrong.
> So they don't vote for people who espouse it.
People had a hard time voting for *Catholics.*
So are you telling me that if you had to make the decision to burn by fire or jump to your death your thought your mind is going to tell you "Well this is it, I am spending my eternity as dirt so which will be less painless fire or falling? if you do that, is that not a "CHOICE"?
So are you "guessing" when you believe in everything that is in the bible? Just curious - you accused me of guessing when it came to my world view, and I admitted to it. How about you?
That only by virtue of having bigger guns you can force people to cooperate with you? And your label of sociopaths may make you feel superior to them, but it doesn't fool me. They don't agree with your version of society? You don't agree with theirs. Why are they the sociopaths and not you?
As I said, it doesn't matter whether you call them your homeys or your police department, having stronger thugs on your side is the way you survive. If the police were on their side you WOULD be the sociopath by definition.
The fullest evidence that Darwin is against our social structure is that all similar structures in the animal kingdom are also maintained by force. The strong survive and the strong should survive. Only when the girlie-men of western civilization understand this will we be able to guarantee our survival against the barbaric forces arrayed against us. But I doubt we will. Greater civilizations than ours have fallen into that same feel good trap.
Shalom.
Hello A-G! It seems you have thrown down the gauntlet: This is a most incisive list of questions designed to challenge the most fundamental assumptions of the metaphysical naturalists out there. Well done!
Of course, not every metaphysical naturalist is an atheist (the theme of this thread). Many are simply agnostic. But if anyone will seriously consider these questions, they may find they are able to broaden their perspectives thereby. To anyone but an atheist, these are not "dangerous questions."
I often wonder about the psychology of atheism, what motivates it, and what atheists hope to achieve/obtain from it. I guess in the end, atheists somehow believe that God is dangerous in some way to their personal well-being (however understood). But this strikes me as being an absolute inversion of natural truth. Still, inverted truth seems to have many champions these days. I wouldn't know how else to explain a Michael Newdow, a Richard Lewontin, a Noam Chomsky, et al., than that they are "inverted" (unnatural) people, trying to invert the world into a "more pleasing shape." (E.g., as much unlike the one God "shaped" as possible.... FWIW
I also think you're right to call atheism a "religion" -- an inverted one, an ersatz one, to be sure; but a religion nonetheless. Methinks it is a religion devoted to the worship, not of God, but of "Me." Thanks for this great post!
Since GOD gave me Free Will a Brain and a Bible I beleive through GOD's word his promises and through prayers I will spend eternity with him.
GOD is not a guessing game to me I talk to him in prayer he answers me, I believe in Jesus Christ and as a human being I don't try to figure out the Mystery of GOD and his ultimate plans however the world has been around alot longer than I have and will be after I am long gone, I choose to beleive I will continue to live even after my body dies and decay's not out of "wishful thinking" but what GOD says about life death and eternity.
This is a common misunderstanding of the First Amendment. Rather than getting theoretical over it, let me remind you that public decency laws were upheld till very recently in this country by judges that understood the Constitution far better than the current bunch.
sorry, I misunderstood your experience.
I would contend that you didn't actually die -- that your soul never actually left your body.
Have you considered that?
(I realize that you may not even believe you have a soul. I will just assert that a "blank" experience is a rather shaky prop for your beliefs.)
But this statement is absurd, tort!!! The hypotheses we humans construct re: the reality or the unreality of God can never be the measure or test of God. His reality does not depend in any way on human will or desire to prove or disprove His "existence." In other words, the ancient insight continues to be valid (and perennially so, it seems to me): Man is not the measure.
"So are you telling me that if you had to make the decision to burn by fire or jump to your death your thought your mind is going to tell you "Well this is it, I am spending my eternity as dirt so which will be less painless fire or falling? if you do that, is that not a "CHOICE"? "
Of course it's a choice. The only difference is that I won't be thinking about some mythical "eternity." I'll be thinking about which would be the most painless death. I'd guess it would be buy jumping, but I'm not in that situation.
I would not be thinking about some choice regarding an afterlife I don't believe exists, just about the immediate situation. You might be thinking about different things than I did.
In fact, each individual in the towers who had to make such a decision had his or her own things to think about. There were Christians, Jews, Moslems, atheists, and probably Buddhists, Shintos, Jains, and Hindus in that building, each facing death. Each had a different way of looking at the situation, I'm sure.
The Hindu might wonder what he was going to be reincarnated as. You might wonder what your "Heaven" was going to be like, just as the Muslim might wonder about his "Paradise." The Buddhist...well, who knows what the Buddhist would be wondering?
The point is that everyone has some sense of the meaning of death. Yours is one sense, based on your belief in Christianity. Perhaps you can imagine no other way of thinking...I don't know. But, I can tell you that the Hindu wouldn't be thinking about Jesus, nor would followers of any of the other religions.
Yours is just one of the religions followed by human beings. Each religion answers the same questions in its own way. You, naturally, believe that yours is the correct belief, but so do the others. For each of them, the beliefs give them some apparent understanding of the meaning of life and death.
For atheists, life and death are simply life and death. It's just another way of looking at the same thing. You believe one thing...others believe otherwise. I'm afraid you simply have to accept that.
I admit, strictly speaking, to lumping weak atheists into the agnostic category, but appreciate the finer distinction of how open their mind might be to the possibility of a supreme being.
Agree completely with your definition of a strong atheist. It is my conjecture and experience that many in this category have experienced deeply traumatic experiences in their life that lead them to conclude that God can't exist, or that if He does, then He's evil for having allowed the trauma to be perpetrated on them in the first place. Their denial of God's existence is more emotional than objective.
"When they get too obnoxious, force would be justified to enforce public decency.
"
Uffda! So, if they say something you don't like, blasphemy, for example, you feel justified in using force to stop them.
If my hypothetical bumper sticker said: "There is no God...damn it!" you'd feel justified in using force to stop me from saying that?
Sorry, annalex, that' ain't American.
This is a really nifty retort, tort; and would work really well if human beings lived only in their own minds, and not in their bodies, their emotional life, their connections to communities and environment, etc., etc. -- IOW, in contexts that are not limited to mental abstractions or the intellelctual life.
But they don't.
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