Posted on 08/01/2006 12:42:58 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
God is good. I had no upbringing in any faith either and God reached down and grabbed me too. I am so eternally grateful and humbled by His love for me.
Exactly. He gave us all these senses to experience things. You forgot sex though. I'd put that on in place of beer, or coffee. I would add pizza though. Oh, and music alone is reason to believe in God.
Silverback isn't an atheist.
Oops, correction: "nuclear physicist" not physician
My dear MineralMan, for whom I have such esteem: your statement is not true.
"For us men, and for our salvation, He came down from heaven." He made Himself seeable, hearable, touchable. He made Himself physical evidence.
I invite you to look at Post 36 on this thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1675922/posts
I don't expect you to thwap your forehead and say, "Aha! I agree!" I just want you see that "the very nature of a supernatural entity is that there is no physical evidence of it," which you suppose to be self-evident, practically a tautology, is quite mistaken.
ping...
http://www.ffrf.org/foxholes/
http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/ath/blathm_urb_foxholes.htm
http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/;_ylt=AlyvVcBHgMc17kCM4SumEJLpFQx.?qid=1006053112726
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/133061.htm
http://www.atheistfoxholes.org/about.php
(from the last) Would God even want people to believe merely because they were under great pressure and very afraid? Can such a faith lead to a life of faith and love which is supposed to be the foundation of religions like Christianity? Is the claim that there are no atheists in foxholes meant to imply that atheists aren't "really" disbelievers and actually harbor a secret belief in God? Perhaps, but it is a false implication and can't be taken seriously. Is it meant to imply that atheism is inherently "weak" while theism represents "strength?" Once again, that may be the case - but it would also be a false implication.
Besides, even if it were true that there were no atheists in foxholes, that's not an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes.
Not a compelling argument for a divine creation given that there are quite probably trillions of planets in the universe.
There's approximately 80 billion galaxies with an approximate 400 billion stars each. 32 sextillion stars. How many planets?
So how do you explain the other non-Atheist ideologies/countries during the 20th century, not murdering tens of millions of people as did the Atheist ones? Checkmate.
I agree. I might also point out that Jesus is fundamentally different from the gods described by MineralMan as merely a projection of human rules for societal order; Jesus came not to give or enforce laws, but to save us from ourselves and spare us from punishment for breaking the rules.
"Since there are, and have been, so many of these deities, which one is the correct one? The answer is that it is whichever one is the dominant deity of your own culture."
The trouble with that thinking is that there are people willing to forego the easy path of believing in "the dominant deity of [their] culture" and believe in someone else. E.g. people in Muslim or Hindu countries who risk or suffer death rather that abandon their conversion to Christianity, or the early Christians who accepted martyrdom to the Romans. Kind of hard to rationalize that with your utilitarian "explanation" of religion.
BTT
Have you read anything seriously, systematically, or in depth about the ordinary rules of historical evidence?
What's your point?
A little Googling with keywords like C.S. Lewis, pagan, myth shows up some v-e-r-y interesting things.
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