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To: Injun_Ear_Danny

Re-read Ecclesiastes if you are so inclined. It makes any argument regarding living without God better than I can. You can smell the desert after a rain with or without a relationship with God. But it’s all vanity, worthless, in that the bad man as well as the good can do the same and the action is of no consequence or effect. The next moment you will smell something else not as sweet. You live and die as do all others and “the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.”

Without God there is void and no meaning. You have an existential or epicurian existence only which offers little joy or strength when it is needed most and no hope.

My point above was a little different. Without God, the world is deterministic. You are born with this physical nature, that collection of genetic characteristics, and the world acts on you. If your being is defined by the physical who and what is responsible — how can there be any responsibility in a moral sense — you are an automaton reacting to stimulus. There is no you beyond the chemicals released in your body and in your brain in reaction to that stimulus. It’s like putting cars in jail, or computers in time out. They are just things. Mechanical. With spiritual discernment, a soul, God, the supernatural you are not locked into a material, physical, deterministic life. The free will that we all experience as a given fact in our lives is real and not artificially constrained by a material construct or philosophy. The political left in its materialism tends to say essentially regarding many criminals, “be lenient, he is not responsible because of a poor upbringing.” In a material worldview they are right.


523 posted on 12/18/2007 1:51:19 PM PST by Greg F (Duncan Hunter is a good man.)
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To: Greg F
Without God, the world is deterministic.

Perhaps you mean "Without the Christian God" or even better--"Without MY Christian God".

Look, I believe in a God. I believe in a creator. But I don't believe that a religion that necessitates people to profess it as the one true religion can't be. I subscribe to spiritual thought much like something Morpheus talked about in "The Matrix 2":

Commander Locke: Damnit Morpheus, not everyone believes what you believe. Morpheus: My beliefs don't require them to.
548 posted on 12/18/2007 2:06:16 PM PST by Injun_Ear_Danny
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