Posted on 07/17/2009 5:37:12 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Well I must say, I had a great time reading the comments, critiques and insults that came in after my last post with its modest attempt to define "atheism". In particular, many self-described atheists took umbrage to my claim that atheism is denial of the proposition that God exists. (Apparently my smarmy attitude was also ripe for verbal assault.)
One of my most spirited opponents drew comparisons between belief in God and unicorns as he/she asked: "do you believe in unicorns? Can you disprove the existence of unicorns?" The idea, presumably, is that belief in unicorns and God are equivalent. Thus, if belief in unicorns is irrational then so is belief in God (bad news for the theist). And if disbelief in unicorns is the rational position for the average person on the street then so is disbelief in God (good news for the atheist).
This is an important comparison to consider, but in doing so I am going to switch from unicorns to Santa Claus since the latter (being a concrete individual rather than a type of thing) is a closer parallel to God. So the question: is belief in Santa Claus like belief in God?
First, let's begin to address the question in the manner of Thomas Aquinas, by giving our opponent as fair a shake as possible:
So here we go. Picture yourself a manager at Walmart interviewing a potential employee to work in the warehouse. "Alfred" seems to be a well-adjusted intelligent twenty-five year old who has solid work experience and references, Thus you are inclined to hire him. Then you notice his Rolex watch and you offer a compliment. "Nice watch Alfred."
"Thanks," he replies, "Santa gave it to me." You pause, wait for the punchline, and then slowly, with growing trepidation, you realize that he is deathly serious.
You swallow nervously as Alfred watches you intently. "Santa?" you ask in a futile attempt to sound nonchalant. A bead of sweat rolls down your brow.
"Yes," Alfred replies. "I was very good last year. Santa loves me, and he watches everything we do. So you can trust me Mr. Manager."
Okay, would you hire Alfred even after he confessed belief in Santa Claus? At the very least wouldn't you be at least be less inclined to hire him in light of that belief? You might concede Alfred's point that believing Santa is watching over him will make him more likely to be honest and hard working. But would that potential positive byproduct of his belief be sufficient to allay your concerns?
With that in mind, let's replay the last exchange:
"Nice watch Alfred."
"Thanks. The Lord provided it as an answer to prayer."
Many people would view the invocation of God as much less threatening or epistemologically questionable than invocation of Santa Claus. Indeed, many would be positively encouraged to hear the invocation of God. But if it appears irrational to ascribe the acquisition of the watch to Santa Claus, why is it not equally irrational to ascribe it to God? In short, what makes the Christian any more rational than Alfred?
You really need to separate the physical world from the spiritual to even begin to understand. Doing good to ease suffering and pain is very noble, but what about your spirit?
From another person, a while ago:
Well, God decided that he was incapable of forgiving us without a blood sacrifice. So, to protect us from himself, he sent the human version of himself to appease himself by sacrificing himself to himself to save us from himself.
What doesn’t make sense about that?
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To show the absurdity of your argument in your comment above, let’s have a thought experiment, shall we?
Suppose you have a fertilized human egg, destined to result in one individual. Say you use the tools of science to cleave this fertilized egg just prior to the blastocyst stage (which is when identical twins are formed by chance). Now, through artifical intervention, what was to become one, is now more than one. Did Jesus die for the other, human-intervention based individuals too? Human cloning is going to mess up all those arguments, and badly too.
How is the egg destined to become one individual when it ends up being two? :). Not a serious question really, but an observation.
But regardless, yes Jesus died for every human being. As Christians are non-materialists (and believe in a Spirit) there’s nothing science can do to alter that.
Oh, LOL, the same old "simple people" argument. The Muslims believe that Muhammad, the illiterate simpleton, spat out the Quran, too. All 6236 verses of it.
And then followed the Islamic empire. Funny how manipulation and imagination can drive empires to be built, eh? O Byzantine Empire, I'm looking at you!
These people went to death willingly to pursue (in your thought) a made up man. No one does that.
Oh, really? Take a look at this: http://vimeo.com/5409826
You are pretty naive when it comes to what you think people can be willing to die for.
No one died for mythological characters.
Say that to the Sikhs, whose gurus were boiled in oil for their beliefs, merely 300-odd years ago.
If you take a human zygote, and cleave it just before the blastocyst stage, the two or more cleaved segments will result in as many multiple, identical individuals.
So, Jesus died for a cloned human, too?
Yes He did. Again, Christians are not materialists — they believe each person has a spirit and that regardless of a person’s physical makeup their spirit is unique.
That’s your belief. Nothing scientific to back that up, as much as there’s nothing scientific, or as evidence, to back your claim of the divinity of Jesus.
Isn’t it absurd to reconcile with that thought experiment? Because now I am going to twist it. Say the embryo was not merely human, but rather, a hybrid of a man and a pig. Will this individual be saved, too? Hybrids, for now, can survive upto the blastocyst stage, by the way. In the future, perhaps longer. But they are clearly hybrid, and clearly alive.
I probably should have been more clear. No one who would be in the position to know if the man-God really claimed what He claimed goes down and dies when they know *wink-wink* that He never claimed such a thing.
Now they may have been deluded into thinking it was true when He was a liar, but that’s not the argument I mean to present.
Those who are separated from the man-God may believe it — but they are not in the same position to believe whether or not He actually said such a thing.
And contrast with other evangelical religions — the goal of Christianity was not originally empire building (hard to do when your founder tells you to pray for and bless your enemies) but to save the lost.
And also, Muhammad never claimed to be God but a prophet of God, something lots of people have claimed over the years.
I’ve actually had some fun with this back and forth, but duty to my family calls (3 children :-) ) so I will probably not be back online today. Hope you have a blessed day!
You have nothing scientific to back up your disbelief in a human spirit. Science, by the way, is based on a multitude of “facts” that one “believes” to be true until a new theory comes out.
Islam claims something similar too. It's funny though, that they all lead to empire, ultimately.
No one who would be in the position to know if the man-God really claimed what He claimed goes down and dies when they know *wink-wink* that He never claimed such a thing. Now they may have been deluded into thinking it was true when He was a liar, but that’s not the argument I mean to present.
Could you please elaborate this, please? I didn't understand one bit of it.
As for claiming divinity, again, you need to rely on the Gospels, which is not exactly what one could use as reliable historical fact. They were all built, written and compiled, in and by the minds of mere, mortal men.
You are using one myth, to "prove" another.
And that brings me back to that John Adams quote again- why were some of the gospels destroyed?
You have nothing scientific to back up your BELIEF in a human spirit. Science itself doesn’t. And won’t.
The assumption is we are discussing born again Christians.
Like I said...there is nothing scientific to backup your disbelief either...so science is really not helping anything here. Why were you talking about it in the first place? LOL.
There’s a moment just before you awake when you are neither here nor there, suspended in both space and time, the sleeping mind shifts gears and begins to breathe with vigor once more; that interlude, that gap in reality is where the spirit, the soul, the “I” in “me” decides today’s fate.
If the gears fail to mesh and the clock winds down, we’re no less the loser either way.
As a Christian, I can say with authority that nothing about Christ makes sense. He did not make sense to his closest disciples who walked with him for three years, he did not make sense to the authorities of his time and he did not make sense to those who witnessed his death until the Holy Spirit touched them:
Here is the first time Peter went public and it was after the Holy Spirit entered there lives: Acts 2:22"Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. 23This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men,[d] put him to death by nailing him to the cross. 24But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.
The reason you cannot understand is because to someone untouched by the Holy Spirit all of this is foolishness:
1 Corinthians 2:14 The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
You friend are at this moment spiritually discerned. There was a time when I was like you, I understand. Although God has not opened your eyes to these things, it doesn't mean they don't exist or that you will always be blind to them.
And that brings me back to that John Adams quote again- why were some of the gospels destroyed?
This seems to be a major issue for you. If the four Gospels we use today, which are traced back to within decades of Christs death, are sufficient to understand the nature of Christ and his ministry, why do we need more? Let me use an example. Color TV uses three colors to represent a picture and when we add time by using multiple pictures in sequence, we have all we need to reproduce a movie. We don't need anything more than these 4 basic things to produce the movie on TV. Likewise, we don't need anything more than the 4 gospels plus the Holy Spirit to understand Christ's ministry and life. Why carry around 50 books when 4 do nicely?
You might be implying that the 50 books would convincingly contradict what the other 4 say. If that were even remotely possible, they would have come in very handy by those in authority in the early christian era's when the authorities used Christians for lion food and human torches to light the streets with.
Further, each generation has its share of skeptics and Christian haters who are capable of raising the objections to the original gospels. The arguments are many and are not unknown to any mature Christian. We know what the objections are to Christ. These Gospels have withstood the test of generations of skeptics and critics.
Also, don't for a minute think you are aware of objections, theories etc that believers have not studied or discussed themselves. In fact the original gospel writers know the objections. They wrote to an audience of skeptics in real time. The original audience was alive to them because they were their family and friends. The Gospels address answers to those objections. One is written to answer the objections to Jewish people, one is written to answer objections by Gentiles. One is written to address Jesus as God. One is written to address Jesus as man. One is written to address Jesus as King. All together they provide a 4 dimensional view of Christ.
An atheist is like the guy who digs in his backyard, finds nothing, then proudly proclaims to the world, “THERE IS NO OIL!”
LOL, I agree.
But isn’t the burden of proof on the one claiming the existence of the non-tangible spirit? If I said instead of one “spirit”, every individual would release a number of “spiritlets” after death, there is no way you can contradict me, by your own logic regarding the existence of the single spirit. When we deal with the realm of the absurd, anything goes. Zero multiplied by any integer, is zero.
I don’t know what exactly you are referring to, but the human brain paralyses the voluntary muscles of the body during REM sleep, so that the body doesn’t “act out” dreams. Theories about this phenomenon include natural selection having determined this trait because when human ancestors slept in trees or in areas with high predation rates, sudden movements in sleep rendered them susceptible to death by fall, or by being devoured while unconscious.
As the brain begins to permit voluntary control again during waking, sometimes you can experience a frightful phenomenon wherein you are aware that you are awake, but can’t move a limb by even an inch. It’s called Sleep Paralysis.
Then, there are times when a person just stubbornly refuses to engage...because it's seen as an intrusion.
There is nothing for me to prove to a speck of dust that is void of destiny. Sorry for the gap in time. Nature calls.
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