Posted on 06/22/2009 5:33:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Do you believe in God? Really? And you're willing to admit it in public?
Oops. Sorry, for a moment I slipped back into the arrogant Atheism of my youth.
Before my parents had children, they decided to raise their kids in a secular home. We had gifts at Christmas time and chocolate covered matzoh during Passover, but there was no religion and certainly no God.
When I was in grade school, God was just a kind of nondescript character who popped up in Little House on the Prairie books from time to time. He seemed like a decent enough fellow, but was more or less a bit player who didn't have much to say.
After my grandfather died when I was seven, his Baptist minister lifted me up in his arms and told me, "It's all right, Grandpa's with God now." At that moment, I could feel my dress was hiked up in the back and all I could think about was pulling it back down. But later, I asked around and discovered that God was our Heavenly father, whatever that was supposed to mean.
I figured, who better to ask about my Heavenly father than my earthly father, but when I did he laughed.
He wasn't amused in a "kids say the darnedest things" kind of way. He was laughing derisively at the idea that my mother's family believed in God. And thus began my introduction to Atheism.
There are people who call themselves atheist who are simply nonbelievers, and then there are the big "A" Atheists for whom Atheism is almost a religion. This quasi-religious doctrine isn't neutral on the existence of other religions; rather, Atheism is a virulently anti-theistic creed characterized by sneering contempt for religion and a profoundly dogmatic bigotry toward people of faith.
Want to know how Atheists see the rest of us?
I grew up learning from my father that Atheism is rational, and therefore, religious belief is irrational; Atheism is defined by logic, religious faith by fantasy; and science is real while religion is make believe. Faith, I was taught, requires a willful stifling of reason.
The Torah, the Gospels, the Qur'an? All woefully inaccurate, laughably inconsistent fictions used to encourage belief in an illusion for the purpose of social control.
My curiosity in religion surfaced again in seventh grade when several of my friends were planning Bat Mitzvahs. Surely my friends weren't ignorant enough to actually believe in God, were they? The answer was no. For most of these Reform Jews, this celebration marked the official end to the tedium of Hebrew school. Most of their families were Ethical Culturists with a recreational interest in preserving their Jewish cultural identity. In other words, they too were Atheists.
By the time I reached high school, having had little contact with religion, I was convinced that people of faith were credulous and unenlightened. They gravitated toward soothing tales of God and afterlife to help them deal with their own mortality. At best, I considered belief in God an anachronism, a quaint vestige of days gone by, on par with superstitions about wicked thoughts causing birth defects.
At my extremely liberal college, I was exposed to even more militant Atheism. It was there that I learned the mere whiff of religiosity is worthy of denigration. Many of the people I met approached religion with something between disdain and loathing, and considered all religious belief a form of fanaticism. Christians in particular were characterized as knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing fundies (and that was in polite company.)
Fortunately my mother taught me enough manners that I kept my bias to myself.
In this new environment, my Atheism was more than evidence of good reasoning, it was a socially desirable badge of intellectual superiority. Make no mistake: Atheists think they're smarter than you. Atheism isn't simple skepticism. It is a certainty that believers are wrong, and by extension, intellectually inferior. Religion, especially Judeo-Christian religion, is nothing more than a crutch for dupes.
But Atheists aren't content to leave religion as a mere object of ridicule. They want it cleansed from public life. And enlightened as they are, they've come up with quite the pretense for justifying the righteousness of their bigotry: they are defending the vision of our Founding Fathers from a dominionist conspiracy to establish Christianity as the state religion.
You see, for liberal Atheists, the only thing worse than religion is the Religious Right, a term they use to encompass all Christian conservatives. And what better way to siphon fuel from the Religious Right than to convince Americans that the government is perpetually on the verge of becoming a theocracy?
And so, they accuse local governments of trampling the Constitution in the name of God and they find subliminal Christian iconography in political ads. They wring new meanings from Thomas Jefferson's notion of separation between church and state, and condemn our country's motto and the status of Christmas as a national holiday. But above all, Atheists stoke fear among religious and nonreligious alike that conservatives view government as a tool to force religion down your throat.
Pope-slandering buffoon Bill Maher, something of a patron saint among Atheists, has called religion "the ultimate hustle." Last fall, Maher's fellow liberal Chris Matthews, a self-described Catholic, roundly criticized Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for talking about prayer in a "secular environment" and complained that she made the Republican Party look more like a church tent than a big tent. In March, Matthews complained, "Why does everything sound like the '700 Club' with this Party now?" Such examples of anti-religious bias can be found every day on cable news, network television, and in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.
As my politics strayed right of center after college, I realized I wanted no part of that Maher/Matthews worldview based in elitism and the ridicule of others. I made the transition from Atheist to atheist to agnostic, and have since discovered why it is often said that religion is experiential.
There was a time when I would have preferred any manner of torture to admitting the possibility of a higher power. These days, I'm proud to say I lost my faith in the Atheist creed.
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Jenn Q. Public writes about news, politics, and the seedy underbelly of liberalism at JennQPublic.com.
Man has ever sought to be the highest authority there is; and our leaders give us a good example of how corrupt people with power become. Everywhere.
Temptation to be self aggrandizing, selfish, greedy, ruthless comes to the fore in many leaders of the present, and the past.
We do not truly understand our own mind, the subconscious mind, our yearnings, our drive.
Truth of God is all around us. It is in a cell, a drop of water. There is a purpose to life, and it is other than simple self gratification. An Atheist does not want to get outside their own “smarts”
We are free to choose our faith ... be it in god or be it in yourself.
Refusal to look at wonder and miracles, birth, healing, without a mind already clinched to believe only in self, is indeed the plan of the Devil. JMO.
Turn to God in genuine seeking ... realizing ones own sins, and with repentance of our sins in our heart and invite God into your heart, and be sincere.
God will change you forever.. in the name of Jesus our Lord and Savior. Amen. We have a hope and a joy! You can too.
At base the acceptance/belief in this thought is the barrier to getting outside atheism. It is not a true idea. However, your believing it makes it true for you. Liberalism is the same way ... it is a religion ... to those that have accepted that view. that does not make it true. Much like the flat earth belief in former times.
Read your Bible. God will meet you there. His Word is living. It will call you to Him.
Have you spent time reading the Bible ... that is what you currently disdain?
Do not call atheism rational or logical ... simply because someone told you it was and you believed it.
God help us in our day. Amen.
Well, what proof is there that God exists? E=MC2 perhaps?
Anyway, Man attempting to comprehend the Divine is like explaining inflight meals to a fish, or the parable of the 8 blind men encountering an elephant.
Anyway, theology discussions make me giggle, make my eyes red and give me the munchies.
Yes. More or less. It's the evolution of superior intelligence and the invention of culture that separated us somewhat from the animals, but we are capable of getting back there in the wild just as comfortably as the animals are, and you know it. A mere veil separates civilization from the jungle.
Watch these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oVhopPjTNg
And
I didn’t understand your bit about one canceling out the other. Which one is canceling which other?
***That doesn’t really answer the question unless you consider mankind as just another species scrabbling in the dirt.
Yes. More or less. It’s the evolution of superior intelligence and the invention of culture that separated us somewhat from the animals, but we are capable of getting back there in the wild just as comfortably as the animals are, and you know it. A mere veil separates civilization from the jungle. ***
And that veneer (rather than veil) is morality. Humans can show the advanced behaviour of mercy; God is Mercy and Love; animals are not. They have varying levels of instincts, but not deliberate mercy and love. Are you postulating that evolution is not a line, but rather quantum leaps in which different levels of existence are experienced?
***Watch these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oVhopPjTNg
And
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpYRITtLSg&feature=related***
I would ask you to tell me about them; no access to FR at work and dialup at home.
***I didn’t understand your bit about one canceling out the other. Which one is canceling which other?***
You previously made a statement to the effect that one religion’s claims cancels out another’s. Therefore I brought up an analogy which to me amounts to the same level of error that your statement has.
That is what I didn’t understand. How does your analogy work?
The videos, one is about a dog that sees another dog hit by a car on the highway, and then uses its forelimbs to grip the injured animal to drag it to the safety of the kerb. The video was caught by CCTV surveillance cameras, in Chile.
The other is about a leopard finding an infant chimp in the carcass of its mother, and the leopard begins to look after it. This video, was from the National Geographic.
***That is what I didn’t understand. How does your analogy work?***
As most analogies do.
However; your claim that opposing claims from different theologies cancel each other out is nonsense. If something is correct, it doesn’t matter that a million other theories or postulations contest it. It is still correct.
Fair enough. I thought Christ was the “only” way...
***Fair enough. I thought Christ was the “only” way...***
The Way, the Truth and the Life. His Way, the Via of Christ, was given to us by Him in the entity of His Church.
It would be nice to have your perspective, but I’m skeptical about these things, and have always been so. Maybe you are ‘wired’ differently.
***It would be nice to have your perspective, but I’m skeptical about these things, and have always been so. Maybe you are ‘wired’ differently.***
I’m wired as an engineer.
I look at Scripture and what it says. It coincides with the Church and it differs with the various Protestant denominations, who all differ from each other. Okay, I’m good with the Church; I am really really good with BXVI, who just may go down as the first Church Doctor in nearly a millennium.
**Over on the religion forum, I get the same self righteousness from people because I’m Catholic. It’s the “you haven’t read scripture like I have” tone. No matter how many references one posts, they are better.**
It’s happened to me too.
“Be not afraid. Have faith.” — Words from today’s Gospel.
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