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.
>>Like I said before, what you are willing to risk for your faith is directly indicative of how much you truly believe in your god-entity.<<
Yup, just what the article talks about.
We have no need to fit into your box.
Now, instead of talking about Christians, how about talking about the article? So far, you have proved it correct.
When Stalin murders for political power, you can’t blame that on atheists who are merely unwilling to believe that a being floating in the sky is there for the well-being of all.
Atheism is not believing in imaginary beings. Full-stop.
Only divine intervention can convince them otherwise.
Christ's command was to love God with all your heart soul and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself. Evangelicals (and Mormons) argue the Great Commission applies to all. Catholics say it's more of an institutional thing noting that the Lord's command was given to the 11 Apostles.
We are all supposed to witness, of course, and none may be ashamed.
And I've noticed on every FR thread concerning atheism, religionists cannot (or choose not) to understand the atheist point of view. Most describe it as something done to spite them and their beliefs, as if we define ourselves solely by being the opposite of what the believers around us profess. Perhaps they have known somebody who was as "in your face" about feeling superior as Dana Carvey's 'Church Lady' was about her particular sect of Christianity.
If it was a choice between only two sides, belief and non-belief, it would be simple. But there are many sets of beliefs, and to those of us who have considered it quite possible that all of the belief systems have been wrong, we feel that we've simply added one to the number of systems of belief that every true believer in a particular sect rejects.
I know it displeases a lot of people here to consider it, but the vast majority of atheists and agnostics really don't care to get vocal or confrontational with it, they really don't give a hoot about your nativity scene or your menorah in a public place, as long as they have the same civil rights that Western societies had formerly granted only to believers. Yes, there clearly are the Michael Newdows and the Madelyn Murray O'Hairs out there, but for every one of them, there are a thousand 'pushers' of the tens of thousands of sects of religious traditions.
Well said.
>>It’s funny that the antitheists (like Islamists) _always_ bring up the Inquisition as “proof” that Christianity is false and evil.<<
Every Christian should listen to stories of the communist countries and what people went through there.
That is modern times.
You are showing tremendous ignorance on this thread.
Believe what?
Now there's a question worth pondering.
If you look at the comments from the believers here, so far, it’s either justifying their hypocrisy, or showering each other with self-pity through calls of persecution, mostly imagined.
Comedy, unintended.
LOL!!!! Right.
Communism and Atheism go hand in hand. Don’t fool yourself.
And again, let’s talk about the article.
Can you please say or do something more than merely indulging yourself in sloganeering? This goes to the others here, as well.
We are truly spoiled, being Christians in America.
(for now)
Seriously?!? I never read that.
*sigh*
I was raised Catholic but left the church back in high school. When I finally reconnected with God, I found another church that I felt more comfortable with.
I never was happy with most of the traditional Protestant Christian attitudes towards the Catholic Church. There's a of misrepresentation and poor attitude. Not having a Protestant upbringing gave me the opportunity to see it from both sides.
There are areas where I disagree with the RCC doctrine, but there are also areas where I think traditional Protestant Christianity is in no position to point fingers.
While I disagree on some doctrinal issues, that does not excuse me to be rude, and I do have the highest regard for the strong stand that the RCC takes on abortion, homosexuality, marriage, and other conservative values, that many of the mainstream Protestant Churches have abandoned in recent years.
No matter how inconvenient it is for you to realise that this is not the case, the truth is that both are unrelated aspects, with vastly differing philosophical positions.
That is every group.
If you are not one of the pushers, you should not be offended.
Now, check out how this thread is against believers. Not defending Atheists.
That’s why the threads run as they do.
And you have faith that God doesn't exist.
Until you have lived in a Communist Country, you really have no clue.
The Apostle Paul, one of the first Missionaries in the Church, did risk everything and did end up executed for his work. But he also wrote back to the Churches to instruct them, and the one thing he did not tell every Christian was to become Missionaries in foreign lands. Not everyone can be or should be Missionaries.
The spreading of the Gospel is not something you have to leave your home town to do; there are many people around you that need the Gospel as well.
There is a great saying about the Gospel:
Spread the message of Christ constantly. When necessary, use words.
But you are correct. Way too many Christians ignore the Great Commission of Jesus, which is to spread the Gospel to all men.
Oh and btw, Karl Marx says you’re wrong
“Karl Marx established atheism as a key part of communism. He famously said, “Religion ... is the opium of the masses.”
So then you, MTCC, as an atheist, are qualified to judge the religious faith of others; that is, their belief in something that, according to you, doesn’t even exist.
This has the same logic as homosexuals judging a women’s beauty contest. (Oh...my bad...that really happened.)
Anyway, you come off as smug, arrogant, and typical of the Richard Dawkins school of religious debate. You’re far more entertaining than you realize.
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