Posted on 05/04/2014 12:34:25 PM PDT by Olog-hai
It’s no more a circular argument than to say you clicked the send button because you wanted to reply to my comment, and you wanted to reply to my comment because you hit the send button.
How does naturalistic science explain the existence of language?
(It cannot and is therefore insufficient to explain ultimate reality.)
How can the tomb have been empty if there was no resurrection?
Why would the disciples change from depressed and hopeless in the days immediately after the crucifixion to suddenly being inspired to live a life of poverty, torture and solitary execution?
Why would the enemy, Saul of Tarsus, convert?
Why would skeptics like James convert?
How could a religion explode from a handful of followers to many thousands within the space of just a few years, in the face of relentless and murderous persecution by the Roman government?
Oh come on. Where's the fun in that? Most Christians I talk to in person have never heard of it. My guess is that it's not something that is broadcast from the pulpit much any more, since it's so phantastical and a little ridiculous.
It wouldn’t make much sense to include this in the writing if it weren’t true, would it ?
It would if Matthew were a parable, a morality tale, or embellished to get the point across.
The point was, that Heaven rejoiced and the dead on Earth rose for a time to join in the celebration. If it's a constructive myth, then it makes sense.
How have people continued to believe the Bible is all true, after thousands of years of scholarship ?
Probably because for the first few thousand years the repercussions for NOT believing it were dire, and ranged from being a social outcast to death. I'd say there are many Christians now who don't believe everything to be literally true, including many that I know, although I also know a lot of Christians consider that "unchristian".
I'll leave it to the believers to figure out who the "real Christians" are though.
I had a friend who had a severe crisis of faith and ended up being against total Biblical literalism because he truly worried about his Hindu friends being flayed in Hell for all of eternity. He was close to having a Jerusalem Syndrome episode; drove him nuts. Another reason I'm glad I'm free of it. The burden that true believers put on themselves is fascinating and depressing.
Having no excuse for rejecting God’s Word, in the end, they will get exactly what they asked for, eternal separation from God.
If eternal separation from God means I return to the same state that I was in before I was born, then I would choose that most likely. If Heaven is a place where your family is irrelevant, and you live for trillions of years constantly and repeatedly praising the Creator, then I wouldn't want to go. It's sounds like going to church and never being able to leave.
No thanks. I'll take going back to where I was prior to birth. The lack in Christianity of a third option for eternity makes me feel like it's a racket.
It must be divine intervention, because I was THIS CLOSE to posting Ecclesiastes 9:11 in my response to the other guy who mentioned random chance:
...but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Maybe time and chance aren't that unbiblical after all.
No man can completely understand the Bible; some things remain a mystery to us.
If we believe only after we have every jot and tittle proven to us, there is no faith on our part.
We are saved by God’s Grace, through faith in God and faith in his Son, Christ Jesus.
How lopsided a justice would it be if people who a) were wickedly breaking God’s Law Word their entire life and b) actively rejected and hated God their entire life, then wound up in heaven ?
God’s justice is perfect. All men are sinners, according to Scripture. This should be VERY easy to believe.
If - that’s a big IF - we admit we’re sinners, we repent, that is, express sorrow and resolve to stop doing that sin, and if we have God’s Holy Spirit dwelling within us - then it would make sense that the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross glorified God. It shows how merciful and powerful God is, to save his chosen elect children from their sins, even to the point of them over their lives steadily becoming more conformed to the image of Christ.
Those who don’t repent of their sins have no excuse, since God’s Word has been revealed in Scripture. They can’t say “I didn’t know”. They can’t erase God’s records - they will face Judgement, and rightfully so.
But right now, hey, eat, drink and be merry !
I would strongly recommend the Matthew Henry Bible Commentaries.
They’re available here...
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&version=KJV
just click on Show Resources, Matthew Henry’s Commentary.
It will greatly help to understand doctrine, as opposed to a superficial scanning of the text for purely historical facts.
One must remember that commentaries are NOT Scripture, thus can not be assumed to be 100% reliable. Commentaries are just the opinions of their authors. The Henry commentaries were well-regarded before the increase of apostasy we see today.
Do you know the nature of it all or not? Didn't Christ often speak in parables? Why wouldn't his book do it as well?
The whole of idea of "justice" as described in the context of the God you worship is not any form of justice that is conceivable to me and many other people. It may be some form of codified law in your mind, but it's not justice in the sense that we understand it.
Simply being sorry for something and casting those bad deeds on a human blood sacrifice 2,000 years ago in a Roman suburb does not relieve you of your responsibilities, any more than the Hebrews absolved themselves by casting their evil on a goat and sending it out to die in the wilderness on the Day of Atonement.
You keep missing the third option. If there were good evidence that any of this stuff were true, I don't want any part of it. I don't want to live on eternal divine soma, not caring about anything and singing hymns for a trillion years, and I reject the ridiculous idea of eternal torment for not thinking the right thoughts.
There's no reason to believe that 60 to 90 years of Earthly existence in any way merits eternal reward or eternal punishment, and it isn't justice in any way that is recognizable to me, where your teenager who was abused by a priest turns away from God because of the abuse, and goes to the flames, while the priest who did the abusing legitimately repents and sits next to you in the clouds. How is that justice?
It's a ridiculous, horrendous idea, and I'm extremely glad that there's no evidence for it.
Of course not. But as a free person with no presuppositions, I can weigh the evidence and make the determination as to what is more likely.
Is it likely that mankind suffered under war, pestilence, disease, early death, and ignorance for hundreds of thousands of years, until Heaven finally says:
"Hmm, maybe it's time to get involved. And the best way to do that would be a solution that copies the other religious human blood sacrifice myths and scapegoating rituals that exist from Peru to Israel to the Far East, and we'll have it happen in a middle east backwater of already credulous people (not in China which was a much more advanced society), and it will work so that God sacrifices himself (or his son), to himself, it order to appease himself."
Perhaps one day you'll have the luxury of looking at Christianity from the outside in; only then can you really grasp the archaic gruesomeness of the idea.
Absent the Holy Spirit, people reject Jesus Christ. They hate him; the world that crucified Christ hated him. The fallen state of man is such that he hates and rejects God and his Law Word.
You don't even really understand the fundamentals of unbelief. I don't reject the God of Abraham or Jesus any more that I reject Zeus and Allah. They are all manmade religions when the evidence is considered in a universal context. If Christ existed, and I had lived during that time, I would not have hated him, and I would have spoken against the torture and murder of an eccentric preacher, and supported his right to say whatever he wished. Regardless of your subjective opinion, I had no say in, nor did I take part in, killing Jesus.
So you don't want to be punished. You reject the punishment. You even reject the reward ! I've heard children do this, as well as adults. I didn't want the ice cream anyway ! I hate ice cream !
Actually the opposite is true. It is childish to think that it all comes out well in the end because some father figure will make it all right. Like Paul said, when I was a child I thought as a child. Now I've put away childish things and understand that the world works in a certain manner, a manner which is perceivable by observation, and it's my responsibility to live in a way that minimizes suffering of others, because I can accept a world with less suffering is preferable to one with more suffering.
It is not childish to want to have a say in the justice system in which one lives. In fact, it's one of the prerequisites of a free man living in a free world. The authoritarian celestial dictatorship of monotheism is surprisingly unconservative and anti-liberty.
What's left out is the whole story of the two lives. This is an oversimplified hypothetically unjust situation, regarding which you then proceed to speak for God and say what his judgement would be, and that he would judge the situation unjustly. Even though God's Word says the penalty for such an offense would be death in a Christian nation.
The story of their two lives is irrelevant if what Christ said was true. He is the only way. It doesn't matter if the abused atheist kid spend his entire life volunteering to feed homeless children, and did nothing else, just like it's irrelevant that the priest hypothetically kept abusing until the last few seconds of his life, when he finally repented. They're both judged on their thoughts at the time of their death; the thought being do they accept Christ as their savior?
Don't start going all wobbly on your own doctrine.
In order to believe in God, one has to be convicted of one's own sin.
That is very, very painful for people to experience.
It isn't difficult or painful at all to know one is a very imperfect primate. Like all other homo sapiens I was "designed" with huge adrenal glands, a smaller than needed frontal lobe, and destructive urges as well as constructive ones (not to mention the beautifully 'designed' appendix and wisdom teeth, which had to be removed), and it's up to me and no one else to make sure that I live a life parallel with the happiness of my family and those around me.
To those who realize it, the lack of cosmic justice forces most to understand the tremendous responsibility to make sure that this life is a good one, instead of throwing it all to the wind and living like a libertine. Probably explains why the prisons are not filled with atheists.
Like that scene in Zero Dark Thirty where the head CIA analyst says "If you thought there was some secret cell somewhere working on this, I want you to know that you are wrong! This is it. There's no working group coming to the rescue. There's nobody else hidden away on some other floor. This is just us!"
Coming to the realization that this is what the evidence shows, my first feeling was a tremendous air of responsibility, not "Ice cream!".
GunRunner is a curious label.
It reminds me of CIA gun running operations.
You have posted hundreds, maybe thousands, I got tired of paging through them, of anti-Christ posts here on FR.
It’s almost like you’re dedicated to being anti-Christian.
It’s like you have a whole lotta time on your hands.
Interesting. Mysterious.
Maybe that was more youth than anything. You were "moving that direction", but maybe you would have felt differently if you had reached the destination. It's your responsibility because there is no cosmic force. Helping people because the boss tells you to isn't really charity, is it?
Do you only help people because it's a commandment, or do you also do it because you have an innate human aversion to suffering.
I thought Sam's routine on starving kids was hilarious too, but to me he seemed to be attacking the Sally Struthers commercials, which had more of a liberal guilt trip mentality than appealing to legitimate human solidarity. "I'm thinking, 'hey, maybe the camera guy can give the kid a sandwich.'" "Don't feed him yet Bob! It doesn't work unless he looks hungry for the camera!"
Family is important to many people; criminal families always live by that rule. Blood is thicker than water. Found that out the hard way.
Speaking of weird and mysterious, this is the second dig at family that I've seen on this very thread when discussing religion. Very strange. One guy says that in heaven, you don't care about the fates of your family members souls, and that earthly families only purpose is to help you prepare for an everlasting lifetime with your heavenly father (whom you will no doubt praise every second of every minute for all eternity), and here you are saying that caring for family is an attribute most aligned with organized crime.
Very weird coming from Freepers, especially since as long as I've been a conservative thinker, caring for family is one of the main antidotes for many to cure them of government dependency.
I guess as the new father of two little ones, this type of thinking is strange and foreign, especially coming from so-called conservative Christians. That's why I have these discussions. I wouldn't be aware of these worldviews if I didn't talk to people
If I was an athiest, I'd be offended that you want to subject me to your particular moral standards.
Like Don Corleone says, as long as your interests don't infringe on me, then it's none of my business. Or more seriously, as Jefferson said, "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
You have posted hundreds, maybe thousands, I got tired of paging through them, of anti-Christ posts here on FR.
It’s almost like you’re dedicated to being anti-Christian.
Not at all. I'm here to speak on behalf of a non-theist justification for morality. The only things I'm truly against is the crazy creationist cult that has taken over a lot of the Christian right. I think it does the limited government philosophy an injustice to have so many people on our side of the political be anti-science. That's probably where most of those posts originated.
You won't see anything critical of religion until about late 2007 though (I've been here for almost 15 years). That's when my reverse conversion occurred.
How does naturalistic science explain the existence of language?
If a question like this seems to threaten the integrity of a particular viewpoint or perspective, perhaps the perspective itself should be questioned.
I would pick up a book on linguistics if you’re legitimately interested. It’s not one if my areas of study.
Taking care of one’s family is a good thing, but it’s hardly something to point to say how “good” you are.
Even the worst criminals will very often take care of their families.
Actually I think it is. If you "take care of your family" by hurting other people and committing crimes, you aren't really helping them at all.
How does doing jail time help your family?
To turn it around a little bit, can you name a good person who does not take care of his family?
I'd say in a couple of years we will have complete and total scientific evidence that the downfall of America was primarily caused by the death of Fatherhood. See our last two Democrat Presidents as a primary example.
Haha, good one. I’ll bet you’re one of those people who believes we have free will because God gave it to us.
So you're telling me, that you could give someone something that is of little consequence to you (a tiny bit of food), and that in helping that person, you could receive some spiritual comfort and joy. You would both benefit from the simply act of giving? Holy cow! That's almost like, "do unto others as they would do unto you."
Look, I've enjoyed this conversation, but I don't think you've honestly given any of these issues real, serious thought. Why do these things that we're discussing require theism; that was my original question. In no way have you given any support to the idea that you are able to do or think things that I cannot, when it comes to charity and helping others.
There are many, many absolute creeps (just look at Congress) who take care of their families very well.
I honestly find your anti-family stance a little creepy, and my two guesses are bitchy step-mom or absent father. It has to be one of the two.
The field of linguistics has to do with the content of language, and other aspects such as its evolution, but not its metaphysical origin.
The origin of language—more particularly the origin of information—has not been described in secular scholarship. Linguists have no clue about it. Neither does anyone in so called information sciences nor do any of the philosophers.
Scientists wouldn’t know how to even approach it, unless they admit language and information can only have come from God.
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