Posted on 12/09/2010 7:31:45 PM PST by Baladas
Oh well,wasn't it Jefferson who said,”But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
But one can't help but pity the man who has no vision beyond the grave.
“Few things point more towards the man-made origin of religion than the twisted sisters who first came up with the idea of “Hell.” Even the pagan Romans and Greeks believed Hades was just a depressing underworld of shadows.
The genuinely frightening `Old’ Testament God makes no mention of it; we don’t get much detail until the Prince of Peace comes along in the ‘new’ testament. (Work with me Israelites)”
AFAIK, the early Christians didn’t believe in Hell either. They seem to have subscribed to the Jewish concept of “Sheol”, which was a place where the dead would go and exist in a zombie-like state. They believed that Satan and his minions would eventually be cast into the lake of fire, but not man.
The idea of all these elaborate tortures that sinners would be subjected to in Hell seems to have originated with the medieval Church.
I believe certain sects of the Greek Orthodox Church interpret Hell as a total spiritual divorce from God.
Making perdition an eternal broken heart—the worst torment of all—a pain that drove Lucifer and his minions mad.
It doesn't take faith to find biology and astronomy sufficient to explain the night sky, babies, bugs and leaves. Quite the opposite, actually.
So when Lucifer and his angels rebelled against God, they were sane...but after spending some time in Hell then they went mad?
Hey, that gives me an excuse to post a Gustave Doré illustration:
Man, he was a great artist. On a tangential note, it's interesting that he draws Earthly clouds rising up thousands of miles above the surface, when 19th century science knew they did no such thing. I've seen the same effect used in motion pictures from as late as the 1950's. Odd...
All Atheists should be required to explain the origin of Reason. How about you? Care to? What in your estimation provides Reason its - Reasonableness?
Why are atheists so insecure?
Why do they proselytize?
Why do they care?
“I believe certain sects of the Greek Orthodox Church interpret Hell as a total spiritual divorce from God.”
I understand that to mean instead of actual torment, Hell is a place where souls simply wander in gloomy misery knowing that because they rejected God, they cannot be with him.
From what I’ve read of Christian theology, Satan and his minions are beyond redemption and will ultimately be thrown in the lake of fire because they rebelled against God entirely on their own. Man can be redeemed because he was merely tempted to do evil and is not fully responsible for his wrongdoings.
I recall a David Brinkley report back in the sixties about Christmas in Japan. I’m sure many of you remember his distinctive delivery - “In America ... people worry about ... Christmas losing its meaning. ... Here, ... it never had any.” ( wry smile )
“All Atheists should be required to explain the origin of Reason. How about you? Care to? What in your estimation provides Reason its - Reasonableness?”
I have heard atheists say that when a person has an impulse to do good in the world or to turn his life around, it came from within himself and not God. So they’re essentially saying that man does have some kind of spiritual force in him. If we’re all just the result of biochemical reactions, then where did that strength to get off of drugs or alcohol come from? Or to save someone’s life?
"Required"? By whom? How should this requirement be enforced, and what's the penalty if I refuse?
How about you? Care to? What in your estimation provides Reason its - Reasonableness?
Reason (it should be noted that there are many definitions and sub-types) is a method of coming to conclusions through cognition, as opposed to methods used by non-human animals such as instinct. Only minds of a certain level of intelligence seem capable of reasoning. It should be noted that some of the more intelligent non-human animals do seem capable of very basic reasoning.
This being the case, it seems reasonable (get it?) to conclude that the ability to reason is an evolutionary advantage in some species. Since humans are the most intelligent animals on the planet, we have the most ability to reason...which is why we milk cows instead of vice-versa.
Well, enough banter for tonight. G'nite..
And I read how Napoleon, when he was exiled on Saint Helena, said to his friend Antomarchi, an atheist, “How can you not believe there’s a God? All the evidence points to it and besides, all the great men have thought so.”
Did you know Newton was born on Christmas Day ? ( the old calendar, of course. )
Right at the end of the Principia Mathematica, in the General Scholium, he gives his famous affirmation of the Lord God as Universal Ruler, brusquely concluding, "... and thus much concerning God, to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy."
Then, in the very last paragraph, he begins, "And now we might add something concerning a cerain most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies." Speculating that, "... animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely by the vibrations of this spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain to the muscles."
As a matter of fact, he felt compelled to add his affirmation of God in a later edition because critics thought the Principia promoted atheism, particularly, as I recall, by his remark that "Absolute true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows without reference to anything external, ...", but note he did not see the necessity of amending this declaration.
Anyway, I've always thought his headlong plunge at the very end into a materialistic speculation on the nature of perception and motor control was quite striking.
Fr Malachi Martin from a few decades ago - paraphrasing - We’re leaving a Christian world and entering into a Paganistic world.
http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=2640502%2C1
In my youth, The Nativity was very much at the center of the public celebration of Christmas, and this included TV specials depicting the Story of the Nativity.
One of these was on one time and my dad was reading a magazine apparently not paying attention. I guess it was an opera, and in the middle of a big chorus, “And Joseph was angry ...” my dad started laughing. My mom asked him what was so funny, and he said, “Well, Mary is pregnant, and Joseph is mad because he doesn’t think he did it, and here they are singing about it! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” My mom remonstrated, “That isn’t funny.” “Yes it is,” he replied.
“Then, in the very last paragraph, he begins, “And now we might add something concerning a cerain most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies.” Speculating that, “... animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely by the vibrations of this spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain to the muscles.”
Well, that’s more-or-less expressing a belief in pantheism (ie. that the universe itself is God). This sort of thinking is common among men of science. Einstein was a pantheist, as was Carl Sagan, and also Stephen Hawking.
Newton considered himself a Unitarian (a Christian who does not believe in the Holy Trinity or the divinity of Jesus) and wrote extensively on religion and the occult.
No being loved God more than Lucifer and when the revolt failed and he and his were cast down the trauma of being rejected by the supreme entity of LOVE himself demented them and made their eternal mission the corrupting of the beings God loves most.
Atheists miss so much wasting their short time on earth—and that IS all the time THEY have as far as THEY believe—cynically rationalizing when they should be intelligently puzzling why so much peace and happiness can be derived from,to THEM,romantic notions of an afterlife.
Atheism is sooo boring because the opinion (one can neither empirically prove nor disprove God) has no past or future.
Most of what I’ve seen from atheists on the net is neither rational or based on reasoning. It’s largely emotional attacks on a God they claim to not believe in.
“Atheism is sooo boring because the opinion (one can neither empirically prove nor disprove God) has no past or future.”
What atheists usually do is invent a strawman god and demand that Christians prove its existence.
With the term "spirit", his reference is implicitly to electricity, which he apparently had some inkling of. Note that "spirits" in our vernacular refers to alcohol, which is the "spirit", or active principle, of wine.
At any rate, Newton was at pains explicitly to deny pantheism:
It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect.
Here's the whole General Scholium. It's not very long.
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