Posted on 05/03/2009 11:50:32 AM PDT by presidio9
“Most people are religious because they’re raised to be. They’re indoctrinated by their parents.”
So goes the rationale of my nonreligious friends.
Maybe, but a study entitled “Faith in Flux” issued this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life questioned nearly 3,000 people and found that most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one. Indoctrination be damned. By contrast, only 14 percent of those raised Catholic and 13 percent of those raised Protestant later became unaffiliated.
(It should be noted that about a quarter of the unaffiliated identified as atheist or agnostic, and the rest said that they had no particular religion.)
So what was the reason for this flight of the unchurched to churches?
Did God appear in a bush? Did the grass look greener on the other side of the cross? Or was it a response to the social pressure of being nonreligious in a very Christian country?
None of those reasons topped the list. Most said that they first joined a religion because their spiritual needs were not being met. And the most-cited reason for settling on their current religion was that they simply enjoyed the services and style of worship.
For these newly converted, the nonreligious shtick didn’t stick. There was still a void, and communities of the faithful helped fill it.
While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious, the cold, hard facts are just so cold and hard. Yes, the evidence for evolution is irrefutable. Yes, there is a plethora of Biblical contradictions. Yes, there is mounting evidence from neuroscientists that suggests that God may be a product of the mind. Yes, yes, yes. But when is the choir going to sing? And when is
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Isavasya Upanishad 9
Oops, once you concede that, it's game over. If atheism could just pass that "common sense" barrier. You know, how everything's an accident, creation of the sun, mitochondria inside our cells, little girls and flowers, Mozart—just like accidentally dropping a bit of mayo on your tie at lunch.
I’ve heard the nonreligious talk about their “spirituality”. It consists mostly of egotism. It is love of one’s own intelligence rather than love of nature, humanity, etc as they may try to claim. This is why you often see new-agers siding with terrorists and expressing their hatred of those who defend the rights of the innocent. Their ego always comes before love of others. Also, you may hear them speak about “holding the universe in your mind” or some such rubbish. I used to be in to that new age stuff. No thanks, done with it.
I’m still not able to believe in God for the reasons stated in the article. In many cases, if you become nonreligious you will never go back to being religious. Likewise, if you were never religious, you will never truly “find God”. There is simply no way for a naturalistic worldview to “convert” to a supernatural one. If you think this happened to you, it didn’t. You were always religious even if you didn’t know it.
Nonsense. Logic and reason point to divinity, as their earliest proponents (Greek and Roman) understood. "Science" has to be pre-defined to exclude religion in order to achieve that outcome.
But I'm sure it makes the author feel better to imagine that faith is irrational, bless his heart.
To me this sounds more like an attempt to square your observations with a predetermined world view. Of course there is a way for a naturalistic worldview to “convert” to a supernatural one. Its just not one you are willing to accept. So you adopt a new hypothesis. Sort of like when the world started cooling off a bit, so Al Gore's scientists invented "Climate Change" to replace global warming.
Please understand that it makes very little difference to me whether you believe in God or not. But I have run into more than my fair share of atheists who found God in their lives. I can assure you that some of them had not one ounce of exposure to spirituality from birth. Some of them were born behind the Iron Curtain. This is the long way, and the nice way, of saying your theory is easy to disprove. The fact is your own prejudices force you to rule out the possibility that some people come to God because they allowed God into their lives. That's the way it works. Again, I'm not telling you to give up your atheism. I'm just reminding you that you have absolutely nothing to lose if you allow yourself to keep an open mind about these things.
No they aren't. There is absolutely no "science" or "logic" to back up that statement, in fact it goes the other way.
Bahhh Hahahaha! Only if you don't bother to check to see how valid those THEORIES are, and how many other THEORIES they contradict. Evolutionary "evidence" does a good job of destroying itself.
"Yes, there is a plethora of Biblical contradictions."
Where? Says who- evolutionists? By all means, list them.
"Yes, there is mounting evidence from neuroscientists that suggests that God may be a product of the mind."
Rubbish. Sence of "self" is a product of the mind too. Just ask any Marxist.
I use myself as the evidence for that statement. I have tried for years to find reasons to convince myself that God exists and have made absolutely no progress. At this point I’ve completely given up on it all and concluded that it’s not actually possible. Even if I heard God’s booming voice from the sky, my mind would easily find some way to dismiss it just like I dismiss great many things. It is actually impossible for me to imagine a scenario involving convincing evidence for supernatural things. It doesn’t even need to be supernatural things, I don’t even have faith that the sun will rise in the morning but I simply don’t get surprised when it does.
The closest I’ve ever gotten to faith is neutral agnosticism. If somehow God does exist, what is the reason for this? Why does it have to be so hard to believe even though I want to believe? I’ve read the Bible but I can’t remember a passage relating to this. It says “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Matthew 7:7)
How many more years?
I’m putting together a list of some of the famous scientists who believed in God:
1) Newton
2) Einstein
3) Kepler
4) Galileo
5) Copernicus
6) Planck
7) Darwin
8) Mendel
9) Stephen Hawking
That’s all I can think of for now.
"Climate Change" had been in use for decades before a single "Global Warming" paper was published in this recent panic.
Not mutually exclusive.
Um... ok. Irrelevant to the point I was making: People switched to Climate Change when Global Warming didn't cover it anymore, but thanks just the same.
By most I assume he meant over 50% but of those 3000 how many were raised unaffiliated with a religion?
In 1996 8% of the country said they had no religious affiliation at least some of these adults would have been children then so let's use that number.
That would be 240 adults.
51% would be 122 adults that chose to join a religion after not being raised religious. Now 56% of the population claimed Protestant affiliation at that time. So that would be 1680 people in the survey. At 13% later becoming unaffiliated that would be 218.
What does this mean? That a small number of people may rock the statics on a small group.
And a survey of 240 adults is far too small to draw any sort of conclusion.
Somebody once said that he is the man for people who want to believe in God but keep finding their intellect getting in the way.
He was a brilliant scholar in his own right (if you are a student of English literature, you can do FAR worse than read his contribution to the Oxford History of English Lit, the volume on the 16th century, or the eye-opening The Discarded Image). But in apologetics he brings a fierce intelligence and persuasive reasoning combined with gentle, conversational English to the table.
And he was an atheist until he was in his twenties . . . and said of his conversion that he was "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
My favorite of his is still The Great Divorce.
So, have you tried asking (prayer)? You might want to try something simple, "Dear God, please reveal yourself to me and open my mind and heart to You."
As an experiment, try that every day for a month; and remember, you don't need very much faith. Christ also said that if we had the faith of a mustard seed we could move mountains.
More than a century ago a proud university student boarded a train in France and sat next to an older man who seemed to be a peasant of comfortable means. The brash student noticed that the older gentleman was slipping beads through his fingers. He was praying the rosary.
"Sir, do you still believe in such outdated things?", the student inquired.
"Yes, I do. Don't you?" the man responded. The student laughed and admitted, "I do not believe in such silly things. Take my advice. Throw the rosary out the window, and learn what science has to say about it."
"Science? I do not understand this science. Perhaps you can explain it to me," the man said humbly, tears welling in his eyes.
The university student noticed that the man was deeply moved. To avoid hurting further the older person's feelings, he said, "Please give me your address and I will send you some literature to explain the matter to you." The man fumbled in the inside pocket of his coat and pulled out his business card. On reading the card, the student lowered his head in shame and was speechless. The card read: "Louis Pasteur, Director of the Institute of Scientific Research, Paris." The deluded science student encountered his country's leading chemist and bacteriologist.
I have that around here somewhere. I got to page 80, left the state for a while, and lost it in the house. I’ll look for it tonight.
One bit of evidence for the existence of God are the people on this thread who are carrying out in their gentle way the Great Commission (Go ye, therefore, and make disciples ...), as it relates directly to you.
You will never find evidence in the form of a "smoking gun" for the existence of God. The Bible tells us that "By faith you will believe." I have often wondered why that is.
My best answer is that, first, He gave us free will. If we did not have that capacity we would be 'captives' or 'slaves' of God, not 'followers.'
Another reason is that whatever the "evidence" is for God, it must be such that a naked child could carry it into the next generation. (That is, if it were in danger of being lost, it could pass in front of the eyes of those who would try to 'eliminate God' and they would not see it.)
Those who want to become god-like are eternally trying to destroy God. If the 'proof' were a big black rock in the Middle East, or some such nonsense, how easy would it be to destroy that 'proof.' So, "by faith you will believe." That can be carried into the next generation by a naked child. Faith may seem fragile. It is anything but. Faith in the salvific power of Jesus spread from the mouth of an empty tomb in Jerusalem about 2000 years ago and swept over the world. I know you know the history of that.
Lord Jesus, here is one, we know him as 'Soothsayer.' who has sought your face, and your breath in his life. When it is his time and in Your manner, I pray that you come into his life in a way that will give him faith in You and in Your power to save him. In your Holy and Precious Name I ask this. Amen
If I had to describe Lewis in one word, I would say, "genial". He was apparently an immensely likeable man in person (though a little boisterous-seeming to the English, as the Irish often seem to them), and it shows in his writing.
And he had to wrestle mightily with his intellect, his pride, and his own personal demons to win through to belief. His autobiography, Surprised by Joy, in some ways conceals as much as it tells, but it is still a very revealing book. The Pilgrim's Regress is also worth reading -- it is a very early book of his and flawed in many ways, but for someone who is in a similar fix it's very illuminating.
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