Posted on 05/22/2013 9:04:58 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
Is the Christian faith intellectual nonsense? Are Christians deluded?
“If God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings, his will is not inscrutable,” writes Sam Harris about the 2004 tsunami in Letter to a Christian Nation. “The only thing inscrutable here is that so many otherwise rational men and women can deny the unmitigated horror of these events and think this is the height of moral wisdom” (p. 48). In his article “God’s Dupes,” Harris argues, “Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception...Ironically, Harris’ first book is entitled The End of Faith, but it should really be called “The End of Reason,” as it demonstrates again that the mind that is alienated from God in the name of reason can become totally irrational.
...Richard Dawkins suggests that the idea of God is a virus, and we need to find software to eradicate it...these atheists are calling for the banishment of all religious belief. “Away with this nonsense!” is their battle cry. In return, they promise a world of new hope and unlimited horizons once we have shed this delusion of God.
I have news for them — news to the contrary. The reality is that the emptiness that results from the loss of the transcendent is stark and devastating, philosophically and existentially. Indeed, the denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil itself. Furthermore, one would like to ask Dawkins, are we morally bound to remove that virus? Somehow he himself is, of course, free from the virus and can therefore input our moral data.
(Excerpt) Read more at ligonier.org ...
My anti-viral software won’t let me read it. ;-]
(just kidding)
Dawkins gets spanked every time he debates John Lennox.
There is another awesome Christian debater who DESTROYS atheists in debates. I can’t remember his name though. He knows the Bible like the back of his hand.
Ones personal beliefs can not be debated.
Ligonier Ministries PING
Believing what I do about human nature and what, philosophically, is and is not of value, if I did not believe in the existence of God and the message of the Christian Gospel, I would be the most dangerous thing encountered by anyone with which I come into personal contact.
The reason? If we are all an accident of nature, then everything I see, feel, hear or touch has whatever value I choose to give it. And that could change based on how I feel.
It is because in such a world I AM GOD, as is every other person on the planet. And my “godlike powers” are limited only by the “godlike powers” of others. IOW, in a very REAL sense, the world of “man evolved from nothing” is controlled by the singular moral law, “might makes right”.
There is a book by Dean Koontz called “From the Corner of His Eye” in which the main character is a textbook human that believes to the core of his being that there is nothing beyond the world we perceive with our senses. His malevolent savagery over the slightest whim is gripping. And the thought process behind it is terrifying.
And it is a glimpse into the mind of a TRUE atheist.
What do you mean by that?
Ones personal beliefs can not be debated.
The argument I use with liberal atheists is:
Imagine you have spent your whole life in New York city. Imagine you are in a plane crash and wash up naked on an island in the pacific inhabited by people who have never had contact with the outside world. How would you convince them that New York exists?
And does their stark denial of what you cannot prove cause your experiences and the city itself to dissapear in a puff of logic?
You can debate the support or lack thereof for someones beliefs. You can’t debate the beliefs themselves.
say wha?
‘my “godlike powers” are limited only by the “godlike powers” of others’
In the absence of God, morality is merely the opinion of a man, waiting to be overthrown by a man whose opinions are backed up with greater force.
It’s an often overlooked fact of life. One can debate actions that may result from different beliefs, but the belief itself is confined within a person and is not accessible to anyone outside of that person. Until science invents a means to inject thoughts into the brain or extract them, your beliefs are yours alone.
Protest as they might, this is the secret fear the atheists will not admit. How horrible it must be for them to live in perpetual fear of divine justice? If there is no God, you win; if there IS a God, you lose.
I have a question for ALL “Athiests”. “What do you say when you hit your finger/thumb with a hammer”?, just wondering...
Precisely. And the killing of another man is NEVER a moral act since the concept of morals is moot in such a world. It would be no more immoral than it would be immoral to kill a flea bugging your dog. It is an act of expedience to improve your condition, much like killing a patch a grass to build a swimming pool.
You mean....kind of like...government school?
“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”Seven Things You Can’t Do as a Moral Relativist
-C.S. Lewis
And the demon uses yet another arrogant dupe to ooze out another great deception. What the man is posing is the syllogism that if there is a god and that god does not prevent things like the suffering and death caused by a tsunami, then that is no god in his definition of god. Here's the underlying acid for such a demonic syllogism:
Presuming the god attributes include the ability to stop every deadly destructive act, the deception arrives in blaming that god for not stopping every deadly destructive act. The listener seldom gets past the deception/lie to comprehend that if God was reduced to reacting to things happening in the Universe of His creation in which He has allowed evil in order to create free will, then The Creator is reduced to being led around by the creation and would thus not be God by the definition the original deceptive syllogism posed.
I use this. It usually results in a wild guess or silence :
As an atheist you believe in the big bang theory. So if everything started with a tiny dot of mass smaller than the period at the end of a sentence, where did it come from?
Mass cannot create itself. If it did that implies thought/being. It`s that or someone put it there.Both are essentially the same thing, supreme intelligence/being.
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