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To: kosta50; xzins; spirited irish; Alamo-Girl; betty boop; Dr. Eckleburg; Quix; MHGinTN; Godzilla
I am also not dissuading anyone to believe.

Not on purpose perhaps, but clearly you are sowing seeds of doubt.

What is your goal in posting here?

Is it merely to state your opinion or is it to encourage others to think like you; to doubt everything and believe nothing?

987 posted on 03/12/2010 9:54:47 AM PST by P-Marlowe (LPFOKETT GAHCOEEP-w/o*)
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To: P-Marlowe; betty boop; Alamo-Girl

INDEED.

Or is there some Mensa headband that gets notches for such things?

Or maybe the smugness chips get higher with gold gilding on such shoulders.


990 posted on 03/12/2010 10:06:50 AM PST by Quix (BLOKES who got us where we R: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2130557/posts?page=81#81)
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To: P-Marlowe; kosta50; Alamo-Girl; spirited irish; Dr. Eckleburg; Quix; xzins; MHGinTN; Godzilla
What is your goal in posting here?... Is it merely to state your opinion or is it to encourage others to think like you; to doubt everything and believe nothing?

I dunno P-Marlowe. Maybe it's really just a cry for help? In disguise?

It seems to me dear kosta has gotten himself into a severe pickle. His position seems to be "anything that I cannot know for a certainty is something not worth knowing." He needs "proof" of God, because that is what constitutes "certainty" for him. If he can't get "proof" of God, then he doesn't have to take Him seriously.

It seems that kosta is in a sort of egophanic revolt — a term Eric Voegelin uses to denote "the epiphany of ego leading to the death of God." I gather he lands in this position by virtue of his insistence on certainty in a world that is thoroughgoingly uncertain in every way imaginable, save one.

The life of man is really burdened with the well-known miseries enumerated by Hesoid. We remember his list of hunger, hard work, disease, early death, and the fear of the injustices to be suffered by the weaker man at the hands of the more powerful — not to mention the problem of Pandora. Still, as long as our existence is undeformed by phantasies, these miseries are not experienced as senseless. We understand them as the lot of man, mysterious it is true, but as the lot he has to cope with in the organization and conduct of his life, in the fight for survival, the protection of his dependents, and the resistance to injustice, and in his spiritual and intellectual response to the mystery of existence. The burden of existence loses its sense, and becomes absurd, only when a dreamer believes himself to possess the power of transfiguring imperfect existence into a lasting state of perfection. — Eric Voegelin, "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme"

"Dreamer" in the above context is best understood in the sense of Heraclitus, as idiotes, a person who rejects the Logos "one and common" and thereby "turns aside" into his own "private world."

One could say this is a form of existential alienation, one which involves a "refusal to apperceive" Reality as it is, and a Ciceronian "contempt for reason" as evidenced by the refusal to apperceive....

It seems to me the more sectors of reality that kosta must exclude because of his insistence on "proof" and "certainty," the more alienated and isolated from the world of Reality — personal, social, natural — he becomes.

Let me wrap this up: Because the world of human existence is thoroughgoingly uncertain from first to last, and all our knowledge of Reality is partial and contingent, all the more reason to trust in the eternal Revelations of God — Holy Scripture, the Incarnation of Christ (Logos, Alpha and Omega), the world of Creation (the natural world), and the Holy Spirit with us. They are God's Word, told "truthfully, but not exhaustively," a light unto the human mind and spirit.

Thank you so very much for writing P-Marlowe!

1,004 posted on 03/12/2010 11:12:06 AM PST by betty boop (Moral law is not rooted in factual laws of nature; they only tell us what happens, not what ought to)
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To: P-Marlowe; xzins; spirited irish; Alamo-Girl; betty boop; Dr. Eckleburg; Quix; MHGinTN; Godzilla; ..
Not on purpose perhaps, but clearly you are sowing seeds of doubt

I am simply asking questions. Why is that "sowing seeds of doubt?"

What is your goal in posting here?

I want to know what is God,  so I ask those who claim they know God. The presumption is that one knows what it is that he or she believes in, what is God.

Is it merely to state your opinion or is it to encourage others to think like you; to doubt everything and believe nothing?

No, I just want to know what it is that people believe in.

1,098 posted on 03/12/2010 10:14:20 PM PST by kosta50 (The world is the way it is even if YOU don't understand it)
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