Posted on 11/17/2003 6:02:20 AM PST by Tribune7
The idea that he is a devotee of reason seeing through the outdated superstitions of other, lesser beings is the foremost conceit of the proud atheist. This heady notion was first made popular by French intellectuals such as Voltaire and Diderot, who ushered in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
That they also paved the way for the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and many other massacres in the name of human progress is usually considered an unfortunate coincidence by their philosophical descendants.
The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing.
In fairness, he cannot be faulted for this, except when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in this regard, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most unthinking Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Still, this is not irrational, it is only ignorance and a failure of perception.
The irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions – and it is here that the cowardice of his intellectual convictions is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.
In fact, such ethics, as well as the morality that underlies them, are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist. Nevertheless, he usually seeks to live by them when they are convenient, and there are even those, who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them.
Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
If you saw a news article and the first sentence was "George Bush ran a whore house in the 1700's", would you keep reading? The source is not credible. 99% of what follows could be truthful, but the story is still a lie.
That's was the problem in the garden of Eden. Eve caught Satan right off the bat twisting God's word and corrected him. Why on earth, she listened to anything else Satan had to say is beyond me. The source was already discredited. Logic dictates that Eve should not have given Satan continued equal footing with the words of God.
Same logic applies with religions. If you know the God of one is real and he claims the other Gods exists, there are only two possibilities: 1) Your God is lying or 2) there are no other Gods.
And if you don't know that the God of one is real and you are searching for truth, you move on when you see falsehood, unless you have reason to suspect that falsehood is not representative of the religion you are studying.
Now I know you don't realize that the Judeo-Christian God is real (whether due to denial or not). So you have to go on a more painstaking approach, examining all the religions as to whether they are true or not. And I'll be glad to help you any way within reason that I can whether it's defending criticism of Christianity or pointing out the flaws in other religions.
I'm not going to type all of Josh McDowell's books on evidence into the web though. I'm going to tell you to go buy it.
Agree that there are many kinds of love.
There's the fundamentally selfish love of another person whom you value & therefore cherish for their positive attributes.
I don't think so. There is selfishness and there is love. Love is not selfish. You can love a person for their postive attributes. There's nothing selfish about that. If you want a person around because the effect that person has on you, that's selfishness.
"and there's the altruistic love of someone whom you pity for their negative attributes."
There is altruistic love. Love can indeed cause you to pity someone who lacks for anything.
How nit-picky. You don't need a spell check you need a reality check.
And handing out reading assignments is a rather ineffective means of covering up your inability to directly address what was stated.
Anybody knows an atheist is a person who denies the existance of God. Period.
How so? If God is the creator and He has a specific way in which He wants us to live our lives, then it is not unreasonable for there to be a basis in logic in His plan. Math is the purest form of logic.
The remarkable thing about the corroboration between the Lord's command and math would be that the command came 2000 years prior to the math.
With that said, the conclusions reached via the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) appear to have some inconsistancies with the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule requires us to do to others as we'd have them to do us -- not as they do to us.
This would rule out a lot of tit for tat that seems to be required in IPD.
You are assuming that the Hebrews co-opted a Babylonian myth and not vice versa. You are also assuming that the Babylonian myth is not a corrupted version of what early man knew which was put straight by God through Moses.
Moses had many miracles confirming him as a prophet. I believe I've read that Egyptian census records confirm a major loss in egyptian population. In looking for support for this claim I found this. amalekites and Egypt
Actually, I don't have to examine anything. Thus far, I've not seen convincing evidence put forth to lead me to believe that any religions (theistic or otherwise) may be correct, thus I've not had much motivation to do painstaking research.
True you don't have to examine anything.
I probably need to give it a break too. Work piling up.
Einstein could not be called orthodox whether Jew or anything else. OTOH, he certainly wasn't an atheist, se we can still consider him rational.
I had never considered Socrates to be an atheist -- nor would I consider it bad to be an atheist in the sense of rejecting the pagan Pantheon and its attendant superstitions.
OTOH, a lot of atheists appear to embrace Socrates as one of their own.
To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behaviour on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress....... to me says, "Thou shalt not play the Gap Game!" (Gaps in our knowledge stem from real holes in natural causation. Miracles!)
I'll make it even simpler: The problem is that there are many stupid people. Period. We don't even have to be talking about the scriptures.
This by itself has more explanatory power regarding life's realities than most other things I can think of.
Christianity is technically rational if one accepts a certain set of axioms (c.f. theologian William Bartley), though it is provably not more rational than beliefs derived from other sets of axioms (including atheism) -- a draw basically. The problem is that those particular axioms are by neither obvious nor universally accepted for perfectly valid reasons (which do not necessarily negate your particular axiom selection).
Of course, I would point out that most people have utterly irrational religious beliefs that have only been examined in the most shallow ways; even if their beliefs are correct, arriving there by accident through gross irrationality is not a justification for the belief. Or as I like to say, being rational and wrong has far more virtue than being irrational and coincidentally right. Few people have the will or faculties to rigorously evaluate their own beliefs, and so most do not, Christian or otherwise.
Tit for tat is only required for defection in IPD. Cooperation with others for mutual benefit is the default behavioral mode for IPD. Or in other words, always play nice unless others don't play nice. Never initiate defection, only reciprocate defection.
It is perhaps in this sense that we might understand what Einstein meant when he observed that the distinction between past, present, and future is in many respects a stubborn illusion. I can imagine the “world view” of relativity theory as Pannenberg describes it. I can see what he means when he says that it is, in a certain sense, “a last contemporaneousness of all events that for us are partitioned into a temporal sequence.”
"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
“God is subtle but he is not malicious."
Einstein's speech 'My Credo' to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin, autumn 1932, Einstein: A Life in Science, Michael White and John Gribbin, page 262
I think you are tripping over imprecise semantics. There is no explicit exchange of benefit per se in cooperation. By treating others well in a given interaction, you are maximizing the amount of benefit you will receive in some number of future interactions. The nature and distribution of that future benefit is not known. In general though, it means that others will be more likely to act to your benefit in future interactions if you act to their benefit now.
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