Posted on 06/22/2009 5:33:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Do you believe in God? Really? And you're willing to admit it in public?
Oops. Sorry, for a moment I slipped back into the arrogant Atheism of my youth.
Before my parents had children, they decided to raise their kids in a secular home. We had gifts at Christmas time and chocolate covered matzoh during Passover, but there was no religion and certainly no God.
When I was in grade school, God was just a kind of nondescript character who popped up in Little House on the Prairie books from time to time. He seemed like a decent enough fellow, but was more or less a bit player who didn't have much to say.
After my grandfather died when I was seven, his Baptist minister lifted me up in his arms and told me, "It's all right, Grandpa's with God now." At that moment, I could feel my dress was hiked up in the back and all I could think about was pulling it back down. But later, I asked around and discovered that God was our Heavenly father, whatever that was supposed to mean.
I figured, who better to ask about my Heavenly father than my earthly father, but when I did he laughed.
He wasn't amused in a "kids say the darnedest things" kind of way. He was laughing derisively at the idea that my mother's family believed in God. And thus began my introduction to Atheism.
There are people who call themselves atheist who are simply nonbelievers, and then there are the big "A" Atheists for whom Atheism is almost a religion. This quasi-religious doctrine isn't neutral on the existence of other religions; rather, Atheism is a virulently anti-theistic creed characterized by sneering contempt for religion and a profoundly dogmatic bigotry toward people of faith.
Want to know how Atheists see the rest of us?
I grew up learning from my father that Atheism is rational, and therefore, religious belief is irrational; Atheism is defined by logic, religious faith by fantasy; and science is real while religion is make believe. Faith, I was taught, requires a willful stifling of reason.
The Torah, the Gospels, the Qur'an? All woefully inaccurate, laughably inconsistent fictions used to encourage belief in an illusion for the purpose of social control.
My curiosity in religion surfaced again in seventh grade when several of my friends were planning Bat Mitzvahs. Surely my friends weren't ignorant enough to actually believe in God, were they? The answer was no. For most of these Reform Jews, this celebration marked the official end to the tedium of Hebrew school. Most of their families were Ethical Culturists with a recreational interest in preserving their Jewish cultural identity. In other words, they too were Atheists.
By the time I reached high school, having had little contact with religion, I was convinced that people of faith were credulous and unenlightened. They gravitated toward soothing tales of God and afterlife to help them deal with their own mortality. At best, I considered belief in God an anachronism, a quaint vestige of days gone by, on par with superstitions about wicked thoughts causing birth defects.
At my extremely liberal college, I was exposed to even more militant Atheism. It was there that I learned the mere whiff of religiosity is worthy of denigration. Many of the people I met approached religion with something between disdain and loathing, and considered all religious belief a form of fanaticism. Christians in particular were characterized as knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing fundies (and that was in polite company.)
Fortunately my mother taught me enough manners that I kept my bias to myself.
In this new environment, my Atheism was more than evidence of good reasoning, it was a socially desirable badge of intellectual superiority. Make no mistake: Atheists think they're smarter than you. Atheism isn't simple skepticism. It is a certainty that believers are wrong, and by extension, intellectually inferior. Religion, especially Judeo-Christian religion, is nothing more than a crutch for dupes.
But Atheists aren't content to leave religion as a mere object of ridicule. They want it cleansed from public life. And enlightened as they are, they've come up with quite the pretense for justifying the righteousness of their bigotry: they are defending the vision of our Founding Fathers from a dominionist conspiracy to establish Christianity as the state religion.
You see, for liberal Atheists, the only thing worse than religion is the Religious Right, a term they use to encompass all Christian conservatives. And what better way to siphon fuel from the Religious Right than to convince Americans that the government is perpetually on the verge of becoming a theocracy?
And so, they accuse local governments of trampling the Constitution in the name of God and they find subliminal Christian iconography in political ads. They wring new meanings from Thomas Jefferson's notion of separation between church and state, and condemn our country's motto and the status of Christmas as a national holiday. But above all, Atheists stoke fear among religious and nonreligious alike that conservatives view government as a tool to force religion down your throat.
Pope-slandering buffoon Bill Maher, something of a patron saint among Atheists, has called religion "the ultimate hustle." Last fall, Maher's fellow liberal Chris Matthews, a self-described Catholic, roundly criticized Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for talking about prayer in a "secular environment" and complained that she made the Republican Party look more like a church tent than a big tent. In March, Matthews complained, "Why does everything sound like the '700 Club' with this Party now?" Such examples of anti-religious bias can be found every day on cable news, network television, and in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.
As my politics strayed right of center after college, I realized I wanted no part of that Maher/Matthews worldview based in elitism and the ridicule of others. I made the transition from Atheist to atheist to agnostic, and have since discovered why it is often said that religion is experiential.
There was a time when I would have preferred any manner of torture to admitting the possibility of a higher power. These days, I'm proud to say I lost my faith in the Atheist creed.
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Jenn Q. Public writes about news, politics, and the seedy underbelly of liberalism at JennQPublic.com.
On the contrary, there are enough of us believers who were atheists at one time to understand your position, better than you realize.
While it is obvious that atheists think that they have believers pegged about why they believe, they are sadly mistaken.
Read the article again and then look in the mirror.
It's clear to me you have a very superficial understanding of Christianity, a straw man version that doesn't stand up to your simplistic assertions and ideas about what should constitute Christianity.
All Christians are to do is plant the seed. Whether that seed grows or not is not for us to determine. There are many others also contributing to that seed. Some seed grows, others die and wither. But the seed is planted.
When we choose to follow Jesus and we are baptised to wash away our past sins, we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit residing in us. We are then a member of God’s kingdom while here on earth and look forward to living with God after death. Then life is spent growing in the faith. We are not perfect - we are man. We face temptations as all others and we often fail - but we have prayer to ask for forgiveness, and we form a relationship with Jesus.
How can any that choose to make the other choice - no God, no Jesus, see the work of the Holy Spirit in lives, how can they possibly understand what a Christian gets from religion?
They are not in a relationship with Jesus and God. They are merely living in a world without God which will be the same after they die. They have absolutely no control over what happens after death.
It is funny. Notice that when people talk about their beliefs - they feel that their belief or non belief makes it so for all mankind. But, how can a mere man give salvation, create heaven for man after death, or determine that there is no heaven, no hell?
Man is merely man. God is God, Jesus is Jesus. Just because one man decides there is no heaven - does not mean that there is no heaven. He just thinks there isn’t. But God is the one making heaven and hell, God is the one giving salvation not each man.
So, I would think it would behoove man to realize he is only one man and has a choice here on earth. That choice determines the future, the afterlife of him only.
But Scripture tells us - “No one comes to the Father except through Jesus”. And we choose to believe that or we don’t -it is our choice with a profound difference in our future lives and the hereafter.
No, you only think that they are true believers because they fit into this rigid, uncompromising box that you've established that has no connection to reality.
One of the biggest turnoffs is that air of self-righteousness.
Yet, often what we are seeing is a fervent belief being offered to another to share their belief.
We cannot expect man to be perfect in sharing the message - each has different talents - but the message is perfect.
2 cor 2:14-16
14But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him. 15For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. 16To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. And who is equal to such a task?
Sure it does. Atheism provides no moral restriction from not killing others. It provides no moral base at all. Anyone can do what and as they please and no one can tell them they're wrong.
Yes. And in the case of the non-believer (such as MyTwoCopperCoins), this failure of faith can play a role in supporting a position of unbelief. I do not suggest that it is the believer’s responsibility TO the atheist to demonstrate faith, but raither a responsibility TO the Lord to do so. One part of the atheist argument that always rings hollow to me is the old Ghandian saw, “If it weren’t for christians, I would be a follower of Christ.” You won’t have anyone else around at the judgment seat to lay blame to for the personal sin of unbelief. God has clearly manifested His divine hand in all of creation—all are without excuse.
That being said, if I were an atheist just now, I would have an increasingly difficult time in listening to anything that a professing Christian says. The failure of the Church in America over the past few years has been dramatic. The compromising, the hypocrisy, the ineffectiveness, the selfishness, the carnality, the divisions have all revealed we are living in Laodicean times. The Christian must personally take stock (every morning) of where s/he stands and what s/he will do for the Lord TODAY. Those that love the Lord, must be mindful of the power of our testimony (and the power of our lack of such) in a rapidly dying world. We must remember our First Love, what He has done for us, the so great salvation He has brought to us, the hope we have in Him, and take up the cross and follow Him. This is what pleases Him. Not going to a faraway land...but a willingness to surrender all. Not getting up to make great sermons...but preparedness to give a reason for the hope that is within us.
Each man has different talents and is to use those talents to serve God.
Look at your body - you have legs, you have arms, you have a brain. Each has a different function but each is extremely important.
Same with the body of Christ.
Nope. You read into it what you wanted. It didn't fit with your little box brand of what a believer is, that's all.
Read the other posts here, in agreement with mine, that true believers would risk everything for their faith. No suffering they endure on this planet, for their beliefs would compare to what they believe awaits them, in the Afterlife.
And where did I disagree with that?
You, however, are a weak believer. An opportunist, one might say.
In your dreams. Me not fitting your preconceived notions of what a Christian is, does not make me not a Christian, nor does it make my faith weak.
But the psychological boost it gives atheists to portray themselves are superior to others as they sit in judgment on them doesn't do any more than make you feel good.
Moral judgment is not the monopoly of the believers alone, in spite of glaring exceptions to the above among the believers themselves.
An Atheist is just as much a social being as a believer. He or she is just as aware about the consequences of breaking social order, and destroying the principle of reciprocity, as is the believer.
I find it hilarious that believers, usually busy fighting against the flavors of their classification (Shia-Sunni / Protestant-Catholic, etc.), manage to feign a sense of unity when their beliefs are confronted by Atheists.
Without a divine origin or inherent/endowed human rights,
we are all simply subject to “might makes right”.
That “might” can take the form of physical superiority, 50.1% of a popular vote, or 5 out of 9 judges.
If they hear voices in their head, they need to get themselves examined.
If you don't know what the Bible says, how can you hold people to that standard?
Ephesians 4:11 It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers
It is a calling to hold a position of authority in the Church, and not someones "own conviction". And yes we do hear God speak to us, although not "audibly" except in miraculous cases.
I don't hear them saying much about the qur'an. And I think I've heard them condemn missionaries for altering the native superstitions of "indigenous pipples" (implying the atheists would have shielded and protected those superstitions).
Christians in particular were characterized as knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing fundies (and that was in polite company.)
Well . . . not all chr*stians (is my meaning clear?).
But Atheists aren't content to leave religion as a mere object of ridicule. They want it cleansed from public life. And enlightened as they are, they've come up with quite the pretense for justifying the righteousness of their bigotry: they are defending the vision of our Founding Fathers from a dominionist conspiracy to establish Christianity as the state religion.
Wow . . . just think about it. The Founding Fathers gave us abortion, "gay marriage," pornography, and prosecuted any state institution that uttered the word "G-d" until suddenly, just a few years ago, a group of dangerous radicals arose out of nowhere and threatened to overturn all these ancient institutions! Oh, wait . . . that's right . . . a group of dangerous radicals arose who hadn't sufficiently kept up with the teleological flow of history that all "moderate" people are constantly changing to conform to!
But above all, Atheists stoke fear among religious and nonreligious alike that conservatives view government as a tool to force religion down your throat.
And some atheists want to force "social justice" down everyone's throat (and are not above quoting the hated Bible as a justification). But then, since the principals of social justice can be adduced by human reason, I suppose that's all right. Now, those silly sexual taboos, they're based on nothing but the fascist decrees of the Monster In The Sky, and we must be free of the Monster In The Sky above all else, however much force the state exercises to compel people to obey the "common sense" of other human beings.
What another man does or does not do should have no influence on your personal relationship with Jesus.
Are you saying you would only believe if every man was perfect like Jesus?
Never let one man or many men come between you and God. Each is judged on their own belief and hearts - not what other men did.
To leftists/atheists, that is the ULTIMATE goal - making themselves feel good.
That’s what’s behind all the government policies, etc.
Not exactly true about the “ordinary” lives. A true believer
will honor God in all ordinary good things that they do. Whether it is
mowing a lawn, handing out a few bills to a needy family,
changing a diaper, or counseling a friend.
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