So maybe then if you were gay you’d have to dress really, really plain?
Well, I do think some of those Puritans were deeply closeted, don’t you? Just sayin’.
(the buckles on the shoes gives them away, every time).
I am talking about the God Jesus, Son of Yahweh. But you knew that. That’s why I said that faith is a subjective issue rather than an objective issue. Some people believe in God, and some people don’t. Clearly, our premises will differ. But that doesn’t mean we have to treat each other with any sort of disrespect. We should hold each other’s experience to be valid, even though they lead us to separate conclusions. Atheists should not believe that the faithful are delusional, and the faithful should not believe that they have something of a special nature that atheists lack. It is simply a matter of experience. Atheists shouldn’t caricature the Christian God, and then mock the caricature, and Christians shouldn’t caricature atheists as God haters or believers in NoGod. It took me a long time to learn my part of this. You need to learn your part.
I do believe in the “Christian God”. I believe that Jesus is God. I believe that He died, that His body was buried, and that He rose again on the third day. I believe that He is eternal, essential, and necessary. I believe that the evidence for His existence abounds in everything I sense, and in my own personal experience. I can no more deny His existence than I can my own. That’s what I believe.
Oh. Okay. Sorry. Please disregard prior sort of semi-rant slash witness (but not the facts of the content thereof).
I honestly thought that you were one of those roll-your-own non-mainstream-religion my-God-is-nothing-like-the-one-you-heard-about-from-the-other-guy theists, like lekatt. I apparently got you mixed up with somebody else. I apologize profusely.
I hold everyone’s experiences to be as valid as my experience dreaming about the fictional Shirt Tales characters, way back when. (Also, I have no idea what “valid” means in this context. Interpretations can be invalid, by failing to be justified by the evidence. But the experience itself?)
Oh, and I caricature the Christian God as the guy who flooded the earth, who ordered his people to take land through slaughter of the current residents, who sent his son (himself?) to die, and who felt that that was justified in some way or accomplished something, who lets volcanoes kill people, ect, ect, ect… Note, of course, that there’s the Christian God, and then on the other hand there is the Christian God. Your Christian God may not be the Christian God I just described, and if not, I am not caricaturing it; I am speaking of a different one with the same name.
[/Great Debates]
We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion about gay and/or presumably gay monarchs.
Ha! Shows what you know! Why, here in Appalachia…
Wait, wrong thread.
Poundage, eh? I thought pounding one out was neither straight nor gay.
No apology necessary. Confusion is not an intention to harm. It is merely a state of mental disarray.
I can only tell you what I mean by “valid”. Something (like an argument, for example) is valid if its premises lead reasonably to its conclusion. In other words, as long as something follows some set of rules that compel its conclusion, then it is “valid”. And that is the ordinary meaning of validity in the field of logic.
It is interesting to note that all circular arguments (arguments whose conclusions mirror their premises) are valid. But that doesn’t mean that they’re “sound”. Soundness goes to a higher level than validity. To be sound, an argument must be valid AND its premises must be true. And it is on the premises that we disagree. You surely cannot deny my premises, given my experience, but then neither can I expect you to accept my premises, given YOUR experience. And so, it is like a chess game with the pawns on d4, e4, d5, and e5 — there is great tension, but no cause for disrespect from either of us. I cannot accept your premises either. But that doesn’t mean that I deny your experience. (You have not interacted with God.)
Yes, I get that. And I get that you do not understand the hurt that a person of faith feels when His God is mocked — even though you say it is a different God. Our God is our life. Our spirit. More important than our mother. More important than even our own physical selves. It is personally hurtful to hear or see God mocked, much in the manner that it is hurtful for a child to see or hear his mother mocked. But I don’t expect you to understand that. To you, faith is a choice made like a choice of appetizer in a restaurant. There is a menu of Gods, and one chooses one. But it isn’t like that. He chooses us. And if He has not chosen you, then you have to remember that physical life is temporal. You never know what’s around the corner. He might choose you tonight. Or tomorrow. Or ten years from now. Or even after you die. It’s not that you lack anything; it’s just that I’ve had experiences you have not YET had. I too used to caricature the Christian God. You never would have convinced me that one day I would not. And I’m not saying that one day you will convert. All I’m saying is that unless and until you do, you cannot understand my experience, just as I cannot understand yours. I do not know what life without God is like. I do not even know what it means. You’re different. But we don’t have to be enemies on account of that.
If you’re going to spend THAT much time writing out your argument, why not take the extra two seconds and make a new thread?
Sorry about my verbosity.
I really don’t begrudge you your views at all…but this thread is really not the place to debate about atheism, so why not just start a new thread about it?
I was referring to the first two sentences., not the big bolded type. That part he is merely wrong about.
Santa Claus is homosexual.
Naughty, naughty, naughty - you’ve taken that quote from the Wikipedia article out of context. As its preceding sentence makes clear, the person who reported this was A. L. Rowse. Which hardly inspires much confidence. Is there any evidence for this outside Rowse’s often fevered imagination?
Also, as the article then goes on to point out, there is good evidence for Rudolf’s hetrosexuality. His extensive patronage of Spranger is surely in itself a sufficient indication that, while they may well have kinky, his tastes were firmly hetrosexual.
As a part time dyslexic, I read this as
**There is no Doug. **
Well, I’m not really that into it at this time, and besides, you wrote: “…the thread’s turned into a debate about atheism. Fine with me.” [Emphasis mine.] It’s like getting an invitation to a dinner, only to show up and be asked, “What the fuck are YOU doing here?”.
Did you bring wine? Because if you did, then I’d really be perturbed.
'Kay, no problem. (And I know my mentals is array-dissed and I muchly prett don’t minding.)
Okaaaaay, but I still don’t get how an experience can be invalid.
I don’t have enemies on this board. (No, really! Opponents, yes, but this is fencing, not war.)
My read on the intense insult people feel when their diety is not ‘respected’ is that it is far, far more extreme than any reaction that people have when a relative, friend, or, um, real thing is insulted. However it matches closely to what happens when you attack not a real thing that is external to a person, but their innermost beliefs or ideology. People get pissy when you kick at the pillars that support their entire worldview. And it is real difficult to care about that in the case of religion - from where I stand, it’s embracing error and cuddling it close like a beloved teddy bear. And error bothers me. (Not sure why - proabably a personality defect. It’s not just religious error, either - I’m sniping at errors of all kinds I see on this board. Heck, I’m sometimes a spelling nazi!)
And, due to my irritation at error, the idea that one day that mental switch might flip in my brain and make me discard critical thought seems very unlikely, with a probablilty akin to suddently turning into a cat. I literally do not think that my consciousness or identity could survive that fundamental of an alteration and be called the same thing; it would instead be the death of begbert and the birth of fundybegbert (a guy the current me wouldn’t even like).
Still, it could happen. Bad things often do.
Okay, then I have no idea what you were talking about.
That explains the elves, then! (But not the missus…)
Nitpick: etc.
:smack:
You never heard of Santa’s beard?