Who are we to judge what is “benevolent”? Isn’t this putting God in a box? I believe we all deserve hell. Every last one of us. I also believe that God requires 100% purity to get into heaven. Obviously none of us have that. Whether you’ve made only one mistake or 5 million, you are essentially the same: Imperfect . That is why I choose to believe in Chrisitanity. Because to me it is the only solution to the problem of human depravity. That is, only through Jesus, and not on my own can I get to heaven.
(Grits teeth. Prepares to be utterly decimated intellectually)
Isn’t assuming that God is the god of Christianity putting God in a box? If we’re going to pick and choose our god-qualities, I’ll take benevolence for $200, Alex.
You lost me on this one. You say that God requires perfection to get into heaven, then say that none of us are perfect. Then you close by saying you’ll get to heaven through Jesus. Is Jesus overriding God, or is it something else?
I get this strange picture of Jesus as a road worker on the highway to heaven with a detour sign.
yojimbo it bothered me to read your first sentence here. Yes, it’s true if you sit there until the minute you die and completely and totally deny the existence of God, there’s a good chance you will go to Hell. But on the other hand, God has an incredible amount of mercy and since he did create us, I believe he gives each and every one of us a fair chance to find him in our lifetime.
[end of slight hijack]
I once read a story about an underground bible study group in some foreign country where bible studies were outlawed. There was a group of about 10 people in a basement, and all of a sudden some military men came in with their guns drawn and proceeded to tell the people that they were going to kill anyone who could stand there and tell them they were a Christian. Half of the people left at that point while the other stood up preparing to die for their beliefs. The men then put down their guns and said they only wanted to pray with true believers and that was their way of finding out who the real believers were.
I hope I would have the guts to stand up for my faith to the point of death. I do know that I will believe until the day I die though and if I am wrong I won’t regret living my life as a follower of Christ.
I like the idea of people living life trying to make the world a better place to be and people being remembered fondly whcih should be done by everyone reguardless of thier belief. As far as the judgement of God how do you know that you will be judged on your merit and not something else? This "Atheist’s Wager seems kind of odd. If athiest don’t believe in a God why would they concern themselves with how they will be judged and how would they know the criteria which will be used to judge?
Oh, by the way, I am not "arguing anything. I just wanted to pose a question. I am a Christian (probably obvious), but I did’nt pose these questions to arguee. I just thought that the answers would be interesting.
(Boy, staying up late to do taxes is making me tired. yawn…:o)
also, minor nitpick. Atheist does mean (as you say) belief in no god. But it also means no belief in god (God, gods, etc). Its more than just a semantic difference. I think most people here have no belief in god rather than a belief in no God.
If there is a god, in the judeo-christian sense of an all-knowing, all powerful conscious entity, it is the most EVIL being in the universe, and no threat of torture could ever make me worship such a <expletive deleted>.
So since I’m not going to worship it or obey it as a matter of proinciple, and I can’t evade or change it, why should I want to believe in it? Sounds masochistic to me.
If I want to believe in a powerful evil entity, there’s always the government - and THAT I may have a chance of changing or at least avoiding.
dreamer that story about the bible group in a “far off land” is utter made-up glurge. It did the e-mail rounds a few years ago set in a variety of countries.
It could well instead just have well concluded as it would do and has done many times in real life: in a full-bloodied massacre.
[quote]
yojimbo it bothered me to read your first sentence here. Yes, it’s true if you sit there until the minute you die and completely and totally deny the existence of God
[quote]
I don’t deny there is a god just don’t believe there is anything of the sort. Not one bit of my life experience, knowledge and observations even hints at a higher power IMO so I don’t need to deny something that just doesn’t exist IMO. From my POV you are the one denying stuff not me
The ultimate nature of reality is probably not able to be determined in any factual way; as such, risk-analysis fails to be a sticking point for how one should view metaphysics, since risk analysis deals with the likelihood of outcomes as well as their relative benfit, and since we cannot assign likelihood to most metaphysical “truths” then clearly any “what if” question is doomed from the start. We cannot perform such a what-if analysis.
What if The Mormons are right, well, then, hey: a mormon priest could spell it out (or whatever mormons call their spiritual leaders, if they have any, I don’t know). If hindus are right, then there you go. If atheists are wrong we are marginally (if at all) more informed than we were before we knew that. Even if only a specific subset of metaphysical truths were “what iffed” into correctness then we would still only be marginally better off.
What if this question is effectively meaningless? There’s a question I’d love to hear answered.
Puzzle Boy, you might want to check out the Pensées of Blaise Pascal, the guy who invented Pascal’s Wager. Good reading, for the most part, in my estimation.
Dreamer, do a web search on my nick. Aside from a couple of companies and rock groups named after him, the life story of the man who actually had this as his name might interest you. (Regulars have heard it from me one too many times already.)
My take on this is something very similar to that of Jeu d’Esprit. I have found that living with what I might call a fatalistic optimism – that although things may seem FUBAR at the moment, they will come out for the best in the end – under the terms of the two Great Commandments given by Jesus – to love God with all that is in one, and to love all other people as one does oneself – or at least as closely to those ideals as one can attain – is personally self-gratifying, self-fulfilling, and in general such that I am much happier with the lifestyle I have evolved under it. (Admittedly, that makes me less than a good Christian to the TULIP YEC evangelicals, since I need to, for example, stand up for the rights of gay people to be treated fairly and equally. But it’s what I was told to do, and it makes me personally much happier than before I took it as my own marching orders – so even under the hypothesis that I was mistaken, I’m doing just fine.
Although, if you grant me the further presumption of no god and a functional afterlife, I will have some pointed questions to ask of the entity whom I experienced and who presented himself to me as God.
I’m slightly agnostic because when I consider that Christianity is based on the beliefs of people from 2000 years ago who were what I would call a bit superstitious. The identity of many of the authors of the Bible is either unknown or suspect.
But I do identify Christian (1) because I was raised that way, and (2) I believe the basic fundamental teachings of Jesus (who was a pretty liberal guy) to be good and right. To me.
Therefore even if Christianity is a big put-on, I can still look back on my life doing my best at following what Jesus was saying we should do and rest knowing that my time alive was well spent, not wasted as the OP theorized.
I don’t know for sure if there is ONE true faith.
I don’t know for sure if there is ANY true faith.
I don’t force my beliefs on anyone else and I don’t feel the need to justify my beliefs to anyone else; though I am happy to share if I’m asked.
Let us postulate for the sake of argument that there is a God more or less matching the Christian descrip, and that this God requires us to worship Him or suffer dire consequences after death (burn in hell or something to that effect).
If I were to believe in such a God, I would find it necessary to plot God’s overthrow and destruction.
I don’t believe in such a God. (I don’t generally call myself an atheist, but my concept of God isn’t compatible with this description). If I am wrong, and discover upon my death that there is such a God, I will simply have to take on God at that point.
Anyone got any notions on strategies for killing God as a dead person standing before the Throne of Judgment?
I don’t think that is what the bible teaches at all. God is not saying “Worship me or else”. The point is Romans 3:23 “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We all deserve hell. I don’t care who you are. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world…” you know this one. I believe God has provided a way out of all this through his son. I can do nothing but respectfully disagree with those who do not agree with this position. I have to admit, I may be wrong. But so might you be. I feel good with where I am at.
There are these things that we cannot measure. Cannot explain. Let me share a story that I know to be true. I went to Haiti last year to work at an orphanage for a week. I met a missionary that ran it named Jim. Jim was the most humble, caring man I have ever met. I asked Jim what made him want to spend his life like this. He told me about a time when he first started the orphanage. He needed medicine for a sick boy but had no money. He needed exactly $300 for the supplies. He got on his knees and prayed that God would provide. As he was praying, there was a knock at the door. Jim got up and answered the door and a Haitan man handed him an envelope. In it was $300 cash. There is no mail delivery in Haiti and this orphanage is 8 hours from Port-au-Prince. Someone had payed this man a great deal to personally deliver the letter.
Another time Jim was having trouble with people stealing his solar panels. Every time he left the compound someone would sneak in and steal the panels. So Jim prayed. He went into town one day and came back fully expecting the panels to be gone. They were still there. When he got out of his truck some villagers came up to Jim and asked him when he got the guard dog. “What guard dog?” was Jim’s response. “The big, black one standing by the solar panels all afternoon”. Apparently, Haitans are scared of black dogs and this dog fit the bill. The dog was gone of course and no one saw it again. The people in the village believe that Jim’s orphange is protected by a mighty spirit. These are just two of the many stories he shared with me.
Now either Jim was lying to me or there was something in His prayers. I can’t write either one of those two off as coincidence.
Well you can go with anecdotal evidence if you want, but us atheists want lot more more proof of God than that.
Did you ask Jim if he’d ever prayed to God and got no response?
Are you saying God will always answer prayers?
The only scientific test of prayer I know of was whether it shortened the time patients spent in hospital. It didn’t.
Of course you do and that is fine. I refuse to believe that this these stories worked out by chance. I’m not even saying this has to be the “Christian” God. But, to me, it is evidence of something greater than I.
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By “no response” do you mean God didn’t say yes or didn’t answer at all? Do you ever tell your kids “no” or “wait”? Your kids may not think it’s fair but I’m sure you would always do what’s in their best interest. (I’m assuming you have kids. If not, I apologize.)
JThunder, that link is pretty disappointing, and exactly fails to miss the point of moral relativity. Not having a God just means that we have no stone tablets to refer to for our understanding of “good”, “correct”, and their opposites such as “evil” and “wrong”. It doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as “evil” or “wrong”. Furthermore, the author seems to think that because we, as humans, can find no absolute standard, that we must therefore find all standards “equally correct”; yet he somehow fails to see that even though Catholics and Methodists may disagree on many points, they would find each other more correct than, say, a Wiccan. As such, the author fails completely to grasp the premise of moral relativism, and disappoints me greatly in that he feels,
:rolleyes:
Moral relativism: the premise that there is no way of absolutely knowing whether or not one moral system is “more correct” than another. Certainly any moral system-- or all moral systems-- may assert that they are, in fact, absolutely correct. The moral relativist would simply say, “Well, that isn’t necessarily the case,” the end, and continue happily along condemning murder, or whatever. Moral relativism is not in itself a moral system, it is a way of thinking about all moral systems.
See above answer for details.