I guess this depends on the definition of “reasoned examination” and “necessary conclusion.” By the former I mean applying logic and observation, using Occam’s razor, basically not believing in something unless there is some kind of substantial proof of its existence. By the latter I mean that there are plenty of people who apply reasoned examination to just about everything in life except their religious convictions. People say, “I know that it cannot be proven, but I choose to believe on faith.” That’s just fine by me, and I don’t mean to imply that such folks are irrational loonies or lump them in with fundies. But you have to admit that at some point, they decide not to examine their religion in a thoroughly rational, logical way. I went beyond this point, and my religion could not stand up to the examination, neither could any other, and I have no interest in living my life by faith. Thus, atheism was the necessary conclusion.
Doesn’t everyone do this regarding every conviction they hold? Do you know anyone who holds a view of the world they think is wrong? I think you mean shoving those convictions down everyone else’s throats, right? Well, atheists all too often get accused of “proselytizing” when all we’re doing is trying to a) explain to someone why we came to our personal decision, not to convince them; or b) keep others who assume that their beliefs are the default beliefs from forcing those tenets on us through the government.
I passionately support freedom of religion. I’m not trying to convert anyone who isn’t interested. Perhaps I sounded like I was “anti-witnessing” (I like that term) because I did originally post to give jmullaney an alternative to the two witnessing posts previously submitted.
Ok I think I understand your point better now. Here are some of my reactions (and I just KNOW you were waiting with baited breath)
quote:
This is not actually what Occam's Razor suggests, though I suspect you were just simplifying. Occam's Razor suggests that if we have two competing theories that explain a phenomenon EQUALLY WELL, one should choose the one which requires the least assumptions. In the case of "Is there a God." this question is not falsifyable, there is really no evidence either way...and both possibilities require ALOT of assumptions. So I do not believe Occam's Razor is applicable to this circumstance.
quote:
~~~By the latter I mean that there are plenty of people who apply reasoned examination to just about everything in life except their religious convictions.
I would agree with this, although I think the same about atheism sometimes too. IMHO atheism makes about as much sense as the organized religions (which is very little) but again that is only my personal opinion.
quote:
~~~Thus, atheism was the necessary conclusion.
You may have gone a little bit black and white here..."If my religion is wrong they must all be wrong" which is probably true...but saying that our perceptions of god(s) are wrong does not necessarily preclude the existance of such a critter. Just means we are idiots in the celestial scheme of things.
quote:
~~~Doesn't everyone do this regarding every conviction they hold? Do you know anyone who holds a view of the world they think is wrong? I think you mean shoving those convictions down everyone else's throats, right? Well, atheists all too often get accused of "proselytizing" when all we're doing is trying to a) explain to someone why we came to our personal decision, not to convince them; or b) keep others who assume that their beliefs are the default beliefs from forcing those tenets on us through the government.
You are quite right of course, and generalizing to any group is unfair. I do think some atheists are guilty of "proselytizing" when they INSIST that atheism is correct. It does not seem that you are doing that. It may be too that some people choose atheism not out of rational thought but as a sort of affront to religion...in other words they have some personal vendetta against organized religion.
As a personal anecdote I think I was similar to you in some respects, in that as a teen I realized organized religion made little sense and they all must be wrong. For a bit there I could not grasp how the concept of God made sense...but I also didn't think atheism made a lot of sense. The world and (this is gonna sound narcissistic, but is unintended to be) my own existance was so perfectly made that I could not reconcile this as chance happening. Frankly as well physical theories of "wHy the world came to be" made little sense to me. I have delved pretty deep into them and the more I read the more delusional physicists seem to me when they use math to try to explain things that happened billions of years ago in the absence of actual empirical evidence. Ok, I am wandering here. I realized also that we humans are so used to everything having a beginning and end, that perhaps...there was NO beginning to the universe, it, god, matter and energy simply always were. I also had trouble understanding my own being from a biological positivist perspective (we are only a bunch of neurons)...again because a bunch of neurons can react without being AWARE they are reacting. Why would we need to be aware that we exist at all? Hell what advantage was it to a bunch of proteins to become "alive"...none whatsoever. And why should one celled organisms develop into multicellular critters, when one celled organisms are essentially much better off. Ok, I don't want to risk "proselytizing" myself, so it is time to bitchslap me with the tuna.
LOL to both Esprix and Gaudere! What’s with the William Shatner comment? I’ve never read anything he wrote so I don’t get it.
felicia … that was one of the most beautiful ways of presenting God’s love I’ve seen. I’m so glad you wrote what you did. I hope someone will take it to heart.
I’ve never read anything Shatner wrote either; but Esprix’ comment was more in reference to your slighly above normal USAGE of all CAPITALS. It does kinda sound like Shatner, alhtough you’re not half as bad. Go to http://www.execpc.com/~mikegr/kirk/kirk.html and listen to him sing! (I hope you’re familiar with the originals so you can see how badly he slaughtered them; download a song and play it)
“…cellophane FLOWERS of yellow! and GREEN! Tooowwwwering OVER your HEAD…” --Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a la Shatner.
I cannot believe what I’m hearing! I had no idea Shatner ever did anything like that. I CANT BELIEVE IT!!! (whooops there goes that all caps again! ;)).
i was surfing through some of these responses, and i thought i’d put my 2 cents in, being a Christian myself. no, going to church doesn’t make you a Christian. no, being baptized doesn’t make you a Christian, and i know MANY people who “profess a belief in Christ and/or God” who are not Christian, either. also, contrary to popular belief, being a “good person” doesn’t get you into Heaven, no matter what religion you claim outwardly. to become a true Christian, you have to be saved, which means you have to literally sit down and pray, claiming your own salvation via the death of Jesus Christ. (see the connection? Christ-ian?) then, according to the Bible, it won’t matter how many sins you commit or how many times you sleep through church, you’re getting into Heaven, guaranteed. end of story.
ps- i don’t have any feelings for william shatner one way or the other.
I’m not sure society does “work best” either. If it is working so well, why wouldn’t god have said, screw giving my son, let 'em just be jews, what is the difference?
I mean if you say j.c. died so we’d be saved by j.c. it is sort of a tautology. If j.c. hadn’t died, we wouldn’t need to be saved by j.c., right?
jumullaney, you said: “I can’t believe j.c. died a horrible death on the cross so we’d be nice to eachother”
That’s not why he died a horrible death on the cross. He did it so that it would be possible for all of us to have a relationship with God and someday go to Heaven. We are all guilty of sin and deserve to be separated from God for it. But God, in His love, decided to send His Son Jesus to die in our place. It’s literally like taking a bullet for someone, only magnified thousands of times.
All that is required of us is to accept what he did for us and give ourselves to Him for the rest of our lives. Then we can finally become healthy human beings again through a relationship with God.
OK, I know I know better than to reply to such an obvious troll – I mean, no one actually believes this, do they? I mean you sit, mutter some majical spell to yourself, and then go on with your life raping and killing, and when you die you’ll go to some majical fairy land in the sky. That’s in the BIBLE?? If this isn’t just a joke, please give me a reference. It is probably something that idiot Paul said, but none-the-less, you’ve even got an atheist worried in so much as I don’t want to be your next victim.
Well, in theory, someone who has accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior is so grateful that they will obey God’s laws out of love for Him. A person who continues raping and killing after saying the have accepted Jesus, well, you may wonder if their conversion was sincere–and if it wasn’t, you don’t get in. Some denominations think you can lose salvation, some don’t. But yes, if Hitler “found Christ” before his death, it is generally assumed he went to heaven (at least by most theories of Christian salvation that I know of). However, that’s unlikely since he killed himself, which is a sin.
The church I used to belong to would have considered the above a terrible heresy. Are you saying Jews don’t have a relationship with God? How did j.c. die for your sins if your weren’t even born yet? Do your sins manage to travel back through time somehow? If you gave yourself to God, did God tell you to write this? Or are you one of these “i don’t practice what i preach because i’m not the kind of person i’m preaching to” types?
Oh, me achin’ 'ead. Is this, like, the Encyclopedia Brittanica “theory”? I love you, Gaudere, but you’ve reminded me of Lewis’s admonition to “read the books first, and only then read the books about the books”. I’m sorry for sounding so incredulous, but don’t you get just sick to death of reading comments framed inside the Cliff Notes version of atheism? If so, you can empathize.
No deed in isolation is a sin. Sin is coldness of the heart.
“It is not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out of his heart.” — Jesus
And I hope you can realize, Lib, that there are thousands of theories of Christianity, of which your is but one of many. jmullaney asked about the statement about being able to sin as much as you want and still get into heaven, and I was explaining, as I understand it, the traditional (fundamentalist) theory on this. I doubt you would get many fundamentalists to agree that sin is soley coldness of the heart, unless they can find some way to still consider homosexuality a sin. If I attempt to explain a certain aspect of a Christian sect’s belief–and I think I did that at least adequately–please don’t jump down my throat becuase I did not cover your beliefs. If any fundamentalists/sin-all-you-want-and-say-you-believe-in-Jesus-and-go-to-heaven-Christians want to correct my “Cliff notes”, they have every right to slam me. But I simply cannot cover every possible aspect of God/sin/justice/mercy/love/salvation/etc. in every single post; I must direct it, as best I can, to the belief system I am talking about/to. ::wondering why I even opened my mouth in the first place, except I don’t like wild mischaracterizations floating about::
Thanks Gaudere. I didn’t really want to get into the finer points of cruxifiction eschatology myself – but I guess that i-do-not-condemn-you-go-and-sin-some-more version of xdom does cover many later day xtian sects and sums up the whole religion for them. If I didn’t have a conscience, I could swing that way myself – then I wouldn’t have that nagging eternal damnation sword of damocles hanging over my head. And what fun would that be?
The Bible says that “the wages (what you EARN) of sin is death, but the gift (free but it’s not yours unless you claim it) of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus.” (Romans 6:23) That means that because we are incapable of living a sinless life, what we earn for ourselves is death. But God loved us too much to let us all die, so He sent His son, who (being God himself) was able to live a sinless life, to pay the price for us. When He died, he took every sin we have committed on Himself, then He rose having victory over death. Many people think he appeared only to the 12 disciples after his death, so they think “conspiracy” but the Bible records Him appearing to a group of 500+!! This was written within the lifetimes of these witnesses, and so could have easily been discounted had it been false!
I promise I won’t think of you as “that lonely guy”, but I will think of you as someone who is searching for the truth and I will pray earnestly for God to reveal Himself to you TODAY in a way that makes you say…HUMMMMMMMM. So keep your eyes and ears open!
It does kinda sound like Shatner, alhtough you’re not half as bad. Go to