That subject is addressed in the bible. I would not make a judgment about the state of a specific person’s soul. It is not something that I know.
Freedom and equality like owning blacks as slaves, the genocide of American natives, and treating women as second-class citizens?
Revenant Threshold Essentially I am arguing that:
- God exists.
- To turn your back on God is to live a life of delusion.
Now obviously if you don’t believe # 1 then # 2 is irrelevant.
I tend to agree on the first part, but not on the second. Paul suggest that they must imitate “those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised”. He can’t be talking solely about those people who are on course for salvation because he’s *comparing * them to those people. There’s clearly several seperate groups here, and those he is talking to is not necessarily synonymous with those who are on the path to salvation.
Which parts are your opinion? That the time will be short, and that we will “devolve”?
Ah, I get you. So when you said people who walk away from God choose death, it’s more like they *don’t * choose life, under your view. Is that correct?
mswas - I didn’t want to quote your quite long post. Fair enough, I do see your point; if you’re right, then yes, faith is comparable. The problem there of course is that it’s only if you’re right. You could be, but you could also be wrong. The needing of food isn’t something that depends on point of view. So i’ll back off and say that faith is potentially something we need. Is that acceptable?
Omegaman - the “Atheists need evidence, but there’s no evidence for love!” is a pretty old argument. There’s certainly evidence for love.
Edit: I see on preview that I seem to have got mswas’s idea. Hooray!
Like freeing slaves, Women’s suffrage, and yeah they didn’t do too good of a job saving the American natives, but there was a Christian missionary who chronicled the devastation that Columbus wrought amongst the tribes of the Caribbean.
I shouldn’t have to make a caveat every post, but this forum seems to warrant them.
I am not at all saying that Christians were pure and virtuous. I am saying that Christianity was a governor on many people’s more selfish natures.
And that’s why churches in Rome are full of gold plundered from Central America? I’d hate to see what would have happened if Christianity wasn’t restricting peoples’ selfishness.
Also, you do realize that womens’ suffrage and emancipation happened when society became more secular?
Yes, it is undesirable for you to believe in something that you have not experienced. I wouldn’t want you to live under a delusion. To accept God because someone else wants you to is not really accepting God so much as serving that individual’s will, and therefore for an atheist would be living under a delusion.
Also, entertain the notion that a Christian may have always been a closet atheist, and as I suspect, there are many atheists who are closet Christians. That can account for conversion. Christians are generally proscripted against choosing physical immortality, while atheists do not believe in eternal life outside of the physical. Basically from a Christian perspective physical immortality is still the same as just living for a really long time as opposed to being eternal. Also, I think that the loss of faith for some people is a very traumatic experience, which has been described as ‘something dying inside.’
Don’t mean to rehash old ideas but DT is a tough one to crack. As I am a Christian I have to try with him. I get the feeling many people that he has known before have given up on him . I’m not going to be one of them.
I can, but opening someone’s skull and groping their brain while they stare at a picture of their wife/husband/child/whatever just to prove a point on a message board is a bit over the top.
Yeah, right. Or perhaps we’d have colonized the Solar System by now without Christianity corrupting us and holding us back.
As opposed to Christian values like killing and enslaving everyone who disagrees with you ? I’m an atheist; I’m free in spite of Christianity, not because of it.
According to you. I see no reason to believe that the progress of humanity has not been because of Christianity, but in spite of it.
“United ? Like a pack of dogs under one whip?” You mean missionaries spreading hate. Hate yourself, hate the world, hate life, hate the unbelievers; that is the message of Christ.
And the enslavement of blacks ( and others ) and the the subjugation of women and the slaughter of the unbelievers were all excused and in part motivated by Christianity. Giving Christianity credit for ending those is like givng credit to a rapist for stopping his rape of a woman because he’s done.
And I say that it excused and encouraged those selfish natures, and corrupted those who might otherwise have been good people.
Er, thank you, but I wasn’t suggesting I was going to believe in it. I don’t actually believe experience itself is enough to believe anyway, but that’s an argument for another thread.
I do think there are some “closet” Christians, atheists, agnostics, whatever. People are adept at lying to themselves, so i’m sure there are some out there. And I agree that a loss of faith can be traumatic, and I sympathise - but a traumatic loss of faith is not a characteristic of Christianity alone. And of course there’s equally those who feel a sense of freedom after a loss of faith.
The church created positions of worldly power, the type that craved such things gravitated toward them. Remember Christianity is not simply its priests, the priests were essentially the people who ran the business of the church. Its spiritualists and theologians were often monks who spent the bulk of their days in contemplation, and the people truly doing Missionary work often did so as a ‘calling’. Yes, colonialism came along with the missionary zeal, but still they were carrying around a book that told them not to be bad bastards, how well they were able to live up to that was based upon individual desire and ability.
The portrayal by Sam Neil of Cardinal Wolsey in ‘The Tudors’ is very poignant. He does a good job of portraying his greed and avarice all while working with larger issues in mind. For instance he tries to sell Henry VIII’s divorce to the saintly Catherine of Aragon, to the other Cardinals by telling them that Henry might turn Apostate, and that they don’t want the King of England to turn apostate. He worked to negotiate peace treaties that of course failed because of Henry’s whims but he tried. Thomas More when he wasn’t burning heretics was writing the book ‘Utopia’, a work very influential in the building of the United States of America. For better or worse, a combination of humanism, and the rise of ‘secularism’ through the empowering of Kings as being absolutely sovereign in their own domains, birthed ‘Secular Humanism’, the system of morality that many atheists employ in lieu of a denominationally specific morality. The advent of ‘The State’ that came directly out of this as implemented largely by the Cromwell who is portrayed in the show led eventually to England being run by his I believe grandson, Oliver Cromwell, a bad bastard in and of himself but this led to the ascendancies of parliaments and rule by bureaucracy rather than rule by the whim of an individual force of personality. All of this spawned in the schism from the Catholic church, which allowed the Templar influenced Freemasons to gain power and influence unhindered by the Roman church, eventually spreading across Europe and being instrumental in the planning and design of a North American Republic.
To hate Christianity is in my mind to hate Civilization. If you want to argue about the merits or lack thereof of civilization in general, I’m all for it, but I do see historical evidence that seems to point to the idea that humans in the west were a bit more cutthroat before the rabbi got nailed to the cross.
I wasn’t meaning that this is an argument that’s been used on **DT ** before (though i’m sure it probably has on some point). I just mean it’s not a very good argument. If you’re serious about trying, I would try a different approach, and be careful you don’t cross the line from what you see as helping into message board stalking.
I wasn’t intending to say that you were. What I was saying was that it would be delusional for you to believe in God without evidence. I believe that I have received sufficient proof of God’s existance.
I do not elevate Christianity to some special privileged relationship with God. It is just the religion I know the most about. I do not consider myself a Christian though I admire greatly Jesus Christ. Though I get the loophole of ‘We are all God’s children.’ so calling him The Son of God, is rather silly to me.
Yes, there are those who feel freedom after a loss of faith. People’s individual subjective experience is all different.
…In the west? Does Eastern Civilisation not count as Civilisation?
I’d agree that things were worse in the past than they are now, but I honestly don’t see why it should be Christianity that provided civilisation. Things gradually improved up to that point. Things gradually improved after. Now, if you could stick me up a chart that showed the progress of civilisation improved at a faster improving rate (not just an improving rate)as Christianity spread, you’d be on the way to convincing me. But really, that’s a *huge * claim.
Well, the doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t delusional, just as it doesn’t necessarily mean i’m not either. But sure.
Fair enough. I’m sure, however, that there are faiths different enough from yours that you cannot claim all people who lose faith are losing faith in your own God (not that you were doing that).
Yes, I know. I just thought i’d better add it since your example were all of bad things happening to people who lost their faith. Showing the balance seemed reasonable.
Civilization existed before Christianity, and it will exist after if Christianity fails at destroying it. And last I heard the Hindus and so forth aren’t living in caves.
Given how brutal and bloodthirsty the Christians have been, that’s obviously untrue, or everyone in the West would have been dead before recorded history.
This is true, but I would argue that fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus are equally batshit crazy and hellbent on destruction.
Definitely.
Der Trihs I was not doing a comparative critique with Hinduism. The Krisna tradition does a lot of similar softening of hindus as Christianity does for Westerners. However, Hinduism as a major religion did not exist until the British came. Hinduism is an amalgam of Pagan tribal religions on the Indian subcontinent. In the West and near east Christianity absorbed a lot of tribes and replaced their tribal mythology with a Christian one that allowed for cross compatibility with other tribes. Secular Humanism has had a very profound impact on the nation that we now know of as “India”, being a Parliamentary Democracy and all. You think that spawned naturally or was it essentially built by the British Empire?
I agree more or less, although I’m unaware of any non-Christian religion that has a major segment that WANTS to destroy the world and looks forward to it ( although I could be wrong ). I mostly argue about Chrisitanity because it’s more dangerous, being both more powerful and more prone to attacking outsiders than most religions ( and no Christianity, no Islam so Islam is it’s fault as well ), as well as being the religion I have to personally put up with.
No, in spite of them. The British subjugated and exploited India; they did not enlighten them.