Atheism! (3 Viewers)

[theism]

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There is a story from The London Observer illustrates the frailty of our understanding. A family of mice lived in a grand piano. They enjoyed listening to the music that came from the great player who they never saw, but who they believed in, because they enjoyed the music that came from the piano. One day one of the little mice got especially brave. He climbed deep into the bowels of the piano. He made an astonishing discovery. The music did not come from a great player; rather, the music came from wires that reverberated back and forth. The little mouse returned to his family tremendously excited.He informed his family that there was no great player who made the piano music; rather, there were these little wires that reverberated back and forth. The family of mice abandoned their belief in a great piano player.Instead they had a totally mechanistic view.

One day another one of the little mice got especially brave. He climbed even further up into the bowels of the piano. To his amazement he found that indeed the music did not come from the reverberating wires, but rather from little hammers that struck the wires. It was those hammers that really made the music. He returned to his family with a new description of the source of the music. The family of mice rejoiced that they were so educated that they understood that there was no great piano player but that the music came from little hammers that struck the wires. The family of mice did not believe that there was a player playing the piano. Instead they believed that their mechanistic understanding of the universe explained all of reality. But the fact is that the player continued to play his music.

Modern science has done much to uncover the natural processes in the world. Daily we are learning more and more about how this world operates. But just because we understand how things work does not mean that there is not an intelligent mind behind the process. Albert Einstein expressed an awe and respect for the superior spirit or mind behind the universe. We should not make the mistake of getting so caught up with how things work that we ignore the Creator, the highly intelligent mind that is behind the intricate process.

[/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica] Isn't believing in Jesus irrational? [/FONT][/FONT]
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[/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Many people think that if they place their faith in Christ, they will have to commit intellectual suicide. They don't realize that Christ died to take away their sins, not their brains. Christians don't deposit their brains at the coat-check window and pick them back up on their way to heaven.

You can go to two extremes when it comes to the subjects of faith and reason.The first is to say that faith needs no reason: we just trust God without reservation then leap off the high board into the dark. But the fact is that Christianity does have a basis in history and in logic. There is evidence that Jesus was an actual historical person. The New Testament writings,the writings of Josephus and other first-century historians document this.

The second extreme is to say that if an idea is not logical, if it has no basis in rational thinking, then it has no place in my belief system. If you follow that thinking to its conclusion, then you have to throw out a lot of the miracles and healings in Scripture since logically people do not rise from the dead, logically the crust of leprosy does not fall off the body of its victim at the touch of a hand, and legs crippled for nearly forty years do not unhinge and become new because someone tells them to get up.

This is the balance people need to keep in mind when they say they are too rational to have faith, when they say they won't believe in something unless they can see it. Some have even said, "Cliffe, I wish I had your faith."Sometimes people mean this sincerely, but often they really mean, "Cliffe, I cannot be so stupid, so intellectually naive to believe all the superstition and garbage about God that you've apparently swallowed." In a way that issue is moot. All of us believe in things we can't see. All of us place our trust in things that are not plainly evident. We believe in team spirit, patriotism, love, and goodness. Although we can't reach out and grasp any of these values, and though we so often see them misused and flaunted for selfish gain, we still believe they exist and often believe they have value.

Every one of us has faith. Every one of us believes in someone or something that gives us direction in life, that gives us security. Peter Schaeffer wrote a play titled Equus. In the play a young boy begins to worship a picture of Jesus hanging over his bed. The boy's father, who is a devout atheist, rips the picture off the wall and replaces it with a photograph of a horse. The young boy, needing meaning and purpose, begins to worship the picture of the horse. The father gets more upset and sends the boy to a psychiatrist to have this fixation removed.

As the psychiatrist begins talking to the boy, he gains some understanding that was not apparent to the father. The boy does not have a fixation on Christ or a fixation on horses; the psychiatrist realizes that the picture gives the boy meaning, purpose and direction.

Schaeffer's point is clear. Whatever motivates us defines who we are. Live for pleasure-you are a hedonist. Live to amass wealth-you are a materialist. Live for personal happiness and fulfillment-you are a narcissist. Live to pursue knowledge-you are a rationalist.

The British writer G. K Chesterton said that when a person stops believing in God, he does not believe in nothing. He will believe in anything.

The question I put to those who tell me they won't believe unless it's rational is, "What is the object of your faith? Whom do you trust?" If the object of your faith is not trustworthy, it is not reliable. Real faith in something or someone that is trustworthy is not blind. Real faith will include the evidence to buttress it, and personal commitment. The faith of a Christian is based on the trustworthiness of Jesus Christ. Jesus stated, "The Son of man did not come to be served, but to serve,and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mt 20:28). Jesus gave us the evidence to back up his words; he consistently assumed the posture of a servant. Even at the very end of his public ministry, on the very night he was betrayed, he assumed the posture of the lowliest servant and washed his disciples' feet.

One day Peter asked Jesus, " 'Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?' Jesus answered,'I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times' " (Mt 18:21-22).He spoke of complete and utter forgiveness.

Jesus gave us the evidence to back up his words. As he was bleeding and dying on the cross, his enemies taunted him. His response? He prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." He proved his trustworthiness; he proved his evidence was sound, and he asks us to trust him on the basis of that evidence.

A few people carry their inquiry even further. They say, "I must know absolutely that Christ alone is the truth before I can believe in him."This can be intellectual arrogance carried to an extreme. It requires that God give enough evidence of his existence to satisfy an insatiable intellect.This kind of arrogance demands that God meet every one of my requirements before I believe in him.

Suppose I demanded that my wife, Sharon, risk her life for me repeatedly to prove her love for me. Once would never be enough. The insatiability of my desire to know absolutely would be cruel manipulation, not intellectual integrity.

Yet many of us do exactly the same thing with God. We continually deny his past trustworthiness and say, "Now, what have you done for me lately?"This kind of wheeling and dealing is not intellectual prowess. It is cowardly manipulation. It also separates the proud from the humble. The proud say,"God, you meet these requirements, then I'll decide whether or not I want to believe in you." The humble person will look for evidence, discover it, and trust that if God was true to his word yesterday, he will be true to it today.
Confronting what I feel is intellectual dishonesty is never easy. It means having the discernment to know whether or not the intellectual arguments people offer are sincere. All of us need help in this area. If I confess my own intellectual and moral insincerity before God, I will be one step closer to being the kind of authentic witness God wants me to be.[/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]

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[theism]

Prove to me God exists

[FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Often people challenge me, "Prove to me that God exists!" Perhaps they suspect that there is no way we can prove it. And they are right. But I ask, "Can you prove to me that your mother loves you or that just because she loves you today that she will still love you tomorrow? Prove to me that she won't poison your coffee tomorrow morning."

Can any of us prove that? I doubt it. We don't have final confirmation that our mother loves us, but we do have the evidence-she has cared for us in the past; she has accepted us; she has taken care of us when we couldn't take care of ourselves. The evidence is that she will not stop loving us tomorrow. The fact is that you and I can prove almost nothing. Instead we make our decisions based on evidence. So let me present some evidence (not proof) that God exists.

First, we live in a world that has unity, order and design. Order and design do not spring from chance. They come from an intelligent mind. Albert Einstein once said, "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

A bit simpler and less profound statement of the evidence comes from Professor Edwin Carlston, biologist at Princeton University: "The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory."

The Bible takes the evidence and makes it poetry: 'The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world" (Ps 19:1-4).

Second, confronted by order outside ourselves, we crave order within. We crave purpose and meaning.

Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, asked,'What is life for? To die? To kill myself at once? No, I am afraid. To wait for death till it comes? I fear that even more. Then I must live. But what for? In order to die? And I could not escape from that circle." Ernest Hemingway, the great American novelist, wrote, "Life is just a dirty trick, a short journey from nothingness to nothingness."

Confronted by the meaninglessness of life, Hemingway decided to shorten the journey by committing suicide. If your birth was an accident and if your death will be an accident, then all that lies between is another accident we call life.

Adam Schaff, the Polish Marxist philosopher, writes, "From the point of view of the progress of nature death is entirely sensible. But from the point of view of a given individual death is senseless and places in doubt everything that he does.... Attempts to ridicule this do not help."Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, said, "The question of the meaning and worth of life never becomes more urgent or more agonizing than when we see the final breath leave a body which a moment before was living."Jean Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher, wrote, "Manis absurd, but he must grimly act as if he were not." Why not? Why not face the logical ramifications of those assumptions? If there is no God, life is an accident. Humanity is absurd. Try and live out that view of reality. Most of us can't or refuse to. We insist upon attaching meaning and significance to our lives and actions. We have an innate drive to understand the purpose of our lives.Jesus said that we were created to love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves.Our desire to live meaningful lives comes from the Creator who made us for a purpose.

Many of us pervert the purpose of life from loving God and loving people to the pursuit of superficial happiness and instant gratification. This makes sense for a few affluent, educated Westerners. It automatically condemns the majority of humanity to a meaningless existence. Jesus said, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (Jn 3:16). Jesus Christ makes sense not simply for one sector of humanity but for the entire world. Jesus Christ brings meaning and purpose in life to the person in the third world and to the person in the United States.

Third, where does human personality come from? I never see life come from non-life. I never see being come from non- being. I never see personality come from matter and energy or from the impersonal. Dr. Jacob Bronowski, the American scientist, wanted to retain his unique personality. He wrote, "When I say that I want to be myself, I mean as the existentialist does that I want to be free to be myself. This implies that I too want to be rid of constraints (inner as well as outward constraints) in order to act in unexpected ways . . . I want to be allowed to be different from others. I want to follow my own way-but I want it to be a way, recognizably my own, and not a zig-zag. And I want people to recognize it: I want them to say, 'How characteristic!'"

Bronowski realized that modem science is reducing human beings to machines."This is where the fulcrum of our fears lies: that man as a species and we as thinking men, will be shown to be no more than a machinery of atoms. We pay lip service to the vital life of the amoeba and the cheesemite; but what we are defending is the human claim to have a complex of will and thoughts and emotions-to have a mind....

"The crisis of confidence . . . springs from each man's wish to be a mind and a person, in the face of the nagging fear that he is a mechanism.The central question I ask is this: "Can man be both a machine and a self?"

When a chemical analysis of a human being is written up and handed in, the human being has not been completely defined. We each have a personality that goes beyond a simple listing of chemical ingredients in the brain.There is an "I" that at the end of a day can review the day's events and critique whether each action and attitude was worthwhile or not. Each of us has the ability to know himself. Behind human personality does not stand impersonal chance and fate but rather the personal Creator.

Fourth, the existence of values suggests that reality is bigger than simply cold matter and hot energy. The human appreciation of beauty and harmony suggests a Creator who created these values and the ability to recognize and appreciate them. Team spirit and patriotism, although not capable of being chemically analyzed or held in one's hand, are real values that many people enjoy. They point to a reality including more than simply that which can be scientifically verified.

Fifth, why do we trust our reason? If reason springs from chance mutations and natural selection, why do we trust it to put us in touch with reality? What gives us the confidence that our reason is an accurate indicator of that which is true? Behind reason does not stand chance and fate but rather the rational Creator. He has created the universe and my mind in such away that by observation and study I can begin to understand how the universe functions. Johann Kepler, the father of modem astronomy, peered out in to the universe and exclaimed, "Oh God, I am thinking your thoughts after you!" If we do not believe there is a God, we must exercise blind faith in order to trust our reason which springs from chance. If we do believe in God, we trust our reason because we realize that both the universe and our minds were created by the rational Creator.

Sixth, we all have conscience, a built-in warning system that clicks in whenever we sense ourselves doing something we ought not to do. If there were no God, if everything were relative and situational, we wouldn't need this system; there would be no use for it. We also experience moral indignation over such things as child abuse, rape, apartheid, and the wanton destruction of human life. God has given us this indignation, this sensitized conscience,to enable us to differentiate between good and evil. Now it is certainly possible for our consciences to become calloused, unfeeling from neglect or overexposure to evil. And it is difficult to live a life of consistency in a world that tries to go its own way without God. But the fact that we all begin with a conscience, is evidence of the existence of one who has imprinted an ability to sense good and evil into us.

Some argue that the human conscience is simply a result of conditioning by society, the consistent influence from the environment, and the pressure of the status quo. But a careful study of history refutes this. Almost every time a society has taken a step forward it was because an individual or a small group of individuals followed their conscience instead of popular opinion, the status quo.

Two white men in England, Newton and Wilberforce, fought for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire until they won in Parliament. Slavery was an important source of income for the British people. Great pressure was exerted on Newton and Wilberforce to quit their fight against slavery. But Newton and Wilberforce insisted on following their consciences instead of popular opinion.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was told by his society, "We don't want to hear from you. Don't you know your place?" But Dr. King insisted on following his conscience in his fight against racism in the United States.He refused to allow the status quo to set his moral agenda. Even when some of his partners in the struggle for equal rights tried to persuade him to use violence, he rejected their pragmatism and chose instead to follow the path of nonviolence his conscience recommended. His commitment to follow his conscience instead of the status quo led to a bullet being shot through his head. Today we honor him for following what was right instead of what was expedient.

Seventh, if there is no God, love is simply a chemical reaction, a biological drive, an animal instinct. In his novel Nausea, Jean Paul Sartre expresses disdain for young couples who try to escape the crushing absurdity of reality by retreating into the mythical realm of love. "I stop listening to them: they annoy me. They are going to sleep together. They know it.Each of them knows that the other knows it. But as they are young, chaste,and decent, as each wants to keep his self-respect and that of the other,and as love is a great poetic thing which mustn't be shocked, they go several times a week todances and restaurants, to present the spectacle of their ritualistic, mechanical dances . . . "

If there is no God, only the natural is real. We are the result of chance mutations and natural selection. Reality is comprised of matter and energy evolved to different levels. Love is a chemical reaction. It is the sex drive or the drive to preserve the genetic pool as several Duke University students insisted. Reality does not include a real value of love. You cannot get the value of love from matter and energy. You simply have chemical reactions, one of which you like to get mystical about and call love. Sentiments are nice as long as they do not cause us to escape reality.

But my experience violently contradicts this world view. I have been the recipient of an unconditional love that was not motivated by either a sex drive or a drive to preserve the human species. I have observed people shower compassion and kindness on handicapped people and terminally-ill patients. Many human beings love others expecting nothing in return except continued racial slurs or slander.

Bishop Hasan Dehgani-Tafti prayed for the murderers of his son in Iran."Oh God, we remember not only Bahram but also his murderers; not because they killed him in the prime of his youth and made our hearts bleed and our tears flow, . . . but because through their crime we now follow Thy footsteps more closely in the way of sacrifice. The terrible fire of this calamity burns up all selfishness and possessiveness in us; its flame reveals the depth of depravity and meanness and suspicion, the dimension of hatred and the measure of sinfulness in human nature. It makes obvious as never before our need to trust in God's love as shown in the cross of Jesus and His resurrection; Love which makes us free from hate towards our persecutors; Love which brings patience, forbearance, courage, loyalty, humility, generosity, greatness of heart; . . . Love which teaches us how to prepare ourselves to face our awn day of death. O God, Bahram's blood has multiplied the fruit of the Spirit in the soil of our souls; So when his murderers stand before Thee on the day of judgment, remember the fruit of the Spirit by which they have enriched our lives, and forgive."

Jesus revealed that reality is bigger than matter and energy. Reality includes the supernatural God. This God is love. When God created us he put within us the innate ability to love. This love enables us to serve and sacrifice expecting nothing in return. This love comes from God and is available for each one of us.

Leighton Ford tells a story about the student riots at the Sorbonne, the French university, in the 1960s. A young man walked up to a bearded man who was rioting and asked, "Excuse me, sir. Why are you rioting?"
The bearded man responded, "I am protesting this lousy world."
The young man asked, "Do you believe in God?"
The bearded man replied, "No! I am an atheist"
The young man asked, "Do you love anyone?"
The bearded man lowered his head and said, "Yes, I love a woman by whom I have had a child She is dying of leukemia."
The young man said, "Oh, that is too bad! Why don't you get another woman?"
The bearded man hauled back and almost hit the young man.
The young man quickly said, 'Wait! You told me there is no God. If there is no God, there is no such thing as real love. There are only biological drives. The woman dying of leukemia is losing her ability to satisfy your drives." Then the young man took out a Gospel of John which clearly states that there is a God of love. Behind the innate human ability to love does not stand the yawning void of chance and the impersonal. Behind every human's ability to love stands a loving Father who is in heaven. The bearded man walked away with something new to think about.

Eighth, even a cursory study of anthropology shows us that every culture has had some kind of belief system. Humankind is incurably religious. Blaise Pascal, the brilliant seventeenth-century French physicist wrote, "You and I have a God-shaped vacuum at the center of our being." Every culture shows evidence of the drive to fill this empty space with something satisfying religiously. You and I have a sex drive. There is a sexual relationship to satisfy that drive. You and I have an appetite for food. There is food to satisfy our appetite. You and I also have a drive to know God. The Bible reveals that God created us to know him.

Ninth, the historical evidence of Jesus Christ reveals that God does care and wants to know us personally. The evidence of his sinless life, the quality and clarity of his teachings, the love that flowed from him even during his painful death, and his historical resurrection from the dead point to Jesus being who he said he was-God in human form.

Nobody invented Jesus Christ.

Finally, consider that for two thousand years people around the world have claimed that this historical figure, Jesus Christ, has radically altered their lives. I'm not talking about a White-Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. I'm talking about people of different racial heritages and diverse economic and educational backgrounds all claiming that Jesus Christ has forever altered their lives and their thinking. I have seen blind women in Haiti tapping their canes to gospel music. I have heard some of the brilliant scientists and professors in the United States speak of their deep commitment and loyalty to Jesus.

The evidence is universal. The evidence is that God does exist. The evidence is that Jesus Christ is the truth.[/FONT]

 

[theism]

Isn't Christianity a crutch for the weak?

[FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]A woman at the University of California in Northridge challenged me: "Jesus is just a psychological crutch to help you deal with ignorance and fear.Because you are weak and scared, you have constructed a father figure in the sky to give you security. I don't need your crutch."

This attitude toward religion and Christianity in particular is very common in our modern world. It is assumed that if something meets too many of our needs, then it must be suspect; it is thought to most likely be a psychological defense mechanism. There are several responses to this line of reasoning.
The first is that I recognize that too many people have used Jesus Christ as a crutch. Jesus is sometimes used as a Rolaids tablet to settle an upset stomach caused by the fear of death. But Jesus Christ is not merely a sedative to give us peace and to ease our anxiety. Rather, Jesus Christ calls us to a radically new lifestyle.

Jesus challenges his followers to live lives committed to love, committed to justice. Becoming a Christian is not a supplement to our old lifestyles.Jesus calls his followers to have the courage to stand for truth and against lies and half truths, to stand for the dignity and sanctity of human life and to fight the dehumanization we see happening around us.

At the same time, we should recognize that we all use some crutch to prop up our lives. It could be the prop of materialism, living to amass wealth.It could be the prop of hedonism, living to stimulate our nerve endings.It might be the prop of narcissism, living for ourselves. It might be the prop of careerism, living for personal achievement. It might be the prop of personal happiness, living for self fulfillment. Crutches help us to escape what we feel, to reduce the pain of emptiness at the core of our lives.

Jesus Christ comes and knocks those crutches away and challenges us to live for something bigger than ourselves. He challenges us to live to serve God and to serve a suffering humanity. To reject Christ and to buy into one of the crutches that our culture offers is to escape the challenge of life.Christianity doesn't allow us to hide behind crutches. Christ forces us to face life squarely and realistically.

Second, seeing Jesus Christ as a psychological crutch distorts the issue.The question of Jesus Christ is not a psychological question. It is a historical question. Jesus really lived, taught, died and rose from the dead two thousand years ago. It has very little to do with how well Jesus meets my needs.The evidence for Jesus is based on history. The historical evidence is that Jesus lived a perfect life and taught others to imitate his lifestyle; the evidence is that he bled and died on the cross; the historical evidence is that three days after he died he rose from the dead. Now the real question we must answer is, "Is this Jesus really the truth as he claimed to be?"

Third, while some claim that Jesus is a father figure in the sky that we project to meet our psychological needs, the psychological argument is circular.I could just as easily say that the reason people reject Jesus is because they have psychological hang-ups that prevent them from being able to trust a father figure. Just because God meets certain needs in us is no reason to reject him. In fact, it would be strange if he didn't fulfill certain needs we have. But again this is not the issue. We are confronted with the historical Jesus Christ who claims to be the infinite, eternal God penetrating human history two thousand years ago. Is he the truth or is he a liar?

The last thing I want to talk about is the true nature of sicknesses and cures. When I was on the basketball team in college, several of my team mates suffered knee injuries. Their legs were put in casts. They were given crutches to walk with. Since they were dependent on their crutches, does that mean I should have kicked the crutches from under them? As human beings we all have real needs. We have known guilt, loneliness and fear, and have experienced emptiness, sorrow and depression. Trying to escape them seems impossible.Regardless of how many sophisticated games we play to ignore it, we all face the finality of death.

To reject a cure because it is a cure seems silly. The exciting news is that Jesus Christ meets us in the midst of our very real needs. Jesus promises to forgive us and to wipe away the guilt that plagues us. Jesus Christ calls us into a relationship with the living God that will meet our deepest need for unconditional love. Jesus Christ knows our struggles, our fears and wants toreplace them with peace and joy. We should only reject acure if it is a false one, especially one that makes our condition even worse. But Jesus is the true cure to our real ailments. He only asks us that we try his medicine and see if it works.

You and I have real needs and hurts in life. It does no good to cover up these hurts and needs. That is escapism. Jesus Christ challenges us to face reality, and Jesus Christ promises to go with us through reality if we will invite him into our lives. The question today is, Are we willing to invite the living Lord Jesus Christ to go with us through life, through death and out the other side to eternity?

Suggested Reading
- Michael Green. Running from Reality. DawnersGrove, lnterVarsity Press, 1983.
- C. S. Lewis. Mere Christianity. NewYork: Macmillan, 1981. [/FONT]

 

[khorne]

Prove to me God exists

So basically..what you're saying is that you worship a Jewish zombie?

Just imagine...If there was no dark age or holy crusades we could be living on the moon, screwing sexy moon chicks. Fuck you religion.

 

[black_kat_meow]

Theism, you are only posting other people's arguments and opinions without providing a personal rationalisation for your beliefs. Typical Christian, don't post at all if you're going to do that.

 

[theism]

Theism, you are only posting other people's arguments and opinions without providing a personal rationalisation for your beliefs. Typical Christian, don't post at all if you're going to do that.

go ahead and read all of those.

i can't better those arguements,
so why bother?

it's like telling an existentialist atheist 'hey, write your own philosophical anthologies', instead of going on about albert camus

don't you hold your own scientists/authors/politicans in high regard?

 

[black_kat_meow]

go ahead and read all of those.

i can't better those arguements,
so why bother?

i can give you a personal revelation of jesus christ' impact upon my life,
but i like to do that in person.

They are already online, you can just link, not post them in here. I've read them, same shit as usual.

Don't bother post in here at all then if you won't post "personal revelations" then, there's no point and no room for intellectual discussion.

 

[theism]

They are already online, you can just link, not post them in here. I've read them, same shit as usual.

Don't bother post in here at all then if you won't post "personal revelations" then, there's no point and no room for intellectual discussion.

what is the purpose of your life?

are you an existentialist?
a nihilist?
an agnostic?

please do read over those
i think some valid points of reasoning are raised.

 

[black_kat_meow]

go ahead and read all of those.

i can't better those arguements,
so why bother?

it's like telling an existentialist atheist 'hey, write your own philosophical anthologies', instead of going on about albert camus

don't you hold your own scientists/authors/politicans in high regard?

Totally different, you can refer to other people/whatever that have inspired you, but posting their entire argument in place of your own interpretation is pathetic.

 

[khorne]

what is the purpose of your life?

are you an existentialist?
a nihilist?
an agnostic?

please do read over those
i think some valid points of reasoning are raised.

The purpose of their life is to pay the taxs required to support your dole.

 

[theism]

The purpose of their life is to pay the taxs required to support your dole.

that's funny buddy.
i'm not on the dole.

i'm not even on freaking youth allowance.
my parents' earn too much money

 

[black_kat_meow]

what is the purpose of your life?

are you an existentialist?
a nihilist?
an agnostic?

please do read over those
i think some valid points of reasoning are raised.

I don't feel the need to define my life in terms of its "purpose."

I read them, they are actually pretty poor. I was a Christian until age 14, I understand the arguments.

 

[khorne]

that's funny buddy.
i'm not on the dole.

i'm not even on freaking youth allowance.
my parents' earn too much money

Good job. You failed to detect sarcasm.

A major flaw in the author's argument is that...well, you guys are the proponents of religion, so you have to prove to us that god exists...You can't make claims without evidence.

 

[theism]

I don't feel the need to define my life in terms of its "purpose."

I read them, they are actually pretty poor. I was a Christian until age 14, I understand the arguments.

What happened?

if you don't mind me asking.

it's always a concern for those that have lost their faith.
In the bible it talks about the good shepard, guiding it's lost sheep from safety.
i have seen personally, what happens to those lost sheep.

tragedies occur.

C.S. Lewis put it so well when he said 'Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world'.

 

[black_kat_meow]

Life happened.

 

[theism]

Good job. You failed to detect sarcasm.

A major flaw in the author's argument is that...well, you guys are the proponents of religion, so you have to prove to us that god exists...You can't make claims without evidence.

Well you can consider me a snob,
because i believe that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.

 

[khorne]

What happened?

if you don't mind me asking.

it's always a concern for those that have lost their faith.
In the bible it talks about the good shepard, guiding it's lost sheep from safety.
i have seen personally, what happens to those lost sheep.

tragedies occur.

C.S. Lewis put it so well when he said 'Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world'.

See what he did there...Tried to make his argument have intellectual grounding by bringing in CS lewis.

To the above post: Call me a snob, but I believe people who can't type or spell properly are idiots...like you!

 

[theism]

Life happened.

something tragic?

'why would God let this happen?'

 

[theism]

See what he did there...Tried to make his argument have intellectual grounding by bringing in CS lewis.

yeah it was an anecdote.
not sure what you conjure from C.S. Lewis

he's a literary figure.

if i quoted myself, that wouldn't have the same.. impact would it
hah.


And yeah,
do excuse my spelling and grammar
i've been on holidays for a while now.

 

[black_kat_meow]

Many bad things. Prayer is useless.

But logical reasoning is the reason I no longer believe. As well as the lower place of women in the ideal Christian world/family.