Re: the God that never was

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:52:04 -0800, hasta la vista wrote
(in article <nospam-389BBC.13520429012008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

In article <C3C3E84B.A4D4C%CSMA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Snit <CSMA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"hasta la vista" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> stated in post
nospam-6BAA01.21113028012008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx on 1/28/08 8:11 PM:

In article <C3BF8985.A430B%CSMA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Snit <CSMA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


I've seen a lot about the prophecies of Nostradamus and, interesting
enough,
virtually all his work is about evil and dark events. Depending on the
translation and which commentary you read, much of his writing is so
enigmatic
and vague that it's impossible to tell if he was accurate or not. There
is
no
ambiguity in the Biblical prophecies that have come to pass.

Oh, give some examples.... quote the Bible and then show what happened.

I will later - I can only give so much time to the issue. And I wonder
why you and other don't research it for yourself. The web is filled
with Bible prophecies and their fulfillment - all you have to do it
google it or yahoo it or whatever.

The web is filled with all sorts of references to the inaccuracies and
contradictions in the Bible... have you looked at those?

Emotional Atheism - Theo-phobia rears its ugly head

June 19, 2007
by Dr. Benjamin Wiker

As anyone watching the best-seller lists knows, atheism is big
business. There seems to be no end of books touting the end of faith. A
common theme in all--Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett--is that atheism
is inherently rational and religion is irrational. Disbelief in God is a
sign of humanity's intellectual maturity. Belief in God is a vestige of
humanity's passion-filled childhood when it was ruled by fear, hate, and
ignorance.

"It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license
religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail,"
declares Sam Harris.

So one would expect to find cool, calm reasoning in the spate of
triumphalist atheism books now flooding the bookstores. Well, frankly,
the caliber of the atheists' arguments generally tend to be rather
disappointing--long on emotion, short on logic. But that is nothing new.
Despite the touting of atheism as purely rational, the truth is that
atheism is more an emotional response than a reasonable conclusion.



Easy to say. Harder to prove. Atheism is based upon the logical assumption
that gods, devils, heaven and hell are all constructs which are, at best
highly unlikely, and at worst, impossible. That's it. Unfortunately, there is
no way to prove a negative except by reflection, that is to say except to
prove that the opposite postulate is true. To do this one falls back on the
fate of other gods and other religions in the ancient world, many of which
were just as long-lived as has the Abrahamic god. The Greek Pantheon, for
instance, lasted just as long as the Judeo/Christain/Islamic god, and only
died-out when it was replaced, in Rome, by other gods from other parts of the
Roman Empire, including Mythra-ism and Christianity.

How far back shall we go? How about the ancient Greek philosopher
Epicurus (341-271 BC). Epicurus argued that our lives are ruined by the
continual dread of the gods, either zapping us in this life for crossing
their entirely fickle wills, or if we escape that, torturing us in Hades
after death. The cure? Epicurus invented a universe in which the gods
couldn't exist. He was the first atheist to use materialism to god-proof
the cosmos.

What a twisting of ideas. Epicurus did not "Invent a universe in which gods
couldn't exist", he merely stated the obvious. The gods were constructs
designed to keep the priests in power and the people subjugated both
financially and physically.

Atheists tell us that it was human fear that created religion. But for
Epicurus, fear of the gods created atheism.

What a load of crap.

But fear isn't the only emotion that creates atheism. Aldous Huxley, the
grandson of Charles Darwin's "bulldog" Thomas Huxley, said candidly of
his atheism,

"For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy
of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation. The
liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain
political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of
morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our
sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because
it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way
they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the
world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people
and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotical
revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever."

For Huxley and friends, the desire for sex untethered to morality
demanded that God be cut loose from the world. Happily, as Huxley noted
later, he realized that this was an intellectual error.

But our present-day atheists appear to be making the same mistake.
Richard Dawkins seems especially cranky that Judaism and Christianity
have moral prohibitions in regard to sex--so much so, that to a proposed
set of Atheist's Ten Commandments, he offered an amendment commanding
us, "Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else and
leaves others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations,
which are none of your business)." Not very catchy, and definitely hard
to chisel in stone.

This person has obviously not even read "The God Delusion" But if he has, he
has grossly misinterpreted Dawkins' words.

And Christopher Hitchens? "Clearly, the human species is designed"--by
evolution, mind you--"to experiment with sex." Indeed, Hitchens assures
readers, "The relationship between physical health and mental health is
now well understood to have a strong connection to sexual function, or
dysfunction." In other words, inhibited sex makes us dysfunctional; it
is downright unhealthy. "Can it be a coincidence," Hitchens complains,
"that all religions claim the right to legislate sex?"

Nature demands complete sexual experimentation; religion demands moral
restrictions on sex; therefore atheism, which denies the divine and
hence divinely-mandated moral laws, is natural, right, good, and true.
So goes Hitchens' logic.

One has cause to wonder if the libido is steering his argument to a
pre-determined conclusion. But sexual desire is not the only emotion
driving atheists' arguments. Witness the words of philosopher Thomas
Nagel, who confessed in The Last Word to a "fear of religion itself."

"I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I
want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the
most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious
believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally,
hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I
don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition
and it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our
time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of
evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including
everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture
to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a
way to eliminate purpose, meaning and design as fundamental features of
the world."

That's about as clear of an expression of Theo-phobia as one could want.
The "cosmic authority problem." Perhaps that is the source of atheist
Richard Dawkins' zeal in his defense of Darwinism? One only wishes that
he--and Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett--were as
candid about the emotional source of atheism as Thomas Nagel.

The source of atheism is the enlightenment of any human being who comes to
the rather obvious (I'm afraid) conclusion that deities do not, and indeed,
could not exist. Unfortunately, none are so blind as those who have eyes yet
will not see.


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