Re: Faith and Skepticism
- From: jjsargent@xxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2005 03:11:48 GMT
[I don't have time to respond to most of bimms' patronizing,
condemning,
hard-hearted lecture, and it would be profitless to do so; but here's
a few points.]
bimms@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> > If we'd been created as automata in the first place, and never knew
> > about free will, would we mind? I doubt it.
> We would be desperately unhappy. To be self-conscious is to demand
> freedom.
Doesn't follow at all. My point is that if we didn't know about the
possibility of free will, it wouldn't bother us that we didn't have it.
> The second I tell you that you HAVE to do something, it becomes
> guaranteed that you WON'T want to do it.
So why, later on, did you keep telling me I HAD to do things? You
should have realized that would be a worthless exercise.
> You need to get Job's perspective. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away,
> but bless the Lord no matter what. You need to bless the Lord no matter
> how terrible life seems to be.
You don't explain why, or why this makes sense. If God screws us,
He deserves condemnation, same as if a person screws us.
> If you decide to bless God in the midst of Job-like trials, God will
> look with favor upon you. If you curse God, as Job's wife tried to
> convince Job to do, you will not be looked upon favorably.
God likes masochists?? Read _Escape From Freedom_ by Erich Fromm
to see how sick and damaging this attitude is.
[SNIP]
> Your postings are somewhat strange. It seems like you "sort of" believe
> in God, but you also seem to pick and choose what parts of the Bible to
> believe in and obey.
I agree with the Bible if it agrees with true-life experience. When it
blatantly doesn't, I naturally disbelieve it, as any sane person would.
Some of my postings which appear to rely on the Bible are calls to
Christians to act consistently with the Bible, which they claim to
be authoritative, when they are not doing so. For instance, I call
upon you to "love your neighbor" even when it's me; your attitude is
superior, "holier than thou", condemning, not loving.
> Perhaps you should just become an outright atheist for a while, so that
> God can chastise you fully. For He prefers us to be either "hot or
> cold." If we are lukewarm, He will spew us out of His mouth.
I've been moving in that direction, actually. It is only in my moments
of moral weakness that I believe in God, because it's much easier and
more fun to blame Him for the ills of the world (and of my life).
> So why don't you become a full-fledged atheist? OR, fully obey God's
> word in every respect.
Excuse me? Does anyone "fully obey God's word in every respect"?
Don't make me laugh.
[snip]
> > 3) "Conviction" is no problem. Unlike many Christians today, I know
> > I'm
> > a sinner. I know I've done some rotten things. But there's no sign of
> > forgiveness, grace, "regeneration", even though I confess these sins.
> > So much for I John 1:9.
>
> Any Christian who "didn't know they were a sinner" would by definition
> NOT be a Christian. If you believe that it is possible to be "a
> Christian" and yet not think that you are a sinner, you are so far off,
> that you have not grasped one of the most basic truths of Christianity,
> which is that ALL HAVE SINNED.
I think you missed my point. My point is that most Christians have
never really "grasped" that they are sinners at all! They parrot it --
either in the many versions of the "Sinner's Prayer" or in the liturgy
--
but they never really face the full ugliness and horror of discovering
oneself to be a sinner, discovering that things one has done which one
may have thought to be admirable at the time were in fact utterly
rotten and evil. A great many Christians appear to think that
they are, and always have been, very fine people.
> "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE
> LORD." You have not grasped the basic truth that the Lord sometimes
> sends us blessings, and sometimes sends us calamities........ and in
> EITHER CASE, we must BLESS HIM.
Would you bless a human who caused you trouble? No? Then why do
you expect someone to bless God when He does so?
> But we don't bless Him in a vacuum. We bless him against the infinite
> horizon of eternal happiness that we will experience when we die.
I quote something from my previous article, from which you went off on
a
tangent, partly quoted above:
> > It is not illogical to believe that things in heaven are NO better than
> > things on earth if you start from the premise that God wills that the
> > conditions we experience be as they are (else they would be otherwise,
> > since He's omnipotent) and that God never changes.
In other words, given that God allows our experience on earth to be
horrible (though I've been through a flood once, I've never had things
as bad as the people on the Gulf Coast or on the Indian Ocean coasts,
or those who went through the Nazi concentration camps) -- and allows
these horrible experiences even to those He claims are His friends --
there is no reason to believe that He would treat even His "friends"
any differently after death than before. There is no reason, given
the facts at hand, given God's behavior toward us before death, to
expect anything better, much less "eternal happiness", after death.
You provide no reason to believe differently, just supercilious
assertions of your own beliefs. The joylessness evident throughout
your postings gives me to wonder how genuine is your own faith.
-- Jeffrey J. Sargent, jjsargent@xxxxxx
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