Religion

Yeah, but it was 6am when I wrote, it and YOU'RE right! I also have a problem with tonight. I often write tonite, and I KNOW its wrong.

 

Not at all, like I said previously I have a faith in God, not man or religion. I don't pigeonhole my faith nor do I have the cockiness to try to pigeonhole God into a mold.

So if I believe in God and there suddenly was nothing after death, what have I lost? Nothing. However, if I didn't believe in God and there IS something after death - I've lost it all.

Just trying to show Mystery that while her analogy seemed like a feasible idea, it has its flaws.

 

Well, shit happens and so do mistakes. But what gets me is when people intentionally cutesy or dumb down their words, like "tuff".

 

It is the nature of the message board beast. People try to get their message across as quickly as spoken word and end up making mistakes. Things like "tuff" and even misuse of "your" are excusable in my book. Repeated misspellings of the same word like "defence" for example are not.

 

I know. That is just stoopid.

 

A life lived in fear is a life half lived.

 

Yeah, I feel sorry for you guys for this. There is nothing more liberating than knowing you are saved.

 

Actually Mormanism is a cult. They are not Christians. If you really get into reading what they believe, it is some crazy stuff.


Big Bang Theory: I would like to know how do you create something out of nothing? Seems to me it takes more faith to believe in the big bang than to believe in God.

It amazes me that of all the people who believe in a higher power in this world (billions) we are appartently wrong yet the few athiests are correct. I do know that my Lord and Savior is Jesus Christ and I fell sorry for those that don't know Him.

 

Actually, that's not true. My stepmother was born and raised in Iran and her mother lives in Tehran, and her neighbor there is openly Catholic. In Iran, Christians aren't persecuted and people can talk about religion. Even when things were more strict, this was the case. The Muslims there accept Christianity because all Muhammad said was that he was the LAST prophet. They don't like new religions, like Bahai, because their "prophesies" came after Muhammad, but I don't think they'll kill ya over it.

Anyway, this is always a good topic. All who are arguing with Miss Tery should bear in mind that she is not attempting to engage in a theological discussion, so there's nothing you can say about religion or theology that's relevant to the discussion, and you certainly can't prove the validity of your Christian beliefs by espousing what you've "learned" by studying Christian theology (slydevl). The existence of God has nothing to do with theology. Theology can only exist if one believes in some form of God first.

While I believe in God while allowing for the possibility that He may manifest Himself in extremely abstract forms, I have to say that I agree with Miss Tery that people who profess to be atheists or agnostics are on average a little kinder and less judgemental than those who profess to be Christians. I also believe that it has nothing to do with anyone's belief system. It's a matter of social dynamics.

Most would agree that there is little inherent in Christian doctrine that encourages people to be hurtful and judgemental (though some denominations do basically look for "loopholes" that allow them to condemn or control others), but the fact is that Christians in this country are in the majority (especially in the South), while atheists and agnostics are a very small minority. As such, Christians tend to think that because they're in the majority, they're on the "winning team". Whenever you have a large group of people who think they're on the winning team, the ones in the group who just do and believe things because they want to be with the majority or were born into it are going to become more involved in the fact that their team is winning than the actual belief system, which leads to the potential to be judgemental and all the other bad stuff Miss Tery has run into. The bottom line is that the larger a body of people is with a common belief system, the larger the number of phonies who don't understand why they're there is going to be because idiots are attracted to the safety of large groups. Atheists and agnostics know very well that they're in the minority. So, right, wrong, or indifferent, they have to be committed to their beliefs (or lack of beliefs) just to maintain them in the face of the adversary they're going to encounter from the Christian majority. Also, since there are so few of them, each one feels a little more pressure to be a positive of their group so that people don't think that to be Godless is to be negative. You could run into 100 Christians in a day, and maybe 10 of them are jackholes, but you may only run into 1 atheist in a day, and if that person is a jackhole it's going to have a much greater affect on one's view of their group. You've encountered 10 idiot Christians and 1 idiot atheist, but since you don't meet many atheists, you're going to remember them more. It's kind of like how a minority family moving into a white neighborhood feels some small sense of pressure to represent their ethnicity well so as to disarm negative stereotypes.

In the end, I tend to think that Miss Tery's CONVICTION that there is no God is just as moronic as Spuds' CONVICTION that he's going to Heaven. If you need proof or evidence to have faith, then you don't have faith at all, you've got some form of deductive reasoning. To me, faith and certainty are two different things, and in my experience, people who say things with as much certainty as Miss Tery and Spuds have are really just reacting to the natural human fear of potential nonexistence. Spuds is saying, "I'm so scared to die that I can't function without a guarantee that there's something after," and Miss Tery is saying, "I'm so tired of stressing about the possibility that there's some judgemental God out there, that I'm throwing the whole thing out of my mind. If there is a God, and it's not good enough for him that I'm nice to people, I don't like him anyway."

Nobody likes "maybe"...

 

blind faith = that monk that set his ass on fire a couple of week ago.