"Why won't God heal amputees?"

First of all, you yourself do not believe in fairies nor that they have infinite powers, so you are being disingenuous. By casting ridicule on a premise that you yourself do not hold, you seek to use the illicit minor as a means of discounting the major premise.

Now, the same argument for the existence of God could be used for Allah or Vishnu, as possibilities for agnosticism or for faith. And by purely empirical methods you would not be able to disprove either one.

 

Do you love anyone? A wife perhaps? A child?

What is logical about love? Yet where would life be without it?

I go back to my prior premise. You have faith that there is no God, but you cannot prove it. See my post on statistical samples and the fallacy of generalization. So you take it on faith that God does not exist. You cannot KNOW it for a fact. You can only suppose and conjecture. So, if you take it on faith that God does not exist, are you a ninny?

 

We both know its impossible to prove a negative. That is why superstitions always last. There is always some who think "just maybe".
Its the same emotions that make stock and vitamin supplement scammers so successful. People want to believe.
I have to run. Leaving for a long weekend with the wife. Will resume next week.
I will leave you with this quote:

If “faith” is a prerequisite in a belief in order to see the truth of the belief, being if there were evidence there would be no need for “faith” in any particular belief.
All supernatural beliefs require “faith” in its truth, being there is no evidence proving any particular belief.
So it must be the “faith” itself that dictates what is true.
Therefore every one of the worlds religions are true, being they all rely on the “faith” of the believer to see its truth. -Unknown

 

Have a good weekend with the wife you love, regardless of the illogic of it all

I enjoyed the debate.

 

Coming from one who believes in talking snakes and people rising from the dead, your observations on the problems w/science seem a bit fallacious. All sciences have contradictions and there is much of which we're still ignorant; the path to knowledge is continuously evolving (oops, sorry, I know how you Christians hate that term). No good scientist would claim to know all the answers or even understand everything they do know. Unlike religious folk, of course, who have it all figured out.

Blah, blah. Yes, I also take it on faith that there is no Boogeyman or Tooth Fairy and that most porn stars have fake breasts.

H

 

lkh,

You were not born again, I assure you not. Anyone who is so filled with a spirit of deception and who is likely just inches away from the unpardonable sin could not have experienced a genuine new birth. The blasphemy you engage in against Christ (including posting and using his Holy name) is so offensive it makes me sick, but then again, I am not surprised, after all you have made a conscious decision to reject Him. He offered you a free gift of redemption, but your pride and arrogance (which you describe as
enlightenment) are so great you cannot even recognize the intellectual mud you wallow in.

Jefferis has clearly exposed the tragic weakness in your thinking and arguments. Actually, his writings are some of the finest I have ever seen, impeccable logic. You have been schooled in the last few pages of this thread and would do good to really think about what Jefferis is telling you... if you have any modicum of respect for truth and sound logic.

Now before you embark on your next tome, just try responding to Jefferis's posts with real thinking, not the weak attacks you have shown so far.

 

What is the qualitative difference between this experience and the experience of the devout muslim, endowed with the holy wisdom of allah?

Or, for that matter, the schizophrenic endowed with the spirit of Napoleon?

If I told you I've met Xenu, you would dismiss me as a crackpot. But what if I told you I've met Moroni? Twelve million strong will swear to his existence...

p.s. Moroni and Gabriel in a steel cage match -- who wins?

 

You illustrate the problem quite nicely.

The possibility that an intelligent person could fall in love with the Christian God, and then fall out of love with same--going so far as to cease all belief in same--is wholly reasonable. Nothing exceptional about it.

People fall in and out of love all the time. (If you divorce your wife, it doens't mean you never loved her.) People also get duped all the time, or otherwise grow out of previously held beliefs. People switch worldviews, philosophies, political associations. Some element of previously unrealized or undiscovered truth slips in and the foundation of the old view is irreparably cracked. Those who are intellectually honest find themselves compelled to clear the debris, focus on rebuilding, and start again. Those who are intellectually dishonest stick their fingers in their ears and cling for dear life to their shattered foundations, willing with everything they have that reality would just go away and leave them be.

For you to assume lkh was not actually born again is the height of arrogance and possible evidence of vacuity if not stupidity. How do you know lkh did not love God?

How do you know it is impossible for a human being to truly 'love' the Christian God in all the qualifying senses, and then to cease loving same?

You can't know such a thing. It is arrogant and ridiculous to suggest that you do. The possibility that lkh had a 'heart for God' and then lost it is quite reasonable, if one considers the question from a simple, logical perspective.

But it's the theological imperatives that muck things up.

There's the rub. Your theology forces you to go in a weird loop-de-loop.

If you are Arminian, you have no problem with people falling away b/c Arminians believe salvation can be lost.

But if you believe in the Calvinist doctrine of 'once saved always saved,' you are forced into a self-defeating pattern of irrationality. This loop-de-loop is necessary to deny the dangerous possibility that you are the one who is deluded.

To preserve your theological structure, you are forced to assume that anyone who no longer loves God never actually did... an assumption that is patently irrational but required by the theology handed down to you. (Assuming here, of course, that you are indeed of the 'once saved always saved' school. Either way, you are making a classic 'once saved always saved' argument in response to the challenges of an ex-believer.)

How would you respond, I wonder, if you were presented with compelling evidence of a Calvinist who absolutely once loved God, but no longer does? What if this hypothetical Calvinist not only had all the teachings and knowledge you could ask for, but a vast body of God-glorifying writings testifying to his lost love that no longer exists?

Could you really say that this person was never born again in the personal sense, never truly loved God? If you could say that smugly and confidently, even when faced with compelling evidence to the contrary, that would make you a fool. (In the rational / logical sense, not the backwards biblical sense.)

Such a creature--a man who clearly, compellingly once loved the Calvinist God and yet clearly, compellingly no longer does--is like a zero divisor in the 'once saved always saved' equation. He jams up the theology; the theological response does not compute.

He is like Douglas Adams' Babel Fish:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel Fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

The ex-Calvinist in question does in fact exist. He is me. Any idiot can tell me I never truly loved God, but I know undoubtedly in my 'heart of hearts' that, for many long years, I deeply and truly did love God. The biblical, omniscient, omnipotent, once saved always saved God.

In retrospect, it is clear I actually loved a powerful constellation of aesthetic qualities and virtues that I ascribed to the biblical God as source. At the end of the day, though, it is the same thing, just as six and one half dozen are the same thing. My love for Yahweh back then was quite real--as real as real can be, wholly demonstrable and measurable. My love blinked out because Yahweh blinked out, not vice versa.

It's a funny thing, this predicament I'm in. If my old 'once saved always saved' theology is correct, then I am still saved at this moment, even though I have wholly abandoned the doctrine and faith I once held.

An Arminian could pop in at this point and say perhaps salvation is perishable, that the Calvinists are wrong, but that produces no quandary for me because I know, and have always known, that Arminian theology is rubber-room bullshit. Those guys threw out logic from square one; their position is not philosophically tenable and never has been. One might as well say satan is chocolate cake and elvis is the virgin mary to believe in a non-omnipotent God. Arminian theology is an embarrassingly silly kludge to paper over the problem of pain.

So anyway, here I am with my own personal theological Babel Fish, forcing the vengeful Christian God in question to wink out in a puff of irreconcilable contradiction. And there is no recourse for me to bring him back, because I would have to use logic to do so, and logic is the solvent that dissolved him in the first place.

Of course, none of that keeps me up at night, because I realize know that it was all a bunch of bullshit. In reality, theology is little different than fictionology.

If you don't understand much of this, don't worry; there's a lot you don't understand if you go around throwing accusations at people like the one you threw at lkh. Suffice it to say it's not inconceivable to love God and then stop loving him, even if you don't believe my personal testimony; the fact that your theology requires absolute belief otherwise--that it forces one into the box canyon of silly acid tests--is testament to its logical bankruptcy.

And that's a real sticky wicket for defenders of religion in general--not just logical bankruptcy, but philosophical bankruptcy.

You have the mystic defenders who promote salvation-as-experience, and the evidentialists who drone on about this blah blah text and that blah blah historical reference; but there is no one to defend the gapingly irreconcilable philosophical contradictions that dissolve all popular religions and wash them away.

It's kind of funny -- the truly crushing blow for popular religion is such that non-thinkers can't grasp its trajectory or its force.

It's like trying to explain the impossibility of perpetual motion machines to someone who doesn't grok basic physics--and refuses to learn.

 

It is hard to read an article like this one and not be awed by the mysterious nature of existence.

But it is equally hard, from my point of view, to imagine quantum complexity and old testament laws regarding the stoning of homosexuals coming from the same intelligence.

When you look close enough, the universe is fascinating right down to the core -- and religion is banal right down to the core. Understanding the universe requires pursuit of clarity and vigorous application of intellectual integrity; religion is all about ambiguity and distorted logic. There is a major disconnect here.

Can you tell me the being who crafted the laws of space-time really gives a shit whether I say 'shit' or not? Would an intelligence with the capacity to manifest galaxies over billions of years really give a damn when someone says 'god damn'? Is the creator and destroyer of worlds, the source of all reality, keeping his ears perked for Betty Baptist's prayer for a good parking space at the mall? The thought is just silly. The gulf is light years wide.

Humans are intrinsically stupid and selfish. This isn't because of original sin; it's because we evolved from monkeys. The point is also relative. Monkeys are actually pretty sharp compared to the rest of the animal kingdom; we humans are stupid and selfish in reference to the measuring stick of our potential, the possibilities of where we could go.

Religion not only plays on our selfish and stupid aspects, it exploits them to the hilt. Did you ever wonder why religious messages are all about "me, me, me?" The focus is ostensibly God, but it's really about personal validation, personal punishment, and personal reward. Why does the believer exist, how can the believer get a ticket to paradise, how can the believer avoid pain. Religion makes man the center of the universe because that is where man fancies he should be.

You point out the folly of hardcore atheism--the presumptiousness of believing with absolute certainty there is no God. In a technical sense I agree with you. We cannot know for certain whether a higher intelligence exists. And yet this argument as presented is essentially a red herring. I find your arguments disingenuous because you wish to sneak a caring, loving deity in through the back door... even though available evidence does not support the idea of a caring, loving deity at all.

We may never know for certain who or what created the universe, if anything. That means the possibility of a higher intelligence can never be wholly discounted. But we can reasonably infer that if there is a creative intelligence behind it all, he / she / it is not overly preoccupied with petty concerns... and may not be concerned with man's individual travails at all.

If one uses 'the universe' as a proxy for 'God', it is clear that the universe cares nothing for human life. The universe does not treat life as precious--if anything it treats it with disdain. Humans are killed as routinely as houseflies. Human life? Precious? Please. The only value placed on human life has come about via deliberate human effort. The universe couldn't care less. Past extinction events have wiped out 90% of life forms on earth. Such events could happen again--and likely will happen again, barring the cessation of all life and / or the development of future technology so powerful we can hardly conceive of it today.

When one tries to imagine the universe as personal, it is a tough job... because the universe is not a personal place by any rational stretch of the imagination. To reconcile a personal creator thus requires stunning feats of rationalization. (Hey, I'm a poet and didn't even know it.)

Not only that, but positing the existence of a benevolent creator creates an incredible mishmash of problems that need not exist.

For example: consider a child stricken with Parkinson's, or leukemia, or some other serious ailment. This type of thing has launched a thousand theological arguments. Why do bad things happen to good people, and so on. All kinds of answers have been offered up as to why a benevolent God would allow the little children to suffer. Some of these guesses are almost reasonable, some disgustingly ludicrous.

But consider the benefit of removing the benevolent aspect entirely. If one accepts that the universe is not benevolent--that there is no intimately involved intelligence--then the moral quandary of the ailment-stricken child ceases to exist.

In a world with no intervening deity, Parkinson's, cancer and other ailments are simply the byproducts of an imperfect reality. If one's child is born with a disease, it is a lamentable thing--but there is no sin to deal with, no theological questions to wrestle with. Scientific explanation of the problem is enough. (And scientific advance may help fix the problem.)

In a way, this is more comforting. Who is better off, the non-religious parents who recognize the world is a hard place and resolve to love their child through adversity... or the fundamentalist parents who tear themselves to pieces, wondering why God afflicted their child, wondering if it was a consequence of their sin?

There's no free lunch in this world, and no free lunch in the next either. Christians act as if salvation is free, but it isn't. It comes with the penalty of hell. The 'good news' of salvation comes with the rider of hell attached, and the implied assertion that 99% of all people ever born will go there. (How is that good news exactly?)

But anyway, that's a side-track.

The main point here was that yes, it's true that hardcore atheism is faith-based in certain aspects. But conceding the possibility of a higher intelligence is a long, long way from opening the door to a caring, loving deity. Your arguments surreptitiously conflate the premises.

 

Well, I told him I'd had tea and crumpets w/the Easter Bunny and I don't think he believed me.

Besides, all he's going to say is something along the lines that he's met the One True God. All those guys in all those other religions who have met their One True God(s) are all, of course, quite mad.

H