Subject:
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Re: Atheism (was: Santorum Fails In His Effort To Pervert The Constitution)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Tue, 17 Aug 2004 16:59:52 GMT
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Viewed:
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2543 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Mark Bellis wrote:
>
> > A Christian has relationship with God.
>
> What is the nature of this relationship? Do you and God go out for pizza
> together? Who picks up the check? My example is admittedly facetious, but the
> underlying question is sound.
A very big question in few words!
The relationship is multi-faceted and includes the following things:
Saviour: how you relate to someone who has saved your life by sacrificing
theirs.
Father: including support, protection, provision and love.
Brother: some similar aspects, also companionship and teamwork.
Friend: dependability
Prophet: He knows everything about me
Priest: someone who brings me out of isolation from God and facilitates
relationship with him.
King: His word goes, but as a servant I *want* to serve him - this is not
involuntary slavery.
Advocate: standing in the gap for me, both in the face of evil (definition as
used in the Bible) and before the judgement throne of God.
There are more facets, but those are the ones off the top of my head.
Yes, if I go for a pizza, God comes too, but he doesn't need to eat physical
pizza :-)
Everything I have belongs to God and he has made me steward of it. Paying for
the pizza from the money God has provided from my employer is his way of
providing me with food.
>
> Do you consider yourself to have a "relationship" with anyone other than God?
> What is the nature of your relationship with that other person? What traits
> does your God-relationship have in common with your non-God-relationship?
My relationship with my wife includes friend and elements of sister and
advocate. The one-ness of marriage is designed to be a reflection of the
oneness between Jesus Christ and his church, which the Bible describes as a
bride.
Describimg the other facets:
I have other friends.
No-one has yet saved my life by sacrificing theirs, though my mum came close
during her 20 year battle with cancer, sacrificing herself in order to bring me
through to adulthood.
My dad has done his best as a father.
I have a sister. We get on better now as adults. I have more teamwork with my
wife.
Some of my Christian friends have acted as prophet or priest at different times,
as I have for them.
I have been under authority, sometimes more voluntarily than others. The
demands of those in authority are not always reasonable.
Various people have stuck up for me.
> Other
> than God, do you have relationships with anyone whose existence you can not
> easily demonstrate to me in a basically non-contestable way? Can you introduce
> me to God (perhaps when we all go out for pizza) in such a way that a reasonable
> person cannot afterwards say that God wasn't at the meeting? Please don't
> resort to parables or metaphors as evidence for his presence at the meeting.
The only hard evidence I have for my mother's existence is a photo and a birth
certificate, but is that enough? It would be quite possible to fabricate such
evidence, so that it remains contestable. I might have been an immaculate
conception in a test tube :-)
If you are adamant that God doesn't exist or that if he does, you don't want to
know, then you are closing yourself to the possibility that he might reveal
himself to you. If you are prepared to entertain the possibility that he might,
to the extent that you might ask him to do so, then sooner or later he will.
This one might be better explained on an Alpha course, which is a place to find
out about Christianity without requiring any commitment afterwards. The
opportunity is there to meet with God, if you wish. It's better done in person,
rather than online!
> I knew a woman about 15 years ago who suffered from schizophrenia. One
> manifestation of her illness was the absolutely certain awareness that a man
> named "Terry" was real and in the room with her at particular times. This even
> occurred on several occasions while I was with her. She maintained that she had
> a relationship with Terry, even though Terry was a figment of her illness. To
> demonstrate this to herself, she forced herself to realize that Terry could not
> in any way make his presence known to other people, but she was still unable to
> convince herself that he was not real. How do you propose to demonstrate the
> reality of God in a way that would be different from my friend's efforts to
> demonstrate the reality of Terry?
Go does reveal himself to people in ways that "Terry" could not. It is up to
God to demonstrate his reality, but you must give him a chance, rather than
insisting on non-contestable proof up front. If all the evidence were on a
plate, there would be no need for faith.
> This example is obviously quite similar to the portrayal of John Nash's
> schizophrenia in "A Beautiful Mind," and I probably wouldn't have understood the
> potential impact of the disease without having experienced its impact upon my
> friend.
Yes, I have very little understanding of the condition!
> > This is based on faith, but acting on
> > faith brings experience. With experience, faith gains vision and is no longer
> > blind. It is a virtuous circle.
>
> A circle, to be sure. Virtuous? Time will tell.
>
> Is there anything that could make you say "Hey, I was wrong about that" and
> reject what you have thus far identified as your faith? If not, then I submit
> that you've merely set yourself up in a non-falsifiable belief system, and
> systems that cannot--even in theory--be wrong are of little value when they're
> right.
I am often wrong, but faith gets up, dusts itself off and perseveres! The
details of my beliefs adapt if I find that I am wrong.
> > It takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe that there is a god
> > of some sort.
>
> I have no faith in any supernatural phenomena or entities. How does this
> require more faith than that required to believe in a non-provable supernatural
> being?
But absence of faith in something is not faith in nothing. Faith in nothing
takes a lot of faith! I suggest that all the unexplainable things lead people
towards believing in something rather than nothing, assuming they don't remain
agnostic.
> > People have not yet managed to grow a tree from a jar of
> > chemicals, so there is still a big gap in science. If science is not
> > all-powerful then something else must be.
>
> Science does not claim to be all-powerful. Even if it did so, then its failure
> to *be* all-powerful would not require that some other all-powerful entity must
> exist. You've proposed what is commonly termed a "false dilemma."
>
> > Call it 'god', since that's what
> > others use to explain things that science can't explain. This argument is not
> > what I actually believe, but how well do you think the logic works?
>
> That argument is well established, but it's ultimately a fallacy. The
> short-hand way of referring to it is the "God of the gaps" argument, which is to
> say that "God" is whatever science can't currently explain. The problem with
> this is that it's an endlessly retreating position, relegating "God" to
> ever-diminishing parts of the universe--hardly a worthy posture for the
> Almighty. Let's say that at some point we can explain everything except how this
> particular quark interacts with that particular quark. God, in this case, will
> have been reduced to the Lord of These Two Quarks. Is that the entity you want
> to worship?
I see science just discovering more of what God put in place, rather than taking
over from God in any area.
> > The chinese word for 'agnostic' is composed of 3 characters, meaning "not can
> > know". I wonder if there's any correlation between people who have trouble
> > trusting others and those who subscribe to type 1 agnosticism?
>
> Intelligent trust is based upon experience and the perception of prior behavior.
> If you trust someone sight unseen, then that is indeed a statement of faith. I
> can see no reason to trust without good evidence that such trust is well-placed.
>
> Dave!
Mark
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