S2M wrote:Rip Rokken wrote:God, sometimes I don't know why I waste so much freaking time here... Dude, I love ya, but what do you hope to achieve by insulting the faithful? Or is that the only goal? You're never going to sway people with a jackhammer, and you definitely won't be changing any negative stereotypes about Atheism by coming off like an angry, bitter old fart. Good lord, I'll take faith in Jesus over that anyday.
Hey Rip....First of all I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic. HUGE difference. Because I will admit that I dont know if there is a god, or not. The jury is still out. Only arrogant people will fight tooth and nail(pun intended) that one exists. Cause no matter what evidence is shown, religious types will
never change their minds. Angel even said it. That proves that, for the most part, the pious have very closed minds.
There will either come a day where either somebody proves either the existence, or the non-existence of a supreme being. If enough evidence is presented - like me actually meeting god, jesus, or some other omnipotent creature, I will be able to change my mind. The problem with the religious is no matter what evidence is shown to them they will never change theirs.
It all comes down to logic, actually. And no matter how resistant one is to that discipline, people have to recognize it's usage here. I bring up scenarios that make one wonder about the blatant ambivolence/randomness of god. How he can, supposedly, make someone walk into a room and find a baby not breathing - yet not care that some left-wing nutjob kills a nine-year old in a wild west shootout. Or how some kid with leukemia suddenly in cancer free, while Corporal Timmy still has invisible legs. I still have yet to see the amputee 'miracle'. Still waiting for that one. It's like when I was collecting Star Wars Cards in 1977. I had the whole set except the one with Lando, reading, 'Conniving Pals'...I just couldn't get it. I'm thinking that god missed that day at Hogwarts...perhaps his fireplace/toilet was broken.....
Hey, man - oops, my apologies for mislabeling you an atheist. I am agnostic these days too, leaning currently toward a type of atheism but the jury is out on everything for me. Most of the agnostics or athiests I've talked to would return to faith quickly if they could justify it as true. Logic, knowledge and personal experience just doesn't allow them to. I still have a hard time not imagining a creator, but every fiber of my personal experience with prayer and pursuing of God over my life has led me to the extremely troubling concern that there is no supreme being who ever had an active hand in my life or the lives of others I cared about. I see nothing but absolutely impartial randomness, and had to realize how many excuses I'd made over the years to explain why things worked out the way they did. Believing that "the Lord works in mysterious ways" finally stopped working for me. It wasn't just that things rarely turned out the way I (or even thousands of believers) thought they should -- I could deal with that. It's just that there were too many scenarios where the outcomes made absolutely no logical sense at all, not coming from the perspective that "all things work out to the glory of God". With faith, God is the constant and the believer is the
only variable (assuming all other factors such as specific doctrinal interpretations, which church you attend and how often, how you pray, etc. are within the believer's ability to control). That leaves any objective believer with to blame but themselves when faith seems to fail, when God seems distant, when Biblical promises fail to come true. I begged God for a long time to forgive me, enlighten me, to take those horrible feelings away, but it never happened. It continued to get worse until my faith just naturally collapsed. I couldn't even deal with it for a few years out of fear, but eventually I crawled out of my shell and faced it head on, then started working on the next step. That next step for me was realizing that the great crafty deceiver, that ol' serpent of yore who I'd always been taught was a master of trickery and would eat us alive if we gave even the slightest ear to his manipulative whisperings in our noodle, was nothing more than logic and common sense. That every time I had doubts and said "Get behind me Satan in the name of Jesus!", I was only suppressing my own gut instinct -- one of the most important natural protective mechanisms nature gave us.
Back to the topic, religious people do change their minds, and I am an example of one, as is Ligzig I suppose. Maybe you were once, too. I was
nothing close to casual in my beliefs and pracice -- I was full-on, but frustrated by my roller coaster experience of extreme highs followed by big crashes. I've found since that there are tons of people who have gone thru the same thing, and the stories are so remarkably similar it's stunning. Lots of fear, shame, and confusion over what they are going thru and what it means for their lives. Most weren't people who didn't really have faith or had never given it their all. Going thru a full deconstruction and rebuild at my age feels kinda like losing your entire life savings. I've described it as feeling like the very ground that I
absolutely trusted to always be under my feet was yanked out from under me. At least I know I'm not alone.
I think we have this in common -- my absolute passion is logic and truth, and I don't tie my ego into what I learn, so if I find myself in error, then I'm obligated by principal to adopt what I perceive as the greater truth. Most of the time I can do it with a laugh, like yesterday. I've been arguing for years that the New Testament never intended for ministry to become a paid profession, but then I ran across some cryptic verses that
seem to support the idea of financially supporting full-time pastors. Ok, then even if I'm not 100% sold on the meaning of those verses, at least I'll immediately cease pushing my case that paid ministry isn't provided for unless I learn otherwise. Sometimes the conclusions are very tough and painful though, and leaving Christianity was about as hard as it comes. It was like sawing off a leg that is stuck underneath a boulder. Keep the leg and die from starvation, or sever it and have a chance to survive?
Even without belief in a specific God, I feel extremely strongly that people benefit from having a connection to something greater than ourselves, and I still do. Kip Winger, Don Dokken, Superman are just a few, and they've never failed once to deliver when I turn to them. JSS, too -- he's definitely larger than myself, at least by a foot. It always helps too to know the exact day and hour that they will return, so we can anticipate their arrival.
). I have some family members who pull that card too, who used to be practically agnostic, but went to some non-denom "Christian" church and got "saved" and now they make it known that everyone else around them are just some flailing horrible sinful people that they just can't be bothered with anymore, and it's all about their "church" (cult) instead. And any kind of conversation they try to force upon people like the topics in here, no matter WHAT or HOW the conversation goes, they want everyone else to JUST see their side, and don't want to listen to anyone else's. And they look at those others with the same attitudes and arrogance I see in here, with puppy dog eyes and a shake of the head while going "tsk, tsk, tsk, I feel so sorry for you." And when those people don't know the things YOU or anyone has had to face, it's easy for them to NOT see why your opinions are darker, and so it's pointless to argue.
