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cfgfd df
From: "cfgfd df"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2001 8:39 AM
Subject: in Re; christ's lamb...etc.
I know how you feel, but just to play christ advocate: Believing in anything even yourself is still believing. So...if believing in god is just an extension to the beliefs taht we convince ourselves of on a diurnal basis. but if you don't believe at all...what's the point...really...what's the point. And life just seems a lot harder if all that you are doing is working for nothing, living for nothing, doing nothing for nothing, because you have the knowledge that there is nothing out there. Trully, ignorance is happiness. So you should believe in god...
How can you say you'd do anything in the interest of 'truthfulness'...I don't recall that you people were upholding that anyway. If you deny any sort of thesis, than there is no truth, because truths are based on a primary set of axioms which you assume. Afterall, you fake yourself out every day that you even exist. It is a uniquely human quality to be concious of existence anyways...Something as universal as the notion of a higher power would have to encompass all methods of life and unlife. Therefore how could you ever propose that your specific skills could even measure the method of existence of such a force, order or being. How can you say there is no proof, when mayn't have the ability to make a proof, and in that you would show your inherent inferiority to something unknown.
Moreover, I have some problems with the argument given by Bertrand russel, he seems namely to assert instances where many christians don't follow christ's teachings...Just because there are a lack of non-hypocritical people in the christian religion it does not then confirm that to be a christian merely means to deny christ's teachings. Also, I do not know about what he means that Christ may or may not have exiseted, whether he means in person, or as his apostles asserted hima s the son of god. (But I don't know). I understand the "first cause " argument as salient, yet...it gets back to the very question of the beginning of the universe ( how, what when, where, why). Now, suppose we did not call it god...but rather a spiritual unity, a higher level in which all beings, which we as humans can qualify as alive , participate . Then, could that not pervade the entire universe of vastly separate minerals, and gases boiling hot, light years away from each other all over the universe. Could you feel no human connection, even to a crazy person? Could you feel nothing as you killed someone, or raped someone? Is not this connection universal, and yet higher somehow than our concious action? I think...it exists, whatever the hell it is.
Ok, I got a little passionate right there, I admit, but doesn't it make your skin crawl...to pierce through human flesh and watch the blood of a loved one flow...Why do you regret the guilt inside you? why do you possess a conscience?
Ok, enough onto the Natural-law argument...the theory that there is one world order, er something like that. Russel seems to argue primarily that natural laws ar not really as intact as we thought they were; what's more that those coincidences taht we did have are really a matter of human convention and not anything put together by some external maker. I follow this argument however, I'm afraid I am vastly confused with his argument concerning the pleasure of god in making creation. the reason for laws would dictate gods actions, but couldn't an anthropromorphic god as we've all chosen him to be be capable off making decisions that were consistent with human consideration of external factors? Unless of course, you made the restriction that god was the ultimate law giver. but then, if so...could not you say that god made the laws, and made everything else in order to work suitably with them?
Whatever could he mean by a "moralizing vagueness"...that we justify everything as a tautology, but what if everything is true--than our assertions themselves would be justified, and hence vagueness in asserting that god is the ultimate law-giver is therefore legitimate and not a negative, but necessative quality. And as far as rabbits go. i don't think they "choose" at all, only human have the evolved brain activity in order to "choose". His argument is merely in support of Darwin's and nothing else.
Furthermore, I cannot concede that it is god's fault taht right from wrong came into being. If god is good, independent of good and evil then, he would simply be good, and all those notions antithetical to him would be evil. To suppose that the world was made by the devil, is to believe in god...period... If anyone ever asserts anything about the devil, they must believe in god, so Bertrand whether he knew it was the very picture of the modern christian. In his argument for the remedying of justice, russel fails to capture the promise of eternal life from the christians by comparing the universe to a basket of oranges. Trully, most experience scientists would suggest that all the oranges were bad, but I doubt that any real mathematician *(as russel claims himself to be) would accept that there was ever a 0% chance, it's just less likely, but certainly possible. Anything is possible..there is always this factor of the unknown. And that in itself cannot be eradicated by human knowledge, unless all the knowledge that one could have about the universe was finite ( which it isn't). As for the second coming, how do we know that christ wouldn't have spoken figuratively as he did often.
Ultimately though, should like to know the nature of the National Secular Society, and why anyone with so many attributes should be bothering himself with such ethereal things as the existence of god, when he asserts even in his speech that anyone who would say it is of any great concern is really worried about some mundane issue.
From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "cfgfd df"
Subject: Re: in Re; christ's lamb...etc.
Date: Wednesday, May 09, 2001 7:45 AM
Did I miss something?
Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
people with no reason to believe
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