|
Religious debate on Jews/Passion of the Christ (pg. 21)
|
View this Thread in Original format
| nic01445 |
| quote: | Originally posted by arctic
I don't see a difference myself, but read into it what you will. :nervous:
Actually, I'm not entirely sure if you're joking or if you're being serious here. Stop confusing me. :( |
lol i am serious. lemme try to explain.
| quote: | Originally posted by WhoaNellie1487
News flash, If you don't have faith in God you aren't a Christian. |
She only states that if you have no faith in god, then you are not a christian. This is true. People who do not put faith in god are not christian. They are also not muslim, or jewish, etc. Part of being christian is having faith in god. if you don't have it, then you aren't christian. of course, you could argue about casual christians yadda yadda but that isnt the point right now.
What you interprated was "only christians have faith in god," which is not what she said. |
|
|
| tathi |
she's assuming God is only the christian God
eg. News flash, If you don't have faith in Allah you aren't a Muslim. |
|
|
| arctic |
Bah, it's all subjective. :p
The way she phrased it, it could easily be interpreted either way. :thepirate |
|
|
| rizen |
yawn :o what a ty movie, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is better.
Oh well those old skool Jews sure know how to treat a person, just like Vanunu :cool:
:( |
|
|
| tathi |
| quote: | Originally posted by rizen
yawn :o what a ty movie, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is better.
Oh well those old skool Jews sure know how to treat a person, just like Vanunu :cool:
|
Jebus was a nuclear technician? |
|
|
| rizen |
| quote: | Originally posted by tathi
Jebus was a nuclear technician? |
According to Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, no he wasnt. But he was treated pretty ty. |
|
|
| Dmatrox |
| quote: | Originally posted by nic01445
It isn't "nonchristians don't have faith in god." It's "if you don't have faith in god then you are a nonchristian." Big difference. |
isnt that the same thing that you just repeated differently?
this is how i think christians perceive non christians: "if you don't beleive that jebus died on the cross for your sins and dont believe in god, you are not christian" |
|
|
| Dmatrox |
| quote: | Originally posted by tathi
Jebus was a nuclear technician? |
it would be hilarious if someone named their kid "Jebus" :D I know a guy named "Jesus" but its pronouned "heysus" |
|
|
| ViolentNature |
| quote: | Originally posted by Dmatrox
it would be hilarious if someone named their kid "Jebus" :D I know a guy named "Jesus" but its pronouned "heysus" |
uh, maybe because in the spanish language the letter j has a stress in it, thus pronouncing the name 'hey-sus'
in the spanish language, jesus is called 'hey-sus' as well you know. Just like they name alot of girls maria, but thats the spanish name for saying mary. |
|
|
| TranceGiant |
| quote: | Originally posted by rizen
yawn :o what a ty movie, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is better.
Oh well those old skool Jews sure know how to treat a person, just like Vanunu
|
idiot |
|
|
| priveye03 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Renegade
I've been following this debate for a while and it's just confirming what I've suspected for a long time. Without wishing to seem disrespectful to the theists on this board, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that the cause of the "rationalists" and the "atheists" here is futile for one very simple reason: religious statements - across the board - are not statements of truth. No atheist (and we are all born atheists remember) ever enters any system of theological belief because, upon careful weighing of the evidence, he believes it to espouse irrefutable empirical, metaphysical or ontological fact. Nor are religious statements - as the theists would have us believe - statements of belief or faith. No-one submits themselves unquestioningly to an ideology because they have a "hunch" it might be true - no right thinking individual anyway.
Given this it is futile to argue with a theist. Their ideology is not bound up in truth, nor with faith or belief - the subjective, bastard sisters of truth. If it were, the deconversion process - where an individual realises via objective, dispassionate scepticism - would be much more common and much less traumatic. But it is here, in the trauma of deconversion, that we uncover the true nature of religious statements - they are statements of hope, nothing more, nothing less. "I know that heaven exists" is not a statement of truth. "I believe that heaven exists" is not a statement of truth, nor is it a statement of well-founded or intractable belief. "I have faith in the validity of the Bible, in which God declares that heaven exists" is not a statement of truth, a statement of well-founded or intractable belief, nor a statement of dispassionate credulity. All these statements convey the same message with differing degrees of self-delusion, namely: "I hope that heaven exists".
Therefore, theists do not find it difficult to rid themselves of theological beliefs because they are scared to compromise any facets of their tightly interwoven systems of truth, belief and faith (we shed held truisms, beliefs and faiths on a daily basis as we acquire new knowledge - however seemingly significant - into the world around us) but because they are scared to abandon the most primitive, yet perhaps the most important of all our psychological, systemtic processes: that is, the systemic process of hope. It's difficult to abandon the hope that we may have been created rather than evolved, that we may be able to live forever, that there may an omnibenevolent being forever watching over and guiding us, or that our life has some pre-ordained purpose - hence the trauma of the deconversion process and the unwillingness to truly delve into religious belief on a sincere epistemic, ontological or metaphysical level. Regardless of what intractable fact you sling at the theist, the religious beliefs will remain in tact simply because your not targeting the arguments at the right psychological schemata - the key to deconverting theists (not that I advocate proselytism of any sort - be it theistic or atheistic) lies not in undermining the empirical or logical evidence supporting the existence of a God, but rather in removing the dependancy on hope - the "emotional crutch" or "opiate" of the theist if you like - vested in this deity.
Similarly I believe in religious Darwinism. The religions that most strongly cling to this formula are those most likely to survive. Any religion that encourages free-thought or open-scepticism, or any religion that bases its ideologies on issues of fact or epistemology - for instance - is likely to fail, simply because it renders itself open to falsification. The second doubt is cast on this sort of religion religion, its adherents abandon it, for they have no emotional stake in the preservation of its ideological intergrity. The religion most likely to survive, therefore, is the one its adherents are least likely to reject. Now as religions based on fact (and belief and - to a degree - faith) are easy to for its adherents to shed (just as more mudane "facts" and "beliefs" are shed in day-to-day life as we become privy to more knowledge) they cannot survive long. On the other hand, those religions capable of fostering hope and then creating an emotional dependancy on the preservation of this hope, are highly likely to survive (especially if this fostering of hope is coupled with the rejection of the validty of empirical knowledge - a la Islamo-Christian Avoerism - and a culture of credulity and anti-skepticism). In this context, a religion can only survive if it makes sure it establishes an emotional dependance within its adherent based on the baseless "hopes" of the latter.
Christianity goes one step beyond this "Darwinism", however. In addition to latching onto generic, latent human hopes (hope of transcending death, hope of a greater purpose etc.) it creates its own need for "hope" by poking yet more holes in the human ego, creating an even greater need for hope and - from this - an inescapable emotional dependancy on its own theology, that cannot be satisfied by any other. I posted this on another forum:
Christianity contains within itself a perfect circular mechanism - it makes man sick so that it may offer him the cure. If you are able to fully convince a man that he is debauched, weak and that he is a sinner against the rest of mankind from the point of his conception, then he is more likely to be susceptable to your promise of "salvation". However, once one accepts this salvation and the rest of the message Christianity prescribes, one simply retreats further into self-depreciation - man becomes yet more convinced of his evil nature and of his weakness and as he does so he becomes even more dependent on the salvation offered through Christ. From this point there is no going back: one cannot be so convinced of one's own debauched worthlessness and then expect to function without some hope for redemption. People find it difficult to stray from the flock because after accepting the disease (Christianity's pesimism concerning man-kind) the only cure comes in the form of a 2000 year old man wearing a robe and sandals. Thus the only way to help a Christian from his "cage", as Neitzsche put it, is not to convince him that God doesn't exist or that Jesus never rose from the dead (or any other argument of a metaphysical, empirical or logical nature), but merely to convince him that man-kind is not sick, it is not debauched, and that every one of us is a unique, free-thinking moral agent with the power to help and work for both himself and the rest of man-kind. Once a Christian is "rescued" from his self-depreciation - freed from his disease - all of a sudden the "cure" laid out in Christian theology no longer quite seems so appealing. He may never free himself from theism, but he will be free of his emotional dependence on theism and, as an atheist, I believe that that is the first step towards true redemption. After all, what good is the cure if you no longer have the disease? |
So, the point of all this, finally, is to convince all you would be proselytising atheists/agnostics out there that religion is never going to be undermined by fact, but only by the erosion of the emotional dependancy that religion creates. Religion dies the second humanity realises it can be happy - and live productive, purposeful lives - without God and without heaven. In fact, I actually believe an atheistic universe to be preferable to a theistic one - from the same post:
No longer do I possess a prescribed essence. No longer am I a being "created" in the image of God. No longer can I blame God for my definiciencies or believe that the path towards correcting these definiciencies lies in God's hands alone. I am a being possessing free-will: I create myself, continually defining and redefinining who I am. We human beings often take it for granted that we are the only beings in the known universe - out of that virtually infinite expanse of matter - that possess this power - to define what we, in essense, are.
But we also possess another unique ability, which ties in with what I meant by "sensuality": namely, the ability to comprehend being both in-itself and for-itself. Extend your hand, flex your fingers about and think about all that this action means. Look at your fingers - that's you. Doesn't this seemingly small, meaningless action in itself inspire some significant, existential awe? That you are able - upon your very own whim - to extend your being out into the world and to act upon it as you wish? That you exist and that you have power to act directly upon your free-will? Go outside, then, and gaze up at the stars. Consider how frightfully huge the universe is, how much matter there must be and how virtually infinite the expanse of space must actually be. Then extend your hand out in front of your face and flex your fingers again: feel the air upon them and try to grasp exactly what it means to be and what it means to sense the world around you. Try to understand your role as an organism abandoned an an infinite, cold and dead universe. Consider your part in the incomprehensible span of space and time, then consider that none of this - not you, not the trees, not the universe, not anything - need exist at all. That the odds against you existing at this very moment are incomprehensively large and yet there you are. A being. In the universe. With the power to act as you wish.
Eternal life? Pah. Knowing that I needn't (and mathematically shouldn't) exist at all, and knowing that once day, in the not too distant future, I will never again be able to stand on my balcony with a cigarette, gazing up at the stars behind my extended hand - and to realise with morbid awe the intrinsic significance of this scenario - is all the impetus I need to ensure that I make all that I can from this life: that I make it full and meaningful and that I waste as little time as possible worrying about unobtainable dreams like "God" and "heaven". That I will, if all things go to plan, have lived for but 70 years wedged between two expanses of infinite nothingness is a miracle, when put in those terms, far greater than anything I could ever dream of encountering in heaven. But it is only the inevitability of this finality that infuses existence with its very purpose in the first place: death gives life meaning, an importance. The unattainable hope of eternal life merely dulls us to that which we should hold must dear in this life here and now - that we should be grateful every day for the short time we have received on Earth and it is up to we alone, as free-willed beings, to make what we can of it. Why would we take time to smell the roses if we had an eternity in heaven to do so?
Don't be decedant. Realise that you are here today and that you may not be here tomorrow. Understand this, and you'll understand why I'd find far more "comfort" living one day as an atheist than an eternity as a Christian.[/quote]
Religion will always exist in some form, but I still consider it important to make religious people realise that life has a very real and definite purpose even though God does not exist. Only in realising this can people become free from their suffocating dependency on religion and - in turn - appreciate the true, genuinely optimistic view of existence. [/QUOTE]
Sorry, gone on the weekends. This gets my post of the year, very well written. |
|
|
| tathi |
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
- Isaac Asimov |
|
|
|
|
