Ecumenicist
New member
... as a moral compass, this is well put.
In terms of "cosmic sense of belonging," and security or comfort
in the presence of chaos, there's a reason that there are no
athiests in foxholes...
No Longer A Christian
- Thread starter Granite
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... as a moral compass, this is well put.
In terms of "cosmic sense of belonging," and security or comfort
in the presence of chaos, there's a reason that there are no
athiests in foxholes...
Zakath
Resident Atheist
Thank you. I do try.
This old canard needs to be laid to rest.
There are atheists in foxholes...
Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers
Here's a list with bio information of a few atheists in foxholes, in cockpits, on ships, and hitting the beach...
http://www.maaf.info/expaif.html
There's even an Atheists in Foxholes Monument in Lake Hypatia, AL.
It's an interesting fact that the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, is eligible for membership in the VFW, but an atheist veteran who won the Congressional Medal of Honor is not...
:think:
Things that Jesus did say:
"You brood of vipers!" "You are of your father the devil..,"
Mr. Coffee
New member
That's just the way it is when words are used in communication. I've gotten the following material from Glenn Miller. Here's an example of a Biblical term: Death
physical death is the separation of personality (soul?) from body,
spiritual death is the separation of the person from a relationship with God (e.g the driving away of the man from God's presence in the garden in Gen3),
separation of a living person from a meaningful life (I Timothy 5.6),
separation of the believer's "volitional-center" from the non-freedom influences of the law (Rom 7.4) etc....
it can also be used to indicate powerlessness or fruitlessness, such as the elderly Sarah's womb (Rom 4.19)
or 'faith without works' (James 2)...
"Natural language seems to be the best medium for the kind of message God would need to get to us...and the nature of lexical use and determination is such that we are always dealing with "that's close enough conceptually" In a message that deals with "infinite" persons, immortality and immorality, evil, natures, personal struggles, despair, rebellion, hubris, apathy, hope, freedom, spirit, etc., the medium used must strike a healthy balance between denotative precision, emotional concomitants, and volitional confrontation. If we build a continuum of precision, with math and logical calculus on one end (extremely precise, but with a very, very limited lexical stock--one doesn't use 'despair' or 'hope' in wffs(!) very often), and with freeform music on the other (notoriously imprecise with its cognitive content, but emotionally powerful and affective), natural language would fall right in the middle...
"Logic requires unambiguous terms, and real life doesn't consist of those. Consider things that affect us as persons: justice, consciousness, fear, hope, despair, companionship, authenticity, loyalty, moral choices, identity groups, significance...even "truth" or "certainty" cannot be defined very precisely...Logic works mostly in bi-valued systems (but life is multi-valued: is hate the opposite of love, or is apathy/no-feeling the opposite of love?)...Life is too fuzzy and robust and dense and thick to work well in highly-precise syllogisms...Most of the stuff you can speak clearly about in formal logic is irrelevant to humanity's deepest needs."
Please note that he's talking about formal logic and not Aritotelian (informal) logic.
Another raspberry. Without any information, you're just spitting.
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Mr. Coffee
New member
It's a question of whether the statements are true or not. The name of the author does not affect this. You really are a poster child for the informal fallacies.
I have the context perfectly staright. The part about being children of Satan was in reference to their lies. And the brood of vipes comment was about them being evil. Just because they called themselves Jews, that does not seperate them from all of the other evil, wicked people.Originally posted by Zakath
The only problem with your citation is that he was addressing hypocrites from his own religion, not non-believers.
Do try to get the context straight.
I was referring to many a Christian including myself who formerly as an agnostic practiced sexual sins, and condoned and supported homosexuals and abortion. I ridiculed "Christians" who took a stance against these "legal rights."
I resented Christians who condemned me for my fornication, drunkeness, and blasphemy. When I became a believer, I either quickly or gradually gave up these sins and these views. No one forced me, but I was simply persuaded through prayer, Bible study, and encouragement of the Spirit, and believers. I can truly say with no equivocation that unless I was a born again believer, I would still be that terrible person.
The Bible clearly condemns each of the sins I described. It is not any Church of mine, or of our forefathers, that promote such wickedness. Just as this is not my country, or that of our forefathers, that did so, either. I for one, want my Country back and our Churches back.
This is only a supposedly Christian nation. I agree with you on that point. :up:
Wow, I really got the old Ralph Cramden blood boiling! I can just see him storming back and forth in his apartment and ending with... "To the moon Alice--jeremiah!
A couple of quick points, I am referring to the many statements by not just Granite, but many other former Christians and avowed atheists on TOL who from their own mouths claim that they are morally superior to the vast majority of Christians that they know, or the Christians that they themselves were!
In the light of that, and if I can produce those statements from threads on TOL, you will see that you turned my point around. In the Christian perspective, at the very least, they purposely break the first and fourth commandments by definition, and probably the third routinely. But let's assume that they do not. Then they major on the last six and proclaim that they are better then most Christians at these. Talk about self righteous arrogance. Knowing that they have never committed adultery, they compare themselves to Christians that they know who have committed adultery. Knowing that they have hardly ever stolen anything in their lives, they compare themselves to Christians they know that have stolen many things,, etc, etc, You get the point. If we can exclude the commands from the Bible that they don't believe in they are by degree and by comparison more righteous than most of the Christians that they know.
Isn't there a name for this type of self analysis and then comparison?
...but the funny thing is that "Christians" (self-professed and so called) can support gay rights or abortion to a point, yes? So being an agnostic or whatever doesn't really corner the market on left-wing politics or drunkenness.
You said:
"I am referring to the many statements by not just Granite, but many other former Christians and avowed atheists on TOL who from their own mouths claim that they are morally superior to the vast majority of Christians that they know, or the Christians that they themselves were!"
Okay. I think I need to clarify something: I NEVER said I was "morally superior" to other Christians. Never. I said I felt like a better Christian now than I was before--but that was just referring to a sense of self-improvement, not superiority. I think you missed the point.
"Talk about self righteous arrogance. Knowing that they have never committed adultery, they compare themselves to Christians that they know who have committed adultery."
Jeremiah, I really think you're flying off the handle here. I said I felt more at peace. I said I feel more forgiving, loving, tolerant of my fellow man. I'm more inquisitive about the world. Now that I'm outside the church I feel like a new (and better) person. The stale, lifeless, psychological blind spots raised by Christianity are gone now.
I don't keep running tabs on the peccadilloes of Christians I know or encounter. You need to take a deep breath, my man.
"The real difference here is the difference between the religion of Christianity and Christ."
So you would have no problem with the institution of the church being dismantled, everybody doing their own individual worship or home church even? Just trying to clarify.
PureX
Well-known member
*smile* Excellent! I appreciate that you had a sense of humor about my response. Sometimes I can be a bit ... over bearing ... in my posts, and I appreciate when other folks can appreciate that without getting upset.
I think you have been misunderstanding many of their statements. I don't believe that they are claiming "moral superiority" over Christians. I think what they are caiming is that they are being truer to the spirit of and teachings of Christ after having gotten away from the religious idolatry, and from the folks who practice it, then they were before. I suppose you could take this as an assumption of moral superiority, but to tell you the truth I don't think most people care that much about their "moral condition" once they get away from those righteousness-obsessed religions.
I can't speak for "Granite" or Wickwoman" or any of the others who have left these kinds of absolutists/righteousness obsessed religions, but I can speak for my own somewhat similar experience. And I can say that having grown up on the inside of such a religion, and now looking back at it from the outside, and seeing how it effected me and how I see it effecting those around me, now, that it's really a very toxic ideology and it really does great harm to those who have been drawn into it, or who have been raised in it.
Of course those who are in it now will not see things this way. That would be like expecting an abusive husband to recognize that he's an abusive husband. Of course he doesn't see it, as he's too busy convincing himself that his wife makes him behave as he does. But from the outside the behavior and the dishonesty is plain as day.
Absolutism is a kind of mental and emotional illness that blinds people to reality and to the real complexity and relativeness of the human condition. This is why people are attracted to it and why they become addicted to it. People are frightened by this complexity and relativity in life, and it's the denial of the complex and relative reality of the human condition that these absolutist religions are peddling. Reality is the "enemy", and these over-simplistic absolutist religions are the drug people use to ignore and deny that fear - that "enemy". But as with any drug, the consequence of the addiction is that over time one loses the ability to grasp and deal with reality even when they decide they WANT to. They don't know how anymore, and in the case of those who grew up in these religions, they never learned how in the first place. And of course many of them never want to. They live and die in the delusional state that their religion promotes as "absolute truth".
The concept of moral righteousness is a big deal to people who are still living under the influence of this delusion of absolute righteousness that these religions peddle, and so to them, "morality" as it is defined by their religion is of the utmost importance. But to most of the rest of us who are not living under the influence of one of the absolutists/righteousness obsessed religions, the concept of our own moral righteousness in not very important. We understand that morality is relative, and that we are all choosing our own standards and that we will all fail to live up to them occasionally. We also understand that this is not the end of the world. Forgiveness abounds. People screw up, and people are forgiven. In fact, we forgive other people when they screw up because we know that we screw up, too, and hope that they will forgive us in turn. We also understand that everyone chooses their own ideas and beliefs about God, and that none of us knows for sure who's idea of God is the "right one". Maybe no ones. Maybe there is no God. But understanding the limitations and relativiness of human knowledge regarding such ideas as "God" means that we can appreciate and respect the chosen beliefs of others as being as equally possible as our own chosen beliefs. And because we understand that we have chosen these beliefs, we understand that we can change our minds about what we believe, too. We understand that it's not a "sin" to change what we believe about God, or morality, or anything else.
I realize that this way of living is sin and "backsliding" to an absolutist, but in fact it produces calmer, kinder, more tolerant human beings. And of course we think these characteristics are more Christ-like than an obsession with one's own moral rectitude, intolerance toward any and all other points of view, and promoting willful ignorance as "faith". We don't really believe that we're morally superior to these absolutist Christians, but we can see that the results of getting free from such religions is both personally positive and socially more functional and productive. It is a better way to live, we think, after having experienced life both ways.
This is not the "Christian perspective", this is your perspective on Christianity. Not all Christians accept the OT laws as applicable, as you do. You're judging other people by your own religious ideals, but they aren't followers of your religion, so that's both irrational and unfair. Who are you to be presuming that other people should be living by your understanding of God and God's will? What makes you think that you undertsand God any better than anyone else does? Who are you to be defining for other people what's "Christian" and what isn't?
Why do you feel they are being "self-righteous and arrogant" just because they choose to believe something differently than you about these commandments? Are you saying that it's "self-righteous and arrogant" for anyone to believe something other than you believe about the ten commandments? Who's really being self-righteous and arrogant, here?
But it was YOU who were comparing the sins of "Christians" and "non-Christians" a few posts back, not Granite or Wickwoman or me. All Granite said was that as he compared the Christians in his church to the folks he used to call non-Christians it seemed to him that the absolutist Christians at his church were miserable people.
And I think Wickwoman has expressed similar experiences in past posts.
I assume that most of us would consider this sort of behavior "immoral" but that's for each of us to decide for ourselves. Lots of Christians around here do not consider this experssion of Christianity immoral. There are Christians on TOL who think we should kill homosexuals simply because they are homosexuals. Is this immoral? They don't think so. They think it's "Christ-like".
Christianity, like everything else, is complex and relative. Only the absolutists refuse to recognize this - it dilutes the power of their imagined absolute truth and righteousness - it dilutes their ideological drug of choice.
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wickwoman
New member
Yes, and where would Christianity be without the strong armed tactics? Maybe they would have all been eaten by lions in the arena. Take away Hell, what have you got? A bunch of wars between tribes and a myth about a blood thirsty god, a list of suggestions on how to be a good person, and a nice man who healed a bunch of people and told them to be kind to their neighbor.
And then there is the argument that making something taboo leads to perversion. For instance, when is the last time you heard about a universalist minister abusing a 12 year old boy?
Personally, I blame the Puritans for our current state of affairs.
Zakath
Resident Atheist
More likely they would have dwindled, much as the Jews have over the centuries...
A double-speak message about a "loving" God who demands human sacrifice while, on the other hand slaughtering unborn babies at whim.
UU ministers are relatively rare in the population and about half of them are women (who have a much lower incidence of sexual predation than males). I am assured by acquaintances in the UU Church that there have been cases of clergy involved in sexual abuse.
I think it's a human problem, not a denominational one...
That's fine, so far as it goes... but since the Puritans are dead and buried, it's up to we moderns to deal with the legacy and fix the problems.Personally, I blame the Puritans for our current state of affairs.
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