National Prayer Day

[delusionsofNORMALity]

most atheists aren't intelligent...

there are more than enough rational and intelligent atheists. they aren't as noticeable as the loud mouthed buffoons and self-described advocates of the cause you may see on the evening news, whining over their lack of representation in the annual christmas displays, but they are out there none the less. judging all atheists by the actions of those few and their attendant organizations is as foolish as judging all of christendom by the insane antics of the westboro folks or behavior of a few pedophilic priests.

[JD1stTimer]

Wow, what a display of brilliance!! Finally we hear a commentary on religion which actually has good logic behind it. I've been worried that intelligence may be fading from human society, to be gone forevermore, but thanks to Delusion's posts in this thread I have hope once again.

My own beliefs fall mostly under a Christian umbrella by the way, although I don't support any particular sect. BTW, the intelligent and rational Christians aren't as noticeable as the loud-mouthed idiot pseudo-Christians either. :fish:

[delusionsofNORMALity]

though i am usually swayed by such high praise, i can't help but comment on this one little statement:

the intelligent and rational Christians aren't as noticeable as the loud-mouthed idiot pseudo-Christians either.

i have to ask what is intelligent or rational about a belief in christian dogma. though the ideals of constancy and self-sacrifice that are put forward in much of the new testament may be laudable, they tend to lose some traction when based on such premises as a virgin birth and talking bushes, not to mention the whole idea of an omnipotent and omnipresent being watching over the fruits of its week long orgy of creation. please excuse me but, as an atheist, i can't avoid seeing the entire thing as childish superstition.

[Coelho]

though i am usually swayed by such high praise, i can't help but comment on this one little statement:i have to ask what is intelligent or rational about a belief in christian dogma. though the ideals of constancy and self-sacrifice that are put forward in much of the new testament may be laudable, they tend to lose some traction when based on such premises as a virgin birth and talking bushes, not to mention the whole idea of an omnipotent and omnipresent being watching over the fruits of its week long orgy of creation. please excuse me but, as an atheist, i can't avoid seeing the entire thing as childish superstition.

Well... as Blaise Pascal said:

"Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it."

[JD1stTimer]

To me the thought of things existing from nonexistence, and living things arising spontaneously from nonliving things is just as intellectually impossible and completely beyond all logic as the virgin birth is to you. This may come from having played with legos extensively as a child, and if I had ever opened the package and found one already assembled there is no way I could be convinced that it happened during shipping instead of being done by a person in the lego factory. And the only argument I have heard to refute that line of reasoning was that the smaller blocks came together first and they had physical properties which made them more likely to combine into more complex structures, again purely spontaneously. To me that doesn't solve the fundamental logic problem involved, no matter how many levels of increasing simplicity are traced back.

I know however, that it is reasonable and logical to you (not the lego story, but that life originated spontaneously), and I believe you are as intelligent or more so than I am, so I am forced to accept the possibility that there is no God, although I don't see any logical fallacy in my belief that what exists is extant solely because it was manufactured by a being either omnipotent or what we would think is omnipotent compared to our own abilities to create things. But I have no doubt that it works out for you, and you have very sound, intelligent, and rational reasons to believe what you believe.

There's another level of belief though, which I think I can describe best using the story of Jonah and the fish. It strains my faith to think that he lived inside a sea creature for three days. But that's not the point of the story. The point was that it foreshadowed the burial and resurrection of Christ, he was gone from the human world for three days and when he came out he helped the people of Nineveh come back to a humane and decent way of life, whereas according to the story they had been in a state of disarray like what we see in Somalia or Sudan today. Then later we have Christ, who did for humanity universally what Jonah did for Nineveh specifically. And they both asked God to let them escape from their mission in life. So the whole thing about did he or didn't he live in a fish isn't even what that story is telling us.

So I don't necessarily have to deny all logic to use it as my spiritual framework, because the physical possibilities are quite irrelevant to the actual message. I think the virgin birth conveys the point that Christ wasn't put together the same way as other people, and not literally meant to be an anatomical explanation of how Christ developed as a fetus. I hope this doesn't have a logic flaw embedded in it that I'm not seeing, and if it does I will appreciate it being pointed out.

I hope I have convinced anyone reading this that there is nothing stupid or illogical about being a Christian in the true sense of the word, just as I don't think there's anything stupid or illogical in atheism. I just can't grok it personally, which in the end could just be a failure of my own mind.

[JD1stTimer]

Blaise Pascal was a brilliant thinker. That's just my ego talking though, because he enjoyed studying clockworks as much as I do. Do I have the big head or what? Hehehe don't mind me I'm feeling under the weather today and I think my temperature is up. Plus my thinking supplies are exhausted after producing my last reply. You're real cool, Coelho!

[JD1stTimer]

Oh, and one more thing. When I say "you" I generally mean it corporately not individually. So my above response is intended both for KillerWeed420 and DoN, and anyone else who is on the atheist side of the debate, although some of the posts in this thread haven't been intelligent enough to have warranted my making the effort to rebut.