I often receive email articles or internet links to photos of breathtakingly beautiful landscapes, or pictures of unusual animals, or news about someone who was saved from a catastrophic accident, in which God is attributed as the maker or responsible for saving the life of the lucky one.
If I were argumentative, I would tell my friends that if God is responsible for all the beautiful things in nature, then God must also be responsible for the ugly ones, like diseases, poor African children stricken with hunger, or for the deaths of the people who did not make it out alive from the accident. However, the answer from my religious friends would invariably be that God has a reason for doing what he does, and it is not for us to know why.
This kind of cop-out thinking is pervasive among the highly religious. Once they have don their "God Goggles", no naturalistic explanation that is offered can satisfy them. For them, the answer is always God, and God can do no wrong!
Which is why I like this video from The Thinking Atheist, in which Seth talks about the "Blind Spots" in the religiously afflicted. Seth was a Christian for 30 years - including 12 years as a Christian broadcaster. However, Seth ultimately found the bible's answers to be sorely lacking, and upon critical examination of his religion and to "think" for himself, finally put down his God Goggles and became an atheist. I like this video and decided to link it because Seth's story is not only interesting, I find him very funny, and his talk is highly entertaining.
3 comments:
Hi NJ,
I found your blog while looking for ways to improve the performance of my A101 tablet. I enjoyed reading about your experiences rooting your A101 with Urukdroid and I am now encouraged to try it myself. I am also mostly in agreement with your analysis of the A101's flaws, well with the exception of portrait being better than landscape, but that's a subjective thing isn't it? :)
You should know that I almost never comment on blogs, however when I stumbled across your "Blind Spots" post, I felt compelled to reply. Now you seem like a very intelligent guy, so I'm not even going to try and argue/reason with you :) But I want to tell you a story in answer to your question, believing it is your choice.
In the beginning God created man and placed him in paradise along with 2 trees, to exercise his free will: one was the tree of Life from which man could receive the eternal life of God, the other was the tree of knowledge, of good and of evil. Man chose the second tree and philosophies (even religion), sin and death entered the world, hence why you have all the horrible things you mentioned.
God's life (i.e. the 1st tree) is now hidden in a man named Christ, who is the prototype of what God intended us to be, i.e. He is God in life and nature. He died for your sins and mine, so that we can be redeemed back to God.
Now, thanks to Him, and through faith, we can eat of this tree again and be joined to God as He originally intended. You need only believe into Him and call his name and you will be saved.
Of course, if man doesn't join himself to God he will perish along with the rest of the old creation when Christ returns put an end to this wicked age. It doesn't matter if man is good or evil, but what matters is that man has God's life which is divine and eternal.
God wants all men to be saved and come to the full knowledge of the truth, especially you NJ, but don't just take my word for it..."seek and you shall find". I will pray for you dear brother.
Hi Kris,
Thank you for your kind comments and for spending some of your precious time in reading my blog. I hope you have success with rooting your Archos tablet. As I wrote in my rooting post, although Urukdroid resolved my storage problem, the Archos 101 is still hobbled by its miniscule 256 MB RAM. A lot of new Android programs are RAM intensive, and the 256 MB RAM limitation on my Archos is acutely felt when I try out many of the new programs I am installing. Ultimately, I will still have to buy a new tablet - which must have at least 1 GB of RAM. Fortunately, as an e-reader, the Archos 256 MB RAM limitation is not so bad.
I actually have many friends of different religions, and many of my best friends are devout Christians. However, as I have written elsewhere in my blog, one of my favourite subjects is history. And if you read the history of the various religions - critically - you will come to the conclusion that Gods are created by Man, and not the other way round. That is the reason why there are so many Gods as there are cultures. Every culture created its own God in its own image. Over millennia, the thousands of gods have converged to just a few. But even to this day, there are still hundreds of gods being worshipped by their followers around the world. The question we then have to ask ourselves: of all the hundreds of gods, is Yahweh/Jesus the true god, or is Allah the true god, or are all gods the same god, or are all gods the figments of man's imagination?
You have employed a method of thinking to settle on Yahweh/Jesus as the true god. But if you had been born in a Muslim country, you could have also concluded that Allah is the true god. When there are competing gods, how do you discern which is the true god? What method did you use to arrive at your conclusion?
The method that I use is called PEARL, which stands for Physical Evidence and Reasoned Logic, which is merely a smart-alecky way of saying The Scientific Method. Unfortunately, Christianity's explanation is not as compelling as that offered by modern science and philosophy. When you read Genesis, and see that God created light on Day 1, but the Sun only on Day 4, you will know how weak the bible is scientifically (the bible says that trees and grasses and fruits came first on day 3 before the Sun on day 4 - which we now know to be scientifically impossible).
And once I found a flaw in a work that is supposedly created by an omnipotent and flawless divine being, I will start questioning all other claims made in the same book. Unfortunately, the bible is not a very compelling piece of work, both from a scientific, as well as from a moral, point of view.
Anyway, I do hope you will read the author Bart Erhman, especially his books "Misquoting Jesus" and "Jesus Interrupted". Professor Erhman was once a very devout believer, but after studying the biblical texts critically, became a non-believer. You will find Professor Erhman's books to give you a very insightful look at how the Christian bible came to be, and why its veracity must sometimes be questioned.
Again, thank you for your kind comments. And Happy New Year.
- NJ
Hi NJ,
I haven't tried Urukdroid yet as I see they are planning a 1.6 release which includes the latest Archos 2.4.81 update, so I'll wait for that.
Funny how much you sound like me 5 yrs ago. I grew up in a Christian family but as soon as I was old enough I rejected religion. At first I adopted the atheist belief but it wasn't long before I had to admit I was actually agnostic. Why? Because everything around me testified to there being a greater power. Rom 1:20 tells us man can see there is a God through creation. This is why there are so many Gods. Fallen man being separated by sin from the one true God (who was invisible) could see the evidence of the Creator in His creation, so man had to imagine what God was like and religion was born as a way of contacting God.
This is one of the reasons why the invisible God came as the man Jesus, so we could finally know what He was really like and we wouldn't need to guess. God through his love for man set aside a people - the Jews - who would one day be a light to the gentiles (i.e. the many pagan nations) by bringing forth a saviour who would lead them out of the darkness of religion and philosophy and back to the one true God. But as we know, even they rejected Jesus, because their hearts were darken and they loved their religion more than the truth. Ironically, they themselves did not really know who God was, and did not recognise Him when He came to them.
The Bible was never meant to be a scientific book, it was inspired by the Spirit of God, but it was written by primitive men who expressed their own primitive views of the natural world. And there was no reason for the Spirit to correct them in that regard, because God knew their was no profit in a book of knowledge. Such knowledge is contrary to Life (i.e. the 2 trees in the garden of Eden) and only leads to the denial of God, and subsequently sin and death. The Bible is a book of Life which is meant to lead men back to Love of God, to make man one with God as was God's original intention.
NJ, having looked at all the books on your Safari bookshelf, I can tell you are searching for answers. But you can't find the truth by only reading the biographies of those men who might have stumbled along the way in their search for truth, because that would condem you to join in their faith. You need to read what God is saying to you right now in the Bible.
Unfortunately, the Bible can be a difficult book to read unless you have help interpretting it, because 1.) it has been translated so many times and 2.) it is a Spiritual book which speaks to the spirit of man (the part of us for contacting God). If I might be as bold to suggest you have a read of this book: http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=jhQltJewQNAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google books just has a preview. It is an interpretation of the Gospel of John which was written to gentiles like you and me to show us who God really is. Start from page 29 if it's available, and you'll find it answers many of your questions.
Happy New Year to you too NJ, and I hope this year brings you closer to the truth.
Post a Comment