Sorry, I lost interest in non-Catholic theology decades ago … esp Calvinism.
Maybe you misread. I’m their token Presbyterian.
Absolutely brilliant! “Context, context, and context”, and they all say that the one who says in his heart, “There is no God” is not the atheist, it is all of us. It’s a principle we love to ignore, but when Paul tells us we do the same things, he extends a method of understanding the Old Testament: every time it speaks of someone sinning, we should never say, “Oh, how terrible that person is!”, we should say, “That’ talking about me”.
After all, how else is it that we who are Christians can sin except by saying in our hearts, “There is no God!”? We know better, and the only way to escape even in the moment of temptation is to pretend – surely, just for a moment! – that God isn’t real.
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Ah, so you picked up the streak of arrogance that infected Rome in the fifth or sixth century and has only rarely looked back.
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Playing the “I can be dismissive” card right back at him, huh?
There’s a lot that the Reformed could learn from the Catholics.
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I guess one way of looking at the truth is that it is arrogant.
No, it isn’t. Jesus is truth, and Jesus is love, so the attributes of truth are the attributes of love, which we know something about–
Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy,
it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered,
But then if you’re Catholic your spiritual director should have taught you that.
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Atheists come up with all sorts of reasons to not believe in God. For someone determined to reject God, it doesn’t take much.
For those who want to believe in God, reasons to believe in God outweigh reasons to not believe in God. Conversely, those who don’t want to believe in God, reasons to not believe in God outweigh reasons to believe in God.
Some atheists don’t need any reason … other than the idea that God might exist strikes them as childishly absurd. Other atheists percieve belief in God as weakness. As my atheist brother-in-law told me, “Anyone who believes in God is a superstitious weakling.”
An abhorrence of the prospect of eternal life is also common amongst atheists, which no doubt adds fuel to their rejection of God, the Author of life.
What church do you belong to? Or are you your own church?
But I know that is not what you really think.
I think you have it! Thanks.
The question of whether God exists as a creator, etc, is entirely another one that the Psalmist had no thought of.
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Fascinating.
I have no doubt whatsoever that this is the case. There are people who believe the earth is flat. The number of people choosing to believe irrational and unreasonable things is increasing and while most are found in religion, atheists are not immune to this.
And many atheists will say the same about theists, that they believe in God because they want to believe in God… they simply want THEIR god to exist. They likewise often say theists lie about there being convincing evidence of their god, quoting old texts which tell this lie as if that proved anything while inconsistently denying all the other books which says things contrary to what they believe.
The majority of atheists I have encountered are simply not interested in religion because they are more interested in other things. They simply spend very little time on the questions of religion. Those which do spend time on the ideas of religion, most often have concerns about the morality of theism. It seems to them to be a way people have of avoiding responsibility for their lives. Of course I don’t agree with them.
I think the biggest difference between us is that I was not raised by theists or among other theists, while you were. I think your exposure to atheists has been limited to those rebelling against the rules of religion, but that is only the most superficial kind of atheism, because these have only an authoritarian understanding of morality they typically snap back to their religion when they discover that a life without any moral guidelines leads to disaster. I on the other hand, like many raised without religion, was quite capable of constructing my own morality (in my case based on reason and principles psychology). Seeing truth in the teachings of Christianity was a much longer road avoiding many of the superficial aspects.
Yes. It is rather obvious that people believe what they want to believe when it comes to things where there is no objective evidence (and often even when their is overwhelming objective evidence like those flat earthers and creationists). The same is true of theist and atheist and those who claim they only believe what objective evidence dictates are frankly indulging in willful delusion.
This is an area of active scientific research. We understand the big picture and are now working out the details.
This is incoherent. Something made using the same machinery of biological organisms is not a living organism. That would be a machine. And yes we are already doing this in medicine and engineering. Things which are a product of design are machines. Living things are a product self-organization, growth, learning, and evolution. That is what it means to be alive.
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Nonsense; you’re dreaming. Scientists are nowhere near producing life from inanimate matter … and they never will be. Get a grip.
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You must be a Catholic from “Down Under”. - I share your conviction, regardless what the agnostic Brit, Nick Lane, believes.
Somewhere you wrote (I can’t find it now) something about our tendency, in areas of uncertainty, to hitch on to one strong position and blame others for lack of objectivity… I think this is a very good point. It is an easy trap to fall into. I appreciate your compassion in that. We all struggle.
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This doesn’t sound like something I would say. I don’t use the words “uncertainty” and “objectivity” in that way. It is more typical of me to talk of certainty as a delusion to avoid and objectivity as something found in the procedures of science which anyone can follow to get the same result no matter what they want or believe. But I think we often get meanings from the words of other people which are not quite what they intended.
Hmmm… what would I say with a similar meaning? I would say life requires subjective participation where what we want is central. So we make choices. This is unavoidable. This is the proper role of religion in our lives. But to see these as objective is to force your choices on other people when the truth is we don’t have a basis for reasonably expecting others to agree with us. The only certainty with any meaning is the choice to live our lives according to our choices, and it is more a matter of faith than anything else. We can consider other possibilities while remaining committed to the choices we have made… and… we can be ready to change our commitment if objective evidence contrary to our chosen faith presents itself. It is one thing to cross a bridge everyday with faith because it has taken us to the other side safely for many years, and it is quite another to continue doing so when objective evidence is found that the bridge is on the verge of collapse.
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Your the one speaking nonsense. Understanding how stars work and how they are formed doesn’t mean we can produce stars ourselves (other examples like this in astrophysics abound). Understanding how a criminal murdered someone doesn’t require us to murder someone in the same way. And it is certainty that understanding something doesn’t require doing something which contradicts the very nature of the thing itself. Next you will be telling us that we cannot understand how parents love their children unless we control it in a laboratory.
That explains my problem, thanks!