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Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?
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Hello, I stumbled upon your site when trying to look for old muscle car information. I read your belief in Atheism. Im always sad to hear when somebody was turned off from God due empty teaching or to "religion" (a useless additive that is combined with the teaching of the bible) Catholicism does a good job of adding "religion" which is nothing more than vain repetition and traditions that were not practiced in the true early church. I am a Christian and not by faith alone. The more I do research on the Bible I find more evidence for the Bible to be true that there is no way to deny the reality of God. By looking at archeological and geological findings and research I find myself overwhelmed with facts that support the Bible. A great web site to check out is www.drdino.com, Dr. Hovind deals with creation vs evolution, the flood, etc. He also has debates that he has been involved in concerning creation vs evolution. Isn't it interesting that science books in schools are constantly changing with revised information on how the world formed, etc. If you look at a science book form just 10 yrs ago you can see the difference in what was written then and what is "believed" to be true today. Yet the Bible through the ages has never been revised or changed. The findings of The Dead Sea Scrolls helps testify to this. I go to a non-denominational church called Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa in Southern California/USA. Calvary Chapel has spread around the world because of it's good solid teaching of the bible with nothing added or taken away. I know there is a Calvary Chapel in England, though I'm not sure exactly where. I believe it would be worth while to check out. Lastly, in dealing with evolution and creation we have two options. Either you believe something came from nothing or that there is an eternal God. Logically, you cannot believe that something came from nothing because that simply goes against basic logic. Then that means there is only one conclusion, God does exist and is eternal. Hope to hear from you soon. Matt DaBigHemi@aol.com
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If you think you have found your truth I am happy for you.
If you think you have found THE truth you are deluded.
If you think you have found my truth you are dangerous.
I too read and find that my reading confirms my beliefs. That seems to be pretty universal. I also read and find information that changes my beliefs, that is exhilarating.
Muscle cars
Aren't they cars that are simply powerful and thirsty beyond any reason?
Have you ever paused to ask yourself what would Jesus drive? From your reading of the Bible you should have a better idea of that than me, but I can't help thinking that the closest that Jesus would get to a V8 would be as a passenger in a bus.
I have often thought it strange that people who call themselves Christians ignore 90% of his teachings and examples and just get fixated on the theology and the idea of divine retribution.
By the way, atheist and atheism do not have capital letters except when they start sentences. The rule is simple, religions get capital letters e.g. Islam, Quakerism, schools or systems of thought do not e.g. mysticism, cynicism. In addition capital letters are given to the names of schools of thought named after real people like Marxism and Reaganism and also after the adopted names of people such as Leninism. Christianity therefore counts for a capital letter twice over, being the name of a system of thought based on the ideas of a man and named after his adopted name or title which has been made into a religion. Atheism does not qualify for a capital letter at all. If atheism is a religion bald is a hair colour.
Martin
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I don't want to come off as nit-picking but I must disagree with you on the fact that Atheism is a religion. In Webster's dictionary religion is defined as: 1)belief in and worship of God or gods 2)a specific system of belief or worship, etc. built around God, a code of ethics, a philosophy of life, etc. As you can see Atheism falls under the later part of the second definition of religion ("a philosophy of life"). Concerning the question as to what kind of car would Jesus drive? Well, the first time Jesus came to this earth, there was one occasion when He came into Jerusalem riding on a little donkey where the Jewish people waved palm branches at Him as He passed by (this is where we get Palm Sunday). In the book of Revelation it speaks of Jesus riding on a white horse with the clouds as His covering, this is concerning His second coming. From this, it looks like Jesus is not too fond of driving but rather prefers riding. You noted that many people who call themselves Christians don't put to practice what the Bible actually teaches. It is written that we should be "doers" and not just "hearers" of the Word. I agree that there are many who profess or call themselves Christians but don't put to practice what the Bible teaches. You can tell that someone is a Christian by the life they live. Jesus said, "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow is the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." I look forward in picking up this ongoing discussion soon.... Matt DaBigHemi@aol.com |
You quote WEBSTER at me! How dare you! That man should have had his head on a pike for crimes against humanity.
Spelling reform? That is the main source of the split between the USA and the civilized world. Spelling is a link between the past and the future. OK, it is hard to learn the rules but the spelling contains the history and meaning of the words, if words are treated as phonetic representations of grunts we can rapidly lose touch with our past, imagine being unable to read any book more than 150 years old because the words have changed their spellings. Now if you want a hero of language I suggest Samuel Johnson, who wrote the first English dictionary and lead the move to standardized spellings. With his help we were able to gain advantage of the true power of English, a fluid and living language that can evolve but at the same time is rooted in the past.
Chinese is not a single language, there are distinct dialects that are vastly different in spoken form, but in the written form they are very similar. Scholars of Japanese can read Mandarin Chinese from several thousand years ago. The written form is timeless, the spoken language, like all spoken languages, evolves. Thanks to the heritage of Johnson there is a chance for English to be the same, readable and meaningful across time and yet able to change in spoken form. Spoken language must evolve, written language must remain understandable across time, quirky spellings is a cheap price to pay for this winning combination.
Now then down to the nits. To call atheism a religion by the latter part of that dictionary definition is stretching the point beyond the real meaning. It is an extension of the meaning of the term religion. If I say that for much of South America soccer is a religion we could agree and yet neither of us would think it merited a capital letter or constitutional safeguards. Perhaps to qualify the point I would say that religions by the narrow definition require capital letters. "A philosophy of life", such as cynicism, scepticism (skepticism to you followers of Webster) or pessimism does not require capital letters. Atheism is, for me, a lack of unjustified and irrational beliefs, it is but one part of a wider philosophy of life. Defining atheism as a religion is absurd and renders the meaning of the word religion so vague as to be meaningless. Yes I have a philosophy of life that colours my judgements, that philosophy concerns my beliefs about the existence of supernatural forces. But I don't think that it qualifies as a religion. It is a bit like arguing whether zero is a number, it depends on your definition of "number". Zero is not a positive integer, atheism is not a religion.
Now then the bigger question. Jesus and muscle cars. Revelations was written long after Jesus died and is the account of dreams and visions. I do not subscribe to the view that dreams and visions can tell you much at all. In 38 years I have had thousands of dreams, none of them in any way useful, inspired or prophetic. I have several times had a very distinct feeling that one of my relatives had just died, it has never been true. I have had many dreams that felt far more relevant than the everyday world around me but they have been shallow. In one I had a vision that I had designed a beautiful sports car in a dream and had gone on to build it, this dream was as vivid as any orgasm or the birth of my children. What was the result? A vague memory of a car that looked something like a Jaguar or a Ferrari. Hardly surprising considering that I made such sketches while I was awake.
People are always having dreams that feel inspired by something beyond them. I can understand a man who was deeply religious in attitude having a few seemingly profound dreams about their hobby (religion), like I did with the car designs, and then convincing himself that the written accounts of them he was making, that all these people seemed interested in, were true reflections of those dreams. Atheists only have dreams about messages from God in fiction. I find it rather strange that people whose religious beliefs seem limited to some vague feeling that "there has to be something in all of that stuff" and who feel uneasy about throwing Bibles away no matter what state they are in will watch a film, knowing how all the special effects are achieved, which shows an atheist or other sceptic behaving rationally and yet something is engineered to happen to them in the fiction and they will come away saying "it makes you think, doesn't it?"
Recently a Christian wrote to me about the number of manuscript copies of the Bible that were in existence somehow proving something about the historical Jesus. People do not throw away Bibles. My religious studies teacher at school (a fair-minded atheist) told of his puzzlement when he had ordered some more Bibles and he asked some boys to throw away the old ones, which were battered and torn, the boys would not do it. They were not active Christians but they somehow felt that a copy of the Bible could never be thrown away. Very strange. The superstition and gullibility of my species is a never-ending source of shame and wonder to me.
Jesus chose to ride a donkey to make an entrance into Jerusalem. I don't think he was short of people willing to lend him a horse or even a chariot. That would have beaten sport sponsorship into a cocked hat, Chariot Hire by appointment to the Son of God. He never did anything in the way of conspicuous consumption, the closest he came was in not refusing to have his feet anointed with extortionately expensive scented oils. I would hazard a guess that if he were alive today he would be standing for environmentalism rather than the presumed absolute right of every citizen in a democracy to burn as much fossil fuel as they care to. Where does that "right" come from and what mechanism is in place to stop the bad results from hurting us?
If you get the urge to take an engine out of a fighter plane and put it into a road car what will stop you? Nothing. Six billion people suffer as a result of one man's selfishness and many of them will actually fall over themselves to applaud the selfish one. What mechanism exists to put the case for conservation of scarce resources? Stand up and draw attention to it and you are marked down as a freedom hating stooge of the Communist evil empire, against jobs and prosperity; or perhaps even Satan himself. But what has God ever done for energy conservation, population limiting, protection of endangered species, protection of native people or anything else? Praying and sitting still have precisely the same outcome.
Millions of people make pilgrimages to Lourdes each year and yet the number of "miracle cures" is actually below what you would expect for random chance; put another way more people get spontaneous remission of their illness by going to Coney Island, Disneyland or Las Vegas than get it by going to Lourdes.
You show a typical anti-science attitude. You think the fact that science books show different explanations after ten years of research is in some way a bad mark against science. Being religious you think of everything in your own terms. Everything is made up of good and evil. Science is a religion, what anybody else believes that differs from your true religion must obviously be their false religion, hence your and other Christians insistence that atheism be defined as a religion.
Most of the scientists who have ever lived are still alive today, and most of them are still working. It is hardly surprising that scientific research will be gathering pace and coming up with alternative explanations, that is what science does. In contrast religion does pretty much the opposite. Defining today's problems by the standards of previous millennia. Science is not some single force. There is no single scientific opinion. It works somewhat like a market. There is no single person who decides the value of a three year old Ford Mondeo, there is a collection of opinions and a consensus emerges. Science is like that. Ten years ago the extinction of the dinosaurs was a mystery, people knew that it had happened but were unsure why, now there is a consensus around the theory that a meteorite that caused a huge crater on the coast of the Yucatan peninsula was probably the biggest single influence.
I am quite confident that there will be many further advances in science that will shed light on the mechanisms of the origin of species. There will also be changes in the ideas about the formation of the universe. Although there is one thing I will put money on, there will not be any convincing proof that the universe was created in six days in 4004 BC. There will be people who believe that, but they believed that before any evidence was gathered and so cannot lay claim to be considered scientists. True scientists welcome their theories being disproved. So-called creation or biblical scientists believe that their theories cannot be disproved, and therefore they do not deserve to be treated as scientists.
When a scientist comes across information that challenges his views on reality he changes his views. What do you do?
In your first message you use the tired old argument about something coming from nothing. In the everyday world we live in it is a reasonable assumption that something does not come from nothing but in the equally real world of particle physics something comes from nothing on a regular basis. If you knew nothing about fundamental physics at all and walked into a modern lecture theatre you might be mistaken for thinking you had stumbled on a den of acid-heads. The universe is so completely different to the way we perceive it, almost everything they teach you about physics before the age of 16 is wrong. Things regularly pop into existence, usually in pairs, having mass where before there was none. Other entities have no mass but spin. There are not three dimensions plus time, there are eleven. The universe is so very different from the way we pictured it several thousand years ago that it is almost farcical that so many people can cling on to old teachings based on the ramblings of men with no scientific training, no peer review and no clue as to what they were going on about. The only reason people believe these stories is because they are told that they are true. It is a self-supporting edifice of lies and delusion. Faith is good, so believing in stuff that seems unbelievable is actually a good thing. Believing in things without evidence becomes a virtue, whereas to scientists it is professional misconduct. The Bible is true, you are told by the people you have decided to believe, they go on to prove the truth it contains by quoting from it. The Bible is the Word of God, they tell you, look it says so here in the Bible, which, remember, is the word of God.
How does your religion spread? By the power of its truth? No, by the power of the people who profess it. By their military and economic power. Guns and Bibles crossed the American continent at the same speed. Never did any white men come across any native Americans who had gone out of their way to find the true religion. I am unaware of any tribal leaders ever sending out messages to ask to have the gospel preached at them. Never once has a conquering people asked the conquered what they believed and tried to use the two stories to build a synthesis of ideas. The only synthesis comes when dispossessed people struggle to come to terms with the effects of the trauma of a clash of cultures. It is no accident that the religion you profess came from the Middle East via Europe and then passed down the generations. That is the way your entire lifestyle and culture has come. The food you eat, the technology you use, the values you hold and even the genes inside you have made their way from the cradle of western civilization in Europe and Western Asia to where you live today. You are the product of those journeys, as is your faith.
Martin