07.19
I usually don’t respond to stuff like this, but I think this guy makes some valid points amidst the errors and vulgarity. What strikes me is how predictable thoughts like his are, given what has been going on in the church for the last “x” number of years. When you get wishy-washy and start blurring your theology like the broader Christian church has, it eventually doesn’t make sense anymore. I want to take the claims one at the time. I’ll ignore the “ranty” parts and just focus on the claims made.
He’s right. Hell isn’t a place or a thing. It’s non-physical just as heaven is. Hell is just a place of non-corporeal existence that is cut off from the presence of God. It’s not a “belief system” either. I am pretty sure you require more than one belief before you can call it a belief system. The other part about no good without evil is kind of a misappropriation of principles. You have to be careful about applying too many language constructs to base metaphysical ideas. If there was no such thing as darkness, we could still see light just fine. Just ask Alaskans. I bet some of them forget there is even such a thing as darkness sometimes. The perception of light and dark might be altered but not the reality of them. In the same way, a world where everyone’s actions were evil all the time would be an evil world. The absence of anything morally good would not mean that the formerly evil actions are all of the sudden morally neutral.
The only thing that good and evil require is a standard by which to judge which is which. It is the Christian contention that the standard is innate and therefore exists objectively and independant of the perception of it. I think this is a safe and reasonable position to take, seeing as how most base morals(don’t kill, rape, torture) are seemingly universal. I’m not just splitting hairs here. This is an important point. Good and evil don’t depend on one another but on a common moral metric.
Half-right. I would say it this way. If there were no hell, the only religions left would be the ones that nobody takes seriously anyway. There is a reason that the only religions that are taken seriously by a large number of people are the ones that include an idea of punishment for sin. Why would I believe in a religion who’s theology didn’t match universal moral intuitions? Everyone knows that killing babies for fun is wrong. If my theology didn’t include punishment for that act then why would I take it seriously? Christianity would certainly not exist since it’s foundational precept is Jesus saving us from that punishment. I’m not sure what that gets you though. That’s like saying, “If there were no such thing as sausage then my favorite food wouldn’t be sausage.”
Please! Not the old science is based on fact, religion is based on “faith” thing again. That’s scientism rearing it’s egotistical head. I guess it makes atheists feel better about themselves to think that they are the only reasonable ones that exist. Religious folk on the other hand all go around dreaming up things they would like to believe and then set about believing them so they can feel better about their cosmic Papa. I take offense to statements like that.
Nobody believes something that is absolutely without proof. They might be mistaken about the proof or it’s accuracy, but they still believe it to be proof. The reason people make statements like that is not because their is no proof for God, but because only certain types of proof are allowed to count for anything in their view. Philosophical arguments are not allowed. Likewise, any science that concludes with anything other than strict naturalism as an answer is not allowed. Just ask Michael Behe how easy it is to get peer review when your research points to supernaturalism.
Also, that description of faith is just totally wrong. Faith describes a secondary belief that results from a set of primary beliefs. If you define it any other way you are not talking about faith anymore. What he is talking about in the quote above is what we all know as “blind faith”. The two couldn’t be more different. For instance, if you had studied a certain set of chemical interactions for 10 years, you would be shocked if the resulting experiment didn’t produce your expected results. You would be shocked because faith had crept in. Not because you really wanted the experiment to work, but because all of the science behind it made sense to you, and demanded a certain result. On the contrary, blind faith just makes up whatever it wants and that is pretty silly.
As an example of faith being a result of other, more primary beliefs see my two previous posts on Agnosticism:
Christian philosophers have come on strong in the last 20 years. There are now theistic philosophers in many major philosophy departments around the world. This is not because philosophers like to make up things and then believe them. They are compelled by the evidence. Just ask Anthony Flew. I’m out of room for now but I will post some more later. Actually the rest of what he wrote is the part I’m most interested in. Particularly his mention of the “middle knowledge” argument.
