(May 2, 2011 at 12:51 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: It's definitely not fair and is tantamount to emotional blackmail. I don't believe in a place called Hell, so why should I worry about going there?
Thanks for your thoughts, Thomas. Yes, it goes back to the old Pascal's wager, I suppose. My dad actually said something to this effect: "You need to think about what you're saying" (Meaning, think about the prospects of going to hell if I'm wrong.)
(May 2, 2011 at 12:51 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: I did say that I'd talk to the priest some time. Of course it's on the back burner for me, and if/when I ever do, I'm going to take a nice long list of hard but valid questions about belief in God and Christianity in particular. I told my mother-in-law not to get her hopes up that it will change me.
Good move on telling her not to get her hopes up. I have spoken with devout believers and my former pastor after my deconversion. Really the best they can do is recommend a book. After speaking with a former agnostic turned Christian (figure that one out), he handed me this book on apologetics to peruse. I read the whole thing and took notes.
Those Christian "thinkers" are experts at tangled and fallacious logic, that's for sure.
Our Daily Train blog at jeremystyron.com
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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