RE: Christian Looking For Debate
November 20, 2011 at 4:05 pm
(This post was last modified: November 20, 2011 at 4:22 pm by Epimethean.)
The supernatural is illogical.
William Fielding put it this way:
The believers in, and advocates of, supernaturalism, take a most illogical and contradictory position. They postulate an All-powerful, Omnipresent Creator, and yet the major portion of their theological presentation and philosophy is a tirade against the evil influences that pervade the whole of creation, and which variably baffle, confound and frustrate the Omnipotent. It would seem that God has veritably created a Frankenstein, and that all that saves the supreme being from this evil genius of his creation is an army of inspired theologians.
Theology is the "science" of the incomprehensible! Its sovereign is obscure and invisible, even if omnipotent, with the results mentioned aforesaid. Its realm is the unseen, the mysterious, the unintelligible, the unknown, and unknowable, as far as acting upon any of the senses with which the human nature is concerned. Hobbes has called it "the kingdom of darkness." Unlike all other sciences, its secrets cannot be learned by observation, investigation, research, experimentation, comparison, testing, analysis and synthesis.
Its "truths" may only be made known through revelation-but not revelation to you, dear reader! That is asking too much. It so happened that the revelations in question, which must be accepted in order to be a Christian believer, were made many centuries ago to a group of primitive, superstitious, largely illiterate people in Judea. Then again, the revelations in question were not committed to writing, in many cases, until long after they occurred, but were handed down verbally for generations in some instances, with what fidelity to fact the reader's guess is as good as mine.
There were at that time enlightened, cultured, educated people in Alexandria and Athens, to name two outstanding examples, not only capable of writing down completely any divine communications, but also anxious to seize upon any opportunity to learn new truths.
Later, and pointedly on this line of thought, Fielding arrives at,
If God is incomprehensible to the human mind, it would seem reasonable and logical to never think of him at all. But such is not the way of the theological mind. Jean Meslier, in his famous Testament, makes this devastating comment on the theistic paradox: "Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God; that is to say, in order to explain what you understand so little, you need a cause which you do not understand at all. You pretend to make clear that which is obscure by magnifying its obscurity. You think you have untied a knot by multiplying knots."
William Fielding put it this way:
The believers in, and advocates of, supernaturalism, take a most illogical and contradictory position. They postulate an All-powerful, Omnipresent Creator, and yet the major portion of their theological presentation and philosophy is a tirade against the evil influences that pervade the whole of creation, and which variably baffle, confound and frustrate the Omnipotent. It would seem that God has veritably created a Frankenstein, and that all that saves the supreme being from this evil genius of his creation is an army of inspired theologians.
Theology is the "science" of the incomprehensible! Its sovereign is obscure and invisible, even if omnipotent, with the results mentioned aforesaid. Its realm is the unseen, the mysterious, the unintelligible, the unknown, and unknowable, as far as acting upon any of the senses with which the human nature is concerned. Hobbes has called it "the kingdom of darkness." Unlike all other sciences, its secrets cannot be learned by observation, investigation, research, experimentation, comparison, testing, analysis and synthesis.
Its "truths" may only be made known through revelation-but not revelation to you, dear reader! That is asking too much. It so happened that the revelations in question, which must be accepted in order to be a Christian believer, were made many centuries ago to a group of primitive, superstitious, largely illiterate people in Judea. Then again, the revelations in question were not committed to writing, in many cases, until long after they occurred, but were handed down verbally for generations in some instances, with what fidelity to fact the reader's guess is as good as mine.
There were at that time enlightened, cultured, educated people in Alexandria and Athens, to name two outstanding examples, not only capable of writing down completely any divine communications, but also anxious to seize upon any opportunity to learn new truths.
Later, and pointedly on this line of thought, Fielding arrives at,
If God is incomprehensible to the human mind, it would seem reasonable and logical to never think of him at all. But such is not the way of the theological mind. Jean Meslier, in his famous Testament, makes this devastating comment on the theistic paradox: "Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God; that is to say, in order to explain what you understand so little, you need a cause which you do not understand at all. You pretend to make clear that which is obscure by magnifying its obscurity. You think you have untied a knot by multiplying knots."
Trying to update my sig ...
