RE: I am a Catholic, ask me a question!
August 5, 2009 at 11:48 am
(This post was last modified: August 5, 2009 at 11:51 am by Jon Paul.)
(August 5, 2009 at 10:41 am)chatpilot Wrote: Jon Paul by saying that humanity is at fault for willingly choosing the evil one over God and all his wonderful graces is precisely why I don't agree with christianity or any religion for that matter.In order to be in this gods graces you have to debase yourself and accept what a lowly no good sinner you have been.And you are a lowly sinner. That is not because you are no-good; that is because you are capable of good, you are given good, but even then, you reject goodness in your sins. And by that, you reject God.
If you can't accept that you are a sinner, then you are just another prideful egoist. Christian atheism is indeed the result of the addiction to the opiate we call egoism and pride.
If that is precisely why you reject Christianity, so be it.
But the balance exists, in that it's a matter of free will: we can choose to accept God and His graces and let him fill us with His Spirit and become spiritually restitute and sanctified. So we can strive to rise above mere egoism and pride and sin, to the point of sanctity and holiness by accepting Gods graces.
(August 5, 2009 at 10:41 am)chatpilot Wrote: Not to mention the god of the O.T. is nothing more than a tyrant and yes he does get angry he has demonstrated that several times throughout the scriptures.He was in favor of the death penalty for the silliest infractions and a terror to humanity.Your arguments seem exactly like the type of thought I hate called christian apologetics.Trying to make an evil deity look and seem good and benevolent when if you were to take some of those stories literally just shows what I monster he really is.Again, this sort of moral objection is completely groundless when subjected to epistemological analysis. For the atheist who rejects the Christian God based on some moral objection, that the Christian God is "evil", has no mandate for the idea that there is any such thing as goodness or evil to begin with, whereas the Christian certainly does. In other words, play the moral card and you have refuted yourself because you have no objective mandate in your epistemic structure for such moral objections, and hence, you are merely building on abstractions of brain chemistry. The same applies to logical objections, indeed any objection in which the atheist has not the kind of outside, transcendent standard which is needed to evaluate and judge Christianity logically or morally as true or false or good or evil.
As much as this surely is also significant for your rejection of Christianity, it is not an intellectual argument you have put forth, but an emotional one.
The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.
-G. K. Chesterton
-G. K. Chesterton