RE: My somewhat deconversion
April 19, 2012 at 11:44 am
(This post was last modified: April 19, 2012 at 11:50 am by Tea Earl Grey Hot.)
Thanks everyone. I feel like I'm in a theism recovery 12 step program now. 
I didn't mean to imply by my nihilism comment that I think atheists are immoral. I don't think atheists are a gang of post-apocalyptic road warriors as cool as that would be. I know you're very moral and nice, probably more often than Christians. It's just in all my years of training as Christian I was taught that atheists are really deluding themselves into thinking life has meaning I'm still having hard time not seeing that. If you have an article, book, or video, that might present what you think to be an airtight case for purpose and meaning in a naturalistic reality, then please share it.
Most Christians think everyone knows God exists, but because of their sinful nature, most choose to keep him out of their knowledge. I have to make sure my sudden bout of reasonableness isn't just complete delusion caused by my sinful nature's bias to not wanting God. So, the Christian response to why doesn't God just show himself is supposedly that he has already, through nature and the human "heart" (whatever that is). Though, when I was a Christian, I did find pretty complexing those passages where God showed himself to a multitude of non-believers and they converted because of that. But supposedly it may be that if God has "middle knowledge" then he created the universe that has the most believers that would freely come to him out of all the possible worlds he could have created (I don't think this though this gets around those appearance stories in the Bible).
One of the things that always caused doubt for me was the sheer size of the universe. It seems a little too big just one race of sentient beings. Another thing is just the sheer incoherence of scripture. Most Christians don't read it because it's not very straightforward. It only seems clear to some because theologians have been trying to make some sense of it for 2000 years, and they can't even agree amongst themselves. Many can't even agree on what salvation actually is (Free grace? Lordship salvation? Baptism? Works? Universalism?). You would think that a divinely authored book would at least be clear on that.
I didn't mean to imply by my nihilism comment that I think atheists are immoral. I don't think atheists are a gang of post-apocalyptic road warriors as cool as that would be. I know you're very moral and nice, probably more often than Christians. It's just in all my years of training as Christian I was taught that atheists are really deluding themselves into thinking life has meaning I'm still having hard time not seeing that. If you have an article, book, or video, that might present what you think to be an airtight case for purpose and meaning in a naturalistic reality, then please share it.
Most Christians think everyone knows God exists, but because of their sinful nature, most choose to keep him out of their knowledge. I have to make sure my sudden bout of reasonableness isn't just complete delusion caused by my sinful nature's bias to not wanting God. So, the Christian response to why doesn't God just show himself is supposedly that he has already, through nature and the human "heart" (whatever that is). Though, when I was a Christian, I did find pretty complexing those passages where God showed himself to a multitude of non-believers and they converted because of that. But supposedly it may be that if God has "middle knowledge" then he created the universe that has the most believers that would freely come to him out of all the possible worlds he could have created (I don't think this though this gets around those appearance stories in the Bible).
One of the things that always caused doubt for me was the sheer size of the universe. It seems a little too big just one race of sentient beings. Another thing is just the sheer incoherence of scripture. Most Christians don't read it because it's not very straightforward. It only seems clear to some because theologians have been trying to make some sense of it for 2000 years, and they can't even agree amongst themselves. Many can't even agree on what salvation actually is (Free grace? Lordship salvation? Baptism? Works? Universalism?). You would think that a divinely authored book would at least be clear on that.
My ignore list
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
