RE: Atheists being asked about the existence of Jesus
January 7, 2019 at 4:26 am
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2019 at 4:42 am by Fake Messiah.)
(January 6, 2019 at 1:16 pm)Lek Wrote: Can science view anything in an abstract manner? How about love and hate? Are these just the results of chemical reactions in the brain or a mere physical reaction to a stimulus?
What else do you think they are? Angels playing in our heads?
Joy, happiness, love and hate are stimulus of the brains: human and probably the brains of other animal species. Rocks don’t feel joy or jealousy, and mountains do not love. These emotions are intensely real to those who experience them, but they didn’t exist before brains did. And still does this explanation somehow diminishes love? People can't write love letters anymore or poetry? Nonsense.
Or take color. Color is "nothing more" than sunlight breaking and only one color of it being reflected of a surface into our eyes that have receptors and yet people still paint pictures to show how they see light in their own way and for other people to enjoy.
Back in the day when Newton explained the light Goethe was appalled thinking that this somehow destroys the "magic" of the world by explaining the mysterious and he even wrote his own book in which he tried to un-explain light and make it mystical again.
But Goethe's fears were in vain because knowing more about light made us enjoy light even more in numerous ways and devices.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
