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Figured you wouldn't have anything but an assertion to go on.
Want me to post the Chris Pratt article where he talks about his faith? If anyone represents pop culture of the last couple years, it's him.
Pratt is an actor. The character he plays represent popculture. That said has any of his characters delivered a gospel message? no? Then Pratt's faith is not apart of his involvement with pop culture.
July 28, 2015 at 5:25 pm (This post was last modified: July 28, 2015 at 5:25 pm by KevinM1.)
(July 28, 2015 at 5:12 pm)Drich Wrote:
(July 28, 2015 at 4:46 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: Figured you wouldn't have anything but an assertion to go on.
Want me to post the Chris Pratt article where he talks about his faith? If anyone represents pop culture of the last couple years, it's him.
Pratt is an actor. The character he plays represent popculture. That said has any of his characters delivered a gospel message? no? Then Pratt's faith is not apart of his involvement with pop culture.
You asked "Do you think it's easier to be a Christian or a member of pop culture?" Pratt's characters don't exist. They're not a member of anything since they're fictional. It's like saying Super Mario or Master Chief is a member of pop culture. Star Lord's existence is 'difficult' only in the context of his fictional conflict against Ronan the Accuser and nothing more, so trying to compare that to a real person is asinine.
Now, you can complain that pop culture no longer leans as Christian as it once did, but that's not what you originally asked/implied.
"I was thirsty for everything, but blood wasn't my style" - Live, "Voodoo Lady"
July 31, 2015 at 9:51 am (This post was last modified: July 31, 2015 at 9:53 am by Drich.)
(July 28, 2015 at 4:58 pm)Pyrrho Wrote:
(July 28, 2015 at 4:38 pm)Drich Wrote:
see my last post.
on what?
Being Christ despite circumstance is hard no matter what. It is so much easier to just give up and adopt some sort of bastardized morality and justify whatever you want so long as no one get hurt.
To have a pastor perform a ceremony that is against his deeply held legitmate religious views is not freedom to practice religion sport, that is a state mandated religious practice. Something our bill'o rights says we do not have to do, but popular culture says we must.
If this were true we would not be killing unborn babies, sanctioning gay marriages, and removing God from every aspect of public life, nor would the state mandate our religious practices.
Where do you live? maybe we should trade homes.
There are two boys lost off the coast of Florida and a radio deejay who announced this news story ended, 'our prayers are with you.' I cringed because he said this on a non Christian station. The very next break he had to appologise for expressing his religious views on company air time and made a disclaimer statement that his company did not endorse his 'prayer.'
what kind of world do we live in, where we can not offer prayer to two 14 year olds lost at sea? More over if we live in a majority Christian country then why do we have to go about daily life as if we were stepping on egg shells all the time?
If you went to china, do you think they would keep their deeply held religious/cultural views out of the public eye so as to not offend some douche bag minority? Then why do we do it here unless those numbers are not repersentivite of who and what the majority of this country really is.
Take another look at the article at your link. It is regarding "wedding chapels," not churches. Wedding chapels are basically businesses which marry people. Businesses are not allowed to discriminate. Churches are.
Next time, try looking for a reputable news source.
silly atheist, you cant refute a tertiary source with another tertiary source, unless you want to look like a fool sitting in his own 'confirmation bias.'
You need a secondary source or primary source material to refute a tertiary source like a new agency or new blog.
Lucky for you the fox news article provides a primary source to not only support everything reported it goes much further is detailing not only the fines, and jail time threatened it out lines how this threat was not constitutional. On the link I provided it provided a link to the actual 63 page legal brief filed with the city, along with Donald knapps signature on the document. Which not only verifies the complain it shows your liberal blog/rags for what they are.
A good secondary source is the summation of the situation on the actual website of the ADF. (The attorneys defending Donald Knapp and the hitching post.) http://www.adfmedia.org/News/PRDetail/9364
This summation is valid because it comes from the actual lawyers defending knapp.
Then a valid tertiary (third part/non affiliated source) is the boise public radio source that not only confirms the confrontation but spells out the final resolution. http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/co...rights-law
Bottom line... Next time you want to challenge me don't let the other fool you into thinking I am not well researched. I rarly have less the three points of verified reference material before I make a stand like this. Several more when a subject like this is contested.
I was not raised as a Christian and did not attend any church growing up. No one in my family had. My first encounter with the word "God" outside of citing the pledge of allegiance in grade school was by my ill mother. She told me that God was calling her home. I was 8. She died a week later. She had been diagnosed with M.S. at 24 and died at 27. I was then raised by my grandparents. My grandmother grew up Catholic but denounced that when she was 17. My grandfather was an angry drunk who hated religion because his sisters were Southern Baptist Bible thumpers. I was angry at this "God" until I was 17. I struggled through my teen years and left home to be on my own at 17. I ran in to a friend I hadn't seen in a few years who was drastically different then I remember him being. He talked to me about Jesus, the Bible, etc and well I didn't want to hear any of it, I could not get over how drastically different he was and toiled with a lot of internal thoughts and feelings of something missing in my life. During the next four years I considered myself an agnostic atheist, but also could not stop thinking of how my friend has changed and kept going back to my mother's words about God calling her home. I felt it worth looking in to.
In college I studied a lot of religions and philosophy and the one that really pointed me to a Christian was C.S. Lewis. His argument from Morality I found to be logically consistent and coherent and honestly irrefutable. To me it certainly pointed to a deity. At the age of 21 I became a Christian and found profound change and peace in my own life. I continue to pursue intelligent reasoning and do not shy away from opposing viewpoints. I enjoy reading the works of Dawkins, Hitchings, Hawking, and Nietzsche (among others). So one might say that my reson for believing is purely emotional but I continue to test it intellectually.
Thank you really taking the time to answer the question. I would say your reasons are primarily emotional. But when I hear someone say they have found "profound change and peace" in their life, I'm usually loath to try and explain why they should give up such a personally useful untruth. But you are here, and you do appear to want to test your belief.
I'd love to discuss the argument from morality at some point. I've read a fair amount of C.S. Lewis, and I must admit I don't find the argument from morality particularly compelling. There are perfectly good evolutionary and social explanations for morality.
(July 27, 2015 at 12:14 pm)lkingpinl Wrote: I would be curious of the answers if it was posed to the opposing view. Most atheists I have conversed with indeed started out in religion and walked away from it because of religion itself (hurt by church, find church people fake) or evil and suffering in the world, or find religious atrocities both current historical etc. These are also emotion based reasons not to believe. Not saying that is why anyone here does not believe, just that in my personal experiences that is why I find most people claim to be atheist.
Fair enough. I was raised in a Christian household. My father had a year of seminary and occasionally preached in our Presbyterian church. My earliest memories include VBS, and monthly meetings of the prayer group that formed the back bone of my parents social life. I went to church every week for most of my childhood and to VBS, and a Christian summer camp for a couple weeks each year.
About the time I turned twelve or so my parents moved from the Presbyterian church to a Lutheran. Mom was raised Lutheran. Dad was Swedish Covenant which is essentially Presbyterian. It was a style change more than a theological one. Lutheran services place more emphasis on worship and contrition than Presbyterian services and Sunday school is in-between services so that Lutheran children and many adults go to both service and Sunday school. I attended two years of confirmation classes on Wednesday nights at the Lutheran church and participated in Luther League events.
But I can't remember actually believing. I can remember listening to a sermon involving Genesis and wondering how on earth all of these adults around me could believe that. That was before I began school, but I couldn't have been all that young, so I'm guessing I was about five then. That puzzlement never really went away. But I didn't voice it for a long, long time. Children have fine instincts for self preservation.
However, as confirmation approached I found I really could not bring myself to make a public profession of belief, so I brought the matter up with my parents. They said it was an adolescent thing and that many teens question and then grow back into the church. When I persisted, they were more hurt than angry, though I think my mother had a fair amount of social embarrassment involved in that too. She wanted me to go through the motions. The pastor came to my defense on that one.
I had a fair amount of guilt over hurting my parents and I spent some time trying to believe. The pastor suggested reading the bible end to end with a good commentary. I did that, but it was a mistake on his part. If ever there were a good plan for deconversion actually reading the bible has got to be tops. I also read much C.S. Lewis at the urging of my mother. But in the end her argument came down to "you really do believe, you just don't know that yet."
I had another go at trying to believe in my twenties and again in my late thirties. The stumbling block has always been the same, the story makes no sense, and there's no evidence of it. At this point, I can't imagine why I tried.
If there is a god, I want to believe that there is a god. If there is not a god, I want to believe that there is no god.
I was not raised as a Christian and did not attend any church growing up. No one in my family had. My first encounter with the word "God" outside of citing the pledge of allegiance in grade school was by my ill mother. She told me that God was calling her home. I was 8. She died a week later. She had been diagnosed with M.S. at 24 and died at 27. I was then raised by my grandparents. My grandmother grew up Catholic but denounced that when she was 17. My grandfather was an angry drunk who hated religion because his sisters were Southern Baptist Bible thumpers. I was angry at this "God" until I was 17. I struggled through my teen years and left home to be on my own at 17. I ran in to a friend I hadn't seen in a few years who was drastically different then I remember him being. He talked to me about Jesus, the Bible, etc and well I didn't want to hear any of it, I could not get over how drastically different he was and toiled with a lot of internal thoughts and feelings of something missing in my life. During the next four years I considered myself an agnostic atheist, but also could not stop thinking of how my friend has changed and kept going back to my mother's words about God calling her home. I felt it worth looking in to.
In college I studied a lot of religions and philosophy and the one that really pointed me to a Christian was C.S. Lewis. His argument from Morality I found to be logically consistent and coherent and honestly irrefutable. To me it certainly pointed to a deity. At the age of 21 I became a Christian and found profound change and peace in my own life. I continue to pursue intelligent reasoning and do not shy away from opposing viewpoints. I enjoy reading the works of Dawkins, Hitchings, Hawking, and Nietzsche (among others). So one might say that my reson for believing is purely emotional but I continue to test it intellectually.
Thank you really taking the time to answer the question. I would say your reasons are primarily emotional. But when I hear someone say they have found "profound change and peace" in their life, I'm usually loath to try and explain why they should give up such a personally useful untruth. But you are here, and you do appear to want to test your belief.
I'd love to discuss the argument from morality at some point. I've read a fair amount of C.S. Lewis, and I must admit I don't find the argument from morality particularly compelling. There are perfectly good evolutionary and social explanations for morality.
(July 27, 2015 at 12:14 pm)lkingpinl Wrote: I would be curious of the answers if it was posed to the opposing view. Most atheists I have conversed with indeed started out in religion and walked away from it because of religion itself (hurt by church, find church people fake) or evil and suffering in the world, or find religious atrocities both current historical etc. These are also emotion based reasons not to believe. Not saying that is why anyone here does not believe, just that in my personal experiences that is why I find most people claim to be atheist.
Fair enough. I was raised in a Christian household. My father had a year of seminary and occasionally preached in our Presbyterian church. My earliest memories include VBS, and monthly meetings of the prayer group that formed the back bone of my parents social life. I went to church every week for most of my childhood and to VBS, and a Christian summer camp for a couple weeks each year.
About the time I turned twelve or so my parents moved from the Presbyterian church to a Lutheran. Mom was raised Lutheran. Dad was Swedish Covenant which is essentially Presbyterian. It was a style change more than a theological one. Lutheran services place more emphasis on worship and contrition than Presbyterian services and Sunday school is in-between services so that Lutheran children and many adults go to both service and Sunday school. I attended two years of confirmation classes on Wednesday nights at the Lutheran church and participated in Luther League events.
But I can't remember actually believing. I can remember listening to a sermon involving Genesis and wondering how on earth all of these adults around me could believe that. That was before I began school, but I couldn't have been all that young, so I'm guessing I was about five then. That puzzlement never really went away. But I didn't voice it for a long, long time. Children have fine instincts for self preservation.
However, as confirmation approached I found I really could not bring myself to make a public profession of belief, so I brought the matter up with my parents. They said it was an adolescent thing and that many teens question and then grow back into the church. When I persisted, they were more hurt than angry, though I think my mother had a fair amount of social embarrassment involved in that too. She wanted me to go through the motions. The pastor came to my defense on that one.
I had a fair amount of guilt over hurting my parents and I spent some time trying to believe. The pastor suggested reading the bible end to end with a good commentary. I did that, but it was a mistake on his part. If ever there were a good plan for deconversion actually reading the bible has got to be tops. I also read much C.S. Lewis at the urging of my mother. But in the end her argument came down to "you really do believe, you just don't know that yet."
I had another go at trying to believe in my twenties and again in my late thirties. The stumbling block has always been the same, the story makes no sense, and there's no evidence of it. At this point, I can't imagine why I tried.
Thank you for your response Jenny. Your story is indeed very common and applaud your efforts to continue investigating and I can respect your conclusions. I would be happy to discuss the morality point, though I wouldn't start another thread, because morality has indeed been discussed Ad nauseum on here, but if you would like to discuss without a peanut gallery, feel free to PM me.
We are not made happy by what we acquire but by what we appreciate.
(July 28, 2015 at 4:58 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: Take another look at the article at your link. It is regarding "wedding chapels," not churches. Wedding chapels are basically businesses which marry people. Businesses are not allowed to discriminate. Churches are.
Next time, try looking for a reputable news source.
silly atheist, you cant refute a tertiary source with another tertiary source, unless you want to look like a fool sitting in his own 'confirmation bias.'
You need a secondary source or primary source material to refute a tertiary source like a new agency or new blog.
Lucky for you the fox news article provides a primary source to not only support everything reported it goes much further is detailing not only the fines, and jail time threatened it out lines how this threat was not constitutional. On the link I provided it provided a link to the actual 63 page legal brief filed with the city, along with Donald knapps signature on the document. Which not only verifies the complain it shows your liberal blog/rags for what they are.
A good secondary source is the summation of the situation on the actual website of the ADF. (The attorneys defending Donald Knapp and the hitching post.) http://www.adfmedia.org/News/PRDetail/9364
This summation is valid because it comes from the actual lawyers defending knapp.
Then a valid tertiary (third part/non affiliated source) is the boise public radio source that not only confirms the confrontation but spells out the final resolution. http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/co...rights-law
Bottom line... Next time you want to challenge me don't let the other fool you into thinking I am not well researched. I rarly have less the three points of verified reference material before I make a stand like this. Several more when a subject like this is contested.
Your own sources say that they do not have to marry gay people. So YOUR sources prove that your original post was bullshit. Your claim again:
(July 28, 2015 at 4:38 pm)Drich Wrote: ... The US is currently jailing pastors for not marrying gay couples.
...
From your third link:
Quote:“After we've looked at this some more, we have come to the conclusion they would be exempt from our ordinance because they are a religious corporation,” Gridley explained.
(July 31, 2015 at 9:51 am)Drich Wrote: Bottom line... Next time you want to challenge me don't let the other fool you into thinking I am not well researched. I rarly have less the three points of verified reference material before I make a stand like this. Several more when a subject like this is contested.
... Says the guy who disagreed with my points on snake clades without knowing what a clade or cladogram is first.
Our view that you're not well researched is well founded, Drich. On a multitude of topics your disagreements demonstrate that you don't even understand basic concepts underpinning the issues at play.
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee
Want to see more of my writing? Check out my (safe for work!) site, Unprotected Sects!
(July 26, 2015 at 8:22 am)ignoramus Wrote: What! Are you implying that if I say "Australian English" is the ONE true English pronunciation, then I'm only saying this because I was born here! nonsense!
Its nonsense because everyone knows Minnesotans speak the one true English.
(July 26, 2015 at 8:22 am)ignoramus Wrote: What! Are you implying that if I say "Australian English" is the ONE true English pronunciation, then I'm only saying this because I was born here! nonsense!
Its nonsense because everyone knows Minnesotans speak the one true English.
(July 31, 2015 at 9:51 am)Drich Wrote:
silly atheist, you cant refute a tertiary source with another tertiary source, unless you want to look like a fool sitting in his own 'confirmation bias.'
You need a secondary source or primary source material to refute a tertiary source like a new agency or new blog.
Lucky for you the fox news article provides a primary source to not only support everything reported it goes much further is detailing not only the fines, and jail time threatened it out lines how this threat was not constitutional. On the link I provided it provided a link to the actual 63 page legal brief filed with the city, along with Donald knapps signature on the document. Which not only verifies the complain it shows your liberal blog/rags for what they are.
A good secondary source is the summation of the situation on the actual website of the ADF. (The attorneys defending Donald Knapp and the hitching post.) http://www.adfmedia.org/News/PRDetail/9364
This summation is valid because it comes from the actual lawyers defending knapp.
Then a valid tertiary (third part/non affiliated source) is the boise public radio source that not only confirms the confrontation but spells out the final resolution. http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/co...rights-law
Bottom line... Next time you want to challenge me don't let the other fool you into thinking I am not well researched. I rarly have less the three points of verified reference material before I make a stand like this. Several more when a subject like this is contested.
Your own sources say that they do not have to marry gay people. So YOUR sources prove that your original post was bullshit. Your claim again:
(July 28, 2015 at 4:38 pm)Drich Wrote: ... The US is currently jailing pastors for not marrying gay couples.
...
From your third link:
Quote:“After we've looked at this some more, we have come to the conclusion they would be exempt from our ordinance because they are a religious corporation,” Gridley explained.
![[Image: giphy.gif]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=media2.giphy.com%2Fmedia%2FaV4UFtIFU05RS%2Fgiphy.gif)
