Counter-Apologetics

Oh, right, truth and reality. Yah, that can really hurt if you're not expecting it.

So you are essentially saying that secular humanist perspectives are all truth and reality while all beliefs throughout time have been wrong. Correct?

I didn't have a good reason, my belief in the thing just evaporated and wasn't as a result of any other experience. It was just like how my belief in Santa disappeared - pretty much exactly like it. These things obviously feel real to you so there's not much more to be said about them other than there are clear and obvious other explanations for them. Why anyone else should feel they have any relevance to how Paul went about creating a religion is not terribly clear to me. It's the reverse, far too few people ask questions of their beliefs. I learned several years after I gave up my beliefs that many of the things I was told by priests were not true and they knew it. They were peddling lies to the masses. If your beliefs can't stand up to objective scrutiny and critical challenge they're pretty poor beliefs. If those that believed stopped indoctrinating children there wouldn't be any counterpart (such that it is). Religions don't have a special pass in society, they're not beyond criticism. If you want to see what happens when closed systems think they have their own rules that can't be challenged by outsiders look no further than the child abuse in the Catholic church.

No. What I am saying is that the light of reality destroys religious dogma at every turn.BTW, secular humanist perspectives vary by the person espousing them and must also be dispassionately examined in the light of reality.Reality sucks. It just refuses to let bullshit dogmas continue to deceive unchallenged. It is mean and hurtful that way.

I had to look up some dictionary meanings in order to get my head around what is being said here. Thus my question to you,(So you are essentially saying that secular humanist perspectives are all truth and reality while all beliefs throughout time have been wrong?) You reply "No"...yet go on to state: GDR argues that some doctrine is historically based, whereas Percy argues as you do that it is all belief and hence all dogmatic.Churches were never formed based on evidence-based science or logic, however. And if so, it was based on a common subjective experience which led to the common dogma experienced and accepted.

So first we have to establish what is and is not Christian Doctrine. Additionally, we have the question of what is doctrine vs what is dogma. Or if the two can be seperate.So we go back to what you say is the only real source we have...the 66 books themselves.(give or take a few added here and there) But you throw yet another wrench at us: Now to be precise, we have 66 books rather than one book, thus 66 sources. Thus when people claim that its not valid to use the Bible to corroborate the Bible, they are speaking as if it is one book. It is arguably kosher to use one of the 66 books to defend another of the 66 books, however. jar always argued that there were different god characters in different books. Your argument now seems to be that there is one God who is the same in the OT and the NT. Further, you argue that such a God is mean and unfair...to goats and enemies of Israel at least. These days people avoid religion because they claim that the God of religion is mean to Illegals, gays, women who had abortions, and atheists. Yet you conclude by saying that the specific message has value. Thus, in order to satisfy this argument, the "loving God" has to be imagined and lived by us and through us. Is that about right?

This 'truth' concept is a purely religious one, it really has no meaning when you're referring to secular matters. Secular stuff is about dealing with the messiness of real life where there's rarely if ever anything absolute and choices are temporal and conditional.All religious beliefs throughout time have obviously been wrong. If you can step outside your own head for a moment - I know you find this impossible, but if you can't, take it from people that can - you agree that all other religions apart from Christianity are wrong. You even agree that other Christians are also wrong eg Faith. So your insistence that yours is 'the Truth' is simply absurd. Of course it isn't.Putting aside the choice of no god, simple probability tells us that your variant is unlikely to be 'the Truth'. A better argument would be that because most peoples over all time have believed in gods of various sorts, then the god is universal, not unique to a particular cult.

Sorry, can't help you here, Phat. Reality trumps dogma six ways to Sunday no matter if the dogma was achieved by common experience or, as is known in most cases, was force-fed to a gullible subjugated populus by the priests.

You're showing your true anti-science colors. The evidence leads me to reject belief. OF COURSE it should be a last resort. How can you even suggest otherwise and still claim to have the slightest respect for science? But you're not sending anything back.When my brother was about five years old, we tried to explain to him that the earth is not flat. His response was, "But I think it is." We'd explain the evidence and he'd return, "But I think it is." No matter what we said, his answer would be, "But I think it is."Your behaviour is exactly the same. You use, "I believe," as an excuse to park your brain at the door and throw the evidence out the window. You even have the gall to suggest that rejecting belief is a bad thing. That's frustrating enough in a five-year-old but there's no excuse for such behaviour in an adult. Why? Yes, that's EXACTLY what we should all do. Truth is not a default.

I heave never read anything like that.

There's no real distinction. To be even more precise, we have a canon of approved sources which were chosen because they fit the desired dogmas. If science worked the same way, it would accept only the evidence that fits the existing theories. We'd have no quantum mechanics, no relativity, no evolution, etc. We'd still have phlogiston and a flat earth at the center of the universe. My argument is that the genocide God is in both the Old and New Testaments, so the "progressive revelation" ploy with a "loving God" has no basis. Apparently, you have to make up a "loving God" to be able to swallow Him.

You claim that the evidence led you to reject belief. I see no evidence that would lead me to reject my belief. Granted there is evidence that has me question the authenticity of what the apologists preach, but I see many people defend their belief and wonder why you so readily discarded yours? You cant have evidence in invisible Spirits either pro or con.Belief is a simple choice. There is no reason to reject belief in an invisible power that permeates the universe simply because such a hypothetical power doesn't *do* everything that you think such a power *should* do. And skepticism is?We are back to the whole Leap Of Faith argument. In other words, faith is based on hope. Your problem is that all you have ever hoped for is significant evidence. And not evidence for God so much as evidence for why your doubts and questions had substance. You found it. End of your story.

Belief is not a choice.Put yourself in the shoes of the child born of Muslim parents in a remote village in the Atlas mountains of Morocco. He will be a believer, I can absolutely guarantee it. Not of Christianity of course, it's impossible for him to believe in Christianity because unless you're taught about Jesus by a Christian you can't believe in him. Sad but true, so he's damned to hell for all eternity. As is right and proper.That's the way it was for all of us not so long ago. Including you and me - we can only believe what we're taught which meant what we were born into. And we're equally damned if Islam is correct.It's the opposite of a choice. You do not believe because you chose to, you believe - in Christianity - because that's what you know.I didn't choose to believe when I believed and I didn't choose not to when I didn't. You didn't choose either did you? You're making the usual mistake of conflating deism with theism. I doubt whether most people here rule out an “invisible power that permeates the universe” - I'm an exception - because that's unknowable and irrelevant. We do object to yourassumption thar the God is the Christian god and that he intervenes with his creation though.

I'm not talking so much of children. I am talking of adult over the age of 21 who have been exposed to the internet, missionaries, and aware of the choices offered globally. True you may have a point that most of them will accept the local product if at all. But this presupposes that all of the products are equally palatable. If there actually is something to my brand---in that the solution of accepting a living Christ is an actual possibility and if something actually happens through accepting Jesus the character vs simply dogma chanted by the local shaman...Christianity will have a statistical advantage.

But people don't reach the age of 21 without being taught the religion of their parents or society. Even atheistic parents can't keep Jesus out of the heads of their kids in a Christian culture. You know this is true because you know that religious belief is not equally distributed in your town between all the world religions. People do not choose their religion. A very few change their religion and a few drop it, but the numbers are totally immaterial. You know that practically all of them wil - if at all. No it doesn't. It doesn't matter a damn what the local religion is, you'll adopt it if you're born into it. You *know* this. You can not be a Christian if you've never heard of Jesus. If instead, you've grown up a Muslim, you're going to believe what you believe just as strongly as any Christian that Islam is One and you'll have the same religious feeling experiences.Get you're head into this Phat - your experiences are not unique. People of all religions have the same feelings about their faith and equivalent 'revelations'. You would not be a Christian if you'd been born in the Atlas mountains to Muslim parents. You'd believe something different and you'd be just a fervent. You didn't choose your religion - hardly anybody does.