Tribute Thread For the Recently Raptured Faith

Correction: NO evangelist that we know of was resurrected. You can believe that Billy Graham was resurrected but that doesn't make it so. And how many lives have been lost because one sect interpreted a jot or a tittle differently from another sect? That seems like a pretty stupid strategy. "Free will" is not much of an excuse for God being irresponsible. And in terms of what we consider death, He was not resurrected. You can't have it both ways. That's just fiction.

I prefer to do away with the concept of spirituality entirely.

Yes, I know! The question is why?
If god wants to send a message to the world why use a man to deliver it? Why choose a method that he knows will be corrupted and polluted every which way. It's totally unbelieveable. CS Lewis knows no more about it than you or I do. He has no other source of information. He's just doing what you do- making stuff up and picking and choosing. No one knows who wrote the bible. But it was you who handwaved the OT away as merely written by scribes centuries earlier than the NT in order to chose the nicer NT. What utter bollocks. Are you telling me that this god guy wanted to tell us the most important thing possible to know but did it in such an obscure way that anybody can make anything of it - from Faith to Atheist? What nonsense, what a pathetic vision of a god.

Thats what makes someone become a believer---when the known evidence is refuted before their eyes. The story appears to be more symbolic. Symbolism can be significant if accepted. Evidence-based skeptics rarely if ever accept unevidenced claims. I guess I cant really blame you for being an atheist. If you were to ever change, your ideas/beliefs would have to die before new ideas/beliefs could replace them. Significantly.

Percy you agreed in one of your lest posts that you are a deist. I have spent hours defending my beliefs and I’d like to see how you defend yours.
Here is the wiki definition of a deist.

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Deism (/ˈdiːɪzəm/ DEE-iz-əm or /ˈdeɪ.ɪzəm/ DAY-iz-əm; derived from Latin "deus" meaning "god") is a philosophical belief that posits that God exists as an uncaused First Cause ultimately responsible for the creation of the universe, but does not interfere directly with the created world.

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Essentially then you believe that God is an uncaused first cause but then washed His hands of the project and left us to fend for ourselves. Is that correct?Do you consider it rational to believe in such a God who goes to the bother of creating life, regardless of how it was accomplished, but then not continuing to have a hand in how it all plays out?You said that you believed there is purpose to all of this so what is that purpose?
Has this God left us permanently, so that at some point when this world ends will it all have been futile and pointless?I realize that you claim that there is a lack of evidence for what you believe but there still must be a reason why you believe as you do in the face of a lack of evidence. Why is it then that you are a deist as opposed to a theist or an atheist?

While you're waiting for Percy to reply, I'd say that the only difference between a deist and an atheist is the final random coin toss.Neither of them know, both go one way or the other depending on their personal psychology.If I was being nasty, I'd say that a deist is an atheist without the courage of their convictions. For all practical purposes there's no diference between a god that has no interest in us and no god at all.

Yes, I know, and don't think it isn't appreciated. It's taken time on my end, too. That's one definition, but that definition isn't a good fit for me because I don't know if any of those things are true. I don't know if God is uncaused or if He was the first to cause anything or if He created the universe. Those things aren't part of my beliefs, and I don't believe anything one way or the other about them. The only part that fits me is that I don't believe He interferes in the affairs of man, though I'm contradictory on this point because I also believe that he does. This doesn't make any sense, of course.The definition from dictionary.com doesn't fit well either:

1. belief in the existence of a God on the evidence of reason and nature only, with rejection of supernatural revelation

I can't use this definition because I didn't, that I'm aware of, use the "evidence of reason and nature."I only call myself a deist because I believe in a deity. If you think I'm being misleading to call myself a deist then some other label would probably suit. Maybe just call me spiritual.In previous messages I've said my beliefs are without evidence. Having no evidence I know I cannot persuade anyone, and indeed would think it wrong to attempt convincing anyone of what has no evidence. My beliefs just spring from within. For me they just are. I cannot defend them. At one point I said (Message 1106), "I'm not defending my own spiritual beliefs because they're not defensible." No, that wouldn't be correct. I don't know if God is uncaused or if the universe had a first cause. This isn't something I believe, but if you're wondering whether I consider my beliefs rational then the answer is no, of course not. I didn't arrive at my beliefs through rational thought and study. They just happened. They just are. As I said in Message 1054, "My God gives purpose to the universe, a purpose unknown to us. Our role, if any, if we're not some side effect or unintended consequence, is miniscule." And in Message 1100 I said, "I don't know anything about this God, but the belief that springs forth within me unorigined and unevidenced is that he gives purpose to the universe, though I have no idea what that purpose might be or whether it involves us at all." How could I possibly know? As I touched on a couple times, we may have no role at all, in which case when the world ends our time on the stage will have signified nothing. Why must there be a reason? As far as I can tell my beliefs just happened. As a child attending Sunday School I wondered where the information in the Bible came from. In particular I wondered how anyone knew that in the beginning the Earth was without form and void, and I thought that maybe God just told people later. But I was never one to think about God much, and at some point I became aware that I believed what I believe now, but that was a long time ago. I didn't make a decision about it, it just happened, and as I said earlier, maybe I shouldn't call myself a deist if it causes confusion.Why do you think one needs a reason for what one believes? Why can't you just believe? It's much more freeing. And from where I sit that appears to be exactly what you're doing, but with the additional belief that you have evidence.In the message after yours, Message 1116, Tangle says, "If I was being nasty, I'd say that a deist is an atheist without the courage of their convictions. For all practical purposes there's no difference between a god that has no interest in us and no god at all." He right about the latter and wrong about the former. I wouldn't call my beliefs anything I have convictions about. They're only something I can examine and describe. But for all practical purposes there's no difference between lacking conviction and just really not knowing, so maybe he's right on both counts.Though I guess there is a rebuttal to his latter point about there being no difference between a god that has no interest in us and no god at all. For an analogy, from an ant's perspective there's a major difference between a person who takes no interest in the ant he steps on and no person at all.--Percy

But it hasn't been. Skeptics accept symbolism. I don't argue against the symbolic existence of Jesus or the symbolic death of Jesus or the symbolic resurrection of Jesus. I'm not an atheist. That would be like breaking an egg. Picture yourself returning to a belief in Santa Claus and the Three Talking Bears.

I've been mulling over your post. In the end it seems to me that you have come to your beliefs, not by arriving at a conclusion of what it is you believe but by eliminating what you don't believe.I kinda get you saying that you don't think He interferes but that He does. You can look at the world and see the evil that people are capable of but then you can also see the tremendous good that people can do as well.Obviously I believe that He does intervene but normally not directly. I see Him working through the hearts of people who have the free will to accept or reject that heart input. In my mind that makes more sense as I'm inclined to think that purely evolutionary forces would have been more likely to produce a more monolithic human nature. However that is just an observation and hardly conclusive. Maybe an agnostic deist just to try and cover all the bases. I know that I argue for a universe that exists because of God and also for an eternal God but when you get right down to it doesn't really matter from a Christian perspective. All that matters really is to say that God is responsible for life, that He cares for that life and desires that we have hearts that care for all life and not just for ourselves. Maybe as an agnostic deist that is something that you could concur with. Maybe that's a bit of a cop out. You attended church when you were young and rejected it. You had a belief that it wasn't correct. You seem to reject atheism which is another belief. So, it seems to me that your belief is a kind of default position that just happened as a result of eliminating the other possibilities. It seems to me though that as you believe that there is a purpose that it would somehow play a part in how you live your life. I would suggest that your moral beliefs and how they apply to your life would have to be a general indication of what that purpose might be. It isn't a case of knowing at all. Of course we can't know. However, it seems to me that although we can squelch it we have to some degree or another intuit that life does have meaning. I know that atheists can find meaning in all sorts of things including love of family, friends, vocations etc but I think that most people are like yourself in that although they don't know what it is, but that there is an ultimate purpose. I suppose, but I have to admit that I do look for a reason for what I believe. I wonder why the world is as it is. Certainly as a Christian I have to ask why the suffering. It is a difficult question, but then I also have to ask why people respond lovingly to the suffering of others. I ask why people wrote what they di in the Bible or other holy books for that matter. I'm glad the people in science weren't content to just believe but asked why and looked for answers.I'm afraid that I just don't accept that believing something without reason is freeing. I contend that it is just the opposite. If you believe something without reason then it doesn't leave you free to see a reason why you should believe that your beliefs should be adjusted. For example, my Christian beliefs have changed considerably over the years as a result of listening to the reasoning of others.

There is probably some truth to that. There was a time when I believed that God created the Earth and life as described at the beginning of Genesis, but that belief faded away, probably slowly and subconsciously during high school.But I haven't eliminated everything I don't believe because I still believe things that I don't believe. That is, my beliefs are contradictory. For example, I don't believe in the supernatural, and yet I believe in a supernatural God. Well, here's where it gets conceited and self-centered. I believe God interferes for me but not for anyone else. He's *my* God, and no one else can have him. Perhaps my beliefs are fragments left over from when I was a selfish child. Agnostic deist doesn't work for me, but I don't mind if others want to call me that. At the risk of boring you, I'll respond autobiographically. Unitarianism is a big, big tent - it's kind of hard to have beliefs so radical that the Unitarians would reject you. When I attended Unitarian Sunday School it didn't feel like they were presenting what actually happened as much as ideas to consider. One year we went through the book Beginnings that described the origin stories of a number of different religions.I mostly attended only Sunday School as a youth. I only attended church services a few times. When I got old enough around age 12 to be thrown out of Sunday school and have to attend services I fought it so hard (it was so *boring*) that my parents soon gave up and we stopped going to church.But I did attend church services as an adult from time to time. I used to occasionally attend mass with my Catholic girlfriend, I would have been 18-19 at the time. She broke up with me, ironically just as "Bridget Loves Bernie" debuted on network television, and began dating the Jewish man she would eventually marry - they have two kids, one grandkid, and a fiance. We just exchanged Thanksgiving greetings via email.When we were engaged my wife and I began attending the Unitarian services of an amazing minister, the Reverend Dorothy Kimball, now retired, but we moved away. My wife is Lutheran and so we married in a Lutheran church and attended services there for maybe a year, but then the minister began installing what to my wife felt like Catholic practices that she didn't feel comfortable with (and me either, but I was already uncomfortable anyway and so the change didn't affect me as much), so we stopped attending.When the kids arrived we thought it important that they have a Christian religious education so that they were familiar with the dominant religion of our culture, and then they could make up their own minds when they were older. So when they were around 6 and 8 we began attending the services of the local Congregational Church while the kids attended Sunday School, but it didn't work out. We had never discussed religion or God at home, but the kids were highly resistant to what the Sunday School was teaching. They would complain afterwards saying things like, "How could such and such ever happen, that's stupid."So we told the kids they didn't have to go to Sunday School anymore but that Sunday mornings we would do Bible study at home. We began at the beginning, Genesis. That didn't go well. I don't remember the specifics, but they were very skeptical.So we skipped ahead to the gospels, beginning with Matthew but skipping past the begats. That didn't go well, either. We eventually gave up. My guess is that my son would say he's spiritual and that my daughter would say she's an atheist. I just texted them, we'll see what they say. Obviously, as you can imagine since I don't know what they believe, religion isn't a big topic of conversation in our family.My mother was raised Lutheran, but I think when she converted to Unitarianism she was pretty happy - it fit what she feels inside much better than Lutheranism. My father was ethnically Jewish (I mean really, really ethnically Jewish - my grandmother was the stereotypical Jewish grandmother), but not religiously. Unitarianism used to be a common compromise religion when Jews married non-Jews.My daughter has answered - she says she's "a pretty staunch agnostic/atheist."And now my son has answered, at much greater length. I don't actually understand all the answer, so here's what he said:

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Well, the short answer would be I believe that there are things in the universe that based on our current knowledge are inexplicable, and because of that I leave the possibility open by identifying as an agnostic (sort of). Do I believe there is some sort of benevolent entity watching our existence from a kingdom above the clouds? No.

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Thinking about all of this reminds me of the very last chapter of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, where he discusses how the goals of Pre-Christian and Christian times are opposite, and that were the ideal to become real then it would no longer be ideal, and if the real were to become ideal then the ideal would exist but the real would not.

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He goes on about how this leads into the question of the existence of God, but I went and grabbed my copy so I could take a picture for you to read the final few paragraphs of the last chapter, I thought they were pretty great and I hope you think the same.

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[he sent am image, but here's that page from Google Books]: Last page of Max Sirner's "The Ego and His Own"

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Well, remember my beliefs are contradictory and don't make sense. I not only believe in a God of the universe, I also believe there couldn't possibly be any God. Gould used to describe religion and science as non-overlapping magisteria, so I'll just have to plead that that's what going on in my own head. I do not believe in a connection between morals and God. I just don't see it. I believe we have little to no role in any ultimate purpose, and that we cannot know what that purpose is.--Percy

Thank you for your autobiographical sketch. I for one don't get bored by such stories, I think they're fascinating.

Faith thinks that I have a chip on my shoulder lately, and I suspect she is right. Perhaps I need to vent my inner anger. (Disclaimer: I'm not mad at anyone here personally...just positionally. Its what you all say that sparks my fuse. )I'm mad at Tangle because he is so cocksure that atheism is his best option. He claims that nobody can know any more about the God of the Bible than anyone else...which is technically true but which shows extreme disrespect to those who study, pray, philosophize, and think about such matters while he (Tangle) simply goes fishing and acts like his answers are THE answers.
I'm mad at Faith because she is also hard-headed about her position...she won't change. Perhaps this means I am mad at myself for being so wishy-washy but that it is suppressed. I wish I could be strong about my convictions, but this damn life is unfair in my eyes. I feel cheated by an unfavoring God. Yet I won't throw Him away...to me that would be blasphemous. I'm jealous that Percy actually has a belief and is now beginning to respect and agree with Faiths tenacity, despite her illogic. I was always mad at jar for ripping my faith to shreds as does ringo. The main difference is that jar claims to be a Christian, which I guess makes him less of a threat in my mind than a defiant ringo is...ringo never agrees that God exists whereas jar seems to say so. I do applaud Percy for also believing so...never thought he would...being an evidence-based guy.I am angry with my church and established traditional religion...as Faith calls it. If God is how they see Him as I am also mad at God...for a variety of reasons. One person whom I really feel at peace with around here is Stile...despite being a nonbeliever, Stile says he is open to reconsideration though he emphasizes personal responsibility over blind obedience...which I respect. It was one of the few things I liked about jars philosophy as well.Finally, I am mad at myself. For a variety of reasons. I won't go into it all here...except to say that I am frustrated lately.Heck, I'm even mad at how I wrote this post! I could have gone so much more into detail. Bottom Line: God owes me. And if He doesn't exist, someone sure owes me!

That's a bit odd. I can understand you being mad at me for being sure atheism was YOUR best option. But why are you mad at me for being sure it's my best option? Fair enough, it's irritating when the other guy is right... 'Extreme disrespect' - sheesh, if you think expressing opinions on a well behaved web forum is extreme you've had a very sheltered life There is no spoon Phat.

Someone? Like who? The Universe?What do you think you are owed? Wealth? You have life and self awareness, not bad for a collection of molecules. Everything else is up to you.I think you are consumed by resentment because some other humans have more wealth than you.If you want more fulfillment in your life, figure out what will make you satisfied and whether you are willing to do what it takes to get there and whether your goal is achievable.I'm pissed that the digital photography tools I use everyday were not invented decades earlier so I could have spent more of my life doing what I love most.Everyone has something in their lives they are pissed about, but you look to me like you have a lot more to be thankful for compared to several billion of your fellow humans.Don't waste your life waiting for god or the Universe to reward you with happiness. The only reward you get is life.

Well I appreciate your honesty. I suspect we all have ‘unreasonable’ why me moments where we rail at God/the-universe/fate/whatever. But you seem to want to put yours out there. This thinking isn’t going to get you anywhere. I hope you manage to sort things out and feel more at peace with the world soon.