Testing The Christian Apologists

Arnt we really already paying the bill? Years ago in the middle of the aberration period, wages kept pace with productivity. Somewhere around 1990, this ceased happening. The wealthiest quadrant took off and left the other three economic groups in the dust. Its almost as if the American Dream became a reality only for the rich or upper-middle class. But we are in the wrong topic for this. It is relevant only in the fact that as I examine these issues, my ideas of what Christianity should be and what it actually is, my worries and concerns about money(security--also a God issue)our discussions about my charge in life(balanced against my perceived entitlements) ...all of these issues are what spurred me into starting this topic in the first place. I was looking for a voice I could trust, mainly yet also a voice that told me what I wanted to hear and calmed my fears and anxiety.You once asked me rhetorically why GOD should love me any more than pond scum. My answer is that GOD, to me is Jesus and Jesus, being fully human, surely loves His fellow humans more than the mold around a leaky faucet. What I need to now honestly face is why I feel so unable to help others and why I expect help from them...Jesus included.

You are right. It's about me. My own Mom told me that it was OK for me to look out for myself because no one else would. I just think that it's unfair that suddenly the whole rest of the world gives us the bill for virtually everything that needs fixing. And then you come along and try and remind the Christians what Jesus wants them to do, even though to you He is but a character in a book. Im not sure how I will choose to behave in the coming years, but I most certainly will try my best to take care of myself. I'm not looking to become wealthy. I just want to survive.And no Christian Apologists have anything for me. It's the same old speech with them. Trust God and since us your spare change. And its not like they just want my spare change. They are trying to sell me the idea that the more I give them, the better blessd I will be! I say hogwash!

Do you know why? I think I see the big picture quite well.First of all, the apologists always supported prosperity and the favor of God. SO I can see why you never trusted them. Second, even though *we in the West* took and took for years, the wealthy basically keep and have kept most of that. Ordinary people like me, who perhaps benefitted a bit due to higher wages and cheap oil, now are asked to pay 23 trillion back. In a way, you are calling all of us (who claim to be Christian) out for not listening to Jesus and being good socialists supporting the up and coming poor impoverished masses. Hey i get it. You wont hold my feet to any fire, however, with the words of jesus. I'll throw it all away in a heartbeat and i will stand with the populists who say that Trump is delaying the bankruptcy and demise of America because there is no way im paying anything back unless several things happen.1) as jar says, everyone is paying. So that is a good thing. These other countries are becoming wealthier...let them help pay for global warming and infrastructure in global common areas. The United States is tired of being the sucker who pays the check for the whole table. And it is not impressionable on me that the West owes the world a payback loan. that will never happen without a major war. If I go down with the ship, the other ships will take a hit also. I'm just a struggling middle-class guy tryna retire. I'm not some noble Christian justice warrior giving everything away to help humanity.Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

Are you kidding me? We pay the lions share of military protection for countries such as Kuwait. We pay 25% of the UN budget. Our military umbrella shielded former enemies Japan and Germany for years, allowing them to rebuild economies that rivaled ours. Its time we took care of ourselves and quit helping everybody else...except those poorest and in true need.Nobody will take care of us if we needed help. This whole globalism thing is rugged not to favor us, so why should we contribute?

That's how a capitalist economy works. We will help the world fight global warming if there is at least a break-even profit in it. What we won't do is throw money at the problem. At least not unless its a global tax that every person must pay their share. We are not gonna sock our people with a higher bill just because we have a higher GDP. Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

Tell me how I won't experience pain either way? The fact is that my generation is being stuck with the bill. Whether we refuse to pay it or whether we pay it, we will suffer either way. What does the evidence show?I feel frustrated! On the one hand, you and ringo have convinced me of this argument that Jesus expects a lot of hard work with no promise of supernatural deliverance...an idea that enrages me. I won't allow myself to believe it. Then, should I decide to throw all that away, I am still faced with this idea that somehow we were owed this bill as a gift from reality and that we either pay it or suffer pain?I say that it is a bit like pushing us in a corner. The fact is that I didn't benefit that much from what the wealthy Robber barons did to the global population.

You really have to reconsider your beliefs. Life is not simply a lottery and chance does not entirely determine your fate.

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Imagine a line. At the left end of the line, we’ll write lottery. Lottery is a game of absolutely zero agency: you can take any two people in the world or throughout history, and they will have the exact same chance of winning a lottery. On the right end of the line, we’ll write chess. Chess is a game of absolutely zero chance: if you and I play a game of chess against each other and I lose, I’ve got nothing to blame but myself.

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Now, where shall we put life on this scale? I think most people will agree that we can’t put life very close to chess; life is certainly not a game without chance. But it’s also true that two people in the same set of circumstances may fare very differently from each other. It seems hard to say that life is *entirely* down to luck.

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I’d say that we would put life somewhere in the middle. Maybe not right in the middle; maybe not even really close to the center. I’m not sure exactly where on the line it would go, but I’m pretty confident that wherever it is, it’ll be a very close neighbor with Texas hold ‘em.

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In hold ‘em, you have no control over your hand. Zero. You can make decisions about whether to bet and how much, but the cards are going to be whatever they’re going to be. The very best poker players in the world only take a prize in about a fifth of the tournaments they play; a great deal of the game is simply beyond their control. But to prove that they do have some agency, and that skill does play some part in the outcome, you only have to remember that the very worst poker players take a prize in zero percent of the tournaments they play. The difference is that, whether their hand is good or bad, the pro players can make the most of it.

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So it is, I believe, with life. There is a great deal that is beyond your control. You had no influence over where you were born, who your family is, the color of your eyes or your skin or your hair. Maybe you want to play pro basketball, and you’re envious of people who are seven or ten or fourteen inches taller than you are. You might feel like you lost the height lottery, so there’s nothing you can do about it. But that’s not completely true: Spud Webb - Wikipedia

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You can’t change your hand, but you can play it well.

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GOD, if God exists did not set it up to be a rigged game of chance. He set it up more like chess. You protect the King. It is intentional.Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

In this context, protecting the King means protecting our way of life and not getting run around by the globalists who demand we pay the bill.

Say we were talking about a city block. 50 people lived on this block. They had a neighborhood watch, a committee to throw gatherings and to pay for a school crossing guard, etc. And say that the block had several residents wealthier than the rest.You were the aging fat guy on the corner. years ago you were extremely wealthy, but age and poor health have taken their toll. Still, you have a larger bank account than the others. Is it fair for you to contribute more towards the block charter dues than any other household? If you say yes, you are truly a Marxist. Fact is, every household contributes the same amount. Period.This whole idea of stolen meals applies at best to the former residents of the block...mainly our parents...who left us the house. We are in no way responsible for whatever inequities they perpetuated on the block. We are only responsible for our current representation and contribution to block welfare.

So what if the old guy at the end of the block no longer works? He no longer has an income. Are you going to tax him based on the size of his retirement account? And lets say that years ago, our parents hired workers to mow the lawn and paid them cheap wages. They live in another county. Are you seriously suggesting that it is up to the retired old man at the end of the block to pay reparations from his friggin retirement account to these workers which his parents once exploited? What would happen if he was socked with every bill that the system could attempt to hoist on him? What if his retirement account was depleted as a result? Now the shoe is on the other foot and he is the one in need. What would you then suggest?Also in this day and age, "from each according to his ability" should be also tied to population. Unless a country is extremely poor, they should contribute based on how many of them are affected. China should pay more than the US. The reason is that the math of economics places an undue strain on our working class. Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

We've been over this before. let me reiterate. There are basically 4 classes. 1) The top 5%. They own nearly everything. It gets passed down from generation to generation in perpetuity. Trump helped them secure even greater riches due to a tax cut earlier in his term.
2) The upper-middle class. They make 250,000.00 a year on average. Trump lowered their taxes also. In my mind they should be helping pay back the bill, as well as the top group...but you have said before that you never worry about them.Instead, you want to pick on
3) The middle class. They earn under 80,000.00 a year. (Personally, my gross is around $30,000.00 a year. I am below them also but I am trying to become one of them. I really want to own my home rather than be a slave to rent.
The apologists are also in this group, and they support a prosperity gospel. We all look at God and ask what's wrong with having a house? Or a car that runs 90% of the time?4) the lower middle class and the unemployed poor. This is where I would end up if I took Jesus at His word in the book, even though He was not specifically addressing me. You would argue that he was. If so, it appears that Jesus desires all of us to be in the lowest economic quadrant.This is the group that sanders claims should all get free health care and free education. This is all well and good EXCEPT that in order to fund such social programs, pay higher taxes, and pay off any loans that we the people have had, the 3rd quadrant gets hit so hard that they drop down to the 4th quadrant. And you see no problem with this? Yes, I am very aware of class struggle. And I will go with carl over your Jesus of the book character. he is unrealistic towards modern economic need and reality. Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

Well if what you say is correct, we need to get the word out. I would be interested in seeing the actual facts. Why has nobody presented them clearly? Why do the populists use propaganda to call them out as fake, when in reality these facts would help the working class rather than burden it?

But not every club has propaganda, do they? What of your club---The Episcopal Church? Do they have a medicine man? Do they sell the idea that the club is a necessity?I am not a fan of Populism or of Trump, but I have threatened to join them in desperation if my world falls apart. I thought about why I felt that way and why ringo makes me so angry. Finally, I realized that a big part of my belief is the belief that God and I have a bit of a supernatural connection.I can and do help people now. I can and will vote for appropriate solutions for the future and not for the Populism that seems to have swept up most of my evangelical friends into a kind of unrealistic dream state. They are in a Coma, as far as I can see. They think a bit similar to how Faith thinks---that the Left is leading the country into the trap of Globalism and of being simply another team player beholden to higher secular authority. I can see how this may cause concern, but I am not ready to call out anyone with a Leftwing ideology as evil. I see both good and evil in both sides of the political spectrum.But as for my belief, it is very important to me and for me that there is a supernatural God at work. If God was not interactive, potentially helpful, or available and if I was told that Christianity was nothing more than a choice to commit to the hard work with no promises, I think I would be very uncomfortable with it.Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

This gets complicated. To a degree, perhaps. I found a good argument that mirrors my feelings in some ways. Philosophy Talk

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Do I really bear any responsibility for what the US does? Isn’t it the officials who decide our policies and/or the ones who faithfully and willingly execute those policies who bear real responsibility? Surely they do the bear the brunt of the responsibility. But I don’t think that we citizens can fully escape responsibility either especially not in a democracy, especially if we condone and support those policies. We can’t just wash our hands of what we empower the government to do in our names. And it’s not just those of us who condone and support the policies that are to some degree responsible. Even people who, say, secretly disapprove of the policies but are too afraid or lazy to openly resist bear some responsibility. Now I grant that their responsibility is perhaps more limited. They, I suspect, are only responsible for what they themselves actually did or didn’t do -- their failure to speak up. That doesn’t make them responsible for what their nation ended up doing. But it does show that they too can be morally tainted by the actions of their country in a way that an outside non-resister cannot be.

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And maybe, just maybe, things can get even more complicated. It seems plausible to me that you can be somehow tainted even by actions in which you played no part whatsoever, in which you neither did nor failed to do anything relevant to the problematic actions. Suppose that for several centuries your ancestors held my ancestors in slavery. Yours got richer and richer; mine got poorer and poorer. One day the slaves are finally free. But for decades, maybe even centuries after, the descendants of the slaves are much worse off than the descendants of the slaveholders. Finally, we get to you and me. Just because you benefited from that history and I was harmed by that history, you and your brethren may owe reparations to me and my brethren, even if you guys aren’t actively oppressing us guys anymore.

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Or maybe you do. I don’t want to say that you definitely do owe us reparations. But I don’t want to say that you definitely don’t, either. I just want to say that the issue is a lot more complicated than we were first making it out to be.

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First of all, I have my beliefs and ideas about God. I know what my critics say: That I invent the God that I desire. I will never forget the day that I honestly feel that I "met" God. The feeling was indescribable, and it had little to do with the church folks around me---I never really embraced nor accepted them into my family and circle of close friends. The only thing that knitted them to me was learning about and experiencing God. We did that together. We were, however, united only by that similarity and, as I look back, I wonder how similar we actually were? Do I even care? God was like finding my father (who had died 23 years earlier) alive again and communing lovingly with me.Obviously I have never successfully communicated that belief to any of you here. Yet I am far more honest in correspondence with EvC Forum than I ever was at church. This topic (Testing The Christian Apologists) was started by me to find what I thought had to be at least one other human who would verify that what I felt about God was in fact correct. I liked to listen to Ravi, a habit that I have since rejected. Ravi may have been to me a bit like the Wizard of Oz finally appeared to Dorothy and her companions. A man behind a curtain using gadgets and gimmicks to appear larger than life. After reluctantly accepting the EvC counter-arguments and evidence against Ravi (thank you, Theodoric) I looked at him again and realized that he said very little. It was all smoke and mirrors. And he was supposed to be one of the most gifted of the apologists. Could jar and ringo be right???? That I was determined not to prove! Frank Turek was also unimpressive, now that I was looking and listening through critical glasses. It's not that the arguments were lies, as some here seem to think. Its that the arguments seemed second hand. Divorced from experiential reality. It was evident that jar was right in that the apologists were simply engaging in business with the public. I still listen to some of them, testing their character and their content. I no longer need a perfect apologist nor was I fully impressed with the atheist counter-arguments brought up by Matt Dillahunty among others. It certainly appeared as if the man convinced himself that God was unnecessary and in fact made up.I finally arrived at my current argument. God exists, this I believe and claim to know...subjectively by necessity. Were it objectifiable, belief would not enter the equation for anyone. Mind you, I have experienced some pretty amazing things that fed my confirmation bias. I refused to sit in the outer courts with jar and freely make arguments which would effectively throw away my need for God. Which brings us to my current whining. I fight very hard to prove to everyone that I don't owe anybody anything. The weakness in my argument is that I at the same time feel that God owes me a relationship and a blank check. It is basically what my Dad would have given me, except that the check would not be blank and would involve some promises on my part.I now am faced with the question of what I owe God.