Buzsaw writes:
I thank God that I am not an athiest, primarily because I believe I will be held accountable forever relative to sin, righteousness and judgement and the need to have a savior/advocate/redeemer so as to be able to stand before Jehovah and his christ/messiah Jesus who is Biblically depicted as lord/master of all humans.
Buz, I'm sure you've grown tired of hearing this, but it's true: this is purely circular reasoning.
What you're really saying here is that you're grateful to be a Christian because you're a Christian. Christianity is valuable to you because you're judging it by values that are strictly Christian. It's like a Muslim saying that he's glad the he's a Muslim because Allah is the one true god. Well, he wouldn't say that Allah is the one true god unless he were a Muslim in the first place, would he? Do you get it? It's like saying that the Miami Dolphins are a better team than the New York Yankees because they score a lot more touchdowns.*
By the way, you haven't actually told us what your Christian values are. Can you name any values you hold that an atheist could not, other than those that simply establish that you are, in fact, a Christian, but have no meaning outside of that? Can you name any moral value that you hold - such as showing forgiveness to others, respecting one's elders, not killing people whenever you feel like it - that an atheist could not?
Having a relationship with Christ isn't a value, it's simply a belief. It's a belief that can encourage the cultivation of certain values, but it's not a value in itself. I hope that you can see the distinction.
Buzsaw writes:
The reason I thank God that I am not an athiest has nothing to do with whether atheists are what I consider moral or immoral. I have a number of athiest friends and people I interact with who are, in fact better people than some professing Christians who I know. Imo, it is not necessarily athiestic values which made these good folks moral. It likely had a lot to do with their up-bringng and enironment, education, etc, none of which are athestic values perse.
Ah yes, there you go. You already made your point for me.
For the record, Buz, I actually respect you quite a bit. I apologize for times when I've been disrespectful in my replies to you. It's difficult to reason with you, and I sometimes doubt your intellectual honesty, but I've never seen you speak to anyone out of malice here and I suspect that you're a decent human being in real life. It would be gratifying if you saw someday that the inner truth you feel of your connection to God shouldn't be threatened by the truth of the physical world around you that you sometimes so stubbornly deny. If your God is real and he's good, then you shouldn't have to think that this universe is other than what science reveals it to be. God wouldn't lie to you, would he?
By the way, it's a-theist, not a-thiest. As in, no theos. No God. That's all.
*For you foreign folk, that's American football and American baseball, respectively.
I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon
™ Version 4.2
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