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Thursday, 28 May 2009
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Why Unbelief is so Appealing?
HTML clipboard Why Unbelief is so Appealing?
“It is wonderful not to have to cower before a vengeful deity, who threatens us with eternal damnation if we do not abide by his rules.”
– Karen Armstrong
…you get the idea that their sole cause for rejecting God is that He does not meet the requirement of reason. Philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if he discovered, after death, that there is an afterlife … he would tell God, “Sir, you did not give me enough evidence…
… Karl Marx famously said that religion is the “opium of the people” … a kind of escapism or mode of wish fulfillment … to numb themselves to the pain and grief around them and to give themselves the illusion that the injustices of this world will be corrected in the next one…
… Sigmund Freud saw religion as providing a cowardly refuge from the harsh realities of life and the inevitability of death …
… French atheist Michel Onfray recently put it, “God is a fiction invented by men so as not to confront the reality of their condition …
… I’m not convinced by any of these explanations …
… Theologian R.C. Sproul makes a telling point: why would the disciples invent a God “whose holiness was more terrifying than the forces of nature that provoked them to invent a God in the first place?” … There are serious penalties attached to ultimate failure: for the religious believer, death is a scary thing, but eternal damnation is scarier. So wish fulfillment would most likely give rise to a very different God than the one described in the Bible. Wish fulfillment can explain heaven, but it cannot explain hell…
… Darwin himself says he lost his faith because he could not endure the Christian notion of eternal damnation… Darwin suffered terribly from the loss of his ten-year-old daughter, Annie … he could not forgive God. Atheism, in some cases, is a form of revenge…
… Lucretius too writes of the heavy yoke of religion, imposing on man such burdens as duty and responsibility. The problem with gods, Epicurus says, is that they seek to enforce their rules and thereby create “anxiety” in human beings. They threaten to punish us for our misdeeds, both in this life and in the next. The problem with immortality, according to Epicurus, is that there may be suffering the afterlife. By positing a purely material reality, he hopes to free man from such worries and allow him to focus on the pleasure of this life…
… the reason many atheists are drawn to deny God, and especially the Christian God, is to avoid having to answer in the next life for their lack of moral restraint in this one. They know that Christianity places human action under the shadow of divine scrutiny and accountability…
…Paul writes in his letter to the Romans 2:6-8, “For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but to those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury.” …
Revelation 21:8 “As for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murders, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death. The implication … death does not bring extinction but accountability…
Christianity is a religion of love and forgiveness, but …temporal and, in a sense conditional. Christian forgiveness stops at the gates of hell, and hell is an essential part of the Christian scheme.
… Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz argues … “A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.” …
…If God does not exist, the seven deadly sins are not terrors to be overcome but temptations to be enjoyed…
… It is chiefly because of sex that most contemporary atheists have chosen to break with Christianity. “The worst feature of the Christian religion,” Bertrand Russell … “is its attitude toward sex…
…Augustine, praying to God to make him chaste … would not find it puzzling or mysterious that a whole generation of young people today rebel against Christianity because of its teachings on premarital sex, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and divorce...
… The orgasm has become today’s secular sacrament… not because we are living in an age of sensuality but because, in a world material things that perish, it gives a momentary taste of eternity…
…a monk who admitted … that he fasts regularly and sometimes even beats his legs with a small whip to “mortify my body for the love of Christ.” … was quite shocked to hear this, but the fellow had an interesting response. The same people who laugh at monks for mortifying their bodies for spiritual purpose think nothing of undergoing painful surgeries to produce cosmetic improvements. Nor do they shrink from the most punishing physical regimens in order to lose weight and tone their bodies for sex…
… atheism is not primarily an intellectual revolt, it is a moral revolt. Atheists don’t find God invisible so much as objectionable. They aren’t adjusting their desires to the truth, but rather the truth to fit their desires… It is a temptation even for believers. We want to be saved as long as we are not saved from our sins. We are quite willing to be saved from a whole host of social evils, from poverty to disease to war. But we want to leave untouched the personal evils, such as selfishness and lechery and pride. We need spiritual healing, but we do not want it. Like a supervisory parent, God gets in our way. This is the perennial appeal of atheism: it gets ride of the stern fellow with the long beard and liberates us for the pleasures of sin and depravity. The atheist seeks to get ride of moral judgment by getting rid of the judge.
Passage is extracted from the book What's So Great About Christianity by Dinesh D'souza
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Sunday, 24 May 2009
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
qiliang1987
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