Oh, no, luv. I am not complaining.
But she still needs to explain the way the world is, the “why” of the gratuitous evil, to her child.
Yes, I think that’s a good idea.
Exactly.
You seem to have completely forgotten the point that was made. That almost ALL Christians are born into the faith. Forget friends, the guy who fixes the a/c or people you meet in a bar. You, Augustine and even the Pope were all Christians because they were born into Christian families. Full stop. Period. End of argument.
You know…now that I think about our prior discussions, I am going to have to say that I actually do NOT “very well know that”.
That’s quite straightforward to answer. It isn’t a description of God. Which is blazingly obvious because he didn’t believe in God.
Um…Sol…please try to stay consonant with the universe of discourse here.That is of course a pile of bovine waste-product. Where did you collect the information about all the thought processes and all publications of all the atheists/agnostics? Let me use your favorite cop-out: “Evidence please”.
I have never seen even one theologian / philosopher who gave a coherent definition of God. Enumerating the alleged attributes, and give a precise definition what those mean. Of course you might have information which I don’t have.
Mind you, it is not the question if those attributes correctly describe God. The problem is the definition itself. Does it make sense? Are the attributes meaningful and free of internal contradiction?
I seem to recall listing for you all the books I had read on Christianity. My wife seems to think that I spend too much time on the subject. I certainly spend more time on it than your average Christian. You accepted that fact then. I also have a few thousand posts where it might be envisaged I have discussed theological arguments ad nauseum.
Um, actually, it’s blazingly obvious that you haven’t read much of Einstein to say that he did not believe in God. He also said that he was not an atheist and resented being called one. Nor have I ever heard him or anyone else refer to Einstein as an agnostic. He was, to put it as Max Jammer puts it, a Deist. A Deist believes in God, but not in a personal God. Deism is a halfway house toward the God I believe in. I gave you the quotes from Einstein by which he identified his God as a supreme Spirit. You might give me an answer as to why that is an incoherent description of God, but I guess you can’t bring yourself to do it.That’s quite straightforward to answer. It isn’t a description of God. Which is blazingly obvious because he didn’t believe in God.
And you are sliding away from giving an accurate account of when you were a Christian. So let me take a stab at this…
Your mother was a Christian. Your father was a Christian. To allow for the law of averages, three of your 4 grandparents were Christian. If you have any siblings, I am going to suggest that all of them were brought up as Christians but one or two left the faith.
I’d also suggest that you wouldn’t have know one end of a theological or philosophical argument for the existence of God until you were in your twenties.
You kicked over the traces for a while in the sixties (let’s face it, we all did), then returned to the family religion became it gave you, as it does a lot of people, comfort and a direction in life that you couldn’t find on your own.
Then you started looking at the arguments for God. And wouldn’t you know it…they all supported the belief With which you were brought up.
Whodda thunk…
How’d I do?
I accepted it on FAITH then.
Example, please of a post where you have offered an argument for God’s existence (that’s actually been argued).
Of course.
Again, I am not complaining about the answer. Not one bit.
Theologian Peter Kreef seems to offer that as one of his 20 cumulative arguments for existence of God at the Strange Notions website.
Fair enough.
I did. Your exact words (to which I replied were): NOT A SINGLE ATHEIST/AGNOSTIC can offer as evidence that he has even considered/reviewed/studied the arguments for God’s existence.
For an atheist there is no philosophical problem of evil which needs to be explained. The natural explanation is: “we are not made by cookie-cutters, and our final attitude is the combination of nature and nurture”. As with any attribute, there is a Gaussian distribution, so it is mathematically certain that there will be a few very good people, also few very bad people and the majority somewhere in-between. And this is not up for argument or disagreement, it is a proven mathematical theorem.
Of course a child is not educated to comprehend this argument, so the simple answer is: “because there is no good God, who would care”. And then you can offer a game to the child: “let’s pray for something and see if God will fulfill our request”.
And when the child asks: “how do you know that?” your only answer is “just accept it on faith”. And when the child says: “when you slapped me yesterday and then gave me a lollipop, did that make up for my suffering?”… and then hopefully you be ashamed into silence.
Your child will just say, “But why did my cousin die of cancer?”
This is true.
Careful, Sol. Mocking Catholicism is not permitted here.
No Catholic should ever be telling someone this.
This demonstrates a rather impoverished understanding of basic math.
IMHO, there is something to argument #10 (although I would not agree with a lot in his presentation here). However, IMHO, it is possible for the atheist to offer pretty good reasons why the other 19 arguments fail to convince her.
Unfortunately your silly little GIF file has no informational value.
Satisfactory to whom? And again… how do you know what is satisfactory to others?
Nope. A “loving” being would not allow ANY gratuitous suffering. And an omnipotent one can always avoid suffering. What is “necessary suffering” is contingent upon the technology that is being used. God’s technology (“omnipotence”) can only fail to do logically unnecessary state of affairs. (You know: “with God all things are possible”… say the faithful Christians, Catholics, Protestants and fundamentalists alike.)
This not “mocking”. I am dead serious. That is exactly what I did when I was about 10 years old and the first cracks appeared on the wall of my faith. And that is exactly what I would say to any child over the age of reason. Let’s try it… and see where the chips may fall. Stay open, do the tests and see the result for yourself.
It is getting boring to hear this repeated all the time… I am in the search of “knowledgeable” believers. The results, so far are not promising. I met a few, but only a very few.
There is no basic math here. No amount of “super - lollipops” can make up even for a millisecond of gratuitous suffering. These are incommensurables.
He pretty much nails it.
Not that it matters a whit, but Einstein did not believe in what you consider to be God. You could call me a deist if you want to stretch the definition. And what if I consider what someone says about their belief to be entirely reasonable? It matters only to that person. It adds no credibility to their belief whatsoever.
Um, actually, it’s blazingly obvious that you haven’t read much of Einstein to say that he did not believe in God. He also said that he was not an atheist and resented being called one. Nor have I ever heard him or anyone else refer to Einstein as an agnostic. He was, to put it as Max Jammer puts it, a Deist. A Deist believes in God, but not in a personal God. Deism is a halfway house toward the God I believe in. I gave you the quotes from Einstein by which he identified his God as a supreme Spirit. You might give me an answer as to why that is an incoherent description of God, but I guess you can’t bring yourself to do it.
As to my own history, you are fairly wide of the mark. It wasn’t looking at the arguments for God that brought me back to the Church. It was recognizing the vacuous nature of atheism as an intellectual and spiritual dead end. When you get to a dead end, usually people turn around and go back in the direction they came from to see if they can find a path that actually leads somewhere, preferably home. Yes, I recognized, like the Prodigal Son, that I needed to get home, because that was the only place where I felt life gave me any purpose and satisfaction and hope for overcoming the dreadful so-called freedom offered by atheism.
It is far and away better to kneel before God than to kneel before Nogod.
I’m finding it a waste of time to comment on your posts. You keep denying that Einstein believed in a God of some sort or another, and that he offered a definition of that God. And you keep refusing to reply to the request for whether that definition of Einstein’s is coherent.
:sad_bye:
