A
Arizona_Mike
Guest
**Luvya: Well, you sure said a lot there. I am not going to go and answer every point you make (though it would be fun), **
Of course you won’t. Atheists always say that, then duck anything they can’t refute, and/or attempt to restate it in a way more congenial to their arguments.
**but I am going to reflect on a few things. Your conclusion was:
“I acknowledge God’s omnibeneficence in my creation, and in the creation of all things I hold dear – Family, friends, the universe, values, His Church. Even if I haven’t been given the knowledge or capacity to understand all His reasons for why things happen the way they do, I extend reasoned trust to him and his ultimate goodness, which is my definition of Faith. God is not obligated to explain Himself to me (as St. Paul said, the clay has no right to judge the potter). Christ’s commands to me (and his example) are sufficient to deal with the problem of suffering.”
What you say here is your profession of “faith” - which is antithetical to reason - no matter what the Church says. **
Critical reading skills have declined in the young lately, but please take time to reread what you quoted. Faith has many definitions, but as defined in this text it is a “reasoned trust,” hence it can’t be antithetical to Reason. If I defined it in another way, it would make no sense in the context of what I wrote.
You admit that you do not have the capacity and the knowledge to understand the “why”-s and “wherefore”-s. You pick and choose some “good stuff” (family, friends…) and quietly sweep the bad things under the rug.
There is, as most sane people agree, empirically more “good stuff” than “bad stuff.” An atheist would perhaps disagree, and insist with an angry little stamp of his foot, that God should provide us only “good stuff” and no “bad stuff.” Many eight-year-olds insist upon the same arrangements with their own father.
**Therefore your proclaimed trust is not “reasoned”, it is based on “cherry picking”, **
Reason requires discernment, Luvya.
it is simply blind trust - which, of course, I do not have.
Of course you don’t.
Well, actually, as an atheist, you do place blind trust in any number of unsupported, whacked-out, and just plain goofy propositions for which you have no empirical basis for belief. You believe that everything was created from nothing with no cause, you believe that life can come from non-life, that fine-tuning can come from randomness, that consciousness can derive from non-consciousness, that reason can originate from non-reason, and that Richard Dawkins actually has a clue about philosophy.
Regarding the above, I could suggest that extraordinary claims, such as the ones above, demand extraordinary evidence, but it probably wouldn’t do any good.
If what I was talking about was “blind trust,” I would have identified it as such.
Of course you won’t. Atheists always say that, then duck anything they can’t refute, and/or attempt to restate it in a way more congenial to their arguments.
**but I am going to reflect on a few things. Your conclusion was:
“I acknowledge God’s omnibeneficence in my creation, and in the creation of all things I hold dear – Family, friends, the universe, values, His Church. Even if I haven’t been given the knowledge or capacity to understand all His reasons for why things happen the way they do, I extend reasoned trust to him and his ultimate goodness, which is my definition of Faith. God is not obligated to explain Himself to me (as St. Paul said, the clay has no right to judge the potter). Christ’s commands to me (and his example) are sufficient to deal with the problem of suffering.”
What you say here is your profession of “faith” - which is antithetical to reason - no matter what the Church says. **
Critical reading skills have declined in the young lately, but please take time to reread what you quoted. Faith has many definitions, but as defined in this text it is a “reasoned trust,” hence it can’t be antithetical to Reason. If I defined it in another way, it would make no sense in the context of what I wrote.
You admit that you do not have the capacity and the knowledge to understand the “why”-s and “wherefore”-s. You pick and choose some “good stuff” (family, friends…) and quietly sweep the bad things under the rug.
There is, as most sane people agree, empirically more “good stuff” than “bad stuff.” An atheist would perhaps disagree, and insist with an angry little stamp of his foot, that God should provide us only “good stuff” and no “bad stuff.” Many eight-year-olds insist upon the same arrangements with their own father.
**Therefore your proclaimed trust is not “reasoned”, it is based on “cherry picking”, **
Reason requires discernment, Luvya.
it is simply blind trust - which, of course, I do not have.
Of course you don’t.
Well, actually, as an atheist, you do place blind trust in any number of unsupported, whacked-out, and just plain goofy propositions for which you have no empirical basis for belief. You believe that everything was created from nothing with no cause, you believe that life can come from non-life, that fine-tuning can come from randomness, that consciousness can derive from non-consciousness, that reason can originate from non-reason, and that Richard Dawkins actually has a clue about philosophy.
Regarding the above, I could suggest that extraordinary claims, such as the ones above, demand extraordinary evidence, but it probably wouldn’t do any good.
If what I was talking about was “blind trust,” I would have identified it as such.
