No I’ve never died and came back to life. Even if I did I couldn’t be sure that whatever I imagined during that sort of experience wasn’t a manifestation of my mind (since as we’ve recently discovered the mind takes hours to fully die).
Great, so you admit you’re speculating based on what you believe to be true, like the rest of us?
Things that help shape our circumstances need not be written off to manifestations of divine interference. You ascribe religion to choice, but if you did an honest assessment you would see our range of choices only increase in direct proportion to our life experience and circumstances, which largely rest outside of our control.
No. I do not ascribe religion to choice, I ascribe choice to religion. That is the debate we’re having. You are saying (correct me if I’m paraphrasing you wrongly, please) that because we are religious we have less choice than those who are not religious, because religion ultimately robs us of choice. I am saying that, to the contrary, to be religious is to make a great choice that atheists such as yourself do not even recognize (because you don’t see there being anything to choose between when you deny the existence of God, the soul, heaven, and hell), though you have made it too via your rejection of God. So, no, we do not have less choice than you. The honest assessment is that we shoulder additional responsibilities that you do not, a claim that you would likely make about yourselves (atheists) with regard to us since you apparently think that religious people are robots or dishonest with themselves (i.e., fleeing the responsibility for their own lives that can only be properly assumed once they are rid of religion). I disagree completely.
There is a herd mentality, or group think that has an immense influence on our thoughts and actions.
And it is no more prevalent among the religious than the non-religious, so I don’t know what point you’re trying to make by bringing it up.
Additionally, does an Ethiopian child choose to live a miserable existence? What manifestation of divine love can explain their dire circumstances?
You’d do better to ask a climatologist, since they’d be more apt to explain the various geographical and meteorological features of the land that have led to frequent famine in the highlands of Ethiopia. The people there are mainly Orthodox Christians, but Ethiopia also contains many other beliefs (Judaism, Islam, native religions), and all the people suffer together because Ethiopia is so poor and the farming techniques so antiquated.
What any of this has to do with God, I don’t know, but I do know (because I know many Ethiopians and Eritreans) that the people there have been sustained through centuries of harshness by their belief in God, and they are still here while so many other empires have crumbled. You are looking at a series of individual incidents and saying “See! God is not love/God does not love them/God does not exist because they are suffering!”, whereas I would look at their 2000+ year history on balance and say that there might not be any greater testament to the existence of God than their story. Ethiopia reaches her hand out to God and God helps her in Axum, in Adwa, in Addis, and all over the country (and the world, e.g. in the diaspora). You fundamentally misunderstand the relationship of the believer to God if you think that God is only manifest in times of plenty, and elsewhere God is absent, or doing something else. God is with the starving in Ethiopia or elsewhere just as surely as he is everyone else at all times. No one is outside of God’s view, no matter what happens to them.
Will relying on mythology and praying to the air feed these people, much less move them to a place where they can grab hold of the chains of their own destiny and find a will to power?
Put down the Nietzsche for a minute and entertain the idea that “destiny” for everyone is not what it is for you. Maybe those who are refugees now (who have moved to a place where they can “grab hold of the chains of their own destiny”) are not any less religious because now they have more food. Do you know any Ethiopians? They are in general very religious people, no matter what their ethnic group, religion, or financial/social/gastronomic circumstances. You are presuming way too much.
At least Catholicism and Arminian Christianity acknowledges there is a such thing as human free will and choice. However, at the same time some of you guys tend to attribute too much to free will (or have created various theories of how our “foreseen choices” play a role in our circumstances, which frankly can be just as misguided as the fatalistic world view the bible holds).
I can’t speak for Arminianists, but I don’t think Catholics attribute any more to free will than can be reasonably attributed to it.
I said if people are interested in living forever (which is what religion really boils down to) then they’re better off placing their hopes in the only thing that has a sliver of a chance of really accomplishing such a thing.
This is presuming that what you’ve boiled religion down to is correct, but I don’t think it is. If I were interested in living forever I’d save all my money from tithing and invest in a cryogentic tube or something. I am interested in serving God, which is a goal unto itself. (I realize I may be in the minority in this case, as I have talked to more than a few Catholics who seem to think that as heaven is our reward, so should heaven be our “goal”, even though they did not say so in so many words. I think this is very misguided, and shows some very negative influence of secular culture on our faith, but this is another debate best engaged in among Catholics themselves.)
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Hence the play on words and given the type of forum.