Dear So And so,
I hope you are going to reply to my main message to you. I feel you owe it to me. However, I would not be surprised if you did not respond. I won't lose any sleep over no response from you, I can reassure you of this.
Do I sound slightly ticked-off in my original email to you that begins, "Let's get serious..."
I would hope you would be glad that I eventually did not accept the Christian belief system as fact. To be a sheep to the slaughter. I would also hope you would be glad that I am not happy at the people of my teenage years who had the guts to indoctrinate younger people like myself into believing something that has no basis in fact.
I have researched my entire life for answers to religion and god by using rational thought. In the 1980's I began to stop rationalizing why there are so many contractions in the Bible.
When I call Christians on the carpet concerning the disgusting and ridiculous laws of the Old Testament and the New Testament, Christians become offended that I question the "Mystery of God." They typically say we don't follow the Old Testament. And they rationalize verses which make no sense in the New Testament.
Yet Christians say a perfect god inspired the Old Testament and the New Testament. If god is perfect why would there be even one mistake or problem in his scriptures? Making excuses for an all power god as to why his scripture is a complete mess is Christian rationalization at its best.
Using the expression the "Mystery of God" (Or saying things like, "How can you question an all powerful God?" or "How can you question the mytery of God?") is a cop-out and a rationalization, also.
Why can't an all powerful god do something as simple as write a timeless scripture? Why can't an all powerful god write a scripture that is filled with moral and ethical wisdom and include a vast knowledge science for all people, which would apply to people living in any time period of human history? Why can't an all powerful god write a scripture that has complete continuity without any contradictions?
Why would an all powerful god have to inspire people to write his scripture? An all powerful god would not want his scripture to be polluted by his imperfect creatures, do I not speak the truth? An all powerful god would have written and published his scriptures by himself and given it to his people. All these things concerning "God's Scripture" would be child's play for an all powerful god who made the huge, huge universe our galaxy is part of.
I have refused to rationalize that which is not rational. I used to be a follower, not anymore.
This is my question to you. Would you rather associate with people who simply take a guess at life's big questions: Where did we come from? What happens when we die? (Want to know the answers to these questions? Answer: We don't know, yet.)
Do you want to associate yourself with people are simply pretending to be happy because you know an imaginary god, you pretend your imaginary god forgives you of your imaginary sin. Are you happy because you believe in an imaginary god who will give you an imaginary ever-lasting life after you die? And are you happy because you pretend that after you die, you will live in an imaginary place called heaven?
Or would you rather associate yourself with people who don't blindly follow others guesses but rationally inquire about the world we live in and takes the history of humankind seriously. Would you not rather associate yourself with people who see the similarity between ancient mythology and ancient religions and call a spade a spade. That all religions are simply ancient guesses by primitive men to try to explain the world around them.
The masses now have the education and fortitude to search for and find the answers to the guesses of ancient primitive men concerning their mythology, rituals, religions and gods.
"Increasingly, world civilization is becoming secular; that is, it emphasizes worldly rather than religious values. This is especially true of Europe, which is widely considered post-religious and post-Christian (though with a small Islamic minority). Secularist winds are also blowing strong in Asia, notably in Japan and China." —Free Inquiry, April / May 2009
Volume 29 Number 3, page 6, A Short Primer on Secular Ethics, by Paul Kurtz.
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=kurtz_29_3_2
Mike
After this email, he responded and said he is on the road and will respond to me. Time will only tell.
1 comment:
One of the most brilliant scientific minds of the last decade is a paleontologist named Stephen Gould. Stephen was an athiest who died in 2002. When asked about how someone could be a person of science and faith, had this to say:
"Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism."
Athiests do not have a corner on the market of reason, and athiesm is not the only reasonable conclusion to a life dedicated to the scientific method.
I am convinced that this bigotry and hatred we have of one another, and the desire to shut each other up, and the lack of tolerance for alternative conclusions is what is killing this world. Not religion. Not athiesm. Not gay marriage (I thought I'd throw that in for you as a jab at the religious right).
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