“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
– C.S. Lewis
Dear Mr. Lewis,
You could be an alien (what I would pay to see you discuss this with Dan Aykroyd), but most likely it means you need to learn to accept reality and not invent a fantasy land to avoid the fact that sometimes we don’t get what we want. If no experience in this world will satisfy you, then perhaps you:
- Have not experienced enough of the world to understand how fulfilled you can be as a part of it.
- Refuse to be content.
- Misunderstand your desires.
- Are deluded into thinking what we desire should be fulfilled.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy drinking vodka with Dan Aykroyd.
Photo by Asterio Tecson
According to a long-term poll by the General Social Survey, those who support homosexuals and gay marriage are now in the majority of the American population for the first time!
The question they asked? “Are sexual relations between two adults of the same sex always, almost always, sometimes, or never wrong?” Only in the 2010 results did the numbers show a change from “always wrong” to “not wrong at all.”
May I just say it’s about damn time!
In a blog post detailing these findings, the comments got off to a glorious start. Here’s a response from “Barbara” who makes so many bigoted, homophobic statements I don’t even know where to start!
Chuck, you’re wrong if you think that everyone is going to come to accept your homosexuality and lifestyle as “normal”. It is not. If you really wanted to be accepted as normal, groups of you would do everything in your power to end the disgusting parades, but there is no call to end them, they are evidently loved by homosexuals. If you seriously want to act like the typical neighbor next door, aren’t you seriously embarrassed about them, or are you not allowed to speak the truth? If you think I would ever allow little children to watch them, you’re way off base. Sorry, but they show you as you are, and your “group” is not normal. The American Psychiatric Association calls depression and anxiety, which everyone has had at some time of their lives, labelled as mental illnesses. But your group has pressured them to accept as “normal” people who participate in parades naked or half-naked, men dressed as women, homosexuals acting out the sex act on a parade float in front of huge crowds, etc as “normal”, and do you really think that’s how the individual psychiatrists themselves think?
Everyone that I know does think that you should not be allowed to marry and definitely should not be allowed to adopt. Polls of Americans show that they do not agree with the states allowing homosexuals to marry, and if they’re asked if they should be allowed to adopt, they would hear a resounding NO. Just because your group is able to donate a lot of money and apply a lot of political pressure to get the laws passed that you want, does not mean that that the average American, and especially Christian Americans, agree with the law. Those laws would be undone in a minute if possible.
For those pollsters who are brave enough to go against the violent vehemence of your crowd, the polls show that your “marriages” are nothing but a sham. The vast majority of them are “open” marriages, with no intention of staying true to each other. It is not a lie that, on the average, homosexuals have extremely high numbers of partners compared to heterosexual men. I really doubt that you and your friends are willing to be truthful about this. Sorry, but this country’s interstate highways are notorious for having homosexuals in the restrooms just waiting for other random homosexual men, not caring in the least if they even see their faces, not caring in the least if they know them, they just want their sex. We all know about the homosexual baths, etc, and that’s why AIDS spread so quickly among homosexuals. The percentage of AIDS among heterosexual men in the US never approached the rate of AIDS among homosexuals. You may try and cover it up and sugar coat it, but it is a sick perversion that GOD says is an abomination. If you think we will all cave in to political correctness and ignore the truth, you’re wrong. It’s a shame that most people don’t bother researching anything, they just go along with whatever is the popular thought of the day. But I will always stand with God’s Word. In addition, being happily accepted as “normal” couples is not merely all that homosexuals want. They already have California law requiring that gay history will be covered in the student’s textbooks. They may not be able to give you the name of the first President, but they’ll have to learn the history of a group of people who want acceptance of their sin. I’m not sorry for how I feel. God’s way is always the right way. It’s sad but true, that I’m willing to go to my death for my faith in my Lord, but you’re willing to go to eternal condemnation for what pleases you sexually. Your eternal life is much more important, I’m praying you will repent.
It doesn’t make any difference in the world if my opinion is someday in the minority. I will always do my best to follow the Lord. Don’t you call it an agenda when you’re not happy enough with laws protecting your jobs, you then want laws allowing you to marry, you have laws to adopt, the next step now being taken is to teach little 3 and 4 year olds the history of the gay movement? And then what will follow, allowing kids of all ages to express their sexuality, so that the homosexuals can be with young boys? When will it end? Sorry, but I hardly see the political action groups dissolving. It’s not surprising that I’ve yet to see homosexuals saying how much they love the Lord and how the Lord has made a difference in their lives.
Sigh.
graphic by James Ellis
I follow the hashtag #atheism on twitter in order to keep abreast on what people are saying about religion and other controversial subjects. Often the content contains thoughtful discussion or bits of news that interests me, but much of it resembles typical “zinger” one-liner material: pithy 140-character messages that resemble confrontational bumper stickers instead of well-balanced arguments against religion. Yeah, I’ve done it too. I admit it! Twitter is the safe-haven of the verbal jab.
I spotted one such “zinger” today:
Without faith there could be no genocide, no racism, no bigotry; faith breeds evil. #christian #jesus #bible #god #atheism #islam #muslim
-@FlyingFree333 (Flying Free), 29-4-2011 13:30:22
I’ve certainly heard this hyperbolic argument before, and as an atheist I do not agree. I realize you cannot easily present a reasoned argument for an enormous claim like this on twitter, but even if there were paragraphs of explanation behind it I’m not sure I would ever be convinced that the sole reason for racism, bigotry, and genocide is faith. To avoid an argument about vocabulary; “faith,” could easily be replaced by “religion.”
I am far from being an expert, but I think there are sociological, psychological, and economic causes unrelated to religion that cause these problems in the world. Religion is certainly used to justify many horrible actions such as genocide (e.g. Deuteronomy 20:16-18) and slavery (e.g. the Curse of Ham). However, I do not think all religions or faiths bring about these results, nor do I think ruling out other causes for the evil in the world is wise.
I’d really like to have a discussion about this claim. Is faith the cause of genocide, racism, and bigotry?
And as a side question: What do you think about these kinds of pithy statements on twitter? Do you think they help anything or perhaps give atheists a bad name?
“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” say Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t though of that” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
– Douglas Adams from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – 1979
An article on ChristianityToday.com asks the question: Why are there still atheists? “Still” is in reference to Romans 1:19-20 and Psalm 19:1 (as well as Creationists—young- and old-earth alike) that declare God has made it plain that he exists through the things he has made. The author, Shawn Graves, argues that the lives Christians lead and their own words must also be the illustration of proof that God is real.
I am relieved that Graves (more so than Jim Spiegel in a previous piece for the same website) acknowledges respectfully that atheists have rational, evidence-based objections against the Hebrew god Yahweh.
Spiegel asserts that for many atheists, it’s not “cool, rational inquiry” that led to their atheism. Rather, in many cases it’s complex moral and psychological factors that produce atheism.
… Surely some people accept atheism due in part to such powerful motivational factors. For some atheists, it’s not merely a matter of evidence. Yet, as Spiegel grants, these motivational explanations don’t hold for all atheists. Consider some of the personal essays found in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise Antony. Some testify that their move from theism to atheism came at tremendous personal cost and required significant, and painful, existential reorientation. A few even express a deep longing for Christian spirituality. Apparently, these philosophers had plenty of strong psychological motivation to retain or embrace theism. Yet they didn’t. Their atheism really did seem to be a matter of evidence and argument.
Yes! Someone gets it. I, for example, was extremely happy and content with Christianity. It had never done me wrong, and I benefited from it. As I’ve said before, I left theism kicking and screaming. I was horrified by the idea that I had been mistaken all my life, and that there really wasn’t a great and magic solution to suffering or evil.
I’m intrigued by the humility in this conclusion:
We should acknowledge that we have our own powerful non-rational motivations for belief. We ought to confess that our religious proclamations haven’t been as clear and compelling as the heavens and the skies in proclaiming “the glory of God and the work of his hands,” that our lives haven’t “made it plain” that God exists. We need to grant that our God is a God who sometimes hides and is silent. Finally, we need to concede that all of this does make a genuine evidential difference for plenty of atheists. Maybe that helps to explain why there are atheists.
Do you think Graves ever answers the question about why there are still atheists? Do you think it’s up to theists to fix this, or are they still incorrectly assuming that what keeps us atheists from belief is a lacking in humanity (namely pride, sin, etc.) and not because there truly is a lack of evidence?
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