You're resurrecting a thread that's been quiet for a year and half to respond to someone who hasn't been on for 5 months?
Is this "tricks Christians play"?
Is this "tricks Christians play"?
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This is trivially disposed of. I certainly trusted my spouse the first time I met her. It was the subsequent thousands of meetings that gradually eroded the feeling.Just like we don't trust our spouse the first time we meet them, so too Christian trust is in a person we grow to trust over time with much a priori and aposteriori evidence.
Also, it seems to me that I am not expert enough to be sure about who is really reliable as an authority, about various things. So, how am I supposed to be able to know who is really correct and who isn't? I suspect I would need to assume who to trust, being wishful, really.
And so, who can be truly objective, since none of us is perfect in how we use our faculties??
Think you misread my text.This is trivially disposed of. I certainly trusted my spouse the first time I met her. It was the subsequent thousands of meetings that gradually eroded the feeling.
The same is true for many apostate Christians.
Your spending a lot of time commenting on non-sequiturs assuming that we are all tracking the same trivial data you are.You're resurrecting a thread that's been quiet for a year and half to respond to someone who hasn't been on for 5 months?
Is this "tricks Christians play"?
Au contraire. I believe you misread mine. If you refer to the second item in my signature you will see that is my responsibility not yours.Think you misread my text.
I have inserted a "that" as this makes your sentence read more clearly for me. I understand that the this growing Christian trust is in Jesus. If that is not the case then I'm lost as to what you were aiming to say and I ask you to clarify."so too Christian trust is in a person that we grow to trust over time." So the opposite of what you represented above.
There are two completely disparate points to be made here:Secondly it is not so trivial since when engaging my apostate Christian former brothers and asking about their experience of means of growth I get, "What the heck are you talking about?
My post was intended to do two things:It is not so straightforward and trivial as your post suggested.
As noted, I am not saying it is trivial. I went into as much detail as your simplified statement merited. If you make an unsubstantiated assertion, I have no compunction in responding in kind. Present a detailed, evidentially supported argument and I'll match it.It is not so straightforward and trivial as your post suggested
The best way to turn a christian into an atheist is to get them to actually read the bible. It worked for me!
A Manual for Creating Atheist Propaganda - First look at Peter Boghossian's book, "A Manual for Creating Atheists."
"A Manual for Creating Atheists offers the first-ever guide not for talking people into faith--but for talking them out of it. Peter Boghossian draws on the tools he has developed and used for more than twenty years as a philosopher and educator to teach how to engage the faithful in conversations that will help them value reason and rationality, cast doubt on their religious beliefs, mistrust their faith, abandon superstition and irrationality, and ultimately embrace reason."
We will examine what passes for, "reason," and, "rationality," and if Peter's approach passes muster, or just is another new atheist philosophically vapid work filled with rhetorical tricks. Unfortunately I didn't get to far before the "tricks," kicked in.
Peter sets the table with the following paragraph:
"Faith is not a virtue. It is absolutely not a virtue. It is an unreliable epistemology and part of the problem is that people think that holding a belief tenaciously, being a person of faith, makes you a good person. Being a person of faith does not make you a good person. It just means that you have a process of thinking about the world that is less likely to lead you to the truth. Once we make that shift from faith as a morality to faith as an epistemology, I think the house of cards will crumble and everything that is built upon the house – religion, everything – will fall with it."
So firstly, we must ask, "Has the good professor accurately represented how theists represent the definition of the term, "Faith?"
When the Apostle Peter new of his death at the hands of Nero he wrote,
"15And I will make every effort to ensure that after my departure, you will be able to recall these things at all times.
16 For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty." (2 Peter 1:15-16)
We have that eyewitness record today. Does Begosian want to eliminate witnesses testimony in cases of law? What about in gathering historical facts? And yet he paints religious faith in a way n knowledgeable Christian apologist would. In a way completely different then how it is presented in scripture.
Faith is not an epistemological category. It is not a way of knowing something. Faith is a way of trusting something. Faith is trusting in that which you have reason to believe is true. These beliefs are formed due to eyewitness testimony, fulfilled prophecy, a priori (conceptual) arguments and a posteriori (experiential) arguments.
In the way I trust he evidence for the beginning of the universe is best explained by the hot Big Bang inflationary model of cosmogony due to over 40 different lines of evidence so too I find the evidence for theism to be even more sound due to my rich experience of God as a person. In both cases I trust the evidence and my beliefs, being justified, become knowledge that I trust.
Here Begosian is off to a bad start.
Why redefine faith as fideism? True, there have been those types (some argue Soren Kierkegaard is one, I'm not that convinced) but a quick read of the Gospels, Acts, or the Epistles and one see evidence marshalled in defense of Truth claims.
1 Peter 3:15 (Pun intended) says,
"always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you;"
Oops.
"Reasons"
"Defense"
So a simple investigation into Christian Faith would have eliminated his straw man version a a way of pretending to know something.
In fact the scriptures pay no attention whatsoever to whether one believe in God or not.
As James says, "The demons believe in God and shutter." But the demons spoken about in scripture don't have faith."
The root meaning of the Greek pistis, ‘faith’, is ‘trust’
Again Begosian goes out of his way to create a straw man theism. This is nothing but a cheap rhetorical trick, and being a professor of philosophy he knows it. But he has faith that most of the population, will be as ignorant of the facts above as his freshmen students at Portland are. And on that point, I must agree with his assumptions as I continually run into "philosophy majors," who haven't the slightest idea about, ontology, the difference between doxastic claims and epistemic ones , logical fallacies or that philosophy is predicated on proper definitions and distinctions rather than the "lack" there of (A.K.A equivocation and conflation).
Those who have read Begosian's book, please point out the good points as I grew tired of his antics before I finished the first ten pages, being a Christian for a good portion of my life and not recognizing his definitions of same. In fact Begosian has created a straw man factory.
But if someone has sme valid arguments from him I am genuinely interested.
I remember telling the full story of Samson to a room full of my Catholic in-laws. They were shocked and floored at how absurd it all was.The best way to turn a christian into an atheist is to get them to actually read the bible. It worked for me!
Now that is an interesting discussion indeed.The best way to turn a christian into an atheist is to get them to actually read the bible. It worked for me!
If you actually read the bible (& not just the hand picked bits the church teaches in bible study) & really think deeply about it, you begin to realise the absurdity of the whole belief.Now that is an interesting discussion indeed.
I have taught the Bible for almost 40 years now with a focus on a deep understanding of the authors, their culture, the other accounts they borrowed and modified to correct the record, historical examinations, and examinations of prophecies that were fulfilled. I find the cultural strange as I find any read of 3500 year old cultures but have not seen my students experience a loss of trust in God as a result of reading the Bible.
I would be interested in a deeper understanding of what is troubling beyond generalities.
You're resurrecting a thread that's been quiet for a year and half to respond to someone who hasn't been on for 5 months?
Is this "tricks Christians play"?
If you actually read the bible (& not just the hand picked bits the church teaches in bible study) & really think deeply about it, you begin to realise the absurdity of the whole belief.
You also realise all the contradictions that are in it. If you were reading the same stories about anybody else, you would never believe it to be true, but because from a young age we are taught that there is a god who can work magic, & that its rude to disrespect religion, & because so many other people believe it, for some of us we somehow think its true, even though it makes no rational sense at all that it IS true.
learn to endure what?I was never taught from a young age that "God will work magic." And if there was anything I did learn while growing up, it was that if there was a God, He seemed vastly interested in seeing if I could learn to endure....
learn to endure what?
sorry to hear that happened to you, but what makes you think god was interested in you enduring that?...the fact that my mother was clinically schizophrenic and put my family through emotional hell. Nothing major.
what makes you think god was interested in you enduring that?
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