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Jeffery Reid

"Is Christianity Good for the World?" | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ... - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...120-53.0.html

shared by Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07 - Cached
  • needlessly convoluted
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Hitchens is now resorting to attacking his writing style... how lame.
  • clumsy observation
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Give the guy a break, Chris!
  • The first is that innate is not a synonym for authoritative. Why does anyone have to obey any particular prompting from within? And which internal prompting is in charge of sorting out all the other competing promptings? Why?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      This is excellent. Why do Christians desire God so? Why do you assume their is an authority there telling you what to do? Innate isn't an authority, it may be only reality. There are no pretty clothes for it to parade around in gathering devotion. Innate means "it's there" and offers no explanation as to why; none is needed. Yet, you theists beg for God. You so want there to be God behind everything to give it meaning. You can't seem to accept that there isn't any meaning in the sense you so desire. So, rather than just accepting the empty universe for what it is, you invent fantastic explanations to give false comfort.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Second, the tangled skein of innate and conflicting moralities found within the billions of humans alive today also has to be sorted out and systematized. Why do you get to do it and then come around and tell us how we must behave? Who died and left you king?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Wrong. Atheists aren't saying that. No one wants to be king. We want to simply acknowledge that the religious models don't hold up under any scrutiny. No one is telling you how to behave. We're simply saying that the reasons behind your current behavior make no sense and are HARMFUL to millions of others. Your beliefs HURT people whether by denying them liberty or outright killing them.
  • And third, according to you, this innate morality of ours is found in a creature (mankind) that is a distant blood cousin of various bacteria, aquatic mammals, and colorful birds in the jungle. Your entire worldview has evolution as a key foundation stone, and evolution means nothing if not change. You believe that virtually every species has morphed out of another one. And when we change, as we must, all our innate morality changes with us, right? We have distant cousins where the mothers ate their young. Was that innate for them? Did they evolve out of it because it was evil for them to be doing that?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Yes. And even other religious types agree that life is about change. You can't ignore it. You already tacitly accept it every time you relegate another Biblical story or teaching from fact to allegory, from law to myth. There is no evil. Evil is only understood through the eyes of a victim of someone else's lethal intent.
  • If Christianity is bad for the world, atheists can't consistently point this out, having no fixed way of defining "bad."
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      But we do have a way to define bad. Bad is what does others harm in the eyes of a society. And the definition of bad changes depending on a) what side you are on in a given argument b) your education and ability to experience empathy and c) how the proposed actions affect you personally.
  • Jesus Christ is good for the world because he came as the life of the world. You point out, rightly, that loving our neighbor as we love ourselves is impossible for us, completely out of our reach. But you take this inability as a state of nature (which the commandment offends), while the Christian takes it as a state of death (which life offers to transform). Our complete inability to do what is right does not erase our obligation to do what is right. This is why the Bible describes the unbeliever as a slave to sin or one who is in a state of death. The point of each illustration is the utter and complete inability to do right. We were dead in our transgressions and sins, the apostle Paul tells us. So the death and resurrection of Christ are not presented by the gospel as medicine for everyone in the hospital, but rather as resurrection life in a cemetery.The way of the world is to abide in an ongoing state of death—when it comes to selfishness, grasping, treachery, lust, hypocrisy, pride, and insolence, we consistently run a surplus. But in the death of Jesus that way of death was gloriously put to death. This is why Jesus said that when he was lifted up on the cross, he would draw all men to himself. In the kindness of God, the Cross is an object of inexorable fascination to us. When men and women look to him in his death, they come to life in his resurrection. And that is good for the world.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      This just sounds like ravings... And, it reminds me of reading The Golden Bough and learning about all the crazy stuff people have believed throughout history.
bkindall

The Second Oldest Question: Jeff: Shalom, huh? - 0 views

apologia.typepad.com/...jeff-shalom-huh.html

shared by bkindall on 06 Sep 07 - Cached
    • bkindall
      bkindall on 06 Sep 07
       
      This is a biblical inference about a prophecy in Isaiah. I'm assuming you know that, but perhaps not. As Christians we also know prophetic language is sometimes metaphorical. That said, if the Kingdom of God is growing toward restoration and renewal of God's creation, we do not yet know, of course, the ramifications of the completion of this renewal. Now, you of course, don't buy this. I knew that in giving you the article. I was trying to help you understand my point of view. This is what I do when I sit down with someone with whom I potentially disagree. I want to hear their story, their point of view, so I can better understand why they do, say, believe what they do, say, believe.
    • bkindall
      bkindall on 06 Sep 07
       
      You've missed his whole thesis, Jeff. Again, take a step back. Quit looking at the brush strokes and look at his argument as a whole. I know you disagree with him, but speak toward his thesis. He is speaking of shalom as the breaking of the wholeness between each other and between ourselves and God. The Bible does speak to those values, and if the Bible highlights those values, then it does speak to the sins of today.
    • bkindall
      bkindall on 06 Sep 07
       
      From your worldview, of course. But if there is a God, we Christians have reason to hope for these things. How do you define good and bad, BTW? How do you know it's an interchange between light and dark? If there is no God your argument is sound, but if there is a God, we have reason to hope. BTW: Would you count good and bad as the yin and yang of each other?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "A lion could lie down with a lamb-the lion cured of all carnivorous appetite."
  • How can you even hope for such nonsense, let alone believe in it?  Existence doesn't work this way. The cosmos is an interchange between light and dark, good and bad and it's only WE who invent those values to describe it. Hoping for the land of milk and honey is a fantasy.
    • bkindall
      bkindall on 06 Sep 07
       
      My, my Jeffrey, you must have been in a bad mood when writing this. More later. Gotta go home.
Jeffery Reid

"Is Christianity Good for the World?" | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ... - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...119-12.0.html

shared by Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07 - Cached
  • So who cares?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07
       
      Humans care... Caring does not require God
  • Why should any of us care about the effeminate judgments of history? Should the propagators of these "horrors" have cared? There is no God, right? Because there is no God, this means that—you know—genocides just happen, like earthquakes and eclipses. It is all matter in motion, and these things happen.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07
       
      Brad, He makes the same mistake you do. This leap to the conclusion that without God's judgment, humans are only left to uncaring anarchy. This is simply bunk. Humans do care about these matters since they impact the survival of ourselves. Morals exist to preserve the individuals in society. Dawkins might say they exist to faciliate the transfer of genetic material. But "good" and "bad" have nothing to do with it outside of the ability of good and bad to exist as cues to survival.... this thing is "bad" means, this thing challenges my survival. Perhaps it's simply your fear of your own thoughts and impulses that lead you to such conclusions. But science discovered that humans have a built-in governor, the mind. We don't really need another...
  • Many of them were actually inspired by the idea that since God is exhaustively sovereign, and because man is a sinner, it follows that all earthly power must be limited and bounded. The idea of checks and balances came from a worldview that you dismiss as inherently totalitarian. Why did those societies where this kind of theology predominated produce, as a direct result, our institutions of civil liberty
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07
       
      I think this is just wrong. True that any European came from a mostly Christian culture. But England was already watering down the choking doctrine of the one true Church. Jefferson and Adams were themselves even more removed from a Christian POV. The separation of Church and State (fundamental to our Constitution) was a product of their ethos and politics and their direct experiences of church injustice.
Jeffery Reid

"Is Christianity Good for the World?" | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ... - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...121-52.0.html

shared by Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07 - Cached
  • What I want to know (still) is what warrant you have for calling some behaviors "good" and others "wicked." If both are innate, what distinguishes them? What could be wrong with just flipping a coin?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Easily addressed: A and B are at war A kills B Troops A calls the action "good" B calls the action "wicked" They are both correct. Such is the reality of human morality.
  • I reply that I would rather have my God and the problem of evil than your no God and "Evil? No problem!"
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Again, the same tired crap. Atheists don't believe "evil, no problem!" We recognize that good and bad depend on your point of view. That the standard isn't fixed and can't be fixed.
  • Actually, I believe I can present evidence for what I know. But evidence comes to us like food, and that is why we say grace over it. And we are supposed to eat it, not push it around on the plate—and if we don't give thanks, it never tastes right. But here is some evidence for you, in no particular order. The engineering that went into ankles. The taste of beer. That Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, just like he said. A woman's neck. Bees fooling around in the flower bed. The ability of acorns to manufacture enormous oaks out of stuff they find in the air and dirt. Forgiveness of sin. Storms out of the North, the kind with lightning. Joyous laughter (diaphragm spasms to the atheistic materialist). The ocean at night with a full moon. Delta blues. The peacock that lives in my yard. Sunrise, in color. Baptizing babies. The pleasure of sneezing. Eye contact. Having your feet removed from the miry clay, and established forever on the rock. You may say none of this tastes right to you. But suppose you were to bow your head and say grace over all of it. Try it that way.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      So the evidence here is that he experiences what the mind experiences therefore God exists and had Jesus not died on the cross, none of this would have been possible. So, before Jesus, beer tasted like shit, a woman's neck was made or razor wire.... what the f#%k!
Jack Frost

Atheism and politics: Count the fallacies with Christopher Hitchens! - 0 views

atheismandpolitics.blogspot.com/...allacies-with-christopher.html

atheism Religion Christian Christian Nation Christopher Hitchens National Day of Prayer Non-sequitur Bad reasoning

shared by Jack Frost on 19 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Jack Frost on 19 Apr 10
     
    Try to keep track of the looping reason shown by a Christian as he meets Christopher Hitchens in a quick exchange about the National Day of Prayer.
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