Gyroscopic Investing

Pointedstick wrote: How is this love?

Mountaineer wrote: I am simultaneously saint and sinner.  God is simultaneously wrathful and loving but not sinful.  God wants all but some are not chosen.  Some do what God says, some refuse the gift.  How is that possible, or even worse, logical?  Does not make sense, at least to me, from a rational perspective so I have to put on my hat that enables me to stay focused on the revealed God, Jesus, and not the hidden one - all those attributes that we want so badly to better understand (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, wrath, etc.) tend to be on the hidden side.  God has revealed what he wants us to know - we sinful humans are always wanting more (Can't you hear you kid screaming and wanting more ice cream even though you are trying to prevent him from having a stomach ache?  Can't you hear Eve saying give me a bite of that fruit even though the whole garden other than that one tree was provided for her? ).

MediumTex wrote: When Jerry Falwell died, Christopher Hitchens said of his passing: "He was so full of shit that if they had given him an enema he could have been buried in a matchbox."

Pointedstick wrote: And how about if instead of death, heroin was a drug that would, upon overdose, paralyze you, keep you alive, and play Hillary Clinton porn in your mind forever?

Mountaineer wrote: I was serious about Christianity being offensive to many, not trying reverse psychology.  Desert said it best when he said Christainity was the anti-religion - repentant disgusting sinners being saved and pillars of the community having difficulty due to their pride etc.

Mountaineer wrote: ATHEISTS KILLED 500,000 TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE AS THE SPANISH INQUISITION AND SALEM WITCH TRIALS, IN 1/20TH THE TIME!!!!

MachineGhost wrote:

MediumTex wrote: When Jerry Falwell died, Christopher Hitchens said of his passing: "He was so full of shit that if they had given him an enema he could have been buried in a matchbox."

What did anyone say about Christopher Hitchens when he died?

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died on Thursday in Houston. He was 62.

***

He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion.

He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Mr. Hitchens was in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice that seemed at odds with his disheveled appearance. He was a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark.

In 2007, when the interviewer Sean Hannity tried to make the case for an all-seeing God, Mr. Hitchens dismissed the idea with contempt. “It would be like living in North Korea,” he said.

***

He also threw himself into the defense of his friend Mr. Rushdie. “It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved,” he wrote in his memoir. “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”

***

Mr. Hitchens became a campaigner against religious belief, most notably in his screed against Mother Teresa, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” (1995), and “God Is Not Great.” He regarded Mother Teresa as a proselytizer for a retrograde version of Roman Catholicism rather than as a saintly charity worker.

***

Mr. Hitchens discussed the possibility of a deathbed conversion, insisting that the odds were slim that he would admit the existence of God.

“The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he told The Atlantic in August 2010. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark.”

Readers of “Hitch-22” already knew his feelings about the end. “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive,” he wrote, “and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.”

Pointedstick wrote: My point is, every time I ask about the "God of love" thing, the subject always changes to why God's wrath is justified, or why free will demands sin, or something else that actually has nothing to do with the supposed love of God. Just more dodging the subject.

Pointedstick wrote: I could completely fathom a religion centered around an angry and wrathful God who created us humans as playthings and wanted belief and worship and reverence from us or else he would kill us or torture us forever or both. That makes sense to me. I might not want to follow that religion, but I could understand it.

l82start wrote: (sorry Christians but regardless of what you interpret a book to be saying nobody knows for sure but dead people)

moda0306 wrote: How do you measure that?  Just because God said so (if so, where did he say that)?  I thought God was the one who decided who was good and evil...

Pointedstick wrote:

Mountaineer wrote: I am simultaneously saint and sinner.  God is simultaneously wrathful and loving but not sinful.  God wants all but some are not chosen.  Some do what God says, some refuse the gift.  How is that possible, or even worse, logical?  Does not make sense, at least to me, from a rational perspective so I have to put on my hat that enables me to stay focused on the revealed God, Jesus, and not the hidden one - all those attributes that we want so badly to better understand (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, wrath, etc.) tend to be on the hidden side.  God has revealed what he wants us to know - we sinful humans are always wanting more (Can't you hear you kid screaming and wanting more ice cream even though you are trying to prevent him from having a stomach ache?  Can't you hear Eve saying give me a bite of that fruit even though the whole garden other than that one tree was provided for her? ).

So you're saying there are some questions you know cannot be answered so you decide that it's futile to even even bother asking them? I think you know where I'm going with this…

MachineGhost wrote:

1NV35T0R (Greg) wrote: I'm reading up on Islam lately. Any thoughts from people as to why it is right or wrong? It seems to be very dry reading but just trying to learn more.

I think there's even less proof Mohammed was a prophet than that Jesus was the son of God.  But if you want to compare behavior of a Direct-Line-To-God-Mouthpiece, Mohammed takes the cake for being truly evil.

MachineGhost wrote:

Mountaineer wrote: ATHEISTS KILLED 500,000 TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE AS THE SPANISH INQUISITION AND SALEM WITCH TRIALS, IN 1/20TH THE TIME!!!!

I think you mean Socialists & Communists.  Being irreligious or agnostic is not the same thing as being an atheist.  Nice try, though!

madbean2 wrote: Mohammed had the disadvantage of being born when people were more literate than they were in Jesus' time so there is a lot more biographical information available. And what I've read doesn't paint a very flattering picture. Why he has so many followers is a mystery to me.

Desert wrote:

MachineGhost wrote:

MediumTex wrote: When Jerry Falwell died, Christopher Hitchens said of his passing: "He was so full of shit that if they had given him an enema he could have been buried in a matchbox."

What did anyone say about Christopher Hitchens when he died?

I like this article, by Doug Wilson who debated Hitchens in "Collision." 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/201 ... tuary.html

Mountaineer wrote:

Pointedstick wrote: So you're saying there are some questions you know cannot be answered so you decide that it's futile to even even bother asking them? I think you know where I'm going with this…

You can ask if you like.  Just don't expect to find the answer in the Scriptures, thus the answer is likely not from a God/Christian based source.  Do do do do do do - SATAN, get thee behing me!  Did you read the Althaus material I posted above?

... Mountaineer

Pointedstick wrote:

Mountaineer wrote:

Pointedstick wrote: So you're saying there are some questions you know cannot be answered so you decide that it's futile to even even bother asking them? I think you know where I'm going with this…

You can ask if you like.  Just don't expect to find the answer in the Scriptures, thus the answer is likely not from a God/Christian based source.  Do do do do do do - SATAN, get thee behing me!  Did you read the Althaus material I posted above?

... Mountaineer

My point is, you are willing to avoid asking those kinds of questions because you believe there is no earthly means of finding an answer. That's no different from what agnostics or atheists do when they refrain from asking questions like, "why are we here?" or "where does morality come from?" or "why are humans capable of evil?" You earlier expressed disbelief that people could  function without answers to these sorts of questions that they consider to be unanswerable, yet are now admitting that you have unanswerable questions of your own that you are perfectly capable of function without having answers to.

MediumTex wrote: I keep thinking about my parable of the little green army men and the light bulb, and how the hubris of the little green army men allowed them to spin all sorts of interesting tales about the nature of the bulb above them, but as the tales grew more and more elaborate they drifted further and further away from the true nature of the light bulb.

Another thing that is unsettling to me is I sense that some of the beliefs we are discussing here are more or less poured in concrete in believers' minds, which would make it near-impossible to revise them even if some new and true information came along that exposed a misunderstanding about some part of the faith.

The vibe I am getting is that the believers are doing that thing they did in 300 with their shields where you form an impenetrable barrier, but that mental posture is based on the assumption that (whether I mean to or not) I am trying to chip away at true beliefs. 

What if I had a few missing pieces that would make the puzzle of faith more complete?  Is there any mechanism for getting those pieces into the puzzle box, or would that still be considered an impermissible dilution of the faith?

Stated differently, once you have completely sealed yourself off from the serious consideration of any positions on religion that are not consistent with your own, how can you be sure that there is no more truth out there that you don't know about? 

I keep thinking that if I were God, I might actually do something like put the Bible out there as a way of testing whether a person is sincerely interested in understanding my nature, or whether he is willing to accept a bunch of contradictory stories documenting the actions of a cruel and sadistic deity without questioning it because he doesn't really want the truth, he just wants peace of mind and immortality.

I feel like I am immeasurably closer to understanding God's true nature now than I ever was when I was a typical Sunday Christian with a long list of internal doubts and concerns about my faith.  When I was in that place, everywhere I looked there were "Off Limits" signs, and ultimately I realized that there was no real mechanism for the honest discussion of faith because once your doubt-based arguments begin to get traction the other person has the option to nuke you any time with: "Well, it's possible that you may have never actually been saved in the first place, and you might even have an evil spirit in you that is planting planting these ideas", and that pretty much ends the discussion.

Mountaineer wrote: Actually, I have all the answers I need for eternal life, the means to obtain them are clearly specified - I just do not have all the answers I want.  I am content with there being mysteries, especially when I'm told don't peek under that veil, it is for your own good.  I think I'm not at all like the agnostics or atheists; I trust in the answers God provides, they don't.  I expressed, or at least tried to express, disbelief that people could function without answers that would provide them eternal life not in hell.  Big difference, at least to me.

MachineGhost wrote: It might not occur to you, but there may actually be an eternal life after this physical one that involves neither heaven nor hell, hence no need to be a masochist for a sadistic "God" that may or may not exist as you imagine.

You really ought to have kept your mind open to new information rather than having closed it.  But, I figure since you're nearer death than many of us in here, it's understandable that you want to have your spiritual affairs all in order, wrapped up and settled for when the time comes, just in case.

Mountaineer wrote: I'd also say, that I "think" I have an open mind, and I've asked hundreds or thousands of questions trying to poke holes, so as I've said before, just make a better case than Christianity - I'm all ears.  I have not heard one yet, but who knows.  With God all things are possible.