The people mentioned by Dyslexia, did not create the devil. Some of them follow him, partially due to bad will, partially by ignorance.
Devil was created (like everything in the world) by God. In absence of devil people could not practice their free will. Now they are free to choose: either to aspire toward the absolute good that is impersonated in God, or to surrender to temptations provided by devil.
dlowan,
On liberation theology:
I found it was quite appropiate for an angry teenager.
The image of the poor people as the actual embodiment of Christ, and of the capitalists as the ones nailing him to the cross was good for moral upbringing.
Have any of you seen Pierpaolo Pasolini's La Ricotta?
"The short film tells of a director making a film on the life of Jesus, and the climax involves an actor actually dying in the crucifixion scene while presenting it to a bourgeoisie audience. This is a prime example of both Pasolini's mystical inclination and pre-occupation with Marxism. The proletariat actor personifies Christ and he dies in the hands of the bourgeoisie or, in biblical parallels, the Romans. This was perhaps in order to alert the middle-class to the suffering inflicted on the proletariat by bourgeoisie demands. Consequently Pasolini was arrested and imprisoned for the supposed blasphemous irreverence of the episode."
But since my personal religious beliefs were not strong at the time, I turned into another church: Marxism.
Marxism, unlike liberation theology, proclaimed its' "scientificity" and "objectivity".
Some of my high school friends became "lyrical Marxists" (that is, they didn't really study Marx, and were rather involved in the liberation theology version), while others became "scientific Marxists".
Thirty years later, the "lyrical Marxists" -some of my Jesuit teachers among them- are still radical, close to the rebels in Chiapas; while the "scientific Marxists" fought for democracy, went into organizing labor unions and political parties and abandoned Marxism long ago.
to my eyes, gods and devils are the same. created by people to explain things they don't want to accept responsibility for.
ehBeth wrote:to my eyes, gods and devils are the same. created by people to explain things they don't want to accept responsibility for.
How can you take responsibility for the Energy Conservation Law, for example? It is a basic natural feature, and the nature was endowed with it by God.
neither the energy conservation law nor your god are mandated by my constitution, bill of obligations, colorado revised statues, county municipal code nor city regulations and when your theology inacts said laws i shall seek a civilized planet to live on.
I am not sure that either Federal or Colorado State Constitution have anything against the basic laws of nature...
wont find them in the local church either
You will find this in the science class of the local high school, and I do not think that any of the churches objects to teaching physics.
If I were to mock religious belief as childish, if I were to suggest that worshiping a supernatural deity, convinced that it cares about your welfare, is like worrying about monsters in the closet who find you tasty enough to eat, if I were to describe God as our creation, likening him to a mechanical gorilla, I'd violate the norms of civility and religious correctness. I'd be excoriated as an example of the cynical, liberal elite responsible for America's moral decline. I'd be pitied for my spiritual blindness; some people would try to enlighten and convert me. I'd receive hate mail. Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles. But, while pedophilia may at least be characterized as a disease, atheism is a choice, a willful rejection of beliefs to which vast majorities of people cling.
Yet conventional wisdom holds that we suffer from an excess of secularism. Virtuecrats from Hillary Clinton to William Bennett to Patrick Buchanan blame America's moral decay on our lack of religious belief. "The great malady of the 20th century" is "`loss of soul,'" best-selling author Thomas Moore declares, complaining that "we don't believe in the soul." Of course, if that were true, there'd be no buyers for his books. In fact, almost all Americans (95 percent) profess belief in God or some universal spirit, according to a 1994 survey by U.S. News and World Report. Seventy-six percent imagine God as a heavenly father who actually pays attention to their prayers. Gallup reports that 44 percent believe in the biblical account of creation and that 36 percent of all Americans describe themselves as "born-again."
Adherence to mainstream religions is supplemented by experimentation with an eclectic collection of New Age beliefs and practices. Roughly half of all Catholics and Protestants surveyed by Gallup in 1991 believed in ESP; nearly as many believed in psychic healing. Fifty-three percent of Catholics and 40 percent of Protestants professed belief in UFOs, and about one-quarter put their faith in astrology. Nearly one-third of all American teenagers believe in reincarnation. Once I heard Shirley MacLaine explain the principles of reincarnation on the "Donahue" show. "Can you come back as a bird?" one woman asked. "No," MacLaine replied, secure in her convictions. "You only come back as a higher life form." No one asked her how she knew.
In this climate -- with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming commonplace -- making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion hall. But, by admitting that they're fighting a winning battle, advocates of renewed religiosity would lose the benefits of appearing besieged. Like liberal rights organizations that attract more money when conservative authoritarians are in power, religious groups inspire more believers when secularism is said to hold sway. So editors at The Wall Street Journal protest an "ardent hostility toward religion" in this country, claiming that religious people are "suspect." When forced by facts to acknowledge that God enjoys unshakable, non-partisan, majoritarian support, religion's proselytizers charge that our country is nonetheless controlled by liberal intellectual elites who disdain religious belief and have denied it a respected public role.
OK, now I was entitled to get a kind of comprehensive response describing your approach. I am far from comparing atheists to pedophiles and people involved in bestiality, but I must admit that religious faith when it is sincere, increases individual and public moral. But there surely may be atheists that follow in their everyday lives the same Ten Commandments the religious people do, just without reference to the "copyright owner"...
In my mind, an atheist conducting a decent life is preferrable to a hypocrite that pretends being pious, but believes only in money and his/her own power. Many of the so-called Islamic fundamentalists represent the latter type: while sending their underprivileged compatriots to earn "keys of paradise" by means of suicide bombing, they hide their own kids from the terror groups' recruiters. The best example: one of the Hamas leaders, Sheik Abed el-Aziz Rantissi (Gaza Strip).
steissd:
You wrote, "It is a basic natural feature, and the nature was endowed with it by God."
You are committing the logical fallacy generally referred to as "non sequitur," or, "it does not follow."
How, logically, can you proceed from your first statement, "It is a basic natural feature..." to the conclusion "...and the nature was endowed with it by God."?
Where is the missing premise in your argument? It must be the general premise "All things are endowed by God" and the validity of your conclusion is continengent on the truth of that premise. Since the truth of your premise is a matter of opinion, your conclusion is conditional on one's acceptance of the general premise. Hence, your statement,"It is a basic natural feature, and the nature was endowed with it by God.", is only true conditionally, at best.
Religious faith does not require proof by means of formal logic: the latter thing is merely impossible. People can believe or disbelieve that the material world was created. Those that believe, admit that its basic properties were assigned by the Creator.
By the way, such an approach does not make evolution theory illegal. I believe, that God has created the biological life in all its diversity. But I do not know how did He do this. Evolution theory proposes one of the possible explanations.
steissd:
Only those who are unable to provide proof through "formal logic" discount its necessity.
To think is to inquire, to believe is to close one's mind to other possibilities.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance---that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
Herbert Spencer
But of course- Once you embrace faith, you have abrogated reason. Faith and reason cannot coexist in one human being!
Steissd: Zionism has become a militant marketing group (in this country, at least) selling the idea that Israel's right to exist and to expand trumps all other rights. Those who have come out against Zionism have been labled anti-semites or anti-semitic Jews. But Zionism has degraded itself with no help from the outside.
Uh-oh! We're back to the chicken-egg problem again! Who created whom? Did humans invent god (that's what I believe)? Or did god invent humans? There's a verbose (how to make a 200 page book out of 40 pages of content!) but interesting book on this by Deepak Chopra. How to Know God.
Of course, this thread is not about zionism, but I shall permit to give you one interesting link:
Dr. Martin Luther King-Jr. On Anti-Zionism. I hope, you do not suspect Dr. King in being a Jew or a bigot?
Tartarin
Quote:. But Zionism has degraded itself with no help from the outside.
That is one hell of a statement. Although this isn't the thread for it are you prepared to back it up?
Maraso, it is impossible to disprove existence of God by means of formal logic either. It is possible either to believe or not to believe in Him. By the way, belief in God may be completely compatible with interest in scientific research of everything in the Universe. This is learning about what are the properties of the created world, and how they can be used for our favor.
It's called the "The Energy of Conservation " law. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but merely converted from one form to another.
( That's what I remember from physics class
)
Yes, exactly. And this law does not have any rational explanation: it is a basic property of the matter. Therefore, I assume that it was assigned by the Creator.
