Religion is dangerous but atheism isn't?

[FFC]

I would just count how many were carrying bibles.

hmmm I would disagree with that. I don't take my Bible to Church half the time because I like paying attention to the Sermon and usually they have the Scripture up on the screen. That way I don't get distracted from the Message by reading my Bible

I know I know you were just Joking

Are we sure the word is still inspired, even when it is on powerpoint?

[B. W.]

I would just count how many were carrying bibles.

hmmm I would disagree with that. I don't take my Bible to Church half the time because I like paying attention to the Sermon and usually they have the Scripture up on the screen. That way I don't get distracted from the Message by reading my Bible

I know I know you were just Joking

Are we sure the word is still inspired, even when it is on powerpoint?

Wow - how many churches still have and provide in house bibles for those that do not have a bible or forgot?

Used to be bibles behind every pew or behind every chair; hmmm, now days???

[zoegirl]

The OPC and PCA churches that I have attended still do, even though the OPC does project the verses on the screen as well. It was a bit of a shock to visit this one small PCA church, a renevated house, fits only 100 people comfortably. They don't even have a screen

And they sing hymns (and the occasional praise song, but hymns! With actual hymnbooks! with only a piano AND they sing all the verses! )

[FFC]

The OPC and PCA churches that I have attended still do, even though the OPC does project the verses on the screen as well. It was a bit of a shock to visit this one small PCA church, a renevated house, fits only 100 people comfortably. They don't even have a screen

And they sing hymns (and the occasional praise song, but hymns! With actual hymnbooks! with only a piano AND they sing all the verses! )

I miss those hymnbooks! Thats sounds like the Baptist church I went to for about 10 years. We thought we were singing praise songs! There was no need for small groups, that's for sure. The whole church was a small group. I'm sorry, I'm getting off topic as usual.

[bizzt]

Wow - how many churches still have and provide in house bibles for those that do not have a bible or forgot?

Used to be bibles behind every pew or behind every chair; hmmm, now days???

VERY TRUE! They used to have that but I guess putting it up on the Big Screen is easier and people do not have to share the Bible in the Pew. Most Bibles also get wrecked as well. And is it not better to save paper then use it so on the Screen it will never Fade or get Torn. Thoughts from a non Bible Carrying Church Goer

[bizzt]

That is one thing we still do have is those Hymn books. Rarely get taken out except special Occasions!!! oooiiii how I miss those days!

[B. W.]

Yea must be getting old if I can still recall the days of bibles actually being in church!

I find it nice to be able to check out if the person preaching is correct by comparing what he or she is teaching and scriptures quoted are really in line with the word of God. I hate being hoodwinked. As nice as having the scriptures appear on screen — you cannot check if the contextual theme taught is correct. This could pose a problem.

Martin Luther, Wycliffe, and others fought against this very thing and desired the bible to be accessed by all in his/her own native language to stop all the hoodwinking and manipulation of the masses by use of biblical text going on in their day.

It is a good idea to bring your bible to Church — to test all things… than to be limited to what is read upon a screen - force fed style...
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[bizzt]

Yea must be getting old if I can still recall the days of bibles actually being in church!

I find it nice to be able to check out if the person preaching is correct by comparing what he or she is teaching and scriptures quoted are really in line with the word of God. I hate being hoodwinked. As nice as having the scriptures appear on screen — you cannot check if the contextual theme taught is correct. This could pose a problem.

Martin Luther, Wycliffe, and others fought against this very thing and desired the bible to be accessed by all in his/her own native language to stop all the hoodwinking and manipulation of the masses by use of biblical text going on in their day.

It is a good idea to bring your bible to Church — to test all things… than to be limited to what is read upon a screen - force fed style...
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The problem for me is I get so intrigued by one Scripture then I start diving and reading around the Scripture and Contemplate on it and before you know it the Sermon has ended Not that it is a bad thing but it is when you should be listening. This is why taking notes and then cross referencing at home (at least for me) is best. To each their own I guess

[Swamper]

Oh man.

There are churches without actual Bibles in them?

I knew I liked my small church for a reason...

[Canuckster1127]

I could use some help with an arguement I've seen quite often. The atheist puts forth that the view that religion is dangerous. Religion has slaughtere untold numberss innocent people, etc.

The atheist then put forths the view that no one has killed in "the name of atheism".

Anyone have input on the view?

Not all atheists believe that religion is dangerous, but the point of contention isn't really religion...it's intolerance and fanaticism, which are facets of human nature.

In terms of religion, some atheists make the mistake of critizing all religion based on how they feel about the 3 Abrahamic monotheistic religions. There have been MANY religions and the pagan and Dharmic religions typically do not share the violent histories of the Abrahamic faiths.

nec

Inded. There have even been non-violent atheists, apart from those individuals and atheistic systems that resulted in so many wars and deaths, particularly in the 20th century. The issue isn't necassarily tied into religious systems as much as human nature. Although Blaise Pascal was onto something when he said in effect that men rarely do evil more cheerfully as when they do it based upon religious principle,

[ageofknowledge]

"Orthodox atheists preach that their worldview is the only right one and religiously adhere to an idea that science proves this to be true. Their unbending faith does not permit them to operate outside the "non-God" box.

Of course, other atheists such as Harvard University's Stephen Gould were absolutely clear that the natural sciences, including evolutionary theory, were consistent with both atheism and conventional religious belief. He noted that unless half his scientific colleagues were total fools, a presumption that Gould rightly dismissed as nonsense, there could be no other responsible way of making sense of the varied responses to reality on the part of the intelligent, informed people that he knew.

Whereas Gould at least tried to weigh the evidence, others simply attempt to force atheistic dogma in an authoritarian biased manner on the rest of the population asserting their worldview as a fact as sure as the earth circles the sun. This faith they have in their belief system is hardwired into the atheistic worldview today and obsessively repeated throughout their writings. They have declared themselves all knowing and 100% right in their conclusion and no other view of reality can possibly be true and some go so far to state that teaching children that God might exist should be a crime and everyone who does so a criminal who should be in prison.

Atheists can be very close minded secularists that merely force their own dogmas upon children who haven't yet formed the discriminatory capacities needed to evaluate the ideas. The Soviets certainly did in the 1950's with false assertions preached like mantras from the pulpits of schools like “Science has disproved religion!" and "Religion is superstition!" and the state of Russian society and culture still bears the deep scars of atheistic authoritarian campaigning where they presented the pathological as if it were normal.

First, faith is not infantile. As anyone familiar with antireligious polemics knows, a recurring atheist criticism of religious belief is that it is infantile. They equate faith in a Creator God with the tooth fairy. Yet their analogy is obviously flawed. How many people do you know who began to believe in the tooth fairy in adulthood and found that consoling in old age? I know of none. But I do know of many that began to believe in God at college. Those who use this infantile argument have to explain why so many people discover God later in life and certainly do not regard this as representing any kind of regression, perversion or degeneration. A good recent example is provided by Anthony Flew (born 1923), the noted atheist philosopher who started to believe in God in his eighties.

Second, most of us are aware that we hold many beliefs that may be shown to be justifiable, without thereby demonstrating that they are proven. Philosophers of science have long made the point that there are many scientific theories that are presently believed to be true but may have to be discarded in the future as additional evidence emerges or new theoretical interpretations develop.

For example, atheists last century once preached a limitless universe in order to have the time necessary to work out a theory to explain reality without a need for God. They were wrong. Now they claim God presents an infinite regress. However, in their astrophysics toolbox lies the answer. Time is a dimension of this universe. A Creator existing outside of this universe could therefore exist outside of time. In any event, there is no infinite regress in the quest for explanation.

The one inescapable and highly improbable fact about the world is that we, as reflective human beings, are in fact here. Look to the anthropic principle which atheists, theistic evolutionists, and progressive creationists use to show the statistically improbable chance that reality could be as it, in fact is. Yet the very fact that we are puzzling about how we came to be here is dependent on the fact that we are here and are thus able to reflect on the likelihood of this actuality. Perhaps we need to appreciate that there are many things that are improbable within a purely naturalistic atheistic worldview but exist nevertheless. The issue, then, is not whether God is probable but whether God is actual.

This brings us to the atheist belief that science has disproved God. The fundamental issue confronting the sciences is how to make sense of a highly complex, multifaceted, multilayered reality. This fundamental question in human knowledge has been much discussed by philosophers of science, and often ignored by those who, for their own reasons, want to portray science as the only viable route to genuine knowledge.

The natural sciences depend on inductive inference, which is a matter of "weighing evidence and judging probability, not of proof." Competing explanations are evident at every level of the human endeavor to represent the world-from the details of quantum mechanics to what Karl Popper termed "ultimate questions" of meaning.

This means that the great questions of life (some of which are also scientific questions) cannot be answered with any degree of certainty. Any given set of observations can be explained by a number of theories. To use the jargon of the philosophy of science: theories are underdetermined by the evidence. The question then arises: what criteria can be used to decide between them, especially when they are "empirically equivalent"? An orthodox atheist would simply revert back to a fundamentalist position that favors their atheistic worldview in the exact same manner as a Muslim or a young earth creationist would revert back to a fundamentalist position that favors their particular worldview.

The truth is that given the limits of science: science, philosophy, religion and literature all have a legitimate place in the human quest for truth and meaning. This is a widely held view, both in Western culture at large and even within many sections of the scientific community itself. Naturalistic science and other disciplines are not at war. It is the atheist (whose core, incontrovertible, foundational assumption is that there is no God) that places them so and tries to force us to choose between them. Worldviews promoted in such a way leans toward fanaticism.

Despite what beliefs you may have picked up along the road in your life, religion need not be evil. Atheists often preach that religion is so and when banished we can then all live in peace. The truth is that belief systems clearly do not teach the same things. They are different. Christianity, for example, teaches that the will and character of God are fully disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth who did no violence to anyone, taught mercy, forgiveness, and authentic justice (not revenge). Jesus was the object, not the agent, of violence and prescribed solutions toward the elimination of its roots.

Now the death toll caused by those seeking to enforce atheist ideology in the twentieth century causes all other democide ever conducted in the history of the world in anything even approximating a similar time frame to pale in comparison. The violence and repression they undertook in pursuit of atheistic transcendentalized agendas clouds the soul. Atheists carried out the most heinous crimes. That's a historical fact.

Atheists fail to appreciate that when a society rejects the idea of God, it tends to transcendentalize alternatives-such as the ideals of liberty or equality. These now become quasi-divine authorities, which none are permitted to challenge. Perhaps the most familiar example of this dates from the French Revolution, at a time when traditional notions of God were discarded as obsolete and replaced by transcendentalized human values. Madame Rolande was brought to the guillotine to face execution on trumped-up charges in 1792. As she prepared to die, she bowed mockingly toward the statue of liberty in the Place de la Revolution and uttered the words for which she is remembered: "liberty, what crimes are committed in your name."

All ideals divine, transcendent, human or invented are capable of being abused. That's just the way human nature is. And knowing this, we need to work out what to do about it rather than lashing out uncritically at religion.

Atheism cannot end divisions within humanity. These divisions are ultimately social constructs that reflect the fundamental sociological need for communities to self define and identify those who are "in" and those who are "out," those who are "friends" and those who are "foes." The importance of "binary opposition" in shaping perceptions of identity has been highlighted in recent years, not least on account of the major debate between different schools of critical thought over whether such oppositions determine and shape human thought or are the outcome of human thought. A series of significant "binary oppositions" are held to have shaped Western thought such as male-female and white-black. This binary opposition leads to the construction of the category of "the other devalued half of a binary opposition, when applied to groups of people.

The simplistic belief that the elimination of religion would lead to the ending of violence, social tension or discrimination is thus sociologically naive. It fails to take account of the way in which human beings create values and norms, and make sense of their identity and their surroundings. If religion were to cease to exist, other social demarcators would emerge as decisive, some of which would become transcendentalized in due course.

A criticism that is often directed against religion is that it encourages the formation and maintenance of in-groups and out-groups. But what, many will wonder, about Jesus of Nazareth? Wasn't this a core theme of his teaching-that the love of God transcends and subsequently abrogates such social divisions?

Jesus explicitly extends the Old Testament command to "love your neighbor" to "love your enemy" (Matthew 5:44). Far from endorsing out-group hostility, Jesus both commended and commanded an ethic of out-group affirmation.

Christians may certainly be accused of failing to live up to this demand. But it is there, right at the heart of the Christian ethic.

Just as a person's beliefs and view of the world guide their behavior and approach to life, an organization, political body, or government's worldview guides why, what, and how they do what they do. The results shape our lives and our world. So yes it matters. In fact, it ultimately.

When an atheist dictator like Stalin or Mao implements policies that kill tens of millions upon tens of millions of individuals in the name of a transcendentalized atheistic worldview (e.g. Marxism) and to protect their power and position; it ultimately matters but atheism doesn't teach that it does.

The Christian worldview teaches that reality is ultimately meaningful. An important concept is the doctrine of Imago Dei which asserts that we are made in the "image of God." This teaching, if true, provides a framework of morality for the decisions and actions that human beings make and has much to say about the potential dignity, value, capacity, and ability we may be capable of. The capability for rational thought, ethics, and morals.

Ethics is really about the right action and the greater good while morals indicate their practice. Interestingly, "Moral" has a dual meaning. The first is one's comprehension of morality and capability to practice while the second is about putting it into practice.

Which brings us to social ethics which is moral theory applied to groups. Social ethics can be synonymous with social and political philosophy that make up a political body or government's worldview. Unfortunately, not all are congruent with the concept of Imago Dei.

For example, Christianity teaches that “Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed for in the image of God has God made man” when speaking of murder (note that the word kill in the ten commandments is 'raw-tsakh' translated as murder and never used in conjunction with just war or self-defense). As a result, the concept of Imago Dei helps to guide the decisions and actions of governments that integrate it into their social ethic.

This is why it is ultimately wrong for a Stalin, Mao, or Hitler to take the life they took in the manner in which they took it and why it is ultimately important for how government implements even just policy. For example, a government certainly can determine that their boundaries have been unjustly violated, their culture trampled, and citizen's displaced and seek to fully correct the injustice.

However, how they correct the injustice is ultimately important. Despite the possibility that an atheist worldview might incorporate humanism to some degree (or not), Imago Dei nor ultimate meaning guide how they will go about correcting the situation. And that realization should be enough to give pause.

Interestingly, while the authentic Christian worldview sets forth a reason to pursue moral accountability as ultimately real and meaningful, we find that we cannot do it perfectly. Freud said the fallen condition of humanity represented the natural state of humanity. But Freud was an atheist. Freud had no idea that this is not normal... that another explanation exists: that while moral evil affected the original image of God in man: it endures nonethess.

Meaning that despite our condition, we possess the ability to make morally correct decisions and that why and how we do what we do is ultimately meaningful."

-reprinted with permission

[Cactus]

The only problem though is that many atheists claim Pol-Pot, and Stalin were not atheists. Is there info I could get proving Pol-Pot and Stalin were atheists?

Well if they are allowed to claim that those people are "no true-athiests", is it a bit of a double standard for us to say that people who kill in the name of christ are "no true christians", to be totally fair i would like to say it is silly for instance for us to say that...for example hitler, was a christian OR a athiest, he misused BOTH ideologies as tools of propoganda. So...to stick any label on anyone who is "no true atheist/Christian" then the label is agnostic.