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Discussion Forum : Articles and Sermons : 7 Arguments Atheists Can't Use by Eli Brayley

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Miccah
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Joined: 2007/9/13
Posts: 1752
Wisconsin

 Re:

AaronAgassi.

If you keep messing around with the Lord, your bound to get saved. See you on the flip side my friend. :-)


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Christiaan

 2011/5/12 1:53Profile
AaronAgassi
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Joined: 2011/4/11
Posts: 118


 Re:

Hey, if our relatives go Mormon, they can marry us after we're dead!

 2011/5/12 8:36Profile









 Re:

Quote:
Hey, if our relatives go Mormon, they can marry us after we're dead!



You can get them to hook you up with a sweet pair of underwear as well! I hear they protect you from things; like demons, and polygamy laws.

 2011/5/12 9:26
AaronAgassi
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Joined: 2011/4/11
Posts: 118


 Re:

And all with absolute certainty!

 2011/5/12 13:12Profile
ChrisJD
Member



Joined: 2006/2/11
Posts: 2895
Philadelphia PA

 Re:

Hi again everyone.

Aaron, just a few observations if I could, I hope to be able to share more a bit later:

"Creation nor a Creator are actually self-evident, merely the obvious first anthropomorphic conjecture in ages past, of human beings, ourselves creators of artifacts. But investigation has proceeded since then, with new knowledge driving new conjecture and more viable hypotheses"



The ancients took the obvious observation of creation and worshiped the creation ignorantly through superstition. Modern man takes the obvious observation of creation coupled with scientific investigation and worships the creation through endless storytelling that is the product of his own mind and imagination.

Modernman has not become more enlightened about his origins through scientific discoveries, just more sophisticated in his ability to tell the stories he believes about it.

His explanations are not more viable because they match reality only more acceptable to more people because of their power to decieve.


If Christians have been left behind, it is because those that have passed them have continued to run a race that was over long ago(Acts 17:22-31).


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Christopher Joel Dandrow

 2011/5/12 14:14Profile
Veronica226
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Joined: 2010/2/3
Posts: 144
Montana

 Re:

Quote:
Rail and protest of shifting sands all you will, but there are no firm grounds. All is subject to conjecture. Absolute certainty is the hallmark of arrogant madness. All that can be done in hopes of drawing ever closer to truth and getting things at all less wrong, is to reason and to look to the evidence, to detect and to correct error as we go, as best as we may, making progress every day. So I feel free to speak even without absolute certainty which is neither necessary nor possible.



Again I will say what Old_Joe (I think) said, you say there is no absolute cerainty, but you say THAT with absolute certainty. Where I come from we call that the boomerang blunder. A statement that commits suicide. A self-refuting statment. If there really is no absolute certainty you can never say that statement. YOu can't say there IS absolute certainty and you can't say there ISN'T absolute certainty. All you can say is "I don't know" and leave it at that. This is the bedrock of postmodern relativism which leads to moral relativism which, as someone already said, leads to anarchy.
That way madness lies.


Also I saw some comments about your "integrity." The only reason you have any integrity is because God, by His grace, restrains you from being evil. Restrains you from being like Hitler. That is why atheist will be punished so severely by God, because you deny Him who gives you the ability to have integrity!

I will also say with others, I'm not really sure why you're even here. You will not change our minds. Not because we don't have an "open mind" but because we have known God, and you cannot take that away nor refute it.


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Veronica

 2011/5/12 14:58Profile









 Re: 7 Arguments Atheists Can't Use by Eli Brayley


Hello again Aaron,

Quote:
Alive-to-God, First of all, that's a myth, and second, I am not clear as to the hypothesis allegedly tested or exactly what you are getting at.

I'll skip your first thought, and move on to the second, as this has got to be the most disingenuous reply you've given so far!

Why? Because you have talked continually about the necessity of hypotheses for verifying observable phenomena, and here I've given you a clear cut case of a series of observed, related happenings, which MUST very simply fit into a sympathetic hypothesis. You also insist that to be scientifically acceptable, the hypothesis must be refutable. Here we have both positive and negative outcomes. How much easier do you want it to be?

Further, you were looking for a degree of parsimony... So, I supplied you with a short saga involving three main parties, expressed in only One Hundred and Seventy words - not too taxing, I hope?

Happily, this saga comes complete with solution, which of course need not be included - but it may help you, to keep it in mind. I would add (fyi) that this was not the first time the children of Israel had murmured. They already knew it would cause trouble. Exactly what trouble was unknown to them, but death had already featured previously.

I didn't stipulate a discipline. You may use Maths, Chemistry - whatever you like - as long as your deliberations include all the facts supplied in the text and its refutation is clearly stated so as to show how it verifies or nullifies the hypothesis you've constructed.

I would have thought you'd leap at the chance! Seriously! I am longing to see what you produce, which satisfies your criteria, so that we may all move on from there.

The unexpected outcomes should be no problem, as the purpose of any hypothesis is to sift and organise the information available into better order, isn't it? Not necessarily answering every question.

Please take as long as you need. The thread will still be here when you're ready. If this post hasn't cleared up the points of which you were unsure, please feel free to ask any other questions. Many thanks. I hope you have fun. (I really do.) :)

 2011/5/12 17:12
ChrisJD
Member



Joined: 2006/2/11
Posts: 2895
Philadelphia PA

 Re:arrogance, madness, and a most agreeable vice?

Hi everyone.

Aaron, just a bit more if I could?



"Nietzsche said that there are no facts, only interpretations."

"Absolute certainty is the hallmark of arrogant madness"



When I saw these things I remembered reading in chapter 3 of Neitzsche's "Beyond good and Evil", where he is discussing what he calls 'the religous mood', or put another way, the affect of religion on the conscience, and he speculates that religous changes in people were owing to their own misinterpretation of facts. He says:

"...is it not possible it may have happened principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion of morals, because it BELIEVED in oppositions of moral values, and saw, read, and INTERPRETED these oppositions into the text and facts of the case? What? "Miracle" only an error of interpretation? A lack of philology?"


First, he does not deny that facts exist. Just errors of interrpretation.

At the beginning of the chapter Neitzsche admits of needing an army of helpers to help him in anylizing the history of the 'problem of knowledge and conscience' as he puts it, and not only an army of helpers, but as much as near divine powers of Heaven and Earth(obvious sarchasim), and yet, without these, he says, he is willing to do it himself.

And why? Why go at an infinite problem with impotent powers? Because he says, "...a curiosity like mine is once for all the most agreeable of vices--pardon me!"

The men that gathered at Mar's hill in Athens gathered there and "spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing". Perhaps they too shared curiosity as an agreeable vice and enjoyed 'the big hunt'.

It's so grand, afterall, to discover some new thing, isn't it? And perhaps it is enough for the ego that believes it is destined to perish from existience to secure for itself some imortality in the form of being remembered by other egos for what it has done. Or at least admired for it in the present.

But anyway, if it is enough for Neitzsche and the army of skeptics that have followed him to explain away the expeirence of others as owing to a misinterpretation of facts, then why not their own? Why is the skeptic's own psychology not rather questioned and doubted as to what drives them to seek explanations for the experiences of others when those experiences do not agree with their own?



cont...


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Christopher Joel Dandrow

 2011/5/12 18:47Profile
ChrisJD
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Joined: 2006/2/11
Posts: 2895
Philadelphia PA

 Re: arrogance, madness, and a most agreeable vice?

con't...

"Nietzsche said that there are no facts, only interpretations."

"Absolute certainty is the hallmark of arrogant madness"


Neitzsche makes the most astounding statement in his work(published postumously I believe), titled Ecco Homo, he says:


"I refuse to be a saint; I would rather be a clown. Maybe I am a clown. And I am notwithstanding, or rather not notwithstanding, the mouthpiece of truth; for nothing more blown-out with falsehood has ever existed, than a saint. But my truth is terrible: for hirtherto lies have been called truth. The transvaluation of all Values, this is my formula for mankind's greatest step towards coming to its senses-a step which in me became flesh and genius. My destiny ordained that I should be the first decent human being, and that I should feel myself opposed to the falsehood of millenniums. I was the first to discover truth..."


The first to discover truth. Wow.

Perhaps he did not mean that aboslutely.


Right before these things Neitzsche makes just as astounding a statement when he says:

'I require no "believers," it is my opinion that I am too full of malice to believe even in myself'


The first to discover the truth, too full of malice, to believe in even himself.


I gather those two statements together and mention them because I think they speak deeply to the issues here.

One of the things that will affect our interpretation of facts is the condition of our hearts. The Lord Jesus chided his followers for the hardness of their hearts and this, most often, in connection with their unbelief.

The condition of our hearts is a strong influence upon what we percieve and what we believe.

Neitzsche's statement of having discovered truth, being so full of malice, is astounding.


But what else is astounding.

His interpretor H. L. Mencken, in writting in the introduction to Nietche's 'The Anti-Christ', says of him:

"What he flung himself against, from beginning to end of his days of writing, was always, in the last analysis, Christianity in some form or other—Christianity as a system of practical ethics, Christianity as a political code, Christianity as meta [Page 12] physics, Christianity as a gauge of the truth. It would be difficult to think of any intellectual enterprise on his long list that did not, more or less directly and clearly, relate itself to this master enterprise of them all. It was as if his apostasy from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man."


In the preface to the work, Neitzsche himself ends by saying:

"...Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self....

Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?—The rest are merely humanity.—One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt."


Taking these two together, it is astounding to consider the irony of what was perhaps missed by both, that such wholehearted love and esteem for self is the greatest self-dellusion of all.




con't..


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Christopher Joel Dandrow

 2011/5/12 19:25Profile
ChrisJD
Member



Joined: 2006/2/11
Posts: 2895
Philadelphia PA

 Re: arrogance, madness, and a most agreeable vice?

Before I leave off I wanted to mention again what I would humbly suggest is our simple epistomolgy here, that of our Apostle John.


John did not write out of any sense of curiosity.

He said:

"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life;
(For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;)That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you"


He says that he saw Jesus the Christ die upon a cross.

That He was buried.

And that he saw Him alive again.


People may call John a madman. They have called Jesus Christ, Who always spoke with certainty and with authority on the reality of Eternity, the same.


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Christopher Joel Dandrow

 2011/5/12 19:35Profile





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