Quote:
Originally Posted by Sounded Standard
To preface: I am an atheist. My entire family, mother, father, sister, aunts and uncles are all theists with the exception with my father's sister and her husband. The theists in my family are either Christian or Catholic.
I had a conversation recently with my sister and her boyfriend about the existence of god. She did not know before this conversation that I was an atheist. She was surprised and asked why.
I said that there were many reasons, but that the main one was that there were too many bad things that happened to people that god could be able to prevent.
She replied with something like "you won't believe in God until you see him in some light." She explained to me the car accident I had recently been in, my fault, that I had (obviously) survived, along with my good friend, the lone passenger, and how lucky I was that I had survived. She called it "a miracle."
I said, "a miracle is only a bit of luck that something worse didn't happen." I told her that had there been a god, then there never would have been an accident. My car never would of crashed and no lives would have been put in danger. I told her that I took full responsibility for anything that occurred in my life, bad or good.
She didn't get what I was saying. She would tell me, your life was spared, hence God. And I would say, well if god could of spared my life, he could have spared my car. And even if he couldn't have, he could spare millions of other lives dying from things only science that hasn't been discovered yet could.
Both her and her boyfriend agreed that "You won't believe in God until you are put face to face with him." They did not mean that I wouldn't believe in god until the moment that I died and was face to face with him literally, if he exists, but rather that I would not understand god until I was presented with some miracle.
Another example of this is when I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, an anarchist, who is also a theist. I could not comprehend how she could reject the idea of a government running things, but accept a religion that governed the morals and ideologies she lived by (she is a Christian, just so you know).
A friend of hers had just died when his car collided with a train, so I might have been out of line with questioning her beliefs (as I believe in times of great grief that questioning ones religion is rude, for that person may simply need something to give them hope and it may also further their grief). She said "it is something I just don't question" and asked me not to continue the conversation. I didn't, for I did not want to have a conversation that may be construed as questioning the fate of her late friend.
However, the question still lingered in my mind. "How can a person who does not believe in the idea of government, mostly because it controls people and governs their moral code, not understand that religion does the same thing and yet still blindly believe in it?"
I don't really want to get into a discussion about whether or not a god of any sort (Christian, Judaical, Muslim, or otherwise) exists, but rather why do people who do believe in a god often believe in it/them even though their religion may have some, but not necessarily all or even a lot, of beliefs that directly contradict or disprove their own.
Anarchism is definitely contrary to the plain words of Scripture - one example, Jesus said "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" - and there are several more proof texts in the NT.
Not just for Christians or religious people, but for humans in general, there exists a network of beliefs. I like Craig's illustration of a spider net - our most fundamental and precious beliefs are at the center and those beliefs are close to what is called revisionary immunity - it takes a nuclear bomb to shake them. But there are many beliefs that are not central to us - they form progressively less important parts of our overall worldview, like the strands of a web. The outermost strands can be stripped away without affecting the more important ones.
So, either your Christian anarchist friend isn't aware of the contradiction or she places her political views towards the outer rim of her web.
I hold a belief as a Christian that most conventional Christians would consider contradictory to the Bible. I don't believe God punishes people in hell forever. But I also acknowledge I could be wrong. That belief however is not at the core of my worldview. That God is just IS at the core, so if it turns out that people are punished in hell forever God can do so without compromising His justice. I have no idea how that is possible but I believe it's true. So if I knew for certain I am wrong about hell, all else being equal(God is just), then I would look forward to the explanation.