March 7, 2007

Fundamentalist Atheist, Continued

I've still got this fundamentalist preacher turned atheist on my mind, especially after Antonina's comment:
That's what you get when you take away the beauty of the mysticism of Christ and the Church (eg. the Sacraments) and reduce it to a diagramatic science, a set of beliefs. When one diagram seems better presented or more believable than another, you can easily switch sides.

Often I think that the trouble with a/theism in our culture is that a lot of people (on both sides) have an image or idea of God that is unbelievable in the first place. The divinity they think they are supposed to believe in is less like the dynamic mystery of the Trinity and more like Zeus, Santa Claus, or the Great Pumpkin.

To make matters worse, we are taught to disbelieve in spiritual realities from an early age. Simple, ordinary spiritual things like numbers are "just concepts." Sublime spiritual realities like love, freedom, and truth aren't "actually real." And yet people everywhere make the most important decisions of their lives in the pursuit of love and truth. People routinely die for the sake of freedom. It's quite an accomplishment, to have folks organize their lives around you, and even die for you, without being "real."

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is my question: if Jesus was a goalie in the NHL would he be able to stop every shot considering that he was perfect...I wonder

Anonymous said...

From a different perspective, I feel like I have been bombarded with concepts like love, freedom, and truth since day one. Unfortunately there is usually an agenda behind each one: love is for selling products, freedom can be reconciled with torture, and truth is whatever justifies our side and demonizes the other side. For me, I have seen more damage due to the perversion of the concepts than the exclusion of them.

Of course, that leads to the question "what is the pure form of these qualities?" and "who decides what the pure form of these qualities is?" That has caused many a war, as well as quite a few tiffs!

Brother Charles said...

Well, Mr. Hockey, you bring up the age-old theological conundrum, the favorite form of which for me is: could God heat up a burrito so much that even he couldn't eat it?

Hidden One said...

"Of course, that leads to the question "what is the pure form of these qualities?" and "who decides what the pure form of these qualities is?" That has caused many a war, as well as quite a few tiffs!"

Hmmm... the pure forms of love, freedom, and truth... I'm sure plenty of other, smarter people have thoguht much longer and much harder, and probably come up with better answers then the ones you are about to receive from myself, but I don't know what they are, so here's mine.

Pure Love: The character of God. After all, 'God is love.' And God is perfect.

Pure Freedom: I'm not sure if there is such a thing, even theoretically, or whether it would be desirable. Certainly, the perfect free will given to Adam and Eve didn't have results that were... too great.

Pure Truth: Anything which is true, lacking falsehood of all sorts. It would seem to me that all truth is pure, for any truth that is not purely truth is not so much truth anymore. For a practical example, I point to God's Word as pure truth.

As to who decides... well, I'd be surprised if God hadn't already. :p

Sincerely in Christ,
Hidden One.