From: kevin@nuchat.sccsi.com (Kevin Brown)
Subject: Re: You should be a Christian because (30 words max):
Organization: I can't see any in the immediate vicinity...
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 16:57:38 GMT

In article <1992Dec16.070843.13073@mr.med.ge.com> bednarek@picard.med.ge.com (Dennis Bednarek Mfg 4-6971) writes:
>Richard Pitts (rpitts@emperor.gatech.edu) wrote:
>: In article <1992Dec14.135939.1888@lut.ac.uk> A.J.Robinson@lut.ac.uk (Alan Robinson) writes:
[...]
>: |But I don't want to be like Christ and I don't want a relationship
>: |with his dad.
>
>Well that can only be because you do not know him in the least amount.

And how, pray tell, do you know this?  Indeed, this statement implies that
*you* know this "God" of yours in some significant way.

How arrogant and pompous.

>If someone gives you a gift you are thankful.  

Well, this depends on what the "gift" is, doesn't it?

>Yet here you are saying
>that you don't even want to know the individual that has given you
>everything you have.  

Well, let's just say that you *assume* that this individual has given us
life and all that.

In any case, the value of a gift can be judged in part by how much it
costs the giver.  Since giving us life costs your God nothing at all
(assuming, for the moment, that your God is in fact responsible), I can
only conclude that the "gift" isn't worth much, at least to your God.

Of course, it really isn't a "gift" at all, since you can't give a gift
to someone that doesn't exist.  Your God, if it exists, didn't create
me for *my* benefit, it created me for *its* benefit.  Were this not the
case, I would not have the ability to suffer, to feel pain, etc.

>Jesus's Father (OUR FATHER) has given you life
>and exesistance, besides that he gave us his most precious possession
>his son so you would not have to bear an eternity lost.

This is ridiculous.  Whether or not we have to "bear an eternity lost"
is completely in the hands of your God, if your God is as powerful as
I presume you believe it to be (for all I know, though, you may believe
that your God is a wimp).

So it's not as if the only way to avoid that situation was for your God to
"give" us its "son".  Indeed, that there was any problem at all is entirely
your God's fault.  *We* didn't set up the rules, your God did.  Your God
*could* have set them up differently, such that there would be no such thing
as this "sin" business you Fundamentalists seem to like so much.  That
anything at all is a "sin" is entirely your God's choosing (after all, it
is your God that decides what is "sin" and what isn't, right?).

Of course, if your God were in fact so incredibly concerned with the
arbitrary rules it uses to judge "sin", then we would not have "free
will" (one could easily argue that we *don't* have free will, but since
you assume that we *do* have free will, I will make the same assumption
for the sake of argument).  Since you believe we *do* have "free will",
it naturally follows that your God really doesn't care much whether or
not we break its arbitrary rules.  Thus, it would appear on the face of
it that this Jesus of yours is entirely inconsequential with respect to
the issue of "sin".

Arbitrary rules and "free will" are mutually exclusive concepts.  It is
only through chance that the choices resulting from "free will" will match
the demands of arbitrary rules.

>: What is there about either Jesus the Christ or the Father that you
>: don't want to be like or even know?
>: What does it require of you
>: to let go of?
>
>My guess is that Alan is one of the millions of poor souls that seems
>threatened by the fact that if he accepted God he would end up changing 
>his life.  Change is what he fears and his ignorance leads him to fear
>of the unknown.  If only his fear were of the eternal flames of hell
>perhaps he would open his mind up to reality.

Believe it or not, I agree in part with you.  Change *is* what Alan fears.
In particular, he fears the change (severe drop) in intellectual integrity
required for such beliefs as you seem to have.  And yes, this *would* change
his life.

So you think that if only his fear were of the "eternal flames of hell"
he would open his mind up to "reality", eh?  Well...let's see you
*demonstrate* this "reality" you seem to believe in, in a repeatable
and objectively testable fashion.

Bet you can't.

In which case, it is truly laughable that you call it "reality".

>dennis

I find it fascinating that there are so many people out there who have
what appear to be such delusions of grandeur (i.e., they believe themselves
to be "special" somehow because they believe that they have won, earned,
or otherwise acquired special knowledge of and/or the special attentions of
some invisible diety).  What psychological mechanism causes such behavior???


-- 
Kevin Brown					kevin@nuchat.sccsi.com
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