Part. 2:

God is Love? Yet, not until the Jesus myth did we have eternal torment; damnation. Had the author the fortitude to explain exactly why our lives are to be controlled to the point of thought limitation, which sets the "quality" of eternal life or even venture into the scandalous abuse of mind, body and knowledge to be buoyed by Christianity and horrifically still on the increase, one may have some time for this piffle.

'Welcome' for 2,000 years? Hotel California comes to mind: you can check in, but never leave - unless eternal hellfire is your desire. Little wonder atrocities under Xtianity are just ho-hum and still excused, denied and conducted not on the strong, but the weak "Jesus" is supposed to have loved so dearly [http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Inquisition.html].

Please keep the constant re-casting of belief/non belief and biblical interpretation to yourself. Your definitions of "atheists", particularly the science/technology line are nonsensical. No doubt you set out to get an idea down on paper and ended up antagonising those you perhaps should be influencing. Ah... how Christian.

One of the reasons I wrote this article was because I was sick of the debate about God being hijacked by the cosmological argument. The question about the Christian God does not rely on the nature of nature or the origin of the universe. Neither does it rely on the existence of a supernatural being. From the earliest theologians, Augustine, for example, it was asserted that God was not a being but being itself. Indeed medieval theology went to great lengths to distance itself from the idea that God was some kind of being.
However, with the turn to nature in the rise of natural science, we began to think entirely in terms of substance, things, beings and we lost the fact that the Christian proclamation was fundamentally about the moral. This is where the doctrine of the Trinity is all important because it is the history of Israel and the life and death of the man Jesus that is held up as God. God was not to be discovered in the stars but in ordinary human history. That is why all theologians are historians and not cosmologists.
Some of the atheists in this thread have been upset because they have interpreted me as saying that to be an atheist is to be evil. That is absurd. But I would say that atheists are lucky that they have inherited the Christian tradition in the society that surrounds them. In John Updike’s last and certainly not best novel, one of the characters worries about the growth of China, “so many billion people with no god to hold them in.” We have seen how determinedly atheistic regimes are capable of momentous evil. There must be a lesson here that we refuse to hear to our peril.

Peter Sellick

Peter, to me, is talking of the future.

Just as the New Testament, in Jesus Christ, is the fulfillment of the Old Testament we humans are called to a holy humanism to engage in the fulfillment of life in the widest, highest and deepest understanding of life we can hold as we move through time towards the Parousia.. ( ?? see http://www.americancatholic.org/Newsletters/SFS/an1104.asp for an accessible explanation)

The underpinning of western thought and social development across millennia through Christian revelation and thought, informed by the Greeks and Romans, is testament to that calling.

The biggest obstacle for this, in our era, is not the atheists but the believers who hold to the "machine" God Peter writes of. Their hand crafted image of God delivered through rationalising theology of the last centuries are just that. An image devoid of story, event and relationship, reduced to belief by formula and adhered to in comfort.

For the future, atheists are irrelevant outside of the natural and good service to humanity they deliver in their work. By their intellectual position they confine themselves to a narrow mechanistic fulfillment aligned with Descartes.

People of other faiths, including the "life by formulae" Christians, have an understanding and sense of the transcendent and more open to an organic and ecological view of life.

But the future rests on the faithful People of God in their pilgrimage to proclaim God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to fulfill life through service to the unfolding notion of the Kingdom of God as here now but not yet.

Cheers

"We have seen how determinedly atheistic regimes are capable of momentous evil."

I can't believe you wrote that Sells! Do you really want to leave that one hanging there? Or do you want to salvage a little credibility and expand on it?

George
I respect your views too. As an atheist I took exception mainly to:

"So atheism is not as simple as it first appears, it is a rather darker animal than we could image. To be a real atheist you would have to decide after reading the gospels, say, that the life of Jesus was not about free grace and that it did not display the love that is the basis of all human life. To be a real atheist would be to find that this man Jesus is the enemy of life; to have a character that is pure darkness. To be a real atheist you would have to argue that the disciples of Jesus were bent on human destruction, were entirely self serving, and essentially mean. By any standard this is a tall order! This is why I assert that there are no real atheists. Perhaps there are instances in which human evil is complete in one person, but I doubt it. Certainly the self professed atheists of our time are tame pretenders compared with the real character of atheism."

Perhaps I was too harsh in speaking of "hate and loathing" but that is the tone or attitude I experienced in reading the article.

It was to Peter's definition of what he perceives or defines as atheism. That is, some sort of evil state of existence. I understand that Peter was not calling those who purport to be atheists as evil but merely saying that our own self-determination or pretension as atheists is flawed under his definition. And under that definition atheism looks prety grim.

I know Christians can cop a bit of flak on this forum but so do atheists and neither group wants to be seen as either delusional or evil.

Surprisingly I am quite interested in religion as a subject of history as Sells states our moral compass (if you like) has undoubtedley been fashioned by our Christian heritage.

Cont/...

'We have seen how determinedly atheistic regimes are capable of momentous evil.'

Pter, that statement is woefully inaccurate.

Regimes who are MONOLITHIC are capable of momentous evil. Nazism, Communism, Islamo-Fascism and Catholicism have all committed atrocities because they see themselves as the one true ideology to the exclusion of all other competing ideologies.

On the other hand, states who are pluralistic and encourage individual freedom of thought rarely commit evil on a grand scale.

And I should add, the natural allies of atheism, in the West at least, are scientific rationalism and secular humanism. Neither of these worldviews have been known to torture or persecute people.