Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Mocking God

Whilst a graduate student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Jason Rosenhouse was surprised when his active Christian friends were uninterested in accompanying him to hear the famous evangelist Luis Palau preach. The incongruity of the outspoken unbeliever - Rousenhouse is a "nonreligious mathematician" and author of "Among the Creationists, Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line" -  trying to persuade his believing but reluctant friends to see a world-renown preacher in action was one for the books.

Rosenhouse wasn't impressed with the Bible-thumping sermon, and was surprised to see at least a dozen people going forward in response to the inevitable altar call at the ending. While he was wondering if something was wrong with himself for feeling unmoved, one of his Christian friends who did accompany him to the tent meeting said, "I hate this part, pressuring people to make a public display of faith."

Palau's histrionics were, for his friends, a caricature of Christianity, wrote Rosenhouse. Whereas he found the proceedings slightly silly, they found them offensive. It was his introduction to very different facets of modern American Christianity.

We have our own homegrown oddities, one who cajoled heartlanders to "give until they bleed", one who dabble in magic tricks to preach about real miracles, and one who perverted a good Samaritan role into a Dominatrix charade. The mother who believes that her son is "a fantastic child, perhaps born in the wrong country" should take heart that there is still a compassionate God. It's the misguided charlatans who give him a bad name.

11 comments:

  1. You forget about the one who dabbles in magic, not unlike
    sorcery and witchcraft often deemed as offensive to his religion yet in the same breath preach hate and intolerance against folks whose sexual leanings are not to his liking.

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  2. It is NOT possible for atheists to mock gods as there is no god in them. Or rather gods do not exist in their understandings.

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    1. It is entirely possible to mock the idea of gods.

      If somebody went around proclaiming that they had an invisible flying unicorn, any unbeliever of that idea could mock it.

      It's exactly the same for gods, since they are equally as non-existent and silly.

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  3. The misguided charlatans who give him a bad name?

    Who are the "charlatans" and who is the "him" here?

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  4. Medieval christianity and european feudalism were natural bedfellows, co-existed for more than 800 years after the fall of Western ROman empire. It wasn't for nothing they called it the "Dark Ages". Europe didn't move a step forward until the renaissance broke the shackles of unquestioning blind faith in the church's world view. The best way to set an entire nation back, even an entire continent back, to keep the masses impoverished and subservient, is to feed them blind faith, the less they think for themselves the longer the elites can extract economic benefits from the peasants. Are we there yet? What do I know, I am just a dumb unthinking product of the system.

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  5. There is no reason to believe that there is a compassionate god.

    If there was such an entity who was "compassionate" to us, Earth would not have taken until 4 billion years ago to form and sprout life. The dinosaurs and other creatures of earlier ages would not have been wiped out by extinction level events. Humankind would not have taken so long to evolve to record and transmit culture. Mutually contradicting religions would not have been created by Man's superstitious minds nor led their brainwashed followers to kill, torture and maim the followers of other religions.

    The idea of a creator god, let alone a compassionate one, is a fabricated myth. We only have ourselves to look out for each other.

    The sooner mankind drops the stupid idea of god, the better off we all will be.

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    1. A Christian pastor who is dealing with his loss of faith and blogging about it, touches on the idea of a god who is claimed to be compassionate but shows no evidence for it:
      https://pastornofaith.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/we-talked-about-the-why/

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    2. http://youtu.be/QaeGfV-N2kM

      For every deconversion, one can probably find another born again. The boys latest stAnd on religion is probably not going to be his last words. The way he is being persecuted and prosecuted, is a result of sheeps hit the fan. You don't need a broken sewage pipe in a BTO flat to see how art mimics life, in an ironic way.

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  6. Presumed omnipotent and omniscient god in the sky who somehow has the need for believers to worship him but also can't tolerate any criticism or insults?

    That makes so much sense!

    Besides, the ancient Greeks nearly doomed humanity with their geometric fetishism of physics until Isaac Newton saved us thousands of years later really shows us the inherent dangers of dogmatic thought left unchecked and unquestioned regardless of religion.

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  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

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