Sunday, July 24, 2011

View of an Agnostic Atheist


The following is an excerpt of an article I came across while surfing the net...sounds pretty cool eh? Logical and scholastic...I am not ready to answer the matter now, so here I would simply reinstate what was written...
I remain willing to believe in God, as well as a version of Jesus the Son of God somewhat less fanciful than the so-called “Four Witnesses” would recommend. I confess that I’m holding onto that conviction with my fingernails at the moment and feeling my grip lessen with each subsequent discovery; it’s possible I still believe only because of my previously-mentioned bias to do so. I was raised to love God and to love Jesus. And I do. To let them go entirely would be emotionaly devastating, many times as difficult as letting go of the Bible (what my professor once referred to as the “fourth member of the Christian Quadrinity”) has been. Also the implications of a godless multiverse utterly terrify me, for very good and well-known reasons. I don’t want to die. I don’t want my soon-to-be wife to die. Nor her grandfather, recently diagnosed with inoperable cancer, or my grandmother, nearing 90 and afflicted with Alzheimer’s…Those are the negative reasons for wanting there to exist a god. Positive ones exist, too. The gift of life is so precious and rewarding that I often feel infused with gratefulness for it, as though the emotion were pumping itself out of my heart and distributing through all my circulatory system. I would very much like this gratefulness to have an object that comprehends it.I digress. Some items within the Bible I find unsupported and unconvincing include: its inerrancy and incorruptibility, most of the supposed 600+ messianic prophecies, Mary’s miraculous pregnancy, stories of Jesus’ childhood, Hell as presented, the historicity of the Book of Job, the historicity of the Book of Jonah, the assertion that the Book of Ruth is historical or even of a religious character, the historicity of Genesis’s first several chapters, the doctrine of “original sin”, the idea that all of the Bible’s books combine to present one unified and convincing theology, the Biblical assertion that all who have not believed are “without excuse”, the theological assertion that the Bible should be treated as one work by one author instead of as an anthology of works by multiple authors, and the complete reliability of each of the four Gospels’ accounts.Everything else I’m still thinking about.Maybe you should start thinking about it, too. (from The Bible is Not God's word by Adam Volle)
I have answer to some of his assumptions but on this stage I don't want to dabble on the issue simply because I feel I need to reflect on the subject, if there is really a need... 

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