# Listening to young atheists.....



## jmharris23 (Jun 12, 2013)

http://www.theatlantic.com/national...s-lessons-for-a-stronger-christianity/276584/


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## centerpin fan (Jun 12, 2013)

This part stood out to me:



> These students heard plenty of messages encouraging "social justice," community involvement, and "being good," but they seldom saw the relationship between that message, Jesus Christ, and the Bible. Listen to Stephanie, a student at Northwestern: "The connection between Jesus and a person's life was not clear." This is an incisive critique. She seems to have intuitively understood that the church does not exist simply to address social ills, but to proclaim the teachings of its founder, Jesus Christ, and their relevance to the world. Since Stephanie did not see that connection, she saw little incentive to stay. We would hear this again.



If the church sets itself up as just another group determined to "address social ills", it will fail.


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## SemperFiDawg (Jun 14, 2013)

Good read


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## Asath (Jun 17, 2013)

Sorry.  That whole bit in the article was a red herring.

The article declared a bias right up front, and went on to ‘demonstrate’ a point already assumed as a premise.  

Any hack can do that.  Heck, half the treads on here – well more than half – have no honest intellectual basis, but exist only to preach.  ‘SEE?’ the article nearly demands of the reader, ‘Atheists DON”T BELIEVE, and are therefore bankrupt, morally and intellectually!’  This is nothing more than one-sided propaganda.

Even the strident Calvinists are more subtle than that, and they can hardly defend themselves anymore.  And from here it gets more than a little bit odd.

If one starts from the position that anyone, any position, or any institution that does not begin with the embracing of the Jesus as their basis is invalid on those grounds, as this article does, then one has started by rejecting the whole of history and the majority of humanity as it now exists.  That is a pretty odd place to start when looking at the reality of the world around us, but if one must start there, by dint of upbringing or whatever, then one must, unfortunately, try to follow that thought to conclusion.

So, in trying to do so, equally unfortunately, this viewpoint begins to break down immediately.  They gave you a Book, from which you learned your point of view.  They told you that this Book contained the whole of Truth.  But somebody gave the fellow Christians next to you, born into a slightly different sect, a whole different Book.  Close to a hundred different Books, it turns out, just within the TRUTH of the Christian religion.  This might indicate, to a thoughtful person, that there might be a problem on their horizon.

If only because one part of these Books didn’t change very much.  It was edited as convenient, of course, but it was hard to change it wholesale.  The reason the Christians couldn’t completely rewrite the Old Testament, after trying at sword-point to re-write all of history,  was because they had a problem that both pre-dated and ante-dated them.  Judaism was founded on the same Old Testament, and try as the Christians might to wipe the pesky folks out, they turned out to be stubbornly resourceful, and quite smart.  They still won’t stop pointing out that your Jesus was a Rabbi.  They are right.  

Then some pesky, illiterate fellow desert wanderer, also suffering from ‘visions,’ came along (ever wonder why all of this came about as a result of nomadic arab tribes in a barren wasteland who were perpetually at war with each other?), heard a few tales from BOTH so-called ‘Testaments,’ and spent thirty seven years hallucinating and narrating those vivid dreams to his brother-in-law.  Thus was born Islam – also based on the Old Testament, and part of the nascent New – Their ‘Prophet’ claims to have actually MET the Jesus. In heaven. That is a tough one to trump.  So THEY wrote a Book too.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years.  This is still the situation for ‘believers’.  Hundreds of millions of them, on all sides. 

Read that again – a couple of THOUSAND years.

So let’s try this again – ‘believing’ is a required condition of human existence because . . . . 

Of just what?


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## SemperFiDawg (Jun 17, 2013)

Asath said:


> Sorry.  That whole bit in the article was a red herring.
> 
> The article declared a bias right up front, and went on to ‘demonstrate’ a point already assumed as a premise.
> 
> ...



Hmmm.   Attack article. Attack author.  Build straw man. Attack and thrash straw man.  Well done.


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## stringmusic (Jun 17, 2013)

SemperFiDawg said:


> Hmmm.   Attack article. Attack author.  Build straw man. Attack and thrash straw man.  Well done.



Not to mention "attacking believers", right here in this forum!


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## mtnwoman (Jun 22, 2013)

stringmusic said:


> Not to mention "attacking believers", right here in this forum!



I'm shocked.....


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## jmharris23 (Jun 29, 2013)

mtnwoman said:


> I'm shocked.....



Yep me too!    Asath has become as predictable as I think he would accuse us believers of being.


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