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Government refuses to acknowledge God [UPDATED]
Published 7:06am Monday, August 6, 2012 Updated 12:11pm Monday, August 6, 2012“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament (sky) shows His handiwork” (Psalms 19:1).
President Abraham Lincoln said once, “I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the Heaven and say there is no God.”
Could the Sears Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge exist without a planner and a builder? Could a plane fly by consensus? Were the president’s faces on Mt. Rushmore caused by erosion? Could fields of corn or wheat or strawberries exist without a farmer first planning and then planting them? Could the sun, moon, stars and planets exist without being planned and created by the Omniscient (all knowing) and Omnipotent (all powerful) Creator?
Today, many educated people with Doctors Degrees have a problem. They can’t look up into a cloudless and clear night sky, into Heaven and come to a consensus of how it all came into existence?
Inconceivable! However, many true and honest astronomers and scientists know that God created it. Millions of repeated observations and tests have proven that an intelligence (God) was actively involved.
The media, state and federal departments of education and public schools refuse to recognize that The Infinite, Omniscient, Omnipotent and Omnipresent God is the source of all honest education, as our forefathers experienced.
Today, our educators try to produce “Excellence in Education” without God. Falling test scores are the inevitable result. An honest consensus about why this is happening is needed, not lowering standards. Unbelievable!
“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they (ungodly) are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).
James Roehrborn
Alexandria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKyljukBE70
Really, one would think that intelligent design guy would have given enough forethought to cause it to rain where there is drought and stop raining where it is flooding. And what’s the design idea for Mosquitoes ? If we absolutely positively have to have Mosquitoes, then how about designing them to find human blood distasteful . Too easy? OK how come we are not designed to not get sick. After all aren’t we designed in Gods image? Or did the great creator just design us to look like him but still get sick and croak. How come the great creator had the ability to create the entire expanse of the universe in a split second flash, but it took him/her six long days to create the earth. Maybe all those so-called “Natural Disasters” took a long time to create. How come the great creator gets credit all the good things that happen but none of the blame for the bad. For example….the guy who survives a class six tornado and tells the 6 O’clock news that God saved him. Really, did god just hate all those other people who died? How about asking the great creator why he made the tornado in the first place? Or I guess you could listen to that quack on the 700 club….god created the tornado because two gay guys live together. It had nothing to do with science and hot air mixing with cold air.
I say it is amazing that mankind has made advances as simple as indoor plumbing with the way some people still believe in fairy tails, superstition, talking snakes and the boogie man. Simply amazing!
Richard, your response identifies that you are not familiar with computer code. If you were, a practical argument would have been to argue Alexander’s conclusions by refuting his evidence.
Would you classify Global Warming theology as a fairy tale, or a superstition?
Throughout history men and women have had close encounters of the spiritual kind. Many of those were too far back in time, too obscure or too “clouded with non-essential nonsense” by the time they became known to the world to be of much use to those who seek proof and understanding of a living God. However, there was one that happened to a Lutheran minister only a little more than 100 years ago. This person’s “Road to Damascus” experience was noted by a significant theologian of the day and recorded in a significant monthly magazine. Yes, just the experience of others were clouded with nonsense so too, over time, was his experience. However, from that experience came a new reality which is repeatable in every individual life where honesty exists and a total reliance on God is requested and a new foundation for living is followed. IF we surrender totally to God–“We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”—These, more than words in a book or signs in the sky are evidence of God’s existence.
(Sadly few seem capable of total surrender and settle instead for the noise of crashing cymbals and gongs. But just because that is the noise you are most likely to hear doesn’t mean a Softer Sound isn’t real.)
Wow! Just Wow! A Lutheran Minster has a spiritual experience and it is noted by a “significant theologian” then reported by a “significant monthly magazine”. If there ever was proof of a divine creator you have just provided it.
Did you ever notice Larry, all those miracles recorded down through history of people miraculously being healed of cancer, or some other ailment that you can’t see because they always occur inside the body, but not one mention of god healing by causing a severed limb to regrow. I wonder why that is? That would be a real miracle. Just imagine how many believers would be created as they all stood around a one legged guy lying on his hospital bed after a shark bit his leg off…a man of god walks in says a short prayer and “booing “ the guy shoots out a new leg. Now that’s a miracle.
I always get a kick out of those people who died but were sent back by God “because it wasn’t their time”
If that happened to me I would say “Well why did you send for me then, you’re supposed to know everything, if you knew it wasn’t my time, why make me go through all this.” Always sound like someone in the system screwed up, some angel should get a three day suspension or fired.
IF we surrender totally to God–“We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.” That line begins the important “stuff” in my earlier post.
Richard, I’m am intentionally trying to be vague and I think I gave you the wrong impression. The theologian didn’t review the spiritual encounter of the minister. He, in fact the religious community as a whole, noticed the changes become evident in people’s lives that occurred when they rearranged their priorities and their methods to reflect the plans and methods of living and active God. That was the point of his review.
(The 1870′s to the 1940′s was a very active time in the world of theology. There were some very new and different ideas being talked about. There was great push-back from traditional religion, so hard they pushed they wrote lots of nonsense. There was the money of the oil men who commissioned the “Fundamentals”. If you want some boring reading force your way through them. And now we have the “net” and we can read our religious history and its struggles.)
Larry/Walt – just ignore the AckerRichardChipMunk – he does not want to have a rational discussion with you – when it comes to religion, all he wants to do is mock those who believe, from his fantasy land of atheistic superiority – it’s called bigotry, and it spews forth on his blog on a daily basis.
Once again Holly you arrive here with nothing but hate for me and your imaginary blog. You could have used your time and space to use what talents you claim to possess in great abundance to refute the points I’ve made in earlier comments. But you can’t.
My comments are a response to the original letters author. Your hate filled comment, as always have nothing to do with the letter nor my answer to it. Once again you simply follow me wherever I go and try to fill your empty life with the glow of being associated with me. In short you are a shallow internet troll, with no thoughts of your own. Like a burnt out cinder in the night sky, no one can see you but for my reflective glow.
Yes, you are a legend in your own mind. And a mocking bigot as well. You should be proud. You are the troll. You must be a joy to live with. And your glow is only in your imagination – you live in the dark in so many ways.
See what I mean?
there is no tangible/detectable evidence of a God thus God is of no concern to rational persons until such time as or if a God choses to make itself detectable. scribblings by cavemen and claims by persons of questionable merit involving secret meetings with the divine are not evidence.
grow up!
Because there will never be evidence of that which does not exist science can only confirm if something does exist, not the other way around.
as if yet there has never been any evidence or reason to believe in such fantasies, however our Constituition via the seperation of church and state ensures that regardless of the validity or sanity of practicing religion, that all citizens have the right freely practice whatever they believe. thus it is wrong to attack our Constituition/Govt/system over anything involving religion as the two have no affect on each other.
The only possible clash would have to come from the religion itself and as such it is the religion then that is flawed
Excellent point Don. Your comment is rational and all that really needs to be said.
Don, just for the record there are as many as 12 million people living today in the United States and some say as many as 70 million who have had close encounters of the “divine kind”. As this experience falls outside of “organized religion” and is usually misunderstood, most pass without notice by anyone other than the person who experienced it. And then, because the effects are only temporary and require daily maintenance many eventually decide not to share their experiences with others. However, if consistently nourished the benefits I listed above become real and verifiable. We may not know what we think we know about God and the things of God. Probably best to leave to each his own What this has to do with civil government I have no idea. Just saying there is a reality many will not accept, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
I followed with interest the recent gathering of athiests, called the “Reason Rally” in Washington, DC, sponsored by various athiest groups who claim that they believe in reason rather than God. But if the rally showed anyhting it was that reason is hardly the property of athiests and other nonbelievers. If anything, from an analysis of reports, reason was sadly lacking.
Reports show that there is no shortage of angry, militant “New Athiests” who throw reason and civility to the winds. A keynote speaker was Oxford’s Richard Dawkins who equates faith with delusion: “a persistent belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence and brooks no argument.” Dawkins and his ilk regard religious people-especially Christians and, more specifically , Catholics-as deluded faith heads whose minds have been taken over by and irrational superstitions and who are no longer amenable to reason. Christians have , perhaps, been infected by a “God virus”, or as Dawkins would say, a “meme”- and are no longer rational beings.
One observer notes that many athiests are themselves persons of faith, though they won’t admit it. That is, it takes faith-a great deal of faith, of a purely natural kind-to be an athiest. For example, it takes faith to believe that:
* something came from nothing;
* a multiverse (for which there is no experimental or observational evidence) containing an inconceivably large number of universes spontaneously created itself;
* reason came from irrationality;
* highly complex order and information arose on their own from randomness and chaos;
*the personal evolved from the impersonal;
* love evolved from “blind, pitiless indifference,” as Dawkins puts it;
* consciousness came from non-consciousness;
* life emerged spontaneously from non-life;
* morality has meaning in a meaningless universe.
etc., etc., etc.
But most of all, it takes faith to believe that athiesm-either of a doctrinaire kind ot the more common variety of indifference to the existence of God- provides the optimal milieu for humanity to thrive and progress, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.
Yet, since the core assumption of New Athiesm (that in a purely naturalistic, reductionist world-view everything should be proven by science) is itself a philosophical statement that cannot be proven scientifically (where is the scientific experiment that proves that science is the only way to knowledge?) what is the athiest left with but faith? Perhaps the the biggest article of athiest “faith” is that science will eventually be able to explain everything, despite the incompleteness theorem of Godel and the fact that since we are confined within the system we cannot see our universe from the outside.
What was also clearly on display at the rally was that most athiests there are not the warm fuzzy tolerant defenders of their faith, but rather those filled with anger, vituperation, and extreme intolerance directed at religion and religious believers.
Athiest guru Sam Harris goes further and argues that”some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them”, and since athiests believe that religion is evil-that it “poisons everything” in the late Christopher Hitchen’s words- it doesn’t take much effort to see that Harris is referring to religions and the people who follow them.
I must at this point credit Andrew M. Seddon, MD, a family practice physician, author of hundreds of non-fiction and fiction, novels such as Red Planet Rising, Imperial Legions, and Iron Sceptor, for writing much of what is written here. Although Dr. Seddon is not a visitor to this blog, his observations are germane to this thread and deserve an airing.
My favorite delusional Dawkins diatribe is when he stated that he thinks we were designed by aliens, but not God.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoncJBrrdQ8
If Atheism is a faith, then not playing chess is a hobby.
Believers have had things their way for so long they think that’s the way things should be. Things should be nice. (because it’s a religion). Non-believers should be deferential. (because it’s a religion) Believers should not be made to look foolish or made fun of. (because it’s a religion)
For nearly all of history believers have gotten away with the most outlandish, murderous, silly, eccentric, bizarre and illegal behavior because too many people, including atheists, have demurred confrontation because of freedom of religion, which in turn has been abused by believers. In these United States you can literally get by with anything just as long as you call it religion.
Now suddenly, when people say (in effect) “we’ve had enough of your talking snakes and smoting and flat earth, creationism of dinosaurs living with humans like the Flintstones”. “From now on we are going to confront ignorance and superstition when we see or hear it”
Now Bill says, we are “angry, militant “New Atheists” who throw reason and civility to the winds”, too bad Bill. How civil was it to burn people at the stake, how civil is it still to fire people from their job because they are atheists, How civil is it to demand a religious test for public office in spite of our constitution. How civil is it to look the other way, to avert your Christian eyes from child abuse and molestation.
By the way, Bill, welcome back. And Liberty, the next time you want to post a video try and pick one that has not been cut and spliced
I think our founding fathers were pretty smart fellows. They created a compromise that I think we should respect. To those who believe there is a God they acknowledged there is. For those who do not believe in God they refused to define who God is or what faith tradition is the “approved one.” To each his own. Seems sensible to me. We should be so smart and compromise so easily.
An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.”
Madalyn Murray O’Hair
I’m not suggesting that Dawkins is personally going to start mowing down Christians with a machine gun. But what kind of effect do these angry, miliatnt athiests have on their even angrier , more gullible followers such as some who are frequent visitors to this blog?
Perhaps the answer is demonstrated by the person at the Reason Rally who held a sign that read “So many Christians, So Few Lions”. We have only to look back at the history of athiestic regimes from the French Revolution to Soviet Socialist Russia and Socialist Communist China to see how Christians and other religious believers have been treated-and eliminated. And they are even now waging war against Christians in this country from their positions of power in the Socialist regime of Barack 0bama.
To wish to send Christians to the lions is bad enough. But to want to do it in the name of “reason”, as Seddon writes, that is chilling because the universe of the angry New Athiests isn’t founded on reason at all, but on the ultimate unreason: the rejection of the Creator, and His replacement by the limited human mind and the sinful human heart.
Bill–you were doing so well and then the wheel fell off your wagon. “And they are even now waging war against Christians in this country from their positions of power in the Socialist regime of Barack 0bama.”–Facts, my boy, facts. You’ll sleep easier if you try to control your emotions with some facts.
Mike, my remarks are always refuting the oppositions viewpoint. I won’t use the term “evidence” because superstition, magic, fairy tails and the Bible are not evidence of God anymore than DC Comics are evidence of Superman.
Global Warming is the naysayer’s term. The scientific term is Climate Change, and that’s a scientific fact, the evidence is all around you and from scientific analysis and experiment. Global Warming comes for either end of such scientists as Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and that crazy dude on the 700 club who thinks weather comes from sin.
You guys are hysterical, you’re arguing about “whose faith is best”? Really? What’s next, “My dad can beat up your dad”?
It seems pretty implausible that you’ll solve the problem of skepticism, since (if Descartes is right) the ONLY thing you can know with certainty is that, while conscious, you can be certain of your existence (because even if you’re being “fooled” you have to exist to be “fooled”). If that’s the kind of certainty you’re looking for, then good luck. That’s what Gödel’s proof seems to imply, it’s not a refutation of logic and reason, nor does it mean that “all reasoning is equal,” that’s beyond silly. That’s equivalent to saying, “the English language is incomplete, so we must not be able to understand each other anymore. I wonder if all that typing means, “he’s hungry?”.” All Gödel’s theorem says is that there’s no point in trying to create a perfect system of rules for first-order predicate logic (if it’s consistent, it will be incomplete and if it’s complete it will be inconsistent), but logical consistency is still far superior to irrationality.
And let’s face it, our senses are fallible (the straight stick appears bend in the water), but we’re conditioned to “believe” the information we get from them, so it takes a lot less “faith” to believe in something you can physically interact with, but hey, you can have faith in whatever. I’m going to have faith in science and reason because it seems to have the pragmatic advantage of appearing to work (if there is an external world). But that’s just my perspective (and I hate to see Gödel abused).
Phaedrus, Descartes also attributes uncertainty to the machinations of an “evil genie” who spreads the seeds of doubt and confusion – AKA, Satan in many readers’ minds.
How fitting then that Satan is the patron saint of athiests, the person to whom Saul Alinskey dedicated his “Rules for Radicals”. Quite a role model for athiests to follow, and , from the hate-filled rants screamed by the athiests at their rallies, still their guiding light.
hahahahaha Saul Alinskey hahahaha Satan is the patron saint of athiests hahahahaha Athiests don’t go much for the supernatural. hahahaha Heck, just for today skip the facts and go for the humor. hahahahaha
BTW–I would be more worried about violence coming from people who have lost the ability to vote and influence public policy than I would worry about armed athiests. hahahaha
I don’t have your ability to read the minds of others, so I’m unable to comment on “how they read it”. I can tell you that the people who make that comparison (the “many readers”) are just wrong. Descartes was conducting a “thought experiment” and that’s the story he told to get to “radical doubt”(did the genie grant him wishes too?). In other words, that’s the tool he chose to express the idea, “What can you know with certainty, if we remove all information coming in from, and compiled from, the senses?” (since we are aware of the fact that our senses can deceive us – so we can’t trust that information completely). The updated story would be to “be plugged in to the Matrix”. It has nothing to do with Satan, only a conspiracy addled imagination pushing a specific agenda could come up with that. And Larry’s right, it’s a pretty strange thing to say that people who don’t profess to believe in supernatural phenomena are advocating for (and/or are receiving protection from) a supernatural entity.
Phaedrus, I don’t know if you were directing your comment of “my dad can beat up your dad to me or not.” I don’t think you were for I didn’t identify which god or which faith tradition to follow to find that god. I was only trying to make the point that if you do a certain thing as others have done before and you find you get the same results as they do, chances are some force is at work. If a scientist repeats an experiment over and over again and the results are the same chances are some force is at work. No? Does that force have to be God or if it does do I have to know His name? I’m saying you don’t. What is, just is.
“On a farm, there was a flock of chickens. One chicken started talking with another, remarking “How good our farmer has been to us. I think he is an awfully nice man, because he comes every morning to feed us.” The other chicken nodded in agreement, adding “and he has been feeding each and everyone of us here every day like clockwork, every day without fail since we were all just little baby chicks.” Indeed, when queried, most of the other chickens clucked in agreement about how benevolent their farmer was.
But there was one chicken, intelligent but eccentric, who countered saying “How do you know he is all that good? I remember, not too long ago, that there were some older chickens who were taken away, and I haven’t seen them since. What ever happened to them?”
Some of the chickens may have slept a little uneasy that night, but in the morning the farmer came as usual, this time scattering even more corn around. The chickens ate this with gusto, and this dispelled any remaining doubts about the benevolence of the farmer. “You see, there is nothing to worry about. Our farmer had a little extra food, so he gave it to us because he likes us! He is a good man,” remarked one chicken to the others, and they all nodded in agreement, all of them, that is, except one.
The intelligent but eccentric chicken became even more agitated. “He is just fattening us up! We are going to be slaughtered in a weeks time!” he squawked in alarm. But nobody listened. All the other chickens just thought he was a troublemaker.
A week later, all the chickens were placed into cages, loaded onto a truck, and driven to the slaughterhouse.
The End
Moral of the story: You cannot always induce the truth from past experience!”
So every additional repetition of the experience or experiment gives you one more reason to “have faith” in it being the same in the future, but there are no guarantee. That’s the problem, we can’t know with certainty that future experiences will resemble past experiences. I’m comfortable with that amount of uncertainty, but some people worry about it, thinking it might lead to chaos and lack of meaning, so they decide to put their faith in other things. But arguing about whether one should have “faith” in science or God is neither mutually exclusive nor productive (if “each side” already occupies an entrenched position, it’s just a urinating contest which neither proves not solves anything).
I liked the story of the chickens.
Chickens will believe anything. That’s why traveling salesmen like them so much
Substitute Barack 0bama for the farmer in your story, and the gullible and complacent fools who who voted for 0bama as the chickens, and you have a reasonably accurate description of the current USA, and its future under the Socialist regime of 0bama and his minions.
Time to bring PETA into the fray to defend Americans?
Ah it’s nice to have you back Bill. It’s nice to see that you ability to see socialist and other boogiemen where none exists wasn’t hampered by your illness.