I'm Just Askin'...
1. Given the fact that hominids, in something approaching modern forms, have walked the Earth for between 100,000 and 200,000 years, why did god, who ostensibly is interested in human salvation, wait so many tens of thousands of years to reveal himself and explicate the means by which to be saved?
2. Why do atheists who otherwise make consistently good arguments, and seemingly have a firm grasp on the issues, choose to believe, and advocate on behalf of, the superstition of objective, prescriptive morality, when, clearly, scientific investigation of the natural order can only tell us what is, while telling us nothing of what ought to be?
3. Inasmuch as, according to the Christian religion, sinful man is redeemed--is granted salvation--by his saving faith in Jesus Christ, if there is an eight-year-old boy who lives in a remote, tribal part of Africa, or perhaps South America, and who dies at that young age with Jesus' message of salvation having never penetrated his village, what becomes of him?
4. Why do atheists who are intimately acquainted with Darwinian theory, and who comprehensively understand universal common descent, persist in the superstitious, speciocentric belief that humans, apart from the rest of our Tree of Life brethren, are special and, in some nebulous way, meaningfully different from everything else that has evolved?
5. Why do some Christians, when they hear that a prominent atheist, such as Christopher Hitchens, has gotten sick, fall all over themselves to declare (seemingly gleefully) that god has inflicted the disease as a "public humbling" when, in nearly every case, the same Christians would probably decline an offer to walk around a cancer ward and inform the patients that they are being humbled by the deity?
2. Why do atheists who otherwise make consistently good arguments, and seemingly have a firm grasp on the issues, choose to believe, and advocate on behalf of, the superstition of objective, prescriptive morality, when, clearly, scientific investigation of the natural order can only tell us what is, while telling us nothing of what ought to be?
3. Inasmuch as, according to the Christian religion, sinful man is redeemed--is granted salvation--by his saving faith in Jesus Christ, if there is an eight-year-old boy who lives in a remote, tribal part of Africa, or perhaps South America, and who dies at that young age with Jesus' message of salvation having never penetrated his village, what becomes of him?
4. Why do atheists who are intimately acquainted with Darwinian theory, and who comprehensively understand universal common descent, persist in the superstitious, speciocentric belief that humans, apart from the rest of our Tree of Life brethren, are special and, in some nebulous way, meaningfully different from everything else that has evolved?
5. Why do some Christians, when they hear that a prominent atheist, such as Christopher Hitchens, has gotten sick, fall all over themselves to declare (seemingly gleefully) that god has inflicted the disease as a "public humbling" when, in nearly every case, the same Christians would probably decline an offer to walk around a cancer ward and inform the patients that they are being humbled by the deity?
posted by The Jolly Nihilist at 9:20:00 PM
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