Hey All!
With the move to the new domain there is a lot of house keeping that needs to be done. Posts may be delayed or missed entirely while I work through this. Sorry for the delay but I’ll be back to the normal schedule very soon! Thanks for your patience!
~Godless Journey
Hey All!
Just wanted to let you know that I’ve pulled the trigger and purchased my own domain! I can be found over at www.godlessjourney.com . I hope you all keep reading and helping me through this journey of de-conversion.
Thanks again!
So I’m obviously currently using worpress.com’s free version. I was debating on switching to a self hosted site since I have all the systems set up. The cost would only be that of a domain name, as opposed to something like $36/year through WordPress .However I don’t want to lose the followers and reader functions that are present in WordPress.com. So, my question to you, fellow bloggers, what are you doing for custom domains?
Ad Hominem
An ad hominem fallacy is when you use a personal attack on someone during a debate instead of attacking the argument. Something to the effect of when you put forth a solid argument, well thought out and presented perfectly. Your opponent retorts with something to the effect of “how can you trust someone who smoked pot in college?” It does nothing to address the actual argument but will make a person listening to the debate think lesser of the one being attacked.
I see this often in debates between theists and atheists from both sides. Usually from the theists because they’ve been backed into a corner and can’t find a logical way out. From the atheist side, usually a neck-beard trying to start a fight (yes I realize the irony of that statement). But in all honesty I think that putting down these sorts of attacks is not a productive way to go about debating. I think its ok to make an attempt to see the point of view from the other side of a debate. I think this makes for a better dialog. Also you can understand it with out accepting it.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyac3meJml8&w=560&h=315]
Hey All!
As you may have noticed I missed yesterday’s Bible Study. This is probably the hardest content to update and it seems to get the least amount of feedback so I’m asking you all whether or not it’s something you actually want to see here.
[polldaddy poll=9860763]
What if you’re wrong?
I’ve heard this from a lot of Christians “What if you’re wrong, that means you’re going to hell. You don’t want that do you?” Well there are a few things that come to mind when I see this. First and foremost, what if you’re wrong? There a lots of religions out there. What if you picked and / or were born into the wrong one? Do you actually thing that if you were born in another part of the world that you would come to the same belief about Christianity that you do today? I’m willing to bet that if you were born and raised in the middle east that you’d be a follower of Islam. Perhaps if you were born in India you’d be practicing Hinduism. I find it interesting that depending on where you’re born and raised so heavily influences religious beliefs. It’s almost as if man created god instead of the other way around. Seems unfair that you’d be sent to hell for a belief that you’re convinced of due to your culture. I quote a great philosopher of our time, Homer Simpson “Suppose we’ve chosen the wrong god? Every time we go to church we’re just making him madder and madder.”
Secondly, from what I’ve read and been taught, when one ends up in heaven you just don’t want to “sin” anymore. For a god that is so worried about free will that it won’t reveal him/her/itself to the world because it would mess with our “free will” they seem very ready to take it away once you get to heaven. Free will is a subject for a whole other blog post but just one more thought on that. If free will is what keeps god hidden because if we knew they existed then we would have no choice but to worship him, what about Satan? He knew god existed and still chose not to. He was his right hand angel for a while there and still went up against him. Seems that knowing that god exists doesn’t really have a bearing on whether or not we worship him.
If I’m wrong, god has a lot of explaining to do…
Continued from Part 4
With my new career path I thought about how to get what I felt “called” to do. I began going to as many church meetings as I could. Not being able to drive yet I pretty much just tagged along with anything my parents went to. I attended both my parents bible study as well as the high school bible study, being on the worship team I also attended both services on Sunday. I soaked it all in.
As time went on I began to lead worship in those bible studies, which were groups of about 10 – 15 people. I also began to lead some of the studies. Anyone who has done any kind of teaching knows that it forces you to learn more. Problem here, in hindsight, is that I was simply accepting what I was learning as truth with out question. I guess you could say I had “blind faith”. Why would all these adults lie to me?
During high school I had changing interests. I was involved in the school musical freshman year, I was in the chess club (briefly), but the one thing that never wavered was church and the pursuit of the knowledge of god.
I have to go back a little ways and talk about an interest that started back in middle school. I was in eighth grade English when one of my passions came to realization. I loved writing. I wrote poems, stories, tales of my life pretty much all the time. I always had a notebook with me and just wrote what came to mind. I wish I could find some of those now. As I began to do this whole god thing all of my creative juices flowed into that. But the passion of it just didn’t seem to be there. I became obsessed with making sure that the poems I wrote could be come a worship song. I suppressed writing about topics that I found interesting because they didn’t go with what god would want. Eventually I just let it go. I gave up trying. I gave up writing. I wonder where I would be if I hadn’t.
Junior year I took a class in drafting. I would design things (like a model house or a bridge) and then build them. I found this to be a pretty neat thing. There was a course that followed this in Computer Aided Drafting. Basically using the computer to do the designs. I didn’t have much experience with computers at this point (we didn’t have one at home yet…yeah I’m old and my father is a late adopter of technology). This sparked the interest that would eventually shape my career path. I found using the computer easy and interesting. People complain that computers never work the way they are supposed to, but they just do exactly as they are told (as I write this I’m realizing the parallel between my love for the computer and my investment in religion). I tend to retort with “Computers are great at making highly accurate mistakes”. Garbage in garbage out. Much like my brain until recently…
Argument from personal incredulity
Essentially this fallicy is that just because you don’t understand something it’s probably not true. For instance, say you travel back in time 1000 years, ignoring the fact you’d die pretty quick from disease, and you try to explain that the earth isn’t the center of the universe, let alone the solar system. You’d probably be called a heratic, among other things, because the people would have no idea how that would even work.
I played into this fallicy hard for a long time. For instance, I couldn’t think of any other way for people to achieve self awareness on our own. God must have made us this way! This is commonly called the God of the gaps argument, we don’t get it therefore god. I would say that science and religion were meant to work together and anything science couldn’t explain must have been god’s doing. I guess I really didn’t understand how science works, but that’s for another post.
Parable of the Sower Mark 4 1-20
This parable is about how people receive the word of god. It talks about the different ways people reject it and how one accepts it. You know, the ones on the path, the ones, in shallow soil, the ones in the thorns, and the ones that grow great crops. He then tells his close followers what he meant by the whole thing. There is something that appears to be missing and I seem to fall into this category. What about the one who hears the word receives it, produces crops, and then, I guess to go along with the parable, withered and died? Or does nearly two decades of having this as an identity lump me in with the ones that shot up quickly but then died due to lack of soil?
The Parables of the Lamp, Growing Seed, and the Mustard Seed Mark 4 21-34
Jesus goes on to talk in more parables about faith and how it is used and what it should be like. The interesting line that stands out to me is at the end. It says he spoke in parables to all the crowds be only told what they meant to his disciples. He says it’s because of a prophecy in Isaiah. Doesn’t this become a self fulfilling prophecy. If you’ve already read this and wanted to make sure you fulfilled it, knowing it would be a good start.
Jesus Calms the Storm Mark 4 35-41
So they are on the boat at night and a storm kicks up. They wake him up and he says “Quiet! Be Still!” is it possible he was yelling at the people on the boat and the storm happened to calm down at the same moment. Or maybe the storm was a bit less intense than they thought.