I wish to thank Rook for reviewing my website. I should pull the Einstein tract. It seems fallicious, dubious etcetra. I will pull it if Rook will review another tract that I will post this week, entitled "The True Meaning of Christmas." or the one regarding "Easter Sunday is a great Day." This is a small blog entry just to thank Rook Hawkins. He's a gentlemen in that I have not responded much to his sincerity in searching scriptural arguments to counter mine. I must respect him for his effort.

I would like to address one thing Rook said regarding the bible door tracts website. http://bibledoor.no-ip.org/ also http://bibledoor.blogspot.com

War On Christmas Image Concept

By Jim Walker

Introduction

People have slaughtered each other in wars, inquisitions, and political actions for centuries and still kill each other over beliefs in religions, political ideologies, and philosophies. These belief-systems, when stated as propositions, may appear mystical, and genuine to the naive, but when confronted with a testable basis from reason and experiment, they fail miserably. I maintain that beliefs create more social problems than they solve and that beliefs, and especially those elevated to faith, produce the most destructive potential to the future of humankind.

An essay by Richard Dawkins:

The argument, like a good recipe, needs to be built up gradually, with the ingredients mustered in advance. First, the apparently oxymoronic title. In a society where the majority of theists are at least nominally Christian, the two words are treated as near synonyms. Bertrand Russell's famous advocacy of atheism was called Why I am not a Christian rather than, as it probably should have been, Why I am not a theist. All Christians are theists, it seems to go without saying.

Of course Jesus was a theist, but that is the least interesting thing about him. He was a theist because, in his time, everybody was. Atheism was not an option, even for so radical a thinker as Jesus. What was interesting and remarkable about Jesus was not the obvious fact that he believed in the God of his Jewish religion, but that he rebelled against many aspects of Yahweh's vengeful nastiness. At least in the teachings that are attributed to him, he publicly advocated niceness and was one of the first to do so. To those steeped in the Sharia-like cruelties of Leviticus and Deuteronomy; to those brought up to fear the vindictive, Ayatollah-like God of Abraham and Isaac, a charismatic young preacher who advocated generous forgiveness must have seemed radical to the point of subversion. No wonder they nailed him.

I just saw this blog feature and thought I'd vent a little.

My boyfriend's mom sent us a letter in a pink envelope with curlique handwriting. And on the inside, pictures of burning demons. She made sure to highlight the areas about "living in sin"

"God" the Ironworker and why the freewill defense fails.

In brief: If there is an omnipotent, omniscient creator, then this creator is perfectly responsible for every aspect of his creation, as an omnipotent, omniscienct creator is necessarily responsible for creating every parameter of existence. Thus it follows that the free will defense for the problem of evil must fail, because freewill cannot coexist with a perfectly responsible creator.

Let's review:

It necessarily follows that such a creator is 1) is responsible for creating the concept of free will, 2) responsible for creating its limits/parameters 3) responsible for granting it to his creation (when he need not have done so, despite the possible deleterious outcomes it might cause for his creation) and 4) responsible for the character of the person and the nature of the environment, which of course dictate choice!

Imagine that you have a home, a life. You have a job, and all the knick-knacks and bric-a-brac that make your home just a little brighter. Your spouse also has a nice job, and between the both of you, and a good budget plan, you are able to pay your bills, buy food for your family, and occasionally you manage to treat yourself to a show or a good restaurant or maybe purchase something deeply desirable.

Now, imagine that you lose your job, and find yourself unable to find employment elsewhere. Perhaps it is that you cannot find employment in the field to which you are trained and you don't know how to do anything else. Perhaps you are just too old and in a state or city where nobody wishes to hire someone of such advanced years. For whatever reason, you simply cannot find work. You start to get really depressed.

PASCAL'S WAGER

The is a rather famous logical argument for the pragmatic benefit of believing in god as opposed to defending his actual existence. As such, it is intriguing because it is intended to gain believers without having to solve the impossible problem of offering proof of God's existence.

Therefore, Pascal's wager is alluring in its simplicity. It's really an attack on'agnosticism' (in the colloquial sense that agnosticism equates with "being undecided" between theism and strong atheism) , for it states that the requirement of certainty is a false one. It states the following: Either God exists or he does not. If he exists and you are a beliver, you "win" everlasting life. If he does not exist and you are a believer, nothing is lost, because you gain or lose just as much as the non believer. However, If he does exist and you are not a believer, you lose out on eternal life. Of the four possible permutations: