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A comment on “Crazy Bible” by Ray Comfort
People criticise Christians for saying atheism is a religion, set of dogmas or a belief. Atheism is indeed a belief. Saying it isn’t is mere denial of the obvious reality. If I do not know whether a cat in a box is alive or dead, it is not a question of it being both, it is a question of which of these alternatives you believe. One will prove to be correct, but up to that point, both believe. The one who says the cat is dead is not able to say he has fact on his side in view of the absence of evidence of life. The cat is in the box.
If God means, as He tells us He does, to save a people based on their choice in faith and love, then forcing them into faith by parading himself means that the criteria would not work and we would be forced back onto works salvation. In such a case we would need to be good, and there obviously is a problem with being good. I can’t do it and neither can you. That’s why the whole world from Creation onwards contains a structure whereby we may in good conscience believe that the Creator came into Creation to take the punishment so that we could be forgiven based on belief, and so does the Bible. The Bible contains things which invite you to either dismiss it in scorn or to try to see things through the eyes of God. We are told truth in a way that the proud will find it only too easy to reject, while at the same time they readily absorb the lies of the world, from abiogenesis through to the idea that Satan is not controlling politics. The faithful on the other hand find it easy to believe God’s word, and are ultra skeptical about the lies of the world.
So both are belief systems. One is a belief system whose proponents know or ought to know is a belief system, the other is a belief system many of whose proponents think is honest science.
Response to Father Christopher Howse’s article in the Telegraph on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela
I am pleased to see someone underlining the risk of spiritual pride that a pure works-religion thing like a pilgrimage can bring. If my understanding is not wrong, pilgrimages started in Spain after the moors got cleared out and the common people needed to be appeased as that was one thing they had appreciated under Islam – a bit like the way in East Europe newly westernised states keep the communist holidays but rename them, as the communists did previously in some cases to the religious ones. The charm of pilgrimage in the mediaeval times was that it was the one time the feudal system was cast aside, and both serf and master would tread a road together. Relieved from their onerous chores and welcomed with refreshments along the way, the medieval pilgrimage was the nearest thing they had to the company outing, and the fashion spread out across the Catholic world from Spain. Read the rest of this entry