apologetics, witness, evangelism, christian, god, atheism, atheist
In a nutshell, this is my problem with Christian apologetics:
What Christian apologetics actually attempts to prove:
There is a Supreme Being.
This Supreme Being (hereinafter "god") is both omnipotent and omniscient.
God requires/desires worship.
God is capable of, and does, reward worship and punish nonworship.
The correct form of worship is Christianity.
The correct form of Christianity is the apologist's particular brand of Christianity.
I've never seen anyone successfully prove all that. I've seen some arguments for the existence of god that look really good if you're unfamiliar with science and logical argumentation, but what about the last two steps? Proving god doesn't prove that your particular church has gotten it right. Realistically, the arguments from Muslims, Jews, Hindus and anyone else are as convincing as the Christians'. They've all got holy books, supposedly written by god, so that's no help. They've all got holy men and women, holy shrines, holy ceremonies- how is one to choose?
If you take a step back from whatever you were raised with, it boggles the mind.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
4 comments:
Comments are for you guys, not for me. Say what you will. Don't feel compelled to stay on topic, I enjoy it when comments enter Tangentville or veer off into Non Sequitur Town. Just keep it polite, okay?
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What's not to understand?
ReplyDeleteThe Christian knows he's right because of the self-authenticating testimony of the holy ghost.
All Christians of a different sect and all non-Christian religionists also have a strong intuition that their beliefs are correct, but their personal religious experience is inauthentic.
Duh.
silly me . . .
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that I have seen arguments that even come close to addressing is the first topic: proving a Supreme Being. They have a plethora of very old arguments that really don't prove a hell of a lot.
ReplyDeleteThen only thing pertinent to attempts at verifying that Christianity is the right religion is by claiming that the Bible is reliable and therefore Jesus resurrected and therefore Christianity and all of its other claims are true. A difficult case to make, obviously...
Exactly. Assuming you could prove the existence of god, you can't really get from proving god's existence to proving your particular brand of religion is the "right" one without some serious leaps of, well, faith.
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