Originally posted by josephw
Don't take everything I say so personally. I was speaking in general terms about that which prevents anyone from acknowledging God in their life.
PsychoPawn is humorless.
Even so, his or her atheism, although arrogant, appears more reasonable than the blind faith that anyone that questions the existence of God just hasn't looked in the right places, or has a closed heart, or whatever it is you're trying to say.
One day, while reading a competent work of history, or maybe the great American novel on my parents' front porch--I was maybe sixteen or seventeen at the time--some "elders" who were maybe two, maybe three years older than me stopped their bicycles and asked me what I was reading. It turned out that they couldn't care the slightest about my book, but were looking to start a conversation that could segue into one about a book they wanted to give me.
The gist of the conversation was that if I would ask God to show me the truth, I would come to see that the gift book--a work partly plagiarized, partly bad history, and partly ? (I wouldn't learn these things for many years)--was the TRUTH. Well, I prayed as sincerely as my Catholic self would allow, and I found no peace giving any credibility to that odd book, even though it contained some remarkably interesting passages. Rather, one might say that the Lord led me further and further from that church rooted in errors that are almost symptomatic of some of the epistemes central to American thinking through the first half of the nineteenth century in America. Or, one might blame the public schools and public universities where I spent some 25 years or so occupying student desks.
Now, you probably have all sorts of reasons for rejecting the teaching of those "elders" that were barely old enough to shave, but I can assure you that I sought the answers through prayer and it led me away from them. This experience, and similar ones with similar assurances from others with divergent notions of "truth" led me not to the sort of atheism trumpeted by PsychoPawn and other like minded sorts, but to the recognition that there are certain things that I don't know--I call this view agnosticism. But not knowing the Truth (if there is even such a thing) does not mean that I am ignorant of error, and that includes 89.754 percent of what self-professing "Christians" have posted in these esteemed RHP forums during the nearly four years that I've been here reading them, not to mention a good bit of what's been put forth on the other side.
I may not know what is true, but I most certainly have learned to recognize what ain't.
BTW, I think gendered pronouns get in the way quite a bit. Given that God even as most dimly imagined cannot possibly suffer the limitations of testosterone induced blindness, "He" seems most inappropriate. If you won't use some sort of gender ambiguity to cover the limitations of Western European languages (s/he/it comes to mind as a viable alternative), then at least recognize that the generative powers of the feminine portion of the animal world, including such primates as humans, is closely akin to the attributes of CREATOR and use "she". While this recommendation does not necessarily lead us closer to discernible and verifiable truth, it at least has the virtue of carrying us a little ways from known and certain ERROR.
christianity
19 Sep '08 12:432 edits
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