Split Thread Signs of the End Times

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Paul Bethke said:
Now I am very sad as you do not know for sure—but we creationist do know for sure that Yahweh is the Creator.
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Remember, I USED to be a creationist. Some of my early writing on the topic is STILL in circulation in heavily edited form as Creationist apologetic, having been sub-licensed by a friend who was, at the time, very close to my way of thinking. I know the mindset because it used to be mine. (Just be sure to get the English Version, as the Spanish translation is crap.)

Paul Bethke said:
So much more easy to grasp, than something you are not sure of.
So how do you console yourself?
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Ah, that explains much. You're religious because the unknown terrifies you. That's a core difference between us, perhaps the most fundamental difference. The unknown excites me. It intrigues me. It makes me want to learn and explore. The unknown terrifies you to the point where you have to cram every corner of the unknown with mythology so you can pretend the "unknown" is really "known."

You ask how I console myself. I respond that it's an irrational question. The human mind needs consoling from things it fears or things that harmed it. The unknown does neither to me. You might as well ask me how I console myself after eating a perfectly cooked and seasoned steak, or after drinking a pint of my best homebrew beer. I don't need to be consoled as a result of something I enjoy.

For me, the unknown is a place to start exploring. For you, it's a place to plaster over with pages of scripture so you don't have to look at it anymore.

Paul Bethke said:
All in good time, time is regulated by this very great and powerful God--then you will get your wish, which will not be as you expect.
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It's sad really. You're spending your life looking forward to a revenge fantasy.
 
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halleyscomet said:
Remember, I USED to be a creationist. Some of my early writing on the topic is STILL in circulation in heavily edited form as Creationist apologetic, having been sub-licensed by a friend who was, at the time, very close to my way of thinking. I know the mindset because it used to be mine. (Just be sure to get the English Version, as the Spanish translation is crap.)



Ah, that explains much. You're religious because the unknown terrifies you. That's a core difference between us, perhaps the most fundamental difference. The unknown excites me. It intrigues me. It makes me want to learn and explore. The unknown terrifies you to the point where you have to cram every corner of the unknown with mythology so you can pretend the "unknown" is really "known."

You ask how I console myself. I respond that it's an irrational question. The human mind needs consoling from things it fears or things that harmed it. The unknown does neither to me. You might as well ask me how I console myself after eating a perfectly cooked and seasoned steak, or after drinking a pint of my best homebrew beer. I don't need to be consoled as a result of something I enjoy.

For me, the unknown is a place to start exploring. For you, it's a place to plaster over with pages of scripture so you don't have to look at it anymore.


It's sad really. You're spending your life looking forward to a revenge fantasy.
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:thumbsup: So well said, especially the highlighted bit.
 
Paul Bethke said:
So while you do not know how life began, and what the organism from which all things originate was, you resort to hypothetical conjecture.
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That's what people do when they want to actually look for the answer to a question. They observe things, then form hypotheses about how they think the observed phenomena might work, and then they carefully test those hypotheses, discarding those that fail to show a relationship and further pursuing those that offer a promise of understanding. I could swear that there was a name for this methodology.
 
halleyscomet said:
Ah, that explains much. You're religious because the unknown terrifies you. That's a core difference between us, perhaps the most fundamental difference. The unknown excites me. It intrigues me. It makes me want to learn and explore. The unknown terrifies you to the point where you have to cram every corner of the unknown with mythology so you can pretend the "unknown" is really "known."

You ask how I console myself. I respond that it's an irrational question. The human mind needs consoling from things it fears or things that harmed it. The unknown does neither to me. You might as well ask me how I console myself after eating a perfectly cooked and seasoned steak, or after drinking a pint of my best homebrew beer. I don't need to be consoled as a result of something I enjoy.

For me, the unknown is a place to start exploring. For you, it's a place to plaster over with pages of scripture so you don't have to look at it anymore.
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I love this mindset. It's what I've been slowly working toward over the past ten years—part of the reason that I joined this forum after I found it. A lot of my final hangups are about this very subject: the unknown. If I spend too much time thinking about it, I get physically nervous. I start to freak out in my head. It does scare me, and I admit that's when the mythology is quite comforting. Even though I know it's not the right answer, and in fact is the wrong answer, it's an answer, where no one else is offering one. Even writing this out, my palms are getting a little sweaty. In those cases, I want to believe. I'm pretty certain there's nothing to believe in, but for me it would be nice to have a set of answers that address all the questions.

But again, they're just an answer, and they're not right.

I appreciate hearing that there is life after belief.
 
Paul Bethke said:
That is true my failure to understand that which is absurd—well in time it will be shown that Yahweh is the Creator, so in the mean time I will endure the ridicule for my so called failures.
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I don't so much view you with ridicule as I do pity. You clearly can't deal with the world you live in, so you've invented fantasies to comfort you with the promise that you have super-powers and the ability to sweep away everything that you're frightened of. And when your attempts to demonstrate those powers fail miserably, you can't even bring yourself to admit that you were wrong.
 
halleyscomet said:
Ah, that explains much. You're religious because the unknown terrifies you. That's a core difference between us, perhaps the most fundamental difference. The unknown excites me. It intrigues me. It makes me want to learn and explore. The unknown terrifies you to the point where you have to cram every corner of the unknown with mythology so you can pretend the "unknown" is really "known."

You ask how I console myself. I respond that it's an irrational question. The human mind needs consoling from things it fears or things that harmed it. The unknown does neither to me. You might as well ask me how I console myself after eating a perfectly cooked and seasoned steak, or after drinking a pint of my best homebrew beer. I don't need to be consoled as a result of something I enjoy.

For me, the unknown is a place to start exploring. For you, it's a place to plaster over with pages of scripture so you don't have to look at it anymore.



It's sad really. You're spending your life looking forward to a revenge fantasy.
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Nom'd.
 
RobRoy said:
You have no idea how heartening that is today. I'm gonna have to take a few minutes to absorb that statement. Thank you.
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I too was raised in conservative Evangelicalism. I was indoctrinated to think that the world was only a few thousand years old, that evolution was a failure that had been abandoned at the research level and was only still being taught in schools, that homosexuals were perverts, and that the Rapture was sure to come before the end of the 1980s. Not to mention that everyone who didn't share my beliefs was doomed to an eternity of unimaginable suffering, even my dearest friends and family. I was twisted with guilt over my perfectly normal human sexual desires and certain that no one else was as weak and lustful as I was. I started doubting in my mid-teens, and by my early twenties, I realized that I just couldn't believe it any more. Not just the hard-core stuff, but any of it. If anything, the realization made me feel much better.
 
Foster Zygote said:
I don't so much view you with ridicule as I do pity. You clearly can't deal with the world you live in, so you've invented fantasies to comfort you with the promise that you have super-powers and the ability to sweep away everything that you're frightened of. And when your attempts to demonstrate those powers fail miserably, you can't even bring yourself to admit that you were wrong.
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It's all part of that "the universe should be simple enough for a second-grader to grasp" mindset. We let our second-graders learn to deal with the world they're going to have to live in, but haven't enough experience of yet, by a two-pronged process of teaching them about its realities and letting them believe in some fantasies to ease the process- Superman, Spiderman, and the Kardashians. At some point, we wean them of the fantasies- but, by cultural inertia, allow them to continue to believe in the fantasies of the Bible, stories that shouldn't impose on the credulity of a child, but are demanded by adults.

Paul wants to be a second grader for life.
 
For some weird reason, so many people would rather believe that a god of some sort that which they cannot identify, which they cannot see, and that they will never know is the one responsible for our universe as opposed to naturalistic explanations which they can identify, which they can see, and which they can know.

Ugh! I guess some folks simply so insecure about their own abilities to understand the truth of a situation that they find it better to embrace the fariy tale explanation of the situation instead.
 
Crossbow said:
For some weird reason, so many people would rather believe that a god of some sort that which they cannot identify, which they cannot see, and that they will never know is the one responsible for our universe as opposed to naturalistic explanations which they can identify, which they can see, and which they can know.

Ugh! I guess some folks simply so insecure about their own abilities to understand the truth of a situation that they find it better to embrace the fariy tale explanation of the situation instead.
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To be fair, eventually all understanding leads towards relativity and quantum physics, and that is some WEIRD stuff right there man. I can understand why someone might resort to fairy tales when the alternative is a world where the ladder problem is one of the simpler ones.
 
Foster Zygote said:
I too was raised in conservative Evangelicalism. I was indoctrinated . . .
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Thank you also for sharing. I suppose there are lots of these kinds of stories that simply aren't told, or that I'm not seeing. This gives me a lot more faith (haha) in humanity.

turingtest said:
Paul wants to be a second grader for life.
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Some days I do too. Thinking is hard.

Crossbow said:
For some weird reason, so many people would rather believe that a god of some sort that which they cannot identify, which they cannot see, and that they will never know is the one responsible for our universe as opposed to naturalistic explanations which they can identify, which they can see, and which they can know.
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Keep in mind that we're taught, told, trained from almost the start that these things are true. Usually, the ones doing the telling and reinforcing are our nearest and dearest, and adhering to their knowledge and wisdom is a thing that keeps us safe, even productive. We don't want to question them, and we certainly don't want them to be wrong. It's a fundamental social construct which at its very core goes against the grain to try to break.
 
RobRoy said:
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Originally Posted by Crossbow View Post
For some weird reason, so many people would rather believe that a god of some sort that which they cannot identify, which they cannot see, and that they will never know is the one responsible for our universe as opposed to naturalistic explanations which they can identify, which they can see, and which they can know.
Click to expand...

Keep in mind that we're taught, told, trained from almost the start that these things are true. Usually, the ones doing the telling and reinforcing are our nearest and dearest, and adhering to their knowledge and wisdom is a thing that keeps us safe, even productive. We don't want to question them, and we certainly don't want them to be wrong. It's a fundamental social construct which at its very core goes against the grain to try to break.
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It's only necessary to break it when the social construct is set up as an opposition to the acceptance of naturalistic explanations. Personally, I can't see the need for what is essentially an add-on to those explanations, with no explanatory power of its own; but there are plenty of perfectly reasonable people who have no problem with reconciling the two things, a god and nature. Paul is an outlier, an extreme; extremes tend to be louder, but that doesn't make them more substantial.
 
turingtest said:
It's only necessary to break it when the social construct is set up as an opposition to the acceptance of naturalistic explanations.
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No argument here. I was simply explaining how the mindset comes to be. It's not a matter of people being willfully ignorant—or at least, it's not "just" a matter of willful ignorance. There are deep-seated reasons that rejection is difficult, and staying the course is easier, even if it requires some hoop jumping to accomplish.
 
RobRoy said:
No argument here. I was simply explaining how the mindset comes to be. It's not a matter of people being willfully ignorant—or at least, it's not "just" a matter of willful ignorance. There are deep-seated reasons that rejection is difficult, and staying the course is easier, even if it requires some hoop jumping to accomplish.
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Agreed; my wife is a Bible-believing Christian, but strictly, I think, by cultural inertia. Which is a good thing- if she had the depth of Paul's ignorance and the strength of his conviction by it, we'd be in trouble.
 
turingtest said:
Agreed; my wife is a Bible-believing Christian, but strictly, I think, by cultural inertia. Which is a good thing- if she had the depth of Paul's ignorance and the strength of his conviction by it, we'd be in trouble.
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Funny, mine too, but a small step further—mine is LDS/Mormon. Same idea though: it's mostly "cultural inertia" (I like that term), else she would never have married me!
 
RobRoy said:
Funny, mine too, but a small step further—mine is LDS/Mormon. Same idea though: it's mostly "cultural inertia" (I like that term), else she would never have married me!
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Are you familiar with the Irreligiosophy podcast? It's an articulate yet profanity saturated podcast by former Mormons.

http://www.irreligiosophy.com/

Some of the interview episodes are particularly fascinating. For example they interviewed Nathan Phelps, one of the people who escaped the infamous Westboro Baptist church cult. Then there was the hilarious multi-episode battle with Kirk Hastings, which spawned a parody, my own apologetic book dismantling some of Kirk Hastings' other writing and an x-rated private detective gay porn parody which had a sequel.

Damn, I'd forgotten how much fun was had from one podcast reviewing one bad book by one thin-skinned, rage-monster conservative Christian.

Anyway, I'm reminded of the podcast not just because you mentioned Mormons, but because Paul Bethke reminds me of Kirk Hastings. For starters, they've both defended the verse requiring a raped virgin to marry her rapist, if he pays the silver.
 
halleyscomet said:
Are you familiar with the Irreligiosophy podcast? It's an articulate yet profanity saturated podcast by former Mormons.
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Nope, but then I don't seek out Mormon or former-Mormon stuff. I know enough, as I grew up in Utah, but I've never been one and, now, never will be.

This is interesting though. I may check it out, as I certainly understand the LDS culture.
 
RobRoy said:
Nope, but then I don't seek out Mormon or former-Mormon stuff. I know enough, as I grew up in Utah, but I've never been one and, now, never will be.

This is interesting though. I may check it out, as I certainly understand the LDS culture.
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They also cover a lot of non-Mormon territory. The multi-episode take-down of Kirk Hastings and his, er, "book" for example was all about mainstream conservative apologetic and creationist dogma.

Just be prepared. If you go back far enough there's an episode where the first 20 minutes or so are the two hosts repeating the anatomical term for a portion of the male anatomy over and over again. Fast forward. There's an actual episode after that test of patience.
 
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