Jason and Christian, again. I want it known that 2006 was the only time I missed an election. I voted this time, and I was pleased to do so. I enjoy following politics as well. It's just interesting. I'm the political opposite of Christian, though. Stellman knows than I am ideologically flexible enough to be a good time.
It's hard to say I was happy about the results; there is enough variance in the Republican Party itself, with respect to the goodness of government as such that I'm a long way from feeling heady. On the other hand, the Democratic Party is so arrogant, and so fundamentally opposed to my view of the world that they deserve to get smacked. Hard. Over and over again.
Christian's non-faith still seems like a huge non-sequitur to me, although we have arrived at our places from very different starting points. I wasn't raised anything, but my childhood with alcoholics and those recovering from it was such that if you asked me at 12 years old whether there is a God, I would have just rolled my eyes at such a silly question. Of course God exists. Where have you been?
Let's just say that subsequent events do not allow me the luxury of entertaining that question in a vacuum. If you presented me at 18 with the basic Christian assertion that specific things which would not otherwise be known by reason or investigation have been revealed by God, I'd say, Dude, duh. Tell me something I don't know. He talks. He talks loud.
I need to hear more, because there is a difference between talking about God, and talking with Him. People who talk about Christianity and its cultural impact without talking about Christ sound like crazy people to me, no matter what the purpose. If you say, "Jim-Bob is a good guy, despite his Christianity, which I don't believe in," it's an odd statement, in two ways. First, who or what defines "good"? If it has some kind of objective reality, the non-theist already has a huge problem, because if he's not defining the term himself, it's referring to some Good, which everything that exists participates in, to greater or lesser degrees. If he is defining the term himself, he's essentially saying, "I agree with Jim-Bob (or Jim-Bob agrees with me) on whichever matters to which the term applies, and his non-agreement in other things is not significant." But what that would do to the truth-claims of a supernatural Being is less than clear. Suppose Jim-Bob were experienced by you in a negative way. It might make me or you less-inclined to listen to Jim-Bob, but it would not change the veracity or lack thereof of what is claimed.
I guess the whole conversation struck me in that odd way. Don't the laments over a Christian's alleged lack of Christ-likeness sort of presuppose the truth of what's been revealed? If not, it's just a human power-play, because my set of self-derived values would have no more to commend it than anything else.
More to say later.
It's hard to say I was happy about the results; there is enough variance in the Republican Party itself, with respect to the goodness of government as such that I'm a long way from feeling heady. On the other hand, the Democratic Party is so arrogant, and so fundamentally opposed to my view of the world that they deserve to get smacked. Hard. Over and over again.
Christian's non-faith still seems like a huge non-sequitur to me, although we have arrived at our places from very different starting points. I wasn't raised anything, but my childhood with alcoholics and those recovering from it was such that if you asked me at 12 years old whether there is a God, I would have just rolled my eyes at such a silly question. Of course God exists. Where have you been?
Let's just say that subsequent events do not allow me the luxury of entertaining that question in a vacuum. If you presented me at 18 with the basic Christian assertion that specific things which would not otherwise be known by reason or investigation have been revealed by God, I'd say, Dude, duh. Tell me something I don't know. He talks. He talks loud.
I need to hear more, because there is a difference between talking about God, and talking with Him. People who talk about Christianity and its cultural impact without talking about Christ sound like crazy people to me, no matter what the purpose. If you say, "Jim-Bob is a good guy, despite his Christianity, which I don't believe in," it's an odd statement, in two ways. First, who or what defines "good"? If it has some kind of objective reality, the non-theist already has a huge problem, because if he's not defining the term himself, it's referring to some Good, which everything that exists participates in, to greater or lesser degrees. If he is defining the term himself, he's essentially saying, "I agree with Jim-Bob (or Jim-Bob agrees with me) on whichever matters to which the term applies, and his non-agreement in other things is not significant." But what that would do to the truth-claims of a supernatural Being is less than clear. Suppose Jim-Bob were experienced by you in a negative way. It might make me or you less-inclined to listen to Jim-Bob, but it would not change the veracity or lack thereof of what is claimed.
I guess the whole conversation struck me in that odd way. Don't the laments over a Christian's alleged lack of Christ-likeness sort of presuppose the truth of what's been revealed? If not, it's just a human power-play, because my set of self-derived values would have no more to commend it than anything else.
More to say later.
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