Design: Religious people invest a lot of themsleves in their beliefs and it shatters one's world to give them up without a new and better explanation of reality.
Yes, and then there's the question of if there is a new and better explanation. Many of the science priestcraft are now so impressed with their own credentials that they've been willing to toss God overboard since the days man first peered into the heavens. Why? Because of a narrow-minded and bigoted church. But since then, science has battled itself as avidly as it battled religion. One hundred and fifty years ago, Ignaz Semmelweis argued that it would be a good idea if surgeons and other medical staff wash their hands. He was immediately attacked by his overzealous colleagues. As Harvard MD John Long Wilson noted: “His doctrine was opposed by powerful members of the academic hierarchy. … The damning evidence that they were themselves the remorseless messengers of death was a scarcely veiled threat to their pride and eminence.” Tied to that was the notion that germs couldn’t cause disease and death, that tobacco could cure cancer, and then there was Fritz Zwicky, who conceived of “dark matter” in the 1930s and was a laughing stock for more than 40 years. Alfred Wegener, in 1912, was ridiculed for his advocacy of continental drift and for decades the idea that scurvy could be relieved by citrus or that pellagra was a vitamin B deficiency.
So until science can tell us for a fact that there is no God and that the order in the creation and operation of the universe, and the complexity in even the simplest of flowers and soaring intelligence of man can be random occurrences, then there will be religion. I’m sixty years old and can’t recall the number of news stories about how this and that discovery will rewrite textbooks — but I wish I had saved them. I would need a fairly large box!
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MadGiant: Sorry, not just JW or Christianity, but none of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam and the Bahá'í Faith) will reflect the wisdom, love or intelligence of your deity because [there] isn't any. And yes, for a deity, he/she/it is mean, vindictive and specially bloodthirsty.
And by whose standards? Yours? If there is no God, neither you nor anyone else has any right to establish any standards of right or wrong. And how was God ever mean, vindictive or bloodthirsty? Because of his destruction of cultures you know nothing about and under conditions in which you are entirely ignorant? How can man, with only a tiny modicum of knowledge, hope to judge a being of omnipotent power and omniscient knowledge and wisdom? Do you know what happens after death? And the people the Lord destroys — do you know what is in their hearts or what their deeds are? Do you know how they receive strangers or whether they throw their children in furnaces while drummers drum to keep the people from hearing the screams of the infants as they perish in the flames? Or whether they engage in profligate sexual fertility rites?
That’s the problem. I read all these atheistic websites that rave about how brutal, bloodthirsty, jealous, mean, barbaric and sadistic God is. The problem lies in their own quickness in judgment, which is why the Lord decrees He is the ultimate Judge of mankind. He knows all the facts going in and where the people will go when they pass through the veil. And He assures us His judgment will be just and true.
Why not believe that?
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