I don’t disagree but to whatever extent I had those feelings of revulsion for the deity, I let go of them long ago. For me the more immediate problem was the promises / predictions of the faith never worked, including but not limited to prayer. I hate to frame it as “there was no utility in it for me” because I suppose a theist would say I was just in it for the benefits, but that’s kind of how it played out. And let’s be honest, why would a sane person pursue any practice or belief that not only did not enhance their life, but caused painful cognitive dissonance and frustration? There’s no “there” there.
Oh don’t get me wrong here, Mordant.
Like you I’m long over the anger and revulsion I once felt towards God. If I come across as angry here that’s because my frustration isn’t directed at a non-existent ancient Middle Eastern sky deity. No. That would be stupid and a waste of time.
My feelings of frustration are directed at the wilfully blind and deliberately unthinking followers of this so-called god of love.
I hope that clarifies things.
Walter.
1 Like
Indeed, a quick read of the bible and you cannot do anything but hold your sides kick your legs in the air and bellow with laughter, at the idea the deity depicted is “perfectly moral”, the word moral would lose all meaning to me.
Worth noting that a deity that was truly omniscient would have no autonomy of choice, it would therefore be amoral. Many of the concepts within Christianity are contradictory and therefore irrational, not just Christianity either.
1 Like
I’d say, in that case and as a parent, a resounding YES is in order. You ARE responsible. Many parents today do not take full responsibility for raising their kids. Case in point, the father of the one kid who, with his friend, shot up their classmates in the Columbine highschool shooting. The father’s excuse: “I didn’t know they were into Nazi propaganda or had those weapons!” Yeah right! I say if you don’t want to raise your kids right, don’t have kids! But in the case of “the evils of this world,” nobody is Superman and people will do evil things no matter what our opinion on those things are. We cannot control that. We can only work to help people as much as we can to try to prevent such “evils.” Our best bet is to be secular humanists who live lives within the law and lead by example. I feel that we atheists have an obligation to prove that we can.
I basically agree, but with the caveat that no amount of walk-on-water perfect parenting guarantees a desired outcome with any given child. Children DO have independent wills, and the older they are, the more they can and at times will diverge from parental teaching, role modeling and expectations. They may lack the requisite circuitry to adequately self-regulate and self-reflect in some situations. Some of those deficits they hopefully grow out of before they cause harm to themselves or others; sometimes they never do. There are also more and less compliant or oppositional-defiant children. And parents are distracted by the need to earn a living and manage their other relationships.
In the case of that shooter yes it is very likely indifference or negligence that a parent is that unaware of or proactive about something like Nazi sympathies or a fascination with weapons or violence. But I could be surface-judged for raising my son wrong somehow as the main explanation for why he never thrived as an adult, when the real reason was mental illness. And as Martin Short recently said about his adult daughter who committed suicide a few weeks ago … she did the best she could, until she couldn’t. I wouldn’t assume Martin somehow made his daughter depressed. This is the fourth family tragedy for him, and I think that’s punishment enough, even if for the sake of argument he somehow deserves punishment.
You’re right and I agree. Perhaps it’s just that I live in an apartment complex where the tenants let their kids be destructive all hours of the day and night, showing no responsibility for them. I see this trend in today’s society and, while I do not believe that parents should beat their kids, the should display some kind of responsibility for raising them. If I did one tenth of what these kids do, my dad would have cracked his belt at me, never using it on me, but he got his point across. That’s all I’m saying.
1 Like
Yeah that’s hard to take.
One time my Dad was driving the family home from some activity and saw some sullen-looking adolescents loitering on a street corner and startled my approximately 10 year old self by suddenly blurting out, “They ought to line 'em all up and mow 'em down with a machine gun!”. My Dad was a typical creature of his generation, on the gruff side, but never a violent man. But I think around the same time he had been accosted by some thugs and had started carrying.
So I definitely understand the gut reaction in an environment where that goes on. I think poverty and drug abuse and other things creep in and people collapse around their responsibilities and it didn’t start as indifference to their kids, but at some point the inability to notice things have gone too far and something fundamental has to change, is hard not to judge. Sometimes it’s even just objectively evil. To cross that Rubicon where you decide you don’t care about anything, even your own children.