While there is a lot to love about this great country of ours, objective eyes and minds will tell you that there is a lot to hate as well. For example, the type of deluded people that will read an article like this and exclaim, “This is America, son! Love it or leave it!” (Is it just me, or did you hear “Dueling Pianos” in the background too?) The simple fact of the matter is that this country was founded on dissent. The original idea that has lost its meaning today was, “If you don’t like it, change it.” The fact of the matter is that we are all just too wrapped up in our meaningless lives to actually do something about it. One day, we find something that we are not pleased with in our government only to go back to to our homes to turn on the increasingly biased media, get wrapped up in popular opinion, drift off to sleep only to wake up with a gourmet coffee that drowns away the dissatisfaction of the previous day.

Just what are we number one in, anyway? Well, we’re fat…REAL fat. In fact, we’re numero uno when it comes to people over 15 years of age with a body mas index greater than 30. Lemme think….OH YEAH! Military expenditures. The world as a whole spent $1,470,000,000,000 in 2008. What will America spend in 2009? $651,163,000,000 which is just slightly less than half of what all of the world spent in 2008! Let’s see… We lead the world in oil consumption. With a population of just over 300,000,000 we consume over 20.6 million barrels per day. By way of comparison, China has a population that exceeds 1.3 billion people and consumes only 7.57 million barrels per day. We are also a leader in food waste with about half of the food in the United States going to waste. On average, everyone in the United States wastes about a pound of food a day. The majority of this waste ends up in landfills.

We should be leading the world in several areas. Health care, production, environmental causes, alternate energy research and deployment… The list is long. But we are not. And we will not until there are more of you that realize that it is not wrong to disagree and even loath current policies that are counter productive to the well being of the country. We need more people that are outraged by the way our government represents us and by the way corporate America dictates policy in order to achieve a higher profit margin and a  better stock price. We need more Thomas Jeffersons.

Do You See It?

This is where it starts. Some of you already see it. Some of you are saying, “See what?” This is when a geek takes the time to whip out the camera phone, freezes the picture on the TV, snaps off two pics, edits one of them in GIMP so that those who don’t get it do, uploads them to your website and blogs about the whole ordeal. All this just because a geek thought for sure that there was an RSS icon or two in a cartoon…

Ah...There It Is...

If you want to know the Gospel of God, you have to read the Book that God wrote. I know there are lots of atheists who simply refuse to even acknowledge the potential for the existence of God, the reality of God. But listen. If an atheist says, “God doesn’t exist because I don’t know Him,” that doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. You may know Him, and the atheist doesn’t.

One by one here. We cannot say that God exists simply because God says that he exists. That would be akin to be declaring that I am King of the world simply because I say that I am. There is no proof in a statement like this. If there were, there would be no need for courtroom proceedings.

“I will ask you one last time, Mr. Johnson. Did you murder your wife?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, that settles that, your honor. My client could not possibly have murdered his wife. He just said that he didn’t!”

The second sentence is a generalization made from gross misinformation. “I know there are lots of atheists who simply refuse to even acknowledge the potential for the existence of God, the reality of God.” Actually, the opposite is quite true. The majority of atheists, at least those that are true to themselves, are MORE than willing to admit that there MAY be a God. We simply demand the evidence.

Now, let me turn a little bit philosophical here. Most of you would agree that the most basic fundamental question concerning your existence is not that nothing is here. The question really is that something is here. The question is not Is there nothing? because obviously there is something. I think the real question then is in your reality, the fact that you exist–how do you explain your own reality? How do you explain the existence of anything in the world today?

These are questions that relate to what we call metaphysics. I don’t want to get into metaphysics, but when you ask metaphysical kinds of questions about origins, about reality, about existence, there are basically only three possibilities that exist to answer those questions.

Here are the candidates to answer the questions of origins and reality. Number one, some would say that something came from nothing.

You were here and you arrived here because once there was nothing and then suddenly there was something. I have to tell you, most people don’t buy this argument because it is irrational. How do you get something from nothing? There’s no explanation for that.

OK, so the second possibility is that we’ve always been here. Matter has always existed. Matter is eternal. The reason you and I are here today is because we had parents who were here before us, and they had parents before them and parents before them–and tadpoles and fish before them. We’ve always been here.

This is the view Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, always espoused. You can still see him on television saying, “All that ever was and all that is and all that there ever shall be is in the cosmos.” That’s saying we’ve always been here, and the reason we are here today is we are eternal; we’ve always been here.

Now that view, frankly, has spawned two basic worldviews. One of them is materialism. “We’ve always been here; this is all there is.” The other is pantheism. “We’ve always been here, and there is no god because each of us makes up this concept of what god is. God with a small ‘g.’ We all have our little contribution to make to god.” Corporately, everything in the world: fish, animals, flies, mosquitoes, streams, mountains, people–everything in the world taken together is god. God is in everything; everything is in god. That’s pantheism. Those two systems of belief come from what I think is a mistaken idea that matter is eternal; we’ve always been here.

So, we’ve looked at two possible answers to the question of How did we get here and where did we come from? One of them is that something came from nothing. That seems to me to be irrational. The other one is that matter was always here; nothing came from nothing. That also seems to be irrational.

There is a third possibility most people don’t even want to admit, and that is that God created something out of nothing. He is what is eternal, not you and me. God is eternal. This view is called theism. It asserts that Someone who transcends time and space, Someone larger than everything, the sum of all the parts of our universe, that Someone is the one who created what we have.

There are two problems with the argument laid out here. First and foremost is the fact that a great deal of the population have no real working knowledge of physics or theoretical astrophysics, for that matter. Most do not keep up to date with the latest theories and models. For example, Dr. Woodrow Kroll goes on later to explain that life could not have existed in any other universe. This is a fallacious argument due to the lack of knowledge about other universes existing, let alone precise data of hospitable conditions within said universe. the physics in another universe could be quite different to that of our known universe, thus giving the possibility of “life” being something completely different than what we know life to be. This is an argument out of ignorance. “We do not know or understand how the universe came to be, therefor God must have created it.” This is called the “God of the Gaps” theory. The problem with this theory, for theists, is that as knowledge is increased, the need for God to be placed within the gaps decreases.

Secondly, this is an argument of special pleading. The rules are laid down that something cannot come from nothing, therefore God must have created it. When asked where God came from, the rules are broken and God is given the special circumstance that the rules do not apply to Him. This is illogical. While not one current theory of how the universe began attempts to attribute it as “something came from nothing,” we are told that God has always been. To me, this is more a test of faith than anything. If everything has a beginning, what is God’s?

]]> http://reasonvsfaith.com/back-to-the-bible-program-proves-god-exists.html/feed 4 http://reasonvsfaith.com/time-to-wake-up.html http://reasonvsfaith.com/time-to-wake-up.html#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:29:21 +0000 David J http://reasonvsfaith.com/?p=503 It’s about time that we wake up from our slumber. It’s about time that we removed the blinders that are limiting our field of view. It’s about time that we took the next step as a species.

I have been asked on several occasions what exactly is my problem with religion. For the longest time, I really didn’t know where to begin to do the question justice. Now it’s a whole different ballgame. Lately, I have had some time to myself to really ask myself that very same question.  Now, I understand clearly what “it” was that kept me from submersing myself into any religious meme. Hopefully I will be able to convey everything that I have to say about it properly. A cautionary word before you continue reading: this post will jump all over the place. By the end of the post, I hope that I can tie it all up for you. My apologies in advance. 

One of the main problems that I have with religion in general in the divisiveness that is inherent within it. By its very nature, religion is divisive. Let’s take the Christian religion, for example. Within the Christian religion there are over 34,000 sub-sects of Christianity. Catholics, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Pentecostal, Evangelical, Unitarian… The list is endless and a new sub-sect is born virtually every week. Why? Because every person is different. The way that we think and react to different situations is shaped by our past experiences and driven by our own agendas. While almost every sect of Christianity feels that the Bible is the Word of God (whether inspired or literal), just as many of them feel that it is the Holy Spirit that aids in its interpretation. If this is true, why so many variations? This inevitably leads to finger pointing and, eventually, the old cliche comes out, “They aren’t ‘real’ Christians.”

Divisiveness. All religions claiming to be true, almost all claiming that they are the only way to salvation. Due to the fact that religion tends to deal with the intangibles (such as life after death) and tries to sooth our base fears, defensiveness is built right into it. Who wants to be told that there is nothing after this life? Nobody wants to be told that they will not see their loved ones on the “other side,” let alone that there is no “other side.” With all of these different religions pandering to our fear of the unknown and all of them claiming to be the one true way, is there any wonder that more wars have been and are fought in the name of the combatants respective Gods? Due to the human component, religion can never be viewed as a unifying force.

What most people do not understand about me is that, in all honesty, I believe that we should (in some way) cherish some religious beliefs. Although, not necessarily the beliefs as much as the culture these various religions have produced. I hold current religious concepts in line with those of the past that have shaped our world.

Currently, I feel that there are more pressing matters that rip at the fabric of our society. Those would be the failing false economy, failing governments and the growing power of the banks and corporations. These are some of the things that I will be focusing on in the next post, due out by Saturday the 26th.