It is truly a sight to behold how the fundie evangelicals bluster and bloviate and still get 99% of their endless, self-righteous, sanctimonious spiels wrong. Or contradict themselves. A current "canardic" claim is that atheists are "spineless cowards" because they choose to withhold belief in some deity the fundies proclaim as having absolute, real existence. (Never mind they haven't even offered a necessary condition for its existence yet, far less a sufficient one).
But I want to explore this nonsense further to ascertain just who the real spineless cowards are in the existential battlefield.
The fundies clearly tie cowardice to being non-commital in beliefs, but miss the point. In any other sphere - like UFOs and little Green Men, they are the FIRST to call out "Nonsense!" when THEIR expectations of proof or demonstration aren't met. Yet they see not one scintilla of irony in believing in talking snakes, guys walking on water or raising the dead or some Schmoe getting swallowed by a whale and living inside it for 3 days- and expecting US to accept it along with their duplicitous, genocidal god which they themselves can't even define! Talk about 'pot, kettle, black'!
These yahoos aren't strong or adult enough to question even their corrupt, contradictory "good books' in an honest, forthright fashion (as Bart D. Ehrman did - which led him to cease with the evangelical- believe on the Lord JC claptrap) and then they have the chutzpah and temerity to to call atheists "spineless cowards" !
The fundies mock Prof. Ehrman and portray him burning in "Hell" in their psychotic little cartoons, but Ehrman possesses ten thousand times the courage of ALL the fundies in his pinky fingers.
Let's look at what Prof. Ehrman points out in his recent book ('God's Problem - How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question: Why We Suffer'),p. 126:
"My faith in Christ made me an amateur evangelist, one determined to convert others to belief as well (in the Lord Jesus Christ as personal Savior). But now I've deconverted. And I have to say the deconversion process was not easy or pleasant....I left the faith kicking and screaming"
But at least Ehrman had the cojones to follow where his questioning led him! He wasn't a coward and petrified to examine his scriptures more carefully - like the cowardly fools who try to tar him as "unsaved" or some other BS. Ehrman questioned and saw the light, just as many atheists have - who've scrutinized the existential claims of supernaturalists for decades, and found all of them wanting or intellectually insulting. In other words, we (questioners) have done something the cowardly baby fundies never will. OPEN our minds!
Ehrman's stone cold courage didn't end there as he also notes (p. 127) how his own family - replete with evangelicals - laid the old "Hell card" on him. As he notes, in response to their hell mongering:
"Roasting in Hell was, for me, not a metaphor but a physical reality. No wonder I was so evangelistic in my faith: I didn't want any of my family or friends to experience the fires of hell for eternity, and so I did everything I could to make sure they accepted Christ and received the free gift of salvation. "
Ehrman goes on to note that because of the engrained fear drilled into him, that when he departed his former faith he still questioned whether HE had done the right thing after all. He noted the fear of death and hell "gripped" him for years, even awakening in cold sweats. And yet, despite that, he didn't run back to his former faith for security. He faced his uncertainty and spiritual issues like a man. Despite all his doubts, he knew his search program was genuine and spurred on by the need to seek out truth, as opposed to copping to convenient beliefs just to save his heinie.
But the coward evangelicals want us all to be cowards like them, to cop to a belief we don't really have just to "save" our eternal butts! Never mind they offer no proofs for their claims, all they can do is threaten.
Let's look now at a number of reasons why atheists as well as all seekers, like my Spiritual Scholar friend John Phillips, have hundreds of times more courage than the weak-kneed evangelical god and Hell mongers:
1) Atheists can embrace doubt. We can live with it, as opposed to whining and crying and clutching special books in the middle of the night. We don't need big, pretend Cosmic Daddy to hold our widdo hands. We can face the prospect of being orphans in a purposeless cosmos without compromising our integrity. This has nothing to do with "false pride" as the imbecile fundies claim, but as seeing that after forty or more years there is simply no evidence of the divine in the world. Where was the "divine" when 6 million Jews were gassed, including more than 200,000 infants and children tossed directly into the crematoria to save gas for the adults? Where was the divine then? The blabbering fundies have no answer yet want US to embrace their stupid faith. Based on what?
We have courage here because we have the maturity to face the cosmos as it is without the need to invent supernatural parents to look after us, or specious moralities to justify our outsized human egos.
2) We don't need to run for "afterlife insurance" policies especially underwritten by bad faith, loss of integrity and fear of some imaginary abode that will purportedly burn us. The atheist says, in effect:
"I have the courage to face my honest doubts that anything supernatural exists, including a god. I do this in integrity and not false pride, because I am smart and sensible enough to know the difference. If then any deity really exists and is going to condemn me for my unbelief based on honest doubt, so be it. That isn't any entity I'd want to spend a second with, far less eternity. Let the fundie whackos have him....birds of a feather and all!"
3) The atheist isn't intimidated by fear or all the Hell-mongering the crazed fundies can insert into their stupid cartoons. We are past that. We also realize the fundies are like this because they are intolerant of their fellow Christians - be they Catholics, or Anglicans or others, as well as Jews, and would assign all of them to a new holocaust of their own creation if they could. But instead choose the afterlife holocaust of Hell, by which to exercise their odious Hate- while also claiming the cover of their religious beliefs as justification. Cowards!
4) Atheists have the courage to accept the nothingness at death, which as many scholars have noted, is far more terrifying than any imaginary supernatural realm. With nothingness, there is absolutely NOTHING! You die and you don't even know you did die because your consciousness is GONE! Terminated totally at that micro-second! You have nothing more to experience, no thoughts, no feelings no fears, or imagination. The only thing in real life that comes close is what happens when one is put under general anesthesia. There is no time, no memory, you are counted backward and then suddenly wake up in the post-op room. Now, imagine that forever! No waking up ever!
THIS, more than anything, is what the cowardly fundies are so terrified of. That WE may well be right after all. Then they realize they've wasted their REAL lives trying to convert others, or engaging in blustering tirades against atheists. THAT is why they so obsessively embrace their KJVs, to try to imagine being spared NOTHINGNESS.
5) Atheists have the balls to take Pascal's "wager" and piss on it for the false choice it is. The false choice between preserving their integrity and submitting to fear by copping to a belief they don't really think is valid. Violating their own authenticity.
Fundies, cowards that they are, "accept" the wager yet ignore the value of "God belief" inherent in it, since they still consign other Christians and god-believers to Hell - for not believing in what THEY do! In other words, they only accept the wager on their terms!
6) The atheist thus has the fortitude to acknowledge the parameters of when and why a claimed belief is valid and when it isn't. The fundies will believe in anything (except UFOs) if it's part of their KJV fantasy realm sthick.
These guys would sell their own mothers or kids down the stream if their phony OT god (a genocidal maniac if ever there was one) ordered them to do it. They lack brains, education, compassion, insight and even the most meager testosterone to inquire further about whether biblical contradictions shown them really have a basis. As opposed to immediately trying to find an excuse to erase the contradiction. Cowards!
SO WHO are the real spineless cowards? I say anyone who takes an easy way out, including who plies phony fear or plays "Hell cards" because his dimwit pea brain believes these will have an effect, when it's just the opposite. (Einstein once remarked the true definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If so the fundies who incessantly play their little Hell cards, definitely qualify!)
The cowards are also those who refuse to face up to their own logical inconsistencies (Like crawling under the "Christian" umbrella when convenient to attack unbelievers, then other times consigning their (once) useful fellow Christians to "Hell" because they don't believe every word of the KJV or in the Lord JC as personal Savior).
These inveterate cowards may hide behind the identity of a "pastor" or "preacher" but ultimately they lack the courage to act even remotely pastoral or to preach from their own interior honesty and integrity. Oh, they will "preach" from their good Books and cite chapter and verse from heart, but that's not the same thing. That's parroting, or more likely acting as someone else's puppet.
These cowards merit no respect or even the slightest award for credibility. By calling seekers of truth "spineless cowards" they've foregone any gravitas in their own right, plus have shown who the real spineless cowards are.
But I want to explore this nonsense further to ascertain just who the real spineless cowards are in the existential battlefield.
The fundies clearly tie cowardice to being non-commital in beliefs, but miss the point. In any other sphere - like UFOs and little Green Men, they are the FIRST to call out "Nonsense!" when THEIR expectations of proof or demonstration aren't met. Yet they see not one scintilla of irony in believing in talking snakes, guys walking on water or raising the dead or some Schmoe getting swallowed by a whale and living inside it for 3 days- and expecting US to accept it along with their duplicitous, genocidal god which they themselves can't even define! Talk about 'pot, kettle, black'!
These yahoos aren't strong or adult enough to question even their corrupt, contradictory "good books' in an honest, forthright fashion (as Bart D. Ehrman did - which led him to cease with the evangelical- believe on the Lord JC claptrap) and then they have the chutzpah and temerity to to call atheists "spineless cowards" !
The fundies mock Prof. Ehrman and portray him burning in "Hell" in their psychotic little cartoons, but Ehrman possesses ten thousand times the courage of ALL the fundies in his pinky fingers.
Let's look at what Prof. Ehrman points out in his recent book ('God's Problem - How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question: Why We Suffer'),p. 126:
"My faith in Christ made me an amateur evangelist, one determined to convert others to belief as well (in the Lord Jesus Christ as personal Savior). But now I've deconverted. And I have to say the deconversion process was not easy or pleasant....I left the faith kicking and screaming"
But at least Ehrman had the cojones to follow where his questioning led him! He wasn't a coward and petrified to examine his scriptures more carefully - like the cowardly fools who try to tar him as "unsaved" or some other BS. Ehrman questioned and saw the light, just as many atheists have - who've scrutinized the existential claims of supernaturalists for decades, and found all of them wanting or intellectually insulting. In other words, we (questioners) have done something the cowardly baby fundies never will. OPEN our minds!
Ehrman's stone cold courage didn't end there as he also notes (p. 127) how his own family - replete with evangelicals - laid the old "Hell card" on him. As he notes, in response to their hell mongering:
"Roasting in Hell was, for me, not a metaphor but a physical reality. No wonder I was so evangelistic in my faith: I didn't want any of my family or friends to experience the fires of hell for eternity, and so I did everything I could to make sure they accepted Christ and received the free gift of salvation. "
Ehrman goes on to note that because of the engrained fear drilled into him, that when he departed his former faith he still questioned whether HE had done the right thing after all. He noted the fear of death and hell "gripped" him for years, even awakening in cold sweats. And yet, despite that, he didn't run back to his former faith for security. He faced his uncertainty and spiritual issues like a man. Despite all his doubts, he knew his search program was genuine and spurred on by the need to seek out truth, as opposed to copping to convenient beliefs just to save his heinie.
But the coward evangelicals want us all to be cowards like them, to cop to a belief we don't really have just to "save" our eternal butts! Never mind they offer no proofs for their claims, all they can do is threaten.
Let's look now at a number of reasons why atheists as well as all seekers, like my Spiritual Scholar friend John Phillips, have hundreds of times more courage than the weak-kneed evangelical god and Hell mongers:
1) Atheists can embrace doubt. We can live with it, as opposed to whining and crying and clutching special books in the middle of the night. We don't need big, pretend Cosmic Daddy to hold our widdo hands. We can face the prospect of being orphans in a purposeless cosmos without compromising our integrity. This has nothing to do with "false pride" as the imbecile fundies claim, but as seeing that after forty or more years there is simply no evidence of the divine in the world. Where was the "divine" when 6 million Jews were gassed, including more than 200,000 infants and children tossed directly into the crematoria to save gas for the adults? Where was the divine then? The blabbering fundies have no answer yet want US to embrace their stupid faith. Based on what?
We have courage here because we have the maturity to face the cosmos as it is without the need to invent supernatural parents to look after us, or specious moralities to justify our outsized human egos.
2) We don't need to run for "afterlife insurance" policies especially underwritten by bad faith, loss of integrity and fear of some imaginary abode that will purportedly burn us. The atheist says, in effect:
"I have the courage to face my honest doubts that anything supernatural exists, including a god. I do this in integrity and not false pride, because I am smart and sensible enough to know the difference. If then any deity really exists and is going to condemn me for my unbelief based on honest doubt, so be it. That isn't any entity I'd want to spend a second with, far less eternity. Let the fundie whackos have him....birds of a feather and all!"
3) The atheist isn't intimidated by fear or all the Hell-mongering the crazed fundies can insert into their stupid cartoons. We are past that. We also realize the fundies are like this because they are intolerant of their fellow Christians - be they Catholics, or Anglicans or others, as well as Jews, and would assign all of them to a new holocaust of their own creation if they could. But instead choose the afterlife holocaust of Hell, by which to exercise their odious Hate- while also claiming the cover of their religious beliefs as justification. Cowards!
4) Atheists have the courage to accept the nothingness at death, which as many scholars have noted, is far more terrifying than any imaginary supernatural realm. With nothingness, there is absolutely NOTHING! You die and you don't even know you did die because your consciousness is GONE! Terminated totally at that micro-second! You have nothing more to experience, no thoughts, no feelings no fears, or imagination. The only thing in real life that comes close is what happens when one is put under general anesthesia. There is no time, no memory, you are counted backward and then suddenly wake up in the post-op room. Now, imagine that forever! No waking up ever!
THIS, more than anything, is what the cowardly fundies are so terrified of. That WE may well be right after all. Then they realize they've wasted their REAL lives trying to convert others, or engaging in blustering tirades against atheists. THAT is why they so obsessively embrace their KJVs, to try to imagine being spared NOTHINGNESS.
5) Atheists have the balls to take Pascal's "wager" and piss on it for the false choice it is. The false choice between preserving their integrity and submitting to fear by copping to a belief they don't really think is valid. Violating their own authenticity.
Fundies, cowards that they are, "accept" the wager yet ignore the value of "God belief" inherent in it, since they still consign other Christians and god-believers to Hell - for not believing in what THEY do! In other words, they only accept the wager on their terms!
6) The atheist thus has the fortitude to acknowledge the parameters of when and why a claimed belief is valid and when it isn't. The fundies will believe in anything (except UFOs) if it's part of their KJV fantasy realm sthick.
These guys would sell their own mothers or kids down the stream if their phony OT god (a genocidal maniac if ever there was one) ordered them to do it. They lack brains, education, compassion, insight and even the most meager testosterone to inquire further about whether biblical contradictions shown them really have a basis. As opposed to immediately trying to find an excuse to erase the contradiction. Cowards!
SO WHO are the real spineless cowards? I say anyone who takes an easy way out, including who plies phony fear or plays "Hell cards" because his dimwit pea brain believes these will have an effect, when it's just the opposite. (Einstein once remarked the true definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If so the fundies who incessantly play their little Hell cards, definitely qualify!)
The cowards are also those who refuse to face up to their own logical inconsistencies (Like crawling under the "Christian" umbrella when convenient to attack unbelievers, then other times consigning their (once) useful fellow Christians to "Hell" because they don't believe every word of the KJV or in the Lord JC as personal Savior).
These inveterate cowards may hide behind the identity of a "pastor" or "preacher" but ultimately they lack the courage to act even remotely pastoral or to preach from their own interior honesty and integrity. Oh, they will "preach" from their good Books and cite chapter and verse from heart, but that's not the same thing. That's parroting, or more likely acting as someone else's puppet.
These cowards merit no respect or even the slightest award for credibility. By calling seekers of truth "spineless cowards" they've foregone any gravitas in their own right, plus have shown who the real spineless cowards are.
1 comment:
"But the coward evangelicals want us all to be cowards like them, to cop to a belief we don't really have just to "save" our eternal butts! Never mind they offer no proofs for their claims, all they can do is threaten"
That's what really gets me! They don't even care if we don't love or honor their confabulation or pet fantasy so long as we believe in the Lord Jesus as personal Savior. In other words, ignore the evidence no real God person existed, or that the God from which he came doesn't exist other in their minds and the deluded twits that scribbled their KJVs.
So what it boils down to is simple unadorned BULLYING! No different from the bullies in grammar school that accost a kid in the rest room and tell him if he doesn't agree to bring his lunch money to them they will hand him his head and he will suffer.
The kid has no more interest in wanting to hand over his lunch money than the atheist his integrity, but the bullies don't care.
At least atheists, unlike the kid, are big and adult enough to tell these fundie bullies to piss off.
The damnable thing is they don't see the awful irony in their own disgusting piety. But that is what makes their entire belief system reek like six month old dead rats.
They use ploys like Pascal's wager but don't even process that they don't really accept it as is (which you aptly pointed out) because they condemn other CHRISTIANS to their little Hells as well!
So WHO are they trying to fool?
Obviously their followers, so we know there have to be a LOT of really dumb people in the world!
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