Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion, since it devalues actual lives and discourages action that would make them longer, safer, and happier. Exhibit A: What’s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals. https://t.co/ppo2bwiVGn
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) May 21, 2020
Evangelicals believe that we will one day have to give an account of our "actual lives" to the Judge of all the earth and that the decisions we make in our "actual lives" can have eternal consequences.
— James Anderson (@proginosko) May 21, 2020
Atheists like Professor Pinker believe otherwise.
You do the math. https://t.co/LFVtF47FhD
Rather than dunk on the latest Steven Pinker tweet I'll just say that I've always wanted to hear more about his wife's paranormal experience and how she (in her words) reasoned it away:https://t.co/cGSxVsfYpE pic.twitter.com/YVHQDYOp2j
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) May 21, 2020
It's an incomplete entry in my file of nonconversion stories:https://t.co/HRskv5KDQJ
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) May 21, 2020
Does, does he know as little about the Christians he's attacking as the atheism he believes?
ReplyDeleteIt sure does sound like it!
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I know plenty of secular intellectuals who are well-educated with degrees from elite institutions like Harvard (Pinker himself has a PhD from Harvard) who are nevertheless utterly ignorant about both Christianity as well as atheism.
Delete"it is true that dominant American religion has tended to push the "If you were to die today..." method of motivation so hard that it doesn't surprise me if some percentage of people get the impression that all that matters to Christians is the afterlife."
DeleteWouldn't that fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the question, which is to use death as a lense through which you look back on your life?
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QUOTE: "One of my favorite grad school professors at Yale once confided to me something that, he said, as an atheist, really bothered him. "Get enough really smart people in a room together, give them enough to drink, and eventually you'll hear stories that don't make sense in an atheistic, materialistic universe." He looked perplexed. And he was right." END QUOTE - Tom Morris (philosopher)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-morris/interview-with-a-philosop_4_b_5522218.html
He seems oblivious to all the humanitarian work including hospitals, food and agriculture development, education, clean drinking water projects, the virtual elimination of human slavery as a practice, human governmental institutions establised on Judeo-Christian principles, and the relief in human suffering in general undertaken during the "actual lives" of prople who believe in an afterlife.
ReplyDeleteOne Person in particular gave His actual life as a sacrifice for people like Prof. Pinker and as a result He may now He freely offer them an eternally longer, safer, and happier life.
Poor guy, apparently so smart, but so encrusted in his stultified ideology that he takes forgranted the actual world he inherited from the actual lives of the very people he disdains. He's like a small spoiled child cursing his parents for their stupidity and wishing they'd never been born, utterly oblivious to the fact that he couldn't survive apart from the means they make available to him, and that he wouldn't even exist apart from them.
Sad.