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Friday, May 22, 2020

The afterlife

9 comments:

  1. Does, does he know as little about the Christians he's attacking as the atheism he believes?

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  2. I know a lot of people, "regular" people, who share Pinker's sentiment, but I'm not sure I blame them. Which is to say, I get why they might think that. It makes me think of my Hebrew instructor (I took it at a JC) who also taught a number of courses on the history of Christianity and history of Judaism (basically, OT and NT history courses for 18 and 19 year olds in a secular setting). His office hour was right after one of these courses and he would frequently comment on the extremely low level of religious literacy of his students. America is profoundly religious but also profoundly religiously ignorant.

    Also, while the Jesus Is My Boyfriend motif seems to have become popular in the last couple of decades, 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.

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    1. 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.

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    2. "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."

      Wouldn'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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    3. hawk: "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."

      Yeah, they should def know better.

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    4. john: "Wouldn'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?"

      I don't know? I was referring to the idea that all one has to do is Ask Jesus Into Their Heart before they die so they don't go to hell, which doesn't seem to me to require any reflection on how one has spent or is spending one's life. Which can lead some people to believe that all that matters is the afterlife.

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  3. 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)
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-morris/interview-with-a-philosop_4_b_5522218.html

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  4. 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.

    One 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.

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