Listening To Young Atheists

[ploomf]

It's interesting to me that most former Mormons become atheist/agnostic. A small number do eventually join another religion but most don't ever really seem to get interested in religion again. I had a brief stint where I considered myself agnostic before beginning my long slow journey back to God.

 

There are several reasons for this but they really boil down to one thing, they don’t trust religion and God anymore. They feel angry and betrayed and they are determined not to be tricked again.

 

 

[WillT]

If the person isn't being intellectually lazy, i believe it'd be pretty exhausting and time consuming. This argument doesn't only apply to atheists. If a sheikh told you that your disbelief in Islam was due to you not living a Muslim lifestyle, would you adopt Muslim practices to find out whether Islam is more true than your current belief system? What if he challenged you to fast during Ramadan?

I'm not saying its a valid argument for belief. I argued against the author in a reaction paper we had to write. Mainly because its a "works based" approach to the gift of faith. In other words, God is portrayed as having some arbitrary "holiness" mark you have to hit before He'll pay attention to you. That's pretty clearly not what Christianity has taught historically. I think that same argument would have been easily accessable to the atheists in the class (all of whom said they were raised as Christians), but the chosen argument was one of not wanting to give up the pleasures of their current lifestyles.

[Kia ora]

 

Except you're disproving your own assertion here, because we have revealed truths indicating that fornication is sin, and guess what? It feels pretty good. Your friend proves that. But fornication is objectively sinful.

 

What does objectively sinful mean?

 

Let me say again, I don't consider myself to be a Christian.

 

When Abraham attempted to kill Isaac, I don't think he was sinning. And even if the angel hadn't stopped Abraham, and Abraham had killed Isaac, I don't think that would have been a sin either. Even though by any morality you care to name, the killing of your innocent son is a heinous and immoral act. But Christian tradition doesn't think of Abraham in that way, because Abraham is the father of faith and not the father of murder.

 

I think sin is subjective in the sense that it always concerns a subject. I don't think of sin as dirt that sticks to certain actions and not to others. I don't think sin exists outside somewhere in the world. I think sin is a misrelation of the subject to the ultimate Subject, God. So I think sin is what a person is and not just what they do. Abraham was a person of faith, and his action of attempted murder was the action of a person of faith, whereas a person who was acting not out of faith would be killing for another reason.

 

So to bite the bullet, I don't think fornication is objectively sinful.