Heretic :An Introduction

Hi Folks.

I am heretic. I have been an atheist for about 25 years; before that I was in turmoil for roughly 5 years; before that again I was a Christian evangelist for about 12 years and before that again I was involved in some of those crazy cults that were around in the late 70’s.
To a lot of people that is about all they need to pigeonhole me in one way or another and many do.
Why do I waste my time in places like this? The answer is twofold
· I have a burning desire for truth and sometimes I find people with an equivalent desire in locations like this.
· I do not like people pretending to be one thing while the truth is something else entirely

I will argue with people about many things but I will only ever attack an idea, not the person that holds it. I may call an idea idiotic but I will not call the person that holds it an idiot. I am someone that desires evidence where at all possible and where no evidence can be presented I may insist that any point that relies on it can only really be guess work.

If you want to know the sort of direction I am coming from then open up youtube and watch videos of the following people
· Christopher Hitchens - Reporter
· Sam Harris - Author, philosopher and neuroscientist.
· Daniel Dennet – Author, philosopher and cognitive scientist
· Professor Richard Dawkins – Author and evolutionary biologist
· Professor Lawrence M. Krauss - Theoretical physicist and cosmologist.
· Richard Carrier – holds a phd in History and wrote a fascinating book on the historicity of Jesus (in English it is a book on the probability that Jesus existed)

While I am not an expert in any of their fields (otherwise I would be getting the big bucks and you could well be boycotting my lectures or speaking tours) I do find their arguments persuasive, compelling even. Though these impressive men do put a good case the principle reason I am no longer a Christian is the emptiness of Christians, Christianity and the bible.

I have been disabled for 11 years and suffer from a destroyed shoulder joint, a chronic pain condition and the side effects of three pain killers.

I still consider myself married to my wife that died just over 5 years ago and we would of celebrated our 37[SUP]th[/SUP] wedding anniversary last week. I have three children Rosehannah (37), Nathan (36) and Adam (32).

I have no doubt that there is enough ammunition there for people to start tearing me apart but I somehow think that they are not the people I want to talk to.

One last point, I live in the mostly secular state of England (in spite of having Bishops in the House of Lords) and I suspect that I will be debating with people from the religious United States (in spite of having a [sometimes ignored] separation of Church[or religion]and state).

Your Friendly Neighbourhood

Heretic

Glad to have you join the conversation. I have heard of your friendly neighborhood Spiderman but not your friendly neighborhood Heretic. Looking forward to your post. If I have not welcome you yet I will do so now. Welcome to CC.

Hello Heretic
welcome ! I myself am a former atheist and know where you come from . I though has a change of heart . Just prepare your self that some of us here are going to try to get you to have a change of heart too!
Being of different beliefs doesn't mean we can't be civil. I hope you enjoy your stay and just maybe we can help you to understand that Christiany is far from empty.

Blessings
Bill

Welcome to CC!

Welcome. May I suggest a short study on Hermeneutics and then a read through the bible and some commentaries.

You will be asking questions about creation in chapter 1 of the book having never read chapters 40 - 66 of the book. Things like "In the Beginning" and "new creation" and "since before the world began" might be new or ignored concepts for you. Having done so feel free to make comments and observations and assertions and also feel free to ask questions.

Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God ...

Again ... Welcome

"May I suggest a short study on Hermeneutics and then a read through the bible and some commentaries."

I suspect that a plain reading of the text and my logic skills as a programmer would be sufficent, maybe add a touch of common sense.

Please. If you make a claim that is extroadinary compared to the natural order then I will ask you to provide extraordinary evidence to back up your claim. A few quotations thrown into the mix don't hack it depending where they are from.

As to "Hermeneutics" this is a topic that I do not have time to study and I suspect Jesus, if he existed, didn't require his listeners to have a background in "Hermeneutics" to understand what he was saying.

Peace

Heretic

Welcome Mr. Heretic to the board.

I'm curious, after reading your list of popular atheists that you follow, have you seen any of the debates with William Lane Craig? He has done debates with at least the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and also Dawkins. (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8)

There are also some really good apologetic books out there such as The Reason For God, and On Guard.

Anyway, welcome to the board

I have seen some of the debates and to be honest Mr Craig let his side down.

As for the book you recommended I would be up to my neck in suggested reading, most of it of no real value, until I just got so bored I would feel like giving up on life and the debate would be no further forward.

If we cannot talk to each other in plain English then we will probably not know what we're talking about. I will however watch the youtube clip just as a reminder but not tonight.

Peace

Heretic

God bless you, Heretic. Richard Carrier got busted for inappropriate conduct towards women and has lost the status he used to have. Have you ever tried Ravi Zacharias of RZIM? Secondly, the separation of church and state is working in this country, the problem is that the state is starting to demand the church change its theology or else. The letter of Thomas Jefferson was to the Danbury Baptists, to point out that the government would not interfere with the church. Finally, have you ever played the game Heretic by any chance?

I tried for a yr to become an atheist. I felt like it would lead to so much liberation and independence. But somehow my mind is not simplistic enough to accept atheism. To believe that reality can be reduced to such simple sensory interpretation just seems like a child-like fantasy. Maybe you can help me better understand how to let go of my intellect and reason and embrace the hope that tiny little finite beings such as ourselves on this tiny little cosmic rock orbiting this tiny insignificant ball of gas could ever be so confident and self-assured to know that we can dismiss the hypothesis of God so easily. Until that time, I shall remain a follower of the one Man who seemed to make all of reality make sense.

Huge fan of William Lane Craig.

"Please. If you make a claim that is extroadinary compared to the natural order then I will ask you to provide extraordinary evidence to back up your claim. A few quotations thrown into the mix don't hack it depending where they are from."

One question, what is the evolutionary basis for human appreciation of aesthetics? How do we define certain things as beautiful or extraordinary?

I'm also going to give you a suggestion and I've given the same message to Richard Dawkins at one of his book signings as well. Instead of arguing and debating with religious people, get busy making religion irrelevant. Start building hospitals and setting up charity groups. Begin doing missionary work and reaching out to children dying of starvation and malnutrition in Africa. Until you demonstrate in real pragmatic ways that people CAN be "good without God," I will found it difficult to believe.

BTW, do some research into the link between atheism and autism. It might help you understand why so many atheists are so socially crippled.

Peace back atcha.
We are evaluating a literary work here and hermeneutics is a literary interpretive system. You may have studies Data Structures and Fundamental Algorithms, searching and sorting, Heuristics, Encapsulation, Recursion, data types, Venn Diagrams, Boolean Logic, programming languages and such like. Hermeneutics is a similar comprehensive approach - logic and logical fallacies and language studies are a part - and there's more much more. So true it is and right you are that a few verses (strings?) thrown around will not complete the structured programming you are about to get involved in. Carry on ...

willfollowsGod said "God bless you, Heretic. Richard Carrier got busted for inappropriate conduct towards women and has lost the status he used to have."

That still leaves his impressive piece of work.

willfollowsGod said "Finally, have you ever played the game Heretic by any chance?"
Some time ago but yes.

Rosered said "To believe that reality can be reduced to such simple sensory interpretation just seems like a child-like fantasy.”

I can see your problem. Simplicity is the way the universe works. The step back to everything being made out of the 118 elements from the periodic table is a hard one for most. We then find out the elements are made from smaller simpler building blocks electrons, protons and neutrons. We then thought the matter finished. The guys at CERN then started smashing these tiny building blocks into each other and finding even simpler particles [I'll stop there because the simplicity of the particles and how they fit together is a bit too simple for me to get around].

Take another example of computer programs. At its simplest a computer is made of machine code, this is normally made up of blocks of 1's and 0's. It is very difficult to write programs in machine code because we find that is difficult to imagine the solution to big problems while having to cope with all those 1's and 0's. For this purpose machine code evolved into assembly language. Assemble Language is made up of various collections of machine code that performed regular actions. Assembly Language made life easier for programmers for a while but when customers demanded bigger and bigger programs new languages had to be created in order to simplify the task of even more massive programs. We now have four of what are called levels of complexity or generations of computer languages and each language is suited to one or more types of task. All of this being said merely hides the reliance of computers on the ones and zeros which make up the machine code that makes the only real programs the computer understands.
Simplicity is what the universe is made of, just as 1’s and 0’s are the only language a computer understands. Wherever we see complexity we need to look a little closer and we will find simpler systems performing tasks and interacting with each other.
Simplicity is the building block of all that we see and hear, everything. To look at the wonder of the universe from impossibly large galaxies to sub atomic particles and know there are simple rules that everything follows. We don’t yet know what all those rules are but the way things are going we will find them pretty soon.
Simplicity does not mean easy. Simplicity merely shows us the way, how easy things are is merely a matter of how much time we spend in study and practice.
Rosered said “One question, what is the evolutionary basis for human appreciation of aesthetics? How do we define certain things as beautiful or extraordinary?”
Yes we see beauty all around us, the beauty of a flower, and the beauty of the stars above. This at first a difficult ‘ask’, where did we get this from. Let us look at the opposite first. Our sense of revulsion. To look at a body or animal rotting on the ground, covered in various parasites, insects and worms. We look at it we find it revolting – what purpose does this have. The answer is quite simple; those that did not find it revolting and eat it either developed immunity to food poisoning or developed a sense of revulsion were the ones likely to survive. We are quite skilled as pattern recognition machines, we see patterns everywhere. We also can place objects on a scale. Once we have one end of a scale we can imagine the other end of the scale. If revulsion is one end of the scale it is not too difficult to imagine the other end as an appreciation of beauty. It could just as easily been a scale of what is good to eat. Never look for a complicated answer when a simple one would do.
Rosered said “ Instead of arguing and debating with religious people, get busy making religion irrelevant. Start building hospitals and setting up charity groups. Begin doing missionary work and reaching out to children dying of starvation and malnutrition in Africa. Until you demonstrate in real pragmatic ways that people CAN be "good without God”.
I don’t know how things are in the United States so I will give examples from the United Kingdom.
When soldiers came back from WWII they were very different from those same soldiers that entered the war a few years. The political party that recognised this and tuned into them knew that they needed a land “fit for heroes”. On the back of this was built The National Heath Service. A service that is free at the point of delivery, it is paid for through taxation. This was created by the socialist grouping and we know it as Labour party, they seem to have a lot in common with the Democrats.
We also had a system of free education right up to University level until about twenty or so years ago. Including in the mix were Universities like Oxford and Cambridge. We now a system like yours where students have to pay for their education, currently about £9,000 a year, and this is paid back throughout their career once their income exceeds a named amount. I think it is 9% of any income over £21,000.
Another example is “Live Aid”. A punk rocker saw an appeal for help for the people of Ethiopia. People dying, children starving – you know the kind of thing. Instead of sending some loose change he did something remarkable, he motivated a whole generation to change things. Many people died in that famine but ordinary people have helped permanent change in Ethiopia. Were those that donated during those simultaneous concerts religious? Some of them probably were, but mostly from US I suspect. On this side of the Atlantic most probably had no faith. The fact is that ordinary people responded irrespective of whether they belonged to a religion or not.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2001/dec/21/voluntarysector.fundraising
This is a link to an article that demonstrates that poorer people gave a higher proportion of their income than the better off.
Project Guttenberg is a library of 50,000 “out of copyright” books which are put into the public domain.
Linux – The only competitor to the mighty “Windows” operating system is created and updated by computer programmers giving their spare time to this very high quality project.
People that are religious probably are involved in these projects but I suspect if they started them or were the majority working on it then they would be shouting it from the rooftops.

That was quite an effort on a Sunday morning.

I don't get a lot of free time but I will try and answer as many questions as I can. [remember it may take 30 seconds to ask a question but will take many many times that answer]

I will try and get around to any question I missed.

Peace

Heretic

"We are evaluating a literary work here and hermeneutics is a literary interpretive system"

If we were evaluating a literary work then there would not be as much hysteria about the meaning of this word or that but churches have been split asunder for the sake of a word here or a word there. We have a situation where there are thousands of churches, many of them related to others. There have even been wars between states, or more horribly within states, religious wars were fought for centuries in England between Catholics and Protestants.
The problem we have in studying the bible is that many questions will provoke emotional responses and the body of the debate is forgotten while there are emotional shouting matches. I have seen debates disintegrate into a real mess when somebody has been poked by a stick in a sensitive spot.
If I participate I will use my common sense, logical skills etc etc. If I have made a mistake I’m sure people will point it out to me.

Peace.

Heretic

I have a set of views that I am fairly sure are self consistent. I am open to new ideas if I am presented with enough evidence and if you have the same outlook then we will get along just fine..

Peace

Heretic