Ok, here we go....
A good question which I will answer as I understand God. He created us in his image. That by the way is the reason we are different to animals as they were not created in his image. That means we have characteristics that animals don't have. We pray, animals don't. Animals eat other animals if they are hungry. We don't eat humans if we are hungry. We use heat to cook food. Animals don't. The only thing that I can think of that makes us worse than animals is that we kill our offspring in the womb, animals don't.
Humans don't eat humans if hungry? Exhibit A. Survival Canabalism. When the society reared human being reverts back to his or her earlier animal state. Add to that the historical gross inaccuracies made by early european and christian slavers that the people of africa or the native americans were animals or an inferior species which were to be in servitude to their own.
http://www.churchsociety.org/crossway/documents/Cway_104_AfricanSlavery.pdf
Being created in his image means that we all have the potential for his characteristics to govern our lives. What stops that happening is sin which in turn produces rebellion. Atheism is nothing more than rebellion against God's nature.
atheism
Line breaks: athe|ism
Pronunciation: /ˈeɪθɪɪz(ə)m /
NOUN
[MASS NOUN]
Disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.
Origin
late 16th century: from French athéisme, from Greek atheos, from a- 'without' + theos 'god'.
There are two attributes that have an affect on us. God's common grace and His personal grace. God's common grace applies to the atheist as well as the believer. For example, the rain falls on the farm whether the farmer is a christian or an atheist. If he exercised his personal grace, it would only fall on the christian farmer's farm. So common grace is not directed. It is given to all.
once again confirmation bias. Making nature fit the storyline.
Personal grace is directed grace to particular people or persons as in if my child is sick and I pray for her healing and she is healed that is personal grace.
If Wises were Horses. Unfortunately it has been my findings with people of orthodox religious ilk that they will happily find every pleasant coincidence to be an act of God.As we know, this little self illusion can be blown out to all grandeur over the passage of time. In terms of praying for a sick child, I could see as a parent the want to pray as a last resort but there are still too many theist who rely on prayer over medicine and end up murdering their own children. Please look at this link:
Revealed Religion is Killing Children
Add to that our conscience which is given by God to us for our benefit in particular and for mankind in general. And this is the rub with atheism. You say there is no God but the evidence is there in you. When you do that which is right, your conscience which God gave you is coming into play. To say that you have a conscience created out of nothing is to say the least poppycock. It had to come from somewhere. So your conscience is the God part of you. Nothing you can do about it as you are born with it.
When a man goes off the rails he is deadening his conscience through sin and rebellion. Often it is not a conscious act. It is something that is built over time and one day they snap and someone is dead.
I disagree. My moral judgement of right or wrong was developed over time by my parents and environment and my own personal experiences. This is true of every human I know. There is tangible evidence which is repeatable through observation. such studies could not be claimed for divine morality.
Bronfenbrenner, Urie. "The role of age, sex, class, and culture in studies of moral development." (1962): 3-17.
Despite what the homosexuals and social revisionists say, a happy family i.e. married mum and dad, children, relations etc. are the most effective socialisers of children in society. They stand the best chance of doing well if that is what they are born into and brought up by. There are exceptions to the rule but they are exceptions not the rule.
As a teacher, I found that the children from broken homes were more troubled than children from intact families.
Another fact is that marriage as opposed to other forms of living together is the best tamer of man's emotions and animal instincts. When marriage breaks down and alternatives replace it is when society breaks down. I have just read a book which says that about 80% of teenagers who fall foul of the law come from a broken family.
This, I will agree with you sir. i am a teacher also. However, a happy family does not have to be a Christian one, I know of more examples than I can count of children going off the rails who have over-religious parents who they cant talk to openly. In fact I was in school with 5 children of vicars who ALL went off the rails. Equally, I know children of parents who are civil partnered, or have one biological parent and another parent who has stepped in after a precious partner left or was asked to leave. Children of had working and loving single parents. So many I would say to negate these as exceptions. I firmly believe that having both parents can only be a good thing provided the parents are good people, if not, a bad family unit can do as much damage if not more by staying than a broken family. That figure is not stated if you consider that 54% of all families in america are broken:
Broken Homes in the United States Are at Alarming Level, Study Finds
As 76% of americans identify themselves as christians this should raise some eyebrows on here. Whereas only 6% of Americans are atheists.
The evidence then is indisputable. Do things God's way and you have a harmonious society. Do things your own way and you have a society that breaks down.
I seem to remember the Nazi's saying something similar...
The other fact that we choose to ignore is that since we have decided we don't need God, we have created our own world of death, destruction, barbarity, carelessness, stress, depression, despair etc all of which are on the rise and in some cases, in epidemic proportions. For instance, there are more wars going on worldwide now than there were in all of the last century. need I say more.
1898-1901 Boxer Rebellion
economic issues and the disputes between the Chinese and foreign missionaries in the wake of the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860). After the legalization of the propagation of Christianity in China around 1860, foreign missionaries were very active in Shandong. But none were more disruptive than the German Society of the Divine Word led by Johann Baptist von Anzer. This missionary order entered Shandong in the 1880s and was aggressive in its intervention in secular disputes and arrogant toward the Chinese. But it attracted converts by virtue of its power to offer protection and support, and the friction between the Christians and the local communities escalated quickly in many areas of Shandong and other parts of China, especially the north, leading to the Boxer Rebellion.
1899-1902 Boer War
The war came as a result of British restrictions which had been placed on the Northern expansion of the Boers in an effort to placate the native African population, who were at this time resisting any European expansion. The Boers resisted and defied British rule and continued their Northern expansion, and the power struggle evolved and progressed until serious hostilities erupted.
1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War
1) Russian ambitions in Asia. Russia wanted trading rights with China and sought bases in Korea and Manchuria.
2) The emergence of Japan as a Pacific power. While Japan had no problems being an imperial power themselves, they did have problems with European countries, such as Russia, being imperial powers in Asia. This is similar to the United States pursuing imperial, or at least imperial-like, policies in Central and South America under the Monroe Doctrine.
3) The need for Russia to unite its people. The Czarist government was under tremendous political pressure to reform and needed an outside threat to take the pressure off.
4) The Russian need for a warm water port.
1910-1920 Mexican Revolution
1912-1913 First and Second Balkan Wars
1914-1918 World War I
1915-1918 Armenian Genocide
1917 Russian Revolution
1918-1921 Russian Civil War
1919-1921 Irish War of Independence
1927-1937 Chinese Civil War
1933-1945 Holocaust
1935-1936 Second Italo-Abyssinian War (also known as the Second Italo-Ethiopian War or the Abyssinian War)
1936-1939 Spanish Civil War
1939-1945 World War II
1945-1990 Cold War
1946-1949 Chinese Civil War resumes
1946-1954 First Indochina War (also known as the French Indochina War)
1948 Israel War of Independence (also known as the Arab-Israeli War)
1950-1953 Korean War
1954-1962 French-Algerian War
1955-1972 First Sudanese Civil War
1956 Suez Crisis
1959 Cuban Revolution
1959-1973 Vietnam War
1967 Six-Day War
1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War
1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War
1990-1991 Persian Gulf War
1991-1995 Third Balkan War
1994 Rwandan Genocide
Total for 20th Century = 31
I'm not going to fill this thread and list them all but look here:
Every battle in the Bible | Constantly Reforming
Total for Period of Old Testament = 88
Secondly the majority of these conflicts have to do with resources. Look at this Graph:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oyO5TwZ72...E/HYQZ970NObo/s640/world-population-chart.jpg
You don't have to be a statistician to see the different in world populace, and as reources become scare, conflict will increase. This is the human animal in action.
....thats all for now. Sleepy time. Sorry for the long post all but do think on these points and read the articles.
