Here.
I guess if you don't believe there is a God, the redemptive power of God to convert the soul needs to be doubted as well.
I guess if you don't believe there is a God, the redemptive power of God to convert the soul needs to be doubted as well.
10 comments:
Wow, just wow. So the millions upon millions upon millions of people who have been rescued by faith in Christ from alcoholism, drug addition, violent gangs, pornography, a life of crime, gambling, spousal abuse, suicidal intentions, despair and meaninglessness... they ought to be discounted on those very grounds???
So now Loftus has gone from living guilt free to living without shame! Like I said in another post, how long before he sinks to "without pity"?
There's just no bottom to the bottomless abyss.
Jezu ufam tobie!
Wow, indeed.
The comments, including Loftus' OP, were such classic examples of so-called atheists declining to understand the fact that if atheism were indeed the truth about the nature of reality, then Mr Woods was one of the very few people authentically living as an atheist, and that they are just poseurs: they just want to dabble their toes in atheism; they want to deny the reality of real moral obligations (of themselves towards others) while holding onto their moral expectations of others towars themselves.
Ilion,
You must have a stronger stomach than me. I tried reading through the comments, but they were basically just one mass of paranoid hatred toward anyone who has found a way out of hell.Not the least scintilla of this much vaunted reason they're always yammering about, just one extended ad hominem against David Wood.
Behavior true to form, at any rate. No greater threat to atheism than an ex-atheist. So they deny the obvious and, in the finest tradition of No True Scotsman claim they were never true atheists to begin with (because, of course, real atheists would never convert).
Now where have I seen such behavior before? Oh, yes! HERE.
Jezu ufam tobie!
"You must have a stronger stomach than me."
I'd say it's VR who has the strong stomach ... or at any rate, the strong skull, as he seems to keep slamming his head into the wall of trying to reason with people who clearly have no intention of reasoning.
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/05/to-hell-and-back.html
From Steve's link:
He descends into the subway as he tells his dark past. Then he emerges topside when describing his conversion.
That plays on Plato's allegory of the cave as well as Dante's Inferno. In addition, Victor Reppert thinks the subway is based on the Green Witch incident in the Lewis's Silver Chair.
If I wished to grant Loftus the intellectual ability to riff off of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, I could imagine he was alluding to this passage in Burnt Norton:
Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.
Many literary scholars maintain that this passage contains an "inside joke" in which Eliot is describing a tube (subway) transfer from the Circle Line to the Piccadilly Line at Gloucester Road Station. The "one way" is by stairway, and the "other" is by lift (elevator). Eliot would make this transfer each morning as part of his daily commute.
But alas, I doubt that Loftus has ever even heard of Four Quartets, let alone read them.
Jezu ufam tobie!
Well, he's got to say something, I mean he can't admit the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, now can he?
So the millions upon millions upon millions of people who have been rescued by faith in Christ from alcoholism, drug addition, violent gangs, pornography, a life of crime, gambling, spousal abuse, suicidal intentions, despair and meaninglessness
Except for the last three, apparently Loftus would say 'But those are great fun things that Christianity doesn't let you experience!'
I’ve thought long and hard about what I’m about to post, so this should not be construed as some sort of “back of the envelope” speculation, but the result of serious pondering.
I wrote in the thread above this one, “I'll come clean here and confess that I frankly do not understand how the atheist's mind works.” Allow me to expand on that a bit. The problem was, as I’m now beginning to see, was one of sincerely trying to find rational thought processes where there were none to find. The second part of that quotation went as follows: “The embrace of such incoherence without suffering from debilitating cognitive dissonance has got to be willful!” Well. I now think I was only half right. Yes, the conscious rejection of reason was indeed willful… but whose will?
About a month ago I posted on this website the following: “Dante warned us that damned souls would suffer the loss of the good of the intellect. Note that he did not say the damned would lose the intellect as such, but rather the good that can come from its proper usage. Recall the obscene imbecility of the Un-man in Lewis's Perelandra, who uses the intellect solely as a tool, to be employed when convenient but dropped unhesitatingly when not. "Reason, wisdom and sagacity" are valued solely as means to an end, but despised when their use may thwart one's aims.”
And so we come to Loftus’s shrill ad hominem and No True Scotsman attacks on David Wood (and all other converts from atheism). Faced with the reality of literally countless stories of personal salvation from very real hells, the atheist simply abandons logic and reason – any fallacy will do in a pinch.
But is it the atheist who is doing the abandoning? I wonder… Maybe it’s time we face up to the implications of our failure to connect with a rational partner when we attempt conversation with an atheist. Could it be that it is not their will which is in control here? To put it bluntly, I am speaking of possible demon possession. At the very least, the truly astounding (and remarkably consistent) inability of certain recently departed posters to this site to think rationally hints at some external power preventing them from doing so.
Ilion blames this on “intellectual dishonesty”. But could it be a case of the intellect having been hijacked by a hostile entity?
Jezu ufam tobie!
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