Original Sin?

Quote: FrGamble

I am neither."
FrGamble

You're wrong that there is a personal
god that sits up nights worrying about
you. Everything else is a byproduct of
that false belief.

Wikipedia is very accurate. More so than Britannica.

Quote: stinkingliberal

The Catholic Church has much to apologize for. However, doing so would force them to step down from the moral high ground they claim. You seem to want to inhabit that same ground by claiming moral superiority over all those who are not believers.

I completely agree! I believe that the only true moral position is humility. Without recognizing you are far from perfect you shouldn't even begin to point out someone else's faults. Jesus but it perfectly when He told us to first remove the wooden beam from your own eye so you can see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother's eye. Now this reasonable and historically true statement that the Catholic Church has much to apologize for, how in the world does it mesh with the lunacy you began your post with:

Quote: stinkingliberal

The multiple and near-constant bloodbaths perpetrated by the Church.

Even you have to admit that this is a twisted exaggeration born from some other place than the facts. Read the Wikipedia article I linked to about historical revision and you can see that you are wrong.

Quote:

Deny it as you might, you've taken dozens of swipes at atheists and have insinuated over and over that they're not good or moral and that atheism leads to war, rape, murder, and unsightly blemishes.

I maintain that I have not said this, but since you won't let it go I must not have been clear. So let me say that if I said what you claim above I was wrong. Atheism does not lead to evil and atheists are not bad people or morally depraved. Atheism does nothing to inspire or move people to commit evil actions or good actions for that matter. It does nothing to stop people from doing evil or from doing good. To borrow a phrase from Evenbob it is nothing. It claims that there is no God, no inherent meaning to life or purpose, no afterlife and no judgement.

Quote:

If so, one wonders how mostly atheist Europe has achieved its peace and prosperity of the last several decades. They have no Church to tell them how to behave. How do they manage? Can you answer that? Are they all evil?

Look back at recent history and see if you can write with a straight face that Europe is a bastion of peace and prosperity. To use your words the 20th century was a near constant bloodbath and more people died in Europe during the last century than all the other so called "religious" conflict combined. That is simply history.

Quote: Evenbob

You're wrong that there is a personal
god that sits up nights worrying about
you. Everything else is a byproduct of
that false belief.

Why do you say I'm wrong?

Quote: FrGamble

I would hope that my good Jewish and Muslim friends would extend to me the same courtesy. I would hope they wouldn't think that I was totally wrong but that there was something of what I believed that resonated with their beliefs.

I knew I'd regret this....

Look, you come up with a being who knows what every quark, lepton, hadron, neutrino and boson is doing at all times in the entirety of a universe billions of light years across. How do you reduce that to a narrow creed, or even a set of narrow creeds?

Quote: FrGamble

Why do you say I'm wrong?

Really? That's your question, you don't know
my answer by now? Do you know that doctors
who work in mental institutions get therapy
themselves twice a week or more? The reason
is, humans are so susceptible to suggestion,
even a trained doctor is not immune. To stay
who they are, and not be twisted by the fantasies
of their patients, they get regular therapy.

Imagine getting a child when they're very
young and filling his head with religious
nonsense. He's be that way all his life, it's
not his choice. Not really fair, is it.

Are you saying someone has filled your head with this atheism nonsense as a kid? That is not fair and is so sad. Do all you have to support your beliefs are stories that someone fed you as a child? Is all you have to try to show someone who thinks differently they are not correct is empty words and falsehoods? Is this why you won't even read Wikipedia?

Quote: Nareed

I knew I'd regret this....

Look, you come up with a being who knows what every quark, lepton, hadron, neutrino and boson is doing at all times in the entirety of a universe billions of light years across. How do you reduce that to a narrow creed, or even a set of narrow creeds?

You can't. That is why humanity from the beginning of time has had so many stumbling attempts to describe, define, and doctrinize (new word) God. No one will ever fully understand God. God will never fit into our creeds. However, it makes a difference when God reveals Himself to us, as He did through Abraham and the prophets and finally in Jesus Christ. It is as if instead of us continuing to grope around in the dark God Himself lit the path for us. But something I always keep in mind is that God is always more, always greater.

Quote: FrGamble

Are you saying someone has filled your head with this atheism nonsense as a kid? That is not fair and is so sad. Do all you have to support your beliefs are stories that someone fed you as a child? Is all you have to try to show someone who thinks differently they are not correct is empty words and falsehoods? Is this why you won't even read Wikipedia?

Atheism generally comes about when a person RESISTS the indoctrination he/she receives as a child because he/she is unable to reconcile that doctrine with his/her observations of the world. Religious belief is almost always instilled in a person before that person has a chance to think critically for himself. From an evolutionary standpoint, we generally take everything our parents say as complete truth up until the age of roughly nine. That's a good survival strategy--when Dad says this or that is poisonous or dangerous, it's better just to trust him rather than test the theory. But it also means we assimilate the false beliefs and views of our parents as well. That includes religion.

But here's the distinction. Atheists don't proselytize. An atheist parent would encourage his child to think for himself and form his own belief system. It's actually child abuse to use our natural proclivity to listen to our parents to instill a religious belief system in a child who doesn't have the critical thinking abilities (yet) to evaluate that system. The Jesuits understood this--"give me the child, and I'll give you the man." The sooner you indoctrinate the child, the harder time he will have resisting it later in life.

Quote: FrGamble

Are you saying someone has filled your head with this atheism nonsense as a kid? That is not fair and is so sad. Do all you have to support your beliefs are stories that someone fed you as a child? Is all you have to try to show someone who thinks differently they are not correct is empty words and falsehoods? Is this why you won't even read Wikipedia?

Father Gamble, you call yourself a Christian and pretend to want to engage in constructive dialogue! How can you do that when you characterize someone's worldview as "nonsense"? That's being abusive and narrow-minded. Those aren't Christian qualities, supposedly. I wonder if you actually are a priest, given that you say such nasty things about people who don't share your belief system. Most of the priests I've known--and I've known many--were genuinely good people and were far from sure about the nature of the world and God. Because of that uncertainty and their basic civility, they didn't lecture people of other beliefs--or those who held no supernatural beliefs at all--that they were morally compromised and believed in nonsense.