Introduction
"First, each side should accept that both religious belief and skepticism are on the rise"
" Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts"
"All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs... if you doubt Christianity because "there can't be just one true religion" you must recognise that this statement is itself and act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts"
One - there can't be just one true religion
"... we couldn't all be equally right about the nature of God"
"How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?"
"[the statement] "no belief can be held as universally true for everyone" is itself a comprehensive claim about everyone that is the product of social conditions"
"You can't say "all claims about religions are historically conditioned except the one I am making right now"
"skeptics believe that any exclusive claims to a superior knowledge of spiritual reality cannot be true. But this objection is itself a religious belief"
Two - suffering
"Just because you can't see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn't mean there can't be one. Again, we see lurking within supposedly hard-nosed skepticism an enormous faith in one's own cognitive faculties"
" On what basis does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair and unjust?"
"God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself"
"we can know that God is truly Immanuel - god with us - even in our worst sufferings"
Three - straight jacket
"one of the principles of love... is that you have to lose independence to attain greater intimacy"
No comments:
Post a Comment