The Shadowlit Realms
| Labyrinth of the Mind |
From one Devil's Advocate to AnotherI have mentioned before how I am reading Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, and how I really do think that the book is quite brilliant, and I agree with all the points he makes, and I am loving it, but I being the constant devil's advocate, when I see something which strikes me as incorrect or misconstrued, no matter what side of the argument it falls upon I will bring it up, particularly if a person is saying something I agree with, but then they weaken their own argument's by their errs.
So Harris challenged the idea of the benevolent God and the age old question of atheists, and anyone else who is critical of Christians has been brining up since just about as long as Christianity itself has been in existence, the whole "why do bad things happen to good people" and if God is all powerful and all God, why does he seem to turn his back upon such events. Now the majority of his argument is focused on events such as hurricane Katrina and for anyone who does believe in God, he would be seen as being directly responsible for any acts of nature which occur, and how statistically most of the victims of Katrina were in fact believers in God, so, if he is all good and all powerful how and why did he allow it to happen? For if he is all good, then he must not have stopped it because he did not have the power to do so, but if he is all powerful, then he must have allowed it to happen because he did not care, thus God could not be both all good and all powerful. But he also address the problem of human crime, and introduces the topic with the scenario of a little girl being kidnapped, who would then be raped, tortured and killed, and in all likelihood the family of the girl would be Christian's so how can God being all good and all powerful allow such a thing to occur. This is where I had a problem with what he was saying, because I think he made an mistake here in his attempt to wrap everything up into the box which he wanted to tie up as proof of why atheism is better then Christianity, the problem with this argument is the fact that Harris completely ignores the Free Will defense. Now the Free Will defense might be an easy Christian cop out, used just to sweep messes like this under the carpet, but that does not change the plain and simple fact of it, it is written within the Bible itself that man is indeed given free will, and the reason why an all powerful and all good God can allow or will allow men to injure fellow man is because man must be aloud to make his own decision and choices or else God can never know the true loyalty and faith of man. But in his argument Harris tosses the Free Will argument right out the window and tries to turn a blind eye to it, though any Christian reading this work as he does address his book to Christians as a plea to try and get them to see reason, as well as any one such as myself who has my own strong qualms with Christianity but still has a knowledge of their dogma is going to point this out. I was quite annoyed that he really made the attempt to just slip that one by. Instead of trying to climb the mountain, or walk around the mountain, or blowing up the mountain, he thought he could just throw a sheet over it and know one would notice that it was there. You just simply cannot talk about human actions in relation to God without brining free will into the equation or your whole argument will collapse onto you. The whole point of the sacrifice of Jesus was so that from that point on men would be allowed to make their own mistakes. 3:08 PM - 7/13/2009 - post comment
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 For though All are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them. ~The Monk
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