Is belief in a creator a sign of weakness?

Excerpt from the Spectator

Atheism may be fashionable, but most intelligent people believe in God
22 December 2015

Have we ever needed Christianity more than we do today? It’s a rhetorical question, for sure, because the loss of our faith and the inability to confront Islam have never been greater. When I was a little boy during the war, my mother assured me that if I believed in Jesus everything would be OK. This was during the Allied bombing on Tatoi, the military airfield near our country house where the Germans concentrated their anti-aircraft guns. My Fräulein, the Prussian lady who brought me up, was more practical. She handed me a beautiful carved knife that made me feel safer than my prayers ever did.

Today, of course, 74 years later, my prayers are far more likely to give me peace of mind than a knife in my pocket. That’s the difference between being five and 79 years of age. Mind you, now I pray only for the safety and welfare of my children and their mother. My soul I sold to the devil long ago. No prayers will save that loser. At times, during Christmas and Easter, when I go to church, light a candle and sit alone in a pew, all these memories come flooding back, especially my fear of the noisy Anglo-American bombs that rained down around us, and how only the steel in my pocket gave me courage.

Atheists seem to be le goût du jour. Our celebrity culture has no room for faithful people, especially Christians; only Islam enjoys that privilege. In 1966 Time magazine shocked its readers with a cover that asked whether God was dead. I remember it well because Henry Luce died soon after. Was there a hidden message somewhere, I wondered? But Luce was a devout Christian and a great believer in the Almighty, unlike Christopher Hitchens, whose favourite targets were priests, Mother Teresa and God, a Christian God whose followers turned the other cheek. The Hitch had very little to say against Allah because he knew the latter’s followers did not take kindly to cheap remarks against him. Hitchens deplored Christmas, ‘the collectivisation of gaiety’ and ‘compulsory bad taste’, as well he should have, being an opportunist. Atheism gets you in through the front door, Christianity is reserved for the trade entrance. He hated the ‘confessional drool’ that families mailed to each other, especially simple people who believe in love and forgiveness.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is an atheist hard to dislike. He’s charming, learned and intelligent, and never a bully. Ditto some ancients — here I rely on the ancient Athenian Taki and his epigrams — such as Socrates and his ilk. Also Voltaire and Mill, and so on. The first modern to go atheist and announce that God had had it was Nietzsche, who predictably went bonkers. Terrific shits like Freud and Picasso were atheists, as were French fries like Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and our very own H.G. Wells. And James Joyce and Philip Roth. One thing all these talented writers and thinkers have in common, apart from their disbelief in the Almighty, is great physical ugliness. That alone should explain it.

The great 20th-century theologian Paul Tillich wrote that to believe that God is active at all times, being out there somewhere, dwelling in a special place and being affected by events, is a shallow supposition: ‘Literalism deprives God of his ultimacy.’ That’s where ‘there is no God’, the cry from the heart of those who have lost a loved one, comes from. Ditto the old saw that you need God in order to be good. God is what makes us understand the difference between good and evil, take it from Taki.

The ultimate irony, needless to say, is that Charles Darwin said he believed in God. Let’s face it: most intelligent people believe in God, as did most world leaders in the past. My uncle, a war hero in the Albanian campaign when we wiped out the Italians, once told me that he had never seen courage like that shown by priests and medical orderlies in the thick of battle. Unarmed and without helmets, they would give the last rites to the dying and tend to the wounded. While soldiers dived into their foxholes, they would go out in the open field and make the sign of the cross over the fallen. God, in most cases, protected them. Go figure, you non-believers.

This is my 38th Christmas column, and of course it seems like yesterday that I wrote the first one. It was in my father’s London office in Albemarle Street. I used clichés galore and didn’t mention God once, just Christmas parties. I have probably come full circle. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that ‘all men are created equal’ he called the proposition self-evident. It was a very Christian thing to say because not all men are created equal. They have equal rights under God, and it is only a Christian God that ensures the latter. Just look at what Islam is doing to its adherents, how it has cheapened life to the extent that people volunteer to blow themselves up in order to get some rice and some virgins, and compare that to Christianity. The idea of the preciousness and equal worth of every human being is largely rooted in Christianity. Have a very happy Christmas and defend our faith. And, if need be, carry a knife.

HA! He has got all bases covered.

Did you watch The Giver? Or read it? That wasn’t in the pamphlet I received. Maybe it was in your instructions, but it wasn’t in mine. Mine said to tell the truth no matter who said what, that I could lie, and above all costs and detriments, keep running my mouth and know when to shut it. I’m already on it.

Yes, it is undoubtedly a sign of some form of mental weakness. For example: gullibility, lack of reasoning ability, cowardice etc.

godandscience.org/apologetic … faith.html

…and No. 13 below…

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Einstein is probably the best known and most highly revered scientist of the twentieth century, and is associated with major revolutions in our thinking about time, gravity, and the conversion of matter to energy (E=mc2). Although never coming to belief in a personal God, he recognized the impossibility of a non-created universe. The Encyclopedia Britannica says of him: "Firmly denying atheism, Einstein expressed a belief in “Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of what exists.” This actually motivated his interest in science, as he once remarked to a young physicist: “I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.” Einstein’s famous epithet on the “uncertainty principle” was “God does not play dice” - and to him this was a real statement about a God in whom he believed. A famous saying of his was “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

…or perhaps you were simply being ironic. I might have put that first.
Have you ever looked up at the sky and stopped to ask yourself: “But where did it all come from?” Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

I can tell you. It would have been impossible for our reality to be created without it first existing. It could not exist until it was created and it all happened relatively and seemingly simultaneously, from the inside-out and from the outside-in. The spark of creation that set it all in motion held all accumulative data from existence and shunted it back to its very beginning, causing it’s very beginning and thus knowing of its ending before it ever got started. Reality does impossible shit. I could explain how our imaginative processes of trying to figure it all out is what added energy in a gravity well of spirit matter, compressing it into the first particle of actual matter; how those particles became the core of a lot of beings, even what drew huge rocks to pummel them into planetary beings, a part of a celestial consciousness; I could tell you a lot of the give and take of nature and the side realities/alternate; the underlayers and overlayers of reality, divergence to the point of it cancelling itself out for having mapped out every single possibility, every single route until it just became repeats of patterns and cycles.

It does anything BUT boggle the mind. It makes sense at the point you realize that the universe was spurred into motion by the sheer potential of what it would be like if it existed. Its future causing its own birth. In all ways, all direction, stupid asses. Keep looking, it’s the same in every direction.

Some Guy in History,

Had to actually google it. No, I never did either.

Always to tell the truth, no matter what? No need to ever be discreet? To hold back?
Is that such virtue to you? Is that a good survival instinct?

.

lol I don’t think that you have learned that as of yet. You’re far removed from it. :mrgreen:

the fact that you are so quick to ask questions like that; and it is questions like that that do get the negative response; is the same fact that says I shouldn’t even need to or have to answer them. If you’re going to pretend to be the idiot, know that we’ve changed how to treat your specific brand of idiocy.

Really? I wasn’t so quick to ask those questions. But I wonder why you can’t answer them. Or are all of your answers absolute and infallible?

They’re what I call ‘stupid’ questions, because they’re meant to trap people up in the maze of manipulative psychology to make them dance in pitiful fashion for the amusement of others. The fact of the matter is, I had to undergo it enough to overcome it and learn the strength to bypass it to go for the throat.

The ones that came before you made it personal on levels you don’t fully understand. But, eternity is a long time and today is a long day, it was here yesterday and will be here again tomorrow. I bet you I can make you love me in ways that you would be certain that you hated me for.

It would be fun to watch that one. :sunglasses:

Yeah, you would think so until I dragged those who wanted to watch the depravity and get their kicks out of it into the arena and forced them to fight. Forced displeasure on them in so many ways until they hated me and loved me for it.

By the way, Remember when I didn’t take you as a serious threat and actually tried getting your back only for you to come back at me and try to fight me for it?

Yeah. You’re THAT stupid.

No, although I had considered that in reverse. I suspect that you again presuming that negativity, deluding yourself into making enemies that never were there … until you decided to “fight back” against your imagined opponent.

And as you said: “Yeah. You’re THAT stupid.”

Some Guy in History

Did you notice the “I” there? That is your own subjective thinking. They would not be a stupid question for many or at least for some. I was trying to have a legitimate discussion with you. I was NOT trying to trap you or anyone.

There are cases where a lie called a little white lie is more appropriate to spare a person’s feelings, one who is vulnerable and needs more affirmation than condemnation; where telling a whopper of a lie to survive would be highly intelligent and practical. The examples can be legion.

The way I look at it to tell the truth with no discretion, forethought or compassion is simply arrogant and egoistical unless one can do it with such finesse that there would be no losing facing for the other.
Sometimes taking a virtue too far becomes a vice. You may think that my perspectives are idiotic. Mine come from my mind and experience and yours come from yours.

I understand this but do you usually back off? Can you say in all honestly that you do not do the same to others in here?

You haven’t OVERCOME anything if you find yourself “going for the throat”.

These were your words:

All those who don’t want to work, don’t want to fix themselves, don’t want to even try because it’s so much easier being broken and not having to do a damn thing.

We really do have to challenge ourselves at times, don’t we? It can be painful and exhausting but how do we give birth to a dancing star (N) if we never try…

.
You are assuming that there is such a thing as eternity? We can’t actually know this - at least I cannot.

I doubt that very much lol but thank you for the fair warning.
This is where much reflection and contemplation and cognitive thinking come in.
If someone says something like this to a person, don’t you think that it gives one pause to hesitate? After all, a stitch in time saves nine, so to speak. Why begin the journey into love when it will only lead to hate? No great percentage in that.
My question to you would be: Why would you even say that to me or any other woman?
You’re a very intelligent man. Your words and your poetry are beautiful and awesome at times but on the other hand you realize that you need to grow, WORK HARDER, in the realm of becoming more emotionally intelligent - AS WE ALL DO.

There are such things as stupid questions. The ones you ask are stupid questions because they’re not designed for the furthering of answers but for the tearing down of the recipient of those questions who then might try their best to answer them only to be hemmed up and beaten down by verbal fighters such as yourself.

I literally have the accumulative experience of over 15 years of fighting people just like you and the amount of them is beyond count. You are nothing new under the sun. Others of your kind of verbal fighting have claimed to have fought many like me and yet each in turn has been proven to be a liar. And, you all fall at the same points when your tricks are seen through. The evidence that I am a rarity in comparison to people like you is the fact that I HAVE fought so many just like you. You yourself have witnessed in part if not in full some of my fights here with others. And yet, you still took a stab at it.

I have only returned fire here. I have poked holes in peoples theories at times; at other times I have insulted them, yes; but mostly based on how they laid their theories which showed the attitude and mindset of themselves in negative fashion. They were worthy of being insulted and they proved it when they dropped all reasoning and only with insult did give back. I, in turn, at the least, gave them shit to grow with beyond the constraints that I found them in. The proof in it is that we grow all together in the mind and they are limited when approaching me in physicality without respect and without apology; without admitting that they were wrong; to continuing the fight. This is why you see people like Laughing Man, Hahaha, simply walk away. Zoot Allures, Mr Reasonable, Trixie, Carleas even stepped into the ring but for a moment to realize where it was going to go and backed out of it, and still here you are.

In the mind we grow, but each in turn devolves to craven animal in terms of fighting me in this way, the same old verbal manipulations and machinations, the twisting around, the spinning it to make me look bad to avoid the obvious factor that you are the one; ones; that look bad. And, since I am seemingly outnumbered while you all do what you do, I look like the odd one out and yet I do hold treasured gold; I do hold in my tragic existence what so many of you need. And, this is me going for your throat as peacefully as possible. I have quite literally caused aneurysms in people, blood vessels to pop in their heads; given them heart attacks, caused molecules to explode causing sharp pains in toes, legs, random parts of the body. I have, without such mental powers, pushed people to commit suicide.

Regardless of your casing of flesh, regardless of gender, regardless of age; if you’re going to step to the mental plate like a heavyweight and throw haymakers that are vastly dangerous, you will be dealt with. Do you think it’s just random when a parent ‘abuses’ a baby to the point of its death? Do you think it craven of a man to beat a woman to within an inch of her life when she’s pushing buttons? Even in spiritual possession when the person themselves don’t even know the spirit that is fucking with them both, and the person they’re pushing the buttons of, lashes out on them and kills them, they are unluckily in the moment when the lashing out occurred and that creates a mass network of afterlife existences carrying our tragedies wherever we go.

At what point do you think you being a woman means a damn thing to me at all? You have thrown down and ended it in insult; a sharpened thorn underneath the ‘beauty’ and seen all too easily. I’ve pricked myself on those thorns before. Let me show you some new ones that you’ve been pricking yourself on for a while now. They’re poisonous beyond belief and I pack them into every response that I give to responses and attacks like yours. The accumulative damage to you is already greater than you realize.

You, like so many others, come at me with wartime activities; war games. Peace is a motherfucker. A savage beast. It has perfected what all war wishes it could perfect. I think you need to rethink your approach to this before I completely obliterate every bit of who you are, whether male or female, liar or truth-teller. You say I need to become more emotionally intelligent, but the fact is that I’m already far beyond those that think like you. Do you think that I would use such tactics as you do? I find them distasteful. My tactics are fully fleshed versions of them because they are RIGHTEOUS. Not self-righteous, but actually righteous; and that’s something that you and so many others know absolutely nothing about.

I think you all need to learn.

Okay, I’ll bite.

How would you have responded to yourself had you been responding to your own words and not me. These words…

You seem to feel that my response was idiotic and had no validity or legitimacy to them. I disagree with what you said…but give me something to think about. My aim is to learn.

So pretend that you are me lol and respond to your words.

No, don’t pretend that you are me.

Pretend that your words came from me and respond in the way in which you would.
Enlightenment me.
Again, give me something to think about. Point out my philosophical errors, my delivery…et cetera.

sorry, but that’s a hypothetical situation without a good answer. It’s like asking how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop.

The world will never know because that’s not how it played out.

If you refuse to learn what I teach, then what more could I ever do to teach you any damn thing? At that point, you as a student fail yourself AND your teacher by refusing to learn and then furthermore by learning the wrong things for your own self gain, seeing the right, but refusing to admit it and the truth of it is written in your every action; you can’t be so blind as not to see it. It is so obvious. And when the student fails them self in such a manner, they no longer have any right at all to blame or fault the teacher.

Some Guy in History

I don’t think that the tootsie roll pop is a very good analogy. I was simply asking you how YOU would respond to your own statement. The former is random, the latter can be more concrete though not absolute.

I am sure that there are many books at least some that are entitled "The hypothesis of this or the hypothesis of that. For instance, the Hypothesis of Happiness. There could actually be a great number of “good answers” and discussions brought about by these books though perhaps nothing definitive. But is philosophy actually about the definitive.
I was simply asking you how you would choose to respond to your response.

But I don’t think that any good teacher simply gives the lesson…utters words. He/she also explains why they feel that way and they give examples of it.

At this point, I am questioning WHAT IT IS that you believe you have taught me. Constructive criticism itself does have a focal point to it, doesn’t it? and yours was not so constructive at the start. :evilfun:

You pointed out to me that my response shuts down further discussion (paraphrasing of course). You haven’t shown me HOW or WHY and I personally still think that there could be responses to what I said.

You can’t point that out to me unless you point out to me the error of my ways, at least from your point of view.

How difficult can it be for you to show me what you feel I “ought to” have said? considering what you did say. You must have had an “ought” in there somewhere.

[/quote]
Oh, I don’t think in terms of my having failed myself. On the contrary, I was inquisitive and was asking WHY. I was looking for clarification or insight.
I was looking for your “more concrete” point of view ~~ how YOU might have answered your statement. I know that I’m getting redundant here. :mrgreen:

The student may blame the teacher if the teacher does not follow through on the right kind of instructions and if the teacher is not so clear.
The student may blame himself if he doesn’t ask questions. But what is he to do if the teacher is such an absolutist. He is doomed to fail.

I don’t presume to know any specific thing I’ve taught you in terms of what you’ve made applicable to your own life, but I can tell you a decent list of possible things I’ve taught you along with everyone else here since I began posting on these boards based on the possibility of the things you read that I posited or posted and since I can’t claim to know specifics there, yet again, it becomes so much a matter that you’ve gained something from it all, otherwise why the continued interaction?

There are too many different ways to teach beyond what we are taught of teachers and teaching as we look around us, so what I’m mostly teaching is ‘perspectivism’ and changing perceptions to embrace and look through various perceptions and perspectives; to enjoy an experience as a new experience if you can’t enjoy it for what it might be and try to find the catalyst in every action and reaction instead of just the bad and the good and to see it as a jumping stone to the next step. I teach how to turn victims and products of their environment into survivors and crafters of their environment.

I teach everything. What you learn is up to you and whatever else gives you a choice or not and depending on your own personal experiences and perspectives, you see things I don’t and see things others don’t and those others see things we don’t and for all of the close-mouthed nature of the group for all the skeletons in the closet and the verbal hurdles to avoid do avoid the greater risk to run that gauntlet, and yet somehow it’s all coming together through twisted and untwisted routes. I find that my unintentional self-centered perception makes it impossible to truly grasp 100% of the time what others experience their 100% of the time while I’m moving on and memories of my past are just that, memories. Am I capable of sympathy in one given moment only to seem cold when I can’t seem to muster it at another? Does that sound emotional; it shouldn’t.

Things fuck with things for the sake of drama and entertainment; so I teach how to give a better entertainment in the process. And, it’s the same entertainment, I’m just the host of hosts and the centerstage centerpiece, jester in clown-suit complete.

We’re all mad here.

What more is there to be said? Let’s say it. Let’s hash it all out again and again; let’s fight in ever-increasing circles of the same old thing as we push beyond the set patterns. Mixed martial arts of the mind and soul, all of existence, all of creation, all of art from the art of art to the art of war, from crafting buildings to crafting blueprints of destruction, tools of surgery become the implements of torture. What experiences are you missing? By the time your lives are over, you’ll experience a lot, no doubt. All I’m saying is that I paid attention to that; that is my thing, what I notice; close enough to the skin to throw you off. Choice or no choice, to see what goes on in others minds without even trying, just by reading body language and understanding it. And, isn’t it funny that that same body language is just a huge amount of tiny things moving and calling out what’s going on? It’s interesting to think that this goes on all over and yet so many don’t see it simply because their own self and their own manipulations get in the way. They see the twisted version of things and thus can’t truly imagine a conversation with someone beyond the need for the insecurities of ego, pride and vanity to the degree where they become what religions know of as ‘sin’. The duality of everything must dictate that there is a healthy version of these things, a right way to exercise them. And nobody is truly expecting others to be perfect, that’s ridiculous. They’re shell-shocked by their own experiences, ptsd, victims of trauma and avoiding the truth. And then the truth is that healed of that, there’s still the eternal war and song and dance constantly and continuously shifting and turning and we all have to get back up and fight again, that this is what we do, that this is not just how it’s done, not just cycles and patterns, but psychology, true and tried; tested emotion to logical limits and beyond only to understand a complexity of psychology on a mass-consciousness level.

And, beyond teaching, this is the war I’ve been fighting; my charlie foxtrot that others step into; my battlefield. Finding the order in what others would call chaos and knowing it for what it is as I walk through it, every second of my life with one of my mental eyes caught eternally in a staring contest with death, another on life itself, staring it dead in the eye and getting back up even when I don’t feel like it and by the end of every day, get back in swing. And if that sounds like something so simple that everyone does it, imagine drowning in what everyone else thought was a shallow pond that in your own perception was the vastest of oceans and that such a simple thing for so many others has been somes most epic victory of a truly epic fight. And, if that shit puts others to shame, not a damn thing I can do about it and isn’t that just teaching others if they get past the envy and jealousy? Hit’em a couple times until they work properly?

Months ago, I wrote “Shadows On The Wall”. I was standing outside of my workplace and I noticed a weather beaten wall. On the wall, I “saw” the image of a man with his arms held out invitingly. God spoke to me for the world, as he often does. The human and many other species who interact with humans have brains that are hotwired to pick out the face from the rest of the body. For humans that aids in socialization. The chest, arms and legs do most of the movement, yet babies look for the person’s face. When humans look at a conglomerate image, the first instinct is to make it into a face if at all reasonable. I can make a conglomerate of dots, and a human will see a face if a face is anything near reasonable.
The children of god are hotwired to see God’s movement in what the earthly man sees as chance and coincidence. I am desperate and someone comes and gives me 5$ or I find it. Earthly man discounts that activity as chance or coincidence. The children of God see God. The earthly man is missing a faculty like vision or hearing. He cannot see the God that is so obvious to me.

Silentsage
March 2017

Look for John Walker on Facebook. On Facebook, John Walker is the picture of a black man in a martial arts pose. If your nature is to seek the truth, God has given me answers to questions people and Christians do not think to ask