For some reason today I remembered a particular evening when I was dining with a group mostly consisting of strangers. I don't remember much about the conversion aside from a conversation which I overhead parts of but that I wasn't involved in. Toward the beginning of the evening, before the food had been brought out, a man was talking to several women about how Christians aren't bright enough to see the contradiction that a loving God would send people to hell. What kind of Father would torture his children for anything that they did wrong no matter how wicked? Everyone seemed to agree that this was plainly unbelievable.
Then out came food and I stopped listening in on the conversation. After the meal had completed and the dishes had been cleared, I heard the same man talking again to the same group of ladies. This time he was talking about another silly Christian belief. He was saying that Christians believe that if Hitler genuinely repented in his heart on his deathbed he could be in heaven right now. How can God be just and yet allow a single act of contrition to erase an entire lifetime of evil? Everyone again seemed to agree with his point.
Christianity is paradoxical in many ways but it is not contradictory like atheism. An atheist can despise God before dinner for sending anyone to hell and then despise God after dinner for not sending enough people to hell.
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3 comments:
Your perceptiveness and insight are remarkable.
although, if the person were actually an atheist, there would not be a god to despise.
"although, if the person were actually an atheist, there would not be a god to despise."
True, but do most people profess atheism because they do not believe in God or because deep inside they really do and that idea of God offends and angers them? It seems to me that "evangelical" or militant atheists would not exists if at least some did not fall into the latter category.
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