Had to turn off the comments again, the porn bot came back worse than before when I tried to put them up. I'll turn them on again in about a week to see if that works. I will try word verification if that doesn't work or something else. Must keep up with my hate mail.
Before I turned it off I found a piece of snark from an atheist jerk who recited two common atheist snarks, a. I only believed in God because I liked the idea and b. that I should believe in atheism because "science gave you the computer you use." In effect, the argument is that science gives us things we want, science gives us things we like, it makes life easier and more fun.
So, he's arguing that I should be an atheist because the idiot equates atheism with science and science with engineering and engineering was his cargo-cult mentality, perhaps ignorant of the fact that every major figure in the founding of modern science was not only a religious believer, they were professed Christians, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, etc. and that many eminent scientists up to and including the present time have been Christians, believing Jews, Muslims, etc.
But even more so, he's saying I should believe in atheism for the same reason he says I shouldn't believe in God, because it works to give me things I like.
Which is actually the level of intellectual discourse which is held to be perfectly respectable when the end is atheism and is held to be illegitimate when the end is God.
I've gone over other things that you can logically get with atheism, in the materialism and the scientism which completes the intellectual trinity that almost all of modern atheism fully believes in, things like a total absence of significance to our minds, our thoughts, the near impossibility of our materially based minds stumbling blindly on something like the truth - as I noted recently, the current coolest physicist on Youtube and religious rejecter, Sabine Hossenfelder, pointed out that science cannot give us either the truth of a view of "reality".
And it certainly can't produce a morality which would make believing in God for the most base of childish desires any more wrong than rejecting God for the most rigorous of intellectual arguments. If you want arguments against believing in a convenient, selfishly self-interested, facile and selfishly believed in God, you will probably find about your most secure bases for that in the in the Bible. Over and over again, when the Children of Israel figure they've got God all figured out, on their side in worldly matters, God makes it clear that God is not figured out or on anyone's side in particular.
And the same is certainly true of the Christian part of it in which Jesus, presented as closest to God of all certainly didn't get a very easy time of it. It's interesting in Acts and the Epistles, none of the earliest believers in God as explained by Jesus seems to have tried to rig things to get rich and have a good life with all the available conveniences.
There are far more adult and intellectually honest reasons to believe in God and to believe in Christianity - as well as other human articulations of the experience of belief than the utilitarian, desire-based ones. Though that isn't to say those are invalid of even disreputable. I think if we could go back and understand and comprehend why any of us believes anything, from the testimony of our own eyes and ears, to the abstraction of grouping things and ownership that are the presumable origins of mathematics, to further analyses of those experiences and abstraction THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF SCIENCE AND THE BASIS FOR ITS METHOD they all started in wanting to believe all of it. To denigrate that is, very possibly, I'd say likely, to denigrate the origins of science as well as religious belief. Only it's honestly admitted when it's religion and it's denied when it's science.
There is another bit of atheist double speak that says religion is a pathological entity which causes us to fear and be anxious for our welfare, that, especially, Christianity is a "death cult" a "cult of eternal pain," "dismal" "a horrible alternative to those lovely pagan religions it unfairly suppressed and ended"* Which is certainly the opposite of the idea that we believe in it because we like it. There are certainly things in scripture I don't like, not least of all is the mainstream understanding regarding things such as slavery, the assigned roles of women, adult, consenting same-sex, sex (as understood by straight people) and things like capital punishments.
Science as given in the materialist, atheist imagination and claims, on the other hand, telling us that when we die we rot in the ground, are no more, that our loved ones who die just rot, that there is no good or evil, that our minds and lives are no more significant than iron oxidizing or rocks falling and bumping into each other, the whole range of terrible Darwinian cruelties - that to accept these terrors and horrors is a virtuous and manly (it's always presented as manly) thing to face bravely, that dark and awful view of reality is considered admirable.
I certainly didn't like the doctrine of eternal damnation as taught by the pre-Vatican II Catholicism I first experienced, especially in the most pathological versions of that as are found in Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin and their line. I now know that that last one is most likely based in quite bad Latin translations from the Greek and the line of the transmission of those malicious mutations in Western academic theology and doctrine - Calvin was able to read Greek, his ability to read the Greek words that indicate that punishment is meant to reconcile sinners by giving up their sin even as he was so emotionally attached to the misreading that he gave it its most terrible claims. As David Bentley Hart said, if you believe that the God of Calvinist predestinarianism is the one taught by Jesus, disbelieving it is totally justifiable.
And in that scheme of predestinarian belief, no one in this life could be sure that ulitmately cruel, evil god had not for no other reason than god willed it, decided a mostly good person was bound for eternal suffering.
There was every reason for someone to reject that on the basis that they didn't like it, and many a religion hater did, in fact, come from that background. Which, it is odd, then becomes a virtue, of believing what you want to believe, to believe in no-god than in that God taught to you in your Calvinist or Jansenist, etc. childhood. Which, if the believer merely opted for a belief in God as really presented in the Scriptures without the late-classical fall-of-empire gloom and its mutation in the Western medieval period, a God of universal reconciliation and salvation - the other predestination to salvation - BECAUSE YOU LIKE THAT VIEW OF REALITY, that what is a virtuous action for the atheist is presented as an unforgivable weakness and vice when the result is a belief in a good God.
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Paul, the best documented of that generation, certainly doesn't seem to have led the rest of his life to that end. He must have often felt ill at ease as a Pharisee, one zealous for The Law, as he had to shed his most cherished habits and ways that were comfortable to him, a comfort that, according to Acts, led him before his conversion to kill and oppress the members of this new movement of Jews who he clearly felt enraged by. Traces of that remain in his authentic letters which show that he was deeply uneasy about sexual and gender roles - and I don't think it was entirely for the important reason to keep the distinction between his movement and the ubiquitous pagan cultures they lived in and the terrible evils of things like the sexual abuse of children and women and slaves that was commonly practiced in them. Though I certainly think Paul would have had that motive as it is explicitly implied throughout the entire Scripture and the Gospel.
I think Paul is a far more fascinating figure than I'd ever realized before because he is so brilliant a thinker and so passionate and so honest in revealing the interaction between deep religious experience and our oh-so-human minds and lives. Just when you find him completely spot on, he says something that clashes with your own comfortable thinking. He reminds me of Joe Biden in that ability to suddenly do that. The key to my noticing that was in that talk by Elizabeth A. Johnson in which she talked about feminist hermenutics specifically noting that even as Paul said that women should be silent in the church (which would have been home churches) HE was the one who documented women leaders in the movement, very likely as presiders at what were developing into liturgy-euchariestic meals, his own trusted colleagues in ministry who he asked other, non-Pauline communities to accept as speaking on his behalf, answering their questions about his very letters that are what we now base our understanding of his ministry in. If he could do both - he must have realized the inconsistency, he was too smart not to have - he certainly could have other kinds of short-comings and discrepancies in his thought. As Johnson pointed out when he told the Women of Corinth to keep silent in church, a. he must have known they were not keeping silent or he wouldn't have bothered to mention it, b. we don't know what the Women of Corinth, so instructed, did. It's quite possible they, probably some of them members of the movement before Paul was, ignored that. When Paul sent his letters, they were just letters. They didn't become Scripture till after that.
* Atheists mostly having a pretty stupid, ahistorical, undocumented and clearly wrong view of the dismal, pessimistic, human-sacrificing, etc. classical pagan religions, a product of Renaissance and later romanticism, not in a real understanding of what those slave-based societies were like. Pagan societies were no bed of roses, no matter how those renaissance artists painted it, how those 18th and 19th century meat-heads romanticized it as a tool to attack Christianity which they hated for its inconvenient egalitarianism that deprived them of enjoying the things their money and social position, Trumplike, made them feel entitled to.
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