Posted: Nov 17, 2014 10:50 am
SpearThrower, you seem to be operating under the assumption that death = bad = evil. That's not really how it is. We die, so we see death as a terrible thing; objectively, death and the fear thereof is more normal than anything else in the world. I think it's a difference in viewpoints: with an atheist worldview, death is the end of life, and a terrible thing. To a deist, death is just another transition; there's a world beyond.
You think that theists have the same priorities that atheists do when it comes to the value of life. That is just not true. To a theist, life and death are just a part of a larger scheme that we don't quite understand yet.
More importantly, humans see things life by life; God sees things all at once, the lives and deaths of everything ever. Not just life, but space, the universe, the stars, everything... What I mean is, a Being beyond human comprehension, and who sees and knows everything that ever will happen or ever has, would not see life as a whole the same way a human being would.
In summary, an atheist sees life as being very important, since that's all anything truly has. To a Christian, God subverts that; there's something more. What that more is, we don't understand all the way yet. But we believe in it, and we know that God is faithful to those who have faith in Him, in the next life even if not always apparent in this one.
To Rumraket: The beauty of Theistic evolutionism is that we can have the science by knowing how evolution works while also having belief in God. The hows are for evolution, the Theism is for the Why, not the How.
You think that theists have the same priorities that atheists do when it comes to the value of life. That is just not true. To a theist, life and death are just a part of a larger scheme that we don't quite understand yet.
More importantly, humans see things life by life; God sees things all at once, the lives and deaths of everything ever. Not just life, but space, the universe, the stars, everything... What I mean is, a Being beyond human comprehension, and who sees and knows everything that ever will happen or ever has, would not see life as a whole the same way a human being would.
In summary, an atheist sees life as being very important, since that's all anything truly has. To a Christian, God subverts that; there's something more. What that more is, we don't understand all the way yet. But we believe in it, and we know that God is faithful to those who have faith in Him, in the next life even if not always apparent in this one.
To Rumraket: The beauty of Theistic evolutionism is that we can have the science by knowing how evolution works while also having belief in God. The hows are for evolution, the Theism is for the Why, not the How.