Faith and the Prospect of Death

"And so it is with our lives: one damn thing after another -- a gutter replaced, a washing machine fixed -- rather than a story"

Sounds very much like Ecclesiastes to me.

Ho hum. Yet another "atheist" who isn't really an atheist, but rather like us, has found enough fault with the Rational Enlightenment/Modernist packaging of Christianity to throw the whole thing out the window.

Barnes is absolutely right. If the G-d who exists really is the sort would turns life within creation into nothing but a pop-quiz for a course we have never taken, we ought neither worship nor show any deference to this G-d.

There is no failing on Barnes' part for concluding that this version of Christianity is completely bankrupt. The failing is on the part of the church for not understanding that if we continue to refuse to abandon this nonsense and rediscover the real Good News, we are, according to our own doctrines, condemning much of the world to Hell.

I just wish these kinds of "atheists" had the stones to admit they want to believe in, and in a sense do believe in, -a- god, they just refuse to believe in -our- G-d.

JIm Marks,

Yes--well put.

Deeply sad and troubling. But the man is right. Without God life is meaningless.

Scot,

excellent thought - His point about fiction, better yet the stories we so deeply love, need to be seen as the human articulation of the depth of reality. Bible as story, as mission. It is the total absence of purpose, of meaning in the secular materialist view that kept, and keeps, me coming back and thinking.