Mark Driscoll, Calvinist rebel?

Nobody really believes in god

Schopenhauer once said something like:

"Man can do anything he wants, but he can not want whatever he wants."

My thesis is that people who claim to believe in god do not really do so. They just wish to believe in god. They somehow feel that their lives are meaningless without god, so they choose to close their eyes to evidence against the existence of god. The christian view is well expressed by Cardinal Ratzinger:

"Religious liberty can not justify freedom for divergence. This freedom does not aim at any freedom relative truth, but concerns the free descicion for a person to, according to his moral inclinations accept the truth." (The times, June 27 1990, p9) [Translated to Swedish in the Swedish version of (Baigenth, Leigh, 1991)

It's as clear as it can be! For a christian you accept the "truth" according to your moral, and then have to be strong in your faith to keep your believes. You decide a priori what to believe and then try to convince yourself and others that it is true. But theists don't really believe, because to believe something is to take it for true, and just like in Nazareth's song Sold my soul there is no sign of god in the world. When you have the evidence for and against something your sub-conscious works on it and makes a conclusion. The process can't be affected by your will, only delayed or suppressed, which will lead to psychoses, and those are far more common among (catholic) priests than any other group..

I have personal experience of this believing what you want to believe. When I was a child I believed in a lot of crazy things. I thought my stuffed animals were intelligent. I believed in Santa Claus. I thought there were monsters under my bed at night. I even believed in god after I heard some of the tales from the old testament. Then I became older and realized that these things weren't true. When I look back I don't understand how I could believe in them, it must have been that I wanted to do so. (Except for the monsters, which had to do with fear of the dark)

When many religious people are confronted with criticism of their religion they convert to atheism or agnosticism. Examples of people who became critical to the dogmas of Christianity are Charles Darwin (Darwin, 1958), Dan Barker (Barker, 19??), Ernest Renan plus many former "Catholic modernists" in the 19th century such as Alfred Loisy and Antonio Fogazzaro (Baigenth, Leigh, 1991). The Catholic modernism evolved in the late 19th century and was banned in 1907 by the Vatican (Baigenth, Leigh, 1991). These people are to me clear evidence that an enlightened person will after considering the facts, reject Christianity and other religions that contain deities.

Note: This is not the "Plead to authority" fallacy. I'm talking people here, who were trying to prove the existence of god and turned atheists. They did not want to do this, but had to after reading a lot of books and doing a lot of thinking on the subject.

“If everyone would think back to when the land of Gaza was given up, not to long after came hurricane Katrina. Just something to think about.”
The statement above reflects the absolute idiocy of Bible believers. God is going to punish the United States if they don’t support the illegal regime of Israel. This is the kind of lunacy promoted by such arch idiots as Pat Robertson and John Hagee. The whole superstition that there is a God and that this God has favorite places and people on this insignificant ball of dust in the middle of nowhere is simply retarded. Christianity is truly the world’s most infamous cult of stupidity.
The UN Partition Of *1947* Was Illegal: The UN awarded the Jews 55% of the land of Palestine even though their current holdings totaled only about 6% and their population was only about 35% (608,000) of all the Palestinians (1,237,000). The plan also gave the most fertile lands to the Jews but the mountainous regions to the Arabs.
In their War Of Aggression Of 1948 the Jews took additional Arab lands bringing their total holdings to about 75% of Palestine, which they kept and never gave back.
Even though this additional land was illegally gained in violation of the Hague Regulations (1907) and the UN Charter (1945) which both included the basic legal principle that it is illegal to acquire territory by force, these new boundaries soon became the “official” boundaries of the new State of Israel.
The State Of Israel Has Created Chaos From Its Inception: War crimes, International terrorism due to the illegal “rogue state of Israel,” political corruption by the Jewish Lobby, defamation of character to all critics of Israel, Jewish racist ideology, world wide instability due to Zionist hegemony, growing Western fascism, American debt & inflation for subsidizing Israel, are additional reasons why Israel should not exist.

You said: Oh, now Boron can read minds. And not just SOME minds, but everybody's. Pearls before swine, Michelle. Pearls before swine.
Boris says: Many Christian apologists such as Hank Hanagraaf, Lee Strobel and others make the claim that everyone in the world believes in God and atheists are just people who refuse to deal with their own sinful nature so they try to ignore God. This statement is as untrue as any statement ever uttered on this planet. I don’t believe people really believe in God or heaven and hell. They can’t explain why they fear death much more than atheists and until they can they cannot prove they really believe.
You said: He sites a very few examples of people losing their faith and totally ignores the many people who became adult converts to Christianity. You know, "losers" like C.S. Lewis and Blaise Pascal.
Boris says: C.S. Lewis was about as dreary and absurd as a person can be. His claim that Jesus was either who he said he was or history’s greatest imposter is a textbook example of a false dichotomy. There are many other possibilities about Jesus the most logical one being that he simply never even existed. Lewis simply wasn’t intelligent enough to realize this. His books are nothing but incoherent drivel.
Blaise Paschal’s wager is not only another example of the false dichotomy, it is Christian idiocy magnified. How should you bet? Regardless of any evidence for or against the existence of God, Pascal argued that failure to accept God's existence risks losing everything with no payoff on any count. The best bet, then, is to accept the existence of God. There have been several objections to the wager: that a person cannot simply will himself to believe something that is evidently false to him; that the wager would apply as much to belief in the wrong God as it would to disbelief in all gods, leaving the the believer in any particular god in the same situation as the atheist or agnostic; that God would not reward belief in him based solely on hedging one's bets; and so on.
You said: He obviously had his knuckles rapped by a nun in Catholic school at some point and is still bitter about it.
Boris says: My ancestors are Jewish, my mother a Christian convert and a Bible scholar and when I was young my Sunday school teacher. Never did she teach me to pray, tell me about God or to believe the Bible. In fact she sometimes sung a line from the old George Gershwin tune: “It ain’t necessarily so; the things you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.” So I have nothing to be bitter about.

Boris, you obviously consider Christianity to be a deeply personal threat to your own worldview or you wouldn't spend so much time typing long refutations on a blog that has all of 17 subscribers on Bloglines. You know very well that your comments are read by very few people. The only explanation is that you're trying to convince yourself.

but Calvinism has been on the rise for years as this article in Christianity Today demonstrates.

Show some understanding, please: unless one is in the movement or knows someone who is, the low profile that Calvinism enjoys on the contemporary American Evangelical scene rises only because the rest of evangelicalism is becoming so whacked. Evangelicals are running for cover. But even of these, few take the whole package - call them "Cafeteria Calvinists."

Apparently Boron can spout the most racist, vile Jew-hating horse-crap and no one calls him on it. He blames the entire collapse of Western civilization on the Jews and no one says anything.

Why? Do you agree with him? Is this really standard Xian theology>

Thanks for letting a Nazi shout and not saying a word.

And Boron, you better hope there is no God, because if there is, you'll be spending eternity with Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, and your other bed-mates.

I don't really have a dog in this fight, other than to consider Mark Driscoll an embarrassment to the Church...but don't you think that someone who can't reconcile in his mind a Jesus who boldly spoke truth to power at risk of his life, who spoke and acted authoritatively, who overtly overturned the religious and social conventions of his day on behalf of the marginalized, the weak, the "other," and the truly "gentle Jesus" who affirmed children, gave dignity and responsibility to women in a patriarchal society and gave both spiritual and physical comfort to the sick and sorrowing...shouldn't that someone be in therapy for whatever mommy and daddy issues are informing the male and female cariacatures that fuel his "ministry"?

"Boris's comments are interesting and worthy of thought"

Yeah, especially those remarks about Evangelical Christians doing the Holocaust, and the 1948 war where Israel tried to defend itself from being annihilated as a "war of conquest". The guy is just so totally balanced and insightful. Sheesh.

Reading the Time article on Driscoll, where he decimates anyone who disagrees with him, holds anyone not like him in contempt, and claims his leadership was all preordained. I'm reminded of the quotation: "What luck for rulers that men do not think." All his converts don't have to, as Driscoll is crystal clear. He's a young Hitler in the making. Just like Hitler, people are swayed by his drama and message of power. Swayed enough to look beyond his message of unadulterated hate. Underlying it all, is Driscoll's desire for power and to rid the world of his enemies.

ZZ
The cause of the Holocaust was Christian fundamentalism. That is historical fact. The concentration camp referred to their captives as Christ killers among other things. They didn’t distinguish between their Jewish captives or the other non-Christians either. They were all murdered for the exact same reason: They didn’t believe in Jesus Christ.

I love the angry reactions you people have when your forced to face the truth about your evil and false religion.

"Reading the Time article on Driscoll, where he decimates anyone who disagrees with him, holds anyone not like him in contempt, and claims his leadership was all preordained. I'm reminded of the quotation: "What luck for rulers that men do not think." All his converts don't have to, as Driscoll is crystal clear. He's a young Hitler in the making. Just like Hitler, people are swayed by his drama and message of power. Swayed enough to look beyond his message of unadulterated hate. Underlying it all, is Driscoll's desire for power and to rid the world of his enemies."

It's amazing that you got that much from one article, enough to judge him a Hitler! Sheesh!

Quick question concerning Calvinism:

My daughter died at the age of three and a half months. She obviously wasn't able to make a decision for Christ or outwardly manifest her membership among the Elect. John Calvin made the following quote: "We may rest assured that God would never have suffered any infants to be slain except those who were already damned and predestined for eternal death."

Is my daughter now suffering eternal damnation? As a follower of Calvin, you should have no problem answering.

Thanks for your time, Phil

Note to Michelle:
Your quoting of the Bible to prove a point proves only how insanely superstitious you truly are. First prove something, ANYTHING the Bible claims even MIGHT be true. Until you can do that your Bible is meaningless nonsense and always will be.