The Roundtable Discussion

Yes somewhere amid all that playing and the eating and the chilling out, of all the conversation topics that had to come out, it had to be religion.

I believe that we spoke close to about 3 hours on the damm topic. it began innoncently enough with me expressing my personnal preference to someone close by to be atheistic (?SP). chiefly being that i think a life in heaven playin harpies castrating prostrate in front of GOD is not a life i would want to have. (at this point in time i would like to add that this recreation has been heavily embellished and is chronologically wrong). And that believing in a life after death is simply dimishing the life you have now.

And suddenly i found my views being challenged in the open . Now i hate open confrontation. chiefly because i tend to lose :) But because i was fairly confident of my position well i let it go :)
On my side was the non- christians. On the other side was Daryl - evangelical/charismatic christian. Brian - conservative christian. and Marcus - liberal christian. And because i'm tired and fairly biased (oxymoron? pun?) I'll just briefly sum up their points.

We discussed some fairly heavy topics. Like the evidence for god in the beauty of the world. And the longing inherent in all of us to believe in a god which they said was instilled in us for god to worship him. Which i countered came naturally from us being able to differentiate between whats good for us and whats not bad for us which is in fact a survival mechanism. That same ability to differentiate is what gives us the ability to imagine a perfect life, a perfect world, a perfect being. And this ability is what causes us to form god in our imagination and not the other way around (ie god created this inherent longing in us versus we long for a god, thats why we create god to worship him).

They said how about all the evidence thats been accumalated in favor of the bible like noah's ark and evidence of a flood. I said i believe the bible is a historical record but i don't believe which should take it to be a god's word in the same way that we shouldn't expect billy graham's books to be become a holy book in the future. And they replied that Billy Graham didn't proclaim himself to be the son of god. (which in my mind simply means that billy graham has something that jesus doesn't - sanity). About the most absurd idea i believe i heard was that Noah didn't have room on his ark for dinosaurs thats why they went extinct. haha wtf.

At this point in time it was still ok i believe because they were exposuing about God in general and about morality and sinfulness in the world and about christians in general which i didn't really have an opposition to...But at some point in time the non believers hit upon a fallacy in the system. Daryl was explaining that God was the alpha and omega and he already had a written plan for all of us. At the same time he also said that we each had a choice to make be obedient to god or disobedient to him. Which begs the question....if god wrote the story for all of us..we don't have a choice do we? So why test us in the first place if he already knows the outcome. And then they brought up this analogy of a maths teacher who was giving a test to students. And one of them was a student who always failed, never studied and was patently stupid. The teacher still had to give the test else it wouldn't be fair. But there's obviously something wrong with this analogy. the teacher isn't God. she doesn;t know the outcome of the test. God does. So why does he still give us the test?

At which point QH replied:" because GOD is a bitch."

And so for the rest of the night it settled on this one topic and because they couldn't answer it sufficently enough the tide turned. In the end all the answers pointed to "no one knows what god is thinking" and " its all about faith". We demand understanding, accoutability and logic in all we do why should rely on faith on something so important as this? Because we can never prove god exists but to say that he might exist just because we can't prove it is so wrong. But Yaochen brought up a good point that actually we go about out lifes with a certain degree of uncertainty and actually its all about how much unknowns you can live with. For me between a belief founded on logic and known constants and one that is based on so much faith its pretty obvious which i would choose.

In the end brian put it in succintly when he said why care so much about the things that do not affect you in the end. these macro issues can never be resolved but in the end you should only care about the stuff that affects you...

will add more if i do recall but thats about the gist of it.