January 05, 2011
Invocation
The City Council in a neighboring community has a tradition of offering an invocation prior to their meetings. An atheist group is objecting on the grounds that the practice is most often centered on Christianity. According to Webster’s an invocation is: the act or process of petitioning for help or support; a prayer of entreaty (as at the beginning of a service of worship), a calling upon for authority or justification. Bless their hearts the Council has agreed to let the atheists take a turn at the invocation. …I wonder who they’ll petition.
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4 comments:
Gail;
-----Do these atheists race to the cockpit of an airliner upon takeoff demanding the pilot control the craft according to their own knowledge? I think not! They stay in their seats, mouths shut, realizing what is at stake. Maybe some of them have had flight training, yet even they leave the control of the craft in the pilot’s care. If they wish the yoke were in their hands, they know enough to seek that responsibility through its proper career channels, because they realize the danger of the situation is immanent in the very moment and available for all to see.
-----But other dangers to what is far more at stake than a few hundred lives are not so clear and present. Other minds that have been far longer open to realities concerning those dangers are more qualified to handle the situations involving them. The fact that the knowledge and wisdom necessary for recognizing those dangers and handling them are more subtly and humbly acquired does not disqualify it from being knowledge or wisdom. Yet, such disqualification is precisely what the atheist seeks to do.
-----How much is there to know about everything? Infinitely more than any one mind can acquire in a lifetime! And if a lifetime were spent acquiring all the tiny portion of knowledge it could possibly acquire, it would have spent no time perceiving the meaning of the bit of knowledge it gained into wisdom. That means some minds certainly know things other minds do not, e.g. God. Is that truism too subtle for the atheist to grasp? If it is, then why should we rely on the atheist’s ability to grasp anything else that simple? Then, why should we call upon such an unworthy reasoning capability to invoke anything, or even more, to sit in such an important seat as do those whom he castigates?
-----At the heart of the atheist’s demand is that God can not be physically seen, touched, tasted, smelled, or heard. Therefore, he concludes God does not exist. Yet, the little big atheist, Stephen Hawking, accepts the existence of dark matter, dark energy, and especially black holes (which existence he himself positively demonstrated) although none of these can be physically seen, touched, tasted, smelled, or heard. “But!” He would demand, “We know these things by their effects upon what we can see, touch, smell, taste, and hear.” I agree with him completely. For that is part of how we know God exists. The existence of Israel, especially in her land today in the situation she is in there, the existence of the church, the Bible, the myriads of people who have lived by it in spite of the twisting done of it by many more, and especially the effects He has in our own lives that can be sensed are just as real effects as those Hawking acknowledges. The truth is, I actually know something he does not. Given the danger thriving in the godlessness of any society, I think it imperative to demand these closed minds to sit down and hold their peace while others who are open to the rest of what’s real pick our ways around the gravest of dangers physics can not see.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
"At the heart of the atheist’s demand is that God can not be physically seen, touched, tasted, smelled, or heard. Therefore, he concludes God does not exist. "
This argument reminds me of a story of a young missionary who was confronted with the same argument. He stated that he could feel god in his heart. So the antagonist said ok there is a 1 in 5 chance there is a God. then this young missionary asked the person, can you touch, see, feel, taste or smell your brain? The antagonist said no, so the missionary said that there was a 0 in 5 chance he had a brain. hehehe
Remember also that Elijah gave the prophets of Baal a chance to call upon their god before he called down fire from heaven. I wonder if the next Christian invocation will call for some fire?
Grace and Peace.
Lisa S;
-----Missionary stories are the best! Of course the missionary knew the logic behind a 0 in 5 chance the antagonist had a brain was fallacious. But being the same logic the antagonist had used, he demonstrated the antagonist was not using the brain he had. And the truth of this whole matter about the human inability to physically sense God or any other spiritual entity is that there is more human ability to do so than gets acknowledged. And that ability is more than the missionary’s feeling God in his heart. The general lack of its acknowledgment evidences the root of deceit - the subjectivism of the individual.
-----Mary held Jesus after He had been resurrected. At that time, His body was in its spiritual form, as Paul discusses at I Corinthians 15:44-45. Peter ate with Him on the shore. The disciples in the upper room saw and spoke to Him, and Thomas put his finger into His wounds. And many others saw Him those forty days before He ascended. Peter, James, and John saw Moses and Elijah. Mary, Jesus’ mother, Zechariah, and Daniel all saw and spoke to Gabriel. Abraham ate with and accompanied two angels to Sodom (some believe one of these was the Lord.) Jacob wrestled with an angel. Elisha and his servant saw the great army of angels, their horses, and chariots of fire around about Dothan. Moses heard God on the mountain. John and Paul actually went into heaven and saw, heard, and spoke to who was there. And all that is just a smattering of testimony the Bible gives of humans experiencing the spiritual beings. The beings of the spiritual world can be registered upon the human senses. But it apparently is at least by God’s will, as Elisha had to ask the Lord to open the eyes of his servant to see the angelic army. Most people haven’t seen, smelled, heard, tasted, or touched them. And because of that, many deny anyone has and consider the Bible to be full of fairy-tales.
-----What the atheist and this antagonist fail to consistently acknowledge is that the existence of anything real does not depend upon even one human’s physical experience of it. Even though unknown species and unknown phenomena amongst the galaxies have been discovered in the last year and over the centuries proving that man need not experience something for it to exist, they inconsistently refuse to extend the same truth to God and the spiritual realm. Yet as the black hole effects matter near it, causing this matter to emit x-rays and even visible light in distinct patterns, and as it took minds well trained in cosmology to understand these patterns and finally realize what was causing them, the missionary can “see” God around him and “feel” him in his heart. And by the same, God has revealed bits of Himself to many over the generations who wrote for our understanding what they actually experienced. It is simple subjective dishonesty to deny the possibility of the Bible’s truth, and plain mental laziness to not search out the available knowledge verifying its truth.
Steve Corey
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