Entire Bible Summed Up in One Facebook Post

Please Explain Tolerance!

C.S Lewis on Reading Literature

We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books.... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do

C.S Lewis

You Can Do Anything!!

An Agnostic Manifesto - At least we know what we don't know

From Slate (Ron Rosenbaum) and a little excerpt from Albert Mohler

"...Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer. Agnostics have mostly been depicted as doubters of religious belief, but recently, with the rise of the "New Atheism"—the high-profile denunciations of religion in best-sellers from scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and polemicists, such as my colleague Christopher Hitchens—I believe it's important to define a distinct identity for agnosticism, to hold it apart from the certitudes of both theism and atheism. 

I would not go so far as to argue that there's a "new agnosticism" on the rise. But I think it's time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as "a theism"—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety. 

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.) 

Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of "multiverses" and "vacuums filled with quantum potentialities," none of which strikes me as persuasive... 

...Agnosticism doesn't fear uncertainty. It doesn't cling like a child in the dark to the dogmas of orthodox religion or atheism. Agnosticism respects and celebrates uncertainty and has been doing so since before quantum physics revealed the uncertainty that lies at the very groundwork of being... 

...But does that mean no *possible* evidence could decide it [existence or nonexistence of God]? That's a much harder argument to make. Huxley thought it was in principle Unknowable, but that's a side effect of too much German Romanticism in his tea. I can conceive of logically possible states of affairs in which a God is knowable, and I can conceive of cases in which it is certain that no God exists. (From John Wilkins) 

Wilkins' suggestion is that there are really two claims agnosticism is concerned with is important: Whether God exists or not is one. Whether we can know the answer is another. Agnosticism is not for the simple-minded and is not as congenial as atheism and theism are. 

The courage to admit we don't know and may never know what we don't know is more difficult than saying, sure, we know..."

And a little something from Mohler, a Baptist pastor. Regardless if you have or don't have (or don't know you have?) theological beliefs, he still makes an interesting comment.

"...But, in a fascinating twist, Rosenbaum suggests, contrary to Huxley, that the existence of God is not, in principle, unknowable. “I can conceive of logically possible states of affairs in which a God is knowable, and I can conceive of cases in which it is certain that no God exists.” 

Well, what might these “logically possible states of affairs” be? At this point in Rosenbaum’s essay, I feel cheated. How can he simply assert that he can conceive of some intellectual conditions for theism or atheism without naming them? 

In the end, Rosenbaum’s argument for a “new agnosticism” seems more rooted in attitude than in logic. He accuses both the New Atheists and classical theists of intolerance and a lack of intellectual humility. 

But, check out this rather striking sentence: “Agnosticism is not for the simple-minded and is not as congenial as atheism and theism are.” Ah, so by implication, theism and atheism might be for the simple-minded, but it takes a higher intellect to be agnostic. How humble. 

He continues: “The courage to admit we don’t know and may never know what we don’t know is more difficult than saying, sure, we know.” 

This is one of the central problems with agnosticism as a worldview. In claiming to take a humble approach, it actually ends up in a posture that is rather lacking in humility. The agnostic argues that we, as human creatures, are capable of deciding the intellectual terms when it comes to the big questions such as, first and foremost, the existence and possible knowledge of God..."