Suicide and Hope Is it possible that a person who commits suicide was actually a Christian? I think so. The event of taking one’s own life is usually fast and always irrevocable. Yes it’s something they do to themselves, but does that single volitional act always negate the beliefs of a lifetime that went before? It’s […]
Read more...Tag: agnosticism
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In Inside Baseball we looked at the position of agnostics, and the point was made that agnostics are agnostic because they approach the God question from a position they suppose to be neutral, but which isn’t; and further, the degree of certainty they require for the evidence of God (this one question only) is an […]
Read more...Inside Baseball
Christian, can we talk? Lend help, here, if you can. If you follow this site you know that it is not intended to be deeply theological, but rather philosophical about the necessity of there being a God, and not only that but that He reconciles us to Himself through Christ, in just the way the […]
Read more...Unraveling Agnosticism
It matters what we believe. A Condemning God? Maybe you’ve heard this criticism of Christianity before: that God is unfair because He gives people the death penalty for not choosing Him. That doesn’t reflect the goodness they associate with their conception of God, so they feel there must be no God. One flaw in this thinking is that […]
Read more...Belief in Unbelief
The Privative Thesis Christopher Hitchens wrote of atheism that “our belief is unbelief.” A.C. Grayling wrote that atheism was merely a “privative thesis,” by which he meant that it is nothing more than the subtraction of supernatural reality from one’s conception of all of reality. This is a common point of view: belief in “nothing.” But […]
Read more...Modern Gnosticism
We have remarked on the curious phenomenon of declaring anything outside of nature to be unknowable. This is the frame of mind we adopt when we declare ourselves to be “agnostic” on the question of God’s existence. Many tend to say that they don’t know whether God exists, and seal off the question as being […]
Read more...Gnosis and Knowing
In Agnosticism, and Not Knowing, we delved into a peculiarity of thinking among many who profess to be neutral on the God question. The very word “agnostic” implies the absence of a special knowing—a “gnosis.” That special knowing is something different than merely being persuaded by evidence. It means subjective, intuitive, experience of truth. A […]
Read more...Agnosticism, and Not Knowing
Why exactly do we say that we’re “agnostic,” when we could instead say “I don’t know,” or “I don’t care,” or “I am undecided?” Surely those are fitting, sometimes? Gnosis It could be that there is an element retained from the idea of a “gnostic,” that a self-described agnostic doesn’t want to be entirely rid […]
Read more...Agnosticism and Belief in Nothing
Physics If we begin to think of “nothing” as being, really, some sort of something, then we can convince ourselves that all of material reality came into being spontaneously. How? If the nothingness before material reality was really a kind-of-sort-of something, then the present universe could be only the result of a physical phase transition. […]
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