tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708139263643046536.post1375276964405040708..comments2024-03-28T14:59:42.168-04:00Comments on Kresta In The Afternoon: Today on Kresta - Sept. 9, 2009Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7708139263643046536.post-91875386534448577342009-09-10T15:07:51.904-04:002009-09-10T15:07:51.904-04:00Re: How Jennifer Fulwiler came to believe in God
...Re: How Jennifer Fulwiler came to believe in God<br /><br />Jennifer, the contented atheist, goes to a liberal college and starts thinking: Maybe I'm not just a mass of random chemical reactions (because the implications of that are very scary); so, I thought, maybe it's not OK to kill off the weaker members of the species; but I can't really, truly defend that, so I need an objective moral code, one that will make it OK to kill pigs, but not OK to kill a newborn child; then I met a smart guy who believed in God ("I was shocked!") and I married him; then I had a kid, and wow! -- the love; now I can humble myself, and I just want to know the truth. <br /><br />Jennifer has reached the mountaintop of truth. So Al wants to talk about atheists and why they're so f'd up. Al notes that atheists have an impulse to be the smartest guy in the room. But why all this pride if they are materialists who know that the final word on things is Death -- darkness, not light; who know we are only a random collocation of atoms and ultimately don't even control our minds? <br /><br />Jennifer, on top of the mountain, puts it in perspective: Looking back, I realize that I didn't want to think about it. I knew I was going to disappear into nothing when I die, so I might as well maximize the pleasure right here, right now. If you're an atheist, all you have is your own ego, so you become very self-absorbed and the ego becomes your god. I would ask my atheist friends why we all shouldn't just kill ourselves right now? [What happened to Jennifer's ego?] Their answer? Antidepressants. But I never found a good answer. The only philosophy I felt [that's right -- felt] was fatalism: utter despair. So I distracted myself with career, friends and parties. <br /><br />So much for the contented atheist. <br /><br />It's a bit confusing. On her blog, Jennifer states that she was generally happy as an atheist, but at nightfall she would feel fear, loneliness, helplessness and discord. Sometimes she felt the "<a href="http://www.conversiondiary.com/search/label/Atheism?max-results=200" rel="nofollow" rel="nofollow">cold terror</a>" of fully understanding the implications of her own mortality. She also writes about doubts and spiritual dry spells during her conversion, and wonders why she didn't revert back to the "<a href="http://www.conversiondiary.com/2007/06/you-first.html" rel="nofollow" rel="nofollow">comfort of atheism</a>," while acknowledging having "a heart where envy, resentment, anger, selfishness, and all sorts of other nasty sentiments lived." And remember that smart guy Jennifer met who believed in God and eventually became her husband? She told Al that it was he who got her to thinking that all the great men of science, like Galileo and Newton, believed in God. On her blog, however, she attributes that story to her <a href="http://www.conversiondiary.com/2006/12/on-having-proof.html" rel="nofollow" rel="nofollow">grandfather</a>. She once casually asked her grandfather if he believed in God, and she was surprised when he said yes. "But he's so smart!" she thought. I don't see how she could have gotten her husband mixed up with her grandfather. <br /><br />I think Jennifer hung out with the wrong kind of atheists. I'll note that the Nobel Prize winning atheist physicist Richard Feynman had an enormous zest for life and died from cancer at the age of 69, that the 68 year old atheist biologist Richard Dawkins has said he considers it a great privilege to be alive, and that the Nobel Prize winning atheist physicist Steven Weinberg keeps plugging along at the age of 76. Why don't Dawkins and Weinberg just kill themselves? <br /><br />About the smartest guy in the room business. I would love to be a fly on the wall in a room with Al Kresta, Regis Martin, Scott Hahn, Benjamin Wiker, Marcus Grodi, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Steven Weinberg to see who tries to be the smartest guy in the room. <br /><br />Just some random thoughts.maumanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09250198272377329639noreply@blogger.com