Terribly Faithful

Faith is at once a beautiful, inspiring and terrible thing.

I don't object to Christians, the majority of them are friendly normal people who get on with their lives. What I do object to are the militant Christians who feel it warranted to be unnecessarily aggressive and unflinchingly blind to evidence to their contrary. This stubbornness is the worst (or best) kind of argument to pit against an intellectual mind - even the most well thought out and sturdily constructed argument can be ignored, this causes more and more frustration to those who only want their point acknowledged.

Case in point: @JoeCienkowski I don't like to name names, but having stumbled across this particular Twitter feed I found myself quite perturbed by a total lack of understanding of the importance of rational thought, even to a deeply religious mind. The faith Mr Cienkowski has is unflinching and without doubt, and is admirable in that sense, however, arguing against him does appear to be a rather painful and pointless exercise. When the argument pitted against him is deemed stupid, they are told they are "foolish and ignorant" and "I am so tired of calling you people stupid", one such post is finished with the cyber-typical flourish "LOL". But when the argument is deemed to be well thought out, systematic and often (in my opinion) right, it is met with something along the lines of: "There is no doubt there is a God; no doubt Jesus Christ is that God (second person of the Trinity) & no doubt about resurrection". My feelings aside, this is just bad theory proving. Intellectual roadblock.

If you understand scientific theory, you must understand that validation is a pointless exercise. You can observe your white swans for over 1000 years and say that it is provable that all swans are white, but a single black swan will tear your argument down. You must, then, seek to falsify your argument, you must constantly seek to test your theory and strive to prove it wrong. You must accept your refuter's arguments as at least valid and explore the possibility that they might be right.

Ultimately, arguing against faith is hopeless. The very point of faith is that it believes in spite of. However, how about we play Mr Cienkowski's game for a bit - lets seek to validate shall we? Show me empirical evidence (not a logical argument such as "this ISN'T true, therefore this MUST be true" or some derivation of teleological logic) of the existence of a higher power.Then these arguments would begin to hold more weight with me. Until then, unfortunately I declare the arguments of Mr Cienkowski to be childish "no, but, no, but, shut up"s.

Finally, if "The Bible is 100% accurate, 100% God's word" then maybe you should take a read of this:

2 Kings 2:23-24:

"And he [Elisha] went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them."

Maybe you should hold back on the verbal abuse from now on, eh? Wouldn't want to be mauled by bears.