"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
9 comments:
I hate to be that guy, but please fix the typos. It would make this more usable as a meme. Thank you.
Exactly. Dennis's dissident books has bamboozled him and taken him captive.
What does "hive a charlatan" mean ? Poor Carl cannny spell well.
Bamboozle doesn't seem to gel well either.
The real problem is power over others. Those that hold power but don't believe anymore, fully expect all the minions to follow whatever they say. They are disconbobulated if the members refuse and reject. Jesus Christ is the Captain of everyones Salvation. That's easier said than followed by power holders.
Dennis
I commend you for presenting a very powerful and relevant quotation, although I'm not sure where you are going with it. I suppose it's a knock on Armstrongism and rightfully so. But I assure you Carl's statement goes way beyond that. What we have stated here is a mini commentary on carnal man and the corrupt world system that easily manipulates him.
The causes and answers to this painful and unheeded lesson of history are only addressed in the pages of Scripture. Scripture alone defines the problem and explains the way out of it. They reveal to us HOW NOT to be bamboozled, which was a fundamental part of the message of the New Testament. If the Bible's explanation on this matter is not true, we have no explanation at all.
The Master Bamboozler knows what he's doing. He bamboozled our first parents and has been doing so ever since. Understanding these tactics are written down for our learning and are a pivotal part of the Christian armor.
You provided an excellent quotation but I believe it hurts your cause. The atheist has no answers for escaping this charlaton power, but the Bible does. All we have to do is believe what is written and act on it.
That's why I don't drink booze.
Fixed. Spotted it after I had left for the day and asked Gary to fix it for me.
Ah, 1:24, the dispensary is more to your liking?
Yeah it's easier to fool someone that it is to convince them that they've been fooled. Hence the size of the Roman Catholic Church and her "daughters".
Dennis:
You have given us an omnibus approach to the arguments of atheism. How does one respond to all this within the boundaries of a blog? And I believe there are published, theistic responses to your 30 points. I will have to answer with an over-arcing response that will seem general instead of tailor-made for each issue you put forward.
Where does human consciousness come from? Can it be simply the sum of billions of chemical reactions taking place in a material brain? If consciousness is simply chemistry, assembled in the womb from biological raw materials, then we should be able to replicate it with chemistry. This is nowhere on the horizon. There is no chapter in chemistry textbooks about the advances in producing consciousness. But this is a gap that theists with boundless optimism might expect to be filled. There are other gaps that are not so tractable. A physically based consciousness is a requirement for modern atheists because they posit competition and natural selection for the genesis of all that we know. And competition and natural selection only operate in the physical realm on physical processes. Atheists even posit a multi-verse in which our universe is one permutation among untold numbers of permutations that permits human life to exist. Atheism is about randomness and large numbers as a replacement for God. That theory does not always work well.
So, let me move upstream from the arguments you present. Human consciousness contemplates beginnings and endings. That is the framework for what I am writing now. The little lizards that play in the desert sun in my back yard don’t think about the proton and eschaton of the cosmos. And there is nothing in the engine of mutation and natural selection to make such ruminations useful to them in their competition for life. Human self-awareness and the ability to contemplate origins, endings and intentions are without etiology in material nature.
Atheism relies on natural processes for the explanation for everything. It must. It has no recourse. And there are many problems with this. Atheism points to mutation and natural selection which operate within the boundaries of a physical reality but it does not explain where the reality came from. Why are there randomness and large numbers? Theism proposes that natural processes cannot be recruited to explain everything. So, theists propose a Deus ex Machina and that is God the Creator. Absent any empirical evidence from atheism on the inception of reality itself (human consciousness is a sub-category), theism is far more plausible. So, the theory of reality just in the inexplicable nature of things proposed by many atheists doesn’t cut it. In a nutshell.
Scout
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