Reply to Is the Charleston church shooting making anyone doubt their Faith?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NP. Like others here, I find the outpouring of sympathy and forgiveness inspiring instead of discouraging. Especially the forgiveness, which is so hard yet so fundamental to their faith. [/quote]

It's far more worthy of respect for someone who confronted the tragedy, go through the phases of grief, and eventually come to acceptance and forgiveness, than it is for the baseless mantra of "God teaches us to forgive". The later involves minimal effort, it is not a virtue to blindly accept how one should feel. In fact it is slavery of the mind, to relinquish control of your rationality, to isolate your human emotions, and to believe that it is so becomes some authority told you it is so.

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LOL?  The fact you call it minimal effort proves you have no idea how it works.[/quote]

It takes a lot of effort to say something that is so counter-intuitive to the anger and hurt and confusion and trauma that a decent, normal person understandably feels when a loved one is brutally murdered by a madman in a church during Bible study.

[b]Atheists can't imagine the mental anguish it takes for a Christian to do something like that,[/b] but  Christians know they are doing it because God teaches them that this is the right things to do.  They don't worry about their own feelings -- that would be selfish.   They think about what God wants and they know that it is forgiving thine enemies - not later once you've worked it through psychologically, but as soon as possible after the heinous act.  They know that like their loved ones who were so horribly taken from them, they will be facing God some day and God will reward them for doing the right thing at this extremely difficult moment of their lives.[/quote]

This is a ridiculous line of reasoning that is false upon examination. What is harder:

1. You must accept and forgive, and you must come to this conclusion on your own, dealing with your roiling feelings of grief, anger at the senselessness, disbelief that the unlikely has indeed happened, questioning why bad things happen to good people, and a natural urge to exact revenge. You must deal with all of this, with no mental crutch, and realize that despite the tragedy and your suffering, that man is basically good, and that behaving as a good person means accepting the tragedy moving on.

2. You must accept and forgive, because God has a plan and this is all a part of it. You may not understand it, but you must have faith that this is for the greater good. Your loved ones are in heaven, they are with Jesus now. Death is not permanent, this life is only a test. You'll see them again when you move on from this life to the next.

Oh I wish it was as simple as option number 2. But I am not going to surrender my intelligence just so that I can be comfortably numb.  
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Nobody, but nobody, is saying it's as simple #2. In fact, 13:51 is saying exactly the opposite when she talks about "mental anguish."  [/quote]

[b]I love it when atheists claim to know what believers are thinking[/b]. Like when this atheist claims that believers don't experience anguish in forgiving murders, instead that forgiveness only takes "minimal" effort because believers just have to keep telling themselves about heaven.  Hah![/quote]

Oh the irony...[/quote] Tip: when you go for a non-response because you can't think of meaningful response, your non-response still has to make some sort of sense in the context of the thread.[/quote]

Wow, I bolded the relevant parts that illustrates the irony. Are you not able to read? The PP dislikes the idea that an atheist claim to know what believers are thinking, yet he apparently had no problem with the previous poster who made a rather bold claim about what atheists think. This is ironic. Do you need a dictionary?[/quote]

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