Quick Apology: You don’t believe in Thor, do you?
Up until now, all of the “Quick Apology” posts have dealt with Catholic-Protestant disputes. Today I would like to address a Theist-Atheist issue. I wrote this post several weeks ago, but I heard this specific objection was just a few days ago…
Objection
Probably as a result of the writings of the “New Atheists”, I’ve heard with increasing regularity the statement:
“You don’t believe in Thor do you? You’re almost an atheist – I just believe in one less god than you”
Response
The suggestion here is that Christians are, in fact, basically atheists since they don’t believe in the gods of other religions. The atheist is just like the Christian except that she rejects the Christian God as well.
There’s the suggestion that, since Thor doesn’t exist, then neither does the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, this doesn’t really follow, does it? After all, does the existence of counterfeit money mean that real money doesn’t exist? I hope not, otherwise I’ve worked 40 hours this week for nothing! Does the existence of counterfeit love mean that real love doesn’t exist? The recently dumped may think so, but I think generally we can agree that counterfeit love doesn’t disprove real love.
So, in conclusion, the non-existence of Thor has no bearing on the existence of Yahweh. The evidence for each must be weighed independently…
I love that Captain America line, and I’m still shocked that it made it into a mainstream action movie.
Ev, I still love the entire character (and Chris Evans’s earnest portrayal) of cinematic Steve Rogers — the Marvel Studio movies in general have been great about not shying away from showing Actual Heroes © fighting Actual Evil © — even deeply-flawed characters like Tony Stark (or even the Guardians of the Galaxy) have had character arcs throughout about finding redemption through works and coming to terms with who they’ve hurt with their previous selfish actions. Captain America, however, is a character who has been does *amazingly* well from a perspective of virtue as we would understand it as Christians (especially from the idea of a man acting both personally moral and serving as an example to bring out the best morality in those people around him: both those with whom he associates and those for whom he’s responsible).
http://nev88.blogspot.com/2014/04/to-believe-or-not-to-believe.html
Hey Miss 🙂
Hey you. How are you?