A famous Christian gospel hymn titled " This World Is Not My Home " sums up how religious views of an afterlife shape believers’ views of this life:
This world is not my home,
I’m just a passing through,
My treasures are laid up
somewhere beyond the blue;
The angels beckon me
from heaven’s open door,
And I can’t feel at home
in this world anymore.
For millions of people, this verse is more than a metaphor. Huge numbers of religious people sincerely and fervently believe that this life is just a proving ground, a temporary way station on the road to a far more important destination. And when a person truly believes that, their actions cannot help but follow suit - treating this life as if it was unimportant, feeling detached and disconnected from this world, and missing out on all the richness and wonder it has to offer.
For instance, C.S. Lewis espouses this view in The Problem of Pain . In it, he writes of how God deliberately...
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Banning the BibleFrom: daylightatheism.org
Post Date: 2007-05-21 05:19:05
A very entertaining story has come out of Hong Kong recently. After the Hong Kong goverment’s " Obscene Articles Tribunal " censored a Chinese student magazine as "indecent" for publishing a sex column asking if readers had ever fantasized about incest or bestiality, over 800 residents protested by calling on the government to classify the Bible as indecent also . (Such material is not outright barred from publication, but must be sold in sealed bags with a legal warning and can only...
more Do You Really Believe That: AbrogationFrom: daylightatheism.org
Post Date: 2008-06-25 06:31:55
Today’s installment of "Do You Really Believe That?" will leave behind Judaic and Christian mythologies to examine a doctrine specific to Islam, the doctrine of abrogation. This belief holds that Allah originally revealed certain practices and rules to Mohammed, only to later issue new revelations which canceled the earlier ones and instituted different practices in their place. In Arabic, this is usually called al-Nasikh wal-Mansoukh ("the Abrogator and the Abrogated").
It sh...
more An Exercise in EmpathyFrom: daylightatheism.org
Post Date: 2008-07-16 05:26:25
[ Update: Comments enabled - I don’t know why they were turned off. ]
In 1967, Mildred Loving and her husband Richard, an interracial couple, were arrested at their Virginia home for violating that state’s anti-miscegenation law. At trial, Judge Leon Bazile offered his explanation for why the state of Virginia had chosen to ban interracial marriage:
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the in...
more Vignette from the New York SubwayFrom: daylightatheism.org
Post Date: 2008-07-19 07:52:27
Presented without further comment:
Last night, when I got on the subway, I noticed an older, balding white man wearing a white T-shirt. The front of his shirt read, in multicolored block letters, "I’m so happy I’m saved," and the back read, over a backdrop of flames, "I won’t have to spend eternity in the lake of fire. P.S.: There won’t be a drink of water there!"
As the train pulled away from the station, a young black man entered the car. He announced that he was d...
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