'Either/or' mentality too close to two-dimensional thinking

[FrankGSterleJr]

The following is a copy of a post I made onto an atheist-minded website calling itself “One Minion’s Opinion”—that links with countless other birds-of-a-feather individual websites.


Re: my essay, “Prey for the Unanswered Prayer,” earlier this year ...

I’m not a “Christian troll[er]” nor much of a ‘Christian’ either. Rather, I was strongly attracted to your website by persistent pop-ups of “One Minion’s Opinion” during my search-engine scans because one of your regulars, who was repelled by my observations/opinions in the original version of the same essay on prayer. In fact, he felt repelled enough to copy and paste to your website blocks of its text from a local metro-daily’s blog site in order to dissect and critique it before all of your site’s already-more-than-converted users.
My posted essay (on this site) included an observation of mine that supports atheists’ collective cynicism towards humungous “Christian” institutions (I use quotation marks because ‘Christian’ should be defined as being Christ-like through practicing his teachings, something apparently rarely done). This especially applies to such giant institutional entities as the Vatican and Roman Catholicism—absolute power corrupts absolutely—though I’ve observed that
the majority of Protestant denominations are not much, if any, better.
Politicians, like Stephen Harper, who profess to be practicing Christians but behave almost 180 degrees to the contrary, frustrate and anger me to the point that I post haste turn the TV channel or news-print page lest I absorb too much of his double-speak and non-Christ-like behaviour.
That same said post also noted that some of the best humanitarians that I’ve met or heard about were/are atheists or at most agnostics who’d make better examples of many of Christ’s teachings than too many “Christians.” Contrarily, some of the worst human(e) beings that I’ve met or heard about are the most devout practitioners of “Christian” theology.
Unlike so very many on your site, I’m open to any plausible possibility—including evolution as well as atheistic existentialism, though the latter to an admittedly very small single-digit-percentage-point degree.
The annoying aspect about dialoguing with atheists on hostile sites such as this one is that, being so closed-minded to theistic possibilities, there’s no purpose in black sheep such as myself in even briefly joining your throngs to comment. Ask yourself, what ‘proof’ would suffice to open your mind to the possibility of the actual existence of a theistic entity/creator? Some atheists may think up something fantastic (e.g. the night sky suddenly lighting up on Easter Sunday morning), but if it were to happen, would it not likely be dismissed as perhaps the work of some master of mass illusions, like David Copperfield, trying to fool you all into switching sides on this perhaps greatest of major issues.
Furthermore, your site is overwhelmingly dominated by a socially dangerous all-or-nothing, either/or mentality, like that I had observed during the OJ Simpson trial: Everywhere I turned my ears or eyes—in the entire media spectrum, ‘around the office water cooler,’ etcetera—it was either “I think Mark Fuhrman planted the bloody glove” or contrarily “I think OJ’s guilty.” I thought that there couldn’t possibly be such narrow-minded perspectives as I listened to or read the uncompromising stupidity. When I’d ask or volunteer my view, that both ‘options’ were most likely true, I received but bewildered expressions.
Established Atheism is quite like the ardent theologians of old—both sides are not truly ‘open minded’ but more toward being potentially dangerous if translated into physical power, such as with the Dark Ages inquisitions.
The same could also be said of some academics specialized in various fields of expertise. Blind skepticism seems to be the sometimes arrogant name of their unrelentingly stubborn game. A good example of such are the willful closed-minded reactions toward the countless accounts of clinical or ’near death’ experiences after which the briefly deceased can relate in detail factors of their corporeal setting about which they in ‘no logical manner’ could’ve been cognizant … There should be a limit to the extent at which ‘rational explanation’ and coincidence can be persistently, foolishly utilized to dismiss so many accounts of the paranormal seemingly for the sake of dismissal.■