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| Antony Flew | |
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| Topic Started: May 19 2010, 08:12 PM (86 Views) | |
| Post #1 May 19 2010, 08:12 PM | Noel Cookman |
| Nary a peep from the Ionians on the passing of our dear Antony Flew? Surely you can forgive his recent foray into delusion and weep one tear at the passing of just one more meaningless human unit who held high the torch for so long. He deserves some sort of mention. I scold, nay I excoriate, my fellow ionians for ignoring the life and passing of this great mind. Where is thy heart? |
 
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| Post #2 May 19 2010, 11:22 PM | Joe E. Holman |
| I didn't know he had past. I saw the Warren-Flew debate. He was always touted as brilliant, but even as a theist preacher student in training, I was never impressed. He became a deist in his last few years. Doesn't help the Christians, and if you think about it, doesn't hurt the atheists. What can I say? I'm not good at goodbyes, not usually. |
 
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| Post #3 May 21 2010, 05:07 PM | Noel Cookman |
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This is not good for your brotherhood. Imagine this - you give your whole adult life, your intellectual fervor, the most energetic years of your life, your heart and soul (not in a transcendent sense of course) to the advancement of atheism; you take flack from god-people, religious nut jobs and assorted Baptist idiots, you are the front man - sometimes quite alone - for atheism to the entire West. And you make one slip in the twilight years of your life - you get soft and not even terribly soft - theism even in its most innocuous form of deism. And what do your atheist brothers do? They do something even worse than attack or hate or revile. They ignore you. They don't even recognize that you passed. This is like saying you were not even here. For an atheist, this IS hell - to exist in the only existence in which one will ever exist - and for all practical purposes, you didn't exist. No afterlife to console you for the years of toil. No heavenly Father to draw you close to His bosom and dry your tears. No greeting on "the other side" to welcome you home. No "grace" to forgive you for your one mistake. For my part I say: love me or hate me; hit me or attack me; agree with me heartily or disagree with me vehemently. But PLEASE - Oh God - PLEASE - DO NOT IGNORE ME. Do not act as if I am not here. Had I never existed this would not be a problem - to pass off into non-existence. But, once existing, to experience the nothingness of non-existence before actually passing into non-existence is too horrible. It is truly the worst "hell" anyone could imagine. But for me to deconvert and become an atheist, this is precisely the life I must face. I am too cowardly. I cannot bear the pain of not having mattered. I jest not. |
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| Post #4 May 21 2010, 07:58 PM | Joe E. Holman |
What do you want? Atheists recognized Flew when he was here. They don't mourn for him like some celebrity. When Goerge Carlin passed, he was mourned, and there is a difference. His work was not unappreciated or ignored, just his senile years. But at least you recognize his twilight years mistake. It wasn't like he again set out to use his profound intellect to argue for Thomas Paine's god.
To some, but you are speaking from your own emotionally fear more than anything, as you suggest below.
Great, now we know how to torture you! :-) But seriously, I don't know what you want with this thread. The problem with well-known atheists or theists switching sides and giving academic reasons for it is not the problem. But once you take a stand and switch or switch again, if you switch back or away despite your own former arguments, you just loose credibility. It would be like me becoming a theist again and accusing everyone of not listening to my "new" arguments." "Can you blame us?", they would be thinking. This seems to be where you are going with this and I don't know why you feel the need to do that. |
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| Post #5 May 22 2010, 03:05 PM | Noel Cookman |
Do you not have some sentimentality about you? I'm going anywhere particularly with this. And I'm not trying to pick a fight over Flew's dead body - least not until it's had a chance to rot a little bit. |
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| Post #6 May 23 2010, 05:30 AM | Huxley |
| Never heard of him. Is that supposed to be a big deal? |
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| Post #7 May 23 2010, 08:14 AM | Noel Cookman |
| Oh my. Revisionist history illustrated. ...as if Flew never existed. |
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4:33 PM Jul 31
