Absolute Truth
I have finally found an explanation of this balderdash:
Our perspective on absolute truth should be determined by the one who is the ultimate authority, or maker, of all things. (This follows because the maker of all things has defined reality, thus becoming the standard for what we understand to be real.) For those who believe that the “maker” was God (a personal, all-powerful Intelligent Being), absolute truth is derived from properly understanding who God is and what His “will” is for His creation.
Those who reject the idea of a personal maker must believe that an impersonal one — chance — has determined reality. Hence, chance (which by definition has no standard or objective sense) is the only “real” thing in the universe. Everything is a chance occurrence, including our ability to understand who and what we are talking about! “Meaning” is a fantasy. There is no way to derive a standard of truth that has any authority. Anything goes!
Another dumb conservative trapped in binary thinking. Fortunately, there’s a great deconstruction in the comments:
[Y]our statement that lack of belief leads to the idea that actions have no consequences is, at best, silly–and at worst it is insulting and condescending, and you will anger or lose readers with lazy and fallacious logic like that.
Even your first statement is erroneus, and it is the closest to being accurate of the four. You say nothing is truly knowable to someone who doesn’t believe in God. But that same person doesn’t believe in God–oh, crap, see? You’ve made the same mistake as the logical contradiction of saying “There are no absolutes.”
Since the person has analyzed this God person, and come to a conclusion (in this case that there isn’t one), then they’ve probed the issue to their satisfaction–I’d say they found the subject *very* knowable, directly contradicting your sentiment.
I guess my point is…hell, there’s no nice-sounding way to say this but I do mean it constructively:
Christians should stick to preaching scripture and telling scary stories, and leave the chore of logic and rationality and explaining how the universe actually functions to those who specialize in it.
Among the flock, those with a mastery of scripture are presumed to have mastered all knowledge, since their clabber-filled brains believe that all knowledge is derived from God. Thus encouraged, these leaders find all manner of false knowledge to feed the sheeple. In this way the simpletons not only share an erroneous world view filled with imagined threats and magical prophecies which have them yearning for death, but also versions of important concepts contrived to support their fantasy existence. It is little wonder that fundamentalists are incomprehensible, for they have passed beyond the veil of reality. In such a place, xenophobia is not a symptom of their condition, but a bulwark supporting the fantastic lies. So it is that hatred and intolerance are merely defense mechanisms. From that warped perspective, their actions are not evil, but perfectly natural.
This is the pathology of authoritarian leaders and their followers.
