Well praise God! This popped up via google: Wendell Fry, son of atheist & Natural Hygiene author TC Fry (above photo), is a Christian & is here trying to reason with folks at an Atheist site (personally I wouldn’t waste my time but God bless Wendell for trying!) & great to know his Dad’s unbiblical persuasion did not rub off on at least one of TC Fry’s offspring.
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Quote:
Tue, 08/30/2011 – 14:33
“Dear Al (an atheist),
“You can’t read any real Christian Apologetics and see an advocating of faith without reason. Galileo and Copernicus, because of Faith in God helped create or substantiate the Scientific Method because they believed that the Universe God created had rules governing it, theories and phenomenon were testable, and so things could be tested and proven because of the surety of those rules, no longer basing thought on the superstition of mythology. They (and I, not to be compared with those great minds) moved away from religious superstition which is faith without reason, which we are never called to (you care to quote a scripture substantiating your assertion?), and looked at God in the Bible with open eyes. (For your information, my Dad was T.C. Fry, a claimed atheist, and friend of Madelyn Murray O’Hare who stayed or visited with us during her lawsuit in the 60’s).
“Christianity, like any other body of thought, can be practiced selflessly or selfishly (Jesus, whom I follow, although He taught selflessness, tells us we are naturally bent to love ourselves “No one ever hated his own flesh. . . so love others like you love yourself”). We don’t have to be taught to be selfish, we are that already. Christianity can falsely be used as an excuse for almost anything irrational or many a foolish act, and sometimes evil treatment of others, but Atheism has also been used brutally, like with Mao Tse Tung and Stalin, but even on a grander scale. How much more were Atheistic regimes marked by people being like cattle, treated like cattle and governed with contempt? So would you then argue everything Lenin and Stalin did was a result of the tenets of Atheism? Were they using intelligence or brutality when they removed the farmers from the farms and installed their “Friends” and political allies to keep them, and thus overly reduce the efficiency of the farms, resulting in the “smart”, “intelligent” and “wise” reduction in produce coming from them? That makes sense!?!
“You use very weak argument, saying atheists make up a very small part of the imprisoned population, so therefore: . . . whatever! What percentage of the population is atheist? What percentage of the prison population is atheist? Is there a real correlation? Is that science or conjecture? (Of course to be honest, with a short amount of time to write an argument, I’ve used the same sort of thing to substantiate my own argument, whatever pops into the mind, makes sense to me and sounds good, right?) But you need to have better argument. Your argument sounds like one of my college papers, where the best part of my arguments to me were my own thoughts and words, not the real truth in them. Jesus was not fictitious, read the Jewish, Non-Christian Josephus’ Antiquities writings. Also, read Lee Strobel’s books, The Case For Christ and The Case For Faith. He was an atheist who came to faith through search and reason, but really took a closer look at what he wrote-off before.
“You said, “It is no accident that the bible lacks any story, tale or parable about the oppressed rising up against their oppressors.”, yet Daniel stood up to an oppressor in Nebuchadnezzar, as did Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, even to their imminent death and were instead victorious. Your generalizations show you ignore what really is, so you can substantiate your argument without true scholarship.
“On Faith Alone” is a misnomer. Faith is always based on evidence. Evidence is two-fold, empirical and testimonial, and all evidence must be weighed. Once one “knows the Lord”, then we know that when we put our faith in Him instead of our own perception, then we will understand on the other end, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try to understand in the middle. It’s a matter of relationship and trust, not blind subservience. We don’t abandon reason, reason is a great tool, but we also understand the weakness of our position and don’t jump to conclusions about what is, because of how we see it, before we find the evidence for it. “Lean not on your own understanding” does not mean don’t understand, as a matter of fact, have you forgotten how much the Bible teaches about getting knowledge and wisdom? Your article is ignorant of the Bible, and more knowledgeable of your perception of it. Is that Truth? Isn’t that the judgment that the Bible teaches not to use, self-serving judgment, instead of righteous judgment? The One who says, “Judge not so that you won’t be judged” also said, “Judge with righteous judgement.” To the one who knows Him, it means don’t be self-serving in how you look at others, always looking to condemn others by your own standard, but judge with righteous judgment. Take yourself out of the picture and know what’s right. Now if you don’t get that, it’s because you are making yourself out to be a judge of everyone’s motives and condemning based not in truth, but in your own understanding, a very subjective thing. We as humans often do things to justify ourselves knowingly or unknowingly. Our comfort with our own paradigm means for us that everything has to fit in our minds (be subject to our perception, specifically or generally) whether we have a grasp on it or not, there has to be some perceived uniformity. All objective truth is subject when it comes to you perceiving or knowing it (though truth is not subject to you) in that you can’t interact with it knowingly without some subjectivity. If the wind moves and it is gentle, yet you are covered head to toe with thick clothing, depending on what you are doing, you might not perceive it. The Truth is that when one hears the gospel as in “Today, when you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts. . .” There is a testimony that is beyond our natural perception, except that it is like the fact that we do not see air, but see its effects, we can’t see or hear God’s Spirit, naturally, but we can see His effects if we are paying attention. That is all subjective, somewhat, but I do not tell you to just take my word. You have to have your own encounter with God, and since you think Him a fable, you won’t look or perceive. But, to perceive takes the simplicity of a child, or it isn’t available for all. All you have to do is be honest and sincere. I didn’t believe until God made Himself known to me. I wasn’t seeking Him, but I did want to know. (and the Bible does say God will reveal Himself to those who were not looking) Believe me, I know all the atheistic arguments, growing up around my Dad, but once you have met God and know Him, you would have to lie to say you didn’t.
“For you and me, the problem is not the Truth, but our perception of it. If we understand the weakness of our position, then we can see a little more honestly and clearly. We have to understand that our perception is relative to Truth, not the other way around. Truth is never relative. You and I have something at stake in the matter, making us unqualified to judge Truth. We must recuse ourselves from standing as authorities. Truth itself is the authority, and we can do our best to study, perceive as clearly as possible, and align our arguments as cogently, and logically as possible, but to not understand our own weakness and subjectivity and vulnerability in the process is to be ignorant of the Truth.
“If you don’t see the Design of God in Nature and in DNA, and you white wash your intelligence by using “Billions and Billions of years” to ignore it, then you are not using true reason, but ignorance. Don’t you ask, “How?” How did things change, how did the nature encountered that required adaptation and change, communicate to the living thing what to do to change? Of course if didn’t, so did the living thing’s DNA just change by chance without knowing what it was changing and just got lucky — gradually over Billions and Billions of years? Does the pressure to change by the Natural Whatever the living thing encounters work over on DNA and make it change in a corresponding gradual way? How would it know how to change? Did it have the “Billions of Years” to make the change before its survival was ultimately threatened by nature?
“Now we see that adaptation is built into the code of DNA, but we see that not by studying the code, but its results. However, we don’t see that intelligence telling us how a light sensitive nerve in a sponge would “evolve” into a spherical eye that has rods and cones and a self-focusing lens all the while it uses the laws of light and lenses to invert the image and tell the brain to re-invert it? Look deeper, or, do we just accept it on faith and not question it? Are you basically saying that “Evolution” is a fact, an obvious given, that the fact that we are here is enough? Sounds like religion to me, Al.
“When is an “Accident” intelligent? When you add “Billions and Billions of years” to it. When is Chance Destiny? When you add “Billions and Billions of years” to it. When are the intelligent stupid, when they equate natural selection, and micro-evolution (which are both really DNA-built adaptation) with Origins and macro-
evolution. You’ve missed the presuppositions you take into account. You have presuppositions (as we all naturally do), but you don’t acknowledge that without them your arguments don’t stand, and that you need them to survive in your paradigm philosophically. Your presuppositions are your beliefs you take without question. Look deeper. “Take care.
“Wendell Fry”
End Quote.
Source (which I hate to even link to, bleh!):
http:// atheists .org/ content/morals-why-atheism-trumps-christianity
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I only scanned the first page of that thread, which is pages & pages long, & did not notice further comments signed by Wendell. He may have come back & piped in later. Either way, nice to “meet you,” brother Wendell Fry! :)
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Wendell mentioned, above, that the famed God-hater Madalyn Murray O’Hair (below photo) used to visit their Fry home in the Sixties (what a small world! O’Hair & TC Fry were both based in Austin, Texas).
O’Hair’s eldest son, William, is also a Christian. I’ve seen William being interviewed on TBN in years past regarding his mother. He gave an awesome testimony of his salvation but also how wretched & dysfunctional his mother was & what it was like growing up with her.
Here are some of William Murray (O’Hair)’s quotes from his site that were posted at the Jesus-Is-Savior site.
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Quotes:
“I was born into a home of near constant rage and violence. As a result of my mother’s constant angry outbursts, she could not hold down a job. She, my brother and I, lived with her parents and my unmarried uncle. My grandfather had never filed an income tax return and most of what he did do during his life was illegal or ill advised. My grandmother read Tarot cards and sent out demons by burning human hair. My uncle kept hoards of pornography in his room and my mother filled the house with statues of mating animals which she worshipped.”
“When I was a young boy of ten or eleven years old she would come home and brag about spending the day in X-rated movie theaters in downtown Baltimore…”
“My mother delighted in hiring unrepentant criminals to work in her atheist office. She particularly enjoyed hiring convicted murderers who had served their time but were unrepentant about what they had done…”
“My mother was an evil person … Not for removing prayer from America’s schools … No … She was just evil. She stole huge amounts of money. She misused the trust of people. She cheated children out of their parents’ inheritance. She cheated on her taxes and even stole from her own organizations. She once printed up phony stock certificates on her own printing press to try to take over another atheist publishing company. I could go on but I won’t. All the money my mother made in this manner stayed behind. It did not go with her. ‘For we brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out’” (1st Timothy 6:7).
“My mother simply believed, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the only law.’”
“The dismembered bodies of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Jon Murray and Robin Murray were found in January of 2000 in Camp Wood, Texas. One of the killers, David Waters, led the authorities to the site in return for a guarantee he would serve his time in a Federal rather than in a Texas state prison. He died in prison of liver disease in 2003. A second killer was sentenced to life in prison.”
“In reality my mother did not create the times, the times created her. She was what America was about in the sixties and seventies. There were several cases going to the Supreme Court to remove prayer. Her case just got there first. The left-wing Court of the day wanted prayer out of the schools and to allow abortion on demand. They virtually were advertising for cases to change America. But my mother saw the secular and sexual turn in America as centered around her.”
End Quotes.
For the longer versions, see the source sites:
http://www.wjmurray.com
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Atheism/madalyn_ohair.htm
William’s Mom had some serious problems! It must be awful to grow up around atheists & God haters! But what a magnificent testimony to the saving power of Jesus Christ that both these men, Wendell & William, somewhat connected though their parents’ mutual atheism & friendship, grew up to become Christians despite their backgrounds. Beautiful! Thank you Lord!
PS: I couldn’t find a picture of Wendell Fry.
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FASTING PARADISE 