I still say Jesus Christ can hit a curve ball!

Or lay off of it when it bounces off home plate.

...something Josh has trouble doing.

Better than being an atheist, but still just religion. Easy to praise God when you get a 25mil contract. Try to do it when you fall on your ass.

Being an atheist is much more respectable than being a public hypocrite like Josh is with his faith. My parents both believe in god, but they let my two brothers and I decide our own way, which is how I'll be with my kids one day. I'm bigger on reality than superstition.

So you are an atheist sympathizer and part nihilist.

I'm not looking down on you but it does seem like you have had a loss of meaning in your life, or maybe you feel like meaning wasn't ever there, or maybe you are in total denial about whatever is driving your despairing ways.

God does love you son.

Why does an all powerful God make people suffer? The short answer is that we as a race have caused suffering through sin, not to say there aren't people who suffer as innocents. There certainly are, and God is chief among them. He suffers with us and for us. He became one of us, to die for us, and to save us from sin.

All that might seem like a bunch of mumbo jumbo but just because it seems like mumbo jumbo doesn't mean its not true and real.

I just can't stand the microphone. "First I'd like to thank God." Well, that's great and all, but if you thanked him quietly after scoring / hitting / WAKING UP, you probably don't need to mention it again. He already heard. Why do you need to feel good about yourself for doing it on TV?

Self promotion sucks.

Or you could just read the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector. Holla.

Completely agree, Max.

i dont even...

Josh left. Move on. Rangers didnt give him what he wanted so he found a team that did. ts really that simple.

I don't have anything negative to say about Josh the person, the Christian. Those that are sound like sour grapes.

Josh the baseball player is dead to me. He quit on my team. He mailed it in. He is getting overpaid. I don't blame him for taking the money. I do wish he'd just shut up about it and admit it, but I don't care that much, really. Bottom line is he did what nearly every player in MLB does--he took the offer from the highest bidder.

I wish we could keep other religions out of baseball, as baseball has plenty of its own faith and religious like components.

@RyanXpress: the USA is a secular nation. Our constitution quite intentionally does not endorse any religion of any kind. Our citizens, residents, and visitors are free to worship as they choose, and more importantly, are free to not worship, reject traditional notions of god, and still remain in good standing within our borders. As a Jew, Jesus probably can't hit, a curveball or otherwise; very few Jews are accomplished baseball players.

As for trying to find meaning to life, that is a very personal and uniquely subjective quest. Meaning is in the mind of the beholder.

As for the notion that suffering is caused by sin, I can see how some people can relieve that in order to account for a god believed to be omnipotent but still permits all manner of awful stuff. I don't know how that applies to non-human animals, who likewise suffer despite an incapacity to sin.

I think it is fair to say humans are incapable of understanding these Big questions, much less answering them.

I say live and let live, love your neighbor, and enjoy baseball and the rest of life's pleasures.

In other news, what is the point of being an atheist/nihilist/believe in nothing?

If you're right, you're dead and nothing happens.

If you're wrong, you'll be left on the sidelines and not cared about, just as you didn't care.

Someone had to create all of this, right?

@ilovetrades: this is hardly the forum for this discussion.

Good post by the Italian

Andy,

Why?

I love trades is about the tenth poster to post on religion in this thread.

I can understand why people want to keep it baseball but the fact is that baseball bleeds into religion and religion into baseball just like ALL other human endeavors. Everything is intertwined whether we like it or not. Unless Joey shuts us down and decides he doesn't want non baseball stuff on here I think we are fine in talking about this stuff because it came up in the context of talking about baseball. Its not like people are just putting up forum threads only for religious purposes. So yes, this is not the forum to talk about non baseball stuff, but when it comes up in a baseball context I see nothing wrong with talking about it even if you depart from baseball a bit.

Joe, his post gets us from talking about characterizing Josh, who is a baseball player (thus it's tangentially related) to exchanging cosmological arguments, which is hardly related to baseball.

Then again, it could just be that I've seen that kind of post in many forums around the internet over the years, and I know how all of them end, and it's rarely a productive discussion.

Joe,
Perhaps commenting on a player's religious beliefs in the context of the player bringing such beliefs as a motivation, or even causation of his successes (for some reason failures do not merit consideration) is one thing, but criticizing or questioning BBTiA participants for their atheism, agnosticism, or secularism, is inappropriate to my sensibilities. In my mind, even discussions in the player context is tenuous as it can tend to trivialize a person's religious beliefs by implying God has an interest in our sports.

I am with Andy. There are plenty of other forums for religious discussion. Baseball is more than enough for me here.

In other news, what is the point of being an atheist/nihilist/believe in nothing?

The point is, rather than believing in something that has never been proven to exist, I possess the (quite logical) thought that there is no creator. That everything I know, have known, or will know, comes through my own perceptions and experience, rather than what cannot be quantified through blind faith and superstition.

If you're right, you're dead and nothing happens.

If I'm right, I will have lived a true and honest life, which is all I'm really trying to fulfill. If I'm wrong, and a god denies me placement in his wonderful little heaven, then I wouldn't want to be there anyway. I know I'm a good person. I was a churchgoer through my age-17 year on earth. I've seen the motivations of the church. I know how disingenuous many of its members are, masking their guilt and shittiness as humans by the righteous belief that they are somehow better than those who do not "believe."

If you're wrong, you'll be left on the sidelines and not cared about, just as you didn't care.

Perhaps I prefer the people who care about me while I'm alive more than the thought of people (or a god whom I've never seen) one day caring for me in a place I don't think exists. I'm comfortable with the thought of dying. If I can feel the tangible love of people whom I love while I'm actually here, breathing, I'll take that over the love I've never felt to be real from the divine entity I believed in my entire childhood.

Someone had to create all of this, right?

Not necessarily. If you ask me, I'd say completely not. We've got so much information nowadays about how the earth was made. Space is so vast; there are so many planets and so many galaxies; we on earth aren't alone and life certainly did not begin with two people being placed in a garden with an apple and a talking snake. I think it's much more rational to believe earth was just a giant mistake made by the universe than if it were some guy playing with a bunch of puppet strings.

Anyway, like primi said, live and let live. Whatever will be will be. It's not as if I look down on anyone for their beliefs, but since it's so socially acceptable to preach the word of a god being real, the opposite of the coin should also be okay. I'm much more comfortable talking about religion than if it were race or homophobia or what have you. There have been so many different gods throughout the ages that I can't put all my wad into one of them, especially not if they claim they are correct and all other idols are "false" and people who don't believe are somehow below them.

I don't think anybody could ever put it better, Joe. VERY well said.

eric,

Is it that you have not experienced God's love or that you HAVE experienced the opposite of love.

If the latter is true there is no one who experienced more of hatred than Jesus Christ. Often suffering is the pathway to a genuine experience of God's love. Seeing things for what they really are as you do can be a foundation for a true experience of God. In other words, you have seen the evils of many religious people, and that gives you a foundation to experience God in a genuine way unlike them.

Regardless, it makes no sense to reject religion because some religious people are bad. There are bad people in every group.

Joe, I never said churchgoing hypocrites were the reason I stopped believing in god, just so we're clear.

And, as much as I'm sure what you just wrote is what you believe in to be truth, it's not the way I see the world. Whatever suffering I've experienced has been due to the choices I myself have made. And that's just that.

To me, god is no more valuable than someone who sells me frozen yogurt from an ice cream truck. The difference is, the man who I get ice cream from is one I can see, and he provides me a legitimate service (because frozen yogurt is delicious).

I admit, I used to be a very superstitious person, especially when I played sports. When I played catcher, I used to dust off home plate with my hand after every batter came to the plate. If the pitcher was having a good game, I assumed part of the reason was because I kept up with the same routine of swiping dirt off the plate. If a hitter came up and smacked a double, I'd stop doing that and move on to doing something else (whether it be kicking a little dirt back over the plate, getting up to throw the ball back to the pitcher instead of staying in a crouch, drawing a little picture in the dirt, erasing the picture in the dirt, et. al).

After awhile, I realized it had nothing to do with what antics I was performing between at bats, but rather as simple as the pitcher making good pitches and the hitter hitting those pitches. It had nothing to do with me.

That's, in an extremely simplified version, the way I see religion. No matter what I believe it's not going to change anything. It's not going to change the fact that no one knows one way or another. There's just so much random chance that happens in life, both good and bad, that I choose to view each act independently, that nothing happens for a reason. Life happens in fast motion, real-time; it's only after the fact that we justify events in our minds to make sense of it all and say "well this happened because of this, and it now has meaning."

Everything I've accomplished and have yet to accomplish is because of what I've done, or have yet to do. I've no problem with patting myself on the back or telling myself that I fucked up. Life is about choices.

^^^ Great post.

So are we saying Mike Hargrove was one of the best first basemen we ever had?

@Eric

I have anxiety like your superstitions. I've heard it is because brain chemical stuff or something.

Max,

Absolutely. One of the very best without a doubt.

Agreed?

Well there was Mark but he is disqualified because he became a jerk.

Be led by faith not sight!