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ShadowCatboy posted:27% of the US population considers itself Evangelical Christian. That's less than 50%, so technically that's a minority. Wait, seriously? Holy poo poo. Guess that explains a lot.
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Nov 24, 2014 04:40
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ShadowCatboy posted:Well there are lots of ways to answer this question, depending on how that statement of "I don't know" is applied. I'm applying this in comparison to an atheist's "No" and a *theist's "Yes," so of course it's not *all* there is to be said. Let's say the opinion is slightly more nuanced: "I don't see any reason to believe in any particular deity, yet I also don't rule out the possibility of the existence of one or several."
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Nov 24, 2014 05:05
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Muscle Tracer posted:I'm applying this in comparison to an atheist's "No" and a *theist's "Yes," so of course it's not *all* there is to be said. Let's say the opinion is slightly more nuanced: "I don't see any reason to believe in any particular deity, yet I also don't rule out the possibility of the existence of one or several." Yeah that's pretty much negative atheism right there. It's basically how you treat any proposition about the world: It MIGHT be possible that vaccines cause autism, but without substantive evidence you don't treat the idea seriously or act in accordance with it. It's also important to remember that before you can discuss you need to have some basic definition of "God" first. Only then can you determine whether you're agnostic or gnostic, theist or atheist, and if atheist, whether you're positive or negative.
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Nov 24, 2014 05:12
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ShadowCatboy posted:27% of the US population considers itself Evangelical Christian. That's less than 50%, so technically that's a minority. Can we stop doing this? Minority in this context does not mean less than 50%. When you are talking about minority in regards to social groups, it actually means something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_group Really annoying to see this mistake made over and over again.
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Nov 24, 2014 05:16
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Kit Walker posted:Wait, seriously? Holy poo poo. I'm presuming you aren't American because it's a pretty pervasive phenomenon in our sphere of politics. And in regards to Black Bones' assertions about the proportion of Biblical literalists: 28% of Americans believe the Bible is the literal word of God, while 47% believe it's inspired by God and not everything within is literal. Granted it's declining, but in the 70s the number of US Biblical literalists was around 40%.
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Nov 24, 2014 05:19
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I can't believe we're still stuck on "atheists have faith too"  There is a being named Snurd. Snurd is a seven-dimensional chartreuse pelican that exists simultaneously in everyone's duodenum, and always has. Until reading that sentence, you were already an asnurdist. You did not believe in the existence of Snurd. That's all that was required, a lack of belief. I am going to suppose that well over 98% of you are still asnurdists, because just by reading my description of Snurd, you did not suddenly believe that there was, in fact, a seven-dimensional chartreuse pelican in your duodenum. You may go further, and actively disbelieve in Snurd. That is, you believe positively that Snurd does not exist. Now, you are making a metaphysical claim which may in some way be comparable to faith.* If you merely accept the fact that this is possible, yet sounds unlikely, silly, and frankly pointless to even consider, you remain an asnurdist. No belief claim is necessary, just a rejection of one. Most athiests merely aren't convinced that God/gods exist. They need not "actively disbelieve" or have aith-faith in a god-shaped hole in the universe. *I still think an evidence-based positivity is different from faith, but I'll admit it's at least in the ballpark.
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Nov 24, 2014 05:22
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ShadowCatboy posted:I'm presuming you aren't American because it's a pretty pervasive phenomenon in our sphere of politics. And in regards to Black Bones' assertions about the proportion of Biblical literalists: 28% of Americans believe the Bible is the literal word of God, while 47% believe it's inspired by God and not everything within is literal. Granted it's declining, but in the 70s the number of US Biblical literalists was around 40%. I'm American. I'm just from NYC so I'm a bit out of touch with what the rest of the country is like. Like, I know religion plays a huge role but I figured evangelicals were like, maybe 5-10% at best.
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Nov 24, 2014 05:24
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down with slavery posted:Can we stop doing this? Minority in this context does not mean less than 50%. When you are talking about minority in regards to social groups, it actually means something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_group I'm being snarky and deriding Black Bones' claim that evangelicals are a minority, dude.
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Nov 24, 2014 05:26
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:So what made you believe? Well God lives just up the street from me, I've met him several times. He's a lot smaller in person than you'd think! More seriously, it's a combination of things; ranging from personal experience to trusted testimony to rational arguments or suppositions. I'm a cradle  , so my internal thoughts and feelings on the matter are heavily influenced externally by my upbringing, education, and cultural milieu. The Bible itself is certainly an important part, but hardly the sole factor. Doubt also plays an important part in my beliefs, and I consider it one of the virtues. ShadowCatboy posted:27% of the US population considers itself Evangelical Christian. That's less than 50%, so technically that's a minority. That is a minority, yes. Why not round it up to an even 30? Then we can say "3 out of 10", or like I said, "a few".
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Nov 24, 2014 05:56
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Kit Walker posted:I'm American. I'm just from NYC so I'm a bit out of touch with what the rest of the country is like. Like, I know religion plays a huge role but I figured evangelicals were like, maybe 5-10% at best. There are probably more evangelicals just in the state of New York than 10%.
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Nov 24, 2014 05:57
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Muscle Tracer posted:I asked him once, "if you woke up one day and God was up there in the sky, telling everybody that, seriously, they ought to believe everything in the Bible, and everyone around you changed their lives to accomodate that, what would you do?" His response was, "I'd know I was hallucinating or had gone insane, because there can be no God." To be fair, if he had the opportunity to decide this he'd probably be right, because peepin' God straight up kills you. Exodus 33:20 "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see Me and live" In Jewish folklore even the angels get pretty freaked out being face to face with God. That's why he's always a dream or a fiery bush or a Jesus.
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Nov 24, 2014 06:24
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I'm interested in the idea of the atheist who denies the idea of the supernatural unequivocally as a perpetrator of religious faith. Speaking as an atheist, I'm as open to the idea of a God or ghouls or demons as I am to he idea of a giant purple octopus living on the dark side of the moon - that is, theoretically possible, but so lacking in compelling evidence as to be an intellectual waste of time. If, however, a ghoul of God or purple octopus DID show up, I'd consider it a natural phenomenon, as we live in a universe consisting of "nature", and not of "supernature", which is a philosophical non sequitur. Even if the entity was completely beyond our comprehension and defied our current understanding of physics, I, as a humble atheist, would be comfortable admitting its nature was beyond our current paltry understanding of the universe we live in, just as gravity and evolution were pre-Newton and pre-Darwin. The concept of the "supernatural" is one that ceased serving a purpose with the onset of scientific reasoning and now belongs exclusively to the realm of fiction. I'd argue dismissing the existence of the supernatural is no more faith based than dismissing the existence of ghjfhy, fjgyyu, or fhgjt - it's so indefinable and so absent from the realm of human experience or philosophical/intellectual purpose as to be essentially a nonsense word.
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Nov 24, 2014 06:28
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The Peccadillo posted:To be fair, if he had the opportunity to decide this he'd probably be right, because peepin' God straight up kills you. Dogma is not a very good movie, but that scene where Metatron explains that they went through several Adams before they figured out why his head kept exploding makes me chuckle.
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Nov 24, 2014 06:40
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rudatron posted:I don't think anyone is saying that though, that evil implies non-existence. Though some people believe the equally absurd converse, that existence is guaranteed because of goodness or some such other bullshit, but again, I don't think anyone itt would take that seriously. No, I see it quite often among the lovely "I just stopped going to church look how edgy I am" type of atheists. It's a extremely facile but common argument.
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Nov 24, 2014 06:43
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Nintendo Kid posted:No, I see it quite often among the lovely "I just stopped going to church look how edgy I am" type of atheists. It's a extremely facile but common argument. Its an attempt to justify excluding oneself from a community; whether they feel a need to justify that to themselves or others, and what the actual cause of their exclusion is, well, that requires multiple sources to determine.
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Nov 24, 2014 06:46
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Well, assuming God created the world, and that our actions in this world are to be judged and will determine our eternal fate in the afterlife, are all the forms of suffering that exist in this world really necessary? Like, were malformed babies really a vital part of this process? Or diseases like ebola? People getting crushed to death by landslides? Like, the obvious response is, "everything has a place in God's plan," but it's pretty unfair. Like, a person born into a wealthy, moral-minded family will probably never have to suffer or starve or do anything sinful to survive, and will probably fill their lives with good works. But a person born to a poor, single parent household and raised by an alcoholic will probably find themselves likely sinning to survive and have few opportunities to do any real positive good in the world. It just doesn't make much sense. The rules of Christianity seem to imply that some people will be damned to hell for all eternity due to circumstances completely outside their control. Free will as we think of it is a myth.
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Nov 24, 2014 06:59
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Black Bones posted:That is a minority, yes. Why not round it up to an even 30? Then we can say "3 out of 10", or like I said, "a few". Or "enough to completely dominate one half of the legislature."
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Nov 24, 2014 07:16
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Kit Walker posted:Well, assuming God created the world, and that our actions in this world are to be judged and will determine our eternal fate in the afterlife, are all the forms of suffering that exist in this world really necessary? Like, were malformed babies really a vital part of this process? Or diseases like ebola? People getting crushed to death by landslides? Consider the possibility that a god exists and is in fact omnibenevolent to an intelligent race, but it's actually an intelligent race halfway across the galaxy and he couldn't care less about humans. Also free will is probably ultimately a myth, outside of any gods or religions. Muscle Tracer posted:Or "enough to completely dominate one half of the legislature." They don't.
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Nov 24, 2014 07:23
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Curses, fishmech'd again!
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Nov 24, 2014 07:25
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Kit Walker posted:(...) Like, a person born into a wealthy (...) family will probably never have (...) do anything sinful to survive, and will probably fill their lives with good works. lmao (you make valid points, I just find funny that you think that wealthy people are more altruistic and less prone to sin)
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Nov 24, 2014 13:50
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Muscle Tracer posted:I'm applying this in comparison to an atheist's "No" and a *theist's "Yes," The atheist's position isn't "No", it's just not "Yes", and includes "I Don't Know". Think of it this way, when we have a trial by jury we don't ask the jurors to vote "Guilty" or "Innocent" but "Guilty" or "Not Guilty" because we don't require them to be sure of innocence but merely convinced or unconvinced of guilt. So imagine God being trial for existing. If you can't say "yes, I believe that God exists" then you are an atheist.
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Nov 24, 2014 14:27
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Kit Walker posted:Well, assuming God created the world, and that our actions in this world are to be judged and will determine our eternal fate in the afterlife Here's another question I've had. So as I understand it, Jesus died so that our sins would be forgiven, and all we have to do is believe that he is God incarnate. That seems like a weird standard - like, why couldn't he die for the sin of nonbelief as well? - but that's how I understand it. It's also been explained to me that all sin is equal in God's eye. That is, whether we think one impure thought or murder 10 people, we've still sinned, and sin is unacceptable however it manifests. You cannot be in God's presence if you're soiled by sin. And lastly, it is essentially guaranteed that we will sin. We are a flawed race, and each of us will sin in our lives, it's unavoidable. So my question is, why strive not to sin? Why even try to do as many good things as you can? As long as you are a Christian, everything is going to be forgiven anyway, and it's not as though you have to avoid felony sins but can commit a few misdemeanor sins - it's all equally unacceptable. Can you be a true Christ-loving Christian and still go to hell for some reason? And if so, how is that "forgiving all your sins"?
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Nov 24, 2014 14:31
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Here's another question I've had. That's penal substitution and it's Calvinist. There were ransom type, substitutionary type, conceptualizations of salvation in the early church but those are different beasts from penal substitution. And in many of the earlier substitutionary ideas the death of Jesus does redeem the whole of existence/creation. GAINING WEIGHT... posted:It's also been explained to me that all sin is equal in God's eye. That is, whether we think one impure thought or murder 10 people, we've still sinned, and sin is unacceptable however it manifests. You cannot be in God's presence if you're soiled by sin. What is sin? Is it specific actions? Is it a state? It depends on what denomination you ask. For the Catholics it's more like a list of harmful action, that move one away from God. On the Protestant side, sin can be more of a state, like a statement that we are separate from God and each other and ourselves. And in that understanding that we are separate is that we are in sin! It's not a: well you'll try to behave well and eventually gently caress up type situation. It's: We are separate and that is a consequence of having existence type situation. GAINING WEIGHT... posted:So my question is, why strive not to sin? Hell, why not strive to "Sin Boldly". To be ourselves fully, utterly unafraid of breaking some arbitrary rules list.
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Nov 24, 2014 15:21
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Kit Walker posted:Wait, seriously? Holy poo poo. Not really. Women are technically ~51% of the population, but outside MRA nuts, it's not disputable that are given the short end of the stick. Your ability to control the levers of power is the important thing. As another example, Shiites were the majority in Iraq and also an oppressed group (aka "minority")
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Nov 24, 2014 15:53
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Cippalippus posted:lmao I don't. I believe it's simply easier to do more good when you're wealthy than when you're poor. That's also why I added the modifier of "moral-minded." I mean, even that doesn't necessarily mean anything, if we're to judge the number of shithead scions of even upper-middle class families I know, but in purely hypothetical terms it's a lot easier to do more good when you can donate thousands or millions of dollars to help people when it'll have no bearing on your quality of life than if you find yourself with barely ten bucks left over at the end of the month. GAINING WEIGHT... posted:So my question is, why strive not to sin? Why even try to do as many good things as you can? As long as you are a Christian, everything is going to be forgiven anyway, and it's not as though you have to avoid felony sins but can commit a few misdemeanor sins - it's all equally unacceptable. Can you be a true Christ-loving Christian and still go to hell for some reason? And if so, how is that "forgiving all your sins"? The belief is that a person who really, truly believes in Christ will live a pure life and not sin. Of course, you don't have to look very far to see how it's often the most fervent believers who seem to use religion as a cudgel to gently caress over other people. Kit Walker fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Nov 24, 2014 |
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Nov 24, 2014 16:25
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Sakarja posted:Different strokes, I suppose. I suppose i judge by categories, roughly speaking: I judge the actions of humans and animals differently, same to a lesser degree with the sane and insane, adults and children, and so on. By the same token, it does not seem like a big strech not to judge the Creator and Lawgiver by the same standard as some random doofus, or at all. In fact, it seems absurd to me to judge an entity that is beyond my comprehension. Yeah he's not judging God though, because God isn't posting in this thread (Calvinist God excepted). He's judging what some random doofus is telling him about God and deciding whether those claims make sense and are consistent and moral. He can certainly judge the claims of some other ape-in-tennis-shoes, but there's this weird rhetorical trick some religious people use to block that by claiming to speak for God and then deflecting any criticism of them as an arrogant presumption upon the Divine. You're not God. You don't get to wear His hat and hand down infallible truths about the universe that we're not allowed to question while pretending to be humble. To accept this line of argument renders all religiously-justified commands beyond moral or logical judgment, which is ridiculous. By this standard we can't even criticize the Westboro Baptist church. Who are we to say whether a loving God wants us to stone the gays: who are we to question the Word of the Lord as interpreted by the Phelps clan ? They say God says it, so debate over I guess, kill all fags. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Nov 24, 2014 |
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Nov 24, 2014 16:43
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Kit Walker posted:I don't. I believe it's simply easier to do more good when you're wealthy than when you're poor. It's also easier to sin without thinking about it, simply by making investments. e: also you've forgotten the widow's mite, Jesus decreed that good is income-adjusted
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Nov 24, 2014 16:49
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Nintendo Kid posted:Also free will is probably ultimately a myth, outside of any gods or religions. Eh, this is a can of worms, and has been so since we thought up the idea of fate. The current version assumes a mechanistic universe. We know that the universe is actually significantly random on the quantum level, and this affects the Newtonian universe in ways which make pure mechanism impossible in the long run (see: quantum tunnelling causing mutation in DNA). On a shorter scale, this is way less true, but even then the best was to do a lot of science is to assume that inputs from outside a given system are actually random even thoough they aren't in principle. Even if our free will is an illusion, my take on it is the name as Einstein's on reality: it is an illusion, albiet a remarkably persistant one. We have to think as if we have free will, even if we ultimately don't. Note that even my strongest positions on free will still admit that we're significantly at the mercy of a gigantic number of actual mechanistically causal variables, from what we happen to think we know to how much of a given neutrotransmitter our cells have to work with at a given moment. The fact that I can play with those neutotransmitter levels to a huge degree with the poo poo sitting around on my computer desk (about 50 or so different psychoactive drugs, all but one legal, and that one is weed and I'm in British Columbia so it's like halfway there) really complicates the question. That I can choose to not take my Effexor, even knowing that this will result in my life being a barely comprehensible hell due to the withdrawl, makes the question really headache-inducing. Not as bad a headache as I'd have 36 or so hours after my last Effexor though. The tldr is that I regard any firm position on free will other than "if we have it, it is within strict limits" to be as superstitious as believing in good luck or that what numbers you run in Keno have any bearing on your odds of winning. Maybe, maybe we'll have some real answers once we have quantum computing to play with. (Not Keno though, unless you have hacked the algorithm being used to draw the numbers). Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Nov 24, 2014 |
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Nov 24, 2014 17:07
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Wait We've kind of unequivocally established that God is an idiot screw up in this thread (open to interpretation) Is it possible the phrase "to err is human; to forgive, devine" got interpreted backwards? That might just explain everything?!!!?!
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Nov 24, 2014 17:15
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That originally meant that only God can forgive, so we may as well kill you because we fallible humans will gently caress it up anyhow.SedanChair posted:It's also easier to sin without thinking about it, simply by making investments. Only since the Catholic Church revised its position on usury. Before that, or as a Muslim, any investment that can be seen as earning interest is a sin. (I'm sure the details are complicated, but government bonds and other investments that are loans paid with interest are usury and will land you in Hell. Also I think Islam might be right on this one). Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Nov 24, 2014 |
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Nov 24, 2014 17:17
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Profit is not interest. But what you do to create profits usually involves sin. Usury doesn't have to enter into it.
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Nov 24, 2014 17:29
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SedanChair posted:e: also you've forgotten the widow's mite, Jesus decreed that good is income-adjusted Even Christ understood what most Conservatives refuse to: marginal utility.
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Nov 24, 2014 17:47
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VitalSigns posted:You're not God. You don't get to wear His hat and hand down infallible truths about the universe that we're not allowed to question while pretending to be humble. To accept this line of argument renders all religiously-justified commands beyond moral or logical judgment, which is ridiculous. By this standard we can't even criticize the Westboro Baptist church. Who are we to say whether a loving God wants us to stone the gays: who are we to question the Word of the Lord as interpreted by the Phelps clan ? They say God says it, so debate over I guess, kill all fags. This kind of goes along with my earlier point, as well as the question in my other D&D thread: there are far too many disagreements arrived at by interpretation for me to take interpretation alone as sufficient. Within that, there are also a great many things that are considered sins by some and not by others for which neither camp seems to have a better or worse argument objectively. We can't even figure out what sins are, much less how to resist the temptation into doing them. And yet, Jesus died to absolve us of our sins, or at least remove the consequences of having done them. So why slog through all that mess of interpretation of what is and is not sin when all of it's getting forgiven at the end of your life? Why is so much time spent declaring what God thinks and what God wants and which things God does not like when you've got a blank check of forgiveness as long as you're a Christian? That's the disconnect here. Interpretation is faulty and our sins get forgiven anyway, yet people spend SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY trying to find the "right" interpretations of things, going so far as to split into new denominations that adhere to those views.
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Nov 24, 2014 17:59
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Who What Now posted:I feel like this may be a sticking point for why you and I have such difficulty communicating. I think I might have a way to crack this nut. Here's a song, that's a story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4 That's: Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. Let's look at the problem of interpreting that song. The first way we can interpret that song is literal. Is the song literally true or not? Is it a broken myth (not literally true) or an unbroken myth (literally true). Well that's complicated. The events as described aren't something that really happened, but they are roughly based on something that really happened (The Ribbon Creek Incident). So it's broken but has parts inside of it that might be unbroken. In a conversation about religion, why does this broken/unbroken stuff matter? Well monotheism, or at least simplistic monotheism, only tolerates unbroken myths. Everything that isn't true is a false idol. So that situation is: X is literally true or it is not. And then X's validity as a belief is dependent on it's literal truth. This is the way a lot of you look at religion. This is the way many evangelicals look at the bible. The question at this level of interpretation is "Is this literally true or not?" If one is asking that question, again that's monotheistic (not necessarily Christian monotheistic, but definitely monotheistic). Because it presumes one reality or truth. When Kyrie treats the bible as literally true, I think this is why. When anti-theists (thank you Reza Aslan http://www.salon.com/2014/11/21/reza_aslan_sam_harris_and_new_atheists_arent_new_arent_even_atheists/ I like that distinction and will use that word) are worried about the literal truth of the bible, I think this is why. But there are other ways to interpret that song. It's definitely metaphor/symbol. It's pretty clearly about Vietnam and Johnson's escalation of Vietnam. It's drat prescient (written 67) and damned true in that context. But, in order to be true in this metaphorical way, the song has to be broken in a literal way. Because then it's actually about something other than what it's literally about. This is broken myth affirming a metaphorical, symbol, (existential) truth. When I can openly say "Part of Luke is fabricated" but then still go on to use it anyway, that's this type of interpretation. Now within Christianity these things butt heads. On one side you've got the literalists, the fundamentalists, the "Christianity is unbroken truth!" crowd. On the other side, there are the de-mythologizers, the Historical Jesus Scholars, etc, breaking the myth. Well I don't think I have to be on one side or the other! But I think that a preoccupation with the literal truth, a conversation of, discussion of: is this or that text or this or that idea literally true? That is a very monotheistic conversation, a very religious conversation. A discussion of if one can know about reality by evidence or testing vs a revealed text, that is a very monotheistic conversation. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Nov 24, 2014 |
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Nov 24, 2014 18:56
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SedanChair posted:Profit is not interest. But what you do to create profits usually involves sin. Usury doesn't have to enter into it. True, but the interest = evil connection is the explicit part, which is why I mentioned forms of investment that earn interest. I'm pretty sure that Paper Mac is the only person who posts in D&D who understands how this applies in contemporary Islam well enough to accurately explain the theory and pracice to us. I doubt anyone here knows Catholic history in enough detail to explain how it applied in medieval Catholicism beyond its implications on the development of antisemitism (tlrd; medival Jews were okay with usury and I don't think the traditions like the Jubilee which moderated the impact of this within Jewish society applied to gentiles). If anyone does, it would be Kyrie or someone already here to reply to him though, so I guess we might be in luck there.
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Nov 24, 2014 19:02
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Muscle Tracer posted:I think it's all a lie, but I'm entertaining notions based on what I understand Christianity to be. If there is a certain facet you think I am ignoring and which could balance out what I'm talking about, by all means, tell me. But creating a race of creatures so you can torture all but a select few of them for eternity is, from my perspective, unequivocally evil, and I don't see how anything could redeem it, especially when the being in question is omnipotent and omniscient. There's nothing stopping you from accepting only part of the argument. But, depending on what you take out, the rest might not make much sense anymore. If you say (for the sake of argument) that there is a god who is omnipotent and omniscient, and that he did indeed create everything, then it's hard to understand how morality could somehow be outside of such an entity's "jurisdiction." rudatron posted:I have no 'position' relative to you, I cannot force your or bring you to account over any reply you make. But okay, you acknowledge that it's not necessary to 'bring to account' to judge. You even admit that it's possible to form an opinion, a judgement even, without needing a 'right'. Just to remind you here, here is your original post on the subject: Of course we have "positions" relative to one another. But as for the rest... At this point I really can't tell if you're misinterpreting my arguments on purpose. I mean it. If you seriously thought that my argument was that it's literally impossible for you to think, say or type the words "god is evil," then why wouldn't you just post something like that right away and claim instant and undeniable victory? quote:So if it's possible to come to a judgement without a 'right' being granted, how is that a valid objection to any atheist argument? Doesn't your argument become a total non sequitur? In the case of 'standards', you even acknowledge that everyone has a standard to judge, but do you understand why I brought up that everyone has a standard? Because that's the standard you can use to judge God. But you, again, commit special pleading for a special category. That does not logically follow. It's another non sequitur. That whatever standard you have can't be used to judge God was my argument from the very beginning. If you read it as "you have no standard at all and thus none by which to judge God" then I'm sorry for the confusion, but happy we finally cleared that up. Also, I don't know how to say this but, how can God not be "special?" I don't want to offend you, but is "god can't exist in a form that would violate the rules of Debate Club" really the argument here? quote:See, you complain about not finding any common ground, but here's my viewpoint. You say you need a 'right' and (special) 'standard' to judge. I make my responses. Your response to those responses is to just to steadfastly restate that a 'right' and (special) 'standard' is needed to judge. Does that sound convincing to you? It wasn't my intention to blame you for it. I was simply that saying part of the reason we can't find common ground is because we're talking about different things. I'm talking about God and you're talking about attempts by ruling classes to use religion to shield themselves from criticism. That's a legitimate topic in its own right, I'm not denying that. But our discussion does seem to have run its course, such as it was. I made that interpretation because you've said things throughout this discussion (about the divine right of kings and such) that make me think that the real issue for you here is the use men make of religion.
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Nov 24, 2014 20:32
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Sakarja posted:There's nothing stopping you from accepting only part of the argument. But, depending on what you take out, the rest might not make much sense anymore. If you say (for the sake of argument) that there is a god who is omnipotent and omniscient, and that he did indeed create everything, then it's hard to understand how morality could somehow be outside of such an entity's "jurisdiction." As far as I can tell, all I'm leaving out is the "...and therefore, you can't judge him" at the end. That's subjective analysis, not an intrinsic property or reported action, just as "...and it was good" is an analysis. Again, if there's a quality of God you think I've missed that would redeem him inventing eternal torture, by all means correct me. Look at it this way: if I'm a monarchist and you're an anarchist, I can assume all your arguments about the properties of anarchy, and reach a different analysis of the results of Anarchy. That's not disingenuous, and it's not "taking out" any part of the posed argument. It's called "debate," or sometimes "discussion."
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Nov 24, 2014 20:45
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Sakarja posted:I'm talking about God No you're not. God is not posting in this thread. You're talking about what has been claimed and written about God by fallible mortal humans, and their claims are as valid an object for criticism and judgments as any human claim. You can't conflate God with people's claims about God and say that Jimbob's ideas are beyond criticism because they're about God and who are we to question God?
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Nov 24, 2014 21:45
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VitalSigns posted:No you're not. God is not posting in this thread. You're talking about what has been claimed and written about God by fallible mortal humans, and their claims are as valid an object for criticism and judgments as any human claim. But, don't you see? THEY were talking about god and FOR god. Therefore, god is talking.
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Nov 24, 2014 21:47
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Here's another question I've had. You do not have to believe in Christ to be forgiven by him. He forgave ALL sin, not SOME. So not just my nasty-rear end grandma but poor misunderstood Hitler too! Do the right thing because it's right to do, not out of desire for reward/fear of punishment (those would be sinful motivations!), I mean what kind of goofball would knowingly choose to be a pathetic loser if they could also choose to be cool and righteous?? rkajdi posted:Not really. Women are technically ~51% of the population, but outside MRA nuts, it's not disputable that are given the short end of the stick. Your ability to control the levers of power is the important thing. As another example, Shiites were the majority in Iraq and also an oppressed group (aka "minority") That's a fair point, I suppose I underestimate the influence of evangelical thinking in American Christianity.
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Nov 24, 2014 22:59
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