|
So, how come God is fussy about whether you believe in him or not? Because, I mean, Jesus had some neat ideas about being good to other people and that, but apparently praising and praying and telling other people that God is really good is more important? Because God will apparently forgive you if you're a horrible person, so long as you are duly regretful and ask Him nicely, but if you're the most upstanding person in the world, if you aren't worshipful of God, you go to hell. Doesn't that seem a bit off to you? I mean, that's always been a bit off to me. Seems like a hard thing to really justify. Like this off the front page: Kyrie eleison posted:Yes, like Abraham, out of obedience to God, and trusting in his Will; and like with Abraham, God would never require evil from me, only the evidence that my loyalty is so great that I would be willing to commit evil for His sake. Why is God really hung up on what you think of Him rather than what you do for the cause? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Dec 8, 2014 |
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 05:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:49 |
|
|
Kyrie eleison posted:Being told I'm doing a bad job defending Christianity by anti-Christian people is not convincing. Of course you are going to say that. I don't expect to change your mind. Your heart is hardened to the idea. But what I can do is expose your ignorance of Christian teachings, and your shady debate techniques such as hypocrisy, or intentionally misconstruing me. And that is satisfactory enough for me, because the goal in debate is not to convince your opponent, but rather to convince yourself, and others like you. Would like a sincere answer to my post on the previous page when you have five minutes, OP. Cheers.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 06:41
|
|
|
Kyrie eleison posted:It is important to realize that God is sovereign over everything. He has total control over all of us. I've gotten that impression, my question is essentially why? I understand that God will punish you if you don't, and reward you if you do, but that doesn't seem like a very compelling argument. Assuming I am an ethical person, which I like to think I am, reward and punishment shouldn't really factor into my decision making. An act is good or evil based on its effects on others, not based on how it affects me. If someone gave me a lot of money to kill someone, that doesn't make killing the person right. So if I don't agree with something God tells me to do, but I do it anyway, what sort of person does that make me? I am doing something I know to be immoral out of fear of punishment or desire for a reward. The ethical choice is to not do the immoral thing and burn forever in hell. That's sort of my general take on most religions, if God isn't the sort of God who would reward someone for being truly ethical, then I wouldn't deserve paradise if I attained it by blindly following Him, if I have to spend the rest of eternity in hell for living ethically then that's unfortunate, but I don't really see a better option. That kind of makes God sound a bit unpleasant by the way, never been quite able to get past that.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 19:14
|
|
|
Nessus posted:You could probably make a theory that God does this in order to test the righteous, and the one who acts ethically is the righteous man who will be rewarded, while the one who obeys without question is the one who will be punished. Well if I were more religious and equally cynical, that would probably be my guess too, tell people to do the bad thing and see if they tell you to get bent, then you know who's a keeper. But I do wonder how religious people manage with that, because presumably that view would be a bit difficult to hold concurrently with the idea that God isn't supposed to be of the classical Greek variety.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 19:33
|
|
|
TACD posted:Isn't this a fairly common religious perspective / fear? Without the fear of the Lord, there's nothing stopping those godless heathens from raping and murdering all day long! Which is another oddity contrasted with the idea that you should do what God tells you regardless of whether you understand it or not, that's almost the definition of amorality.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 19:38
|
|
|
Nessus posted:So what is it about, if not "Jews deserve it when they're killed en masse"? I think the statement is supposed to be specific, not general. Though whether it's accurate or not I can't say, my copy of the bible came with pictures.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 22:03
|
|
|
Knifegrab posted:I really can't stress this enough guys: God isn't real. 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 22:11
|
|
|
Nessus posted:How so? Most of the people who got in the water died. That does, in fairness, solve a lot of their problems, and stop them from sinning any more.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 23:17
|
|
|
I am moderately jealous of Christians for having a somewhat legitimate reason to use the word 'catechumen'.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2014 23:38
|
|
|
BrandorKP posted:I am aware of it. The risk of faith is that what we trust in, what we absolutely depend on, might be false. When it is false we end up like Victor, or the Kochs, or the fascists, or assholish authoritarians, or fundmentalists, etc. One might argue that skepticism therefore is a useful solution to the problem of faith, if faith in things produces problems, that forms a worthy argument against having faith, at least in anything that involves large scale decision making or shapes your outlook on the rest of the world.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2014 20:29
|
|
|
BrandorKP posted:Must be why I talk about doubt as necessary part of faith. To me, that sentence makes as much sense as 'black is a necessary part of white'. The two are polar opposites, where doubt exists there is no room for faith, where faith exists, doubt cannot, you can apply the two alternatively and arbitrarily to different parts of your life, but you can't apply both to the same thing. I would describe myself as vaguely spiritual but I can't correctly say I am a person of faith because there is doubt everywhere that meaningful faith would go in my life.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2014 20:49
|
|
|
The Snark posted:Either your definitions don't match with ours, or you may be simply mistaken. Doubt and faith can coexist. In fact, I think doubt can go with pretty much anything- and probably should. Very little good seems to come from absolute certainty. I can understand doubting one thing and having faith in another, that's not difficult or inherently contradictory, but doing it about the same thing would appear impossible. To have faith in a thing is to trust that it is a certain way, to, for the moment, suspend your criticism of it and accept its perceived state as truth, presumably so that you can go on to build further ideas on top of it. Arguably this is necessary to some degree at all times because your brain would wear out otherwise, but when you describe 'having faith in a thing' I would assume you mean having that uncritical trust for a protracted period of time. Otherwise the term doesn't really say much. Doubt is the precise opposite of that, to doubt is to be in the state of questioning that trust, to be not assuming your perception is true about a thing, and to be presumably unable to build further ideas on top of it because you have nothing solid to build on. Even an irrational person would presumably have difficulty building an idea on something they genuinely do not believe is true, as irrationality is usually decided based on someone holding unsupportable premises, not on your ability to do basic logic. If your definitions of faith and doubt are different please do tell me because otherwise I'm going to have a very hard time understanding what is meant. I would describe faith and doubt as being generalised versions of the above, to have faith is to generally do the former, to doubt is to generally do the latter. The Snark posted:Finally, if you have no doubt... What are you having faith IN? How is it separate from simply KNOWING? (Or, at least, thinking you know.) There isn't really a difference, though I suppose the colloquial use of faith would be to describe the idea of knowing something while acknowledging that the evidence for it isn't generally accepted, while saying you know something is usually accompanied with the tacit suggestion that 'also everyone else agrees with me so I'm more right'. But internally I don't imagine there's much difference. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Dec 10, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2014 21:01
|
|
|
Hmm, I would argue that any sane person would include a measure of skepticism in their concept of 'knowing' because to know without awareness of the underlying reasoning and its foundation on the accuracy of your own perception is... well it's pretty much madness. It's to believe that your head defines universal truth, which is such an alien concept that I have difficulty parsing it. Hence why I would define the distinction mostly as a social one, it's acceptable to say you 'know' something if everyone else (in the immediate vicinity, at least) agrees with you, whereas to say you have faith in something is more saying 'I know it sounds odd to you but I believe it'. Both faith and knowing in common use I would expect to be fairly practical ideas, believing for the purpose of achieving some greater rationalisation without completely losing the concept of the possibility of being wrong. Obviously you have people who take both to extremes and do lose the concept of being wrong but I would expect those people to be comparatively few, and frankly, mental.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2014 21:40
|
|
|
The Snark posted:The less someone is willing to consider they may be wrong, the more radical and 'mental' they tend to be. This certainly seems to be true with any topic, not just faith. Absolutely, which is part of why I don't generally consider absolute faith or absolute knowledge be a useful use of the words, because it is rare and more accurately described as being insane. I assume a degree of skepticism is present based on the fact that the person is talking to me and not murdering me because their delusional brain is telling them that everything they do is completely correct. That does lead to the two not being very different though.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2014 21:57
|
|
|
CowOnCrack posted:Truth. You can do that without God, I have a set of moral ideals that I look to in order to determine my actions, but I don't need to make them sentient and pretend that they can punish me if I don't follow them. I can follow them of my own volition. Which you would think I would want to given that I made them up in the first place. I daresay it's easier in some ways if you believe there's someone standing behind you with a big stick ready to club you over the head if you sin, but of course equally, if your morality comes from an outside force, there's always the possibility of evading it, or reasoning with it, or bargaining with it, which makes it really just a matter of your own powers of rationalisation as to whether you can justify sin. If the stick is in your own hand, it's rather harder to outrun, or reason with. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Dec 11, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2014 02:56
|
|
|
Nessus posted:This is really where y'all Jesus-havers have, in large part, hosed up - you've let the fundamentalists become 'the US brand of Christianity,' either out of distraction, indifference, or because their political agenda is close enough to your own to be worth losing a lot of souls. Part of why Pope Francis is so over with a lot of Americans isn't because he's teaching NEW things, it's because he's mentioning the parts that - for some reason - kept getting left out. As if - for some reason - economic justice was less important than controlling gays. Well, personally, if you propose the idea of forgiveness on one's deathbed regardless of how horrible you are, I'd tell you it was a Catholic idea rather than an American one, it's got more history in the old world than the new.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2014 03:01
|
|
|
The Snark posted:To answer your question about one thing faith offers that atheism does not, hope for some measure of persistence past death for one. As an atheist you die and... are now so much rotting meat. What do you have to hope for? That your limited amount of life might be spent in a way you judge to be worthwhile. Which doesn't remotely dull the terror of death but life isn't generally a very happy thing, so I wouldn't really expect it to have a happy ending. Yes you're going to die and yes it's horrible, but that's part of being human. You just have to face it, do your best. It's quite possible to live without hope for life after death. I would personally argue that it helps to place a suitable amount of importance on your rather short amount of time being alive, and motivates you to use it appropriately.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2014 23:40
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:We don't blame roadlayers for car accidents. They create the situation where car accidents can happen. But the drivers are (sometimes - assuming for example that they don't succumb to brain tumours) morally culpable. The reason we don't do that is because the roadlayer did not, ostensibly, create the road, the car, the people driving it, the laws of physics which describe the nature of the car accident, and the concept of linear time which causes its effects to be permanent.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 00:06
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:God created Man with free will. Men choose their actions. God knows (in eternity) those choices. Some of the choices are bad ones. Which begs the question of why he would create people deliberately in the knowledge they'll gently caress up and go to hell.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 00:12
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:Raises the question. God created Man to share in His own life. Like any parent, his children might choose the wrong thing. A parent having a child does so in the hope that they will have a happy and good life, while you can certainly argue that this is a pretty vain hope, God doesn't even have the option of hope. He KNOWS that the people he creates are going to live lives of suffering and damnation, and spend eternity suffering unimaginable horrors because he made them so that they would. A parent which has a child in the certain and absolute knowledge that their life will be nothing but agony is an immoral parent.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 00:26
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:Yep. But a parent who has a child and then allows that child not to choose their actions is also an immoral parent. Only a parent who allows their child to choose, even though some of those choices might be wrong, is moral. Such is God. Yes, that is also arguable, but if your choices are between allowing your child to be born, knowing their choices will drat them, and allowing your child to be born, and controlling their life absolutely, those are both bad choices. The moral choice is not to have children. If you cannot give your child a good life, do not have one, that is fairly standard reasoning. The further issue with this is that if God is all powerful, why can't he create a world where we can exist but not suffer? If he can and chooses not to, he is not good, if he would but cannot, he isn't God.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 00:34
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:We all have it within us to be good. You said that God knows some of us won't be good, if God knows that, how can we be good? We would be defying God's knowledge. Cavaradossi posted:He did! We rejected it. Then he didn't create a world in which we wouldn't suffer... Humans are a part of the world, if he has perfect knowledge, he knew humans would reject Eden, so he knew that his design of either Eden or humanity was not going to make us happy. So why did he make it that way? The general problem with all of this is that if God knows how things are going to happen, then everything that happens is part of God's expected outcome for the world. He would have known this when he created the world, which means he created the world so that it would suffer. God cannot be fallible and omnipotent at the same time. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Dec 12, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 00:37
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:This is what free will is: the ability to choose to reject God. Yes, that isn't disputed. But it doesn't answer the paradox of why God would choose to create a world like this. If God is all powerful and all loving, why is he powerless, or unwilling, to make it so that we don't suffer for rejecting him? Or, why did he create us in the first place? It is still immoral to create something you know is going to suffer.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 00:45
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:Because that's what suffering is: the rejection of God. Except I reject, or at least don't accept, God at the moment. I wouldn't describe my existence as especially painful. Whereas Hell is almost defined as a place where we will suffer, so I would assume it's pretty bad. If, after I die, I got reincarnated as basically myself again, I'd be fairly happy with that. But that isn't what Christianity teaches, or at least no branch of it I'm aware of.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 00:51
|
|
|
God works via retroactive continuity? It's certainly an interesting notion that humanity perpetually redefines God by our every action but it does rather hamstring the idea of him being all powerful. Cavaradossi posted:Lucky that Christ has redeemed us then. So God was only evil for the thousands of years before Jesus was born then?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 00:58
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:No more than it is by not being able to choose to fly. You may have to explain that one.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 01:02
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:I cannot choose what is impossible, that's not the choice I'm given. That statement itself sort of contradicts the notion of free will because it places it under material constraints. If your will is truly free, it should be able to choose anything, if your will is constrained by material things like physics and the limits of your brain, it's a material effect, which makes it... not much different from any other physical force in the world, entirely predictable given sufficient knowledge. The concept of free will requires it to be some sort of entirely magical, unrestrained idea.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 01:07
|
|
|
Sharkie posted:The point is that you can't make a choice that is unknown to an omniscient God. If God is omniscient, he cannot be surprised by a moral choice you make. Therefore, when you are making moral choices, the only one you have available is the choice that God knows, therefore eliminating the choices that would "surprise God" by violating his omniscience, therefore you don't have the free will to make that moral choice. I still rather like the idea of Retcon God, every choice you make changes the past so that God always knew about it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 01:12
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:You have the choice. God knows what you choose. I'm afraid this is a very vague answer and doesn't address the issue of whether God knows in advance, thus creating the problem described multiple times above of restricting your free will, or whether god doesn't know until you do, thus refuting his omniscience. Unless you define omniscient as "God knows everything that happens as it happens but doesn't know the future because free will renders the future unknowable." Which sort of works except it begs the question of how God created the universe to begin with if he's constrained by the limitations of time. Cavaradossi posted:This isn't even true outside of Catholic doctrine. What do you mean it isn't true? It's a well understood component of any argument about whether free will exists or not.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 01:15
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:God knows what you choose. You still chose it. That's the same answer, and still doesn't address the paradox. Does God know in advance or does he not know until?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 01:17
|
|
|
Cavaradossi posted:You choose something (you have free will). Wait so you actually are suggesting Retcon God? I was kind of joking with that. Cavaradossi posted:It isn't true that free will is considered to be magical, or unrestrained, even outside Catholic doctrine. Well, you're right in the sense that free will is considered not to exist outside of people who think it's magical and part of your soul or whatever, or people who haven't really thought about it one way or another and just sort of feel like free will might exist because it feels good. But a logical defence of free will does require it to be basically magic. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Dec 12, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 01:29
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:so has anyone explained what exactly the concept of a supernatural god brings to the table yet? Job Creation.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 01:47
|
|
|
Captain_Maclaine posted:According to CowsonCrack (I think, it's been a few pages), it's a great piece of cover behind which to shelter from the existential terror of being aware of one's own limited mortality in a universe that not only is uncaring of your existence, it won't even notice when that existence ends. So is prescription medication, which is probably better for you in the long run.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 01:51
|
|
|
Periodiko posted:This thread would be a lot simpler if people just realized that accepting a world-view that isn't consistent with material reality can still have a positive effect on the individual person. Kyrie claims that his belief in Catholic doctrine has made his life better, and it's totally believable that that's true. There's ample evidence that belonging to a religion can improve a person's life, and in that sense, it's a rational choice to believe in the irrational. Religion in general I don't have much issue with, but poor arguments are poor arguments, if you're going to have a debate I do expect some quality there. I can not mind that someone believes in God and still think they're a very poor debater. "I believe in God because it makes me feel good." is something I can't and wouldn't dispute, "I believe in god because <nonsensical argument about it being the truth of reality>" both can be disputed, and merits it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 02:15
|
|
|
Sharkie posted:In a kind of related case, I don't have a problem with someone saying "I believe in God, and don't have a problem with gay people, because Jesus never mentioned it," cool, whatever. I do have a problem with "I believe in God, and that means gay people are wicked and rebellious, hellbound and causing hurricanes." IRL only one of these has a chance of me disputing the person. Well, obviously, the latter would suggest a moral imperative to support the creation of an all-gay fortified island nation in the pacific to attract all the hurricanes to that area and thus protect large cities from being destroyed by them.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 02:41
|
|
|
Sharkie posted:edit: and no, I'm not saying we'd be on Mars if not for the Middle Ages, that's dumb. I just wish they had spent more time copying plays, histories, and cool poems from antiquity. For a while, the Church was probably the only organization in the western world who did that at all. It's just they also did a bunch of writing on the nature of god bothering as well.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 02:56
|
|
|
Muscle Tracer posted:At the very least, neither booze, food, nor jogging requires you to believe in anything that can't be readily demonstrated. The primary issue with religion is that it actively discourages critical thinking as an irrelevant skill, when it's actually literally the most important sill. So do a lot of things, in fairness.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 04:54
|
|
|
Torka posted:Yeah, and to be honest I'm not sure there is a more effective coping mechanism than a heartfelt belief that death isn't real and your ultimate destiny is infinite happiness. I wish I was capable of believing it and I envy those who are, what could be better than getting back that feeling of security you had as a child, before that painful frightening moment when you realised your parents (and by extension all adults) were fallible and didn't really know anything I dunno, I can't in good conscience voluntarily go back to that, because it is ultimately an illusion, and unless you remain aware of that, that's all it will ever be. The knowledge that the world doesn't work like that is important if ever we are to get any closer to it actually working like that. I think it'd be nicer if one day we didn't have to face quite so unpleasant a reality.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 05:56
|
|
|
Who What Now posted:Meaning is arbitrary anyway, so my meaning for my life is just as valid as a religious person's for theirs despite the fact that I won't exist to continue assigning meaning after I die. I generally take the stance that while dying will ultimately either not be something I have to worry about, or it will present a whole slew of new and more pressing concerns other than what I did when I was alive, while I am alive I should try to do things properly. Using death as a justification for indifference or apathy rubs me the wrong way, I don't much mind other people doing it and can see why it's an obvious conclusion but I never much liked it myself, better to act as if what you do when you're alive is of absolute importance, because if death is the end, it literally is everything that will ever be important to you.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 06:26
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:49 |
|
|
Kyrie eleison posted:I am comforted to know that, through religion, I am liberated from the constant pressure to "make the most of my time," and can instead simply relax and enjoy myself, after tending to my duties and obligations. What an existential burden that is! Be sure to reflect in solitude from time to time, but please remember to just go with the flow a bit, people. I am to judge, for myself. I keep the the rules I set because that is what I set them for, it is important to act morally, to be critical about your actions and use your best judgement to decide whether they are improving the world around you or not. A god standing behind me with a poker isn't necessary to keep me doing that, I can do it of my own volition, as can every ethical human being. Acting not out of conscious moral obligation, but out of fear of punishment, isn't ethics, it's what children do. You say there is no moral imperative to disbelieve in god, you're correct in the general sense but not, I think, in the specific. The Christian God definitely carries a moral imperative not to follow him, or truly believe in him, because true belief and following of God would mean to surrender your ethical reasoning. It is impossible to be moral and to act in accordance with the idea that God defines what good and evil is. It is possible for your actions to coincidentally not be judged immoral by moral people, but you aren't apllying the kind of ethical reasoning you need to in order to be an ethical person. You aren't driven by ethics, you're driven by threat of pain, temptation of reward, and obedience to a set of arbitrary rules that you don't understand. That's quite the opposite of ethics. In practice as I said, it isn't necessarily harmful, a child can be well behaved because it's afraid of getting slapped, or because it knows to just do as it's told by its parents, but it can't be ethical because of that. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Dec 12, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2014 14:29
|
|