There is one thing that doesn't matter, and that is Jesus Christ

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > There is one thing that doesn't matter, and that is Jesus Christ

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Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

I think this probably should just be in the other thread. You cannot come close to understanding the world without understanding something about Jesus Christ, so I think your argument fails on its face.

If you'd like this to be otherwise, bombing will have to begin today.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 15:16

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 20:06

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

The Propositions:

1) X is a Christian. A1 was an act or belief motivated by his Christianity.
2) Y is a Christian. -A1 was an act or belief not motivated by his Christianity.

Is not an example of 'no true scotsman' or any other example of a logical fallacy. Kindly stop drumming it in to your arguments inappropriately.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 16:29

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

CommieGIR posted:

Bullshit. He is arguing that Christians that justify slavery with their religion are 'warping it' i.e. "No True Christian"

Its a No True Scotsman.

I don't necessarily accept your point, but even if I did, no true Scotsman in that form is not a formal logical fallacy, and the argument is arguably true in some parallel situations: e.g. 'No true Marxist believes in the vanguard party'. Yelling 'no true Scotsman' is in no way decisive to the argument.

Who What Now posted:

Christ never forbade or even spoke against the owning of slaves nor implied anywhere that he was against it probably because he had no problem with it, being a Bronze Age Jewish scholar and all.

Slavery does appear in the New Testament; the best way of thinking of it is probably the 'rend unto Caesar' logic. E.g. Christianity is not intended as a program for government, and one is intended to follow the law insofar as is possible.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Feb 6, 2015

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 16:34

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Kaal posted:

Lol you are such a troll of this thread.

For the folks who aren't seeing through this one. Abolitionism came out of the Enlightenment rationalists, many of which were deists or agnostics, and for nonreligious reasons. It was largely adopted throughout Europe and Northern US long before it became popularized in the Southern US by Protestant evangelists.

The abolitionist movement in Britain was led by evangelicals. Evangelicals at that time were also more likely to be political radicals; their influence was strongly responsible for the institution of free trade in Britain, as well. If you don't know that, you don't know much at all about British 19th century political history.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 16:55

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Kaal posted:

Ftfy

I suggest you Google the names Locke, or Rousseau, or Montesquieu

Ah yes, the troll reveals himself.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 17:01

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

I keep reading Starving Autist's handle as Starving Atheist. At first I thought it was a mistake, and now I think it's because of the convergence of those two things ITT.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 17:08

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

CommieGIR posted:

The difference between you and me: I can accept that atheists do bad things, like Pol Pot and Stalin. You cannot even come to terms with the idea that your own faith has ALSO been used to do and justify bad things. Well done.

You are so bad at your own ideology that you may as well join the other side to inflict maximum damage.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 17:43

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

McAlister posted:

Sure you can. This is trivially demonstrative. Individual believers customize their deity to support their actions. So the deity of a FYGM person is a deity that shows favor through earthly riches while the deity of a more noble person emphasized community service.

Those two people may or may not use the same name to refer to their personal deity who wants what they want and values what they value. But if they do, the two mental constructs are still distinct entities that just happen to have the same name. When one invokes the name they are talking about something
different than the other.

You can't understand JC or any of the other popular names for "powerful entity that agrees with me" because they aren't a single thing. They have as any definitions as there are people who care about them.

So you have it precisely backwards. In order to understand god concepts you have to first understand people. And you can understand people without paying attention to the pretense that various gods are a singular thing.

This is so loving reductive that it's ridiculous.

What drives people to create their belief systems? That question is going to involve you in examining concrete examples of belief.

What unifying elements do belief systems have? As above.

What types of human behaviour cohere to certain patterns and why? Ditto.

That is even if you admit your premise, which is false. People do not only have a ~personal god~ except in a flatly epistemological sense (inasmuch as everything is personal) or in the sense that their relationship is personal. But to talk about this subject in this way is to invite the same conceptual problems about any wide-ranging historical or social phenomenon. That doesn't mean those subjects are best tackled by ignoring them and focusing on the purely personal. Certain historical forms of Christian belief are nonetheless extremely edifying when it comes to understanding attitudes and conduct.

Moreover, people do not form their ideas in some sort of bizarro individual vaccuum. They form them in a social and historical context, one highly significant trope of which is religion.

From an atheistic perspective - religion is man made. Of course, to understand religion, you have to understand. But the opposite will still be true! To understand man, you have to understand religion!

Lastly, implicit in your post is some kind of assumption that people cohere to a certain nature. When you say you have to understand 'people' - what does that even involve? Individuals are very different, as you have already emphasised. It is very questionable that there is such a thing as 'human nature'. If individuals are very different, you then hit the epistemological problem - how the gently caress do I know what anyone else thinks about anything else at all?

Maybe by looking at the traditions in which they express themselves and interact?

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Feb 6, 2015

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 22:02

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

ikanreed posted:

Oh man, this thread got away from me.

My original argument is that all serious modern morality arguments fall outside the set of things the bible attempts to discuss.

Christians and atheists both frame their concerns in ways the bible was not "advanced" enough to address.

You definitely can't answer complex questions using just the bible, but the bible throws weight behind certain lines of argumentation, as well as developing others that probably would not be relevant at all if people did not believe in it. So in that sense it is indispensable.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 22:23

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

ikanreed posted:

But even those framings still owe more to say, utilitarianism or natural rights than whatever fractional memetic fragments are left from strict biblicalism.

But it still propels them in directions they wouldn't always take. Plus, the manner and context of their development is still strongly governed by the history of Christianity - philosophical questions are not merely analytic discussions of abstract logical propositions, they can also be genealogical or involve themselves in questions of traditions of discourse, etc.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 22:28

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

blowfish posted:

this book which many people think makes a moral argument is used by people to justify their moral argument

Congratulations on stating the obvious, the point isn't that people do dumb poo poo and therefore it must be worthwhile it's that the poo poo they do is dumb.

I don't think we're disagreeing.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2015 11:49

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Terry Eagleton is a hack when he gets out of his chosen field, and a pretty vicious and unpleasant one at that.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2015 23:29

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Orkin Mang posted:

instead of critiquing loving book reviews how about you read actual literature on the topic.

It's not like Terry Eagleton's book on God is any good (his recent book on Marx is also rear end).

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 00:56

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

I think you guys are complaining a bit too much about oh they don't understand :qq:

. People like Dawkins just don't give a poo poo about definitions and descriptions of God beyond the point that those definitions would involve them in having, by definition to believe in God. They're obviously, because of the nature of their own project, going to be dismissive of even beautiful and intricate thinking that is piled upon an assumption that can't be empirically or clearly logically demonstrated (namely, that God qua any type of God you care to mention, exists). Combine that with the fact that they're humanists and Aquinas's arguments about God are necessarily anti-humanist and...well, I don't know what you would be expecting.

But you seem to be proceeding as if the views of Aquinas as a proponent of religion should have intrinsic value to people like Dawkins, which is hazy to me even as a student of Aquinas. They're never going to care if you can't demonstrate the basic underlying assumption that God exists at all, which Aquinas is definitely not sufficient to do. Really that is the nature of their project. Arguing about internal theological inconsistencies within religion in a very blunt instrument way is just ornamental trolling to that central POV.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 13:12

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Orkin Mang posted:

i mentioned aquinas incidentally.

The argument applies more generally. I didn't intend the post to be principally about Aquinas. My point is that Dawkins doesn't really intend principally to engage with the question in the manner you seem to want him to, but that isn't necessarily just his problem. Insofar as he does, in my view he's partly doing it as something like a troll.

Orkin Mang posted:

i'm no thomist.

I didn't say you were.

Orkin Mang posted:

you're simply presuming that there are no rational arguments for the existence of a necessary being;

I'm not making that presumption at all. I did not say there were no arguments or that such arguments as exist are irrational - I just expressed my view that such an argument is in my view not successfully rendered in Aquinas (or elsewhere).

Orkin Mang posted:

such arguments are far from relegated to aquinas.

I didn't say they were; you brought him up, I merely used your example as an example of my own.

Orkin Mang posted:

the idea that you're a 'student of aquinas' is bs.

A well-founded view if ever I saw one.

Ocrassus posted:

Aquinas is an intellectual badass and I fully respect his work. He is able to make some seriously compelling arguments, but one of the major issues of his proof is that it proves that there is a being and nothing further. Christians require a very specific 'God' to exist with certain characteristics.

And it's important to remember that however much people would like Aquinas to be a deist, he wasn't one. But he has the integrity to now try to carry the logical ball further than it can be borne.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Feb 10, 2015

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 14:35

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

SedanChair posted:

One of Dawkins' TV specials opened with a vast ceremony of lights on the Day of the Dead. Dawkins' smug face comes on. "It looks beautiful. But isn't it just a short step to bombings on the Tube?"

Dawkins is a straight up simpleton. It doesn't really matter all that much what he intends.

I'm not really attempting to defend Dawkins, I just think it's funny that religious people and Dawkins chase eachother in circles because they keep having totally mistaken expectations about the kinds of question the other is going to be able to answer, which is why the other Jesus thread is like it is.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 15:28

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

OwlFancier posted:

Perhaps theists and atheists of all philosophies can unite in their belief that Richard Dawkins is an insufferable berk.

Yep. Part of the reason I do think he's trolling is because I've seen him participate in debates in which he conducts himself quite well, but it's the exception rather than the rule.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 16:10

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

CommieGIR posted:

Well Dawkins and Hitchens don't really understand that their form of skepticism and atheism is just burning bridges, which is not what we need to be doing.

Or they do understand, and that is what they want, but I don't think it serves our purposes well.

I cannot comprehend that you of all people think that someone else's form of atheism burns bridges but yours doesn't. Your arguments are always more reductive versions of Dawkinsesque ones.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 17:01

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

OwlFancier posted:

I think Dawkins probably likes lots of money for books and TV programs and enjoys being a self righteous bellend at people he thinks are stupider than him.

Which I guess technically we all would like but there is such a thing as moderation.

He actually adjusts his tone relative to the intellectual standing of his opponent, if he has one. He's fairly reasonable if he has an opponent of good standing, e.g.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EjO-7Wynd0

When he's on stage with some loony tunes evangelical from the South I think he sees the red flag and goes for the gore. When a narrator alone on television, he likewise has carte blanche to go full obnoxious.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 17:06

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

SedanChair posted:

The simple arguments are fine, more complicated ones are not needed. What isn't fine is the New Atheists' bigotry, white supremacism and misogyny that underpins literally everything they say and do.

They're a mixed bag, but there is a lot of that. They are, as are a lot of people, their own argument's worst enemy.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 17:16

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

DarkCrawler posted:

I'm just not of the mind that religion needs to be challenged everywhere. It doesn't in itself hurt anything. It's simply not relevant in the realities of law, science, morality, anything in the physical world, and as long as it can be kept apart from those, what is the harm? Most religious people I know seem to be able to do exactly that.

Religion is just one of a number of forms of ideology capable of motivating otherwise ordinary people into acts they wouldn't ordinarily pursue, as well as the first form. To really get up to some truly evil poo poo en masse you either need a religion or something that functions in a similar way. That's why it's relevant as a historical talking point, simply put.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 18:24

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

DarkCrawler posted:

Well yes, I worded it a bit wrong, it's obviously relevant in understanding our history and how the human mind works, true. But in the way a modern society functions, religion offers nothing. It has nothing to contribute towards our future and advancement. In the same way, private faith is not harmful in any way or form. Like any other ideology, its when you try to impose it on others it becomes a problem. I'm fine with people believing in things that to me are dumb - I do things that are dumb and illogical too. It just doesn't touch the lives of others (I hope so anyway).

Here the new atheists are quite divergent. Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens don't all mind the concept of a domesticated or private religion (though they don't recommend one per se), Dawkins however seems to view it as a very high good to actively work towards the total eradication of religion.

My own view is close to the Marxian one that religion is a form of false consolation and removing the situation that requires illusions will also cause the death of religion, though where that's coming from is more of a mystery to me than it ever was to Marx.

I also think there's something to the argument that religions partly stay domesticated because they're constantly put under pressure to stay that way - that is to say, there's no reason to suppose that anti-clericalism, for example, is a bad idea in the present just because there isn't as pressing a need for it any more.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 18:37

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Can you not just re-post whole pages of the Catholic Encyclopedia (which, by the way, is not always on the money doctrinally)? And if you do, can you at least give a citation?

E.g. your whole post is here.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 20:52

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

CommieGIR posted:

One religious motherfucker.

This guy was. Although he used to keep the god chat out of parliament a lot of the time because people found it tiresome and moralising.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 00:44

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

At least kyrie's gimmick is funny.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 00:50

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

I don't agree, but I don't see what's unfunny about the idea of a person trying to do that in DnD. We could replace you with a bot that scrapes r/atheism.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 00:53

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

SedanChair posted:

Think of it like the assists stat. You may not have made a lot of baskets but how many shots did you set up?

Context dude. Anyone can put up big numbers against a lovely team, it's the good assists that matter on ESPN.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 01:11

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Crowsbeak being a more incompetent defender of Christianity than Kyrie ITT.

Mornacale posted:

Excuse my lack of clarity. I'm not saying that abolitionists adopted Christianity as a rhetorical tool to argue for their ideas; I absolutely believe that they sincerely believed their movement to be justified by religion. Neither do I claim that Christianity naturally supports slavery unless material factors intervene. Rather I'm saying that since "following Christianity" was a constant on both sides of the slavery debate, it must be that some other factor besides being a Christian led a person to the choice of sides. Ergo, Christianity--as a whole, at least--can't be credited for "motivating" abolition or slavery, but rather for helping to motivate people to more fervently pursue whichever side they happened to fall on.

Well yes, but this idea is less knotted if you begin to unpack the idea that there are really lots of kinds of Christianity. British arguments for abolition were very caught up in arguments about specifically non-conformist and evangelical ideas of Christianity. However, in Wilberforce's major speech in Parliament on the subject, he did more or less make a secular argument, which can be found here.

It ends rather portentously:

quote:

Having heard all of this you may choose to look the other way but you can never again say that you did not know.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Feb 11, 2015

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 12:20

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Irony Be My Shield posted:

Only you only came to that realization after creating the most widespread and brutal system of child abuse ever, and using that to get rich as gently caress

It is in many ways appropriate that your avatar is more or less fedoratipping.jpeg.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 16:35

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Brandor this is my routine reminder that you should learn to speak English. There are fundamental problems with the way that you write that move beyond the stylistic.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 21:20

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

OwlFancier posted:

I quite liked this post:

It's not that I think Brandor always writes incomprehensibly, but that only serves to make it more :sigh:

when he does.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2015 22:48

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Miltank posted:

Yeah, I wasn't kidding. A preposterous attack at the rationality of what is already recognized as irrational with some pseudoscience thrown in to boot. The idea that since we are made in God's image then God must ~logically~ have a central nervous system is something that a broken computer would come with.

Yeah. I mean, medieval theology has more than adequately dealt with that idiotic level of objection, which is not to say I think it's correct.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2015 01:08

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

13th Century Theologians have done the hard work for you all.

If you don't believe in god, this kind of theory is not usually of overwhelming interest to you. I only have reason to care because I've studied a lot of medieval philosophy. It's also not entirely accessible without a good knowledge of a long tradition of thought including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Plotinus.

Obviously, the argument is mounted upon assumptions that no atheist would make (e.g. God as prime mover).

But it's pretty stupid to say, as I'm sure someone will 'hey look, those Christians are in disarray about God because they're wrong about God being the prime mover!'. Well yeah. I think the whole point of atheism is pointing out that the predicate is wrong. The whole point about theology is trying to theorise around certain very fixed points to make the best sense of things possible, which is what doctrines about the simplicity of God do for this question.

There is also a foundational mistake in this argument, demonstrated by Aquinas here:

quote:

Reply to Objection 2. Man is said to be after the image of God, not as regards his body, but as regards that whereby he excels other animals. Hence, when it is said, "Let us make man to our image and likeness", it is added, "And let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea" (Genesis 1:26). Now man excels all animals by his reason and intelligence; hence it is according to his intelligence and reason, which are incorporeal, that man is said to be according to the image of God.

That is, you're assuming [traditionally doctrinal] Christians believe that all human faculties are non-supernatural, which is of course a bit of a mistake when you're dealing with people who believe in souls.

Re: God being angry:

quote:

Reply to Objection 2. Anger and the like are attributed to God on account of a similitude of effect. Thus, because to punish is properly the act of an angry man, God's punishment is metaphorically spoken of as His anger.

This is 1274. There aren't really many new arguments to be had on this topic.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Feb 12, 2015

# ¿ Feb 12, 2015 11:21

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

BrandorKP posted:

Not always. Sometimes it's as prime mover. Sometimes it's as abyssal ground of reality and some atheists do make that particular assumption. Usually the assumptions of theologians are responses to the ideas of the philosophers. An example: Christians talk about the spiritual because they are responding to Plotinus. Basically I think you've got it backwards. The assumptions come from the outside. Theology is usually apologetic, responding. It's an attempt to reconcile the Christian's experience of Jesus, with those other things from the outside.

Either way, it's a hermeneutic, which seems to be what people have trouble with.

Radbot posted:

What if religion is some sort of necessary prerequisite to the formation of civilized society, but also something to be discarded once we reach a certain point in our development? Kinda like how many animals that walked on land for the first time retained the ability to breath underwater, but then lost it as they became more finely tuned to their evolutionary niche.

It's stupid to argue against the brilliance of Aquinas or Mendel or al-Khwarizmi, but maybe that system is holding people back today?

That's a kind of semi-Marxist attitude to it, and one I have sympathy with. Although there has always been something like a secular or sceptical tradition of value throughout the history of European religious life. And sometimes, a syncretist one.

But you can't entirely abandon understanding the internal logic of religion if you want to talk about it in its own terms, which is a bad habit of a lot of r/atheists.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Feb 12, 2015

# ¿ Feb 12, 2015 17:44

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Barlow posted:

I have seen little evidence that well thought out theistic beliefs lead to any worse conclusions with regards to morality than atheism.

Well, maybe, but if you're starting from a questionable assumption (there is a god who supplies objective moral values) you can more liable to fall into the hazard, or believe the right thing for the wrong reason. I don't, for example, believe that a good reason to support the abolition of slavery is belief that slaves cannot go to heaven, an argument made by lots of evangelical abolitionists, even though I welcome their historical contribution.

Barlow posted:

On some issues, like ethics surrounding war and peace, Catholic Just War traditions or Anabaptist pacifist traditions are far better thought out than their secular counterparts.

I'm not so sure. People are always quite nice about Quaker pacifism or Gandhi's non-resistance, but in both instances you have people claiming that fighting the Nazis is immoral and arguing that it is morally preferable to be slaughtered by fascists than fight them, which I regard as highly suspect.

Just war is alright, although some people may have reason to question the Augustinian/classical hypothesis that 'peace is the only thing worth fighting for' as being in some sense a paradox.

I don't think anyone has any answers to this question that are shown to work in reality.

Barlow posted:

Really we only have to look at the most outspoken New Atheists to confirm that morality does not conflate with "enlightened" non-belief.

Yeah, this is a real tangle, particularly since a lot of them claim that they're not espousing moral values while simultaneously doing just that.

Barlow posted:

Hitchens supported torture for years and was gleeful about the Iraq war

Right only on the second count. He was rather outspoken in opposition to waterboarding after trying it out on himself. He was consistently opposed to torture and CIA adventures in doing it for decades. Hitchens could also be quite misogynistic (while simultaneously espousing largely feminist beliefs - he was a bit of a discombobulated person).

Barlow posted:

Harris has argued that there are some religious beliefs that justify killing those that believe them,

And worse. But he is also, ironically, more open to some religious spiritual claims than Hitchens was or Dennet and Dawkins are, including some concept of an afterlife.

Barlow posted:

Dawkins is terrible on women's issues. Many religious figures likewise have abhorrent views, but its hard to claim that lack of grounding in religious traditions makes anyone a better person.

No, but if you were trying to develop a system of morality today, it's still quite firmly arguable that religion would be a poor place to begin.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Feb 12, 2015

# ¿ Feb 12, 2015 18:52

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

CommieGIR posted:

The idea that atheism is an organized movement is kind of bizarre, you are trying to organize the movement like a church and that doesn't work, there are not prophets, just vocal proponents. Carl Sagan was a fairly vocal agnostic athiest, why was he not listed? Or Neil Degrasse Tyson? Or Bill Nye?

In fairness you can say ~~the~~ something similar about Islam.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Feb 12, 2015

# ¿ Feb 12, 2015 19:15

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

CommieGIR posted:

Fine Agnostic in his words. However, you are being nitpicky, he was pretty clear that he also doesn't buy into the idea of gods as beings, more that 'God' was simply the natural laws, nothing more. This does not align with theism at all, it aligns more with pantheism . Panthiesm is identical to atheism, especially agnostic atheism, as it does not identify with any anthropomorphism or supernatural beings.

What the gently caress are you talking about? We don't have all these different words to pull tricks on people, you know.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2015 19:53

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

vessbot posted:

Holy poo poo you utterly vapid individual. Of course none of it is true. There is no point in a theology without a God, though, so there is no point wading in to a theological argument without making the assumption of a God, still less of wading in to a theological one in Christianity without accepting its basic precepts. Just happily assert you don't believe it instead of trying to wade the gently caress in.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2015 20:23

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

vessbot posted:

Um... so we agree then?

Fact checking theology is an idiotic idea and probably one of the single worst trends in atheism, it just leads you down absurd blind alleys where you totally miss the point. You're better off just working on the root; the 'theo' part.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2015 20:32

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 20:06

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

vessbot posted:

I used to think that Daniel Dennett was being somewhat of a pompous prick when he said that religion, in order to survive, requires the maintenance of a veil of ignorance to shield itself from reality. After seeing the reactions to my posts here, I now fully agree with him. A defensive taboo is being raised against fact-checking religion, and being partaken in by non-believing academics who appreciate it.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2015 21:16

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > There is one thing that doesn't matter, and that is Jesus Christ

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