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zeal posted:Okay, say I take you at your word. At the cost lifelong reverence and the pledge of your eternal soul after death, this spirit gives you the capacity to temporarily numb yourself to the many and varied unwelcome pangs of existence. What happens to you after death is sketchy, but it seems to involve praising your spiritual dope dealer for the rest of eternity. I'm gonna take Odin's offer and strive for Valhalla instead, personally. At least there's mead, contact sports and valkyries there. Normally what happens after death is nothing. I do not believe in an eternal soul whatsoever. Nor do I pledge anything else. Neither do I treat anything with reverence. It is much simpler. Jesus is a semi mythological figure. Like Buddha. There are elements of truth wildly mixed with fiction, elaboration, gaps of knowledge filled with fake prophecy and everything else you can imagine in a basic soup of stuff. Most of the stuff however tries to explain the teachings of this Rabbi from nazareth. (personally I think the carpenter thing is a symbol of sorts. Jesus seems much to well read top be a carpenter but this is personal speculation.) The teachings of this guy are borrowing heavily from other sects and philosophies in the eastern med. My view on it is a more politically radical school of thought than Buddhism but very similar. Both feature themes of rebirth heavily, and in both death and rebirth are symbolic events. Meaning not real ones. It is basically about ego transcendence. A manual more of less. There are newer works on the subject from neurological experts but the general guidelines are the same. So no mead in Valhalla.
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Oct 9, 2015 22:19
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grate deceiver posted:So what was your point in dropping this babby-level truthbomb? I'm on the edge on my seat here, awaiting further groundbreaking insights such as "the grass is green" and "sky is blue". To cut through all that analytical philosophy bs. That poo poo has taken this thread nowhere. Gods exists in enough ways that debating their existance is an exercise in pride and self agrandissement. It is more interesting to discuss the implications of this than to bicker.
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Oct 9, 2015 22:25
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Quift posted:Gods exists in enough ways that debating their existance is an exercise in pride and self agrandissement. Yea, except not in any way that is relevant to this thread
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Oct 9, 2015 22:49
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zeal posted:
The Gospels are the transcribed oral traditions of the early Christians and the rest of the NT is just letters from early Christians. I don't 'ignore' any of it, but I don't have any delusions about its infallibility.
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Oct 9, 2015 23:40
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Its a silly question that really shouldn't be asked anymore because it's irrelevant. Even if a god does exist (Just as likely as one not existing if you can 'believe' that it's just as likely that an advanced ancient race has created us and the universe we live in just like we will likely one day create AI) If a god exists it just begs the question, who created that god? Ad-infinitum. Which is why belief in such a power boggles me. People should stop wasting their time with it and just focus on acting and making the world a better place for not only themselves and their families but others.
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Oct 10, 2015 00:37
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Miltank posted:My God's chosen form of worship is service to the meek fwiw.
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Oct 10, 2015 04:14
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rudatron posted:That's still a bit of a misdirection, since when you say worship, that's not what is understood. Though that starts a little debate on what worship is, which will be tedious. Why people worship at all is the more interesting question. Yeah, I recognized that the average person is gonna have a different idea of what worshipping means after my first post, but I didn't mean it to be a misdirection. It is difficult to even talk about religion with people who havnt grown up in the church because we really do speak different languages when it comes to spirituality.
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Oct 10, 2015 05:46
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Plenty of us grew up in church, we just don't have some special snowflake single-member version of Christianity that wipes its rear end with the Nicene Creed.Miltank posted:I don't see what ancient hebrew war poetry has to do with the Christ. You mean the rabbi who told Jews to follow the law?
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Oct 10, 2015 09:08
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Quift posted:Exactly. Welcome to irrational belief based systems functioning on the pure basis of faith. So if Money can exist only due to faith then it is not unreasonable to argue that God can exist due to having believers very much like the existence of Justin Bieber. What? You are conflating the value of money with its ontological status. Exactly how schizophrenic is your axiology, exactly? In Neil Gaiman's Sandman series all the ancient pantheons of gods were once real but have long since died because they don't have the prayers and faith of believers to quite literally sustain their life forces anymore. You seem to think something like that is actually the case.
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Oct 10, 2015 10:11
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Smudgie Buggler posted:What? Given that he referenced Pratchett earlier I'm not entirely sure he doesn't believe that.
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Oct 10, 2015 14:10
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Smudgie Buggler posted:What? Apparently I need to start this post by stating that I'm not a schizophrenic. Also, it is not nice to use mental disease as an insult. Neither towards me, but primarily against people struggling with mental illness whom should not need to have their struggle made fun of top call someone an idiot. This is called ethics and we will resume that subject later. To the fun stuff. Most here regard the question of God existance as an ontological exercise. I try to reframe it since the ontological approach has failed to deliver meaningful answers for a few thousand years. Framing it as an ethical problem for instance might be more fruitful. Hence dismissing the ontological approach wholesale and instead focusing on the human aspect. If God exists even in the most trivial sense (the Neil Gaiman sense), what does that mean for humanity? And that sense is true, in a trivial sort of way. Trivially true might be sufficiently true. Otherwise we end up with questions like, "what does existance mean? " and we do necessarily end up there since each word in the question needs to be defined properly in analytical philosophy. Do the readers of this post exist or are they all figments of my imagination? What if I'm a figment of the imagination of the dreaming godhead awaiting another kalpa? That might be a fun discussion if we all regard it as a masturbatory group exercise. Is that what we are doing here? To recap, I reject the notion that an epistemological approach is the correct one. If you wish to continue with that approach I will need to prove the existance of something else with it. Something easy. Prove that I exist in a non trivial sense and we can continue with another 1000 years of ontological arguments. Otherwise I cannot see that ontology has anything to contribute to the discussion.
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Oct 10, 2015 15:19
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Catsplosion posted:Its a silly question that really shouldn't be asked anymore because it's irrelevant. This is only true if the God in question created the universe. Which is not necessarily true. A good that we created is still possible. See jungian theory.
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Oct 10, 2015 15:24
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I feel the conversation needs to be reset from this really strange tangent. The most obvious reason why there is not a God as per any world religion is because there are plenty other world religions with other Gods. For example, if Christians are so very, very sure that the Shinto pantheon is mythical, the rest of the world are just as qualified to be certain that the Christian God is as false. I feel believing in any God quickly becomes an untenable position. Everyone in this thread arguing why there is a God should be just as well compelled to post why other faith's Gods do not exist, but they don't. It's a false dichotomy that the debate is atheistic vs theistic when actually atheists are very, very close to Christians; there are about 4,200 world religions each with their own God(s). Christians believe 4,199 are wrong, Atheists believe 4,200 are wrong. We're really not too far apart on the issue. A definable God (as a logical construct) is only possible once you remove all religion and dogma from the concept, and I feel that once you do you erase any concept of a God that is purported by theists in the world today, rendering it a redundant concept. It's kind of cheating or a cop-out to try define a God in absence of that faith's creed, because we all know the latter part is what we really all care about the most. The conversation is much more approachable when you say "The Sikh God is/is not..." (ironic, I know). But once you go about poking holes in the concept on every other world religion's God(s) then it is only more unlikely that you're going to end up with one world religion whose deity you cannot argue against. The reason why philosophy majors sound 'spergy when explaining/explaining away God is because it is an irrational concept by nature, along the lines of other irrational and subjective concepts such as love or awe.
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Oct 10, 2015 16:29
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Rakosi posted:
That's bullshit, because at most it means that other religions get confused about how the God or Gods work (e.g. if the Abrahamic god of 52% of the Earth's population is real, then multiple god religions are interpreting different facets of the same entity as independent figures and vice versa). It would also probably mean that the real God or Gods are also not picky about their worship being done exactly right, or at all, but that invalidates religious practice rather than the god or gods involved.
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Oct 10, 2015 16:42
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God? Maybe. Maybe not.
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Oct 10, 2015 16:43
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Rakosi posted:I feel the conversation needs to be reset from this really strange tangent. The interpretation of other deities as mythical by Christians, or by any religion, is a contemporary phenomenon. Far more common in the past was to consider them as diabolical or at best nondivine entities. That is, if they weren't considered to be falsely worshipped God, or saints. So this sort of falls apart, because that sort of belief only emerged as a result of the modern, rational world where the supernatural is inherently ridiculous. Furthermore, most religions are compatible with one another to a large extent, which is how Vodou, Santeria, and Candomble, most familiarly, emerged. The idea of a totally incompatible religion is something that emerged as a consequence of the need to manage gigantic colonial empires and crush local cultures into oblivion.
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Oct 10, 2015 16:54
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Nintendo Kid posted:That's bullshit, because at most it means that other religions get confused about how the God or Gods work (e.g. if the Abrahamic god of 52% of the Earth's population is real, then multiple god religions are interpreting different facets of the same entity as independent figures and vice versa). It would also probably mean that the real God or Gods are also not picky about their worship being done exactly right, or at all, but that invalidates religious practice rather than the god or gods involved. I challenge you to put forth a definition of God that is devoid of all dogma and is not such a vacuous entity as to be synonymous with "pure mystery" or the "unknowable". Not even theists argue for such a God. And if no one is in favor of a "God of the Logical Gaps", then it's going to have to take back seat in the conversation to the other entities that are readily defined by religions. You have to define the God before you can say that any God exists. This is the end-game argument for a God. It is guaranteed to be either Jesus or not Jesus, but once you open the gate to dogma the whole thing collapses into a logical black hole. God is defined by the religion, so it is from the religion you have to approach God. All religions disagree with each other. God is unapproachable. In every other domain of discourse, discussing the existence of something without defining it exactly is insanity at worst and unfalsifiable postulation at best. It is impossible to define God(s) exactly because of dogmatic differences. In every other domain if discourse something that the vast majority of the world's population cannot even define is not considered real.
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Oct 10, 2015 17:06
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Physics, it seems, is religion, thanks to the uncertainty principle making measurements a logical black hole. Perhaps your approach is simply constituent of intellectual cowardice, taking an unassailably stupid position and defying people to disprove it.
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Oct 10, 2015 17:09
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Rakosi posted:I challenge you to put forth a definition of God that is devoid of all dogma and is not such a vacuous entity as to be synonymous with "pure mystery" or the "unknowable". A supernatural or natural but extremely powerful being capable of making major changes to events in the universe beyond currently accepted abilities. Also, it's pretty easy for a god to not care about the dogma some of its supposed followers build up - it just means they're kinda chill. I also remind you that currently a slim majority of the world population accepts what they at least claim is the same god (the Abrahamic one).
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Oct 10, 2015 17:11
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Nintendo Kid posted:A supernatural or natural but extremely powerful being capable of making major changes to events in the universe beyond currently accepted abilities. Okay great, now what proof is there that such an (natural or supernatural? You still haven't defined exactly) entity exists, without resorting to any dogma whatsoever?
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Oct 10, 2015 17:15
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Rakosi posted:Okay great, now what proof is there that such an (natural or supernatural? You still haven't defined exactly) entity exists, without resorting to any dogma whatsoever? Can you define something without that definition being theory-laden? Because what you pejoratively call "dogma" (though you will undoubtedly dodge honesty about your intent in doing so) other people would call "theory".
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Oct 10, 2015 17:17
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Rakosi posted:Okay great, now what proof is there that such an (natural or supernatural? You still haven't defined exactly) entity exists, without resorting to any dogma whatsoever? This is irrelevant, as the supernatural form would necessarily be beyond normal investigation. A natural being can still exist without having bothered to interact with Earth, for that matter (indeed there's all sorts of reasons to expect that if a god created this universe, they hav eno interest in our little corner of their creation! and even more so if its just a particularly powerful being of the universe considering how big the universe is). I don't think you know what the word dogma means, either.
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Oct 10, 2015 17:17
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Nintendo Kid posted:This is irrelevant, as the supernatural form would necessarily be beyond normal investigation. A natural being can still exist without having bothered to interact with Earth, for that matter (indeed there's all sorts of reasons to expect that if a god created this universe, they hav eno interest in our little corner of their creation! and even more so if its just a particularly powerful being of the universe considering how big the universe is). I don't think you know what the word dogma means, either. It's very relevant. The kind of God you define I think everyone (even theists) can agree is impossible to argue for, or against, which was kind of my point. We'll never see it, it'll never act on us, it is Schrodinger's God. Also, I know what dogma means. At least the dogmatic make points that can be discussed. Creationists can be debated with because of their dogmatic beliefs about God's role in creating the world, so what I am saying is that if you remove all dogma from the definition of God (which is only fair if we're not to favor any one of the 4,200 religion's definition of the concept) it becomes undefinable at worst, or at best completely vacuous a definition as yours is.
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Oct 10, 2015 17:35
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Rakosi posted:It's very relevant. The kind of God you define I think everyone (even theists) can agree is impossible to argue for, or against, which was kind of my point. We'll never see it, it'll never act on us, it is Schrodinger's God. You're word salading. It's possible for a god or gods to exist even though their worshipers hosed up their description/rituals/whatever, so long as they're just not all that obsessed with Correct Worship. And really, why would they be? And there's nothing vacuous about that description, it just hurts your feelings because you expected to be all "well god isn't actually a trinity eat that Christians!!".
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Oct 10, 2015 17:38
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Nintendo Kid posted:You're word salading. It's possible for a god or gods to exist even though their worshipers hosed up their description/rituals/whatever, so long as they're just not all that obsessed with Correct Worship. And really, why would they be? So you agree your hypothetical entity is unfalsifiable, then? Completely unknowable and unrelatable in the context of current Human experience? Considering this debate is about arguing the existence of a God, you've taken a definition of one which is not going to help you much in the argument.
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Oct 10, 2015 17:49
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Rakosi posted:So you agree your hypothetical entity is unfalsifiable, then? Completely unknowable and unrelatable in the context of current Human experience? Considering this debate is about arguing the existence of a God, you've taken a definition of one which is not going to help you much in the argument. The supernatural version is necessarily unfalsifiable. The non supernatural but still very powerful version is falsifiable, but there's no reason to expect that it's around Earth, or even ever has been in recent times. And merely not hanging around now is no evidence that it doesn't exist in general.
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Oct 10, 2015 17:52
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Effectronica posted:The idea of a totally incompatible religion is something that emerged as a consequence of the need to manage gigantic colonial empires and crush local cultures into oblivion. Not really. Christianity was causing trouble for claiming to be the one true religion long before it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. It was the the Romans who were trying to promote religious plurality (at least early on). Most empires throughout history promoted religious tolerance because they wanted people to behave and not revolt, and they recognized the role that dissatisfied religious populations could play as a potential fifth column for rival empires offering a better deal.
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Oct 10, 2015 17:55
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Rakosi posted:I feel the conversation needs to be reset from this really strange tangent. This is of course not true even in the trivial sense. It is much easier and way more fun to argue that they are all true. All of them. All of the world's religions are built by humans. Humans are essentially the same. So all myths are basically identical. See James Campbell for example and his theory about the monomyth. All inconsistencies are the result of failed understanding of the basic truths hidden in each myth. Some variations are obviously false interpretations, others less obvious. The reason philosophy majors sound spergy is because they think they are smarter than the rest of humanity without having ever had an original thought. Nor have their discipline provided much knowledge about the human condition the last hundred years. Except Nietzsche of course.
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Oct 10, 2015 18:08
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Mukip posted:Not really. Christianity was causing trouble for claiming to be the one true religion long before it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. It was the the Romans who were trying to promote religious plurality (at least early on). Most empires throughout history promoted religious tolerance because they wanted people to behave and not revolt, and they recognized the role that dissatisfied religious populations could play as a potential fifth column for rival empires offering a better deal. Claiming to be the one true religion has nothing to do with compatibility. Early Christianity absorbed local deities as saints and coopted religious holidays. This is well-known. In addition, however, folk religion (such as belief in fairies/huldre-folk/trolls) was essentially tolerated for well over a thousand years, and attempts to crush this belief don't begin in earnest until the 1500s, alongside the efforts to annihilate Native American religious belief in the Americas and Judaism and Islam in Iberia. That is, it's only when colonial efforts begin on a large scale that belief in fairies becomes incompatible with being a Christian. Note that the Crusader states did not attempt to convert Muslims en masse, nor were they considered to be especially tyrannical by contemporary Muslim chroniclers. This is only considering Christianity, too. Quift posted:See James Campbell for example and his theory about the monomyth. The monomyth is basically bullshit.
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Oct 10, 2015 18:19
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Effectronica posted:The monomyth is basically bullshit. I mean it's cool when you read it but it's a bit of a stretch to argue that literally every story in the world is part of it. It's a good thing to read if you're working with narratives but it's not strictly correct.
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Oct 10, 2015 18:22
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Quift posted:The reason philosophy majors sound spergy is because they think they are smarter than the rest of humanity without having ever had an original thought. 
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Oct 10, 2015 22:33
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"the knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, ett are one in knowledge " Meister Eckhart 1260-1327
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Oct 11, 2015 11:17
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May God bless the Lord, Himselfwise.
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Oct 11, 2015 11:23
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Quift posted:it is not nice to use mental disease as an insult. Neither towards me, but primarily against people struggling with mental illness whom should not need to have their struggle made fun of top call someone an idiot. This is called ethics and we will resume that subject later. . Quift posted:The reason philosophy majors sound spergy is I know you were replying to someone else's use, but Jesus Sorry, the psychology major in me loved the first quote, but the philosophy major in me insisted on the second quote.
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Oct 14, 2015 01:08
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Mukip posted:Not really. Christianity was causing trouble for claiming to be the one true religion long before it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. It was the the Romans who were trying to promote religious plurality (at least early on). Most empires throughout history promoted religious tolerance because they wanted people to behave and not revolt, and they recognized the role that dissatisfied religious populations could play as a potential fifth column for rival empires offering a better deal. This is a truly simplistic view of the early Christian theology. Christians attributed worldly power to the Emperor; and consequently they recognized all other facts of life as being part of the separate kingdom of heaven. This Christian Empire created parallel to the Roman Empire, bearing signs of asceticism and monasticism, could only be perceived as a threat to the Imperial rule if interpreted in a way ignorant to the Christian theology. And ultimately St. Augustine basically reproduced Cicero's political theory in his Christian theology, definitely reconciling fundamental Christianity and Roman statehood. Basically, there never was a single Christian church open to Roman assimilation, in fact there were major conflicting factions of the Christian faith, propagated despite the wishes of the Empire, and ultimately compiled into a single dogma despite a clear conflict of interests within early Christianity.
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Oct 18, 2015 01:15
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Monotheism as we know it owes a lot to the Romans. The idea of one world, with one god figure at the head of it is Roman. This gets combined with the evolving Jewish idea of one national God. Look at Luke. The birth narratives are structured in the same way as an Roman emperors birth narrative. It's just inverted. Rome had a emperor as god, as the head of state of the most powerful empire, with all the accompanying mythology. Christianity inverts that, it takes it and puts a executed, embarrassing, backwater, nobody in the place of emperor and just steals the accompanying mythology. The myths of the time used to talk about the divinity of the Roman emperor, it takes to talk about Jesus. Is that a good way to attack power in this world? To take the structures of the powerful, and to turn them on theirs head and to put the rejected other, the outsider, the marginal outcast, with a message of "'You shall love your neighbor as yourself', in the place of the powerful and the influential. Who cares about the question of the existence of God. The structures of power, the myths society is based on now, need to be inverted in this same way and the brothers and sisters of Jesus (all of us who make up humanity) should be put in the place of the powerful and influential in those myths.
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Oct 18, 2015 06:23
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BrandorKP posted:Monotheism as we know it owes a lot to the Romans. The idea of one world, with one god figure at the head of it is Roman. This gets combined with the evolving Jewish idea of one national God. Unless you have an actual idea of how to accomplish inverting society's power structures then all this is is a load of meaningless, pompous, and most of all useless bullshit. We already know what needs to be done so needlessly dressing up the message in Jesus terms doesn't help in the slightest. So great job, Brandor, you've independently came to the same conclusions political activists did more than half a century ago.
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Oct 18, 2015 07:41
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The inversion of power-mythology will occur after power is inverted in reality, not before. You can't bring about change through mythology, because myths help those who can propagate them. You can see this in history, where the 'role' of sorcery went from a kind of encouragement to act fairly in hunter-gather societies, to yet another way for the upper class to punish the lower in very early agricultural societies.
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Oct 18, 2015 08:08
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Its a chicken and egg thing. You cannot shape mythology without power, but you cannot effectively wield power without mythology.
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Oct 18, 2015 15:56
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I wield power every time I turn on a light switch. 
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Oct 18, 2015 16:31
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