Christian Theological/Philosophical Book Club discussion
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Secular Values
Stuart professing to be wise you are utterly foolish. Social welfare, hospitals, schooling, democracy even Amnesty International are all the legacy of Christians. If you think all the sorts of ethics are human ethics
you are completely clueless, perhaps you should visit some remote tribes in papua new guinea and see what they think of your theories. Prior to the missionaries the pacific islands were filled with cannibals and head hunters.
You despise the foundations of the society you benefit from your book is appropriately named.
This is what "God-inspired" morality can - and obviously does - lead to:
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=...
Atheist parents teach their kids that religion is superstition and mind control - and no atheist parent would permit such brainwashing.
https://www.facebook.com/AtheistParen...
Because their children could even turn out like the Sunday school class we have here.
Thank God there are some questioning believers who question the concept of "God".
http://www.grettavosper.ca/
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=...
Atheist parents teach their kids that religion is superstition and mind control - and no atheist parent would permit such brainwashing.
https://www.facebook.com/AtheistParen...
Because their children could even turn out like the Sunday school class we have here.
Thank God there are some questioning believers who question the concept of "God".
http://www.grettavosper.ca/
Thanks Stuart, as always fun and enlightening. Forgive me if I'm a little slow in picking up on your points, I never claimed to be the sharpest tool in the shed.If I am following you, or if I try to summarize, it seems you want proof and evidence for the existence of God first. Then, if you had that, you would want to talk about the teachings or ethics of that God. In other words, I am more interested in comparing theist and atheist systems of ethics while you want me to prove God's existence first.
As for your hypothetical scenario, I am not going to say "no Christian" would have that sort of ethic today since you'd only need find one example to refute me. But, call me idealistic or naive, I think if we're going to have a discussion we ought to look at the best of each other's ethics and not the worst. I mean, I could create a hypothetical scenario that paints godless persons in the worst light (whether the godless person be a North Korean dictator or a murderer in North Carolina) but that does not seem fair to you. Unless that is the game you want to play?
Yes, I know I've taken bits and cobbled them together to have the Word of God say what I want it to say. That's how religions work. Just ask your local priest/pastor/rabbi/imam.
I work as a pastor and that's not actually how it works. At least, and I can only speak from my experience, for Christians I worship with. In my experience we see the Bible as a narrative culminating in the story of Jesus. So basic Christianity 101 is progressive revelation - we learn more about who God is as we go and thus whatever earlier revelations might mean, we begin and end with Jesus. Your interpretation of Jesus' teachings does make me wonder if you've taken any time to read halfway decent Christian scholars.
But if we're talking about Jesus, the deepest Christian ethic comes in his call for us to take up our cross and follow him. In other words, we ought to die for others. Rather than violently defend ourselves, we sacrifice our lives. So in your hypothetical scenario, I ought to step in between the Asian neighbor and whomever wants to harm him and give my life.
I usually find that people who ask me what sort of evidence I require don't have any. People who do, flop it out on the table for everyone to admire. I don't trust bashful people.
Like I said, maybe I'm just slow. But I have not been certain what you mean. I am not sure if you are projecting motives onto me or something. Another piece of evidence would be that I find far more people to model my life after that were theists of some sort - from Jesus to Francis of Assisi to Bonhoeffer to Dr. King to Gandhi - then I do of godless people.
You spoke of "atheist principles" and As far as a godless ethics code goes, I'm going to pretend that the libraries full of centuries' worth of secular statute books don't exist...
My question remains - what tools do we have to then question the culture we are in, the laws we currently have? How do we know what we have now is right, especially when we know some of the hideous laws they had in the past?
Or, for fun, imagine the zombie apocalypse! You're not a fan of The walking Dead are you? I think this show illustrates what I have been trying to get at (and failing apparently, sorry bout that). In the show the entire world changes as zombies decimate humanity. The question becomes - how do we live in this new world?
During season two this question pits two characters against one another. One, Rick, wants to continue with the morality that worked in the previous world - help the weak, care for those in need. Another, Shane, sees the new world as needing a new morality - the most powerful can exert their will on others. If you are the strongest man, you should be in charge and dominate others.
When we get to season four a new wrinkle enters - cannibalism. We meet a group who decides to kill and eat other people in order to survive. THe viewer finds this abhorrent, but in such a world where survival is at stake, why not be a cannibal?
So the question is, on so-called "atheist principals" - who is to say the strong man dominating the weak is wrong? Who is to say hunting and eating other humans is wrong?
I just saw your recent post. I think that any secular organization in the west doing good without god proves nothing. As I've said, we've inherited morals and ethics from our, mostly religious, predecessors. What do you say to Nietzsche who reprimanded his fellow atheists for rejecting God but wanting to keep the same morals. Kudos to those who do this, but what reasons if they step back and think about it do they have? Or, if there were not hypocritical churches to show up and stick it to, would they still do it? It is one thing to help others in order to show you can without God, but if we lived in a truly godless world, would this care for those in need automatically remain? Or, to bring up one of my hypotheticals again - if I have $1000 and decide to buy a flatscreen TV rather than help those in need, on what ground in a godless world do you have to tell me I OUGHT to give to those in need? I have one life and am lucky enough to be wealthy, who are you to say I should do differently?
To be most concise, answer that once question - I have $1000, what should I do with it? Why?
David wrote: "Thanks Stuart, as always fun and enlightening. Forgive me if I'm a little slow in picking up on your points, I never claimed to be the sharpest tool in the shed.
If I am following you, or if I tr..."
Yeah, you didn't/wouldn't catch on.
Not going to repeat.
If I am following you, or if I tr..."
Yeah, you didn't/wouldn't catch on.
Not going to repeat.
That was a disappointing response, seeing as how I've thrown out numerous things you haven't given a good response to.*Numerous questions - why not abort a baby with down syndrome? Why run a soup kitchen (post 4 and post 13)
*Morals are like grammar, you've said. But you've never given any tools to critique how we can know our culture is using the correct grammar. From what I gathered, we're stuck in the present with some morals and from your perspective we have no tools to know if our morals are better then the past, then other cultures, or what may come in the future.
*Knowing morals will change in the future, how can we trust them now?
*You've not even attempted to respond to Jake's post (40) about goals. To put it one way, you saying morals are like grammar is kind of like saying they are like rules for a game. But how do we know if we are playing the right game?
*The universality of religion, from Baptists to Buddhists as you say, is evidence to me that there is some sort of supernatural.
As we near the end of this discussion, I will readily admit there are lots of problems for a theist to solve in regards to morality. You have pinpointed many of them. Yet when I look at the problems, the problems for an atheist view outweigh the problems for the theist. Or at the very least, rejecting God does not solve the problem.
*You have stated that all moral systems are godless. Are you saying that all humans were atheists at one point? Or are you simply presupposing your conclusion - if there is no god, obviously all morals are godless. But assuming from the outset there is no God and then arguing from that that all moral systems are godless begs the question.
If you were successful in convincing me there is no god, you have not provided any manageable way to live in light of that. You haven't even tried really. As you accuse theists of cherry-picking morals you end up with the exact same problem for atheists - some atheists do live very moral lives while others may decide to live self-centered lives. There are no tools within your worldview to say that one choice of life by one atheist is any better then that of another atheist. So atheists too cherry-pick their morals.
Not saying there is no Divinity/God.
Not asking anyone to prove Divinity/God exists.
Asking believers, from Buddhists to Baptists, to produce independently verifiable evidence that the tiniest shred of anything they have comes from THEIR version of Divinity/God.
No one ever does.
Ever.
Not trying to convince you there is no Divinity/God.
When you can demonstrate - outside the religious promotional literature - that Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost was/were behind a single law/moral/ethic, we can look at more hypotheticals.
Until then, I'm going to continue to suggest that humans managed to figure out for themselves that stealing other people's stuff and so forth was bad for society as a whole.
Priests, pastors and rabbis understood the human psyche well enough to realise it would have much more impact on the ever-credulous throng, if they wrote stories pretending the laws came from "God" on the top of a smoky mountain hundreds of years before their own time.
And believers still buy it without question today.
As I say - don't worry about trying to prove Divinity/God.
Just a tiny scintilla of something outside the promotional literature I can check for myself will do.
Of course atheists cherry-pick morals - it's called experience and thinking for yourself.
If we didn't, we'd be preaching eternity in Hell if you don't follow our super-human, miracle-working Leader, and burning you at the stake or cutting off your head if you don't.
But just a jot or a tittle of independently verifiable evidence that anything at all actually comes from your version of Divinity/God will do.
Anything.
Not asking anyone to prove Divinity/God exists.
Asking believers, from Buddhists to Baptists, to produce independently verifiable evidence that the tiniest shred of anything they have comes from THEIR version of Divinity/God.
No one ever does.
Ever.
Not trying to convince you there is no Divinity/God.
When you can demonstrate - outside the religious promotional literature - that Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost was/were behind a single law/moral/ethic, we can look at more hypotheticals.
Until then, I'm going to continue to suggest that humans managed to figure out for themselves that stealing other people's stuff and so forth was bad for society as a whole.
Priests, pastors and rabbis understood the human psyche well enough to realise it would have much more impact on the ever-credulous throng, if they wrote stories pretending the laws came from "God" on the top of a smoky mountain hundreds of years before their own time.
And believers still buy it without question today.
As I say - don't worry about trying to prove Divinity/God.
Just a tiny scintilla of something outside the promotional literature I can check for myself will do.
Of course atheists cherry-pick morals - it's called experience and thinking for yourself.
If we didn't, we'd be preaching eternity in Hell if you don't follow our super-human, miracle-working Leader, and burning you at the stake or cutting off your head if you don't.
But just a jot or a tittle of independently verifiable evidence that anything at all actually comes from your version of Divinity/God will do.
Anything.
Everything I have comes from God - the good, bad, and ugly. Independently verifiable how? If you dissect me you'll find at the cellular level such wondrously complex substances such as Deoxyribonucleic Acid which is far too intricate to have been randomly built from swirling chemicals in the primordial ooze. It was fashioned with some superior foreknowledge of it's ultimate function. Because no one has come forward to claim this more eloquently and forcefully than Yahweh, I'll ordain Him as Creator and afford Him the luxury of being powerful enough to put forth a recipe book for how His underlings should comport themselves.
Stuart wrote: "Not saying there is no Divinity/God.Not asking anyone to prove Divinity/God exists.
Asking believers, from Buddhists to Baptists, to produce independently verifiable evidence that the tiniest sh..."
Stuart, I have been following this discussion on Secular Values with interest. I'm going to agree with David that it seems to me you are evading the fundamental questions by not putting your position on values on the table. To put it another way, from my perspective, you are not taking a position on the question - Are values objective or subjective?
To me this binary question is at the foundation of this discussion on values. At the risk of repeating points in an earlier submission, if you choose "objective" then you have to face the question: "Where do theses objective values come from?" In a universe of only matter and energy how could objective values arise?
In my reading, atheists who have written on the subject generally decide that values must be subjective, that is to say, that everyone invents their own. But this presents other problems.
(1) Why expect others to be sympathetic when we appeal to values that we have invented? You do this in your posts when you present examples of human tragedy (why is it a tragedy if it's only a taste or a fashion and not a wrong or an evil?)
(2)Subjective values are not values at all. As Jake pointed out. There is an is/ought problem. When you present examples of human tragedy Stuart, you are assuming universal agreement that these tragedies ought not to be allowed to happen and deserve universal censure. Why expect a shared response when "values" are personal inventions? Why expect expect everyone to invent exactly the same values?
(3)Actions motivated by self-interest or pragmatism are not value-motivated actions and are not regarded as such in general by the human community. Certainly good results may be a by-product but if self-interest is the primary motivation, that is not how we describe actions "we ought to do."
For example a person may jump into a raging river to save someone else's toddler because it's the right thing to do and therefore he ought to jump in. If after the successful rescue, he gets the keys to the city, that does not at all mean he did a personal risk-benefit calculation before he jumped in.
(4) Most materialists do subscribe to a principle that supposedly governs the behaviour of all living things. Darwinism, especially in Dawkins formulation of the selfish gene, apparently is one of the fundamental guiding principles for behaviour in the universe. So, it seems to me, a consistent atheist and materialist, when confronted with the long lists of violence, cruelty, manipulation, and hypocrisy that you presented in your posts ought to say:
"Of course they would do that. They are simply carrying out the fundamental behavioural directive of our universe, namely to collaborate with others when one is able to gain an advantage and to destroy competition when one can do so safely. After all that is how the ultimate goal of survival and reproduction can be realized. There is nothing inherently wrong or evil in any of those behaviours (speaking from within materialism). Indeed that behaviour is exactly what I would expect."
In summary, from where I sit, you need to take a position on what your values are and where they come from. Otherwise (again it seems to me) your argument is inconsistent and not internally coherent. That is to say you tacitly assume objective values as you make statement after statement about behaviour you assume your readership ought to find deplorable and then at the end you act as if there were no basis for objective values.
Finally your statement:
When you can demonstrate - outside the religious promotional literature - that Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost was/were behind a single law/moral/ethic, we can look at more hypotheticals.
You are demanding evidence for the theistic point of view when you haven't even presented a contrary point of view for comparison:
(1) So what is your position on values?
(2) Where do they come from?
Once we finally have your position, then we can compare the relative merits of the two explanations (theism and yours).
Good God - how many more times do I need to put my position on values on the table ...?
Evading ...? Utter nonsense ....
Let's do it again.
Given the complete and utter absence of the tiniest jot of a hint of evidence that any values were given to any human by Jesus, Allah, Brahma, Ahura Mazda, Yahweh or any of the other millions of imaginary super-beings, my position is that humans managed to figure value systems out for themselves.
Here's my position again - we have no evidence of divinely donated values, leaving me to postulated that humans developed value systems.
My position is that the written systems we have purporting be written with the finger of "God" on the top of a smoky mountain or wherever, were actually written by priests who knew how to manipulate the human psyche. It's what priests do.
My position is that the biblical Yahweh is as imaginary and mythological as the countless versions of "God" that came long, long before the Jewish priests gave the Canaanite deity Yah a promotion to Lord of the Canaanite Elohim, and re-wrote the existing values/codes/laws to reflect their newly promoted theology.
The question is not a binary question. I find that believers love the "if you're not for us you must be against us", the black and white, the right or wrong, yes or no simple and easy answer that puts you into a comfortable camp. Many, many questions are not binary.
And nor does one need to present a "contrary" position when discussing a topic. That's as simplistic a position as the "binary" claim.
I chimed in on this discussion when the general opinion was that human values came from a higher source. I'm still waiting for a single soul to demonstrate that that is actually the case. There you have your evasion ....
The discussion was not how objective or subjective values were, but whether values came from "God", or were humans, through thousands of years of social evolution and experience, able to develop libraries full of secular statutes.
I find it an insult to the intelligence to say that humans are incapable of developing value systems. I find it equally insulting to the intelligence to expect educated people to accept that a mythological pagan deity from the backblocks of the Middle East's most advance civilisations, scratched a value system on tablets of stone with his finger, on top of a smoky mountain that would instantly strike you dead if you touched it. Human priests most probably made all that awesome stuff up. It impresses the simple folk.
Let me put my position on the origin of human values again:
No demonstration of "God" in ANY value system, leads me expect that ALL value systems are human value systems.
As a corollary - as I've pointed out before - if humans who follow the value system given by Jesus when he was still in Heaven with Yahweh and the Holy Ghost, can examine the 613 OT "laws" he gave to Moses on top of the smoky mountain, and decide for themselves which ones they're going to sweep under the altar (now we can buy cheeseburgers on Sunday) and which we're going to trot right out the front (don't forget the 10% tithe, and , yes, God hates fags) demonstrates my point exactly. Christians can conveniently turn themselves into temporary atheists, and rummage through the 613 values and pick out the ones they like, like a bag of trail mix, and cobble them together into a never-changing, God-given set of values that cannot be altered ... until the next time some godless scientific conspiracy show quite clearly we don't live in a terracentric universe, or Homo sapiens didn't used to be mud-cakes 4004 years before Jesus incarnated himself as a Jewish human to not really alter any of his earlier laws ... or leave any clear theology to compensate for his failed political ambitions.
Let's do this one more time, just for the hell of it.
No clear Jesus - therefore probably humans.
And this one's just for my old mate Joshua (I know how much he loves Wikipedia - I even give them money!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_...
And while we're on the topic of old mates and priests writing things themselves and attributing it to "God", I remembered that Robert told me Yahweh had had given his book of creation pseudoscience his "imprimatur". How, prophesy is not my milieu, but I'm willing to predict that if we ask Robert to actually back that up with anything the rest of us can check, we're going to get nothing more than a smokescreen of religio-babble and a whole lot of emotion and veiled (and not so veiled) threats, which will lead some of to suggest that it only happened inside his own head. Some folks, when such things happen inside their heads, I suggest, can be quite convinced they have had a "spiritual/metaphysical/whatever" experience. Others are downright frauds.
How do we prove if Robert is in touch with Yahweh, or delusional, or a fraud ...? We probably can't.
And that's one of the many traps of religion.
Gotta go - not going to proof this rant.
No Jesus. Humans were smart enough to figure out the subjective and objective values and realise we don't live in a simplistic, binary, either or, right or wrong world, and have figured out how to change and adapt values - even ones given by "God".
Evading ...? Utter nonsense ....
Let's do it again.
Given the complete and utter absence of the tiniest jot of a hint of evidence that any values were given to any human by Jesus, Allah, Brahma, Ahura Mazda, Yahweh or any of the other millions of imaginary super-beings, my position is that humans managed to figure value systems out for themselves.
Here's my position again - we have no evidence of divinely donated values, leaving me to postulated that humans developed value systems.
My position is that the written systems we have purporting be written with the finger of "God" on the top of a smoky mountain or wherever, were actually written by priests who knew how to manipulate the human psyche. It's what priests do.
My position is that the biblical Yahweh is as imaginary and mythological as the countless versions of "God" that came long, long before the Jewish priests gave the Canaanite deity Yah a promotion to Lord of the Canaanite Elohim, and re-wrote the existing values/codes/laws to reflect their newly promoted theology.
The question is not a binary question. I find that believers love the "if you're not for us you must be against us", the black and white, the right or wrong, yes or no simple and easy answer that puts you into a comfortable camp. Many, many questions are not binary.
And nor does one need to present a "contrary" position when discussing a topic. That's as simplistic a position as the "binary" claim.
I chimed in on this discussion when the general opinion was that human values came from a higher source. I'm still waiting for a single soul to demonstrate that that is actually the case. There you have your evasion ....
The discussion was not how objective or subjective values were, but whether values came from "God", or were humans, through thousands of years of social evolution and experience, able to develop libraries full of secular statutes.
I find it an insult to the intelligence to say that humans are incapable of developing value systems. I find it equally insulting to the intelligence to expect educated people to accept that a mythological pagan deity from the backblocks of the Middle East's most advance civilisations, scratched a value system on tablets of stone with his finger, on top of a smoky mountain that would instantly strike you dead if you touched it. Human priests most probably made all that awesome stuff up. It impresses the simple folk.
Let me put my position on the origin of human values again:
No demonstration of "God" in ANY value system, leads me expect that ALL value systems are human value systems.
As a corollary - as I've pointed out before - if humans who follow the value system given by Jesus when he was still in Heaven with Yahweh and the Holy Ghost, can examine the 613 OT "laws" he gave to Moses on top of the smoky mountain, and decide for themselves which ones they're going to sweep under the altar (now we can buy cheeseburgers on Sunday) and which we're going to trot right out the front (don't forget the 10% tithe, and , yes, God hates fags) demonstrates my point exactly. Christians can conveniently turn themselves into temporary atheists, and rummage through the 613 values and pick out the ones they like, like a bag of trail mix, and cobble them together into a never-changing, God-given set of values that cannot be altered ... until the next time some godless scientific conspiracy show quite clearly we don't live in a terracentric universe, or Homo sapiens didn't used to be mud-cakes 4004 years before Jesus incarnated himself as a Jewish human to not really alter any of his earlier laws ... or leave any clear theology to compensate for his failed political ambitions.
Let's do this one more time, just for the hell of it.
No clear Jesus - therefore probably humans.
And this one's just for my old mate Joshua (I know how much he loves Wikipedia - I even give them money!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_...
And while we're on the topic of old mates and priests writing things themselves and attributing it to "God", I remembered that Robert told me Yahweh had had given his book of creation pseudoscience his "imprimatur". How, prophesy is not my milieu, but I'm willing to predict that if we ask Robert to actually back that up with anything the rest of us can check, we're going to get nothing more than a smokescreen of religio-babble and a whole lot of emotion and veiled (and not so veiled) threats, which will lead some of to suggest that it only happened inside his own head. Some folks, when such things happen inside their heads, I suggest, can be quite convinced they have had a "spiritual/metaphysical/whatever" experience. Others are downright frauds.
How do we prove if Robert is in touch with Yahweh, or delusional, or a fraud ...? We probably can't.
And that's one of the many traps of religion.
Gotta go - not going to proof this rant.
No Jesus. Humans were smart enough to figure out the subjective and objective values and realise we don't live in a simplistic, binary, either or, right or wrong world, and have figured out how to change and adapt values - even ones given by "God".
Stuart, I know there is nothing I can do to prove to you that God exists. You have no experience with Him apart from legalistic Christians who probably stored baked beans in their basement in the eighties.To the same extent it's impossible for you to prove to me that He doesn't for my many experiences trump any reasoning. I hope you weren't put off by an apocalyptic cult.
If I were an atheist, I would still be a Christian. Christian societies are the most peaceful and dignified on the planet and I'm proud to be a part of one. Australia is a Christian nation, there has been a significant decline of late but still over 60% adhere to the Christian faith. It's values have made us great.
The decline in adherence to Christianity in Australia has correlated with a decline in morality. In an atheist mindset there is no reason to abstain from theft, adultery, fornication, murder, abortion etc. so long as you can get away with it.
I have a friend who was a prison guard, he has told me a number of times how the worst of the worst criminals are only restrained by the fear of God.
I also have a friend who was a missionary to an atheist state. This person described how being forced to a stadium to watch an execution. The authorities forced a man to shoot his own wife because she was "Christian".
This missionary has spent many years caring for people the atheist government has no regard for.
Atheism is not the answer to morality, whether you believe in God or not. Have you done your homework?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_at...
When you can demonstrate - outside the religious promotional literature - that Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost was/were behind a single law/moral/ethic, we can look at more hypotheticals. In other words, when we submit to you and answer the questions and have the debate the way you want then you might answer some questions? Why? The more I read of this debate, the more I suspect you are a different type of fundamentalist, the atheist version of Rod (no offense Rod :). I readily admit there are problems with the theist view but you apparently refuse to even consider problems with an atheist view. Such certainty is a trait of fundamentalism. Hence your refusal to even consider answering any questions that illustrate a problem with a godless view. Play by your rules or we lose, apparently.
As for your demand for independent verifiable evidence, I'll say is we are talking about morality and ethics, not science. Following that, everything is promotional literature. Everybody has a take, an opinion. Why discount the words of Jesus or Buddha or whomever? On your logic, if you convinced me I would not be warranted in holding a new view because I was not thinking independently but I was listening to you! Second, the problem is, you preclude God from the outset, so it really does end up being an argument for or against God's existence.
For "evidence" - I believe that all people are created in God's image. Within this universe there are objective rights and wrongs, there is truth with a capital T. And all humans in religion and philosophy are striving for it. So Jesus, being the human face of God, gives us the height of morals in the sermon on the mount. But Socrates and Plato also get the truth they teach from God, not as if God whispered in there ear. The evidence is that the very idea of objective morality ends in a godless world.
The evidence is that we recognize some lives are better lived then others - a cannibalistic serial killer who dies alone and happy lived a demonstrably and objectively worse life than a Christian or Muslim or atheist doctor who dedicated his life to curing diseases. In a godless world there is no way to say the cannibal lived a worse life, there are no tools.
Rather than demanding evidence, I think it makes more sense to set two ways of looking at the world next to each other and see which one is more satisfying. For all the problems a theist has, I think the atheist has more.
The discussion was not how objective or subjective values were, but whether values came from "God", or were humans, through thousands of years of social evolution and experience, able to develop libraries full of secular statutes.
Actually no. Post 13, before you even entered the conversation, I was arguing that in a godless world there is no way to know whether infanticide is right (as the Romans said) or wrong (as the Christians said). I said the same thing in post 4. Lee's question was driven by an article on secular values and my point has always been and remains that we learn from our culture so it is easy for people to reject God and still hold the morals from our culture but if we step back and think about it we see there is no reason for this moral system to hold in another culture.
David wrote: "When you can demonstrate - outside the religious promotional literature - that Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost was/were behind a single law/moral/ethic, we can look at more hypotheticals.
In other words,..."
* Un-proofed rant below - splattered out quickly - read at you peril!
Hmm, let the say the same thing again: if you insist there is such a legitimate thing as a "god" view, it's your obligation to first demonstrate that there actually is a "god" view. Because if there is no such thing as a real "god" view, then there is no such thing as a "godless" view, because "god" wasn't ever there to start with. There is just a "view" and "god" or "godless" doesn't come into it. From my point of view there is only a "view" - you need to demonstrate "god".
Now since God/god means millions of different things to millions of different people - Christians can't even agree on what "God" is for them - it's pointless trying to define "God/god". So here, I'm not trying to prove the existence of "God/god" - but I leave the door open for any of the claimants to lay what they have out for independent verification.
No one ever does.
But we can look at the claims of individual claimants, and, from a hopefully independent standpoint, see if we can see any validity in their claims.
Unless you can demonstrate that any version of "God" gave morality/ethics/laws/whatevers so humans could tell right from wrong, you must, by default, consider that ALL human value systems were developed by humans.
Since all versions of "God", other that the various competing Christian versions, are false, then other than a few odds and ends to Noah and others, the first God-given laws were by Jesus (who IS God) to Moses on top of the Magic Mountain in 1200 BCE, but copies of which we don't have before 200 BCE.
Laws from the Babylonians and Egyptians and others that came way, way before the Hebrew language and the Israelites and their god and culture evolved from the broader Canaanite culture, were not God-given, because their gods were not "God". Numerous aspects of these early - obviously humanly devised codes - are very curiously similar to the ones Jesus gave to Moses much later, in 1200 BCE, but of which we don't have copies until 1,000 years later in BCE.
It doesn't take a genius to join the dots. But it does take religion to pretend the dots aren't there.
I never preclude God from the outset, it's just that no one ever - and I mean EVER - demonstrates that any version of "God" is anywhere other than inside their heads and the heads of the people who wrote the "scriptures" - except I suspect that many of the people who actually wrote what believers now insist in divinely inspired "scripture" had no intention of it being taken as scripture. Jesus may have had some influence in the Mosaic laws, and Satan may have had some influence on the pre-Mosaic laws - I simply leave the door open.
And as I said on several occasions - if you had evidence that Mosaic law came from Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost, you would slap it down on the table and we would both be happy. Because, as I will point out again, I have no partisan interest in actually proving anyone wrong. I have no vested interest in Jesus not being the incarnation of Yahweh any more than I have a vested interest in the King of Nepal not being an incarnation of Vishnu. You, on the other hand do have a vested interest in not ever being wrong. Hence the highly prejudiced game of "apologetics", from whence there NEVER comes an independent investigation.
It's not a matter of having the debate/discussion the way I want it. It's a matter of if you can't even establish that a single moral actually comes from "God", then you are not in a position to declare that "I was arguing that in a godless world there is no way to know whether infanticide is right".
By the same token, if we live in a "god" world we can tell if it's right. It becomes necessary to establish that we do live in a "god" world. Muslims tell me - quite literally, and to my face - that we live in an Allah "god" world, and all laws/morals come from Allah, and everyone, including Christians - because Jesus was only a prophet of Islam, and especially Jews, are going to burn in Hell. Christians tell me that we live in a Jesus "god" world, sort of, because he's only a son of Yahweh or maybe he's the equivalent of Yahweh, and then there's the Holy Ghost to consider, but anyway you have to believe something or other because the only true God-given code came from them - except the ones Jesus sort of did away with when he was here on Earth 2,000 years ago, and the ones we don't really like anymore, and we can't demonstrate that the laws on the Magic Mountain thing really happened, but if you don't believe what we are telling you to believe with all your heart, you are going to burn in Hell for all Eternity, but we won't actually say that to your face anymore because it's not selling too well these days either and too many young people just aren't buying it.
OK, I going to put my position one more time:
If you had a shred of anything other than the human-written biblical scriptures from 200 BCE, you would have stopped evading the admission long ago. My proposition is that ALL moral codes are therefore, by default, human codes. But the table is still there for your evidence of any tiny thing at all from any version of "God".
OK, given that I cannot find a scrap of evidence to back up the "God's Law" insistence, I'm going to have to think for myself. I'm a capital A Atheist so I must be able to do it. My suggestion is that because of the zero on evidence from anyone's version of "God", humans have been learning and adapting from experience, and some of them have been claiming that their conclusions came from "God". A trap for the modern Atheist is that if they work through a moral dilemma, and say they figured a reasonable answer out for themselves, then theists are going to troll through their thousands of years of "scriptures" and find someone who solved a similar and claimed the answer came from "god" and the Atheist had simply learned from "God" - and we just as we can't demonstrate that the answer did come from "god", so we can't demonstrate that the Atheist didn't get the answer from "God".
Let's walk into an old trap anyway.
David brings me his daughter with Spina Bifida, and I'm the administrator of a hospital in the UK, and I welcome them in and give them every care the NHS has to offer. My society understands that this is "right", because, amongst many things, we, as a society have the experience of living through the misery of a pre-NHS society, and we have well-documented histories of the negative effects on individuals and of society as a whole to not treating such cases, and we can now afford the resources to care of our sick, so we do.
I the Spina Bifida case in the UK, we did not need to refer to "God" - even though we could have searched the scriptures of numerous versions of "god" to get the same result. Except perhaps the Jewish "scriptures" where they exult at smashing babies against the stones, and ripping open pregnant women. I mean pleasant scriptures.
I'm a tribal chief in outback Australia and I kill infants with Spina Bifida because, through thousands of years of experience, I understand that my society cannot afford to risk healthy lives by supporting the sick, and I am doing the right thing, and my culture understands. I don't follow the Jewish Jesus, so I am, by default, godless.
We could suggest that because Jesus is "God", Jesus influences the decisions of tribal Aboriginals. But that is just piling imaginative speculation on imaginative speculation - which is what religion does.
My expectation is that humans, through experience, have developed moral codes - and much, much more in the libraries of secular statutes that the biblical shrimps and sacrifices don't come anywhere near - without the influence of any of the millions of versions of "God".
I've shown how 2 atheists can make 2 different decisions based on experience, with no reference to "scripture".
And we can do the same with consumer goods, or workplace ambitions, or any aspect of human life.
However, if you pick a nice thing the biblical writings seem to be telling us to do, I probably can, as I've demonstrated on a couple of occasions already, demonstrate that the biblical writings tell us to do quite the opposite in very nasty ways.
As I say, to be a good Christian you need to be a bad Atheist.
(Actually, I never have said it before, I just made it up then! And I'm sure going to use the hell out of it. Do feel free ....)
Now it's your turn to demonstrate that something actually came from Jesus.
Just quoting his marketing people won't do - I really do need something I can go away and verify for myself. (Yes, I know I can't check on Julius Caesar, and yes, Stalin was an atheist and a really bad guy, but let's please keep the spotlight on Jesus.)
In the meantime, I'm going to go and ask my Hindu friend, Raj, if he's got me that independently verifiable evidence about Brahma creating the universe. He knows, on a metaphysical level, that it was nothing to do with Jesus. His Holy Rig-Veda is from about 1500 BC, whereas the Holy Biblical book of Genesis is from about 200 BCE.
Raj is under the impression that Christianity has been influenced by his culture. I await his independently verifiable evidence regarding "God" too.
Splattered this out quickly too - not going to proof, but I'll put a note at the top this time.
In other words,..."
* Un-proofed rant below - splattered out quickly - read at you peril!
Hmm, let the say the same thing again: if you insist there is such a legitimate thing as a "god" view, it's your obligation to first demonstrate that there actually is a "god" view. Because if there is no such thing as a real "god" view, then there is no such thing as a "godless" view, because "god" wasn't ever there to start with. There is just a "view" and "god" or "godless" doesn't come into it. From my point of view there is only a "view" - you need to demonstrate "god".
Now since God/god means millions of different things to millions of different people - Christians can't even agree on what "God" is for them - it's pointless trying to define "God/god". So here, I'm not trying to prove the existence of "God/god" - but I leave the door open for any of the claimants to lay what they have out for independent verification.
No one ever does.
But we can look at the claims of individual claimants, and, from a hopefully independent standpoint, see if we can see any validity in their claims.
Unless you can demonstrate that any version of "God" gave morality/ethics/laws/whatevers so humans could tell right from wrong, you must, by default, consider that ALL human value systems were developed by humans.
Since all versions of "God", other that the various competing Christian versions, are false, then other than a few odds and ends to Noah and others, the first God-given laws were by Jesus (who IS God) to Moses on top of the Magic Mountain in 1200 BCE, but copies of which we don't have before 200 BCE.
Laws from the Babylonians and Egyptians and others that came way, way before the Hebrew language and the Israelites and their god and culture evolved from the broader Canaanite culture, were not God-given, because their gods were not "God". Numerous aspects of these early - obviously humanly devised codes - are very curiously similar to the ones Jesus gave to Moses much later, in 1200 BCE, but of which we don't have copies until 1,000 years later in BCE.
It doesn't take a genius to join the dots. But it does take religion to pretend the dots aren't there.
I never preclude God from the outset, it's just that no one ever - and I mean EVER - demonstrates that any version of "God" is anywhere other than inside their heads and the heads of the people who wrote the "scriptures" - except I suspect that many of the people who actually wrote what believers now insist in divinely inspired "scripture" had no intention of it being taken as scripture. Jesus may have had some influence in the Mosaic laws, and Satan may have had some influence on the pre-Mosaic laws - I simply leave the door open.
And as I said on several occasions - if you had evidence that Mosaic law came from Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost, you would slap it down on the table and we would both be happy. Because, as I will point out again, I have no partisan interest in actually proving anyone wrong. I have no vested interest in Jesus not being the incarnation of Yahweh any more than I have a vested interest in the King of Nepal not being an incarnation of Vishnu. You, on the other hand do have a vested interest in not ever being wrong. Hence the highly prejudiced game of "apologetics", from whence there NEVER comes an independent investigation.
It's not a matter of having the debate/discussion the way I want it. It's a matter of if you can't even establish that a single moral actually comes from "God", then you are not in a position to declare that "I was arguing that in a godless world there is no way to know whether infanticide is right".
By the same token, if we live in a "god" world we can tell if it's right. It becomes necessary to establish that we do live in a "god" world. Muslims tell me - quite literally, and to my face - that we live in an Allah "god" world, and all laws/morals come from Allah, and everyone, including Christians - because Jesus was only a prophet of Islam, and especially Jews, are going to burn in Hell. Christians tell me that we live in a Jesus "god" world, sort of, because he's only a son of Yahweh or maybe he's the equivalent of Yahweh, and then there's the Holy Ghost to consider, but anyway you have to believe something or other because the only true God-given code came from them - except the ones Jesus sort of did away with when he was here on Earth 2,000 years ago, and the ones we don't really like anymore, and we can't demonstrate that the laws on the Magic Mountain thing really happened, but if you don't believe what we are telling you to believe with all your heart, you are going to burn in Hell for all Eternity, but we won't actually say that to your face anymore because it's not selling too well these days either and too many young people just aren't buying it.
OK, I going to put my position one more time:
If you had a shred of anything other than the human-written biblical scriptures from 200 BCE, you would have stopped evading the admission long ago. My proposition is that ALL moral codes are therefore, by default, human codes. But the table is still there for your evidence of any tiny thing at all from any version of "God".
OK, given that I cannot find a scrap of evidence to back up the "God's Law" insistence, I'm going to have to think for myself. I'm a capital A Atheist so I must be able to do it. My suggestion is that because of the zero on evidence from anyone's version of "God", humans have been learning and adapting from experience, and some of them have been claiming that their conclusions came from "God". A trap for the modern Atheist is that if they work through a moral dilemma, and say they figured a reasonable answer out for themselves, then theists are going to troll through their thousands of years of "scriptures" and find someone who solved a similar and claimed the answer came from "god" and the Atheist had simply learned from "God" - and we just as we can't demonstrate that the answer did come from "god", so we can't demonstrate that the Atheist didn't get the answer from "God".
Let's walk into an old trap anyway.
David brings me his daughter with Spina Bifida, and I'm the administrator of a hospital in the UK, and I welcome them in and give them every care the NHS has to offer. My society understands that this is "right", because, amongst many things, we, as a society have the experience of living through the misery of a pre-NHS society, and we have well-documented histories of the negative effects on individuals and of society as a whole to not treating such cases, and we can now afford the resources to care of our sick, so we do.
I the Spina Bifida case in the UK, we did not need to refer to "God" - even though we could have searched the scriptures of numerous versions of "god" to get the same result. Except perhaps the Jewish "scriptures" where they exult at smashing babies against the stones, and ripping open pregnant women. I mean pleasant scriptures.
I'm a tribal chief in outback Australia and I kill infants with Spina Bifida because, through thousands of years of experience, I understand that my society cannot afford to risk healthy lives by supporting the sick, and I am doing the right thing, and my culture understands. I don't follow the Jewish Jesus, so I am, by default, godless.
We could suggest that because Jesus is "God", Jesus influences the decisions of tribal Aboriginals. But that is just piling imaginative speculation on imaginative speculation - which is what religion does.
My expectation is that humans, through experience, have developed moral codes - and much, much more in the libraries of secular statutes that the biblical shrimps and sacrifices don't come anywhere near - without the influence of any of the millions of versions of "God".
I've shown how 2 atheists can make 2 different decisions based on experience, with no reference to "scripture".
And we can do the same with consumer goods, or workplace ambitions, or any aspect of human life.
However, if you pick a nice thing the biblical writings seem to be telling us to do, I probably can, as I've demonstrated on a couple of occasions already, demonstrate that the biblical writings tell us to do quite the opposite in very nasty ways.
As I say, to be a good Christian you need to be a bad Atheist.
(Actually, I never have said it before, I just made it up then! And I'm sure going to use the hell out of it. Do feel free ....)
Now it's your turn to demonstrate that something actually came from Jesus.
Just quoting his marketing people won't do - I really do need something I can go away and verify for myself. (Yes, I know I can't check on Julius Caesar, and yes, Stalin was an atheist and a really bad guy, but let's please keep the spotlight on Jesus.)
In the meantime, I'm going to go and ask my Hindu friend, Raj, if he's got me that independently verifiable evidence about Brahma creating the universe. He knows, on a metaphysical level, that it was nothing to do with Jesus. His Holy Rig-Veda is from about 1500 BC, whereas the Holy Biblical book of Genesis is from about 200 BCE.
Raj is under the impression that Christianity has been influenced by his culture. I await his independently verifiable evidence regarding "God" too.
Splattered this out quickly too - not going to proof, but I'll put a note at the top this time.
Not sure that I remember actually advocating a "godless view" as opposed to the "god view" offered herein - maybe I did ...?
However, I have been pointing out that no one here offers the tiniest jot of evidence that Jesus as God was behind any morals. People here simply claim Jesus-God was behind the biblical morals.
I'm simply asking them to back the claim up.
No one has.
Everyone wants to hear my godless claim through. Not sure that I made one, but I answered the distraction above - now it's your turn for an intellectually forthright answer. No more deflection please.
Of course were dealing with morals and not science, and the evidences are not expected to be the same. If you claim that morals came from Jesus, it's up to you to back up your claim that morals came from Jesus ... with evidence. If you don't have a shred, it's hardly moral to evade or avoid or whatever, admitting you don't have shred, by asking people who ask for your evidence for your claim, to first demonstrate that Jesus DIDN'T provide the morals/creation/flood/whatever. It's the old dodge and deflect trick - someone wants evidence of "Creation" and it gets turned into a critique of science. Someone wants to talk about Jesus, and it gets turned into a diatribe about Stalin. It's a trick that gets played by all manner of religious people all the time. To this Atheist, the trick and the avoidance and the non-admission are immoral. And I worked it out for myself.
There is no actual "ism" in atheism to get all fundamentalist about. I quite simply press the point to religious people of all persuasions that they never, ever, back up a single one of their supernatural claims.
If I were a "fundamentalist Atheist", I would adopt the exaggerated language of some folks I read here, and demand that there is no God. I don't do that at all. I quite simply point out how I come to expect that certain versions of "God" are quite mythological and imaginary, and ask that followers of that version of "God" provide some sort of evidence to back up the words and deeds they attribute to their version of "God".
No one ever does.
Ever.
After all, there is absolutely nothing "metaphysical" about Jesus drowning all the Egyptian children during their Fifth Dynasty. And there's nothing "metaphysical" about Yahweh hurling fire and brimstone down on all the women and children and homosexual men in Sodom. These were supposedly real, physical events. Jesus, or Yahweh or the Holy Ghost inscribing laws with a finger on top of a magic mountain, may be metaphysical, however.
I'm not saying physical and metaphysical happenings in the biblical writings didn't occur, I'm simply asking people - especially those who declare such happenings in other people's scriptures to be false - to keep the focus firmly on their own claims, and back them up.
Or admit they can't when they can't.
After all, when I read a set of writings that begin with a talking serpent, and end with a four-headed monster: plain old common sense tells me I'm probably not dealing with non-fiction. It would take a special sort of state of the mind to accept that I'm dealing with reality. And it would take an even more special state of the mind to assent to the proposition that I am dealing with the Word of God.
There are numerous, very sensible, reasons for non-theism.
However, I have been pointing out that no one here offers the tiniest jot of evidence that Jesus as God was behind any morals. People here simply claim Jesus-God was behind the biblical morals.
I'm simply asking them to back the claim up.
No one has.
Everyone wants to hear my godless claim through. Not sure that I made one, but I answered the distraction above - now it's your turn for an intellectually forthright answer. No more deflection please.
Of course were dealing with morals and not science, and the evidences are not expected to be the same. If you claim that morals came from Jesus, it's up to you to back up your claim that morals came from Jesus ... with evidence. If you don't have a shred, it's hardly moral to evade or avoid or whatever, admitting you don't have shred, by asking people who ask for your evidence for your claim, to first demonstrate that Jesus DIDN'T provide the morals/creation/flood/whatever. It's the old dodge and deflect trick - someone wants evidence of "Creation" and it gets turned into a critique of science. Someone wants to talk about Jesus, and it gets turned into a diatribe about Stalin. It's a trick that gets played by all manner of religious people all the time. To this Atheist, the trick and the avoidance and the non-admission are immoral. And I worked it out for myself.
There is no actual "ism" in atheism to get all fundamentalist about. I quite simply press the point to religious people of all persuasions that they never, ever, back up a single one of their supernatural claims.
If I were a "fundamentalist Atheist", I would adopt the exaggerated language of some folks I read here, and demand that there is no God. I don't do that at all. I quite simply point out how I come to expect that certain versions of "God" are quite mythological and imaginary, and ask that followers of that version of "God" provide some sort of evidence to back up the words and deeds they attribute to their version of "God".
No one ever does.
Ever.
After all, there is absolutely nothing "metaphysical" about Jesus drowning all the Egyptian children during their Fifth Dynasty. And there's nothing "metaphysical" about Yahweh hurling fire and brimstone down on all the women and children and homosexual men in Sodom. These were supposedly real, physical events. Jesus, or Yahweh or the Holy Ghost inscribing laws with a finger on top of a magic mountain, may be metaphysical, however.
I'm not saying physical and metaphysical happenings in the biblical writings didn't occur, I'm simply asking people - especially those who declare such happenings in other people's scriptures to be false - to keep the focus firmly on their own claims, and back them up.
Or admit they can't when they can't.
After all, when I read a set of writings that begin with a talking serpent, and end with a four-headed monster: plain old common sense tells me I'm probably not dealing with non-fiction. It would take a special sort of state of the mind to accept that I'm dealing with reality. And it would take an even more special state of the mind to assent to the proposition that I am dealing with the Word of God.
There are numerous, very sensible, reasons for non-theism.
I have mentioned the miracles I have witnessed, the profound influence Christianity has had on society and the historical correlations across so many cultures. Yet it means nothing. I was confused by it, now I am not.I think I now have a little more understanding as to why Jesus spoke in parables.
One last comment for you Stuart. What you believe is not revolutionary. You follow in the footsteps of people like Marx and Lenin. I hope you understand what team you are batting for.I think it's worth repeating. Since one of the worst human rights records in the world belongs to an atheist state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_at...
David wrote: "When you can demonstrate - outside the religious promotional literature - that Yahweh/Jesus/Holy Ghost was/were behind a single law/moral/ethic, we can look at more hypotheticals. In other words,..."
Well said David. I particularly appreciated your point that "everything is promotional literature."
Joshua wrote: "I have mentioned the miracles I have witnessed, the profound influence Christianity has had on society and the historical correlations across so many cultures. Yet it means nothing. I was confused ..."Good point Joshua. In Stuart's list of "people behaving badly because of their beliefs," the Stalinist atheists and Maoist atheists never seem to make the list.
Joshua wrote: "One last comment for you Stuart. What you believe is not revolutionary. You follow in the footsteps of people like Marx and Lenin. I hope you understand what team you are batting for.
I think it's..."
And there it is in its classically simplest form - the cheap little dodge and deflect.
We dodge questions concerning Jesus ...
And ...
Deflect attention onto Marx and Lenin.
It's cheap, it's obvious and, in the experienced opinion of this Atheist, it's immoral.
If you had a shred of evidence that Jesus-God inscribed a moral code for Moses on the magic mountain, you would have presented it.
I suggest you and I both know we are dealing with myth and make-believe.
The less "godly" of us I also suggest, is the more honest.
I think it's..."
And there it is in its classically simplest form - the cheap little dodge and deflect.
We dodge questions concerning Jesus ...
And ...
Deflect attention onto Marx and Lenin.
It's cheap, it's obvious and, in the experienced opinion of this Atheist, it's immoral.
If you had a shred of evidence that Jesus-God inscribed a moral code for Moses on the magic mountain, you would have presented it.
I suggest you and I both know we are dealing with myth and make-believe.
The less "godly" of us I also suggest, is the more honest.
Stuart said: If you claim that morals came from Jesus, it's up to you to back up your claim that morals came from Jesus ... with evidence.A valid question for me: what difference does being a Christ Follower make for me. I can only answer this on the personal level because I'm the only person I truly know anything about since I can't really walk in anyone else's shoes.
I read my Bible most every day and I have over time built up a picture of what Jesus is like. I see him in circumstances that I can relate to and his character becomes to me a guiding light and objective moral law or sign post.
Why is that important? As Creator and Originator he transcends all human laws and values. It means that right, good, and justice really exist apart from any human construct.
It also means that I can figure out if my country's laws and values are just and right. My society has become so efficient at manipulating people and changing public opinion, I know I'm at their mercy and over time I can be made to think any way the spin-doctors want. The ethic of Jesus let's me get outside of that. I'm not wholly immune, but I have a chance.
It's also a living relationship. he speaks into my life and points out things to me I ought to change.
I have also never received any direction that would cause me to harm or kill others (when they come, those come from my own heart), but I am urged to help the poor and value human life.
As far as the Old Testament goes, like Stuart I see the same God there as in the New Testament. I have never walked in God's shoes, never had to play the cards dealt to him by our free will so I do not judge him (unlike Stuart who seems to judge God rather freely) because I have no right. But I know God's heart (OT and NT) and he loves us deeply and had the courage to come down and live with us and suffer right along with us (that's what the data tells me).
So are there good atheists? One's who help the poor and help others? Absolutely, I have met some and I think we have a bond in shared objectives for service.
But I have also met other atheists who are ruthless, merciless, betrayers of friends, and liars. I prefer the former, but I fear they are operating above their principles. Why? Because, if you are developing your own values, starting with leptons and quarks, there is really no way to define good, right and just. So you either hitchhike on the values that come from some religion or in the end you do whatever you want or what some spin-doctor wants. The pull of selfishness is too strong and the spin-doctors too clever.
Peter wrote: "Joshua wrote: "I have mentioned the miracles I have witnessed, the profound influence Christianity has had on society and the historical correlations across so many cultures. Yet it means nothing. ..."
What list ...?
I haven't produced a list.
I suggest this also a dodge and deflect - and it's dishonest.
You have not yet defended Jesus or Christianity with fact.
This was supposed to be your turn to present your "god view".
You have not submitted a shred of evidence that a single verse of your single source - the biblical writings of no more than 200 BCE - actually came from your, comparatively recent, version of "God".
Given the dodging and deflecting, it seems to me even more likely that the biblical writings are simply the writings of Jewish priests pretending to be quoting Yahweh. But the door is still open and the table is still bare.
Using precisely the same arguments as I've seen here, my Hindu friend Raj has a far greater claim to be representing "God". He has precisely the same level of independently verifiable evidence - zero - but his 1500 BCE documents trump the 200 BCE Jewish documents by a long, long way.
And the costumes are way better, and he doesn't pretend to drink the blood of a human sacrifice, and conservative preachers don't remind him every Sunday that he was born a sinner, and should be ashamed of being a human in the first place.
I too am glad you appreciate that everything is promotional literature - that's why the less credulous of us don't accept the talking serpents, the virgin-born god-men, ascensions and assumptions to Heaven, and
four-headed monsters with a "spiritual" or "metaphysical" state of the mind, and insist on some good, old-fashioned, down-to-earth evidence for everyone's literature.
And we've learned, through godless experience, not to trust believers who engage in immoral dodge and deflect trickery.
Jesus, I'm sure, would rather you talked about him, than Stalinists and Maoists.
What list ...?
I haven't produced a list.
I suggest this also a dodge and deflect - and it's dishonest.
You have not yet defended Jesus or Christianity with fact.
This was supposed to be your turn to present your "god view".
You have not submitted a shred of evidence that a single verse of your single source - the biblical writings of no more than 200 BCE - actually came from your, comparatively recent, version of "God".
Given the dodging and deflecting, it seems to me even more likely that the biblical writings are simply the writings of Jewish priests pretending to be quoting Yahweh. But the door is still open and the table is still bare.
Using precisely the same arguments as I've seen here, my Hindu friend Raj has a far greater claim to be representing "God". He has precisely the same level of independently verifiable evidence - zero - but his 1500 BCE documents trump the 200 BCE Jewish documents by a long, long way.
And the costumes are way better, and he doesn't pretend to drink the blood of a human sacrifice, and conservative preachers don't remind him every Sunday that he was born a sinner, and should be ashamed of being a human in the first place.
I too am glad you appreciate that everything is promotional literature - that's why the less credulous of us don't accept the talking serpents, the virgin-born god-men, ascensions and assumptions to Heaven, and
four-headed monsters with a "spiritual" or "metaphysical" state of the mind, and insist on some good, old-fashioned, down-to-earth evidence for everyone's literature.
And we've learned, through godless experience, not to trust believers who engage in immoral dodge and deflect trickery.
Jesus, I'm sure, would rather you talked about him, than Stalinists and Maoists.
Thanks Peter - that was essentially significant.
No need to rant Stuart, we're just having a conversation :)I am not trying to evade, as you say, I am trying to point out where I disagree with the terms you are trying to set for the debate.
There is just a "view" and "god" or "godless" doesn't come into it. From my point of view there is only a "view" - you need to demonstrate "god".
For example, I disagree that there is just a "view". I don't think there is a default view. Some people believe in God or gods and some do not. Those are two of the views (I am sure we could parse them out to more). I agree that I ought to make an attempt to convince you of my view. But I will continue to insist that you would need to convince me of your view also. And as I've said, the way I look at it there are two views both of which have problems and I choose one (the god one).
No one ever does.
You've said something along these lines numerous times. It makes me think of the link you posted on a few threads (I deleted a few of them, no need to post the same link numerous times). Your link, I assume, was meant to be witty, but it was incredibly ignorant. It implied religious people only read one book - I read dozens a year as do many religious people. It also implied religious people have the market cornered on certainty while in reality many atheists are just as certain as some religious people. I'll go ahead and admit I don't know much.
Anyway, I bring up that post because I am curious as to who the "no one" is in your statement. What moral or ethical philosophy are you reading? Or are you content to argue with amateurs such as myself on the internet? Are you so confident you are right that you have no need to read the best theist ethical philosophy? Or have you read it and found it wanting?
I hope you join us in reading Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not a Christian. It might surprise you that many of us Christians enjoy reading, even those who disagree with us.
In your example of the ill child, I will continue to hold that there is no basis for any objective morality in a godless world. If a person came in to your hypothetical and said, "Healing these children costs too much money, we ought to just euthanize them all" there is no way to say this is wrong. As Dawkins recently said when asked about a baby with Down syndrome - "Abort and try again."
Anyway, I will continue to hold there is no such thing as unbiased literature nor is "independent verifiable evidence" possible, at least in terms of morality and ethics.
That said, I'll plow forward and see if I can offer some sort of argument which might contain evidence (not independent, not verifiable...call it evasion if you want but I don't think such a thing exists). The way I see evidence is noting certain things that are true of humanity and seeking the best way to explain them - are these things best explained by invoking God, society, human reason, etc?
Anyway, here is the moral argument as traditionally posed, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mor...)
1. There are objective moral facts.
2. God provides the best explanation of the existence of objective moral facts.
3. Therefore, (probably) God exists.
Point 1 seems to be where we would find the "evidence" that you so desire. We all recognize (well, nearly all of us, there are a few oddballs) that things like rape and genocide are always wrong.
Point 2 seems to me to be where the disagreement would be strongest. I think the existence of God better explains objective morality then anything else (society, human reason or experience). We are still in the realm of philosophy and not theology so there is no need, yet, to worry about religious texts or religions. The point is much more broad - we have a moral awareness in common with most other people, how do we explain that? God creating humanity seems to me to explain it better then simply all humans learned it through experience.
It is quite a long post, showing people much more intellectual then me (and, no offense, I assume you) have argued about this for a long time. Maybe you're a professional philosopher and your demand for "independent verifiable evidence" will clear this up and settle the issue? Its quite a long article, I'll admit I didn't have time to read the whole thing, so I might be okay if you cleared things up for those guys.
I'd love to respond to your second post (#67) but work calls I fear.
Stuart I see the world different to you. A psychologist once told me that people don't work from the rational, they work from beliefs.Our beliefs influence our emotions which influence our reason. Not the other way around. That's why emotional responses are more rapid than rational response they reflect what we believe.
A great story I once heard was about Eddie Murphy. He was in an elevator a few blacks and two white women walked in very nervously not realising who he was, clearly they believed black people were trouble.
They were looking at the buttons for floor they wanted and Eddie said "hit the floor" at which point the two women dropped to the floor screaming. Reason came when everyone was laughing.
When I am speaking about morals it is at the level of belief that I am discussing things.
A scientific experiment may involve taking a plant and providing certain nutrients to soil. Some nutrients will make the plant thrive, some will make it wither. Spirituality influences our belief system. The fruit of our beliefs are seen in our reason and actions.
To me the fruit of Atheism in the world is an entirely valid assessment of it's spirituality. As is the fruit of Catholicism, evangelicals, Buddhists, Hindi, Muslim etc. You would say atheism has nothing to do with spirituality. I would say spirituality is a part of people if you like it or not.
Your proposition is that atheism can produce good morals. I propose that western atheists have good morals by inheritance from the societies they were raised in. Full blown atheism has been a blight on the world. I would prefer you were gnostic. Then you could have Jesus' morals (which have changed the world) and blast the old testament at the same time.
As for a list, I'm not sure what you are saying there. But I still am at a loss for what evidence you want.I have a friend who was healed of cancer
The dating for the great flood matches ancient Chinese records
A description matching the plagues of exodus have been found in Egyptian papyri
All civilisations on earth appeared around the time of the flood or after
Scientists are studying formations that are the result of massive northern hemisphere flooding.
That everyone died in the flood is sunday school stuff, I have no problem with the possibility that the Chinese survived. It explains their eyes.
Flood mythology is found in nearly every culture on earth.
As the archaeology article I posted points out the ancient scriptures have been proven many times in archaeological digs.
Regardless of what you think of the old testament, we all need Jesus. He is real, He is alive and He is the strongest force for good this world has ever seen.
Lee wrote: "Look, I think reasonable people agree the Old Testament is an improvement on earlier law codes but still is pretty immoral, the New Testament is an improvement on the Old Testament but still needs ..."
The old "Word of God" is "pretty immoral" ...?
The new "Word of God" it "still needs a little help" ...?
If any of the "words" actually were the words of "God" they wouldn't be immoral or need improving.
As I say, I expect they were the words of Jewish priests who were pretending to write the words of their local deity. It impresses the simple folk.
And as you've pointed out, the writings have indeed evolved through human experience and social evolution.
And no one here has demonstrated that a single word is actually from "God".
But we do get our attention diverted away onto the bogey man of Stalin ...! And simple people will swallow the simple (and cheap) scare tactic of: if you drop Jesus, you will automatically end up with an atheist dictator like Stalin. Because they are the only two choices open to you!! Rubbish.
Religion is like a bag of trail mix, and to be a good Christian, you need to be a bad Atheist.
(Told you I was going to milk that ...!)
The old "Word of God" is "pretty immoral" ...?
The new "Word of God" it "still needs a little help" ...?
If any of the "words" actually were the words of "God" they wouldn't be immoral or need improving.
As I say, I expect they were the words of Jewish priests who were pretending to write the words of their local deity. It impresses the simple folk.
And as you've pointed out, the writings have indeed evolved through human experience and social evolution.
And no one here has demonstrated that a single word is actually from "God".
But we do get our attention diverted away onto the bogey man of Stalin ...! And simple people will swallow the simple (and cheap) scare tactic of: if you drop Jesus, you will automatically end up with an atheist dictator like Stalin. Because they are the only two choices open to you!! Rubbish.
Religion is like a bag of trail mix, and to be a good Christian, you need to be a bad Atheist.
(Told you I was going to milk that ...!)
Lee is quite the evangelist. Stuart what do you assume a Word of God would look like?
To a Christian the Bible shows us God's perfect morality, justice, protection and Love - and Grace. It's funny that you can't see that Stuart. Bit supernatural actually.
Maybe Stuart needs help redefining God. He's still trying to squeeze God into Yahweh.
Lee's right, when we talk of "God" we are making a very general claim. We're not talking about specific gods or scriptures. We're in natural and general revelation, not special revelation.Stuart, with all due respect, I like to know a bit about who I am talking with. You seem to want to jettison any discussion of the traditional moral argument which I linked to in a previous post. I am not saying that argument is a slam dunk, but I am saying that theist and atheist philosophers engage with that argument.
The argument states that objective morals exist (feel free to dispute that one) and the best explanation for this is God.
My philosophy is weak, I'll admit, but I believe we are in the realm of ontology, what is. We have not yet entered into epistemology, how we know. So we may not know what the correct morals are, we may have serious debates on specific issues. But the argument is saying that the best explanation for this evidence (objective values) is the existence of some sort of God.
Like I said, if you are sitting on some sort of silver bullet to cut through the debate professional philosophers have, then I will await the publication of this ground-breaking work you have. Right now it seems you are content to argue with amateur hacks (like us...hey, its the internet). I'll ask it again, not as an attack but because this is GoodREADS and I am always interested in what people are reading - what ethical and moral works have impacted you? Any recommendations?
I know you don't expect such a question from a religious person since apparently you think we only read one book. Honestly though, I joined this site to talk about books, not rehash the same old arguments over and over, as much as I enjoy that.
Thank you David for this substantive rebuttal. I could not have worded it any better.
But the argument is saying that the best explanation for this evidence (objective values) is the existence of some sort of God.
I spent one - and only ever one - unfortunate semester in the academic autoerotic field of philosophy.
During that single semester, I discovered that the issue of "god" came up rather regularly, and I dared to write about the issue in an assignment I received 15% for - I was even more acerbic 40 years ago than I am now ... would you believe.
As I stated to Professor Whateverthefuk at the time, the whole "God" thing looked to me to be very much a copout - just like the whole "God" thing is in so many fields, from cavemen to physicists.
When certain humans reach the limits of their knowledge, and there are wonderful things beyond their knowledge that they can perceive but not explain - out comes the helpful old crutch of "God" - and no one dares challenge the idea of "God" - except that nowadays we do.
Today, just as I did then, I suggest the invocation of "God" is weak-minded bollocks. It's not any sort of explanation. It's an intellectual copout. I have not read a "philosophy" book since the 1970s, and will only ever do so if non-philosophic academics tell me the "philosophers" have got their hands on the table where I can see them, and have dropped their pretentious affectations. This Atheist does not waste his time on such nonsense.
So-called "revelation" is also part of what I see as the nonsense of "philosophy". Have a chat to engineering lecturers about "revelation" some time.
Now, about establishing that anything at all comes from your Jewish version of God ...?
All I've been getting is the standard dodge and divert trickery in more or less sophisticated forms. Because, I suggest, we both know that while "God" - whatever that may mean - may exist, human concepts of Divinity - including the comparatively new Yahweh concept from Judea - are no more than figments of the evolved human ability to imagine.
And just one more time - given the complete and utter absence of any sort of evidence to back claims of any sort of "god" or any sort of "revelation", I accond to the proposition that humans are quite capable of using their experience and intellect to develop libraries full of secular statutes.
Less scrupulous - or less intelligent - humans will ascribe things that come into their minds to "God" - just ask Robert about Yahweh's imprimatur on his book of creation pseudoscience.
I spent one - and only ever one - unfortunate semester in the academic autoerotic field of philosophy.
During that single semester, I discovered that the issue of "god" came up rather regularly, and I dared to write about the issue in an assignment I received 15% for - I was even more acerbic 40 years ago than I am now ... would you believe.
As I stated to Professor Whateverthefuk at the time, the whole "God" thing looked to me to be very much a copout - just like the whole "God" thing is in so many fields, from cavemen to physicists.
When certain humans reach the limits of their knowledge, and there are wonderful things beyond their knowledge that they can perceive but not explain - out comes the helpful old crutch of "God" - and no one dares challenge the idea of "God" - except that nowadays we do.
Today, just as I did then, I suggest the invocation of "God" is weak-minded bollocks. It's not any sort of explanation. It's an intellectual copout. I have not read a "philosophy" book since the 1970s, and will only ever do so if non-philosophic academics tell me the "philosophers" have got their hands on the table where I can see them, and have dropped their pretentious affectations. This Atheist does not waste his time on such nonsense.
So-called "revelation" is also part of what I see as the nonsense of "philosophy". Have a chat to engineering lecturers about "revelation" some time.
Now, about establishing that anything at all comes from your Jewish version of God ...?
All I've been getting is the standard dodge and divert trickery in more or less sophisticated forms. Because, I suggest, we both know that while "God" - whatever that may mean - may exist, human concepts of Divinity - including the comparatively new Yahweh concept from Judea - are no more than figments of the evolved human ability to imagine.
And just one more time - given the complete and utter absence of any sort of evidence to back claims of any sort of "god" or any sort of "revelation", I accond to the proposition that humans are quite capable of using their experience and intellect to develop libraries full of secular statutes.
Less scrupulous - or less intelligent - humans will ascribe things that come into their minds to "God" - just ask Robert about Yahweh's imprimatur on his book of creation pseudoscience.
"I have not read a philosophy book since the 70's." yeah..we can tell.
Stuart - you can argue everything under the sun EXCEPT an individual's relationship with God. That's theirs alone and you're not privy to the terms of the contract. If I pray that what I write glorifies God and I get affirmative feedback, then the deal is between us and closed. Pan the book or belittle my intelligence, but don't dare to try to weasel in between me and my Lord.
Sorry Stuart - you are going to have to do 10x better than that if you desire to separate Robert (and a few other of us) from our Biblical God. But please keep trying. It's fun!Stuart quote:
" I was even more acerbic 40 years ago than I am now ... would you believe."
When exactly were you EVER a dedicated Christian Stuart? Didn't you claim to have had the FULL experience? (I could be wrong.)
Stuart quote:"All I've been getting is the standard dodge and divert trickery..."
" given the complete and utter absence of any sort of evidence to back claims of any sort of "god""
Stuart I don't think you have even begun to argue honestly. You have stacked the deck and insist in ONLY playing by your rules. But this is a normal bias so I'm used to seeing it daily.
If you DON'T want to find a god - then it's very easy to bury yourself in secular babble that will keep you miles away from the evidence at hand. And this will help you proudly boast that God is NOT knocking on your door.
Here's how this SHOULD properly play out: Stuart do you WANT to find truth about God? What would that mean to you? Or do you much prefer a world with no deity?
If you want to find god - then we can honestly begin. If NOT - then go live your atheistic existence to it's miserable fullness.
-----why do atheists insist on wasting their precious years annoying the religious with their lazy research and mockery-----
Aaahhh, but a quest for a GOD: now that's an adventure.
But to BEGIN the quest:Start with the world right in front of you.
The problem, Rod, is when the religious present a world view that Stuart knows is not true. For example, if you hold to young-earth beliefs and insist that your concept of God depends on this, he isn't going to waste his time. If you insist that the Bible is a perfect moral guidebook or perfect history book or even everywhere in agreement, he knows better, and isn't going to waste his time. You must leave behind all the unnecessary beliefs and get to the heart of the matter: What God is doing for you and what he means in your life.
Lee what GOD EXACTLY are you referring to? And how?Every religion claims a deity is doing something and has specific meaning.
If nobody has a moral guidebook, or a godly creation account, or a trustworthy history...
Then how do you even know there's a truthful God Lee? He appears to only be in your mind. What exactly is God doing for you Lee? You appear to be living like an atheist.
What Stuart assumes is not true is part of the comedy. Watching Stuart waste his time is what keeps me loving God and His word even more. (you too for that matter.)
Lee - how does Stuart KNOW something isn't true. My science runs rings around his, but I don't KNOW the world is old (every indicator I trust points to it, though). There's far too much certainty on this board and far too little faith. To paraphrase: Mortals KNOW; God smiles.
Note the irony: Stuart, in another thread, posted this link:https://believervsnonbelievers.wordpr...
Yet it appears he does not feel the need to read books on the issue we have spent nearly 100 posts discussing. I admit my philosophical skills are weak, it appears Stuart's are non-existent. I was born in 1980, but apparently I've read more philosophical and ethical books then Stuart.
It seems this would be how the thought process goes:
Atheist - "Religious people are so dumb! Look at this witty meme I found. Religious people only read one book, lol!"
Theist - "Okay, let's discuss ethics. I've read a few books, what have you read on the subject?"
Atheist - "Reading is dumb"
Theist - "Pot, meet kettle."
Stuart, when you proudly say you have not read philosophy since the 70s and then insist on promoting your definitions or arguments, you sound EXACTLY like a young earth creationist or climate change denying Christian. Their mindset seems to be, why do I need to study things if I already know the answer? If a young earth creationist responded to your argument for evolution by asking, "were you there, show me it happening!" I suspect you would not accept that?
You have not been getting trickery or evading, at least from me, you have gotten the moral argument for God's existence based on the existence of objective moral values. You've also gotten an effort to define our terms, which has revealed you have no knowledge of the difference between "God" as a concept (the God of philosophers, the God even deists would adhere to) and "God" as the personal God of religion. Maybe you need to go back and try philosophy again. We're not talking engineering or biology, though when either of those areas can give us a hand in terms of morals, right and wrong, I'am all ears.
Science can tell us a lot - maybe we can learn what it feels like when one animal eats another or how to build a bigger bomb or better phone. But, to paraphrase the words of Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, science tells us what we could do but not necessarily what we should.
you have no knowledge of the difference between "God" as a concept (the God of philosophers, the God even deists would adhere to) and "God" as the personal God of religion.
Now we're getting somewhere.
The Reformation Hypothesis posits that the Yahwist Reformation was undertaken by returning Alexandrian Jews who were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy.
For the Greeks, the word "theos" came from an adjective meaning approximately "divine", and like our word "god" today it was very vague and, I suspect, conveniently ill-used.
The Yahwist Jews had to be very careful, under their Greek overlords, of who they were calling "Theos".
I further suspect, that back in Judea, the local Jews were still worshiping the multiple Canaanite Elohim, of whom Yah/Yam was but one. The returning reformists syncretised - I postulate - their new Yahwist religio-philosophy, with the old Elohist writings.
In Hebrew, the reformers have used, for the locals, the term "Yahweh Elohim" - no one knows what the "Weh" bit means - but the overall term does appear to be a name. In their Greek, they use the term "Kurios Theos" - which is most definitely not a name. Kurios simply means "lord" and it's a title. "Theos" is as vague as our word "god" today - but it's definitely not a name either. The word "god" is a job description - there is no one in the Bibles called "God" - it's a modern exaggeration. As many things are.
So, in my view, the Yahwists used the terms Yah or Yahweh for the locals back in the hills of the old country who still believed in a literal old man who lived in the sky.
Which brings me to your point about "God as a concept". For the Greco-Judean Yahwists, I expect "Theos" was an intellectual concept. But they had a problem in their own time - how were they to get the fundamentalists back in the hills to grasp the idea of an abstract construct?
We find the same difficulty here with the Sunday school class howling and spitting and making a great clamour and hollow din over any new idea, and professing all manner of faithful fundamentalism with veiled and not so veiled thuggish threats. Imagine trying to introduce sophisticated Greek philosophy to the hillbillies of Judea 2,300 years ago, when they still believed in literal angels and the old man in the sky and virgin-born god-men.
That will do for that for the moment.
But let me say, that for me, a few weeks of philosophy at uni was more than enough to let me know that a personality like mine was not going to get along with it - I could see it teaching me little of practical value - and I still do.
If ever I occasionally poke my nose in, I come across the same sort of make-believe as always - more sophisticated than the Sunday school, but the make-believe of imaginary constructs nonetheless - such as your "revelations" you mentioned earlier.
My Professor Whoeverthefuk played the same card as you, several decades ago - obviously "philosophers" get this a lot. He had the standard cliché of: "The time for contempt comes, if at all, after mastery of the subject matter."
That is valid when it comes to reading the instructions for your new smartphone. However, I get the same cliché in varying forms across religions - and obviously philosophy - where it's the same old dodge the "God" question by deflecting attention onto a vast corpus of writings that still don't give the tiniest hint of evidence of any sort of "god" - personal, conceptual, universe-creating, planet-flooding, mud-man-creating, virgin-born, death-defeating, whatever.
A triumphal "lord" crashing through the clouds with armies of angels for the Sunday schoolers, or a "conceptualisation" for the philosophers, "God" has never been demonstrated outside the evolved human imagination.
I'm going to reissue the challenge I issue to everyone who fobs me off by referring me to a vast smokescreen of writings.
Give me one paragraph, right here, from just one of those books, that demonstrates "god" outside the human imagination, and I will spend the rest of my life quietly reading all of them.
Oh, and the meme obviously worked. Your response is what I think they were aiming for.
Now we're getting somewhere.
The Reformation Hypothesis posits that the Yahwist Reformation was undertaken by returning Alexandrian Jews who were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy.
For the Greeks, the word "theos" came from an adjective meaning approximately "divine", and like our word "god" today it was very vague and, I suspect, conveniently ill-used.
The Yahwist Jews had to be very careful, under their Greek overlords, of who they were calling "Theos".
I further suspect, that back in Judea, the local Jews were still worshiping the multiple Canaanite Elohim, of whom Yah/Yam was but one. The returning reformists syncretised - I postulate - their new Yahwist religio-philosophy, with the old Elohist writings.
In Hebrew, the reformers have used, for the locals, the term "Yahweh Elohim" - no one knows what the "Weh" bit means - but the overall term does appear to be a name. In their Greek, they use the term "Kurios Theos" - which is most definitely not a name. Kurios simply means "lord" and it's a title. "Theos" is as vague as our word "god" today - but it's definitely not a name either. The word "god" is a job description - there is no one in the Bibles called "God" - it's a modern exaggeration. As many things are.
So, in my view, the Yahwists used the terms Yah or Yahweh for the locals back in the hills of the old country who still believed in a literal old man who lived in the sky.
Which brings me to your point about "God as a concept". For the Greco-Judean Yahwists, I expect "Theos" was an intellectual concept. But they had a problem in their own time - how were they to get the fundamentalists back in the hills to grasp the idea of an abstract construct?
We find the same difficulty here with the Sunday school class howling and spitting and making a great clamour and hollow din over any new idea, and professing all manner of faithful fundamentalism with veiled and not so veiled thuggish threats. Imagine trying to introduce sophisticated Greek philosophy to the hillbillies of Judea 2,300 years ago, when they still believed in literal angels and the old man in the sky and virgin-born god-men.
That will do for that for the moment.
But let me say, that for me, a few weeks of philosophy at uni was more than enough to let me know that a personality like mine was not going to get along with it - I could see it teaching me little of practical value - and I still do.
If ever I occasionally poke my nose in, I come across the same sort of make-believe as always - more sophisticated than the Sunday school, but the make-believe of imaginary constructs nonetheless - such as your "revelations" you mentioned earlier.
My Professor Whoeverthefuk played the same card as you, several decades ago - obviously "philosophers" get this a lot. He had the standard cliché of: "The time for contempt comes, if at all, after mastery of the subject matter."
That is valid when it comes to reading the instructions for your new smartphone. However, I get the same cliché in varying forms across religions - and obviously philosophy - where it's the same old dodge the "God" question by deflecting attention onto a vast corpus of writings that still don't give the tiniest hint of evidence of any sort of "god" - personal, conceptual, universe-creating, planet-flooding, mud-man-creating, virgin-born, death-defeating, whatever.
A triumphal "lord" crashing through the clouds with armies of angels for the Sunday schoolers, or a "conceptualisation" for the philosophers, "God" has never been demonstrated outside the evolved human imagination.
I'm going to reissue the challenge I issue to everyone who fobs me off by referring me to a vast smokescreen of writings.
Give me one paragraph, right here, from just one of those books, that demonstrates "god" outside the human imagination, and I will spend the rest of my life quietly reading all of them.
Oh, and the meme obviously worked. Your response is what I think they were aiming for.
STuart showing off: "For the Greeks, the word "theos" came from an adjective meaning approximately "divine", and like our word "god" today it was very vague and, I suspect, conveniently ill-used."So let me get this straight:
You are digging deep into academic language and trying to impress us with historic brilliance "The Reformation Hypothesis posits that the Yahwist Reformation..."
And yet you can't comprehend the goodness of God throughout the Bible. Love & Justice is beyond your understanding and you can't seem to sort out Good from Evil or Contradiction from variety???
Wow, just WOW! NO wonder University kids are dumber than ever these days. Too much internet fodder it seems.
Stuart here's an option you probably haven't explored:It's nasty but revealing - go into the heart of evil and see what a world WITHOUT God looks like. From Drugs to Prostitution to abortion to crime to insane fame & debauchery to child sex abuse. And if you LIKE these things then the test is over - you have proven TO US that God is not what you were looking for. But hopefully even you have standards that atheism doesn't clearly hold to.
In the darkest places the God of the Bible easily shines brightly. Unless the darkness is coming from YOU...
Another reason I remain a dedicated Christian is because of all the evil around me - most of it in the name of Atheistic Freedom. And the only way to stop it is to throw a Christian moral standard at it. Other religions will absorb almost any evil into it's culture over time. Biblical Christianity does not budge an inch ---- although liberals keep trying.
Well Stuart, my friend, I think at this point we are just talking past each other. We will probably both walk away reaffirmed that we are correct. Hopefully if we ever met in the real world we could sit down for a cup of coffee and discuss lighter subjects (Doctor Who? Lord of the Rings? Haha).One more time, just for fun:
You proudly haven't read a philosophy book since the 70s, have you read history or biblical studies?
I agree with your prof, you ought to gain some expertise before you criticize something. You complain about Sunday school level ideas, but since that is all you understand that is all you can criticize. Many young earth creationists wear their lack of education as a badge of honor, they feel they do not need to study science to criticize it. In terms of moral philosophy, you seem the same. And you'd never let a young earther get away with that - if they said evolution was absurd and demanded the sort of evidence you want, if they wanted to see evolution happening right now, you would explain that is not how the evidence for evolution works. Instead, Darwinian evolution best explains the available evidence.
I think we both need to read more morals and ethics before we argue much more.
The meme worked? They wanted to be proved wrong by people like me, religious people, who read dozens of books each year? They wanted to look like arrogant, self-righteous, self-congratulatory idiots?
Anyway, like I said, we'll both walking away content in our positions. I've not offered the evidence you want and you've not answered the questions I want. Oh well.
Peace.
David comment:" Many young earth creationists wear their lack of education as a badge of honor, they feel they do not need to study science to criticize it. "
You've reach a whole new DESPERATE low David. Most creationists I know are very involved in looking through the world of science. Where do you come up with this CRAP? Just how many areas of science do you assume there are: 2? the challenge is to honestly compare what Creation Science says against what other scientific claims are. Then look for who's making wild assumptions and just mocking any disagreements. It's not that hard.
EVerytime I read work from creationists they have to endlessly quote and show the errors in secular science - these people aren't sticking their heads in the sand and just saying GOD DID IT!
It tells me A LOT ABOUT YOUR BIASES when you make stupid comments like " Many young earth creationists wear their lack of education as a badge of honor".
Most I come across are WORKING SCIENTISTS IN NUMEROUS FIELDS. So what makes YOU an expert David??? I'm not - I just know bad assumptions when I hear them.
And once again:
Good science is Testable, Observable, Repeatable -- and Predictable.
The evolution that is worshiped is none of those. Just a lazy excuse to say that God is not necessary.
David you give the same lame arguments that most atheists give ----- doesn't that SCARE YOU?
David wrote: "Well Stuart, my friend, I think at this point we are just talking past each other. We will probably both walk away reaffirmed that we are correct. Hopefully if we ever met in the real world we co..."
Perhaps we are talking past each other.
Bit hard to hear anything for the morons with the CAPS LOCK.
I might just leave you to see if you can get out of your desperate new low (FFS ...!)
The Sunday school bozos obviously need more professional help than they'll get from their collection of myths and propaganda.
For you there is still hope.
Pax nobiscum.
Perhaps we are talking past each other.
Bit hard to hear anything for the morons with the CAPS LOCK.
I might just leave you to see if you can get out of your desperate new low (FFS ...!)
The Sunday school bozos obviously need more professional help than they'll get from their collection of myths and propaganda.
For you there is still hope.
Pax nobiscum.
David doesn't that scare you: the atheist who mocks and insults the Christian God sees Hope in you ALONE!!! Wow...
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These people operate independently of any belief system. They make no mention of any belief system. Somehow they seem to have had the innate intellect to work out what to do with the glaringly obvious without reference to any imaginary super-being or son of a super-being.
A quick Google on "welfare in the ancient world" reveals that not only are Christian beliefs and ethics and mythology legacies of more ancient cultures (the only unique thing about Christianity is its claim to be unique - and it's the only religion I know that claims that its founder actually IS God - and we may ask where the pride and arrogance really lie) but welfare systems, medical facilities, centres of learning were all around long before Jesus incarnated himself in a backwater of the socially advanced Roman Empire.