Continued from Quotations, 2009.1.
Anyone who doesn’t want to argue about the existence or nonexistence of God had better go to Quotations 2009.3.
Reminder: As is the case with all threads dealing with potentially contentious subject matter, this is a place for careful, clear, respectful discussions, not brawls. We expect MBers to be able to express their opinions without attacking others personally, AND to be able to listen to people who disagree with them without feeling personally attacked.
Easier said than done, of course. But, as we’ve said before, MuseBlog is a good place to practice trying.
You can go to here for the Quote-o-matic and the GPP test.
w w w.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/quiz/index.shtml
RAR! YOU STOLE MY FIRST POST! NOW I WILL GUESS YOU ON THE ALTER EGO THREAD
FOR ALL OF ETERNITYUNTIL I GET BORED!…That was pointless. Fine: 5.8 kilos choklit.
Yes, It was. I’m sorry. *hands over choklit.*
*is ashamed*
Well, now you won’t have too.
SFTDP, but are we even now?
Hey! You were Brutus?
And why did you reveal yourself?
And you guessed my favorite Alter Ego out of ALL Alter Egos ever!
1. Yes
2. I didn’t do it on purpose!
3. Umm…You revealed yourself on the R&R thread. Tip:If you mess something up like that, you don’t have to follow up. I had to, since my comment could only be made by me.
Yayness! New Thread! I was the one that suggested this,correct?
First Post?
Actually, this isn’t a popo. I was doing todays crossword puzzle with my dad, and the theme is “Last words”. All Musebloggers should check it out. One was from somebody who was about to be executed, and the quote was, “That was the best Ice cream soda I’ve ever had”.
“(string of random numbers)PANICnodisccode(string of numbers)Panic, no hard disc” -my old laptop’s last words (my punctuation).
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all of its pupils,”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Louis Hector Berlioz
2- I always want to know the stories behind last words, because taken out of context they can be so random. If only there was a book of all the famous last words and a couple of paragraphs describing the death of each person who said them, I would be so happy.
“It is not necessary for the public to know whether I’m joking or whether I’m serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.” ~Salvador DalÃ
“The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?” ~Pablo Picasso
“Art is a lie. It is a lie that tells the truth.”
~Pablo Picasso
Cool last words:
“I’ve never felt better!”
“It’s either me, or the wallpaper!”
More last words:
“What’s the hurry? Are you afraid I won’t come back?” -The Red Baron, taking off on his last flight.
“I am just going outside and may be some time.”- Lawrence “Titus” Oates, walking out into an Antarctic blizzard voluntarily so the other explorers wouldn’t be slowed down by having to care for him.
“This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries.”- Sir Walter Raleigh, looking at the ax he was about to be beheaded with. (We all wish our last words could be that awesome.)
“Uh-oh.”- Astronaut Mike Smith, as the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. (Most of our last words are going to be something more like this.)
That is, if we’re cool enough.
Quote: “Foible you, Muffin Faces!”
This was from Pippin rehearsal. It made perfect sense under the circumstances, but you probably think I’m crazy.
Normal Person: I have a question.
Med Farces participant: AND A SHEEP!!! *rolls around on the floor convulsing from laughter* *is hysterical*
SBF, don’t scare us like that. People around here might be shocked into thinking that you’re *convulsive shudder* sane *another convulsive shudder*
I’m clarifying: I am the Med Farces participant. Heh heh.
“The doctors X-rayed my head and found nothing.”
-Some baseball player, I don’t remember who.
Very funny
164.1 (Robert)– I never said those were Washington’s last words.
User: Puffy is a good wittle mothy!
Cleverbot: Can you restrain the puffins?
User: Yes!!!! Just call me Silver Lining the Puffin-Restrainer!!!!!
It sort of looked that way because you had a “last words” heading a few lines above.
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind, don’t matter, and those who matter, don’t mind”
-Dr. Seuss
I like that one.
Time flies like arrows. Fruit flies like bananas.
-Groucho Marx
That one makes me laugh every time.
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. ”
-Mao Zedong
I really like the way this is stated and I feel like it’s immoral or something to like it.
11 – no, you didn’t get it right. It’s, “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”
“WE DON’T. We die, we live – we live. It’s all a matter of destiny, my friends – AND CHIP, STOP STEALING MY TEA!”
-a dubbed playthrough of Sonic Unleashed that’s too funny not to watch
“AND CHIP, STOP DRINKING MY TEA INTO MY BOOKS! I need to read those!”
“I need a refill!”
-that same playthrough
Oops, sorry. Still, one gets the idea.
“Life’s short, talk fast”
~Lorelai Gilmore
”i destroy worlds, i create worlds”-lelooch from the japanese anime code geass, he is saying this as he dies.
brains go farther than beauty- leloochlover101
”the planets are like marbles in a bag”-some artist
peoples lifes in time are like grains of sand on a beach- idk, maybe me, dont know
oh yeah off topic but to watch that quotation being said by lelooch type in code geass r2 episode 25 english dubbed
“Ah, to heck with science, I love this trick.”
-some show titled “Magic’s Greatest Secrets Finally Revealed”
“You know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I go get and beat you with until you understand who’s in ruttin’ command here.” -Jayne, Firefly
“Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds, but with a delicate floral hint.”
-Steve Mirsky
Yay!
One of my favorite quotes:
“On ne voit bien qu’avec la coeur. L’essentiel est invisible aux yeux.” ~ Antoine St. Exupery
Translated: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eyes.
let them eat cake- the person who said this later found them selves in a bloody situation, hint hint.
why do we argue, when we know it will be resolved, why do we cry, when it will do nothing, why do we kill, when we will all die, and why do we love, because it brings us hope for the better- leloochlover101
The full quote is: “If they have no bread, then let them eat cake.” It’s often (mis-) attributed to Marie Antoinette.
“Why are you throwing beached sea stars back into the ocean? There’s tons of them, no matter how many you throw in, it won’t matter.”
*Picks up sea star and throws it back in*
“It mattered to that one.”
“Look Terry, I can’t come running across the world whenever Steve gets in trouble. I’m Jane freakin’ Goodall- I have monkeys to study!” -Jane Goodall, Irregular Webcomic!
“Dear Moon Pie Gods…” -Cariann
(A priest is standing in a church with a large wall of stained glass behind him.)
“And give us this day no sonic boom.” – Old cartoon from The New Yorker.
“Where did you learn to count?!”
-one of the Joker’s henchmen in The Dark Knight
“This city deserves a better class of criminal. And I’m gonna give it to them. You’ll see – I’ll show ya.”
-Joker in The Dark Knight
SFTDP
“Never start with the head. The victim gets all fuzzy. He can’t feel the next – See?”
-Joker in The Dark Knight (which actually wasn’t half bad – not as good as Batman Begins, but it’s getting there)
“Do I look like a guy with a plan?”
-Joker in The Dark Knight
Umm, that first one is a bit… grisly. It sickens me slightly. I wish you wouldn,t post things like that anymore, alright? Thanks. *tries not to think about quote*
It’s not grisly in context. I know it sounds that way on its own, but trust me, there’s nobody dying in that scene or anything.
If I may be depressing:
“The Impartial Friend: Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all–the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.”
“…what sorry shows and shadows we are. Without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor things and much of a size; our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams. At our best and stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and teach, and believe, but only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.”
“Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.”
“All people have had ill luck, but Jairus’s daughter & Lazarus the worst.”
–All Mark Twain
You’re funny when you’re depressing!
“Jon and Kate had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had never met.”
No, Mark Twain is funny when he’s depressing. Except he’s depressed when he’s depressing, so it’s not funny. Really, longing for death is not exactly what would constitute for “funny”, but that’s just me.
All of these are from my friends:
“What did the Proclamation of 1763 proclamate?”
“I’ve been SPANISH-ED!”
“Isn’t it amazing how we actually get to watch photosynthesis in action, live?”
“I don’t GIGGLE, I GUFFAW.”
– Mariel
“Carrots are made of vegetables!”
“Will you help me hold down [snip]’s arms so I can pull out her tooth?”
“Look at you! You feed your soul with math! I have to cook something for you, you know, get some meat onto those bones.”
“I want to marry my dad!” (that was a guy)
And this is from The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett:
“If you trust in yourself… and believe in your dreams… and follow your star… you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”
Oops. The names of the people who said them weren’t supposed to be there…
Teehee. My favorite quote from this year’s history class:
“Kaitlyn’s going to marry his wife! I mean daughter! I mean son!”
“So, wait- you time travel and become your evil twin?”- BZWingZero
“The only thing more powerful than my black magic is the power of true love! …Teenage hormones!”
“Kai, people go to hell for writing Barry Manilow parodies.”- OM.
Animation teacher: “So, what are we naming this animation clip?”
Kid whose clip it was: “Deadsword_1.”
Me: “But there’s no death or swords in it!”
Electros (overhearing): I like death and swords!”
Yeah, it was funnier in context.
Random kid: “How do you do this?”
Me: “Click ‘enter,’ grasshopper.”
Same kid: “I’m not a grasshopper!”
Animation teacher: “Now there’s a sentence you don’t hear every day…”
From the script for one kid’s animation:
[Battle]
[Much fighting]
[War]
[Sword melee]
[Brawl]
[Epic combat]
As in, all in the same place.
From the same script:
Wizard: Well, looks like I escaped from the jaws of death!
Death: Are you sure?
Wizard: AAAAA!!!!
“There’s no screaming! I need screaming! Armada, help me find some screaming!”
-[different] random kid
“TALK TO ME!!!!”
“Flying monkey attack!”
“Oh, shut up and stop being so random.”
-Me and electros
“God, the soundtrack on this is crappy. And the animation is even crappier. And the costumes are worse. In fact…”
“Don’t you dare insult this!”
“But it’s crappy!”
“It’s epic!”
“It’s crappy!”
“Hey everyone, she insulted this movie!”
“You like this thing? It’s stupid!”
“STAR WARS IS NOT STUPID!!!!!!”
-Me and another random kid–we were watching clips from Star Wars and Indiana Jones during animation class
Oh, yeah….three guesses as to what I did today.
Guess 1: Animation
Guess 2: Animation
Guess 3: Animation
Was I right?
Indeed you were. How did you know????
Wait, wait, wait…. YOU DON’T LIKE STAR WARS?!?!?!!
*attacks Armada with EMW*
She won’t be able to fight back, Enceladus. She won’t be here till Monday.
Don’t ask me how I know that, I’m psychic.
*cracks up*
Electros really reminded me of someone in that quote. I can’t think who… *coughCMcough*
“That mountain is evil.”
– what’s-his-face in RotK (movie)
“Murderers… traitors. You would call upon them to fight? They believe in nothing. They answer to no one.”
“They will answer to the King of Gondor.”
-Aragorn and Elrond in RotK (movie)
“You are such a noodle!”
(Bet you know who said that)
“Escape the Fake World” – Lux Pain (DS game)
“Attack form ‘Mastermind Eats His Own Nose Hairs’. What!? I don’t have any nose hairs!”
– Yin Yang Yo
“I remember him! I kicked his butt once!”
“Is that why he doesn’t have a butt?”
“No, he sort of came buttless.”
-Yin Yang Yo
“Did that little blue rabbit just break wind in my abandoned nacho fountain!?”
-Yin Yang Yo
“Frodo, any chance of seeing that old Ring of mine? The one I gave you.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle. I’m afraid I lost it.”
-Bilbo and Frodo in RotK (movie)
“I’m glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee… here at the end of all things.”
-Frodo in RotK (movie)
“If Legolas can kill 19 Orcs in a matter of minutes, how can he only kill 42 of them in the entirety of one night?”
-Me
Me: All the kids in my animation class are…um, eccentric. One of them is a pyromaniac, another is electros (no further explanation needed), one of them wears a tricorn hat all the time, and I can’t tell whether half of them are male of female. Our teacher is just as bad. He acts like a kid all the time. It’s an interesting class, yeah.
RoseQuartz: Heh, sounds kind of like MB.
This is true, isn’t it? Now….who wants to be the pyromaniac?
Pyromaniac! Mwahahahaha!
I totally knew you were going to quote that conversation…
I WANT TO BE A PYROMANIAC!!!!!!! *burn! burn! burn!*
“One day I was walking along, and I saw, burnt into the wall, ‘I am not a pyromaniac’ ”
-One of my friends
Can all three of us be Pyromaniacs? I want to be one too! I even changed my avatar!
Yep. I think I’m a pyro. I am in the middle of what I think is turning into a flame war.
“Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.”
-Arhur Schopenhauer
“Not only is God dead, but try getting a plumber on weekends.”
-Woody Allen
Uh….huh? I don’t get the second one…
Me neither…
The inefficiency of the hydraulics companies is, according to Woody, the epitome of societal dysfunction and ultimate proof of the absence of any sort of conscious, divine, supernatural entity. And it’s bloody funny.
Huh? Oh….
“You flatter me shamelessly. I like it. Good.”
-Skybreaker (a book)
Some amusing Pope quotes:
Pope Pius IX, from his “Syllabus of Condemned Opinions” (i.e. opinions that are BAD):
“Every man is free to adopt and profess any religion, which, under the guidance of reason, he believes to be true.”
“The Church has no power to lay down dogmatically that the religion of the Catholic Church is the one true religion.”
Pope Pius XI:
“Mussolini is a wonderful man. Do you hear me? A wonderful man.”
Pope Pius XII:
“Private ownership of the means of production is ordained by God.”
“One Galileo in a two thousand years is enough.”
Those last two are real gems.
Wait, so the Catholic Church sees those first two quotes as BAD?
o.0
Yep. Nice people, eh? You know that while the Vatican library’s shelves are full of prohibited books by excommunicated authors, not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after WWII?
Reading the Mussolini quote out loud with an Italian accent is hilarious.
All those are just another reason for me to dislike the Catholic Church.
Some more:
Pope Gregory I (The Great):
“The bliss of the elect in heaven would not be perfect unless they were able to look across the abyss and enjoy the agonies of their brethren in eternal fire.”
Pope Gregory VI:
“From the polluted fountain [of] that absurd and erroneous doctrine, or rather raving, which claims and defends liberty of conscience for everyone comes, in a word, the worst plague of all – liberty of opinions and free speech.”
Wait, I’ve got some American Evangelical stuff too…
Jerry Falwell:
“Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.”
“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”
“The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”
Pat Robertson:
“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice the the spirit of the Antichrist.”
“The minute you turn [the Constitution] into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society.”
“The great builders of our nation almost to a man have been Christians, because Christians have the desire to build something… The people who have come into [our] institutions [today] are primarily termites. They are destroying institutions that have been built by Christians… The termites are in charge now …and the time has arrived for godly fumigation.”
What, Zyklon-B? It was first developed as a pesticide XD
“The feminist agenda is… about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”
Seriously, this is some of the best unintentional humour out there. These people are so ignorant it’s funny.
Take these to the hot topic thread. It will spark debate. Me likey debate.
Nah, too one-sided. Besides, the hot topic is already dedicated to the Iranian mess and I’m notorious for being vehemently anti-theistic.
Pssst, Enc. That is NOT a good idea.
What, afraid I’ll shatter everyone’s faith?
Whoa, whoa! There’s no need to be so aggressive here, please. Frigid Symphony was enough vehement anti-theism for me.
Uh… the person whose post you just responded to is FrigidSymphony.
How is that aggressive?
And by the way, I’m FS. Pleased to meet you.
Back again, then, eh? Why the name change? More importantly, when did you come back? Last I saw you you said something along the lines of “MB was too childish” and that you went off to pursue your own esoteric interests?
Anyway, no matter how much argument you’ll spark, welcome back.
Meh, I heard something about paleophyte threads so I thought I’d check the site out again. I’m on vacation and bored, so anything new is always fun.
Alright, then I’ll see you around!
Heh. That post reflected your avatar, a little bit… If that’s not how you intended it, sorry, but it just sounds like how your avatar looks to me, if that makes any sense.
I didn’t choose the avatar.
I know, it just looks appropriate for the post.
Meanies.
I hate all fundamentalists… of both theism and atheism
It’s very difficult to find an atheistic fundamentalist. In fact, by definition it’s impossible. An atheist does not believe in God because he doesn’t see evidence for it. If evidence were to point to God’s existence, he would change his mind. A religious fundamentalist, however, will never change his mind no matter what the evidence says.
Though it is possible for one to passionately seek out evidence against religion?
What do mean by “evidence against religion”?
And how is passion the same as fundamentalism?
By evidence against religion, I simply mean that I know people, not referring to you, who seek ways to prove that religion is bad. They will look for any fault, and then capitalize on it.
Secondly, I didn’t mean to suggest that passion is fundamentalism. I was just recognizing that atheists are in the middle due to lack of evidence. This person I know purposefully moves against religion with whatever he can find, though he calls himself an atheist.
The burden of proof is on the believer. Christians are atheists when it comes to Thor, Odin, Zeus, etc. We just take it one god further. The theist makes a claim about the universe, and the atheist, quoting Carl Sagan, will say that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. The theist, unable to supply such evidence, should abandon his claim. That he doesn’t is a testament to his irrationality.
Not necessarily. The Atheist’s refusing to believe should not alter the Christian’s course. If the Christian is attempting to spread his word, which is completely based off of faith, and someone is not willing to give the faith necessary for what the Christian accepts as truth, then the Atheist is simply a horse led to water that did not drink. The Christian should leave him be, and not pester him if that is what the Atheist as chosen, in my opinion. The Christian believes still what he originally did.
Although, I just got into an argument about something I didn’t mean to. What I’m trying to point out is that no evidence does not mean that there is no God. It’s a possibility, not proven wrong by a lack of physical evidence, just not proven true, to the man who chooses not to believe.
No one chooses not to believe. We are all born atheists until someone indoctrinates us. People choose to believe, if anything, and therefore, the burden of proof is on them. If I were to choose to believe that I could ignore the laws of gravity, I would need to provide evidence for this belief, or people would (rightfully) meet my claims with derision. According to your logic, I don’t have to provide any evidence, and everyone else is simply choosing not to believe that I can disregard the laws of gravity. Can you not see that for me to continue believing this is completely irrational and absurd?
Oh sure, it’s a possibility. As possible as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or the Great Teapot in the sky. Popper’s principle of falsifiability states that for a hypothesis to be applicable in the real world, it needs to be falsifiable. I.e, you need to be able to disprove it, or it’s a logical fallacy and doesn’t count. Of course it’s possible, but if you look at it that way, EVERYTHING’s possible, and that’s not a rational or productive way to live life, is it? Rationalism and empiricism both show that belief in God is utterly inane. Yet you discard these methods (that you otherwise apply to every single aspect of your life) when it comes to matters that religion claims to be its own field of expertise.
Quite honestly, I’m not trying to convince you. I’m not giving you evidence because if you don’t want to believe, you don’t have to. I don’t mind if you give me evidence to the contrary as long as it’s not “you don’t have evidence.” This is because religion is only based off of faith- whether or not you believe, not if you see something every day or not.
What’s wrong with “you don’t have evidence”? That would discard any claims in a legal court, a science lab, etc. For me to bring evidence against God you first need to formulate what definition of God you’re working from. Pantheism, Deism and Theism are all very different things.
The problem is that no evidence is needed if no point is trying to be proved. I’m not trying to be evangelical, and thus, no argument here is needed.
If you are trying to prove something, go ahead and base it off my beliefs that yes, there is a God, and I doubt that he has had any physical action taken in this world except through his son, who was his hands for the short period of time he lived. Truthfully, I’m still defining my idea overall as it is, as I’m not sure if I believe in demons or the old Hebrew Miracle stories.
Truly, though, don’t pick a fight right now, unless you have something you want to prove, and you can bring the evidence forward.
Meh, since you’re not providing any concrete statements, I’ll let it go for now. I’m too lazy to write up the arguments for nonbelief. I suggest you read Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris, they do it far better than I do.
Thank you! It’s surprising how hard it is to get out of an argument with you once one starts. I never meant to get into this debate.
Also, thank you for the suggestion, I think I will try to find some of those authors.
While I’m at it, here’s an extensive list of well-written, coherent books on atheism.
Bertrand Russell – “Why I Am Not a Christian”
Daniel Dennett – “Breaking the Spell”
Sam Harris – “The End of Faith”
Sam Harris – “Letter to a Christian Nation”
Richard Dawkins – “The God Delusion”
Christopher Hitchens – “God Is Not Great”
Christopher Hitchens – “The Portable Atheist” (a collection of essays on atheism by authors including Hobbes, Spinoza, Mill, Marx, Shelley, Twain, Conrad, Orwell and Updike)
And here are some more:
Oolon Colluphid – “Where God Went Wrong”, “Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes”, “Who is this God Person Anyway?”, “That About Wraps it Up for God”
I’m sorry, I had to. I ♥ H2G2.
You do know that Douglas Adams was a fervent atheist, right? Great friend of Richard Dawkins. I’ll transcribe a speech of his tomorrow.
But, that’s assuming that atheists are rational. If there was evidence found for god, then if an atheist kept not believing in god, then wouldn’t that be fundamentalist?
Also, “fundamentalist” is the belief that the main point of the religion should be interpreted literally. As science is usually the foundation of atheism, then a fundamentalist atheist would usually be someone who took scientific results literally.
Semantics. Define terms before arguing, absolutely.
The subject of irrational atheists is a touchy one. Some people consider themselves atheists because they’ve just never been indoctrinated, but act completely irrationally otherwise. The conscious rejection of theism, however, is 99% of the time rooted in rationale and a thought process modeled on the scientific method.
There are some Atheists (I don’t think your one of them) who say the following, basically:
“1. If the Bible is true it is the literal word of God.
2. The Bible has a creation story
3. evolution disproves creation
4. therefor there is no god since the bible is not all true, and it’s the word of god, if there was a god.
This is Fundamentalist since they believe the bible is the word of god, but there is no god since the bible is false in parts.
My “branch” of christianity basically says that the bible is a book that has basic morals in it, but under stands it was written 3000-1500 or so years ago ,depending on parts, and that the world has changed, and the bible was written with the 3000-1500 people in mind.
Religion thread, GAPAs?
That’s some real shoddy logic you got there. How does that make them “fundamentalist atheists”? It’s a logical procession: IF the Bible claims to be true, and some parts are obviously not true, THEN the claim is incorrect.
As for a book of basic morals, wouldn’t you think a divine creator could have done a much better job in compiling them? Or, if you don’t believe it was written by an entity like the Christian God, why still consider an outdated, violent, obscene and incoherent book a valid source of morality?
And yes, by all means, a religion thread. Damn, not one day on MB and it’s already happening.
Keep in mind that this was due to your quotes here.
Right, because people weren’t itching for an excuse to jump and argue their faith. I never said anything about religion, I only typed some quotes from various popes and televangelists. I’m sorry if they’re representative of the entirety of Christianity.
Fighting words as always. I have to say it’s good to have you back for another argument.
Although, I have to agree with you. In my views, the quotes are not reflective of the religion. Many religious leaders took advantage of the faith they gained, and were pretty much jerks. That much is agreed.
I never said that either. In fact, many of those quotes highlight inherent fallacies within religious thought, like the mutual exclusiveness between faith and learning. Faith teaches us to accept what we don’t know and attribute everything to ad hoc explanations. That there were good and bad people involved with various religions is a statistical imperative. However, good people doing atrocious things is only possible through the medium of religion (and possibly patriotism).
Well, now you’re using things I never said. I never said that there were good people doing atrocious things. I did say that there were jerks who used their influence to do atrocious things. Please stay consistent.
Which results in the same thing. They had to influence someone for atrocious things to happen. Do you have any real arguments??
You know what? No. No I don’t. I don’t even know how I got in this argument. This really isn’t something I want debate over.
They may have been viewed as good in some people’s eyes, but not mine. What more do you want?
Not only him. I’d intended to respond to the posts by crazyquotescollector at the end of the last thread because I really disagreed with them and what they said/implied, but I don’t have time for much of that sort of thing.
Now my schedule’s cleared up and maybe I will…
Post 452? Yeah, those are pretty common, and wonderfully ineffective.
Mhm. To both points.
Me too.
Haha, talk about reading into things wrong – I read only the first half of this or so, failing to see the last line, and got myself all worked up and wanting to retaliate!
It is great stuff. I think the best part is that they actually believe it so much.
-A
Hermione: “See that girl over there? Apparently she’s trying to smuggle you a love potion.”
Harry: “Really?”
Hermione: *snaps her fingers in his face* “Hey! She’s only interested in you because she thinks you’re the Chosen One.”
Harry: “But I am the Chosen One! *she smacks him on the head* OK, sorry, um… kidding.”
-A featurette I saw on the HBP movie
I love that.
I glanced at it quickly, and I thought it said “A featurette I saw on the HPB movie”
Where’s Luna the Lovely, by the way?
Rebecca informed me the other day that she is still in Alaska, working nearly full-time. Rebecca said that Luna said she wouldn’t be on the blog very frequently.
I think she’s on vacation.
No, she has an almost full-time job and is extremely busy with life. She is, after all, nineteen years old.
GAPAs, can we move the whole of post 394 over to the religion thread if the discussion is not over? This is sort of unrelated to the quotations thread…
Gaah! You got 42 again! How do you do that, Kokonilly? I agree with you. We should move it. (Mostly so that this isn’t a PoPo.)
I just have excellent timing.
I WANT THAT POST!
I’ll copy the discussion to there.
(42) Kokonilly: We can delete posts, but we can’t move them. I’m afraid you’ll just have to work around the disruptions to this thread, for a little while at least.
Okay, thanks Robert.
I see what you did there! Post-publishing editing
It’s a low-tech way to send subliminal messages.
It just so happens that my rhetoric skills are highly appreciated by my academic community, and whenever I get to chance to hone my debating skills and practice putting philosophy into words for someone who doesn’t already have a degree I take advantage of it.
Hm. “It just so happens that my wrestling skills are highly appreciated by my athletic community, and whenever I get a chance to hone my hamstringing skills by immobilizing someone 50 pounds below my weight class I take advantage of it.” The Administrators confess themselves unimpressed.
Nice way of putting it, Robert. Haha!
When you put it that way, Enceladus is unimpressed as well.
Excluding the fact that physically immobilizing someone has greater medical consequences than philosophically battering them, it’s a cute analogy. Oh, and that the intrinsic value of the art of rhetoric and the intrinsic value in being able to grapple with scantily clad men are on completely different levels.
Will you not just accept the meaning of what Robert is saying? Is there some reason that you have to have the last say in all of these? (I understand that if you respond to this, it’s not the last say-they were questions.)
Sure, if the analogy were accurate, I might concede a touché. But I like arguing too much to let is slip if there are inconsistencies I can point out. Furthermore, the debate was between you and me, and if an administrator thinks that our debating skills are on as uneven a footing as if you were “50 pounds below my weight class”, well, they might have a point, but so what? I wasn’t debating with Robert, I was debating with you.
I can tell. That was more of you trying to force an argument then us mutually debating.
The point I was trying to get across, though it was obviously misinterpreted, was that due to the fact that atheists have no evidence, then shouldn’t they remain neutral on the argument of the existence of God, as opposed to believing there is no possible way?
No, because granting equal probability to the existence and nonexistence of God is fallacious. You can’t disprove Russel’s Teapot. Do you think there exists the same likelihood that the Teapot is real than that it isn’t?
The claim sequence happens like this:
1. There is no claim. No one believes in a God.
2. Someone claims there is god
3. Some people do not accept the claim in no. 2. These people are still in the condition of no. 1
You see how they aren’t the same thing? If there was evidence that pointed to God’s existence, and there was an equal amount of evidence that pointed to God’s nonexistence, you would be right. This is impossible, however, as the God Hypothesis cannot be falsified (and according to Popper and the entire scientific community should not even be considered a plausible statement in the first place because of that), hence no one can truly “disprove” God, much as you can never truly “disprove” the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
However, scientific discoveries, enlightenment values and moral philosophy all go to removing ever further the need for any kind of God. There is no need for God, and as such, it is logically incorrect to assume such an entity exists.
Occam’s Razor is the concept that you’re describing, Elias, I believe. If there are two equally plausible causes of an event, it’s logical to choose the one that makes the least supposition. It doesn’t invalidate the possibility of the other cause though.
Nope, it’s not exactly Occam’s razor. The two causes are not equally plausible.
‘Need’, as such, does not determine existence. Besides, I can prove it is more likely that an all-powerful god exists than not.
An all-powerful god can make it so that there is no evidence of en.
Natural laws can make it convincing that there is a god, but not as convincing as god can make it that there is no god.
There are inconsistencies in the universe. Even though they may be explained, there will be other inconsistencies to be explained yet. Therefore, it is more likely there is a god.
Follow?
Your arguing with a “gap theory”, i.e. that any gaps in knowledge we have are most plausibly filled by a God hypothesis. Your argument goes something like this:
“Did you know that elephants hide in cherry trees?”
“Yeah, right, that’s a load of bollocks”
“Have you ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree?”
“No”
“The fact that you’ve never seen one proves that they hide so well you can’t see them.”
Guys, it’s a very simply thing called logic. You apply it to EVERYTHING in your everyday life.
AIEE! Everyone else is joining in our argument.
43.2.1.1.1.3.1.1.1.1-If you can’t disprove the existence of God, why are we arguing? Secondly, just because you don’t have a need for something makes it not exist? I don’t see how logically not having a need for something makes it go away. I personally don’t NEED this computer, yet it still exists.
Really? (This is about Occam’s Razor) I thought we had two improvable possibilities, the existence or not of a god. Both are plausible, and equally so because there is no way to prove or disprove either one. If we take the simplest option, we have the no god theory. Simplest isn’t necessarily most probable however.
43.2~1.5_My argument is not like that because that is not a proof for God. It is just a proof that it is more likely that God exists.
But you can see the computer in front of you, and that proves that it exists. The claims of evidence for God’s existence rely entirely on “this [usually the existence of the world] could not exist without a God to create it”, hence the only evidence for God is an imagined NEED for such an entity. Needless to say, such an argument is utter bollocks, first of all because you can’t argue the necessity for a creator without getting into the irreducibly complex problem (who created God?), and second because historical trend and past experiences (which count as evidence) show that any gaps in current knowledge will be explained in the future.
RE: Occam’s razor: The two claims are not the same, because the theist makes a claim, and claims MUST have evidence to back them up. The atheist simply refutes the theist’s claim. They also do not have the same amount of evidence because if we use religious texts from current religions as an indication of what God is like, then it is very easy to disprove his existence through inconsistencies, logical fallacies, etc.
Gaps will be explained, but there will be new ones. And, of course, God need not be created since he exists independent of time. And yes, if you mean ‘need’ that way, then we still need God.
I have given you evidence, and you have yet to actually refute it besides by using ridiculous, well-worn arguments.
Give an example of an inconsistency.
What evidence? New gaps will also be explained without bringing God into the picture. And saying that God doesn’t need a creator because he exists outside of space and time is an ad hoc exception fallacy, and incorrect by definition. I urge you to look up Russell’s Celestial Teapot as an analogy of what you’re doing.
Inconsistencies in religious texts? Well, how about contradictions in the Bible, or the fact that only two of the Gospels mention something as important to the Christian faith as the fact that Mary was a virgin? I could go on and on. Here’s a list of 432 questions that the Bible gives different answers on.
www. skepticsannotatedbible .com/contra/by_name.html
(remove the spaces after www and before com)
Okay. I looked at that website and it is just verses taken out of context or worse, mistranslated.
You are also making the common, incorrect assumption that God is an object. I want you to prove cause-and-effect. The burden is on the believer. Can you prove it? I’d like to see you try.
O.K. FS, or EES.
This is exactly what I’m saying about fundamentalist Atheists, ok?
No, those are all inconsistent Bible passages that claim different things. Maybe some are mistranslations, but you can’t dismiss all of them, and even one is enough to blow the Bible’s claim of absolute truth out of the water. Sure, they’re small, but don’t you think that a holy book that claims absolute truth should get things right? Anyway, another logical inconsistency with the Christian God is the suffering problem. This is as old as Lucretius: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God.”
Exactly, the burden of truth is on the believer. It is up to you to provide evidence for your claims. Remember, absence of evidence is evidence of absence until evidence of presence is found.
What is your definition of God? The irreducibly complex fallacy is airtight, the only way theists can argue their way out of it is by making an ad hoc exception for God’s ability to bend the rules of physics and logic, the very rules they claim he created in his perfection.
Cause and effect: Assumption: Everything that exists must have a cause. Fair enough, although speculations as to the infinity of the universe would boggle my mind no matter what the result turned out to be, finite or infinite. The mistake is an creating an ad hoc (sorry for overusing this term, but it really is crucial) entity to provide a cause without its own cause. Everything for which there are currently no known causes will be discovered discovered through scientific means, as they have until now, and this will continue in the future.
I want evidence for God. A manifestation, astronomical proof, etc.
TMFA: Elaborate. Explain your complaint about “fundamentalist atheists”. Despite the utter inanity of the label, I will answer it.
No, what I really want is for you to prove that cause-and-effect exists. You can’t. And my definition is a being that has ultimate power and exists independent of time.
Not a single one of those ‘quotes’ has any validity at all. I gave up after the tenth ‘inconsistency’ on that website.
Oh yes. I’m Jewish, not Christian.
If cause and effect is not an absolute rule, then there’s no need for God to act as a causeless cause. I’m not quite sure that cause and effect is in fact a universal absolute, as the universe might very well be infinite. But for the point of the debate, find me something that exists without a cause.
Next, can you explain why those quotes don’t have any validity instead of just writing them all off with one sweeping statement? And my point still stands. Wouldn’t an all powerful entity have a clearer book to represent his opinion? Well, theoretically yes. Shame the Bible was written by people.
I dislike the Jewish faith less than the Christian one. Historically it comes out with a better reputation. Plus the fact that no Jew has ever knocked on my door on a weekend morning to talk about Jehovah is a bonus. Anyway, that just leaves the Talmud/Old Testament. Which is even more brutal than the New Testament.
a Fundamentalist Atheist believes that the bible has to the literal word of God for God to exist.
the bible is a man-written book, with four or five groups of writers, works hundeds of years apart, based on oral historys, and thusly can be flawed.
Give me one quote and I’ll show you. I can’t respond to all of them. Second, my point about cause-and-effect is that it cannot be proved that cause-and-effect exists. The proof for it is a ‘Gap Theory’. Is gravity a causeless cause?
Define gravity. Gravity is the principle by which objects of mass attract each other. What causes gravity? I can’t say I know that. However, most would argue that gravity is not an entity or an object, rather an abstract name given to a physical principal of objects of mass, therefore it is an incorrect example for your analogy.
As for the quotes, well… Let’s try the first one. Who was Jesus’ grandfather on his father’s side? Matthew 1.16 says Jacob: “And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” Luke 3.23 says Heli: “And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli.”
What causes that principle?
Also, I’m Jewish. But I can prove this one wrong. One is a Hebrew name, one is Greek.
It’s not an entity to be caused, it’s a property. Properties don’t need causes, they are inherent to the object they belong to. The object needs a cause.
So Heli is the same as Jacob, only greek? I call shenanigans, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You didn’t even read the supplied link, “Christian Responses”, where apologetics attempt to explain away these apparent contradictions by claiming that the Gospel of Luke’s genealogy really goes through Jesus’ mother instead of Joseph. The obvious problem with this approach is that the Gospel of Luke clearly says:
(Luke 3:23) Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work. He was the son (as was thought) of *Joseph* son of Heli, …
Nothing about Mary in there at all and no, Joseph was not the “son-in-law†of Heli, and Mary’s ancestry doesn’t coincidentally intertwine with Joseph’s going all the way back to Abraham, occasionally matching some people along the way and no, back in those days they didn’t give a flying flip who the mother’s ancestry was.
It is not a translation, but sometimes they have different Greek and Hebrew names. Besides, I’m Jewish, not Christian. And explain why properties don’t need to have causes, but god does.
43.2.1.1-So this is all a matter of pride, then? What a silly thing to argue over…
Pride, no. My post about rhetoric skills was in retaliation to part of Robert’s previous post, which he later edited out, saying “few things in the universe can stop the force of someone who likes to hear himself talk.” Disregarding the blatant ad hominem, I felt it still merited some sort of retort. My militant stance for atheism stems from a genuine desire for truth and humanitarian benefit.
Fair enough. I don’t want an argument.
“Success four flights Thursday.” – Wilbur Wright writing home, making the understatement of the then-young-century.
“I got its big, hot, steamy butt!”
-My brother
“Get your feet off the wall!”
-My stepmom
I was at a camp and we made a movie we called “Children of the Orb”. Here are some quotes:
“We could change the polarity of the Orb and the space-time continium. I bet that has something to do with it.”
“Or we could just throw fruit at them.”
“Think about it. A world full of-” *pause* “-ugly people!”
“I gotta go. I love you too, Mom.” *Hangs up. Throws phone over shoulder.*
“Get the Orb!”
“Doctor Professor has saved the day again!”
“How did you save the day?”
“I saved the day. It’s what I do, I save the day.”
“OK.”
“Let’s make a sequel!”
“D***, I’m good.”
-Sideswipe in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
“What you are about to see is top secret. Do not tell my mother.”
– What’s-his-face in T: RotF
“What are you looking at, Slobberpuss?”
-Wheelie in T: RotF
“Hmm… It appears as if I’ve already frittered away half my HP.” ~Glalie, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon
“I leveled up! Doesn’t that make you happy?” ~Mew, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
50- I love Pokemon! Especially Mystery Dungeons! Which version was that?
Well. Quotations has turned into Hot Topics, Poems and Songs has turned into Hot Topics, I’m sure Religions will turn into Hot Topics within a week… nice to have you back, Fridgey.
Rubbish, “Poems and Songs” is stil poems and songs.
*cracks up*
Agreed.
Okay. I’ll go to Religion now.
“What you gave to me, I return to you. A one-way ticket to oblivion!”
“Well, we missed you, Zack.”
“I didn’t!”
“Thanks, Dean.”
“You’re welcome!”
-my aunt, uncle, and their friend Zack
From a production I was part of a while ago:
“Ms. Lane, they’re here! Everything’s going to be okay!” -Jimmy Olsen, closing words of Justice League: The New Frontier.
Some girl: “Hey, Jenny, where did you go on Spring Break?”
“Jenny”: “The Bahamas, of course.”
Some girl: “Did your dad buy you everything you wanted in the Bahamas?”
“Jenny”: “Well, I wanted him to buy me the Bahamas, but he said he couldn’t.”
“I am considered a misanthropist now and then, because I do not socialize with many people. But it’s only my mind that avoids you. My heart is still with you, and seeks the distance so that it can keep on loving you” – Franz Grillparzer, Austrian playwright.
“HEY I’M NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE POTPLANTS D:”
~ purplerosesbeauty, Nefai of Faelwen, Gaia Online
Then something Tookish woke up inside him, he wished to go see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking stick – the Hobbit
That is like the best line in that book. It gives me chills.
Kaiser
“GAAAAAAAAA! CHIRON IS NOT A MODEL!” -SudoRandom
Feel free to pie me now, Sudo.
*ducks*
“Empty soul, my disc drive – you don’t have a mascot because you don’t have any quality games.”
-part of a project some of my classmates did two years ago
Is there a 2009.3?
There is now.
The Man For Aeiou: Obviously. Atheists don’t believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. However, theists do, and the atheist is showing how this belief is inane. To do this, it is necessary to assume the same mentality and show where it doesn’t hold together.
Not all theists believe that.
You don’t understand. Most Christians don’t believe the bible is the literal word of god, and when atheists start fighting with literal word of god and contradictions and such, it makes it seem like the atheists are only seeing one part of the cristianity and giving them more credit then they deserve.
Oh sure, I absolutely agree. Like I said, there are varying levels of belief, and each one has to be addressed in the appropriate manner. I wouldn’t insist on Biblical inconsistencies with a moderate Christian who acknowledged that they were written by people. I’d be arguing on different points. However, Cromwell has not stated that he considers the Bible to be a product of human origin (or in his case, the Talmud).
You should stop using the term “Atheist fundamentalist”. It makes no sense at all.
Of course the Talmud was made by people. You obviously know nothing about the Talmud.
There, now you’ve stated it. That’s all I needed.
I’ll admit that I’ve never been a big Talmudic scholar (I’ve focused on the Koran and the Bible- New Testament and Old), but as far as I know the Talmud is essentially the same as the Old Testament, no?
We believe in the Old Testament. the Talmud is an explanation of the Torah. It was gathered sometime, I don’t know when, look it up, but R. Yehuda HaNassi gathered it together.
Ok, so what are your metaphysical beliefs about the universe?
Why should I answer that question?
Simple curiosity on my part.
Well, I don’t want an argument.
What, you mean beyond what we’ve been doing so far?
Yes. Exactly. We can have the argument about this and have the thread be named ‘Should cromwell answer the question?’
Granted, there are varying degrees of fundamentalism. I should have made sure to mention that.
Cromwell: Ok, you’re Jewish, I get it. You don’t have to answer for Gospel screw ups.
Properties are not single entities, they are simply parts of a whole. They do not exist on their own, and thus do not require a cause, although the object they belong to could technically be used as the cause, I guess. You’re spinning the debate, rather unskillfully. You’re forgetting I’m not making a claim that everything needs to be caused.
Never mind about gravity, then. I didn’t understand that you gave up the part about what caused god.
What part? I was simply stating a common theist argument, that everything needs a cause and God is that cause, showing how it didn’t work because of the irreducibly complex fallacy.
I think that argument (the theist one) is not logical, too.
So, a thread change! I am an atheist. Nice to meet you all.
To me an ultimate god that created life/the universe/everything just really doesn’t seem the most plausible thing anymore. It was about when I learned of evolution and all that science stuff and the religious people around me started ignoring/criticizing it simply because it didn’t fit with what they thought that I started getting actually annoyed. Here was something that looked like it made the most sense I’d heard in a while, and look there was proof of it, but just because it didn’t fit with some people’s viewpoint it was a taboo subject.
I couldn’t have discussions with people like I wanted to about evolution, the universe, nature, lots of things that I found really interesting because they’d just say “Well, I guess that’s the way god made it.” And I was too polite to respond in most cases. Not so much now, but I also have friends who are atheist I can have good hearty discussions with now.
I had to answer the phone in the middle of this post so things may not line up in it as I meant them to, oh well.
People criticized you for believing in evolution? Where I live, people criticize others for believing in creationism.
Not all geographical locations are as enlightened as yours.
True. I do believe in evolution, just in case you’re wondering.
“Belief” is the wrong term to use when it comes to evolution. The scientific method is the best tool for making sense of the world we have yet come up with, based on the observable results of employing it.
Belief is something completely different. Believing is accepting something is right without, or in spite of, the evidence. That is anti-science – there is no belief in science.
OED-
belief
• noun 1 a feeling that something exists or is true, especially one without proof. 2 a firmly held opinion. 3 (belief in) trust or confidence in. 4 religious faith.
I’m following 1 or 2 here. Especially does not mean necessarily.
It’s still the wrong term. Technically it might be correct, but according to the nuances of the English language belief has a much stronger religious connotation.
I don’t agree, but there’s no use arguing.
I live in one of the most conservative districts in northern IL. I am one of few atheists at my school, but since my friend and I are probably the most outspoken/known ones (most of the others don’t mention it that often) we are often the most… I don’t know, not “made fun of,” that’s to strong, and not “ostracized,” also to strong, but a watered-down version of those combined. There’s no real active people trying to “save” us that often, but there are undoubtedly some who believe we’re going to hell and might deserve it. People make jokes as to our belief or lack thereof and occasionally it really pisses me off.
Okay, I live in Minnesota, and most of my friends are Lutheran or Catholic.
While I have nothing against this, I’m atheist, and some things they do irk me. (I love that word. Irk, irk, irk, irk, irk… Okay. Back to the point.)
For example, a close friend of mine came up to me one day and wondered if she was being true to God by being friends with an atheist. She also wondered how we could be friends, because she’s a strong conservative and I’m a very strong liberal.
Well, this pretty much broke my heart. We’ve known each other for several years, and I thought our friendship was better than that. So, I ventured into the unknown and assured her that God loved everybody, so it’s okay to be friends with her. Mollified, she thanked me and walked away. We’re still friends, but… I dunno. It got me thinking.
Another example: Someone I know – not really a friend, just acquaintance – responded to a question along the lines of “How was the moon created?” with “Because God willed it”. Well, she received no credit, as the teacher was looking for the scientific answer, and she threw a hissy fit.
I have no idea what these prove, but it’s sort of hard to be an atheist in a very conservative group of friends. I think as long as we don’t discuss religion or Twilight, we’re pretty much civil to one another.
Kokonilly, I’d say your friend in the first example showed her worth by being honest with you. Some denominations hold very strong views about mixing with nonbelievers, and she may have felt quite torn.
You think so? Well, I suppose you’re right. Whew, that made me feel so much better…
If someone I considered a close friend said that to me I would immediately dismiss them as worthy of my time. Someone who can let their imaginary friend get in the way of real friendships isn’t someone I want to be friends with. If you live in an overwhelmingly religious area, it might be hard to find people to socialize with if you take my attitude, but I do think it’s better to be alone than in bad company.
I have some friends who believe in god. While I don’t spend that much time with them (almost none at all beyond the minimum necessary), it’s not really a problem, as they all know my views, my willingness to argue, and my ability to poke holes in almost any argument they might bring. So they avoid the subject.
While it is kind of flattering to know that I’m “scaring” people into submission, it’s annoying because they won’t argue.
But, to them, you see, it’s not imaginary. It’s real. They really and truly believe in God, and I respect this. I’m not getting rid of a friendship just because of a religion. I am, if you’ll excuse this, not that close-minded.
I do, however, have to ask you something (don’t answer this if you don’t want to): Do you have very many friends? Because, to me, it seems you’re very argumentative (see: “it’s annoying because they won’t argue”) and will ruthlessly defend any belief you have, even if it means sacrificing a relationship. And, while I’m not very experienced or wordly or any good at debate, I do know when it’s not worth it to pursue an argument. So, FS, I would suggest to you to learn when it’s not worth it to pursue an argument.
Really.
SometimesThe thrill of arguing is not worth a friendship.I have my standards. I don’t want to be friends with certain people. I dismiss people mostly for intellectual reasons. If someone thinks that their delusion (it doesn’t matter whether they think it’s real, fact of the matter is it’s NOT) is worth more than my friendship, well, I know where I stand.
Everyone, can we PLEASE stop this whole debate? If you want to continue, go to the religion or hot topics threads, but PLEASE – stop pulling it into other threads.
65- This is their thread now. There’s a new one for quotations.
Jinx.
What just happened?
Alice and I said the same thing at the same time. I deleted my comment and added a link to hers.
Jinx!
*surrenders and collapses into a heap of giggles*
68- I responded to I-Man at the same time that Lady Bunniful did. I then jinxed her, but by that time, she had deleted her post and put a link in mine.
I disagree with the idea of calling someone nonreligious something that sounds like a religion. It makes me feel kind of…odd. I’m not religious, and I really don’t like it when people ask me what religion I am, I say I’m not religious, and they say, “Oh, you’re atheist?” It also bothers me how a lot of the time, they think I don’t know the word “atheist”, and it feels like they want to educate me about what I am called. I KNOW the word atheist, but I just don’t feel that it’s an appropriate word for someone who does not believe in any “higher being”.
Well, atheism is exactly that, a-theism. It’s not a religion, but you can recognize belonging to a social movement that seeks to raise awareness of the atheist community. Then you have the Brights, for example. Atheist is just a label to use. I have t-shirts with scarlet As (and I LOVE the double meaning) on them. If you don’t believe in God, you are an atheist, whether you like being called one or not. I’m aware that the term carries heavy social stigma in many parts of the world. It’s not a “religion”, however, absolutely.
I know it’s not a religion, but…I don’t know. It still bothers me for some reason.
St. Thomas Aquinas, a great scholar and philosopher, proved God’s existence in his Summa Theologica. He gave five separate proofs. We’ll start with the first.
“The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e., that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.”
Yes, and thus was born the irreducibly complex. I’ve read Aquinas, and everyone who disproved his theory. If you postulate the necessity for a “mover” for anything, then God needs its own mover, or you’re dealing with an ad hoc exception. Honestly, it’s one of the weakest arguments for God. Dawkins wrote a better rebuttal in the God Delusion, I’ll reprint it here, gotta go now.
No, that doesn’t work because God, like laws of physics, reason, and logic, does not need a cause.
So you’re inventing an ad hoc mover for the regression and calling it God. Read the Dawkins rebuttal further down the page.
Good. Next.
“The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or one only. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.”
“The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. But it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.”
“The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble, and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest, and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.”
“The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.”
I’ll wait for Elias’s summery of what Dawkins said to refute those, as I’m sure they can do a much better job than I could after reading those. Suffice to say that in no way impacted by nonbelief in any deity. Several of those points seemed either just silly or ridiculous to me all in all.
In other news, I was just reading an article about an atheist summer camp, here’s some text:
“The 24 places on Camp Quest UK, which will be held next month near Bath, have already been booked up.
Organisers said the purpose of the camp was to encourage critical thinking and provide children with a summer camp “free of religious dogma”.
The camp, supported by scientist Richard Dawkins, plans to expand after receiving hundreds of inquiries.
The event has been set up by Samantha Stein, a postgraduate psychology student from London.
She said: “It is not about changing what they think, but the way that they think.
“There is very little that attacks religion, we are not a rival to religious camps.
“We exist as a secular alternative open to children from parents of all faiths and none.””
I think it’s an interesting idea and a good one. All the summer camps that have been available to me through my life are founded by some religion or another–and the ones I go to there’s always grace and breakfast lunch and dinner, prayer, ect, and thought it’s not overwhelming to the point I refused to go, it did make me uncomfortable. I’d have liked to go to one where there wasn’t any of that atmosphere of… pressure, I guess, to not let people know I didn’t really believe all that stuff.
Ok, Dawkins’ rebuttal to Aquinas.
“The five ‘proofs’ asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don’t prove anything, and are easily – though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence – exposed as vacuous. The first three are just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together. All involve an infinite regress – the answer to a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum.
1. The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.
2. The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.
3. The Cosmological Argument. There must have been at time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God.
All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts. Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent. Karen Owens has captured this witty little paradox in an equally engaging verse:
Can an omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change his future mind?
To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘big bang singularity’, or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading. Edward Lear’s Nonsense Recipe for Crumboblicious Cutlets invites us to ‘Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into the smallest possible pieces, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine times.’ Some regresses do reach a natural terminator. Scientists used to wonder what would happen if you could dissect, say, gold into the smallest possible pieces. Why shouldn’t you cut one of those pieces in half and produce an even smaller smidgen of gold? The regress in this case is decisively terminated by the atom. The smallest possible piece of gold is a nucleus consisting of exactly seventy-nine protons and a slightly larger number of neutrons, attended by a swarm of seventy-nine electrons. If you ‘cut’ gold any further than the level of the single atom, whatever you get is not gold. The atom provides a natural terminator to the Crumboblious Cutlets type of regress. It is by no means clear that God provides a natural terminator to the regresses of Aquinas. That’s putting it mildly, as we shall see later. Let’s move on down Aquinas’ list.
4. The Argument from Degree. We notice that things in the world differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God.
That’s an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion. [Elias’ note: I’ll elaborate further on why this argument is bunk later]
5. The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Design. Things in the world, especially living things, look as though they have been designed. Nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Therefore there must have been a designer, and we call him God (I cannot help being reminded of the immortal syllogism that was smuggled into Euclidean proof by a schoolfriend, when we were studying geometry together: ‘Triangle ABC looks isosceles. Therefore…’). Aquinas himself used the analogy of an arrow moving towards a target, but a modern heat-seeking anti-aircraft missile would have suited his purpose better.
The argument from design is the only one still in regular use today, and it still sounds to many like the ultimate knockdown argument. The young Darwin was impressed by it when, as a Cambridge undergraduate, he read it in William Paley’s “Natural Theology”. Unfortunately for Paley, the mature Darwin blew it out of the water. There has probably never been a more devastating rout of popular belief by clever reasoning than Charles Darwin’s destruction of argument from design. It was so unexpected. Thanks to Darwin, it is no longer true to say that nothing we know looks designed unless it is designed. Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance. And among these eminences of pseudo-design are nervous systems which – among their more modest accomplishments – manifest goal-seeking behaviour that, even in a tiny insect, resembles a sophisticated heat-seeking missile more than a simple arrow on target.”
I will pick and choose which parts to respond to here as the others are not worth discussing.
Choose the explanation for the ’causeless cause’ problem.
Something, say a magical celestial teapot, created a God independent of time, which made that object.
God exists independent of time.
God needs no cause just as laws of physics, logic, etc. do not need causes.
For ‘changing his mind’, choose one.
If you are an atheist and believe in free choice, that’s over right there.
He exists independent of time.
The ‘smelliest’ argument, choose one. [I don’t like Aquinas’s argument here because we are limited by that definition, but it’s a start.]
Good and evil are abstract. Smelliness is not.
The design one, I have no explanation for.
You’re gonna have to elaborate further. What do you mean by “choose one”?
How do you prove that God exists independently of time? Or do you just throw that extra definition in to make it sound plausible? Your analogy to God being like laws of physics and logic is just silly. First of all, there’s a huge difference between physics and logic. Newton’s laws work the way they do because the world exists in a certain way. Logic is a mental process used for finding correct conclusions. Furthermore, logic and Newtonian physics can be proven to work correctly. There is no such proof for God.
Good and evil are not abstract. There are objective degrees of morality. Hitler was bad. Gandhi was good.
I didn’t just throw that in. And how are good and evil not abstract? Define them with non-arbitrary terms.
Evil is that which provokes a negative reaction within us provoked by our moral compass. The moral compass is a relative thing, as is your own reaction to certain stimuli, but good and evil are not.
You keep making empirical claims without ever providing a shred of evidence, coherent logical reasoning, or any other type of validation other than claiming (utterly imprecisely) that I can’t counter it. In any university anywhere in the world I would be declared the winner of the debate.
If good and evil are absolute, how can you measure them?
Arguments so far-
Gap theory-I gave it up.
Inconsistencies-You gave it up.
Five proofs-In progress.
Logical proof-I progress.
You have not countered any of my arguments except for the Gap one.
He shut down the five proofs. Did you not read the long post?
Read 79.1
It doesn’t particularly convince me, but I suppose FS has to prove that God does not exist independent of time for that not to work… Although you sort of have to prove yourself before it works, as FS pointed out in the following post.
I’m proving the existence of a God independent of time.
Where?
The whole time.
God is defined as a being with absolute power.
If God is perfect==>God does exist.
True.
If God does not exist==>God is not perfect.
True.
Wait-So there is an imperfect God. Wow. Never knew. At least, according to you there is. But wait-no-I have just proven atheism logically inconsistent. Cool
No, if God does not exist, God does not exist. Do you even know what logic is? The Christian claims god is omnipotent and omniscient. This cannot be, ergo the Christian god is a logical impossibility.
If you’re gonna play by the rules of logic, you’re going to have to brush up on it again.
For the record, how old are you, what religious upbringing have you had, and what’s your IQ? Nothing personal, I just like to get a sense of who I’m arguing with. It helps my overall perception of the human race.
Let me guide you through my argument.
If A, then B. If A is false, the statement is true.
From if A, then B, we know if not B, then not A.
That is logic.
Do you believe in free will?
I am 13 and have an Orthodox Jewish upbringing.
That’s not logic. It would have to be a reflexive property: if A=B, then B=A, but if A/=B then B/=A. What you put doesn’t work.
One of the rules of logic is that if A, then B is true, then if not B, then not A is true.
Here-if cheesecakes taste bad, I won’t eat them, however, if I won’t eat cheesecakes, it doesn’t mean they taste bad.
No, the contrapositive would be if you eat cheesecakes, then those cheesecakes taste good.
Like I said, it has to be reflexive, not if, then, or else it doesn’t work like I showed you.
No. You used this.
If A, then B.
If B, then A.
The contrapositive is this.
If A, then B.
If not B, then not A.
But that doesn’t work. Understand, please, you are using the wrong property.
Like I said in 81.1.1, it has to be reflexive.
Perhaps somebody can explain the way these properties work better then me. Elias? GAPAs? Someone with a background in math?
If you don’t know what a contrapositive is, look it up on Google. And yes, my 20-year-old brother is majoring in math at University of Chicago and he’s the one who taught me logic. I am not using the Reflexive Property at all since I am using if-then statements. You have not said anything relevant to my proof so far. Thus, it goes unchallenged.
If you are not reading this sentence then I have not written it.
Is that not true?
Now, we have established the contrapositive and the fact that if A is false, the statement is true. Good.
God, this argument is nothing but NO U. NO U. NO U.
It doesn’t matter who taught it to you. That’s a logical fallacy and it has nothing to do with this argument, neither should it effect it in any way.
I know what a contrapositive is, it just doesn’t work with an if, then statement as proved by the cheesecake analogy.
In the cheesecake analogy, you used the converse, not the contrapositive. You obviously have no idea what a contrapositive is. That or you’re not really thinking. What do you think a contrapositive is?
Yes, I understand that it is possible for if not B then not A, but it is ALSO possible for if not B, then still A.
Even if I’m wrong about this, I certainly have irritated you to the point of being incredibly rude about your argument.
I was a math major and took courses in advanced logic and the foundations of mathematics, but I don’t think I could provide much help in untangling the web of confusion that this thread has become.
Sorry gimanator, but cromwell is right on the types of logic, at least, although I do not find it accurate in supporting en’s statements and disagree with them.
Statements that are true:
If A then B
If not A then Not B
Statements that are not true:
If B then A
…there was a 4th but it’s late and been a while since I took geometry. I have much more to say on the subject of atheism, but I am tired in more ways than one.
I understand that, but, is not this also true?
If A, then B
If not B, then still A. Hence, the cheesecake analogy.
The contrapositive works like this:
If “A implies B” is a true statement, then “not-B implies not-A” is also a true statement, always. Example: “If you are human, then you are a mammal” (human implies mammal) — true. Contrapositive: “If you are not a mammal, then you are not human” (not-mammal implies not-human) — also true.
Jadestone’s “if not-A then not-B” doesn’t necessarily follow. “If you are not human, then you are not a mammal” — no, because you might be a horse or a cow or a rat or another mammal. Of course, you might also be a bird or a fish or an amoeba, in which case it would be true that you were both nonhuman and nonmammalian, but it’s not necessarily true. The best you can say is “if not-A then possibly not-B.” For similar reasons, gimanator’s “if not-A, then still B” doesn’t necessarily follow, either.
I hope that helps. Honestly, though, I don’t think that formal logic is going to help you find out much about either God or godlessness.
oh. OK then. I didn’t think it would, but thank you for clarifying.
Let’s use Robert’s example.
You know the contrapositive and the implication. If you make both negative, it’s the inverse, if you just switch them around, then it’s the converse. If either the inverse or the converse is true, the other is true, and it’s the same for falsity. Now there’s the contradiction, which is. in this case, ‘there is a human who is not a mammal’. In my statement, it would be ‘there is a perfect God which does not exist’. Which is not only a paradox, but also false.
That’s the converse.
That’s called the contrapositive.
Alright, I’ll walk you through Elias’s argument.
If god is omniscient, he knows what he is going to do in the future. However, that means that he cannot change what he will do. Therefore, he is not omnipotent. If he changes what he does, he is not omniscient.
It’s such a worthless argument, just like yours is.
God exists independent of time.
Smelliness is abstract. Many people seem to find perfume delightful. I find it horrifying because it smells wrong/bad to me. Maybe my nose is uncultured.
The perception of smelliness varies. That does not make it abstract.
I realize that my position has been completely been taken over by cromwell. I can’t keep up with this if I’m working every day. I’ll just watch where this goes, but it seems to follow a pattern…
cromwell poses some sort of proof to prove that God is real
FS identifies the fallacy
cromwell either a)tries to argue his point further until he gets to b or just goes straight to b)see the top step.
81-Goodness, I don’t even know where I could find my IQ…
So. I really think that, for the sake of debates (and my hair staying in my head, which would be very good, as I like my hair), everyone should read up on religion if they don’t know much about it. I have spent time doing this, but I still am fully aware that there is much I don’t know. (Meaning that I can’t always refute ignorant statements
)
I just can’t begin to respond to anything on this thread. I’d undoubtedly end up with a post that would end up being burned up before reaching the moderation page. (From the flames.)
Well. I approve of Elias. He’s one of the few people who have made logical arguments — or copied very good ones.
Please. For the sake of sanity, read up on what you’re talking about!
Elias, if we’re going to keep discussing this, I think we should put out some common ground by defining what exactly “God” is. What I’m going on, and what I think cromwell is going on, has been defined by St. Anselm as a being greater than which nothing can be conceived. Now, St. Anselm thought of the statement “God exists” as self-evident. Okay, so think of a thing that is greater than anything else that could exist. It is completely impossible to think of something greater than this thing. Okay, so this thing exists in your conception of it, correct? By this, I mean that it exists as a hypothetical object. Okay. So, there exists hypothetically a thing that is greater than anything else that could hypothetically exist. But would not a thing that exists both in reality and in the hypothetical realm be greater than that which exists only in the hypothetical realm? Yes, which means that this thing must exist both hypothetically and actually.
I agree with you that good and evil are not abstract. What I think cromwell meant was that smelliness is a physical attribute while good and evil are spiritual attributes. There is nothing about the atoms and compounds that made up Hitler or Gandhi that made them good or evil; their goodness and evilness are spiritual, or moral, not physical. Because of this, Dawkins’ metaphor about a perfectly smelly being does not apply to the concept of a god, which is a purely spiritual being.
You say, “Newton’s laws work the way they do because the world exists in a certain way.” I completely agree with this; only an idiot would argue against science. However, why does the world exist in this certain way? Obviously you can’t say that it exists how it does because it exists how it does. That’s an impossible paradigm. Going back to Aquinas’ proofs, there must be something that caused the world to exist how it does–it would be ridiculous to assume the world just spontaneously began existing by itself. Obviously, our universe does have a beginning–the Big Bang. And, of course, there existed a great lot before the Big Bang, depending on your opinions of physics. In any case, our universe used to be a singularity, and that had to come from somewhere. But where? That’s the question. You could keep going and saying it’s just a cycle that goes back, but our world, both in our universe and out, had to have a beginning. Therefore, it logically follows that, at one time, the world did not exist. Since the world could not have just begun existing when there had existed nothing, there must be something outside of our world to create it. Our world contains all the various dimensions, including the fourth dimension, which is time. Since there existed something outside of the world that created the world (and its dimensions), this thing must have existed outside of time. This is all quite obvious. Furthermore, since this thing exists outside of time, it is not limited to our common problems concerning beginning and ending. This thing can quite easily have always existed because it is not confined to space-time. You continue saying that there is no scientific proof for God. This is simply because he does not exist in our world of space and time, and therefore cannot be proven by these things to which he is not limited. Therefore he can only be proven by logic and reason, which are also nonphysical. Oh, that reminds me: how can one prove logic? Would not logic be needed to prove logic? Wouldn’t that be impossible?
I hate to say it, but, like cromwell, you just tried to prove something that was already proved wrong by FS. It’s the circling that needs to be terminated by something so that we can comprehend it-God.
The St. Anselm argument and the Descartes one are both utterly ridiculous and have been rebutted by such people as Kant and Aquinas. Also, that’s not my definition of God.
Yes, I was just citing the Anselm one for reference. And when did I mention Descartes?
You didn’t. I can just foresee that that will probably happen.
How is it impossible that things exist how they do because they exist how they do? Things do exist how they do because they exist how they do. From a Christian’s point of view, God exists. Why does God exist? Because he does. See what I mean? Don’t tell me God created enself (why should God be male? Sexism, sexism), because it is impossible to create yourself.
Oh, wait….I’m not getting caught up in this. Goodbye, everyone. Don’t involve me. I don’t want to argue with you at all, Piggy, I’m just pointing something out.
That’s a fallacy in itself. Things can’t be because they are, and therefore it doesn’t work.
Okay. Explain to me why things can’t be because they are. Seriously, I want to see your argument.
The “impossible paradigm” you point out is not removed by inserting God into the equation, you merely postpone it by an entity. Your definition of God in this post is simply a name given to an ineffable force you conjure up to explain that which we cannot explain scientifically yet. There was a brilliant youtube cartoon somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it again.
As for proving logic, logic proves itself by working. You can use it and it will work. That’s proof. I can’t use prayer, it doesn’t work. No proof.
Have you prayed? If the answer is no, then how can you say that it doesn’t work if you have never tried it? That’s like saying that you hate broccoli but you have never eaten broccoli. And since millions of people have found answers to prayer, then how can you say that it doesn’t work?
Because praying doesn’t do anything unless you convince yourself it does, in which case it is simply a placebo. The effects or prayer were tested by Harvard University (ironically with support from the Templeton Foundation). The results are here:
Source: http://www. ahjonline .com/article/PIIS0002870305006496/abstract?browse_volume=151&issue_key=TOC%40%40JOURNALSNOSUPP%40YMHJ%400151%400004&issue_preview=no&select1=no&select1=no&vol=
“Abstract
Background
Intercessory prayer is widely believed to influence recovery from illness, but claims of benefits are not supported by well-controlled clinical trials. Prior studies have not addressed whether prayer itself or knowledge/certainty that prayer is being provided may influence outcome. We evaluated whether (1) receiving intercessory prayer or (2) being certain of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with uncomplicated recovery after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery.
Methods
Patients at 6 US hospitals were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups: 604 received intercessory prayer after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory prayer also after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; and 601 received intercessory prayer after being informed they would receive prayer. Intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days, starting the night before CABG. The primary outcome was presence of any complication within 30 days of CABG. Secondary outcomes were any major event and mortality.
Results
In the 2 groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not (relative risk 1.02, 95% CI 0.92-1.15). Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer (relative risk 1.14, 95% CI 1.02-1.28). Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups.
Conclusions
Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.”
So yeah, prayer doesn’t work. You know why? Because there’s no one there to hear you.
85-I’m ducking out BECAUSE I have no education in debate and little in theology. Do try to stay away from flames, though.
As for the omniscience/omnipotence “proof” that God cannot exist under that definition, you are forgetting that God exists outside of time. Therefore, he does not know something before he does it, simply because there is no “before” or “after”. Obviously this is difficult for us, being in space-time, to comprehend, but it is logically impossible for God to know what he does before, during, or after he does it, as he is outside of time. He is omnipotent–there is nothing that he cannot do. In many people’s eyes, God could know what he’s going to do and then do something different, but, since he exists outside of time, he had already known that he was going to do that different thing. It’s not a matter of God traveling through time–he exists completely independent of it. Therefore the omnipotence/omniscience “proof” is bunk.
How could he actually change his mind without the concept of time? It would all be one huge lump, with only one possible outcome ever existing.
Also, the argument of “We can’t understand him so he exists” is a little… not going to work out for me.
“[…] it is logically impossible for God to know what he does before, during, or after he does it, as he is outside of time. ”
I rest my case. XP
But I know. The omnipotence/omniscience is a load of crap. So is the argument that relies on perfection. It’s because they are both absolutely superficial.
However. For the sake of discussion.
“God could know what he’s going to do and then do something different, but, since he exists outside of time, he had already known that he was going to do that different thing. ”
In that case, he’s incapable of doing anything that he didn’t already know he was going to do.
He cannot do something that would surprise himself, in short.
Also, to disprove omnipotence: can your god create a rock that he cannot lift?
Aren’t these fun?
Total bull, but interesting. (Not really, I’m not sure why I’m wasting my time. Because people took the other one seriously, I think.)
He can do that. He can make a rock and not lift it. He cannot because he does not. There is no truth besides reality.
Okay, so you replied to that other thing that wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. Will you reply to the content, which is that your argument is very flawed?
Stop getting existential. You’ll go to hell for it.
It would always be possible for him to lift the rock, even if he chose not to. It is possible for me to flame you out. I am, however, choosing to take a more reasonable approach. Does that make it impossible for me to flame you? No. It just means that I didn’t.
It is impossible unless you do.
Unless there are alternate realities. XP
But no, that’s not true. I could burn down my house in 10 minutes. It is possible. It is also possible for me not to. Oh look, and I haven’t done either. Hmm. I think that I just may have proven you wrong.
Keep off the sarcasm, please. It can be interpreted as quite rude, though I hope it isn’t…
It is not possible if you do not. There may be alternate realities, but they would be created by quantum physics. You haven’t done either, but at any moment, you will not do both. Since time is subjective, and you cannot change what you did in the past, there is only one possible path. There aren’t alternate things that happened in the past.
Er? The hell? That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the future. Although, actually, in your opinion your god is out of time. Meaning there’s no future, true. But, as you seem to have overlooked, there’s no past either. God would, supposedly, be able to alter anything he wanted to. But he would have to know that he was going to, which would mean that he wouldn’t be able to do something he didn’t know about, etc.
Also. “and you cannot change what you did in the past”
A truly omnipotent being can do anything. Anything. Including things humans, theistic or not, can’t conceive. You know, the impossible to conceive argument, so much loved by theists? It works both ways.
This whole argument is pointless. It’s nothing but semantics, and makes absolutely no difference.
This whole argument meaning this one right here, not the rest of the thread. SFTDP
I said you cannot change what you did in the past.
Cromwell. How does that prove god’s being “out of time”?
That’s not what we’re arguing about, if you can call this an argument. This is really very pointless. Not because Glassboro is not up to par, but because the subject is not worth discussing.
Read the posts before you butt in.
Sorry, wrong thread of responses. The system is quite confusing.
Anyway, how would that prove God’s omnipotence? Omniscience and omnipotence are two mutually exclusive properties. Add goodness into the mix and how have a being that makes less sense than the 2000 presidential elections.
Those are not mutually exclusive, as you would see if you actually thought through that ridiculous argument. I do not see the need to explain the fallacies in that argument.
I’ll spell it out for you.
If God were omniscient, he would already know how your life will run out its course. Therefore, he already knows what, if any, interventions he will make. This leaves him without omnipotence.
See? Very clear.
(87) I’d say all parties have conducted themselves admirably thus far. The absence of vituperation is commendable — and allows the conversation to stay focused on substance.
Though, as a general observation, I would point out that it’s redundant to describe someone’s argument as “worthless” if you believe you’ve sufficiently demonstrated that it is so.
I never said anything of the sort.
Sorry, gimanator, I didn’t mean to imply that you did. Stream of consciousness — then I forgot I’d started out by addressing your comment. I do beg your pardon.
It’s no problem. I understand.
Are we going to use Descartes next? I like that, it’s fun to refute.
I’m an atheist, but I’m a secular humanist. So I think that it really doesn’t matter what you think as long as it doesn’t affect me. But, you’re wasting time on this when we could be talking about something important, or arguing/talking about something fun, instead of bashing together the twin brick walls of Elias’ and cromwell’s belief/lack thereof.
78- It’s an interesting idea. I’ve gone to Jewish summer camps and Girl Scout camps that say grace and suchlike, and a camp with a respite from that would be a good thing. But it also seems like it should be very unnecessary. For the past few years, I’ve gone to band camp. There is no grace said there, and all the activities are secular.
Jinx!
Or at least kind of. See 86.2.1.1.
I missed this before. You say you’re a secular humanist, so you say it doesn’t matter what beliefs people have as long as they don’t affect you.
Well, they do affect you.
The most powerful country in the world has leaders that are determined by their faith in imaginary friends. An atheist would never get elected. This affects you, either as a citizen of that country or as a citizen of any other country, because when the US gets a cold, the whole world sneezes.
Intense belief can lead people to commit acts of terrible, irrational violence. Moderate belief demands respect for belief, and thus provides a cover and an excuse for more “extreme” beliefs. This affects you as a potential victim of religiously motivated violence.
Belief and faith are factors counterproductive to knowledge, learning and progress. The Church has always opposed science, and faith itself is defined as belief in that for which there is no evidence. This affects you as a citizen of a world where people who are against progress and educational growth are the majority.
Enough for ya?
Faith is not defined as belief without evidence. The Catholic Church has many high-ranking officers who believe in evolution, and not all people who are religious are extremists. And only extremists provide cover for extremists. Come on. Just stop saying that belief is evil. It created our society. If you believe that it’s evil, you’re a hypocrite.
1. “Faith: Firm belief without logical proof” – The Oxford Compact English Dictionary. Of course the precise wording will vary from edition to edition, but that is the definition of faith, and it is accepted by theologians and philosophers alike.
2. I am aware that many Catholic officials believe in evolution. Just because you have faith that leads you to believe in some things that don’t have evidence or that go against evidence does not mean that you believe in everything that does not have evidence or goes against evidence. Logical fail.
3. Extremists still exist because society has an irrational respect for religion. This respect only exists because moderate religious people demand it. Thus, they are providing respect for religion that is a cover for extremists.
4. Our society was not created by religious beliefs. In fact, the values we hold so dear to our modern, civilized world emerged during the enlightenment, a philosophical movement characterized by its condemnation of traditional religious values and an embrace of secular, humanitarian values. Religion, if anything, has been a constant source of conflict where none existed otherwise (Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. And that’s only the ‘b’s). Religion provides a justification for sexual violence in Islam, homicidal “pro-life” murders in the US, and child abuse everywhere.
1. “Strong belief in God based on spiritual apprehension” Abridged OED
2. Okay. I agree with that, though I don’t understand the last two words there.
3. That is absolutely ridiculous.
4. It was. Those ideas are rooted in the Bible. Maybe you could try reading the whole thing, not just excerpts sometime. Great book. And the ‘justification’ is accepted by few besides the perpetrators.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the church was what made the nomadic tribes form civilizations. Learn some history.
Your arrogance is astounding.
1. Read all the definitions. And include all the words in the definitions.
2. It means you made an incorrect logical analogy.
3. How is it ridiculous? Please elaborate a response instead of just dismissing it. My opinion is quite diffused among political and philosophical circles.
4. Yes, civilizations that were rife with injustice, corruption, disease and evil. You as a Jew should appreciate most of all the negative influence of religion on Medieval societies. Jesus may have preached tolerance and goodwill, but he also preached violence in some cases. In addition, the old testament is rife with horrific laws that openly condone genocide, murder, rape, slavery, etc. I have read the Bible. Far too many times. As for the justification being accepted by the perpetrators, well, that’s all it needs, doesn’t it?
The role of the Church in the stabilization of nomadic Germanic tribes after the fall of Rome is greatly overstated here. It is true that monasteries and churches provide social gathering points, but beyond that it was simple social evolution that ran its course.
Please, no personal attacks.
1. I did.
2. I didn’t, but no use arguing.
3. Really? Okay. Moderates do not think it is okay to commit violence in the name of religion, and instead of just insulting fait in general, try to do something about it.
4. If they weren’t made by religion, they would have been much worse. Look at the U.S.S.R.
‘the old testament is rife with horrific laws that openly condone genocide, murder, rape, slavery, etc’
Not at all true. At all. What translation do you use?!
It is not overstated at all! It would have taken much longer.
1. Whatever, it’s part of the definition no matter what.
2. Yeah, you did, and I pointed it out to you, but no use arguing.
3. You’re not understanding me. Moderates do not think it’s okay to commit violence, agreed. But they do demand respect for religious faith. Respect which is extended to extremists.
4. Oh, yes, the old “look at what atheist regimes did!” First of all, the USSR was not run based on atheist philosophies, they were run based on a fascistic distortion of communist theories. As for the old Testament, have you ever read Leviticus? What about the stories about the murders of the middle eastern tribes who were NOT god’s chosen people? What about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah? The most moral man in the city offers his virgin daughter up for gang rape.
I’m not going to argue history here. The main point is is that society as we know it today rests on certain values that were developed by enlightenment philosophers who recognized the necessity to detach themselves from religion in order to find relatively just and moral ideas. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, De Sade, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin… All anti-religious, and probably atheist.
1.2.
3. That respect is not extended to extremists except by themselves.
4. Point taken about the USSR. I have read Leviticus, yes, what about it? The ‘murders’ were to take over the land. He offered his daughter because or else the people were going to kill his guest.
They got those ideas from the Bible.
3. WRONG. When Salman Rushdie had to flee his country for writing a work of fiction, a horde of journalists and politicians sprang to defend the Muslims calling for his head because he “offended their religious sensibilities.” Creationists are able to muscle out Darwinian evolution because we must “respect religious beliefs”. 50 year old Jewish priests are allowed to suck on baby’s penises and then mutilate them because it’s a religious tradition that demands respect.
4. Leviticus is full of absurd little rules about how to conduct business, sex, marriage, rituals, etc. S&G: Lot deliberately offered his own daughter without any qualms to be raped rather than give up his guests. Great moral example. The murders (which are described as such, and do not merit apostrophes) were to take land, so what? Is that a good example? It’s horrific and immoral, and no one should be using it as a guide to morality.
5. Before you make incorrect generalizing statements about the philosophical works of an entire movement I suggest you familiarize yourself with their works first. That said, all of these authors explicitly condemned the Bible, and developed their ideas out of independent philosophizing. Voltaire, who used to sign everything he wrote with “crush the infamous thing [religion]!” would be turning over in his grave to hear what you’re saying.
3. I don’t know the facts about Rushdie. Creationism is not extremism. And circumcision is proven to be good for you.
4. You are just making generalizations and insulting it mindlessly. You certainly did not read the Bible, or at least did not understand it. And would murder be better? Those were not murders, they were wars. It is not horrific and immoral. Your argument here is absolutely sickening. Please don’t make sweeping generalizations that are based on misunderstandings. You do not know anything about the Bible.
5. They didn’t like some parts and specifically the belief in God, but many things they do owe to the Bible.
3. Creationism is certainly a form of extremism. When religious beliefs are imposed on a general populace, that is extremism, not to mention due to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.
4. I certainly have read the Bible. I can furthermore provide you with a website that contains cross-references to various categories in the Bible- family values, injustices, violence, sexuality, etc. skepticsannotatedbible. com. It also contains the entire Koran and book of Mormon. I’m sorry if you find it disturbing when someone questions the integrity of your holy book, but it does indeed contain horrific examples of condoned violence. Let’s try this one (excerpt from Christopher Hitchen’s “God is not Great”. I’m not using the Bible because Hitchens provides an explanation along with the story):
“Seventy-four of the elders, including Moses and Aaron, then meet god face-to-face. Several whole chapters are given over to the minutest stipulations about the lavish, immense ceremonies of sacrifice and propitiation that the Lord expects of his newly adopted people, but this all ends in tears and with collapsing scenery to boot: Moses returns from his private session on the mountaintop to discover that the effect of a close encounter with god has worn off, at least on Aaron, and that the children of Israel have made an idol out of their jewelry and trinkets. At this, he impetuously smashes the two Sinai tablets (which appear therefore to have been man-made and not god-made, and which have to be redone hastily in a later chapter) and orders the following:
“‘Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.’
And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses, and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.’
A small number when compared to the Egyptian infants already massacred by god in order for things to have proceeded even this far, but it helps to make the case for “antitheism.” By this I mean the view that we ought to be glad that none of the religious myths has any truth to it, or in it. The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.”
By the way, are you saying that wars are not horrific and immoral?
5. What things? Go on. Give me examples. You’ll only be able to come up with Christ’s teachings of forgiveness, and examples of such moral teachings exist in literature in much more elaborate and moral forms in times long before Jesus.
Monasteries preserved and copied writings during the Dark Ages. Also, many of the civilizations that sprang up had to have approval from the Catholic Church. Charlemagne was crowned by the pope. The guy who started the Holy Roman Empire was favored by the pope. Also, while many small, feudal states existed throughout Europe without a king or in a definite nation, the Church was THE CENTRAL AUTHORITY during it all. The Church played an influential part in politics (many council had representatives from the Church. In Spain, bishops owned land, commanded armies, and had influence with the king), wars (the Crusades!), and exploration (God, gold, and glory were the predominant reasons for people to go to the New World). Yes, yes, I know the Church could be quite corrupt at points and I’m not arguing in favor of that at all, but what I’m trying to prove is that the Church was extremely important in the development of societies after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was not simple social evolution, as you put it.
You misunderstand. I know my European history. You confusing correlation with causation. The Church managed to weasel its way into everything and gain authority, but it didn’t cause the social development. In fact, without the church’s stifling moral policing, technological advances would have been much faster. The only part of the Church that actually helped were the monasteries.
I can’t do anything about this, so I try not to think about it. (sometimes I enter debates on religion, when I think it will help change someone’s mind, but not this-you’re both arguing to prove yourself right, not to learn about other perspectives).
I appreciate the eloquence of your post, though, and will keep it in mind.
I could go on. The purpose for entering religious debates is not to change the other person’s mind, for faith creates a near impenetrable barrier to reason and rationality, but to show the audience that your arguments are stronger and that your position is more valid. Christopher Hitchens doesn’t go rip out William Lane Craig’s philosophical throat because he thinks he can change Craig’s mind, but because he knows he can expose Craig’s arguments as the rubbish they are and that people in the audience will notice that and learn from it.
Ahem. “faith creates a near impenetrable barrier to reason and rationality” isn’t very nice in the first place, but ignoring that, I’ll continue.
Let’s face it. There is almost no point with these debates. You’re arguing with people who: 1) you don’t know, and 2) won’t change their minds.
So, what’s the point in beating someone you might never meet?
I don’t have to be “nice” as long as I don’t directly insult. It’s true, faith does have that effect.
I just said that the important thing isn’t to convince the people I’m arguing against, but the people who are somewhere on the border in the sidelines watching.
Oh and you most certainly can do something about it. Join an organization. Campaign. Be an activist. I’ve volunteered for both the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (a charity) and the Sam Harris Reason Project (a political campaign to spread secular values and humanitarian thought throughout less ethically developed reasons, i.e. the Middle East and the American South). Join the Out Campaign. Buy a t-shirt and help raise awareness for atheism. Atheists are the fastest growing minority group in the US, with 16% of the population being atheist. That’s more than Jews and Homosexuals put together. And yet, atheists are the most discriminated group in America. You can do something, and if you treasure your humanist values you will take action.
Sorry to sound like a campaign advertiser here, but really, apathy isn’t going to get us anywhere.
But this is fun…And it would be Elias’s, Glassboro’s, and cromwell’s if I had the energy to respond/Elias didn’t beat me. I’ll be partially over jetlag and loss of sleep tomorrow. Maybe I’ll do better then.
Who disagrees with these?
Truth table for ‘If A, then B’.
A\B-0-1
0—-1-1
1—-0-1
1 is true, 0 is false.
Who disagrees with the contrapositive?
see the argument in 81.1 and further down to see what he’s talking about…
Do you agree with the truth table?
I do not disagree with the truth table, necessarily.
However, it has no place in a religious debate. You have said yourself that your god is beyond human understanding. However, I have only seen that apply when it is to your advantage. This is outrageously hypocritical. Your argument is simple semantics, relying on the definition of “perfect”. Are you basing a proof of the existence of your god upon one 7-letter duo-syllabic word? I certainly hope not. I can’t imagine anyone being that deluded…
I am never going to take that argument seriously. I don’t think that anyone else will, unless they happen to be on the same side, and either foolish enough to believe it, or dishonourable enough to go ahead and use it anyway.
I did not say he was beyond understanding. Many phrases can be substituted, such as ‘independent of time’, ‘compassionate’, etc.
Is this statement true?
God is omniscient=>God exists.
88.1- Yes, that’s exactly my point–he can’t change his mind. And I never even insinuated he exists because we can’t understand him–I was only saying that it’s a difficult concept to understand.
89.1- You did more or less call a few of my arguments worthless by saying it was already “proved wrong by FS,” as well as in a few other spots. From now on, just try not to say something has been completely and irrefutable disproven just because a teenager cited a book that argued against that something. Philosophers have been debating these things for millenia–for every proof there is a disproof, and for every disproof there is a proof.
As for Descartes, I very much disagree with that philosophy. Everything I’ve said, I’ve meant for my perspective of “reality”. In a larger picture of my philosophy, I don’t believe anything can be proven to exist. I may not exist. All of you may not exist. In reality, God may not exist. Whenever I say something exists or doesn’t exist, I’m saying it exists through my perspective, which is the only way I have of seeing things. I may be imagining myself, as contradictory as that is. For those of you that have read the HG2G trilogy, I’m rather similar to the man who controls the universe.
So, unless anyone can prove I exist, this conversation is all futile anyway. Maybe. *is aggravatingly existential*
There’s a distinct difference in tenor, however, between judging something is proven wrong and injecting adjectives like “worthless” and “dishonourable” into the debate.
Of course it’s futile! I doubt anyone’s point of view will be changed at all..
I just try to have fun with it. Weeee!
No, philosophers rarely debate religious topics if not for the sake of argument. Philosophers realize that faith has no place in how we know, and how logic works, because faith makes people immune to logic. Theologians may have debated it for centuries, but they never get beyond refining Aquinas’ proofs and St. Anselm’s ontological argument (which is also a wonderful pile of poop, Hume, Kant, and, more recently, Mackie and Russell, have all shattered it- that is, assuming you accept the rules of logic). That said, theology is quite like the textile study of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
As for the perceived futility, in epistemology we recognize that we may not exist and cannot be sure of our humanity, however we ignore this doubt except when thinking about this very problem. It’s counter-productive just gets in the way of life. Because of this, it is defined an “irrational doubt”, which is very fun to debate, but gets you nowhere. Live based on the assumption that you do in fact exist as you perceive yourself to. Oh, and you might want to read up on what existentialism actually is. You’ve got the right country, but Sartre and Camus are definitely more fun to read than Descartes.
A. It may make some immune to logic, but so does politics.
B. If you accept the rules of logic, take a look at my argument.
C. Optical illusions fool us. Should we believe what we think is there? Is it an irrational doubt to think that when you look at those optical illusions, what’s there is not what you see?
You’re taking what I say and skewing it, demonstrating an incomplete understanding of my arguments.
A: The nature of faith is such that by definition it relies on accepting statements without or in spite of evidence. Such acceptance makes you immune to logic.
B: Your argument is incorrect and flawed through a bad use of logic, as people have already pointed out.
C: Optical illusions fool us, indeed. It is not irrational to doubt optical illusions. However, when an item retains its characteristics despite intense probing, and peer recognition is aligned with your perception, it is no longer rational to doubt what your senses tell you.
Actually, there was a misunderstanding about the contrapositive there, so it looks like we’re all okay now about that. Now I agree that it is best to mostly believe our senses. I just wanted to see what you would say about that.
A–But what if the logic agrees with the evidence? Faith is in the heart AND the head, and you can’t have faith without both.
What do you mean? Logic usually does agree with evidence, if that actually means anything. They’re two different fields of epistemology, rationalism and empiricism.
I know this conversation is long over, but here:
“Le couer a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.”
Translated:
“The heart has its reasons that the mind knows not of,” or something along those lines.
Your point being? That quote indicates the discrepancy between emotion based thinking and rationalism based thinking. That doesn’t mean that emotion based thinking is as valid, or as accurate. In fact, emotions will cloud judgement and lead you to incorrect conclusions more often than not.
I believe we are assuming here that existentialism doesn’t matter. And as for Descartes, this is his proof.
I can imagine a perfect being.
Existence is better than nonexistence.
God must exist.
Of course, that doesn’t work. Existence is not a property.
Just for the record, here is Douglas Gasking.
The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable.
The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being — namely, one who created everything while not existing.
Therefore, God does not exist.
But then God did not create the world, and that premise is worthless anyway.
The true fallacy with the ontological argument is assuming that existence is inherently better than nonexistence, apart from Russell’s point that “there isn’t a direct link between what we think and what exists.” I’m inclined to believe that Descartes recognized the silliness of the ontological argument, but included it nevertheless because anyone who didn’t mention God in some positive way in their work in that period was killed.
cromwell, have you read The God Delusion? Everything I’ve read that you’ve brought up has been covered very well in it.
You only think that because you are already atheist.
Just as you only think that because you are already religious.
Yes, but I am willing to think through your arguments and not just dismiss them. Do you disagree with this?
God is omniscient==>>God exists.
What does ==>> mean?
If-then statement.
If God is omniscient, then God exists.
How is that different from saying “if unicorns are horned, then unicorns exist”?
Let’s look at that then [I’m going to change horned to white in order to keep the definition of unicorn].
If unicorns do not exist, they are not white.
That’s okay. Any unicorns that exist are not white. But none exist. But if you say that God is not omniscient, he has to exist.
I hate to ruin this because this seems such a perfect proof. But here’s where I went wrong. The opposite of ‘God is omniscient’ is ‘There is no God that is omniscient.
No, you can say that the God you imagine is omniscient. Imaging something does not make it so, regardless of what properties you imagine it to have.
Furthermore, the opposite of “God is omniscient” is “God is not omniscient”. I repeat, there is no direct link between the property of omniscience and the existence of the entity that you attribute said property too.
That is not the opposite. If it was, then my proof would work. And since you seem to know absolutely nothing about logic, you might as well give it up. I did not say in my original statement if the God I imagine is omniscient. Face it. I made an argument that you could not refute.
Your “argument” is a rambling, incoherent jumble of logical mistakes, baseless assumptions and misleading skewerings. Try to construct a coherent and well-formed post with your argument.
Furthermore, you obviously don’t read my posts thoroughly, or if you do, you ignore certain parts of them. And don’t tell me I know nothing about logic. I study epistemology, FFS!
Your argument is just attacking not my points, but my very argument. I am saying things quite clearly, it is just that you don’t read my posts or just can’t understand them. Your basic argument is that mine ‘doesn’t sound right’ and what’s more, you assume that any argument made by me is poorly built, skewed, wrong, and that your next post disproves it even if it does no such thing.
However hard it is to decode your nonsensical posts, I still read them. I think we should just stop arguing.
Wait, now it’s getting personal. Your smearing my arguing. I don’t say “it doesn’t sound right”, I point out logical fallacies and reinforce them. My posts are not difficult to decode, my writing is concise and clear. I don’t assume that anything you say is wrong, and I grant your arguments the recognition of taking time to write far more exhaustive replies than you do as answers.
I think you’ve realized that you’re losing but your pride won’t let you admit defeat. I’d agree to stop arguing this particular line of atheism IF AND ONLY IF the GAPAs will fulfill the function of moderators as if it were a formal debate and decide a winner based on argumentative skills rather than personal opinion.
PS: Dammit, I just realized there’s been a typo in post 96.1.1.1.2. It should be “of course I disagree”, not “of course I agree”.
[‘Tis so amended. –Admin.]
‘Your “argument†is a rambling, incoherent jumble of logical mistakes, baseless assumptions and misleading skewerings’
Ahem. You are accusing me of that?
And as I’m sure you know, in the statement ‘if a, the b’, if a is false, the statement is true. So that statement would be true. The ‘logical fallacies’ you ‘point out’ are actually perfectly fine. And the reason I give your argument rather brief replies is because most of your points aren’t worth it.
It’s not that I’m losing and my pride is making me not say that, it’s that you made up your mind, and you really don’t want to change your mind. I realize that, so we might as well stop arguing. And the gapas will most likely do no such thing.
“in the statement ‘if a, the b’, if a is false, the statement is true. So that statement would be true.”
What does this mean? “If it’s true, it’s true?” You’re making assumptions without backing them up. Either it’s a severe case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, or you’re just not explaining yourself well at all. You have never explained your logical statements, nor walked through them step by step. You absolutely need to back up your claims with some sort of reasoning. Simply making these assumptions doesn’t cut it.
Anyway, I respect the laws of science and logic, and if there were compelling arguments in favour of God’s existence I would change my mind, as would most of the atheist community. If Jesus came back, for example. Or if telescopes saw God.
I meant ‘then B’, if that’s what you’re wondering.
Say we have the statement-
If the sky is not blue, then the sky is blue.
According to the rules of logic, this is correct. If the first statement is false (or you consider it to be), the whole thing is true. That’s one of the rules of logic. Therefore, we have-
If God is omniscient, then God exists.
Although there is no relation between the statements, this is true because you do not consider God to be omniscient.
That makes no sense at all. Let’s take it step it by step.
1. If the sky is not blue, then the sky is blue.
What? Your first assumption is that the sky is blue. You cannot derive an opposite conclusion from that first assumption. The statement is false.
2. If we consider “If the sky is not blue” to be false, then we would have:
“If the sky is blue, then the sky is blue.”
Yes, this is correct according to logic. So? It’s two different initial assumptions with no relationship between them.
3. “If God is omniscient, then God exists”
I see what you’re getting at. You’re labouring under the misapprehension that the initial assumption of the statement is variable. By your logic, “if we assume the first statement (God is omniscient) to be false, then the entire thing is true”; because you’re making an analogy with “If the sky is blue, then the sky is blue.” However, you cannot change the first assumption in the statement at will. Either the sky is blue, or it is not. Either God is omniscient, or he is not. A further mistake you make, however, is by assuming that there exists the same type of cause and effect relationship between omniscience and existence than there does between blue and blue.
Put in Venn diagrams, it would look something like this: The sky is blue and the sky is blue would be two circles right on top of each other, because they are defining the same property of the same thing. Omniscience and existence would be two circles completely separate of one another. No overlap, no contact exists unless you insert a third second assumption after the first one.
If the first is false, the rest does not matter. At all. Look it up on Google if you have too. It does not matter. Why? This is why. Pay attention (though I’m sure you will).
If A, then B. Okay. You can only draw a conclusion from this without using the contrapositive and such is if A is true. If A is not true, then nothing matters, because no conclusion results. Now do you agree with the statement, “God is omniscient.”?
Yes, if the initial assumption is false, then the derived consequences are also false. That is basic logic. But what does that have to do with “God is omniscient”?
That statement would be false to you, since God does not exist. Thus, the statement ‘if God is omniscient, then God exists’ would be true.
No, because (for the umpteenth time) there is no logical connection between omniscience and existence. Here’s an example:
“If heffalumps were pink, they would exist”
Being pink does not make them exist. Being omniscient does not make him exist.
You’re trying to use a perversion of logic to say that because I don’t think God is omniscient (because I don’t believe in God), the assumption of the incorrect statement “God is omniscient, therefore he exists” is false, thus making the actual statement in itself true? Wow, you’ve really argued yourself into a conundrum. Too bad it’s a load of bollocks. You can’t use the two statements together as if they were one logical assumption. We can talk about this later once you’ve read up on your theory of knowledge.
The statement is true no matter what you say. There are no ‘assumptions’ here. This statement does not say that God exists. It says that he would if he were omniscient. and your heffalump statement is quite true actually. But since heffalumps are not pink, they do not exist. That statement is true. Seriously, look it up on Google if you don’t know.
GAPAs, can you back me up here?
Robert already posted something in regard to this. “How is that different from saying “if unicorns are horned, then unicorns existâ€?”
Again, you fail to explain why a property like omniscience or pinkness would be a logical reason for existence.
BTW, I googled “if god is omniscient, he exists” and got pages of articles on how an omniscient god can not exist. You know what I think? I think you read an article or an essay somewhere, didn’t understand it completely, thought you did anyway enough to argue the theist case, because the atheists are all wrong anyway, and are now struggling for air.
No, I meant Google the rule about if A is false, the statement is true. I actually made this argument up. This may seem to be a novel idea, but people actually do it. But anyway, the statement
If God is omniscient, then God exists.
Is true because, according to you, God does not exist and is therefore not omniscient. But look at the statement closely. This does not prove existence of God because according to the statement, God only exist if he is omniscient, which you do not agree with.
Oh. My. God. Are you serious?
God not existing would certainly mean that he is not omniscient, granted, for how can a nonexistent thing be anything? However, your huge, gigantic, gaping, black hole of a mistake here is that you assume the exact inverse of the statement to work.
God does not exist => causes => God to not be omniscient or anything else.
God being omniscient =/=> does NOT cause =/> God to exist.
That you fail to see the inanity of this “logic” is beyond me.
I know that!! I am not saying that that results, I am saying that that is a true statement, not that the second part follows from the first.
Now that we have established that my statement is true, let’s look at the contrapositive.
If God exists, then he is omniscient.
The contrapositive of this is:
If God does not exist, then he is not omniscient.
According to Wikipedia, “One statement is the contrapositive of the other just when its antecedent is the negated consequent of the other, and vice-versa.”
How can he be not omniscient if he doesn’t exist?
If he doesn’t exist, he’s not anything. Not omnipotent, not omniscient, not good, not ANYTHING.
But how can you say something is not anything unless it exists? If he’s not omniscient, then that implies that he exists. Something nonexistent can’t have properties except imagined ones. But here it actually is a real property. How is that possible?
It’s not a property but an absence of a property (I just wrote this somewhere else). If something does not exist, it doesn’t have any properties. You can say “IF god WERE to exist, then he WOULD be omniscient.” But being “Not-omniscient is not a property. It’s a lack of one.
Oh, God. Cromwell, please. I can see the problem in your argument and you refuse to admit it. I’d prefer this argument to be over, please.
I agree that my argument is flawed, but that is certainly not the way. Anyway, I am more than willing to end this argument as of now.
It means “therefore”.
First of all, I think through your arguments as well, and I only dismiss them once I have shown where they are incorrect.
Second of all, of course I disagree with “God is omniscient, therefore God exists”. What sort of logical leap is there from omniscience to existence?
Jinx.
I will explain. Let’s find the contrapositive. It is-
If God does not exist, then God is not omniscient.
Well, that’s a contradiction, but only if you do not believe in God. So, well, that’s inconsistent.
You’re engaging in a severe logical fallacy. For a basic reply, see Robert’s answer just above.
I recommend you think your logical leaps through a bit more before posting them. If it were that easy, don’t you think theologians would have already come up with that? No, because the logic is faulty.
Sorry, but you really had no idea what was wrong with my argument. You just thought it sounded kind of wrong. That’s the reply you’ve given to every argument.
Yeah, right, I thought it sounded kinda wrong. Sorry, but that’s just not true. Now you’re exaggerating. I’ve pointed out the logical inconsistencies with each of your post, you just ignore them.
So if you do believe in god, and god doesn’t exist, he’s still omniscient? Or am I not awake enough yet?
No, you’re awake. He’s just making a mistake.
Wow…that’s a pretty bad mistake. O.o Glad to know that I understood, though.
The people who believe in god assume he does exist. So then he is still whatever you believe him to be because I said ‘IF he does not exist’.
You’re saying that the people who believe in God imagine him to have certain qualities regardless of whether or not he actually does exist? Well, obviously, but this is no form of proof at all.
That’s not my proof. Have you actually been reading my posts?
Yes, and you’re doing a terrible job of explaining yourself.
Oh and reversing my own criticisms back at me won’t work.
Actually, I hadn’t read your post when I said that.
Not to mention Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and Dennett’s Breaking The Spell.
I haven’t been closely following this argument, because I tend to reside in the more peaceful parts of MuseBlog, but now that I check it out, I’ve just got one comment:
Wow. This is really, really bloody.
There’s no name-calling or bigotry on either side, which I am amazed at. All there is, is some of the most vicious logical attacks I’ve ever seen. You’re managing to angrily shout at one another while entirely remaining in the world of the logical debate.
I’ll either follow this thread eagerly, or slowly back away. I can’t decide.
Please join. I’d welcome another party.
As for the name calling, I’m trying very hard to avoid bringing up cromwell’s age as a valid form of ad hominem, but he’s not making it easy for me.
O-kay. Here’s my view on religion, which I think is different from both of yours. (Be prepared for a really, really long post.)
Let’s start out with my own personal religion, which is a mix of about seven different religions. I believe in reincarnation; that is, I believe that humans are reincarnated into humans again after they die. I believe this because it is what makes sense to me. There is no scientific proof of this. The only way to prove any view of the afterlife except the idea that our body rots is to prove the existence of the soul, which is a whole ‘nother argument.
I also believe in a weak form of karma, but only while one is alive. I do not believe that doing good deeds makes you have an easy next life, or the reverse. I do believe that when someone is mean to someone else, and then has someone be just as mean to them, it is fun to point at them and shout “Karma!”
I accept the theory of evolution as the best theory about the origins of life, and other scientific explanations in other fields of science as the best theories in those fields. In short, I believe in science. This does not, however, make it impossible to believe in God in my view. During the Scopes monkey trial, one expert said that God was just as truly and just as intimately involved in the gradual growth of a seed to a plant as He would be in creating the full-grown plant in a millisecond of time. This is also my view.
However, I do not believe in the God of the Bible. I do not accept the Bible as a guide to live by. I believe that if the God that people use as an excuse to hate others is real, he does not deserve to be worshipped. I also believe that if those aforementioned people who use God as an excuse to hate are right, and I will go to hell if I don’t agree with them, then I’d rather go to hell than spend eternity in heaven with them.
I believe in a unifying force throughout the world, generated by all living things. This force is sort of like that in Star Wars, except it does not involve Harrison Ford, and you cannot manipulate it. People love each other, and plants grow, and life happens. This is that force. There is no difference. The force is not an effect of this, or a cause. It is one and the same.
I was raised as a Reform Jew, and believe wholeheartedly in the importance of tradition. Judiasm has been a crucial part of my life and identity. I honestly don’t care if it makes me seem like a person who just takes EVERYTHING on faith. It’s not the teachings I love, it’s the moment when all of the family is sitting around the table, and Mom lights the Shabbat candle, and we say the prayer together. I don’t believe in it. I don’t have to. But it’s the love of family, tradition, and latkes that I’ll never give up.
I also believe in Discordianism, the religion of chaos. I do not believe that Eris, goddess of chaos, created the universe, unless it is in the intimately gradual way described above. However, I do believe wholeheartedly in this short explanation of Discordian values:
“One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice.
Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?
“O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!â€
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON’T SOUND WELL.
“I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.â€
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
“But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it.â€
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left the Polyfather stranded alone with his species.”
There! That’s my religion down! Now onto my views on atheism!
I have never met an atheist who used ens beliefs as an excuse to be immoral. The lack of belief in a God often only serves to make en more conscious of being moral. In fact, I’ve often thought that if less people believed in an afterlife they’d pay more attention to being good at this one.
However, I’ve seen wonderful things being done by religion. After my great-grandmother committed suicide, my grandmother used religion as a way to avoid becoming medically depressed herself. Many lead religious groups are also focused on making this universe a better place, and also accept scientific findings as good theories. As I said earlier, religion can be a wonderful way to get the family together and have traditions. Hate, prejudice, and bigotry, however, is something I cannot tolerate. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s what they teach you in kindergarten, for the love of God. I just wish more people would live by it.
Interesting. For the record, how old are you?
I’d like to focus on your last paragraph. It is true that religion provides comfort to many people in times of great personal suffering. I have experienced this with many of my friends. A few years ago, a 14 year old girl died of meningitis. Some of her friends became utterly religious, others abandoned religion altogether, with a “no God would ever let this happen”. However, religion is not the only thing that can offer this comfort, whereas it is the only thing that can provoke such irrational violence on the scale it does. Me, I try to find meaning in myself, my own actions, and my own existence. I am cynical, misanthropic, and narcissistic, and in my opinion there is nothing more important in this world than I. The greatest purpose for living I might have is to fulfill my own needs and existence.
Anyway, the main point than an anti-theist (me) would have is that while there will always be bad people doing bad things, and good people doing good things, the only way you will get a good person to do bad things (like fly themselves into a skyscraper) is through faith and religion. The bad effects of religion far outweigh the good.
Wait, you’re actually insinuating that Bin Laden is a good person, or that suicide bombings are in the Quran? Furthermore, if you are the most important person in your universe, why do you even care about anti-theism?
Bin Laden thinks he’s doing good. He’s convinced of it. He’s sure that by doing suicide runs he’s awarding himself a place in heaven and making the world a better place by freeing it of infidels. As for Jihad, the Koran is full of it. I could site pages of passages that explicitly give orders to murder nonbelievers.
I care about anti-theism because I care about the world. It’s my world, and I live in it. I have a strong sense of justice, and I want to make this a better place. I volunteer for secular atheist organizations. I donate money. This is the only world I have, the only life I have, and I’ll be dead before I see it ruined by religious stupidity.
Clap, Clap, Clap.
How about saying something concrete rather than childishly try to insult the entire debate and everyone involved?
Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not insulting anyone. I was complimenting Cat’s Eye for her post.
I take it back then, I misread the reply system.
(97.1) Discipline is
good for the soula useful skill to have in your arsenal.Ad hominem’s are only valid in certain cases, like when pointing out a personal prejudice in an argument. I’ve been trying to stick to standard debating rules throughout, it would be nice if we could have some sort of standard debating recognition system.
Mentioning my age is not a ‘valid’ arguing strategy.
Which is why I haven’t done it.
My comment wasn’t meant as criticism, by the way, if that wasn’t clear. I’ve just seen many people lose arguments because they succumbed to the temptation of ad hominem or simply lost their temper, so I was thinking about all the valuable practice you’re getting in staying calm….
I debate all the time, with various levels of theists. Ad hominems usually lose debates. Which is why it’s frustrating that there’s no sort of judge here.
Have you considered, Elias, that there are many, many, many more good, religious people than bad religious people? You hear much more about Osama bin Laden than you do about the Smiths (who are very good people) down the street. You say that the bad effects of religion outstrip the good ones. What are the bad effects of religion? From what I can see, one of the chief ones is that people take their religion and turn it into a banner that proclaims that they should be the rulers of the world. Those people are wrong, and they have misinterpreted their religion or are using it to justify wrong things (such as fly into the Twin Towers). The five great religions of the world all, at some point and in some way, stress the equality of ALL men and women’s souls. If people decide that they are better than others, then they are abandoning their religion.
Bs. Religion doesn’t make the smiths good, they’re good people because they have a general understanding of humanitarian social values.
Furthermore, even though all religions may stress at one point the equality of all people, in many many other occasions they do the opposite. Jewish men wake up each morning and thank god they aren’t women. The Koran and the hadith explicitly state that men are superior to women. Christianity does the same, although in a more symbolic manner (Eve being created by Adam’s rib).
Violent interpretations are not incorrect interpretations. They are only too correct. The Koran tells Muslims that if they die while killing non muslims, they go to heaven and get 70 virgins. There’s no other way of interpreting that. How do you know what the true meanings of the religions are? Religions don’t come from god, they come from men, with all their flaws.
I highly recommend you read Sam Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. If you read it with an open mind you will find it highly engaging, provocative and interesting.
If men and women are equal, then shouldn’t they be interchangeable? Otherwise, it’s separate but equal, which is never actually equal. The major religions don’t support that. Examples: gay rights, Muslim women. “At some point and in some way” isn’t enough, it needs to be pervasive. Maybe it’s only the extremists, but if equality were pervasive, then they wouldn’t be able to interpret their religion in that way at all.
>If people decide that they are better than others, then they are abandoning their religion.
Jews are traditionally the Chosen Ones, there’s a lot of stuff about how they have more commandments because they’re better/more subservient to God/etcetera. Some of the Crusades happened because the Christians wanted to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims, who were worse than them. I could continue…
Excellent points. Since each religion claims the absolute and exclusive truth to itself, there is an inherent sense of fascist superiority in religious organizations. We find a perfect example in a speech given by Adolf Hitler, the most famous fascist in the world, on April 12, 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939 Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20. Oxford University Press, 1942, just in case anyone has difficulty believing Hitler was a Christian):
“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and who summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific His fight for the world against the Jewish poison… as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.”
He was ABSOLUTELY, and I can’t overstress how absolutely, wrong. Why on earth would God fight against His first Chosen People, from whom Christianity stemmed? The vipers and adders weren’t the Jews as a whole but the leaders who were envious of Jesus. The fact that they were Jews has NOTHING to do with it.
According to you he was wrong. But the Church never condemned his actions, and he found validation for his actions in the Bible and in Christian tradition. See how that works?
I was going to reply to some things, but Elias pretty much covered most of them.
But my main thought through this: Cromwell, I understand that you’re trying to use a principle of logic to make your point, but I see no way that A and B in your examples relate. Before your arguments become effective you must prove that omniscience and existence are somehow directly related to each other–which I don’t think they are.
Something cannot be ‘not omniscient’ if it doesn’t exist.
And actually, my A and B don’t have anything to do with each other. But it still works.
When it no longer exists, it ceases to have properties. Now you’re just being stubborn.
But I showed that it has the property of being not omniscient. That is a property, and therefore the statement is contradictory. Which means that there not being a god is logically inconsistent.
But FS/EES used your argument to “prove” that heffalumps exist.
He didn’t really. He just didn’t understand my argument.
As Frigid earlier said and I said: Yes, the principle works, but only if the two subjects are related. FOr example:
I live in the UNited states, I like ice cream.
I do not like ice cream, I do not live in the United States.
Logically, it fits the principle, but not in reality. Please explain the correlation between omniscience and existence.
Just stating things like “If (any) god exists he is omniscient” isn’t going to do much, as mainly the people you are saying this to, correct me if I’m wrong, do not believe in god in the first place.
The two statements only have to be correlated when discussing the hypothetical, such as geometry.
No, they have to be correlated for the logical proposition to make sense.
Socrates is a man. Therefore, he is human.
There is a correlation between being a man and being a human. Since men are a sub-category of humans (the other categories being children, women, etc) it logically follows that to be a man, you must be human.
Socrates needs to eat to stay alive. Therefore, he is human.
This is an incorrect logical proposition. The first assumption is true, but since there is no exclusive correlation between needing to eat and being human, the deduction is incorrect. Socrates might be a donkey, or a dog, or any other life form that requires food to stay alive. While it is true that humans also need to eat, they are not the only things that need to eat.
I suggest you read up on logic again.
I know logic. I am not using the word therefore. Statements with therefore are different from if-then statements.
Irrelevant, in this case, as the argument still stands. If Socrates is a man, then he is human. If Socrates needs to eat to stay alive, then he is human. The first one stands up to logic, the second one doesn’t, for the same reason. Granted, in other cases you will find nuances that affect the word choice, but as an analogy to your argument, it stands.
If A is false the statement is true. Nothing else matters. Stop gasping for air and either give up or give an answer that makes sense.
Gasping for air? Hah.
According to you, if “Socrates is a man” is false, then the statement “If Socrates is a man, then he is human” is false. So, if Socrates is not a man, then “If Socrates is not a man, then he is human” becomes an incorrect proposition. You’ve been shown to be wrong by pretty much everybody. Either reformulate your proposition into something coherent, or admit defeat, or GTFO.
That is not logic. If “Socrates is a man†is false, then the statement “If Socrates is a man, then he is human†is true. Read my posts. Seriously.
I’ve read your posts, but that simply isn’t true. If Socrates is not a man, then “If Socrates is a man, then he is human” does not make sense because the assumption that Socrates is a man is no longer true.
GAPAs, can we have some moderator intervention here so the party in what is clearly the wrong will stop insisting on a point that has been corrected ad nauseum?
The moderators are mostly letting this thread take its course, as you may have noticed. Technically, however, “man implies human” can be true even if “man” is false, so “Socrates is a man implies Socrates is human” is logically compatible with the statement “Socrates is not a man.” A contradiction arises only if “Socrates is a man implies Socrates is human” collides with “Socrates is a man AND Socrates is not human.”
Sticking with “X is a man implies X is human,” suppose Armada comes along. She’s not a man, so she’s an example of NOT-“X is a man.” Human or not, she has no bearing on the original statement, so she’s logically consistent with it. She doesn’t prove it or even provide evidence for it one way or the other, but her non-manhood can coexist with “man implies human” without causing a contradiction.
As I say, logic isn’t much help in finding out about the world.
Sure, Socrates being a man is not exclusively the reason for implying humanity. It all depends on the initial assumptions and definitions. As it is, Socrates and man are different variables than God and omniscience.
However, saying that “Socrates is not a man implies Socrates is human” doesn’t work, because while being a man necessitates being human, and you can be human while not being a man, NOT being a man does not necessitate being human.
While logic may not always be practical, it is nevertheless a good exercise. And while logic may not be helpful in “finding out” things about the real world, it is helpful for dismissing impossibilities.
“Socrates is not a man” certainly does NOT imply “Socrates is human.” But it does imply (in the restricted, technical sense of never negating) the statement “Socrates is a man implies Socrates is human.”
Do I understand correctly? If we recognize that “Socrates is not a man” does not imply that “Socrates is human”, it follows that “Socrates being a man” would imply “Socrates is human”? Granted, but if this is the case, it seems to me that a plethora of middle-ground conditions are lost.
Yes. Technically, as I understand it, “Socrates is not a man” implies “‘Socrates is a man’ implies ANYTHING.”
I suppose that’s the origin of expressions like “If A is true, then I’m Johnny Depp.” In logical terms, that means “A is so far from being true that its truth would be logically consistent with (and thus imply) my being Johnny Depp.”
I’ll see if I can get a logician to stop by and explain why logicians think this way.
It’s a fascinating exercise, to be sure, and I’ll raise the issue with my epistemology professor when I see him again. My immediate problem with the issue, and it’s quite apparent, IMO, is the lack of correlation between possible variables of “A” and me being Johnny Depp.
That was my problem when my brother told me.
It’s those pesky words “implies” and “if, then.” It’s a very weak kind of implication.
Cromwell, you did a horrible job of explaining the theory. Where you trying to use it as proof for God’s existence? My initial criticism still stands, however. There is no correlation between omniscience and existence, whereas there is a correlation between being a man and being human.
Anyway, the technical niceties of logic are all very well, but there are meatier arguments further down the page.
The Invisible Pink Unicorn is a unicorn, not a heffalump. Therefore the IPU has the property of not being a heffalump. Therefore it must exist.
No. Utter crap.
First of all, you haven’t shown that it has. Second of all, ‘not being a heffalump’ is not a property. Third, insulting people’s arguments is a very rude habit. I hope you don’t go aroung doing that.
Some arguments deserve nothing but derision. Like the flat earth society. Or young earth creationists. An argument can be very bad and not deserve recognition. The fact that people are actually taking the time here to respond says a lot about the level of politeness that exists on this blog.
If “not being a heffalump” is not a property, the neither is “not being omniscient”. The analogy is solid, your argument is entirely bunk.
Not being something is not a property by any means. The analogy is not solid. If you can’t already tell, you need to actually think it through.
And I’m sure we’re all relieved to have you admit that you are impolite.
“Not being something” is “not being omniscient”. Substitute any adjective for heffalump, and you have the same argument.
Okay. Well, then let’s look at the problem in this analogy. First, I’d like for you to define the IPU.
Invisible Pink Unicorns. There is no proof of them, and thus, it is illogical to assume they exist.
It’s really too bad that you’ve fallen back on this argument.
So offer your own. You’ve done nothing of the sort so far, merely repeated and rephrased your initial incoherent argument in what constitutes not so much rational debate but trolling. Apart from the fact that I find your arrogant, smug sense of superiority hilarious coming from a 13 year old with a handicapped understanding of both logic and the Bible, I’ve tried to argue coherently with you. But when all you can say is NO YOU and avoid my probes, points and logic, you really do start to lose respect.
So you fall to ad hominem. I know Hebrew, you do not. My argument makes sense, yours, sadly, does not. I have lost respect-for your ability to argue. While I certainly don’t think I am objectively better than you, I know much more about the Bible since I have read it more than 15 times and I understand the language it’s written in. If you don’t want to argue, any more, I will not. Let’s end this argument. It’s just creating bad feeling.
What does hebrew have to do with anything? The English translation is fine.
Anyway, you keep avoiding the question. Offer your own proof for god.
I have given my proof, many times over.
The English translation usually sucks. For example, let’s look at the very first verse.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.
Usual translation. But that’s not right. It would be
In the beginning of the making that God made there was the heaven and the Earth.
It makes sense in Hebrew. But, no, that’s not right either. Heaven and Earth mean different things. So it would be
In the beginning of the making that God made there was made the elements.
Very different, you see.
You may have given your proof, but I still have not understood what you’re trying to say. For clarity’s sake, make a new post at the bottom of the thread, without replying to a previous post, where you formulate your proof in as concise a manner as possible.
Oh, and, “The English translation usually sucks”?? Is it lonely up there on your pedestal? The King James Bible is considered a highlight of the English language and is a veritable treasure trove of symbolism, metaphors, and other literary devices.
Yes, but it was not based on the actual Bible. It was translated several times before it got to that version. At each step, the beliefs of the translator got in the way of the actual translation.
Given the fact that the Bible was compiled by Constantine’s bishops anyway long before it was translated by anyone kind of makes your argument redundant, don’t you think?
JEWS DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. Thank you.
I’m talking about the entire Bible here. Constantine’s ecumenical councils gathered to discuss, among other things, which parts of the Bible to keep and not. As such, a plethora of gospels and other texts (Enoch, for example. Boring as hell, too.) were discarded from what was to be the final version of the Bible. Constantine was Christian, and Christians use both Testaments. As such, the Old Testament was edited as well.
Yes, I know. But we don’t accept that. They include the Book of Maccabees. We do not.
One example. Your religious texts are still a product of politically inspired editing.
You’re the one being stubborn here.
“Religions don’t come from God, they come from men, with all their flaws.”
So men made up religion. They made up five major religions (yes, I know that there are more) that have more or less the same core ideas and have the same goal? For example, the goal of those religions is to be united with God, Brahma, or in Nirvana. There are similarities in all those religions. Why, from the earliest civilizations, have people created religions? If humans were the highest beings in the universe, then there would have been no need to do that. If they aren’t and have flaws, then there must be a higher standard that is above them. Don’t tell me it happened by cultural diffusion, because religion happened in the Americas, who had no contact with Eurasia.
True, religions don’t make people good, but they refine the goodness in people. And religions have flaws because they are carried out by people.
Yes. Because we are all men, with the same evolution-instilled ethics, and the same petty emotions (jealousy, fear, etc) and so it isn’t surprising that human constructs would be similar. After all, houses all across the globe share basic characteristics. The evolutionary traces of religious memes are very interesting to study.
Religions might refine goodness in some people. But is it really good if you’re acting morally out of fear of judgement and then hell? That doesn’t refine goodness, it just makes it artificial and devoid of meaning.
Actually, Pirkei Avot says you should not do good deeds for reward, but out of love for God.
And it is in my opinion that one should not do deeds because you think some higher being would find them appropriate but because you believe in what you are doing. For many people “love of god” has nothing to do with their motives.
What Jadestone said. The only reason for doing “good” deeds is because you want to appease a nasty, temperamental god?
He’s not nasty and temperamental at all. Read the Bible with commentary next time. Then you can understand it. And the reason is that you should love God and hold him in awe.
The god of the Old Testament is jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Thomas Jefferson described the god of Moses as ‘a being of terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.’
Excerpts from Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and examples of Yahweh’s behaviour in Exodus, Genesis, etc show a being with exactly these characteristics. I understand the bible, probably a lot better than you do, and god’s unpleasant character is obvious to anyone who reads it with an open mind.
I am not going to respond to a copy-paste argument. If you can’t think for yourself, don’t just mindlessly use someone else’s argument.
It’s not mindless, and it’s valid, and you know it.
Using someone else’s phrases for an argument because you can’t think of something yourself is mindless.
No, it’s academic. If someone makes the same point as you in a better way, why not cite him? As it is, I forgot to reference, so: RIchard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Chapter 2.
I will respond to this in detail just to show how ridiculous you are being.
jealous_No, that’s actually there to relate to humans.
petty_Examples? None.
unjust_Examples? None.
unforgiving_”For I am a compassionate God, remembering good deeds to the thousandth generation.”
control-freak_We’re talking about God here.
vindictive_He takes revenge on bad people because they are evil.
bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser_If you’re referring to Amalek here, try reading Esther.
mysogynistic_Examples? None.
homophobic_The purpose of sex is to have children.
racist_Chosen People? It’s only because of the religion.
infanticidal_Examples? None.
genocidal_Examples? None.
filicidal_Impossible.
pestilential_No.
megalomaniacal_He’s God.
sadomasochistic_That makes no sense.
capricious_If we are not punished quickly, we will forget.
malevolent_”For I am a compassionate God.”
bully_God has ultimate moral authority.
Take that.
jealous: “For your god is a jealous god” appears often enough. The first Commandment testifies to this.
petty: Leviticus is filled with petty rules for trivial rituals of utter unimportance.
unjust: Is it fair to kill all the animals in Noah’s Flood just because people were bad? That’s only one example.
unforgiving: The sins of the fathers ring any bells?
control freak: God has to be a control freak? Nice god. It’s still a bad quality.
vindictive: He kills innocents out of trivial crimes, grossly overextending any sense of vengeance at all.
bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser: All the tribes he tells the Israelis to wipe out?
misogynistic: Apparently god cursed Eve and all women after he with childbirth, menstruation, etc, as well as the subjection to men.
homophobic: gays are to be stoned to death
racist: It’s still racist. One tribe is better than all the rest? Racism.
Infanticidal: The first born children of Egypt.
Filicidal: He sent his own son on a suicide mission to be killed.
Pestilential: The plagues.
Megalomaniacal: Even if he’s god, it’s still a nasty attribute.
Sadomasochistic: He sent his own son to be killed. According to the trinity, his son is also himself.
Capricious: capricious doesn’t mean swift. It means according to his whims.
Malevolent: all the examples above are indications of being malevolent.
Bully: It still makes him a bully.
Now, the question arises: Are you in severe denial or just very ignorant?
jealous_Look at my post on that.
petty_God is all-powerful, so nothing is too small for him.
unjust_Who cares about animals?
unforgiving_Yes, I know that. But fathers often teach their sons in their ways. That is what it is referring to.
vindictive_Example?
ethnic cleanser_He only tells them to wipe out one tribe.
misogynistic_And punished man too.
homophobic_Yes, and?
racist_Not one tribe, just his religion. There’s a difference.
infanticidal_They weren’t infants.
filicidal_That’s the New Testament.
pestilential_He’s not pestilential.
capricious_Not according to his whims, but to man’s.
I did read the Bible when I did not believe in God six months ago. That changed my mind because I read it without bias.
Yay, further delusion.
Jealousy: my first answer stands.
Pettiness: Why waste so much effort on the trivial and let big important things go to pot? Such incompetence.
Unjust: Who cares about animals? Well, aren’t you the paragon of virtue.
Vindictive: “Your god is a vengeful god”. ‘Nuff said.
Ethnic cleanser: It was more than one tribe, and even so it would still count as ethnic cleansing.
Misogynistic: Punished man to a lesser extent and explicitly put women inferior to men.
Homophobic: You don’t see how ordering the stoning of gays is homophobic?
Racist: The ethnicity coincided with the religion, hence racism still applies.
Infanticidal: Some were, some weren’t. What about all the babies that died in the flood? In Sodom and Gomorrah?
Filicidal: New Testament, same god.
Pestilential: Semantics. The description is accurate.
Capricious: God intervenes according to man’s whims?
Oh, you’re a recent convert with all the blind enthusiasm of a born again child. Makes sense now. I too read the Bible without a bias when I was growing up. I realized on my own that the stories didn’t hold together, weren’t coherent, and many were downright obscene. You’ve mentioned reading the Bible with commentary. Whose, Isaac Asimov’s or Kirk Cameron’s?
unjust_I don’t claim to be.
ethnic cleansing_Read the Book of Esther.
filicidal_I’m Jewish.
capricious_When man sins, God punishes.
No one tried to convert me. I found out by myself. The commentary was Rashi/Ramban/Sforno, whichever I happened to have.
And again, you ignore most of my points, and offer climbing on glass answers to the others. For the sake of coherency on my part, however, I will continue to argue.
Unjust: You must see that killing animals for man’s sins is unfair. As is killing children for Pharaoh’s sins.
Ethnic cleansing: Esther stops Haman from committing genocide against the Jews (I looked up a quick summary). Where is God? What does this have to do with God ordering his people to commit ethnic cleansing?
Filicidal: It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re Jewish, the God of the New Testament is the same God in the Old Testament. Of course, you can ignore the New Testament, in which case, whatever.
Capricious: God punishes incoherently and according to whimsical changes in temperament throughout the entire Bible.
You lose. Big time.
No one tried to convert me either, for that matter. I had exposure to all sides of the debate and picked the one I found most reasonable. Statistically, the overwhelming majority of children will do the same if offered unbiased parenting.
unjust_I don’t care about animals.
ethnic cleansing_Haman descended from Agag, the king of the Amalekites that Saul failed to kill.
filicidal_I’m Jewish.
capricious_No, not true.
The other ones didn’t make sense to me.
Where’d you get those statistics from?
unjust: It’s still unfair, whether you care about animals or not. And you’ve avoided my point about killing children for other people’s crimes.
ethnic cleansing: And that proves God isn’t an ethnic cleanser how…?
Filicidal: Ok, so you ignore the New Testament. Whatever, it’s a minor point.
Capricious: Yes, he does. The Bible backs me up on this. It is, however, a detail that pales in comparison to my (or Dawkins’) other points.
I can’t remember the source for the statistics. If necessary, I will withdraw that statement you require backing from sources. It is, however, a small loss, and one I can live with.
unjust_Children learn from their parents.
ethnic cleanser_He is, but that is not a vice.
unjust: Are you seriously using this as a justification for killing children for their parent’s sins?
ethnic cleanser: Right, just like Hitler’s ethnic cleansing wasn’t a vice.
I’d be disgusted if you weren’t 13.
unjust_That doesn’t mean he actually punishes them. It means they are likely to be punished.
Also, ‘father’ could be interpreted as the founder of the school of thought they believe in. Thus, even if they do not act, they will be punished for their beliefs.
ethnic cleanser_If that hadn’t happened, Israel would have been wiped out by Amalek.
And saying that all my arguments are bad because I’m 13 won’t work.
Unjust: uh, no? God kills children and animal. End of story. Sliding in possible interpretations of the word father won’t work, either. The Bible makes it clear that it refers to biological fathers, and even if it didn’t, it would still be unjust.
ethnic cleanser: It doesn’t do anything to stop God from being an ethnic cleanser.
RE your age. I didn’t say your arguments were bad because of your age, I said that I’m not going to consider you a disgusting excuse for a human being because of your obscene moral values, because at 13 you are still forgivable due to immaturity.
I think religion should be recognized as a way to look up into hope in bad times, and not to worked with evil like conducting wars out of reason of religion, which you make up in the first place. i fnd it to be a diffucult yet interesting concept which divulges in both history and philosophy.
Can we just start another argument that makes sense and is interesting, yet doesn’t involve cromwell’s obviously fallacious reasoning? This thread has become almost devoted to proving it wrong, and him denying it.
Neither you nor FS/EES actually proved my argument wrong. I admit that my argument is wrong. FS/EES didn’t agree with me that it was wrong. That’s why I was arguing.
This is getting long really, really quickly. *wonders*
All the people who are arguing against religion: why are you so intent on disproving religion or the concept of a god? What harm is it doing you? Examples have been cited such as Bin Laden or other extremists which apparently prove that religion supports murder. However, one can easily list off ten “good” people to counter one “bad” person. Religion has good points and bad points, yes, but in the end, a person’s morality is not affected by religion–their religion is affected by their morality. So why are you trying to prove to be lunatics the billions upon billions of people with some religious affiliation who have been born, lived, and died upon this earth? Why can’t they just live out their little fantasies, as you see these religions, and everyone can get on with their lives? Religions are not harming you, so why are you trying to eliminate them?
This is the atheism thread. I tried mentioning other things, but people who are not atheists came here and said things, and no one seems to want to discuss anything but the existence or not of a god. As an atheist, they are addressing me and others, so I respond when I have time.
If people don’t want to think about atheism, then they should not be on this thread and addressing the topic.
Also, I read another article recently, saying that more men are likely to be atheist than women. I can’t quite remember all the details, but one was that men are usually bigger risk-takers (taking the risk that there isn’t a god after all) while women usually play it safe and are more likely to go through the motions of belief just in case. Thoughts?
All the lunatics, to use your word, do nothing, for the most part. However, as Elias stated earlier, they provide cover for the extremists, who do horrible, horrible things.
The truly good people would do good things even without religion. Any who wouldn’t are simply acting out of fear of punishment and/or greed. Not that any would admit it.
Thank you! I was trying to explain to EES the part about how people’s morality isn’t affected by their religion, or at least not as much as their religion is affected by their own morality, but I don’t think I got the point across as well as you did. A person can be sickeningly pious and have the blackest heart in the world, but I know an atheist who is very kind, and in my opinion, a good person and a great friend.
So if everyone is good inherently, but some people use religion as an excuse for the evil that they do, but most other people recognize that religion is a way to express their goodness, then what is wrong with religion?
Because it can bring a number of upper middle class, relatively wealthy, educated men with loving families to fly themselves into a skyscraper. What other reason could they have possibly had to do that other than strong religious belief? Religion provides a cultural separation where there need be none.
Religion is not the source of morality, but it can be a motivator for obscene behaviour. Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali made a short film criticizing Muslim treatment of women (which is in fact obscene). The next day the death threats started rolling in, and a some time later Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death in a street by a militant Muslim. The killer left a note on the knife saying that Ali would be next. If you insult Islam, the Koran says you deserve to die.
Fortunately for the Western world, our Enlightenment period managed to reign in absolute Church power and instill secular values. No longer are you tortured to death simply because you might be a witch and this way we save your soul.
The point in the end is this: Good religious people are not good for religious reasons, they would be just as good if they were atheists (as you yourself said). I give you the Hitchens Challenge: “Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.” However, many, many, many bad religious people are only bad because of their religion. Who has ever seen an atheist kill someone over religion?
Religion and God aren’t the same thing. Religion is how people define God, with help from God in some cases. Yes, I agree that religion can be a motivator for obscene behavior, but other motivators such as greed, pride, fear of change, and revenge can be mixed in there too. Working at St. Vincent dePaul’s, which is a good humanitarian deed that is also religiously motivated, however, doesn’t include any of those other motivators.
The Enlightenment period did manage to reign in absolute Church power, and that was good because the Church was becoming corrupt. The Church was not established to play politics or lead armies. If it strays from its original mission, which is to spread the word and love of God, then that is bad.
Hitchens Challenge: Prayer.
The point that I’m trying to make is this: Everyone has good and evil in them. For some people, religion is a way for people to funnel the evil, for others, it is a way to funnel the good.
Assuming God exists, wouldn’t he intervene to make sure that religions were saying the right thing? If any of the existing religions had it right, their claims would be provable, and thus we would be able to ascertain the correctness of one over the others.
Hitchens Challenge: Morality is defined in terms of suffering, (which is why we have no moral obligations towards rocks) and prayer in itself is not a moral act.
Now, a variation of the Hitchens Challenge: Name me an immoral statement or action that could only have been performed by a believer. Obviously, many examples immediately come to mind.
True, people can be good or evil. However, since morality does not have a religious source, any way that religion can funnel good can be done by nonreligious activities. However, many ways that religion funnels evil can only be done by religion.
(98.1.1.1.1.1) Cromwell: It doesn’t sound as if anybody understood your argument.
I haven’t had time to follow it closely, but I gather that it has something to do with the way formal logic defines “if, then” statements, also known as implication. If a implies b (a –> b), then the negation of that relationship is “a and NOT-b”. That is, “a implies b” will be false whenever a is true and b is false. (That makes intuitive sense: a can’t very well be said to imply b if you produce a and then b never shows up.) In all other cases, “a implies b” is true.
You combine that definition with a logical identity called the contrapositive, which states that the statement “a implies b” is equivalent to “NOT-b implies NOT-a.” By picking the right statements for “a” and “b,” you then wind up with God. Is that the gist?
In my experience, formal logic is great for sorting out relationships among statements and for programming computers, but it’s next to useless for discovering anything new and significant about the real world. So I’d be surprised if it worked as advertised in this case. On the other hand, I haven’t been paying attention to the details, so I can’t say anything more specific than that.
If you’d like to summarize your argument, step by step, in a single post, maybe other MBers could inspect it for strengths and weaknesses. I’m afraid I don’t have time right now to give it that kind of scrutiny myself. Sorry!
Also, it would be much easier to keep track of all the separate trains of thought without nested comments. >.<
*brain implodes*
98.1.1.1.3.1.1.1.1.2- I don’t wish to participate in the discussion, but why would it be illogical to believe in something where I don’t have proof of it’s existence? I don’t have proof-forgive me for using you as an example, Jakob- that Jakob exists, except for a few posts that could be written by anyone. But I believe in Jakob.
Say that MB crashes and doesn’t come back online. I don’t have proof that MB exists, or did exist, but I still believe in it. Say someone founds the church of the pink unicorns. As long as the practicians of pink unicornism don’t harm others in their religious quest, there’s nothing wrong with them believing in pink unicorns. It makes them feel happy, gives them a path in life to follow and if it includes something about being nice to other people it’s doubly good for me.
103.3.1- Just because some religions are extreme, it doesn’t mean that religions in general are bad. Usually, people rely on religions to give people some form of morality, a guideline for right and wrong. Sometimes they’re out of whack. But think about raising a child as an atheist- what would you tell en- don’t kill someone because if the cops catch you, they’ll put you in jail? Rules are made to be broken. Only extreme awe keeps us from breaking rules. If you take away the consequence from bad acts, you won’t be able to stop people from committing them even more. I agree that religions need pruning, but you can’t say that we should all throw them out of the window just because some went bad.
In the modern world, how big is the cultural separation really- does it make a difference if you don’t eat ham because of your religion or because you’re vegan/vegetarian?
Religions develop too, and you can’t judge medieval ones by modern ones.
Religious conviction- if someone blows up a building because their government tells them to or because their religion does it doesn’t matter so much. What do you want to do, abolish nationalism because some insane people might turn into kamikaze pilots? You need to find a nice spot in the middle, as usual.
1. Jakob’s posting provides some form of proof that Jakob exists. At the very least, it provides proof that someone is posting using that name.
2. You would have memory of a past MB and that would suffice as proof in this case. What if the doctrine of Pink Unicorns mentioned that women were inferior?
3. Morality has objective standards and evolutionary causes. Morality is based on a terms and degrees of suffering. Killing is wrong because you cause suffering to another human being, and all human beings have a right to life. Faith in itself is bad because it is a mental attitude that leads people to accept blindly tenements that can have profound impact on their life. Since there is no God, these tenements come from people, with their own faults and virtues, and as such are immensely harmful.
4. Religious obsession with ham is not harmful as much as it is hilarious.
5. It’s the same religion. The Bible has gone unchanged. What other piece of bronze age culture do we still regard as relevant today?
6. I agree that nationalism can also be a strong force in overriding reason. As such, it is usually a negative sentiment among people. As is religion. Yes, you would abolish nationalism. And you would abolish religion.
1/2. Yes, but not conclusively.
3. But the universe was created for you!
4. Ham in ancient times was often infected. No one knew that then. But Jews didn’t eat it. Why? Because God knew.
5. Marriage.
6. Nationalism is defined as racism.
3. Bull. The universe exists independently of me or not.
4. I’ve heard this argument before, and it’s bunk. I will cite a passage from Christopher Hitchens:
“It is argued that the ban was initially rational, since pig meat in hot climates can become rank and develop worms of trichinosis. This objection- which perhaps does apply in the case of non-kosher shellfish- is absurd when applied to the actual conditions. First, trichinosis is found in all climates, and in fact occurs more in cold than in hot ones. Second, ancient Jewish settlements in the land of Canaan can easily be distinguished by archeologists by the absence of pig bones in their rubbish tips, as opposed to the presence of such bones in the middens of other communities. The non-Jews did not sicken and die from eating pork, in other words.”
5. In religious terms, a direct derivative of religion, so you just reinforce my argument. In secular terms, a natural result of evolution, which leaves us more inclined to monogamy in order to ensure the safest environment for raising children.
6. WRONG. Nationalism, while a quality I dislike, is the belief that one’s own country comes first and is superior to all others.
4. Of course, they didn’t automatically die when they touched a pig.
5. Not necessarily monogamy. I mean just staying with a mate for your whole life. That’s not religious.
6. Exactly. Your country is superior. Superior.
4. He never said that. He said that non-Jews were not afflicted by rank pork.
5. That’s monogamy. It’s not religious because it’s biological. It’s like saying “eating”. I said “culture”, not “instinct”.
6. Which is not racism. Racism is the idea that different ethnicities imply inherent levels of superiority and inferiority. Nationalism is political, racism is biological.
Actually, when Protestantism developed, they took away some books of the Bible. So the Bible changed. However, Jesus’ central, core message didn’t. But the religion did. Haven’t you heard of Vatican II? And seeing as Christianity has branched into many different sects would mean that the religion changed.
Protestantism did not become the sole representative of Christianity, as the the Catholic Church remains. Neither do the various splinter groups of Methodists, Baptists, etc. They all use the Bible, which was written by people who thought that the earth was flat and that you could cure wounds by spitting on them.
And by the way, what is Jesus’ “central, core message”? I can definitely cite conflicting passages. Half of his moods are pacifist and hippie-like, the other half are reinforcements of the brutal laws in the Old Testament.
So you think that Christian teaching is bunk as it was written so long ago? Atheism has been around even longer than Christianity. But that doesn’t mean that atheism is worthless just because the people who first thought the way you do also thought the earth was flat, etc.
Atheism is not a religion, it is an approach to life that embraces a completely rational and scientific view of metaphysical claims. As such, atheism has only existed for as long as traditional science existed. Philosophical atheists, like Lucretius, may not have known that the world was round, but he definitely didn’t subscribe to any dogma that ruled out doubt.
Christian teaching is bunk because both its metaphysical claims and its moral claims are false.
(Quirky historical footnote: Pre-Christianized Romans considered Christians and Jews atheists for not believing in their gods.)
Atheists or heretics? Anyway, the point is made by Dawkins several times in various interviews and presentations: Christians are atheists when it comes to Odin, Thor, Zeus, etc. because they don’t see a valid reason to believe in them. We just take it one god further.
Atheists. As I understand it, the Romans could tolerate other gods (which, as polytheists, they could usually rationalize as members of their own pantheon under different names), but disbelief in their gods annoyed them.
Then we have a case of different interpretations of a term. Atheists do not believe in god. Any god, so pagans would be wrong to call monotheists atheists. Of course, of for Romans the definition was different, then the example is not relevant for the current discussion or the current age.
(Hence the parentheses and the label “quirky historical footnote.” I do think it’s interesting that it was disbelief, not misbelief, that bothered them.)
Which is why the Romans are such a sociologically interesting people. I can’t recall, for example, them ever making big decisions based on their religion. War strategies depended on real conditions, not signs from the gods, and their economic and foreign policies weren’t changed by religious beliefs either. I’m sure there are some instances (the treatment of criminals in arenas as examples of who the gods think should live comes to mind), but otherwise they seem to be a remarkably secular group.
These should really go in the religion thread. Or a history thread, if there is one.
Love God and love your neighbor. Where are the conflicting passages again? Cite New Testament, not the Old Testament.
Book learning isn’t the same thing as intelligence. Just because 2000 years ago science wasn’t advanced enough to know the shape of the world (and how could they, seeing as they spent most of their lives in one area?) or about germs, doesn’t mean that they couldn’t see what was in front of them, which was a man who performed miracles, was crucified, and then rose from the dead.
And the fact that performing miracles and rising from the dead cannot scientifically happen doesn’t make it seem more probable that it’s all lies, instead of assuming that the laws of physics were suspended 2000 years ago? The blatant contradictions between the different Gospels themselves don’t bother you? And don’t you think that if God did in fact manifest himself on earth, he’d make sure to give advice about things like bacteria and hygiene rather than just going around randomly healing individual lepers instead of leprosy in its entirety?
As for the conflicting passages, take a look at Matthew 5:18-20. Jesus is found reinforcing the entirety of Old Testament law, and the apostles regularly echo this theme (for example, see 2 Timothy 3:16-17).
But what if the memories were faked? Memories can easily be faked. There was an issue in Muse a while back, where people claimed they had met Bugs Bunny at Disney land. As Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character, this couldn’t have happened.
Have you heard of the five minute theory? The world was created 5 minutes ago, and all things ‘from the past’ were faked, including your memories. It’s totally possible, as anything can be faked.
THANK YOU SO MUCH for posting that. I agree with everything you said on that, and I am so glad someone said it. Thank you thank you thank you!
People, why can’t we have this discussion without insulting everyone who has a different belief or opinion? If someone believes in god, then you shouldn’t try to shove proof in their face that there isn’t one, especially if later you complain about people converting and recruiting! It’s hypocritical! And also, don’t say, “Your god is a jerk. He’s a terrible person! He does all this bad stuff!” That isn’t nice. That’s being pretty mean. Think a bit before you respond to someone, to make sure your post isn’t unnecessarily hurtful.
Would it be hurtful to tell a Stalin-era communist that a government driven on his economic beliefs was killing people? People kill for religion. No one has ever killed for atheism. It is your duty as humanists to alleviate suffering. And how much suffering is caused by religion. More people have died in the name of Jesus than anyone else. Religious opposition to condom usage in Africa causes millions to die unnecessary painful deaths due to AIDs. Religious opposition to stem cell research is stopping the medical world from developing the science that could save so many lives.
Everything must be criticized. I reproduce Douglas Adams’ speech at Cambridge shortly before his death that I already posted in the religions thread:
“Religion… has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’.
Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows – but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe… no, that’s holy?
… We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much of a furore Richard [Dawkins, Oxford biologist, author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion] creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.â€
It’s fine to criticize people, but people on this thread are doing it to an unnecessary extent. People don’t build their lives around Macs or PCs, but many people have religion very close to their hearts. I did not say that you can’t you can’t argue with each other, and so much of your argument is unrelated to my post. It was a good argument, but it will not change my opinion, because I agreed with the bulk of it.
Good. There is no “unnecessary” extent. Anyway, it was more of a response to bookgirl_me.
Yes, there is.
Unless it’s gratuitous trolling with no intention other than irritating the other person, there isn’t.
Here’s a cute video made by Australian cartoonists. Very insightful.
http://www .youtube. com/watch?v=IVbnciQYMiM
Maybe an admin would be so kind as to embed it?
“Women aren’t good at anything.
Except babies.”
Lol. It made me laugh. So did their other video of god deciding to come down to earth.
“Oh yeah, and he wants you to stop boiling goats in their mother’s milk”
“WHAT??”
of course, the real kicker is:
“The thing which made the things for which there is no known maker and… Man, this name’s really long, can’t we find something shorter?”
You see how a torrent of ad hocs and logical fallacies ends up with a religion.
Premises: Contrapositives have the same truth value as the statement.
The truth table in post 92.
Something cannot logically be described if it does not exist.
God does not exist.
You can see definitions for the contrapositive, the converse, the inverse, and the contradiction on Wikipedia.
So…
If God is omniscient, then God exists.
God cannot be described. The first statement is false. The entire statement is true.
If God exists, then God is omniscient.
True, since the first statement is false.
If God is not omniscient, then God does not exist.
The inverse is true, so the converse is true.
If God does not exist, then God might be omniscient.
The contradiction is false.
If God does not exist, God is not omniscient.
The contrapositive must be true.
Therefore given that contrapositives have the same truth value as the statement.
The truth table in post 92.
And that something cannot logically be described if it does not exist.
God
cannotmust exist.[Typo corrected per 108.1.1 –Admin.]
So what, are you proving that god exists or that he cannot exist?
Anyway, what still leaps out to me (apart from your still unclear presentation and formatting) is the problem with “if God is omniscient, then God exists”. It’s a completely random association to make with no basis whatsoever for correlation. Random choices may work in Mathematics to fill in variables, but not in philosophical logic.
I made a typo. I meant must, not cannot.
They don’t have to be correlated. That is irrelevant, as it is a true statement.
Yes, they do. The logic game might be clever, but saying that omniscience causes existence is just false. Furthermore, don’t you think that religious logicians would have come up with this already? You’re making a serious error in your thinking pattern, and your argument, as such, is zilch.
What about the counter example? What if I replaced ‘God’ with ‘perfect and all-knowing pink unicorn’? That would prove that the ‘perfect and all-knowing pink unicorn’ must exist. Therefore, it is invalid.
Whoa whoa whoa… hold on.
You’re arguing: God does not exist, and therefore cannot be described.
Thusly, If God is omniscient(which is impossible, because you stated that he does not exist), then God exists(which you just made impossible because the if part of the statement was false), which is true? I fear I may be missing something here.
If God exists(which you decided didn’ t work), then God is omniscient (Well, now he’s not, because he can’t be described). This is also true? I may be totally not understanding, so someone let me know if I’m not, but this seems illogical to me.
If God is not omniscient, then God does not exist. (Well, this only works if the previous one works, which I don’t particularly agree with…)
Then we end up with if God does not exist, God is not omniscient. OK.
The contrapositive is true? Hm. Tell you what. Let’s work it out like this, and see what you say.
Something cannot logically be described if it does not exist.
God does not exist.
If God is imperfect, then God exists.
God cannot be described. The first statement is false. The entire statement is true.
If God exists, then God is imperfect.
True, since the first statement is false.
If God is not imperfect, then God does not exist.
The inverse is true, so the converse is true.
If God does not exist, then God might be imperfect.
The contradiction is false.
If God does not exist, God is not imperfect.
The contrapositive must be true.
So God exists if he’s imperfect?
I used the same argument, so tell me if I’m wrong.
Eh… Please don’t get too angry. I don’t like angry, rude arguing.
As Robert has said twice now I believe: Applying logic to actual situations does not often work or come out as it should. There are to many factors influencing everything everyone does–there’s no real way to isolate them.
All this talk of logic and trying to use it to prove an omniscient god… well good job for trying I guess but it’s not going to convince anyone. We’ve been over it several times now, and it hasn’t helped your points at all, in some cases it has detracted form them. I suggest trying to find other sources to back your arguments, because the one you’ve been using isn’t doing the job and makes understanding what you’re attempting to say difficult.
Ontological arguments are no more convincing than these: (source: www. godlessgeeks .com/LINKS/GodProofs.htm)
Argument from Incomplete Devastation: A plane crashed killing 143 passengers and crew. But one child survived with only third-degree burns.
Therefore God exists.
Argument form Possible Worlds: If things had been different, things would be different. That would be bad.
Therefore God exists.
Argument from Sheer Will: I do believe in God! I do believe in God! I do I do I do I do. I do believe in God!
Therefore God exists.
Argument from Non-belief: The majority of the world’s population are non-believers in Christianity. This is just what Satan intended. Therefore God exists.
Argument from Post-Death Experience: Person X died an atheist. He now realizes his mistake.
Therefore God exists.
Argument from Emotional Blackmail: God loves you. How could you be so heartless as not to believe in him?
Therefore God exists.
NOTE: The purpose of this post was humour, not serious argumentation.
Actually, the sheer will argument rings true. If you believe so truly in a god, then they will exist, because what is existence but perception of existence? If you believe, then what you believe is true.
However, this doesn’t mean that it is true for others. Herein lies our problem.
-A
But there is no connection between your beliefs and reality. Anyone seen Father Ted?
109- First, I am restating you to try to understand it.
God is omniscient=p God exists=q
p and q are false
1. p-> q
statement is true because both parts have same truth value
2. q->p
false because 1 is true and this is the converse
3. ~p-> ~q
false because 1 is true and this is the inverse; also inverse and converse have same truth value
4. If God does not exist, then God might be omniscient.
The contradiction is false.
I didn’t learn what a contradiction was in school (I’m doing this analysis off of memory of the logic we learned in math class two or three years ago), and Wikipedia is too technical for me with not enough sleep. This doesn’t seem relevant to your conclusion, anyway.
5. ~q->~p
true because 1 is true and this is the contrapositive
I think the main problem with this is your belief that “something cannot logically be described if it does not exist.” Elias has stated that your interpretation of this is false before, I don’t know what to do except repeat it differently and see if that helps.
If you begin with the assumption that p and q are false, that means that you also begin with the assumption that ~p and ~q are true. So you’re already saying that “God is not omniscient” has to be true, as well as that “God does not exist” has to be true.
You then claim that “God is not omniscient” (~p) cannot be true because ~p is a description, and therefore for ~q->~p to be true ~q must also be false (~q being “God does not exist”). And also that the whole argument breaks, therefore God must exist.
Here is your problem: If p is a description, then ~p cannot be a description, because ~p is the opposite of p. If ~p is not a description, then there is no conflict with “something cannot be logically described if it does not exist” and everything works and God doesn’t exist.
You seem to firmly believe that ~p is a description. I don’t understand why, could you please explain?
also, I agree with Robert, there are too many variables in real life that aren’t binary or that are ambiguous, application of logic to which does not come out well.
(I wasn’t going to get involved, but I like doing math problems. also, I spent a least an hour on this post, sorry if I was ninja’d.)
Hello. I asked my brother, Lee, who’s a computer science professor at Hampshire College, to dissect the arguments here. He took a look at the thread and very reasonably said he’d be glad to help but he needed some direction as to which argument to focus on, as there are many. After some GAPA consultation and further perusal, he ended up zeroing in on the points made in comment 109. He sent me an email with his comment and then sent a follow up saying he refreshed his browser after sending it and saw that Dodecahedron had made a similar point to his bout the biggest problem with the “proof.” So don’t blame him for being redundant!
With no further ado, here’s Lee’s comment:
My attempt to make sense of Cromwell’s argument in comment 109:
First, some definitions from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition (not sure if this is exactly the intended source, but it was the closest I could find):
implication — if P then Q — first statement implies truth of second
inverse — if not P then not Q — negation of both statements
converse — if Q then P — reversal of both statements
contrapositive — if not Q then not P — reversal of negation of both statements
Cromwell’s premises:
Premise 1: Contrapositives have the same truth value as the statement.
Premise 2: The truth table in post 92. [This just defines the logic of implication in the standard way.]
Premise 3: Something cannot logically be described if it does not exist.
Premise 4: God does not exist.
Cromwell’s Statement 1: If God is omniscient, then God exists.
Cromwell’s support for Statement 1: God cannot be described. The first statement is false. The entire statement is true.
Comment: Statement 1 is of the form “if A, then B.” A in this case — “God is omniscient” — is allegedly false because premises 3 and 4 imply that God cannot be described. Any statement of the form “if A, then B” is true if A is false (as per the standard definition of implication referred to in Premise 2). So if A is false then Statement 1 would indeed be supported. However, premises 3 and 4 do not actually imply that “God is omniscient” is false. They imply that “God cannot logically be described.” Cromwell seems to believe that this means that “God is omniscient” must be false, since it is a description of God. But “God is not omniscient” is also a description of god, so by the same reasoning premises 3 and 4 would also imply that “God is not omniscient” is false. But this is a contradiction, and if we allow the derivation of a contradiction then the logical system becomes useless (since then absolutely anything is trivially provable). Cromwell’s move of deriving the falsity of a particular description of an entity from the statement that the entity cannot be described must be rejected. The logic of descriptions is a rich subject — Kripke’s book “Naming and Necessity” is one classic in this field.
Cromwell’s Statement 2: If God exists, then God is omniscient.
Cromwell’s support for Statement 2: True, since the first statement is false.
Comment: The statement “God exists” is false because it is the negation of Premise 4.
Cromwell’s Statement 3: If God is not omniscient, then God does not exist.
Cromwell’s support for Statement 3: The inverse is true, so the converse is true.
Comment: Not clear what’s intended here. Statement 3 is the inverse of Statement 1. But Cromwell’s supporting statement seems to be support for inferring the converse on the basis of the truth of the inverse, while it is the inverse that needs support here. Maybe I’m misunderstanding which inverse and/or which converse Cromwell is referring to. One *might* say that statement 3 must be true because it is an implication of the form “If A, then B” and that A here (“God is not omniscient”) must be false because God cannot be described (from premises 3 and 4). But this is problematic for the reasons given above.
Cromwell’s Statement 4: If God does not exist, then God might be omniscient.
Cromwell’s support for Statement 4: The contradiction is false.
Comment: Not clear what’s intended here. Contradiction is not one of the terms defined above, but Cromwell may mean “negation,” since a statement must be true if you can show that its negation is false. The negation of “If A, then B” is equivalent to “A and not B.” In this case A — “God does not exist” — is a premise, and the falsity of B — “God might be omniscient” — might be supported in the same (problematic) way that the falsity “God is omniscient” was supported in the support for Statement 1. So this makes some sense, although the same problems occur here.
Cromwell’s Statement 5: If God does not exist, God is not omniscient.
Cromwell’s support for Statement: The contrapositive must be true.
Comment: This is indeed the contrapositive of Statement 1, and hence it would indeed follow directly from Statement 1 (although the presented support for Statement 1 is problematic).
Cromwell’s conclusion: God must exist.
Cromwell’s support for the conclusion: Just a restatement of the premises.
Comment: Cromwell did not make the connection to the prior statements explicit (at least not in the post that I read), but it seems reasonable to suppose that the intention was to show that a contradiction was derived — because Statement 5 contradicts Statement 4 — and that one of the premises must therefore be rejected. This is a proof by contradiction. Presumably the intended implication is Premise 4 must be rejected, as this gives the conclusion. But without more argument it’s not clear that Premise 3 isn’t equally weak. In any event, the contradiction can only be derived if the prior statements can really be supported.
Thanks, Rosanne and Lee! Rosanne, please tell Lee that any Spector is welcome on MuseBlog anytime. Oh, and that there’s a pie waiting for him. Several pies.
Thank you, Lee!
I was trying to say this (it seems a little weird saying that non-omniscience isn’t a property, but was easier), and your explanation of the contradiction is much better than mine.
Off topic, but Hampshire College is really great! I nearly applied there. All you MBers who are doing the college-apps thing, should definitely look at Hampshire.
One additional comment from Lee:
FWIW I agree with Cromwell’s rejection of Elias’s subsequent critique: The lack of a semantic connection between A and B in “If A, then B” is irrelevant here. But the purported proof is nonetheless problematic.
Very enlightening, thanks Lee! I missed a bunch of those little fallacies myself when reading Cromwell’s post.
Now, the question that bothers me: I still don’t see how in any other field than Mathematics you could state “If A, then B” without there being a causal relationship between A and B. I feel like Diderot confronted with Euler.
Oh, EDIT: There is now a post of mine in space 108. It didn’t appear when I originally posted it, as I assume the admins had to check it for content first. Now that it is there, however, I urge you all to watch it. It is both poignant and funny.
(114) Didn’t the British empiricist philosophers hold that one can never observe actual causality, only correlation? Modern logic’s interpretation may be rooted in that tradition. I don’t know; perhaps your teachers can tell you.
If that means that you can never actually observe the exact moment of cause, I don’t see how that holds up. When I move my arm to shut the window, I can observe the instant in which my arm touches the window, which causes the window to shut. The fact that it may be difficult to distinguish between causation and correlation is evident in the common “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy, which is nevertheless easily explained. Even if causation is not directly visible, it is relatively easy to discern where it takes place, if we don’t give in to dogmatic thinking with all its fallacies.
Well, you see and feel your arm extend, you see the window closing, and you can verify with your senses that the window has closed. But everything else is interpretation, isn’t it? It’s physics. If you were drawing up rules of logic, you’d want them to be more fundamental than, and thus independent of, any theory about the way matter interacts. So you might find yourself taking a very cautious approach to statements involving causality. “Correlation that is never violated” might be the best you could do.
Again, I don’t know that this is how logic developed, but it sounds as if it could be. And for all I know, there may be other types of logic with different rules to accommodate a stronger type of causality. It might be worth looking into.
Your knowledge of physics tells you that the instant in which something caused the window to close was when your arm touched the window. As far as causality goes, it does rely on interpretation in many cases, yes. But there is an absolute, objective way to interpret it.
Anyway, I don’t know either, I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’ll definitely look into it.
It’s not the only imaginable interpretation, though. Maybe closing windows attract hands. It’s a silly idea (Douglas Adams could have had fun with it), but is it logic’s job to make that judgment?
I see that Professor Spector has just added a relevant comment below.
But you can easily test whether or not closing windows attract hands. Find a way to close a window without hands (by harnessing gravity, wind, or whatever) and see whether it attracts hands.
Hands or hand-equivalents, whichever get there first.
Anyway, the rules of logic can’t perform those experiments and presumably can’t be informed by them. Or maybe they can — I’m not an expert in phenomenology.
Well open windows my hands have been under have seen it fit to decide to close on them before, so I can’t fault this XD
Hello, Lee. Thanks for the explanations, nice to have you here.
A brief comment in reply to Elias’s question (in comment 114): “I still don’t see how in any other field than Mathematics you could state ‘If A, then B’ without there being a causal relationship between A and B.”:
This is an important point that has been discussed quite a bit in the history of logic. A summary of some of this literature is given in the Wikipedia page on “Relevance Logic” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_logic. There’s also a longer discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-relevance/. (Note: I haven’t read these pages carefully just now, although I’m familiar with some of the issues from prior study, including reading parts of the Anderson and Belnap book to which both articles refer.)
So emphasis lies on the form rather than the content? Interesting, I’ll have to look into this in more detail. Thanks for the links.
Thank you. I had a felling that there was something wrong with both its statement and its negative being false, but I wasn’t sure. Thank you.
Hurr durr. I hereby declare myself victor of the thread. It was indeed a win of epic proportions.
Victor? Oh really.
O RLY
Your “proof” was exposed. Got anything else?
Proof by degree maybe, proof by the initiator of movement, proof by the existence of consciousness-You haven’t won, I haven’t either, but no one will convince anyone else, so this discussion is over. That doesn’t mean that anyone actually won.
Those aren’t proofs, as there isn’t one possible explanation for those elements. The existence of consciousness, for example, proves god to the same extent that the existence of dwarfs proves pastafarianism. In both cases, an ad hoc exception thrown in.
I don’t want the discussion to be over, I’m a polemical junkie.
Dwarves*, and me too.
-A
My mac told me it was wrong. Regional differences in spelling?
“Dwarfs” is the original plural. “Dwarves” was J.R.R. Tolkien’s invention to distinguish his Dwarves from run-of-the-mill dwarfs, but Lord of the Rings became so popular that “dwarfs” is rapidly disappearing. Snow White’s friends were dwarfs, not Dwarves.
Oh! Forgive me! And that’s quite interesting; I’ll be sure to mention it to people now.
Thanks to Elias as well.
-A
Err, apologies, as well.
-A
We know the reason for dwarves. Stop mentioning the fake religions. Now.
But the scientific reasons for dwarves are just placed their by the FSM to test our faith!
See how it works? As soon as you take away the traditional and cultural respect from religions they work exactly the same way.
Oh, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster greatly objects to you calling them “fake”, and you will not be awarded with the volcano of beer and infinite stripper bars like the rest of the faithful when you die (I checked the gospel of the FSM).
So there.
haha! GO FSM!!! I’m more or less atheist but like the FSM anyway. “May your life be long and noodly, Ramen.” is the end of the FSM prayer.
There was once an athiest who said he didn’t believe in God because he doubted that anyone could be imaginative enough to create evreything there is. I am a Christian and I think that that only proves how great and awesome God is.
I do love circular logic. Saves you from a lot of thinking, doesn’t it?
God is awesome because he was able to create all of this that I think he created because he’s the only thing awesome enough to create it, etc, etc.
Alright then, if god is so great and awesome, why all the imperfections? Why all the meaningless violence?
I always think of God as a scientist; creating Earth and our solar system was an experiment for en. En started us out and let us go where we pleased, with only a few interventions now and then.
I promised myself I’d stay out of this, so I’m leaving now.
How are the interventions decided upon?
Probably pretty arbitrarily. I’m not advocating that God is so great and awesome and whatever, but something created life in the universe, and I don’t believe in coincidence.
No one’s saying coincidence. Although random chance does seem to be a possible reason for the existence of life, it’s really not such a long shot given the number of worlds in the universe, etc. I’m not going to get into statistics here (although I could), but just because we don’t have a clear explanation in scientific terms right doesn’t prove that it was god. That’s just childish.
Scientist: “Oh, I seem to be missing a piece to the evolutionary puzzle. Let me go figure it out.”
Theist: “No need to! Just accept that it was god and you won’t have to go experiment to find the real answer!”
OK. I really don’t care either way. I’m not really very religious, but I’m not an atheist either, and I don’t appreciate being called childish. I’m not going to continue this conversation. I’m leaving.
I called your argument childish. Don’t invent insults where there are none.
And sorry, I’m just addicted to arguments. The adrenaline is amazing.
Gee, are you really? We all totally can’t tell.
RQ’s theory actually sounds kind of good, as religious theories go. I’m an atheist, and I respect non-atheists, but I never really liked the thing about God ‘watching over’ everyone all the time. It is possible to see that a belief is interesting without believing in it yourself.
I would like to recommend Dan Dennett’s book to you, “Breaking The Spell”. It talks about the dangers of “believing in belief”. http:// en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Breaking_the_Spell:_Religion_as_a_Natural_Phenomenon
I don’t see where in her post she says anything about “believing in belief.” Personally, what annoys me is when people try to push their beliefs on other people. As far as I can tell, that’s what you’re doing, Elias.
FS- I’m not really allowed to browse the internet, and my parents would probably want to know why I was checking the book out from the library…would you mind giving me a summary of Dennett’s argument? And why is “believing in belief” dangerous? I believe in belief. I don’t agree with people who believe in God on that count, but I do believe that they believe in God. Not to do so would be idiotic. Or is the term you’re using just a name for something else entirely?
RQ- I’m not sure what “believing in belief” as FS uses the term actually means, therefore I’m going to wait until he enlightens us to say anything else about that. But I do agree with your other statement. It’s possible to be tolerant of people who don’t share your beliefs. It sounds sort of like FS is trying to get people to become atheists for “their own good,” but at some point trying to “educate” people does more harm than good.
“Believing in belief” is the attitude that some people need religions to be happy because it provides an exclusive source of comfort and well-being. Of course, I don’t need to spend too much time pointing out the obvious flaw in this: The comforts religion offers are easily replaceable. The harm it causes, however, is not. This is why granting undue respect to belief is dangerous.
Which leads me to the next point. My agenda in promoting atheism is not for “your own good”. Nor am I pushing my beliefs on you. First of all, technically atheism is a lack of belief, so I have no beliefs to push on you. I am trying to reinforce a predominantly rationalistic perspective of reality. I do this for two reasons. One, I despise ignorance and stupidity, and religion only fosters this, as it teaches us to be content with what we don’t know. Second, despite my blatant misanthropy and cynicism, I am in fact a vehement humanist, and religion is one of the greatest causes of violence in human history. Not only, but it is also the cause with the least excuses. You can provide concrete examples of positive nationalism to some extent (it builds camaraderie and strengthens nations), you can excuse communism (the original idea was quite sound and ethically correct). But you cannot excuse a view of reality that is not only warped, but leads people to, in the words of XTC, “fight in the street, because they can’t make opinions meet about god.”
Armada: Check the book out, and explain that you’re curious and want to learn. They can hardly argue against that, Dennett is a renowned and respected philosopher.
Well, there are arguably some people who do need religion, because they are in such an extreme situation that they would commit suicide if they didn’t have something to believe in and hope for. Agreedly, the majority of people is not in that situation, but ignoring the minority is never a good thing.
Atheism is, indeed, a lack of belief in god or religions. But it is nevertheless a belief. Any position you hold on a particular topic is a belief. But let’s not discuss technicalities.
It is, indeed, true that there has been much harm done by religion. But there has also been some good. The harm is greater than the good, definitely. But the people who caused the harm would probably, if religion did not exist, have found some other excuse to do the same things. The majority of people who believe in God are decent, respectable people.
Religion is a worldwide phenomenon. I don’t know the numbers, but a lot of people believe in it. It will probably never be eradicated completely. And if it was, would atheists really be any better than religious tyrants who forced their beliefs on people? I say live and let live. When violence and harm is caused in the name of religion, it’s the fault of the people, not of the religion itself.
And yes, I’ll check the book out if I can. I’ll tell my parents FrigidSymphony told me to. They’re probably not going to argue with that.
By the way, it seems from previous posts/threads that the religion that you have the most problems with is Christianity. Are you against all other religions for the same reasons? Because some religions are fairly nonviolent, and you can’t use the violence argument on them.
My main peeve is Christianity, because I live in a Christian society, and Islam comes a close second.
It will be eradicated soon. Atheism is one of the fastest growing movements in the world.
As for violence and its causes… Remember the Hitchens challenge?
“Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”
By that same token, “Name me an unethical statement or an action performed by a believer that could only have been performed by a believer”.
While it is true that at the end of the day it’s people who kill other people, religion is a huge motivator. Not because of precisely what it says, but because it grants an overwhelming moral superiority to any action that a believer can manage to reconcile with his religion. Do you see the problem? “Live and let live” might be a nice mantra, but it won’t work because religion grants moral authority to impose upon others.
Yeah, I understand that. I have a lot of problems with Christianity myself.
I’m really not sure about that. Atheism may be growing fast, and someday the majority of people will probably be atheists, but religion will never be extinguished entirely. You can’t get rid of something that big entirely.
So, wait…your second statement there isn’t against religion? Mmkay… The first statement is true when viewed in the abstract, but I find it doesn’t work quite as well when applied to real, everyday, actual-interactions-between-people life. Your friends are not going to stay friends with you if you try to tell them their way of viewing the world is delusional and twisted and they should view it your way instead. If you get mad when religious people try to push their beliefs on you, they probably get mad when you try to push your beliefs on them. When this happens on a national scale, wars happen.
Yes, I am seeing what you’re saying. Evil people should not be allowed religion, because it gives them an excuse to be evil. But I’m still holding that evil people will be evil people, and taking away their religion is probably not going to make them be good people. Religious people are not necessarily bad, and atheists are not necessarily good. You’ve got a good point about the moral authority, and I agree with you there. But taking away religion is not going to take away crime and violence.
Evil people will be evil regardless, true. But the only thing that can turn a 30 year old happily married, psychologically stable man with a good job and a loving family fly himself into a building is religion. That’s a good man doing evil because of religion. And almost no other thing will cause him to do that. The problem goes beyond excuses for evil people. It gives an excuse for manipulation and facilitates brainwashing. When people, good people, talk to god and think he answers, that isn’t god. It’s something human. And humans can be evil.
As for the live and let live, it’s nowhere near as simple as that. Some ideologies cannot be granted the same respect as others.
Correction: Agnosticism is a lack in belief, at least in the classical definition. Atheism (Although this depends on the severity, but still:) is a belief that there is no greater power.
-A
Nope. Agnosticism is the active stance that proclaims that we cannot know whether or not god exists. The absolute agnostic gives an equal chance of probability to both the existence and nonexistence. Which is illogical.
As for atheism, you could play semantics and say that an atheist is anyone who is not a theist, which would slide agnostics under the atheist umbrella as well. But agnostics differentiate themselves.
Originally, agnostic means a-gnostic. I.e. a-religious, which is without a religion. However, in the modern day, it is used to mean what you use it for.
In ancient Greek, gnosis doesn’t mean “religion”; it means “knowledge.” A-gnostic means “not knowing.”
The British scientist Thomas Henry Huxley invented the words ‘agnostic’ and ‘agnosticism’ in 1869. In an essay 20 years later, he explained what he had had in mind:
When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"--had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. ... So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant ...
In other words, Huxley didn’t know whether God existed, doubted that the question could be conclusively settled one way or the other, and didn’t think the evidence was compelling enough to be worth worrying about. Others might use the term in a different way, but that’s what the original agnostic meant by it.
Too true, Elias – and therefore, it is also a lack in belief.
Atheism – if you are not arguing semantics, which for the point of this discussion let’s say we’re not – does connote beliefs. Beliefs that there is nothing higher to believe in, yes, so not faith in the usual sense, but beliefs nonetheless.
-A
But atheists would argue against you, by saying that belief in the religious sense doesn’t even enter the equation. We don’t have “faith”, we abide by the scientific method, which unlike faith, is not dogmatic, and therefore open to correction.
What you’re explaining sounds a lot like Deism to me?
Deism is the belief that God created the universe but takes no more interest in it–like winding up a toy and then letting it walking around on its own. So if God was “watching over everyone all the time,” then that wouldn’t really be deism.
I’m sorry for looking like I’m double posting, but the comment above was made several days ago, so does this count as double-posting?
Anyway, I have a few questions:
I would like someone to explain all of the miracles that have happened, not just in the past, but also in the present. There are lots and lots of books written about prayers being answered and miraculous healings occurring, as well as some documentaries. I have also seen hundreds and hundreds of crutches and wheelchairs put up in places like st. Anne de Beaupres, L’Oratoire St Joseph, and Lourdes and Guadalupe, where people have found healing. Don’t use the placebo effect argument–do you seriously think that would work instantaneously for thousands of people? I would also like someone to explain why Juan Diego’s tilma hasn’t rotted away years and years ago. Oh, right, and scientists have done tests and can’t figure out what the image is made of. Plus, it was almost blown up and nearly destroyed various times, but was never harmed? Lastly, please explain why, when I saw a traveling picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, every single person in the room could smell roses, even me, who had bad allergies.
Finally, where do good and evil come from, and why do we know the difference?
I’m not doubting at all that there are miracles. There may be. But, I don’t consider them made by a higher being. I think they’re 1) luck, 2) scientifically explainable, or 3) unexplainable.
But:
And I have terrible allergies. It’s not even funny.
“Lastly, please explain why, when I saw a traveling picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, every single person in the room could smell roses, even me, who had bad allergies.”
Ah… maybe someone walked by with strong perfume. I can smell things with strong perfume, even with the blanket over my nose commonly referred to as Allergies.
The miracles are simply luck/lies. So this one artifact has survived unharmed. What about all the others that were destroyed? It was just one.
“Lastly, please explain why, when I saw a traveling picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, every single person in the room could smell roses, even me, who had bad allergies.” Because every single person in the room expected to. Placebo effect. ;D
Good and evil are human constructs. We can tell the difference because we are raised to be able to. You could raise a child to believe that killing people randomly was good, and that sparing their lives was evil.
122.1, 122.2- For your consideration:
[The GAPAs prefer MBers to present information in their own words rather than point to a list of links. Those who want to know more may search for “eucharistic miracle Lanciano Siena.” –Admin.]
And this could only possibly be a result of divine intervention because…?
Because why would a doubting person want to fake it to himself that the bread and wine really turned into the Body and Blood of Christ? “OK, I’m not sure I believe it, so I’m going to try to play a trick on myself!” If he was going to do that, then he might just give up Christianity altogether. It just wouldn’t make sense for someone to do that. Also, where would he get the blood and heart tissue? If he robbed a grave, it would have begun to decompose.
No, I mean is divine intervention the only possible explanation for blood and tissue appearing or is it more likely that an as-yet-unexplainable phenomenon exists which through some sort of chemical reaction creates blood and tissue, or valid substitutes? Occam’s razor, people.
As for your “doubting person”, knowing only Christianity and probably wanting to believe makes it a lot easier to jump to conclusions. Of course, it’s also possible that the entire story about the skeptic convert was made up.
Very interesting, Piggy! Look it up, people!
RE: Miracles
James Keller, along with many other philosophers, states that “The claim that God has worked a miracle implies that God has singled out certain persons for some benefit which many others do not receive implies that God is unfair.†An example would be “If God intervenes to save your life in a car crash, then what was He doing in Auschwitz?”. Thus an all-powerful, all-knowing and just God, predicated in Christianity, would not perform miracles.
Spinoza’s view is also intelligent:
“Further, as nothing happens in nature which does not follow from her laws, and as her laws embrace everything conceived by the Divine intellect, and lastly, as nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it most clearly follows that miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle.”
Which is why Spinoza was excommunicated.
Your point being?
I don’t think that God would break the laws that He set down. But if God is Nature, then why couldn’t there be miracles? For example, healing. God is speeding up what would or sometimes could have occurred naturally. That’s just my take on it.
So why does it only happen for a few specific cases?
What few specific cases?
Why do miraculous healings only happen to a few specific people and not to the populace at large? Why, if god has the ability to cure blindness (for example), does he just fart around curing a few choice blind people and not just cure the entire malady?
Oh, and despite the fact that that’s STILL a logical impossibility.
And how does anything about miracles in any way exclude any other possibility than divine intervention?
To everyone who said: PLACEBO!!
I tried a little experiment. I walked into my mom’s office and said, “Mom, can you smell my perfume? It smells like cherries, and most people say that they can smell it and it’s really strong.” I wasn’t wearing any perfume. She sniffed the air and said that she couldn’t smell it, even though I was saying that I was wearing perfume. She expected to smell cherry perfume but didn’t. So placebos mustn’t work all the time. We also tried a similar experiment on a friend, and the result was the same.
Try that experiment again (with different people), but don’t tell them what the “perfume” smells like. Just say, “I’m wearing my new perfume- do you like it?” or something to that effect.
Maybe if you don’t try to convince people to imagine specifics, their minds might fill in the blanks…
Thanks, but I was trying to replicate what happened, and we were told specifically that most people could smell roses.
Are you coming back to Romantic Musical Comedy?
So you think you disproved placebos and proved miracles? It doesn’t work like that. The mind needs to be convinced of what it is should happen. This is reinforced by the fact that neurons fire in special patterns when people think religiously. Basically what happens is that the brain pathways that deal with fiction get crossed into those that deal with reality. So religious thoughts end up being considered true by the mind.
Sorry if I’m being unclear, I just woke up.
I wasn’t trying to disprove placebos in general, I was just saying that this wasn’t necessarily a placebo.
But in both cases, the people who were told that they were going to smell something were both told specifically what they were going to smell, and it was coming from honest, trusted sources (I know YOU don’t trust the Church, but that’s beside the point). So what is the difference? I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
I’m saying that the most honest, clearest solution to these things is scientific. Even in cases where placebos couldn’t be a direct reason, it’s more logical to assume that it’s caused by something of which we don’t know yet than to jump straight to god. My little post on the brain was to show how people can easily convince themselves despite their skepticism when it comes to religion.
And yes, I don’t trust the Church. With good reason. Ever since it was founded, the Church has lied, cheated, and suppressed dissidence with violence. While they’ve stopped burning heretics, they are still grossly misbehaving. Their policy on condoms, for example, is obscene. Their stance on abortion is as well. Did you hear about the incident in Brazil some months ago? A 12 year old girl was knocked up by her step-father (probably raped) and was pregnant with twins. She went to have them aborted. The Church excommunicated her and the doctors, which in highly religious Brazil is like becoming an immediate social outcast. The step-father got off scot-free. Didn’t even face rape charges.
Ah, this conversation is so ironic, but I don’t want to spoil this month’s issue of Muse for others.
Good lords… This reminds me. I haven’t read Muse in a year or so now. Oh, mon dieux!
-A
This is just a slightly random note that has to do with the topic, but what if the Christian interpretation of God was put on trial? He’d be persecuted for:
Putting children who didn’t love him in his basement and lighting them on fire
Purposefully drowning an entire army
Kicking people out of their home because they ate an apple
Telling someone to sacrifice his son
ect, ect.
And, when his lawyer said “My client works in mysterious ways”, the jury would probably vote guilty anyway
That’s a good one. Reminds me of this:
Why God never got a PhD
———————–
1. He had only one major publication.
2. It was written in Aramaic, not in English.
3. It has no references.
4. It wasn’t even published in a refereed journal.
5. There are serious doubts he wrote it himself.
6. It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since then?
7. His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.
8. The Scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results.
9. He unlawfully performed not only Animal, but *Human* testing.
10. When one experiment went awry, he tried to cover it by drowning his subjects.
11. When subjects didn’t behave as predicted, he deleted them from the sample.
12. He rarely came to class, just told his students to read the book.
13. Some say he had his son to teach the class.
14. He expelled his first two students for learning.
15. Although there were only 10 requirements, most of his students failed his tests.
16. His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountain top.
One of my friends at camp actually used that as a statement for someone who is a fervent Christian at camp.
Wait, written in Aramaic? You know very little about the Bible, my friend. Perhaps you should find out exactly what it is you keep trying to insult. You’re doing rather poorly at that, if I might add.
That’s not my work, it’s a copy/paste job from a random site. It’s also a joke, rather than a serious argument. I do know quite a bit about the Bible, and the language of origin is irrelevant as they were compiled/edited in latin during Constantine’s councils.
Criticizing my knowledge based on one point from a post that wasn’t even mine originally just looks like you’re climbing glass.
Language of origin is relevant. The Latin translators didn’t destroy the earlier texts in Greek (for the New Testament) or Hebrew (for the Old). Biblical scholars and translators routinely consult them, as well as translations into Coptic, Syriac, and many other languages, some of them now extinct.
The variations from text to text are interesting and in some cases surprising. For example, in some early texts of the Book of Revelation, the Number of the Beast isn’t 666 — it’s 616. Which number did the original author write? There’s no way to know.
A very interesting popular book on biblical textual scholarship came out a couple of years ago: “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why,” by Bart Ehrman. Despite the title, it’s not a conspiracy theory; he talks a lot about how scribes and editors worked (fascinating to someone who does what I do).
(By the way, in Elias’s joke, for some reason “Aramaic” just sounds funnier than “Greek” or “Hebrew” would. A comedian would include it even knowing that it’s inaccurate.)
Umm…The Old Testament was translated from Greek to Latin, not Hebrew to Latin. Heard of the Septaguint?
Yes, but Hebrew texts for most books in the Septuagint (as well as the Greek) have been preserved, haven’t they? Elias seemed to be saying that the Latin versions are all that matter.
I was just saying that the Old Testament was not translated straight into Latin.
Another thing:
Proof God cannot be omniscient:
P1)If God is omniscient, then he can do anything.
P2)If God can do anything, then he can create anything.
P3)If he can create anything, then he could create a mountain so heavy, no one could lift it.
P4)God is someone
Therefore
C1)God couldn’t lift it.
C2)But God can do anything.
Finally
Cmain) God is not omniscient, as it would create logical contradictions.
If God is not omniscient, then he couldn’t have created the world we live in today, as rocks that are faked to be older than they actually are, and have no problems or faults would require omniscience, and perfection, as omniscience is a quality of perfection for a holy being.
Same with creatures that appeared to have evolved to fit the circumstances of life.
Same with the chemicals that make up our daily lives. Working from no design, these couldn’t have been created. Without design, any chemical could have taken the places of the ones we know and live today.
If they couldn’t have been faked without omniscience, and God has no omniscience, then God couldn’t have created the world.
Because God didn’t create the world, and if he did, then he would have been there before and now, as the bible tells us, we should conclude that God doesn’t, and cannot exist.
Fallacy, fallacy, fallacy. Everyone knows god did create all of those things – to test how strong our faith is. You have failed. I’m so sorry.
-A
Why have I failed? Because I didn’t believe in god? And yes, I should have said omnipotence. But, that disproves god’s omnipotence. And, to be a perfect god, you must have omnipotence. As god (if he exists) is not omnipotent, then he is not perfect. And, could an imperfect being create an perfect fake, with the exact number of carbon atoms in fossils? Or layer life so that it looks like it evolved? Apparently, if what you’re saying is true, god wants rational people to burn in hell? Would a loving god want anyone to burn in hell? I guess so.
If this god is so concerned about people believing in him, why doesn’t he just appear infront of us, tell us that yes, he exists, and that the bible is true?
gradster is engaging in the fine art of irony.
Shh!
-A
You have quite clearly failed due to a lack in faith. And your reasoning is incorrect; god wants the people who are supposedly ‘rational’ and in reality just mislead to understand. That’s all he wants! He wants to help you understand.
God works in mysterious ways. None of us can truly comprehend why he doesn’t do these things, but we must have faith in him and his great work!
You must believe, young one.
-A
a) Omniscience is knowing everything. The word you were looking for throughout much of your post is omnipotence, the quality of being all-powerful.
b) I’ve already used the argument, in the whole semantics section farther up. I did not mean it to be taken seriously, and noone should. It is nothing more than entertaining logic.
Ha, Ha, Ha. Omnipotence, you mean. You can fake things without it, by the way. Although I don’t believe that. But anyway, A) God is not ‘someone’ and B) He can do anything, it’s just that you’re placing specific restrictions. I can throw a ball up in the air, but I can’t do it while firing three guns, opening a bottle of champagne, and doing a sudoku puzzle. Even though that’s throwing a ball in the air. Specific restrictions is irrelevant. Sorry.
Has anyone heard of that atheist camp mentioned in The Economist? I forgot the name.
Ad hoc exceptions, all the time! I can’t elaborate on this now (no time) but you’re engaging in bad logic. Real bad.
Yes but if god is omnipotent, then he could do those things, even if he wasn’t a physical being. Also, here’s a revised version:
P1)God exists & is omnipotent
P2)If God is omnipotent, then he can do anything.
P3)If God can do anything, then he can create anything.
P4)If he can create anything, then he could create a block, no existing being could change.
P5)God is an existing being
Therefore
C1)God couldn’t change it.
C2)But God can do anything.
Cmain) God cannot be omnipotent, as there would be contradictions.
Also, could someone fake an exact number of carbon atoms to make it appear that it was a fossil that was 1,000,000 years old? Or uranium atoms? Could something imperfect make perfect fakes? I think not*.
*therefore, I am not.
Just a random thing. Went to a Catholic wedding yesterday. I’m an atheist, but because the rest of my family is very Christian, nobody really knows. I would tell them if they didn’t rant on atheists at the dinner table. So it was really awkward for me.
*siiigh*
The rest of your immediate family (who you live with)? Or aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and such?
For me, my entire family is Roman Catholic. See, we’re Filipino. In the Philippines, you’re pretty much either Catholic or ostracized.
I’m pretty much exactly the same way. It’s awkward when my parents try to force me to go to church: if and when we go, I’m in a bad mood the whole day. Once we went, and the service was about how people who didn’t believe in God would burn in hell. It was not fun.
Oh, well, at least they didn’t make me do Confirmation. 
I don’t get that! Correct me if I’m wrong, but God is supposedly perfectly incorruptible, right? ((I may easily be wrong. I’m practically clueless when it comes to religion.)) So doesn’t it seem kind of corrupted to call everybody who doesn’t worship you bad? ((Please don’t get on my case if I’m wrong about this one. If I am, I’m very sorry to all.))
Don’t be sorry for challenging tradition and dogma, skepticism is essential for knowledge and growth. Challenge religious claims the way you would challenge any other claim.
Has anyone besides me here actually convinced someone that their belief was wrong?
Um. My best friend was Christian when we were 5-10, and we’d contradict each other.
Mili: *mentions God*
Rowan: But there’s not a god…
Mili: Yes there is!
Rowan: No there’s not!
Mili: Yes!
Rowan: NO THERE’S NOT!!!
etc.etc.
He attributes his atheism, in part, to me. XD
Who have you convinced?
-A
Rainbowstar: Both, actually.
Nilly: Yikes. Luckily I’m not Filipino.
I’d like to stay and write, but I’m currently in Berlin and don’t have much time. Cheers!
Are you aware this thread has 663 posts (counting this one) and only 132 of those are singular posts?
I hope I get 666’th post!
Why should you care if I believe in god or not? If I have been a good person (except for not believing in god), I will be sent to heaven.
I am a good person
I will get sent to heaven or hell when I die
I won’t get sent to hell, as I am a good person
Therefore:
I will get sent to heaven.
Symbolic logic:
I=me
G=good person
N=Heaven
L=Hell
(x)(Ix->Gx)
Im
Gm
NvL
Gm->N
~L->Gm
____________________
N
Truth table:
Im -> Gm/ Im/ Gm/ N v L/ Gm -> N/ ~L -> Gm// N
T T F T T F T T F T F F T T F F
We assume the conc. false and premises true
As valid arguments can’t have the premises true and conclusion false
There is a contradiction when that happens
The argument is valid!
(Im & Gm are both said to be true and false)
My truthe table didn’t work! Retry:
Im -> Gm/ Im/ Gm/ N v L/ Gm -> N/ ~L -> Gm// N
T _T __F _T __T _.F T T _F __T F _FT _T _F _F
Because your concept of “good” can be gravely perverted by religion.
Can you explain that, please? I think religions have good intentions. I mean, ‘be nice and don’t kill people’ is a good thing to teach, right?
Yes, but just because they teach some good things, doesn’t maen te teach all good things. Christianity, for one, teaches that shrimp and homosexuality are both evil. By the same logic if the Church of the Pink Unicorn taught that it was good to be nice to people, and that it was good to throw chickens at cows, that would say that throwing chickens at cows is good.
Christianity says that shrimp is evil?
Okay, well, things can send us some wrong and some right messages, but that doesn’t mean everything they say is wrong – or right. Christianity is not evil because it says homosexuals are bad. Okay, that’s pretty bad, but it also has its good sides. Like ‘thou shalt not kill’ and all that.
I hope that made sense.
It’s Judaism, not Christianity, that forbids shellfish.
Oh. Well, that seems more reasonable, what with kosher and all that.
Y’know, I’m actually mildly allergic to shrimp. Just a random fact.
Small correction homosexuals arent evil, as the Catholic Church teaches. I know theres the big controversy over the marriage (which is a sacrament!!!!) but I dont get into that so dont bother responding. But they arent evil or sinning by being what they are. Should this go to Hot Topics?
Sodomy is a sin, according to all the major monotheistic religions.
Being a homosexual is not a sin, just as being attracted to an animal isn’t a sin. It’s the actual act.
This discussion is straying considerably from the putative topic of atheism and into realms outside MuseBlog’s purview.
Cromwell, if you read Elias’s preceding comment, you will see he did indeed refer to an actual act, not homosexuality in general. He made this point himself in a comment which, after some consideration, I decided to zap rather than snip.
Elias, you’ve been around the blog long enough to understand where we draw the lines. Not everything that is “common and natural,” as you phrased it, is appropriate for general audiences in the real world. There are plenty of other forums for more explicit conversation; we have other priorities and concerns to consider here. You’re free to disagree with our policies, of course. We accept that your intentions are honorable, though I will note that cursing at the administrators is perhaps not the most effective strategy for making your point.
I swear as a general expletive and emphasizing tool, not at people. Some people say “wow”, I say something vulgar. Consider it my Italian heritage (for those of you unfamiliar with the role of swearing in the Italian language, consider this: there exists a hand gesture which is only translatable as “what the f**k”). I keep forgetting that Americans tend to be on the prude side when it comes to language.
So yeah, it wasn’t a directed offense.
On a more philosophical note, who defines what is and is not “appropriate”, and are they right in their definitions? If it’s one thing I despise, it’s an unfounded social standard.
what defines it? Rules, because every rule is unfounded and arbitrary. But, you know how in football games there’s a huge out of bounds line? Well, there’s also a huge out-of-bounds line in appropriateness, and it’s best to stay out of the line so that you don’t go to the side.
I didn’t ask you, but oh well. No, saying “rules define social standards or levels of appropriateness” is incorrect because the social standards are reinforced by the rules. The rules come after the the standard. And no, not every rule is unfounded and arbitrary. “Don’t stick your head out of the train window”, for example, has a very strong foundation. You would lose your head, which would be very painful and probably lethal, which is objectively a bad thing for you. Suffering = bad.
I meant that any rule that gives a limit on something, such as appropriateness has an arbitrary cutoff.
No, not “any” rule, absolutely not. Many cutoffs are chosen with a specific reason for the limit in mind. Take abortion, for example. It becomes morally unacceptable by most once the fetus has developed a nervous system, i.e. the ability to feel pain. Of course, I have a slightly different criteria for ethics in that area, but that’s a discussion for the new thread (if it turns up).
Religion ascribes higher moral importance to things like virginity, which are private, personal and no indication of morality whatsoever. The current accepted definition of morality is relative to the alleviation of suffering. Being preoccupied with things like sexuality is NOT relevant to the alleviation of suffering, and therefore putting moral weight on that issue is a perversion.
Furthermore, religious laws and edicts act in the same way a totalitarian government would, by creating laws that are impossible to stick to. For example, one of the Ten Commandments forbids “coveting” someone else’s wife. This means that as soon as you’ve even thought about it, you’ve committed a crime. This is what Orwell was writing about with his “thoughtcrime” in 1984 as indicatory of authoritarian repression.
Those things are indicative of morality. I don’t know what you mean by alleviation of suffering here. Don’t know about you, but I think most people can agree that prostitution is bad. According to you it isn’t. Sex is something which is important, which is why you shouldn’t jut sell it away or have sex before marriage, with someone else’s spouse, etc.
That’s not thoughtcrime. It’s only bad if you act on it. Try reading The Bible with Rashi or something, because you obviously don’t know much about it.
But, to put in what I think should be the counter argument here, sex is a natural activity, and a human desire. Because of what it is (a desire, not dissimilar to hunger or thirst), it should be a part of everyday life. Creating a way to make money out of it (like selling food, for example, which is commonplace) is entrepreneurial.
(Totally off topic)Though for some reason the US gov’t doesn’t see it that way, which is odd, since the only way they would see it as wrong would be if they had the essence of the church’s teachings embedded in them, which shouldn’t be happening… hmmm…
PS. Could we please stop putting things in our comments such as ‘you obviously don’t know anything about it’, because those are the sorts of things that lead to flaming…
Why is prostitution bad? It’s not hurting anyone. Why should your prude sensibilities dictate what other people should be able to do or not do? The accepted criteria for moral evaluation as has been defined by ethical philosophers is how much suffering you’re alleviating. What suffering are you alleviating by outlawing prostitution? Unless you free a few girls who get forced into it, not much. In fact, you’re creating suffering by taking away a whole job opportunity to a large part of the female population.
And it isn’t only bad if you act on it. The Bible says “coveting”. That’s desiring. As soon as you desire the person, you’ve committed a sin.
While before you didn’t seem to be too radical, now you have simply gone out of the range of sensibility and into the part inhabited by militant atheists, fundamental Christians, jihadist Muslims, and others that I simply can’t argue with seriously. So I’ll stop. It’s not worth it. Just consider the true implications of your ideas.
Thanks for lumping us in with the fundies and jihadists.
What shocked you, the idea that prostitution isn’t inherently bad? How about you telling me why prostitution is bad. And be objective.
You’re welcome.
You can’t, can you. Apart from your own personal convictions, you cannot tell me why prostitution is bad.
GAPAs, idea for a new thread: Ethics And Relativity. This topic might provoke quite a few responses.
I just don’t want to discuss this because it’s just too far out. I gave it a chance, but now I gave up.
Why is it too far out? Give an explanation, instead of claiming it’s “so far out”. What’s too far out? Prostitution? Or my views about it?
Are you suggesting that if anyone posts a slightly ‘radical’ idea, it’s impossible to argue with because it’s just ‘too far out’, and once you see things that way, you can’t be turned?
Why exactly would selling your body NOT be bad? (GAPAS, just zap this if I’m putting it badly) It’s saying, “Hey, I’m just something to sleep with, I’m not a person with a brain.”
Personal convictions and principles are impossible to just set aside. And they are worth fighting for.
A potter sells his hands when he makes a jar to sell. A dancer sells her body for our voyeurism. Prostitution only seems worse because we have given a special status to sexual intercourse, heavily linked to the religious idea of sexuality being sinful. Why should promiscuity be a loss of personality? it’s a choice of lifestyle, as valid as any other. Who are you to judge? Prostitutes harm nobody.
Who said anything about sexuality being sinful? It’s exactly the opposite, or it is supposed to be, and that is precisely why prostitution is such a bad thing. It takes something which should be holy and profanes it. One could argue either way for dancers, but a potter isn’t selling his hands, he’s selling something he made with them. And just because something or someone ‘does no harm’ does not mean that it’s right. My taking a rock from a state park really harms nothing, but I still shouldn’t be doing it. (The example isn’t on quite the same level, but you get the idea.)
Sorry, but I forgot to add: Some lifestyles aren’t good. Our culture’s focus on personal choice is damaging, in some ways, because it leads us to think whatever we want should be okay. That doesn’t always work. A mobster chose his lifestyle, did he not?
You still haven’t explained why prostitution is inherently bad. Just that you think that it’s bad. How does it harm someone? Taking a rock from a natural park harms the natural world.
What about shoplifting a candy bar? Is that okay?
The natural world can’t ‘suffer’. That’s ridiculous.
If there’s no suffering, it’s not immoral. Shoplifting a candybar isn’t unethical, it’s just illegal.
Hello again! I am back from camp! Yay me!
All right, to business. Firstly, I would like to point out that the Old Testament was indeed written in Hebrew, and that not only scholars study it! Unless you would like to consider me a scholar, which I doubt you do. Secondly, the first four books of the Bible were spoken by God through the mouth of Moses. The fifth book was Moses saying things by himself (God told him what to say, but his credibility was established and he no longer needed the added weight of God actually speaking). So God did ‘write’ the Bible.
Next, a question: what is your definition of ‘worship,’ to believe in God, or to follow all the commandments in, say, the Bible?
Did that whole big paragraph make sense to anyone else, by the way?
Why do you know that the first four books of the Bible were God’s words through Moses’s mouth? Because that’s what the Bible says? If so, then that’s rather circular.
Actually, the Ramban, or Nahmanides(?), was the one who said that, in his introduction to Deuteronomy.
Moses had a speech problem, from putting the hot coal in his mouth as a child, yet for the first four Books, he spoke clearly. Not so in the fifth. (From the same Ramban.)
134.2.2.1.2.1.3.1.1.3 (the reply buttons have vanished, so my reply is down here)
STDs. I don’t think anyone would say that’s good.
Reply to Gimantor’s point: Yes, it is natural for people to want to reproduce. But (I do believe it was Aristotle) as Aristotle said, we are “rational animals,” capable of thought and reason and emotion and so on. So, if people sleep with each other then it should be because they love each other, not because the species is dying out or in danger of doing so. I’m not sure how to word that, but I hope you understand my point.
I also heard on the radio about when police arrest prostitutes, many of them try to go back to the streets because (are they called pimps?) their bosses threaten their families if they try to run away. That seems quite different from a man working at McDonald’s. If he suddenly doesn’t show up one day, the boss isn’t going to try and kill his family, will they? So how can that situation be good? And no, I was not listening to some crazy radio show, I heard it on the NPR.
Oh, no, I absolutely agree with you, I’m just trying to feel for the opposition of the argument. I’d like to know what arguing from the other side is like.
STDs don’t happen if the sex is safe, which it is in countries where prostitution is legal and controlled, like Holland. Same goes for the “pimps”. I’m still waiting for a reason why the very concept of prostitution itself is bad.
RE: Sex and “rational animals”. Sure, you’re entitled to your opinion about sex. But that doesn’t give you the right to impose your views about sex on the rest of us, and it doesn’t mean that you’re right. Many people (me included) have more liberal or diversified opinions about sex and the reasons to have it.
This thread appears to have strayed from the topic of atheism. If you’re through with that discussion, perhaps it’s time to shut it down.
There’s a practical reason for doing that, by the way. It’s understandable that a discussion of prostitution — like any other topic involving sex — will draw considerable interest here (or elsewhere). But Elias and the other over-18 MBers are legally adults, whereas the rest of you are minors. I’m very leery of running a blog that could be described as “an online forum in which adults and minors chat about sex.” I haven’t consulted a lawyer, but that seems like a recipe for potential trouble. We want to stay in business, so restrain yourselves, please.
I’m part of the administrative team on another forum. We have a section specifically for personal sexuality, closed to anyone under 16 (British law- the server is in the UK) and another one for anything legal closed to anyone under 18. For the rest, anyone can talk about sex in a medical, ethical and impersonal fashion without incurring legal wrath, while I do understand the hesitance.
I would recommend leaving this thread open and moving the prostitution-related posts to a new thread entitled “Ethics and Relativity”. Thus you are restoring the atheism thread to the appropriate content and are allowing an interesting subject to continue in a philosophical theme, rather than a sexual one.
Hmm, yes, I see where you’re coming from. (Though I can’t say my 18+-year-old friends are really adults…) Seeing as how you have all ages here, I think this conversation might be best scrapped, not moved, unless you put some sort of restriction on it. (If you do, would you mind making it, I dunno, 15+? Because I hate to be banned from a conversation I’m already part of. 16 in October!)
Though it’s not as if we’re ‘chatting about sex.’ We are having a fairly mature, religious/philosophical discussion. Just saying.
You might think your 18+ friends aren’t really adults, but the law does, however arbitrary its yardstick seems.
Oh, I’m not complaining, just making a leetle joke about the maturity levels of my friends.
I think it’s too much trouble for the GAPAs to create a paleostuff thread available only to those they approve as 15+. I don’t want to put too much of a burden on them, so it’s really their choice if they want to have the thread continue, although monitor the topics to make sure that the conversations stays mature and philosophical or zap the thread.
And I’m not 15 yet, so I don’t like that idea anyway.
But the age limit would be far too time-consuming, yes.
GAPAs, that ethics thread is looking ever more attractive. I’d like to discuss these things with more than one person.
(138) New threads generally need more than one vote. Has anyone else been clamoring to discuss these things with you?
No, simply because the blog is set up in such a way that unless you actively seek out the thread, you won’t see the discussion. I’m guessing that the topic should be provocative enough to stimulate debate. If not, close it.
I’ll add my vote, it would be an interesting topic for a thread. Maybe put it in the Paleostuff category?
Oh oh! You have my vote.
Elias said that Atheism has only existed since the dawn of science. While I realize that science gives us atheists a good tangible explanation of our physical world, couldn’t atheism exist without it? Imagine this: A philosopher has decided that her culture’s religion is defective. She asks some foreigners about their religion. Though they make some good points, but she finds their religion impossible as well. This goes on for, say, twenty-three religions. In the process of her sifting through the metaphysical mudpit this philosopher has come up with an explanation that makes the most sense she has ever sensed, but it still makes no sense! She throws her hands up in the air and quits trying to peice it all together. She will not try to explain what things are and why they are that. She will be a species traitor and just take things in stride.
Atheism, etymologically, means no religion. I bet a lot of people will dissagree with me here, but humans are the only animals with religion. Religion is an overthought. Atheism is overthinking that overthought until your neurons blow out and you have to admit the whole overthought was only a complex network of far-fetched excuses. (agnosticism is when you just ignore the whole thing, because really, its just sitting there.) At least that’s a sumary of my own road to atheism.
“Elias said that Atheism has only existed since the dawn of science.”
Sorry, where did I say that?
Regardless, what are we considering science?
Calling back to the original “quotations” function of this thread, I was watching Blackadder the other day. During the episode where his puritan mother comes to visit, he asks her if he should put the fire on, because it’s cold. Her answer was a brilliant example of religious satire:
“Naughty child! Cold is God’s way of telling us to burn more Catholics!”
Needless to say, it had me rolling on the floor.
Yes, nothing is quite as humorous as the thought of Catholics being burned alive. Ha ha. I am also rolling on the floor.
Obviously the humour is lost on you. I shall spell it out for you. The idea that such an obvious, natural thing as cold could be turned into an excuse for violence via religious interpretation is funny, because it’s as ridiculous as anything else in religion.
Tell me, do you purposefully ignore the subtleties of such jocularities or are you simply that dull?
I think Piggy’s main dislike of that quote was because it poked fun at the idea of burning people.
Specifically, the burning of me.
Elias, I hold firm to my belief that you are extremely similar to the religious radicals you love to hate.
And the fact that the point of it was being critical of burning does nothing to remove your block, right?
Bear in mind, the historical context is Elizabethan England.
Extremely similar? Because I’m passionate about the topic? May be, but my passion will never lead me to violence against innocents. Which is the main difference.
No, I think Piggy thinks you are similar, because you adhere to strict rules about your beliefs, and try to get everyone else (or most people) to believe your philosophy as well.
Strict rules? Beliefs? Wrong on both accounts. I recognize the provisionality of all of my conclusions, as I’ve already explained various times in the hot topics thread.
Does no one actually read my posts? I’ve refuted Piggy’s accusations of being dogmatic various times before.
Oh, and how about letting Piggy answer?
Read the intro to the ‘God Delusion’. Yes, I have read it. In it Dawkins shows he is not fundamentalist or radical, but instead passionate, and there is a huge difference.
His rhetoric is brilliant, isn’t it? Highly enjoyable writing.
Anyway, good that you read it. His argument can be condensed thus: An atheist like Dawkins would change his mind if confronted with sufficient evidence. The fundie will never do so.
Very interesting. I like how he compared Anselm’s argument to a pre-schooler’s. The kid did seem a little sophisticated, but it completely did away with the argument, which is [snip] anyway (I mean Anselm’s).
The ‘fundie’, if presented with conflicting evidence, will see it as a divine test. Of course, Dawkins would need a lot of evidence, but that’s just the normal bias of people to stay with their current opinion.
Anselm is rather bunk
I can’t help but think that his writing was a subtle parody of theology- surely no one as intelligent as Anselm proved to be in other writings would be taken in with that.
Well, Dawkins would require a lot of evidence because, as Carl Sagan (or was it Michael Shermer? Might’ve been Stephen Jay Gould. One of those guys) said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan, I think.
Fridgey, even if the “joke” was being critical of burning, I still find it extremely offensive. Let’s substitute Puritans and Catholics for another few groups, shall we?
(See, it’s funny ’cause it’s making fun of French people’s stupidity!)
Or maybe:
(See, it’s funny ’cause it’s making fun of white people’s overwhelming racism!)
Or possibly:
(See, it’s funny ’cause it’s making fun of Germans’ xenophilia!)
So could you please explain to me the humor of these jokes? I find them only excessively offensive and crass.
“See, it’s funny ’cause it’s making fun of Germans’ xenophilia!”
It’s very disconcerting when you say that, because the other paranthetical comments are not sarcastic, but I just have to hope this one is.
You’re missing what the original joke funny. It’s not the burning, it’s the tendency of religious people to interpret natural phenomena as divine missives.
And even assuming you’re correct in your interpretation (which you’re not), if it’s being critical of burnings and xenophobia then it’s not offensive. None of the other examples you posted were offensive, except being an offense to the art of humour and basic intelligence.
Cromwell- They were all sarcastic.
Elias- You’re really saying that burning black people isn’t offensive?
Piggy: As I read it, Elias is saying that burning anybody is horrible, but that the joke he cites, and similar jokes, satirically condemn the practice of burning people. Therefore, they are not offensive.
In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for example, there’s a scene involving the trial of a supposed witch (with a carrot stuck on her nose). That scene, too, is “about” burning people, but it certainly doesn’t condone it. It satirizes the stupidity and cruelty of people who would do such a thing. The scene in Blackadder showed the same sort of dark humor.
What do you mean? Discussing historical burnings (or lynchings, in this case) of black people is not offensive, it’s observational. Using those historical events as a setting for humour that is critical of dogmatic mentalities conducive to the violence of the burnings is anything other than offensive.
And I think that when we get to the point where we’re discussing the desire to burn black people we’ve gone beyond the point of “offense” and entered “abhorrence”.
So what does “dogma” mean anyway? The Merriam-Webster website didn’t give a good enough definition.
Dogma- a statement that someone just tells you to believe, without giving a reason. For example, a dogmatic science teacher could say “The Earth is round” and when a kid asks “How do we know?” the science teacher says “Because I said so” or, “It’s in the textbook”
Not necessarily without reason.
Without a good reason then.
I usually use dogma to indicate a self-defining statement, to be accepted simply because it IS. Although I may be missing certain nuances.
Well, a lot of whites are overwhelmingly racist.
A lot of humans are overwhelmingly racist. Labeling whites as racist without mentioning other groups is inaccurate, misleading, and, ironically, rather racist in itself.
Not physical violence, at least? Verbal violence you seem very close to.
Verbal violence?
What?
It’s not his mother, it’s his aunt. Shame on you.
Details.
(Sorry. I’m embarrassed)
143.1.1.1.1.1.2.3.2.4 – Just like the fact that the inverse operation works.
No, because that doesn’t pertain to the real world.
Are you referring to the mathematical term? Math can certainly be said to be dogmatic. The difference is that it works
This is my view of God. I don’t mind if you attack me for it, I just want to say it outright:
God created the universe and all that is within it. However, scientists have found evidence that the Earth is more than 7,000 years old. This is because God uses METAPHOR. Jesus said in Revelation that he was coming quickly. It has been 2,000 years. Why couldn’t the 7 days of creation be 4.5 billion years? When God created man, did it say how he created them? Could they not evolve?
There. I’m done with all I want to say.
Why does any criticism, no matter how eloquent or polite, when directed at religion become an “attack”? I’ve seen more brutal language being used to review restaurants.
Anyway, does it seem more likely that a 2000 year old book that is purportedly the infallible word of god requires subtle interpretation that varies from period to period or that the whole thing is bunk, given the extraordinary amount of contradictions and factual error present within said book?
Occam’s razor, darling.
First of all, restaurant reviews are a somewhat less sensitive topic than religious debates. Second of all, your statement about how opinions vary from period to period is similar to science in general. Read the last paragraph of Michael Crichton’s The Lost World to see my point.
How about telling us what he says, since not everybody has the book ready to hand.
One of the characters (Thorne) says this:
A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. They’ll say, ‘You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?’ They’ll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer, better fantasies… And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That’s the sea. That’s real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That’s all real. Life is wonderful. It’s a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn’t really anything else.
This follows his exclaiming that hundreds of years ago, people believed that four humors controlled behavior and whatnot. Now, he says, we believe that self esteem controls behavior and more stuff like that. (Sorry for not being too specific…) Anyway, his argument is that there is no evidence that whatever we believe now is real. That could be used as an argument against religion, but what it really means is that our world view fluctuates over time, and that it’s not actually a bad thing. I think I should stop posting on this thread, come to think of it, because the “being able to listen to people who disagree with them without feeling attacked” isn’t really happening. See ya!
I can’t help it if you feel attacked- I have not attacked you at all.
Science changes over time, that’s what makes it the preferable viewpoint to dogma and religion. However, there is evidence that whatever we believe now is real. The problem is that what we consider evidence might very well change in the next paradigm shift.
Furthermore, my point was actually about pointing out how a purportedly unerring book needing different interpretations doesn’t say much for its unerring holiness, does it?
We will only know if we are right in what we believe when we go to Heaven. God will still redeem those who believe in Him but don’t get everything exactly right.
What about good, moral people who don’t believe in God? Do they get into heaven?
I can’t speak for muselover’s beliefs, but different circumstances give different “requirements” for heaven, in a way. Of course, in the end a lot of this is less than concrete, and we won’t know until it happens. (“It”, of course, meaning death.)
If you can’t speak for his beliefs, why answer for him?
Frankly, the idea that an ethical person is relegated to an inferior moral status than a god-fearing murderer simply because he does not believe in god sickens me.
I’m not answering for him, by any means.
No, the Bible clearly states that people who don’t believe in Jesus (here he comes into the debate) will not get into Heaven. However, people can believe in God and not go to Heaven due to their non-God-fearing actions. Hey, it’s fun stating my beliefs plainly! I know some people “hint, hint” find them ridiculous, but it’s so refreshing to share the Word of God!
Okay. What about a person in the middle of nowhere in sub-Saharan Africa? He’s never heard of any sort of church. But he lives by moral laws–the Ten Commandments–and is a good person. He’s just never had any sort of a chance to be told of Jesus or God. He dies having lived a just life. Would God send him to Hell because no one told him about Jesus?
And do you think that’s just?
I honestly think that he will go to Heaven. No one told him about Jesus, and that’s not his fault. But I still think that God will ask him, “Do you know me?” (or something to that effect) as Jesus did the blind man, and if he sees that God is his Father, then he will go to Heaven.
By the way, Piggy? Could you please change your avatar back to the cute pig? That Pit of Despair one is too intimidating.
But you said that God uses metaphor? Couldn’t he be using a strange and complex metaphor that says “If you believe in me, you go to heaven” but means “If you are a good person you go to heaven” ?
He does not just say that if you believe in Him you would go to Heaven, he says outright, “No one can go to Heaven except through me.”
But in Genesis, it clearly states that he created the world in 7 days. Even if the 7 days are geological epochs, the order he created them is incorrect. Saying something outright doesn’t mean it’s true, when you’re using metaphor.
People in the middle east 2000 years ago didn’t know about geological epochs. TÃ .
I am now going to express my true opinion, even if I get yelled at for it.
Why can’t we all just put aside our differences and not argue and get angry at each other just because of what we believe in? Religion has created so much hate for no good reason. Just because our beliefs are different doesn’t mean that we have to get angry at each other. I think that the world would be a much better place if everyone could believe in what they want to and not get treated wrongly for it. There is so much hate in the world just because of disagreements over religion. I never have and never will judge anyone for what they do and do not believe in.
Is there anyone who agrees with me?
Hear hear.
Yes.
*agrees wholeheartedly*
While there is religion, there will be extremists, and there will be violence, because of the basic characteristics of religion. A plea for mutual tolerance is nice, but naive. Criticism must take place, always and anywhere.
Thaaaat’s cynical.
Meh, I like that idea. Nobody should care what other people’s religions are. It simply has nothing to do with their character. Devout Christians who preach that God loves everyone or whatever go lynch people, and atheistic people who don’t follow the Ten Commandments exactly can contribute objective and well-reasoned ideas to the world. Tolerance = win. And sorry if anything’s taken the wrong way/… I think you guys know what I mean.
I’d rather be cynical than naive.
I agree that it shouldn’t be important what other people’s religions are. But when those beliefs start influencing other people, innocent people, and their personal spheres, well, then I have every right to speak out against it.
If everyone’s tolerant, then there won’t be the problem of extremists.
The naivité is heartwarming.
When I hear of Islamic groups in northern Africa and the Middle East mutilating their girls’ and women’s genitals (a highly painful and shocking procedure the details of which I will not explicit here, but which you are welcome to look up on your own initiative- you have been warned) because of certain parts of Islamic doctrine, I’m supposed to stand by without saying anything because I need to be tolerant of their religious rights and culture?
When children are raised in homes with the notion that homosexuality is wrong and that homosexuals are lesser individuals for it because of the parent’s religious beliefs, I’m supposed to tolerate the parent’s right to impart bigotry and hatred into innocent children?
When global warming is denounced as fraud and conflict in the Middle East is provoked because of a desire to hasten the events announced in Revelations, I’m supposed to stand aside and be tolerant of the religious beliefs of media figures and politicians?
When children are left to starve in the streets of Delhi because their parents were born into the wrong caste, I’m supposed to tolerate the religious structure that condones judging someone on the context of their birth and reinforces the idea of karma?
Extremism exists because of tolerance. Because ideas and rules without any justification are allowed to go un-criticized and unchallenged.
And this is why you are quite similar to the extremists and religious radicals you love to slander.
Is he actually making false and malicious statements that could damage the reputations of “extremists and religious radicals”? Let’s try to keep the rhetoric in line, please.
That’s not the point I was attempting to make, and I apologize if that’s what it seemed. I was referring to his statement, “Extremism exists because of tolerance.” I meant that his opposition to tolerance is very similar to other people’s opposition to tolerance. He believes that his views are more correct than other people’s, just as they do. He believes tolerance of other beliefs is a main source of the world’s problems, just as they do.
But my point was that none of that has anything to do with slander. And introducing such terms haphazardly into the conversation only adds more heat without light. Your subsequent explanation was better.
Also, it seems to me that there is a more interesting question within this conversation about the meaning of tolerance and its limits.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, slander wasn’t the right term. I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, you’re entirely incorrect in your analogy. I postulate a necessity for conversational intolerance only when it comes to the point where I would be tolerating intolerance and tolerating violence. Extremists feel that other views are wrong because they are not theirs, and theirs are right, whereas I feel that other views are wrong when they become conducive to violence.
There is only a slight similarity, and comparing me to these people is almost offensive.
Instead of using my post as an excuse to attack me further, how about addressing the “more interesting question […] about the meaning of tolerance and its limits”? Do you disagree with me that criticizing Islam (for example) is justified in the face of religious-born violence?
But you’re influenced by your parents ideas as well – maybe the children’s parents were influenced by THEIR parents and have never known anything else. Maybe they’ve just never been educated. It all stems from fear, which turns into intolerance, which turns into hate. It has nothing to do with religion being malevolent. Also, Elias – a few posts below this, you say Scientologists have “ridiculous” religious beliefs. That’s offensive to Scientologists, who, of course, don’t think their beliefs are religious. A couple centuries ago, people thought it was ridiculous to believe that the Earth revolved around the sun.
My parents are not religious, and they taught me critical thinking.
Go read the Bible again. Then the Koran. Keep an eye out for the passages that either incite to violence or could be used to justify violence.
Scientologists’ beliefs are no more ridiculous than any other religion- the logic is at the same level of absurdity. Is it offensive to point out a matter of logical fact?
We should tolerate ideas, but not open violence and hatred. And denying global warming is religious extremism?
(I do believe in global warming, btw. So please don’t jump on me for it).
Christian fundamentalism yearns for the destruction of the earth so that they may be swept up by the rapture. Ergo, denying global warming, (the most proponents of which come from Republican organizations) furthers that end.
I did explain in the previous post, you know.
Extremists, by definition, are intolerant. Nobody who is intolerant is tolerant. If everyone was tolerant, then there would be no intolerants. If everyone was tolerant, there would be no extremists.
Trying to talk sense into Elias will never work.
Kind of funny, how your religious tolerance idea is slightly put off by your new skull avatar.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. I like people no matter what they believe (except if they’re Scientologists).
Scientologists why? Because they have ridiculous beliefs, the leaders use their religion for personal aggrandizement, and it causes suffering among non followers?
Are you trying to say that’s what Christians do?
Bingo.
And let’s not even start on Islam.
I am rather offended by your remark about “ridiculous beliefs”. True, we do believe
somea lot of hard-to-believe things, but some of us have seen God’s proof. About your other remarks, most of the people who do these are not spirit-filled. I honestly hate it when people who claim to be Christians do that.Right, so a woman gave birth without having her ovary fertilized by sperm because some people don’t know about the brain’s capacity to trick itself; and anyone Christian doing bad things with Christian justifications aren’t true Christians, is that it? How is your definition of “Christian” more correct than theirs? Empirical and/or rational arguments, plz.
We recently left a church whose pastor was a lot of things, many of which I can’t bring to mention here for personal reasons. (I won’t expand any further in case some people on here actually go there.) I don’t know what he was, but he certainly wasn’t spirit-filled. About your previous remark, I have seen miracles. I have seen my little sister break her neck and have it instantly healed. We have seen God’s hand in our family business, and in our personal life. I don’t have anything against your atheist views, I can understand why people would believe those things. But some of us have seen God’s proof, and we want to share about Him. (I can think of a million ways you’re about to jump on that…)
Hahahaha.
Sorry.
Alright, one:
How do you define being “spirit-filled”?
Two:
Regarding you sister breaking her neck and having it instantly healed- Occam’s razor says either you were mistaken, or you’re lying. Broken necks don’t heal instantly. Furthermore, any positive changes in your family’s business or your personal life are more probably due to entirely normal explanations that don’t imply god at all unless you read him into it due to a personal bias. Which you obviously have.
I’m neither lying nor mistaken. The nurse felt her broken neck about an hour before their CAT scan which showed nothing wrong, and she felt a break. That, my friends, is what I call a miracle.
What, is the second half of my post lost in cyber-space?
Anyway, all it means s that the nurse screwed up. Or was lying. Or the CAT scan wasn’t working. Or a heretofore unknown medical condition occurred. If it had truly been a miraculous occurrence, then this nurse of yours would have received an invitation from some nice folks in Sweden.
Perhaps the nurse was mistaken, and it was dislocated (Or something). Or your sister was mistaken, and just imagined the break. Has she ever broken her neck before? Does she know what it feels like?
She deliberately did not tell my mom what she felt because she thought it would scare her. She, by the way, was a completely qualified doctor.
Occam’s razor. Every time, Occam’s razor. Look up Anatole France’s essay on miracles for further clarification on the appropriate way to treat “miracles”.
Anyway, you still haven’t told me what you define as being “spirit-filled”.
Spirit-filled mean filled with the Holy Spirit. (Oh, no, here it comes…)
That’s not what I meant with my question. How do you tell if someone is filled with the Holy Spirit or not? And how do you tell if someone is more or less filled? And what makes your method of judging any more valid than someone else’s?
How did the Quotations thread turn into another religious debate?
143.1.1.1.1.1.2.3.1- Well, there sure have been a lot of witch burnings recently. Let’s ban religion!
145.1.1.1.1.1- You didn’t attack him directly, but you said in post #145.1:
“…given the extraordinary amount of contradictions and factual error present within said [Bible]? Occam’s razor, darling.”
To many people who do believe it, that would sound like a sort of attack.
146.4- “While there is religion, there will be extremists…”
Nonsense. People will always find an excuse for extremism. Extreme scientific standpoints, extreme political ideas…I’d mention communist Russia, but someone always seems to jump on me when I do.
146.5.1- Well, scientologist beliefs have become almost mainstream (which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re true), so “personal aggrandizement” and “ridiculous beliefs” wouldn’t be that obvious. And mostly, they aren’t so dogmatic and serious about their religion. But not all non-atheistic people are, either.
It’s been the “atheism” thread for ages now.
Actually witch burnings continue to be commonplace in various parts of Africa, not to mention children being beaten to death or left in the wilderness because they’re thought to be possessed by the devil.
Saying that the Bible contains contradictions and factual error (which it does) is not an attack, and anyone who perceives it as such is being oversensitive.
While there is religion, there will be religious extremists, I’d assumed that would have been obvious. While I agree with you that nonreligious ideologies can and do also produce extremists, you’d be hard pressed to find one that reserves for itself the status of holiness and claims to be beyond any criticism.
Religion is dogmatic by nature, and Scientologists are damn serious about their religion- it’s their main source of financial income.
Rather few religious organizations claim themselves to be beyond any criticism.
We’re not talking about explicit, politically tangible declarations, but rather the structure of religious thought and the respect given to “holy” ideas as opposed to any other idea, not the mention the extreme sensitivity that religious people seem to have regarding religion, claiming offense at atheist bus slogans (as one of many examples). You yourself in a previous “religions” thread claimed that someone was “attacking” your religion, when all they had done was point out an accurate historical detail about the Catholic Church selling time out of purgatory. It wasn’t an attack, yet because of the nature of religious ideals, you construed it as such.
That was not due to “the nature of religious ideals”. That was due to my own logic and powers of intuition. It was an inaccurate statement that gave the Church negative attributes it does not have in actuality, and I felt from context that it was meant as a halfway-derogatory jab at Catholicism. I may have been correct or incorrect. Now, if you want to argue that my personal intuition is bunk, this isn’t the thread for it.
Had it been regarding anything else you would not have perceived it as an “attack”, merely as a semi-erroneous critique. But because it was aimed at your religion, you allowed yourself to feel offended as well.
Whether I felt offense or not at that does not affect the situation. And if I did feel offense, is that not my own choice? It seems that you take offense at other people taking offense. This confuses me. You are offended when you see things that disagree with your beliefs, such as, for example, global warming being “denounced as fraud”, as you said in 146.4.1.1.1.1. But you object to other people being offended when they see things that disagree with their beliefs? Such a double standard is unlike you, so I must be misinterpreting something here, and I apologize for that.
Nah, I’m not offended when I see people denying global warming. I find it incorrect and harmful to humanity, but it doesn’t offend me personally. Of course you can choose to feel offended. But whether your offense can limit the expressiveness of others is another question- in this case, your offense caused you to ask whoever was criticizing Catholicism to stop doing so.
You see the problem? A good analogy was when a Moroccan woman living in Germany filed for divorce because her Muslim husband beat her, and the judge said it wouldn’t be right to interfere with the marriage, as one had to be tolerant of Islamic marital culture.
But getting back on subject, it would be rather illogical for a religion to believe itself to be inaccurate. If this was the case, followers of said religion would modify that religion or find or start a new religion. It would be against reason to believe in a religion that you also believe to be false. But a religion that believes itself to be wholly accurate is logical. Not logical in their doctrines, necessarily, but logical in their self-view. If a person believes religion X to be wholly accurate, it would make sense for that person to believe in or practice religion X. It’s the same way with nonreligion. If a person believes all religions to be incorrect, it is logical for them to not practice religion.
Truth does not depend on what you believe, it depends on what is. If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. A religion can believe itself as accurate as it wants to be- that still doesn’t make it any truer. To make claims, they need to provide evidence. Lack of evidence, coupled with the inconsistencies within the religious structure, make the belief system wholly illogical.
Speaking of witch burnings, the parents(/their priest) of a girl I know actually tried to have her exorcized, because they thought she must be possessed as she disagreed with them.
Cab you imagine how she felt through all that?
You need to spend more time on rationalia.
I try to go on when I can, but I’m very limited in time lately.
147.1- “Actually witch burnings continue to be commonplace in various parts of Africa…”
The African witch burnings and child beatings are not from religion; they stem from ignorance. There used to be Christian witch burnings, too. They have stopped. Christianity hasn’t.
“Saying that the Bible contains…”
What are some of your critiques? A lot of Christians could argue them. Of course, all of their arguments would be ad hoc, wouldn’t they?
“While there is religion, there will be religious extremists, I’d assumed that would have been obvious…”
Status of holiness? Beyond any criticism? I assure you, that does not only appear in religion.
“Religion is dogmatic by nature…”
Why does religion have to be dogmatic? I’ve seen Christians, Atheists/Scientologists (whatever), and Muslims getting along just fine. It’s just that people think the extremists are representative of each others’ religions. And I have yet to see a Scientologist do something insane in the name of his/her beliefs. (Well, maybe I have)…
147.1.1.1.1.1.1.1- “Nah, I’m not offended when I see people denying global warming…”
I’ve criticized global warming (or at least the steps we are taking to stop it) before, and there were roomfuls of people who were offended.
“You see the problem? A good analogy was when a Moroccan woman living in Germany filed for divorce…”
Religion? That’s more like fear and overcompensation.
148- We don’t get these horror stories, at least where I live…
How about providing actual arguments and counterexamples to your claims? At this point answering would be merely repeating myself.
(It’s strange to realize that I’m older than some of the religions you’re discussing. Scientology didn’t exist when I was a child. Neither did Wicca. I’ve watched both of them being invented and becoming established. Everything that exists had a beginning, of course, but within my lifetime? It makes me feel like an Ent.)
By the way, why don’t modern Western societies persecute and kill witches, do you think? Is it because we’ve developed a more tolerant attitude toward witchcraft? Or because we don’t really believe it exists? My moral-philosophy professor raised that question in class once and gave a somewhat surprising answer.
(Oh. Gee, thanks for pointing that out….well, at least we’re still younger than the Unification Church.)
*cough* GAPAs aren’t talking in italics! *cough*
[HTML gnome to the rescue.]
149.1- Witchcraft: Puritans. But Christian witchburnings aren’t in the news much nowadays.
Bible: I’m asking you for an example.
Status of holiness/beyond any criticism: Stalin, Kim Jong-il and Fidel Castro (basically), other dictators…
Christians, Atheists/Scientologists (whatever), and Muslims getting along: All of these people live in the United States, and most of them can refrain from murdering each other. I’ve also been reading this book called Three Cups of Tea recently; Americans building schools for Muslims in deprived regions.
I’ve criticized global warming before: Well, I can’t prove a personal experience. But google search for a global warming debate. People get offended.
Religion? That’s more like fear: Well, seeing how afraid we are to offend certain ethnic groups, that should be a given. Affirmative action comes to mind.
Granted, mainstream witchburnings don’t happen anymore. We can thank the advent of secularism and Enlightenment thought, along with ethical advances in the legal system. Christian-caused violence, however, has not ceased.
Biblical inconsistencies? There are too many to reproduce here, but for example, Matthew 28:16 says that Jesus showed himself to the other 11 of his disciples after his resurrection on a mountain in Galilee, whereas Mark 16:14, Luke 24:33-37, and John 20:19 describe the meeting taking place in a room in Jerusalem. Another one about Jesus is that Matthew 21:5-7 says he rode into Jerusalem on an ass and a colt, Mark 11:7 and Luke 19:35 say it was a colt, and John 12:14 says it was an ass. Don’t you think that a greater level of consistency and accuracy should be achieved by the divine, unerring creator of the universe?
Dictators create their own religions, their own “cults of personality”. Communism is an even more interesting case. The holy texts that communists use to justify actions are the writings of Marx and Engels. The system is exactly the same. However, this is a red herring, as we were discussing ideologies and beliefs. I’ve never had a communist tell me “you can’t criticize my political beliefs, it’s offensive.”
Of course people of different religions get along. They’d have to, wouldn’t they? When levels of religious fervor are low, coexistence is possible. When they go up, it becomes problematic. Look at the Balcans and the Middle East.
No one gets “offended” at denying global warming. They may get angry, or outraged, or even upset, but no one’s “person” is being offended.
Your last comment merits nothing more than a *facepalm*.
1. “Christian-caused violence”? Yes, there is violence that is caused by Christians. Just as there is violence caused by Lutherans and Jews and Muslims and atheists and agnostics. The common thread is “human”, not “Christian”.
2. Jesus showed himself multiple times after his resurrection, so that point is not contradictory. And are you really trying to discredit the entire Bible by whining about what kind of animal Jesus rode?
3. You really have quite the double standard, you know? Marx’s and Engels’ writings are not considered “holy”, just as the various antireligious books you read are not considered “holy”. And what sort of religion has Mugabe created? Or Than Shwe?
4. And now you’re trying to insist that the normal state of religion is violence? Please prove this to me, and not through spouting rote examples. I’m under the impression that the normal state of religion is peace.
5. Okay. In that case, no one gets offended at hearing their religion attacked. They just get angry, outraged, or upset. Fridgey, you have quite a mastery of doublespeak.
6. Very mature, Elias.
1. Sorry, bad phrasing on my part. Should’ve been “Christianity-caused violence”. What we also have is Christian-caused violence which is then covered up by Christian organizations.
2. Dammit, he asked for a Biblical inconsistency. It’s one of many. You’re missing the point, and again, throwing in a red herring. Nor am I whining. The Bible is not unerring on that point, as it is on many. Case closed.
3. Again, you miss the point. Have you ever studied how Communism works? I recommend you read Bertrand Russell’s “Practice and Theory of Bolshevism” for a brief introduction. This is not a double standard, it is an example of structural similarities between dictator-based political systems and religions.
4. No, not violence. But each religion (excepting some eastern philosophical variants) has an inherent belief in the superiority of its religion over others. It’s simply a matter of the extent to which this belief is applied practically.
5. You can get angry, outraged or upset without being offended. I can be angry because I feel someone is using bad arguing techniques that will seem coherent to an uneducated audience (has happens often to me). I can feel outraged because I think that arguing against gay rights is a gross travesty on human rights. I can be upset because I am worried that the continuing denial of global warming will condemn our planet beyond recourse. In none of these cases am I personally offended. Yet when it comes to religion, people are quick to claim offense.
6. It’s not an argument, and a facepalm is the best answer for it.
Do you shun violence, or only religion-induced violence?
Violence can be justified in some situations. Generally though, I am against causing suffering, and violence is a source of suffering.
151.1-I bet you got that from the SAB. Guess what else is in the SAB?
And the king of Egypt called for the midwives, and said unto them, Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men children alive?
And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them.
Therefore God dealt well with the midwives:
“Therefore God dealt well with the midwives.”
God rewarded the Hebrew midwives for lying to the Pharaoh.
Is it OK to lie?
Apparently, it isn’t okay to lie to genocidal dictators.
*referee calls a time out*
This many-sided piecemeal debate is starting to repeat itself. For the sake of efficiency (among other things), this seems like a good time for all parties to step back from the fray and summarize their positions. The big issues under discussion are the existence or nonexistence of a deity or deities, the status of certain books, and the role of religion in human life, historically and at present.
So — summary statements, please, and no responses to others’ statements until all the major players have had a chance to post. (The referees will decide when that is.) Who wants to start?
I haven’t posted lately, so I don’t think that my views really matter, but I’ll say them anyway.
The Tanakh is meant as a moral book. The stories are meant to teach lessons.
One of the main reasons for the rise of atheism is rebellion against authority-both the authority of religion and the feeling that a God should not exist, so therefore it doesn’t.
Hey GAPAs, could you make it possible from the top of the page to easily get down to the bottom? It took me several minutes of scrolling to get down here on my iPod Touch.
The easiest way for us to do that would be to flip the order of replies so that the newest ones appear at the top of the page. I suspect that most MBers would scream bloody murder if we tried anything so radical for the blog as a whole, but maybe for this one thread… Voilà !
*waits for screams of “bloody murder”*
Bloody murder! It completely messed me up.
I’m on the computer now, so I can read it fine, but I would still have to go to the bottom of the page to comment.
My views:
[insert supreme religious power here] probably does not exist. People are free to believe in it as much as they like. Atheists are also not inhibited to try praying (hey, if there is a god/super immortal being, it can’t hurt to get on their good side). However, no religious texts or other recorded devices should justify or be invoked to justify any harm to a human being.
I have figured out the source of my confusion for the past 10 minutes on his thread– it goes from newest to oldest top to bottom now. Is this a temporary/accidental thing?
…Being able to read at the top now, which I’d just skimmed through as the comment box was at the bottom, I would like to offer my vague discontent with the new layout.
What neophobes these Musers be! Very well, I’ll detopsyturvify the thread.
154-
“One of the main reasons for the rise of atheism is rebellion against authority-both the authority of religion and the feeling that a God should not exist, so therefore it doesn’t.”
I most certainly disagree. I became an atheist because I could find no logical proof for any sort of Deity. It had nothing to do with authority and rebelling against it–actually, life would probably be much easier if I did believe in some higher power. But it would mean I was ignoring science in favor of imagination. I stopped believing in monsters/fairies/ect both when I learned that there was no proof for them and when it became socially unacceptable, and parents/others began to tell me they did not exist. The only difference between that and God is that people think it’s wrong when others tell them there is just as much reliable proof (i.e. none at all) for unicorns and dragons as there is for the deity they base their life off of.
It’s not a rebellion. I just think it’s silly.
“I just think it’s silly.”
They hate that
They rather do, it seems.
Of course you don’t think that’s the reason.
And you think you know better?
If you can say that, than I can say that people only believe in a god because they are too afraid to face things on their own. You just don’t think that’s why you believe in one.
That would be putting words in your mouth, in a sense, so please don’t do that to me and other atheists.
You can say that, but the thing is that most of the atheists at my school are cynical of all authority. I’m not saying that you are, or that all atheists are motivated by that, but it’s certainly a factor.
It’s also possible that the atheists who are cynical in regard to authority are also the ones most likely to be vocal about their atheism. Those who don’t share that trait may prefer to keep their beliefs to themselves. It’s often the case with minority viewpoints that people will keep quiet in the interest of getting along with others, thus the stereotypes develop from the most outspoken.
Given that atheists are the most hated minority in the US, less defiant atheists might not want to be terribly vocal about their religion. I go to a school where a significant portion of the student body is atheist or agnostic, and the atheists don’t seem significantly more cynical of authority than others.
Also, even if atheists are more cynical of authority, there’s the issue of correlation vs. causation. If atheists hear discussion of a deity they don’t believe in from authority figures, that might lead them to become more cynical of authority.
(Since I haven’t really joined in the discussion here before, I’ll give some context by saying that I’m a secular Jew. I’m an atheist, but I’m extremely religiously tolerant. Isee myself as only somewhat cynical of authority.)
cromwell come on you know that doesn’t make any sense. Everyone I know who has brown hair is a jerk therefore people with brown hair are jerks? that’s not an argument that’s a logical fallacy :/
i’m not an atheist because I think it’s cool and edgy. that’s just what make sense. atheists often feel marginalized and some are bitter about that so some adopt a belligerent attitude. i think they’re wasting their time but whatever,they can do what they want.
I, for one, am cynical of authority because I require concrete justifications for any authority. Atheism is to some extent a by-product of this.
Or perhaps all people you know who are religious have just been taught for so long to be docile and followers that atheists seem radical by comparison.
Labeling this way doesn’t work.
58.2.1.1.1_See, there’s somethings everyone here is missing.
A.) This is not a vice. Not only are most (or at least many) of my friends cynical of authority, many of them are atheist. That’s because I hang out with people who are smart or could be cool, but don’t want to be (somehow, the two seem to be almost mutually exclusive).
B.) I know people who are outspoken about it and not outspoken about it.
C.) I think the mistake here is association of church, etc. with God. Church is something which is often very bad. I agree with that. But religion is something that should be thought of as different from church. It’s just unfortunate that religion caused church.
158.2.1.1.1-I don’t personally know anyone who is very vocal about their atheism, because they don’t really care about it. Christians may be a minority at my school.
158.2.1.1.4-Thanks for backing me up.
158.2.1.1.5-In other words, people just flip a coin to decide their belief. Nothing goes into their decision.
There’s another distinction I ‘d like to make-atheism by birth and atheism by choice. The difference should be apparent.
Everyone is “atheistic” at birth. No one is born with an innate religion. It’s simply a matter of reverting to the initial state by seeing through indoctrinated falsehoods.
I think what Cromwell means is atheist because en hadn’t considered any other options or their parents taught them that way, and atheist because en thought that atheism was logical, and decided to believe it.
I thought all teenagers rebelled against authority.
Maybe we should just have a Atheism 2010.1 or Atheism, part 2?
God, I didn’t realize this thread was still running. I guess I’ll have to catch up on it.
146.5.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.5-Not sure what you think of this Elias, but I recently read an excerpt from a book by C.S. Lewis which spoke on that topic. Specifically, though Occam’s Razor will cut through the majority of ‘miracles’, and though we may understand our perceptive dimensions, is it not also possible that another layer on our world contains a supernatural, who’s probability or general workings we do not understand? In our world a broken neck does not heal itself, yes, but we don’t know anything about a potential supernatural, for which that task is commonplace! Just wanted to see if you’d heard that theory or argument before.
Of course it’s possible. That doesn’t mean it’s probable, or that there’s any reason to assume there might be. It’s another “ok, since we have things like laws and physics and facts about the world along with which god can’t possibly exist, imagine if he did anyway!” argument.
I don’t think the existence of God is disproved by the laws of laws of physics and various facts. Disregarding plenty ‘miracles’ that make no sense or are logically inane, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t prove anything…
There were some examples of various accounts of, for example, the battle from Sennacherib’s invasion, in which Herodotus claims that mice ate the bow strings and straps on weapons on Sennacherib’s weapons, as opposed to the Bible’s interpretation that angels killed the opposing side. Knowing nothing of a possible supernatural, the prospect of the Angels(whose supposed nature we know nothing of) is a lot more likely then mice eating every one of the 185,000 men’s bowstrings.
how do you know herodotus wasn’t just full of crap? certainly there are things that happened and events recorded…but i mean just because it’s written we only have two possibilities? how about herodotus took creative license when describing a battle that occurred three hundred years prior? his histories were written by a transient being just like the bible. there is a third and much more probable answer: neither of those things happened. it was a battle.
That’s kind of what of figured. Fair enough.
Although, how on earth, then, is one supposed to regard any historical paper with any respect? Obviously some things are more obvious than others, but what’s to stop people from saying “you can’t listen to that junk-they must have just made it up”.
There is value in the written word and I shouldn’t have phrased it any other way. I’m just saying that the statement that it’s either over 9000 mice or angels just seems kind of ridiculous to me,especially considering the fact that herodotus did embellish a lot of his histories. in that situation it just seems obvious to me that neither of those things happened, but I understand that you believe otherwise.
Actually, I wasn’t sure I believed either from the beginning. It’s just an argument that seemed it might be worth bringing up, with possible evidence on both sides.
Generally speaking, one evaluates historical papers in the context of other evidence. Do contemporary and later documents agree or disagree, is the information consistent with archaeological and other evidence, not to mention the laws of physics? It’s a complicated puzzle, made more so by the very different ways that writers of various eras approached reporting. For instance, some cultures believed that the symbolism of numbers and events were more important than adherence to facts. But they often do is in fairly predictable ways, so historians can untangle some of the information some of the time.
Also, how do we know that angels didn’t come as mice? According to the Bible, angels are not all glowing men with wings that our society has told us about.
There is no reason to believe in Angels- no precedents, no proof, no evidence, archeological, paleontological or otherwise, etc.
The Bible actually claims that the angels just killed the opposing side.
Uh, no. The mice is more likely. Because we know about mice, and there are observed precedents of mice eating bowstrings.
There may be precedent for mice eating bowstrings, but angels of an unknown nature seems to be much more likely then mice ‘suddenly’ eating around 185,000 men’s bowstrings / all of their shield straps and shoe thongs. I think a more open minded approach would suggest what we don’t know about angels is a better guess then what we do know about mice, and although they may gnaw bowstrings, you don’t think their doing it on such a wide scale is unlikely?
Of course it’s unlikely. But it’s more likely than biologically and physically impossible beings descending then to kill some people and never being seen again.
The thing is, for the hypothetical angels to have killed the men has a relatively high chance of being more likely then the mice. Think of it this way-we have the angels(which we will place as an x on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of probability) and the mice (which we say is unlikely, how about a 4?). Because we don’t know the nature of said supposed angels, they could be anywhere on the probability chart, which gives them a 60% chance of being more likely-odds point to them. I think the open minded approach would be to say the 60% is the more likely of the two.
But angels are as likely to exist as leprechauns. It doesn’t work like that- it’s not an “either-or” situation.
You seem to have presented your ‘mice are more likely’ as an either or.
Overall, I doubt either happened. I just think in this context, angels seem more likely.
Even if it was an “either or”, then mice are still more likely. Because:
1) Mice exist
2) Mice bite through things
3) Historical instances of animals being used in bellicose subterfuge are also known.
But, if you consider that Angels are a possible explanation, as in, they could exist and we don’t understand their behavior, then they seem more likely to me then an unlikely account of mice.
But angels aren’t a possible explanation. If we were to postulate possible supernatural explanations just because the natural explanation seems unlikely we’d never get anywhere, and it’s never been the case that a natural explanation was impossible to find. “Oh, look, the virus is dying, and I have no idea why! It’s never happened before!”
“Must be angels!”
“It couldn’t be a new type of antibody?”
“Nope, too unlikely. Must be angels.”
-.-”
I was interested to learn that Herodotus says the mouse incident happened when Sennacherib tried to invade Egypt. When the Egyptian army refused to fight, the Pharoah prayed to one of the Egyptian gods, who sent miraculous hordes of mice to gnaw the Assyrians’ shield thongs and weapons.
Also, Sennacherib’s own account of the Palestine campaign has been preserved on clay tablets. He says that he conquered 46 cities and lifted the siege of Jerusalem only after the king, Hezekiah, gave him lots of treasure. Nothing about mysterious casualties.
A.) The Egyptians wrote down the thing about the mice. Herodotus copied what they said, albeit not very accurately. The reason he thought the battle was in Egypt was because a guide showed him a ‘battlefield’ which was actually a cemetery.
B.) Of course Sennecherib said that. What would he say? I just messed up and lost a battle?
Thank you, gimanator. The whole problem with Occam’s Razor is that it relies on the precedence that there is no God.
Hm? What are you thanking me for? I don’t think that Occam’s Razor relies on the assumption that there is no God. In fact, if you look at it, it doesn’t have to be used in terms of religion. In other words, it can be used in a logical argument for either side. While there are multiple theories it takes down, there are always exceptions. For example, this invasion by Sennacherib (although I’m really thinking neither thing happened).
I know, it actually is more commonly used in scientific arguments. Religiously, however, using it becomes a circular argument. Occam’s Razor can come to mean, “God doesn’t exist because there is no God.”
Uh, no. :S
SFTDP, but
154-I think the problem with that is assuming that religion is an authority which people should obey. People have a choice-it’s similar to a post I read on the web (stuff like this scares me of fellow Christians sometimes) where a guy was saying that the only point for Atheism and Homosexuality was to bash on religion, which assumes everyone should understand and obey religion when they’re born, or else have it stuffed down their throats. Every one gets a chance to review the whole situation:as Elias said much earlier- Christians make a claim, they need sound proof to back it up, not the other way around.
Say, to start a new topic while the other begins, have we talked about the existence of Jesus yet, as in if some believe he was just made up to embellish stories?
I don’t think he existed, but he probably was not made up.
How would that work?
He worked his way into the stories by mistranslation, etc. No malicious intent.
Prophets in the middle east during that time were everywhere. Someone named Jesus? Probably, yeah. His life? Completely unrelated to the Bible or the mythological figure of Jesus Christ.
Would you suggest that other historical documentations, such as that by Josephus, and Tacticus(who both wrote about Jesus and rome’s reaction) for example, are mistakenly referring to another prophet by the name of Jesus? Perhaps they are only caught up in rumors at the time of Christ and reference it?
Or are you suggesting that the man probably lived, just the miracles he performed are embellishments? Please explain.
How favourably do you think Rome would have looked upon any sort of messianic figure? Again, there were hundreds of them at the time- all being hailed as messiahs or whatever. The Josephus and Tacticus records talk about one of these many figures, who just happened to be named Jesus. Does this have anything at all to do with the validity of a Christian figure? You know the story of Christ was cobbled together by St. Paul of Tarsus upon traveling around the Mediterranean area- he combined common pagan myth elements with some platonic philosophy.
It doesn’t matter whether or not one of the many hundreds (probably thousands) of messianic figures was named Jesus or not.
So you think they each referred to a different ‘Messiah’ who each time, happened to be named Jesus?
No, I mean that out of the many messianic figures, or people percieved to be the “Messiah”, it’s quite possible that one of them was named Jesus and had a pretty ardent fan in Saul of Tarsus.
*outrage* RELIGION IS THE ONLY WAY! I SHALL MASSACRE ALL ATHEISTS WITH PILLOWS!
Kidding. That’s just rude.
But I appreciate religion.
I really do.
So Elias, you can try to talk me out of it now.
Bye, everyone.
Just wanted to post on this thread.
To talk to people about atheism.
I really am leaving it now.
Bye.
well you obviously don’t actually want to have any kind of conversation about religion,so why post? inflammatory remarks like that don’t really help anyone out :/
Sorry. Was not in my right mind, apparently…
I can sum it up for you:
You’re wrong.
Ta!
Wow. You have such amazing debating skills, you might even be more mature than someone in kindergarten!
If I may quote Axa, “inflammatory remarks like that don’t really help anyone out”.
I think that was the joke.
Sorry, I just was really annoyed by EES’s ridiculous comments.
Such as?
Saying, “You’re wrong” without going into why you thought she was wrong. Which is a blanket statement, like “RELIGION IS THE ONLY WAY!” Doubtlessly you’ve gone into your reasons elsewhere on this thread, she doesn’t accept your arguments, lets all accept that fact and agree to disagree.
Darling, that was the point. I answered a pointless blanket statement with an even more obviously pointless blanket statement.
All I can say, Elias, is that religion works for me. Atheism works for you. Why argue? It’s like trying to talk a plant out of dying.
You never change your mind about anything?
Not about something as important as religion. Actually, that was a stupid metaphor. I’m sure SOME people can be talked out of religion. Just not me..
What, something as important to defining the way a person lives their life isn’t open to debate? No room for improvement? No chance for change? What if you discover you were wrong? What if you were better off without it? Something so important to you, and you just leave it untouched, living on, feeding off of un-justified tradition and dogma?
Then I’d discover I was wrong. I’m just saying that’s not likely to happen in the near future.
And I’m not dogmatic.
And by the way, Elias, you have 3 hits on Google.
Excluding the possibility of being wrong to such an extreme, as you seem to be doing, is pretty dogmatic. :S
I’m not excluding the possibility of being wrong. It says you shouldn’t do that in the Bible.
*imagines look of horror on en’s face*
And the irony of basing skepticism on a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible is lost on you?
163.2.3.1.1.1.1.1.1.1 – I was KIDDING. KIDDING. I was being ironic. I haven’t even read most of the Bible. Only through the first, like, five and a half books. I think I’m on Judges.
Hey! If everyone on this thread simply made that argument, it could become the Quotations thread again! I had underestimated your mediating abilities, Elias!
And yet another person completely misses the joke. I refer you to my previous comment, number 164.
Oh, I got it. I was making a joke of my own.
Wow guys, really perceptive. Jesus…
What about him?
I talked to him last night. He said we should worship Cthulhu.
Think of a cross between a giant space squid and a man and a dragon, and give it super mind powers.
And then stick it somewhere under our oceans.
I &heart; Lovecraft
Yes, yes… let us document this moment and spread it to the world through the internet!
I could destroy the world with that thing.
They shut down the Richard Dawkins forum, robbing me and my friends of years of posts and debates!
>.<
ANGAR!
Maybe you and Keiffer should get together and merge her religion with your Cthulwhatever love. Look at the religion thread. She worships creatures of the the night, or something.
I’m doing a project in school on atheism at the moment, and it would be really helpful if some of you who are atheists could answer these questions for me–answers won’t be included in my report/presentation directly, but I’d like some stories/opinions of people other than those i know directly or just reports I find online.
– How/when did you become an atheist?
– How/when did you “come out” to your family/friends as an atheist, if ever?
– Have you ever faced discrimination as a result of your atheism?
– Are there any misconceptions about atheism you would like to see corrected?
– Anthing else you’d like to share?
1) i remember first wondering if there really was a god when I was in second grade but I don’t think i finally admitted it to myself/dealt with it until maybe 9th/10th grade. (see next answer lol)
2) i was raised catholic so i was going through confirmation and just really could not deal with it. It was really an awful experience trying to figure out what to do but I eventually told my parents about it and they were surprisingly fine with it. my dad said he still wanted me to go to church and I don’t think he really wanted to accept that i didn’t believe at all, but it’s not really a problem. in fact i don’t know if either of my parents really get that this isn’t the whole “organized religion/why do bad things happen” thing that people seem to assume is the root of all atheism.
3) not really. i don’t bring it up in common conversation or anything.
two of my good friends are also atheists and other than that we all respect each other’s right to own own views so it’s all cool brah.
4) As I mentioned before a lot of people seem to think that atheism stems from a disbelief that there is a god that would allow cataclysms to occur or from a disdain for organized religion and the evils it often propagates. That’s not really my problem. I just think that religion was a man made necessity and I myself have no need for it. The things in the bible don’t reflect divinity to me but rather thoughts of people from the past.
I’ve touched on this before, but the phrase “there are no atheists in foxholes” is really something that i want to mention again.
to me it’s like, doesn’t that just prove my point? isn’t fear of the unknown and a search for validation and meaning what creates religion? It’s natural to want to believe that there’s something more than this,something lasting, that what you are and all you love doens’t fade but lasts forever. but i don’t need something like that to feel justified. i don’t need to feel justified at all…? i just live my life.
another thing is that people seem to think that all LBGT people are automatically atheist. one of my best friends is lesbian and she is this beautiful christian, i don’t know anyone else who actually has all the goodness of religion, all the love. I feel terrible that she has to sit through sermons about how she’s a sinner and will burn in hell.
oh and you know what? her girlfriend (another one of my biffles lol) is an atheist. And they love each other more than anything. So to me…at some point what you do or don’t believe isn’t really the point, it’s who you are and what you do.
5) hmm I think that the religious “soul” is kind of a misconception. I think that’ your consciousness. or more bluntly, your brain. not sure how to parse that.
I’d also like to mention that my AP Euro class in sophomore year really only affirmed some of the things that I was thinking anyway, especially during the Enlightenment portion of the class. I loved Voltaire’s quote “Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.” And really since he was a deist it’s more aimed at what religion has become as opposed to what it should be. So while it’s not exactly in line with what i think, I still love the message.
I think I read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut around that time as well,maybe a bit afterward, but that put words to a lot the the things I was thinking as well. If anything, I just might be a Bokononist.
anyway that’s it. fun! tell me how your project goes once it’s done 8D
Hang on, are you agreeing with the phrase “there are no atheists in foxholes” or not? Because I know a LOT of atheists in “foxholes”.
no dude i’m saying it’s kind of ridiculous that people don’t recognize they are validating my atheism by saying that. Also it’s pretty smug since there are literally many atheists serving in the military who don’t need to deal with that crap
1) I wasn’t raised religiously, so I stayed in the default position sans indoctrination, namely atheism. Religion seemed weird to me- even as a little boy I remember being freaked out by having to kneel and stand up in unison at the call of a guy in a funny hat. When I was 12, I spent a year in a Catholic middle school full of unquestioning, glassy-eyed idiots. I developed my first skills at debating there, and it was the first time I experienced discrimination as an atheist, when classmates drew back in disgust when they discovered I wasn’t baptized. Then when I was 15 I read Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, and became convinced of the necessity for militant atheism. I began exploring Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and more general philosophy, honing my ideas and opinions to the utter atheism it is today.
2) I never needed to “come out”- my dad is a philosopher, so an atheist by default. He never talks about religion, thinks it’s utterly silly. My mom never really says what she believes, but she’s had enough exchanges with me to be completely aware of the inanity of religious belief.
3) Apart from the episode I mentioned in point 1, I’ve been discriminated against on various occasions for religious reasons. I’ve had people walk out on during a perfectly nice conversation because they discovered I was an atheist. “You’re an extremist! You’re going to hell!” etc. Otherwise, I’ve been pretty lucky. Switzerland is one of the more tolerant countries today.
4) That atheism is NOT a proactive affirmation of knowledge or faith in the absence of gods, merely a reneging of incorrect affirmations of knowledge or faith in the presence of gods. It does not take a “leap of faith” to be an atheist
5) Any atheists looking for a community to engage with, learn from, and enjoy a wide variety of discussions is welcome to visit rationalia.com- which, as of this week, is also the home of the majority of contributors to the Richard Dawkins Forum due to its impromptu shutting down.
Good grief, that’s horrible. What, are you supposed to have little Satan horns still left on your head? ( If you weren’t baptized. ) I just realized how liberal my city really is.
1. Well, I think I officially became an atheist in 3rd grade. Before that, I had gone to a reform Jewish congregation where they taught that you had to believe in God in the same way you had to believe that 1+1=2. Still, I didn’t really buy it. I kept trying to convince myself that it had to be true (because that was what I was taught). Then, in 3rd grade, I moved to (my family helped found, actually) a secular Jewish congregation, which was a very “You can make your own choices about God” place. So I learned that I didn’t have to believe in God, and that just made my life a whole lot easier.
2. I don’t remember ever officially “coming out”. I always just sort of was. I think it helped that pretty much all of my family is atheist. As for friends, I didn’t really advertise it, and if asked my religion I’d usually just say Jewish, but I didn’t deny it or anything. I think all my good friends knew I was an atheist. (I now just say that I’m an atheist, which is actually the norm at my school.)
3. A little. My town is sort of religious, so I did face some discrimination. Not much, though. What’s coming to mind is one tale of a terribly ignorant 5th grade social studies teacher. We were studying ancient civilizations. She was telling us that the development of a religion was a prerequisite for civilization, because a person cannot be civilized if en doesn’t believe in God. I raised my hand and said, “But I don’t believe in God, and I’m civilized.” My teacher responded, “Oh, honey. Of course you believe in God. Otherwise, you would have kicked me when walking into class.”
4. The concept that a person cannot have a religion and be atheist. There are quite a few people who are Christian or Jewish or some other religion who are atheists. I myself actually just a few weeks ago realized that I belong to a branch of Judaism known as humanistic Judaism, which is where God is optional, the power of humans is stressed, and the Jewish value of “tikkun olam” (healing the world) is really important.
5. Uh, not that I can think of.
Well, there is a 40 page proof for why 1+1 =2.Unlike the existence of god, it can be proved with logic and science.
I don’t personally believe that any god exists, and I choose not to believe in any god. I still think, however, that if religion is construed by humans to explain morality, and some of the ideas are very nice philosophies to live by. I agree with many of the moral ideals in many religions, but I don’t think that you have to believe in any god to follow those ideals, and I wish that some people would recognize that being a good and moral person is more important than believing in the same god.
will also say that there are some parts of all religions that I really disagree with, especially when the religion is used to justify cruelty or prejudice.
40 pages? I’m taking a rigorous proof-based mathematics course in college, and we started from the nine basic field axioms, and I’m pretty sure we could prove 1+1=2 in fewer than 40 pages. Probably in fewer than five pages, actually. I’d like to see a citation of this “fact”.
Another thing: it’s all logic in that proof. no science.
Depending on where you start, it could take more than 400 pages.
Don’t know if this has been posted yet. Douglas Gasking’s humourous take on the ontological argument.
1. The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being —
namely, one who created everything while not existing.
6. Therefore, God does not exist.
I was going to respond by something about how that’s not comparable to Anselm’s or Descartes’ argument, but now a mellow song is on Pandora and the singer is saying something funny-xkcd 438.
Everyone on here ( this thread ) is so smart, and I can’t understand half the things they say…or quote. D’:
Hahaha. Then again, you have to wonder: if God did not exist, how WAS the universe created? And what existed before it?
On a different note, I just brought myself to see Battlefield Earth. I’m sure you’ve seen it, Elias. Being a vehicle for Scientologist actors, I have a sneaking feeling you wouldn’t be able to resist. I must say, it is quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. Half of it was laughably bad (I haven’t laughed so hard in a while, in fact) and half of it was unwatchably bad. If anyone on the MB hasn’t seen it, I urge them to get it streaming off of Netflix.
muselover – there’s a great Bloom County cartoon in which Opus and what’shisname are staring up at the stars and one of them says, “Do you think the universe was created or it just happened?” Try googling it, I like it a lot.
Okay, something relating to what this thread used to be, too: I remembered this quote from some book in the Uglies series.
“The Rusties, praying to their imaginary superheroes in the sky…”
Ha, I love that quote. And I kind of agree with it…
170.1.1. (Robert)–
My little joke about why I’m a Christian:
If you’re a Christian, and the Christians are right, then when you die you go to heaven, and everything’s happy.
If the atheists are right, than when you die, you really don’t have time to ponder the fact that you were wrong.
And if the Scientologists are right, Xenu help us.
And if you’re a Buddhist ?
Then you think, “Oh, no, not again.”
170- I realize that you’re saying all that as a joke, but it’s a big part of the ideology of the church that people are more likely to “believe” in god/heaven/hell “just in case.”
I’ve just always been mistrusting of anything that uses the carrot/stick method : /
Ah. I see what you’re saying. Rest assured that this is not the only reason I’m a Christian. However, in order to avoid further debate (since I have other things to do at the moment) I can’t talk about those at the moment.
This thread is the best in pirate,
Oh my goodness yes! I always avoid such threads, but this is making me laugh so much. I’m getting such mental images…
I love this thread right now… can we keep the pirate thing for this discussion?
I’m afraid not, me hearty. I’m about to switch off the plug-in and restore the blog to its usual nonpiratical diction.
What I have learned from this thread can be summarized like this:
A couple Catholics, some atheists, an Orthodox Jew, and some other people* walk into a bar. The bartender tells them that he will personally foot the bill if anyone can prove that God does or does not exist. At the end of the night, the bartender keeps his money and the bar has made a fortune.
*I’m not completely sure of everyone’s beliefs and/or viewpoints on this thread, so anyone who is not me, Piggy, Elias, or cromwell fits into “other people.” No disrespect meant.
I agree so much. But you know what? Those people have a great time debating some of the biggest questions in the universe, and what does a bar tab matter if there is (or isn’t) an afterlife?
It’s still worth trying, just because we all love just thinking about this stuff. Yes, it’s futile, but genius is all about taking on questions that you couldn’t possibly ever prove anything about.
Oh, I know, and I’m not saying it was pointless because no decision was reached. It’s just funny.
Oh, I agree completely!
Sorry for the misinterpretation.