Jayhawker Soule

This is the argumentum ad ignorantiam at its ugliest:

• If it's God's will, it can't be wrong.
• You cannot be 100% sure that it's not God's will.
• Therefore, it can't be wrong.
• In any event, I don't see God as cruel, immoral...but you do, which is a difference in opinion.

It is also, as I said before the 'logic' behind 9/11 and every other obscenity justified in the name of God.

As for Bait who asks: "Do YOU know what was in the hearts and minds of those he eliminated?", I can only imagine what he suspects might have been in the 'hearts and minds' of the children that would justify 'elimination', or in the hearts and minds of the young virgins that would justify rape and enslavement, and I find myself very thankful that much of the horror endorsed by Bait is no more than the belicose myth of an emerging people. But 'God help us' when good people like Bait come to believe in prophets who instruct them to "kill the infidels".

Blu

ReasonableDoubt:

Remember me?

First and foremost, no God, no Faith, no religion, instructs people to kill nor does it justify murder.

God doesn't have human flaws, emotions, or any other human aspect such as Will.

Human beings insight violence, not Satan...and not God. The key word is "HUMAN BEINGS" Nothing outside the human body can control how a person thinks, and how they act. Drugs to an extent alter brain chemistry but even that can't be compared to Religion or God which are aspects outside the human body.

This argument is something that I have seen repeated.

"God" doesn't even create evil. Human beings have. "God" gave human beings free will and we use it and we are going to be held accountable for it. People who use scapegoats to justify their actions are scared. They don't want responsiblity for what they have done so they say: "Satan made me do it" or "Allah wants me to do this" or "God spoke to me and told me to do that."

IT IS A BUNCH OF CRAP!!! PEOPLE MAKE THEIR OWN CHOICES NO MATTER WHAT!!!!

Echo

Hi Blu,

I'm curious..if you maintain that God never instructs people to kill other people no matter what, would you agree that the ancient Hebrews of the bible were mistaken when they believed that God was instructing them to kill various Canaanite tribes? Was this something *they* wanted to do - to acquire land perhaps - and then erroneously attributed to God?

If so, maybe the ancient Hebrews were wrong about some of their other God-beliefs, including the belief that God gave people free will and that they will be held accountable for the use of this free will.

Malaclypse the Younger

Blu

The first assertion is obviously false. Crack open the Qu'ran or the <a href="http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty.html" target="_blank">bible</a> for an example of religions and faiths that instructs people to kill.

The second is an uninteresting tautology--killing justified by the command of God is, by definition, not "murder"; similarly, killing justified by the command of Charles Manson was not, to his followers, murder. Murder is "unjustified killing"; killing justified by one's moral authority is not unjustified by definition.

You left out "existence".

Agreed. God does not incite violence--as no gods exist, it is difficult to believe one could incite anything. However religion, as an entirely human phenomenon, does indeed incite violence. Or have you not been paying attention to the news from the Middle East, Ireland, Bosnia, Serbia, Ethiopia, etc., ad nauseum?

True indeed.

Apparently not often enough for you to even understand the argument, much less effectively refute it.

I believe I have already made the point about the ineffectuality of nonexistant beings.

I thought things outside the human body couldn't affect how we think. It would make these sorts of conversations at least more interesting if you would make just a little bit of effort at disgusing your internal contradictions.

Scapegoats like Jesus's sacrifice? Agreed.

True indeed.

Harumi

If I recall correctly a passage from the Bible, there was one Jew who had tried to spare one of the kings from the city they were attacking...Agog I believe. God ordered him to kill the king, and the jew couldn't do it. So God replaced him with another, and then told that jew to hack Agog to pieces.

So much for God never ordering people to kill others.

Harumi

Jayhawker Soule

From Numbers ...

From Samual ...
From Isaiah ...

Blu, people who frequent this board could easily add dozens of additional quotes from your Bible. I can understand why that might be unsettling, but it's your bible, not mine. To be perfectly honest, I'd much rather see you angry than smug, because the anger may some day cause you to review and reconsider your position. I hope so because, in my opinion, it truly is much more than a difference of opinion.

[ March 13, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

Blu

Hello there,

Let me first say thank you for responding to what I wrote. I find your agrument similar to other arguments I have read. It amuses me.

First of all, I don't give a whip what it says in any relgious text what so ever. If religion causes people to kill then all religious people would be murderers. I can assure you that not all religious people are murderers. If the cause of murder was religion then the cause would be repeated everywhere. In places we do see people murdering using religion as scapegoat, there rarely has ever been "peace" in those lands and they are also lands where there is little or no government. etc etc. There is also poverty in those lands and a variety of other factors.

Religion therefore is not a cause but a scapegoat people in war torn nations use it to try to justify their hatred. Religion therefore is not a cause. Would the terrorist be terrorist if they had grown up without seeing the atrocities of war? If those people had been living in a peace filled nation, do you think 9/11 would have happened? If you take away a so-called cause, isn't that supposed to alter the effect?

Now let's address your relative truth. It is everyone's right to disbelieve or believe in God. Your belief that there is no God doesn't mean that your belief is Truth for everyone. Just like people's belief in God doesn't mean it is true for you.

A lot of people, surprisingly, forget that their truth is only relative to the individual. People with like beliefs can gather and then give their group a name but no one can ever have identical relative truths. Relative truth is as different as our fingerprints.

Thank about this for awhile without feeling selfrighteous and then get back to me.

TollHouse

Blu,

Nice shot at smug superiority you've got there.

Blu

My response:

Ancient people had their relative truths as well as every individual on this planet today. A person can genuinely "believe" that God said this or God told them that but in reality they might have misinterpreted something, had already present agression or hatred, and political reasoning for insighting violence.

My whole point is the person makes his or her own decisions no matter what. People sometimes associate forces outside themselve to making them do something. Their thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotional and mental state are really the causes for their actions not God. It may be their idea of God, but it is still their idea (which comes from their own minds) that cause them to do what they do. God is not in control of human minds.

In religions, people all over the world have different interpretations. People who end up being terrorists commonly live in cultures that are very limited maybe do to money, war, government or lack of, or all of the above.

Religion is interpreted through the minds of religions followers. Someone who is already in a compromised mental/emotional state do to growing up in war torn nations are going to be more prone to violence then people who live in happy/peaceful countries. But these two types of people may follow the same religion.

If religion was a cause of violence or terrorism then religion alone would guarantee both types of
people to become terrorists. If religion was a cause, then every single person who follows a religion would be a terrorist regardless of where they lived or what they experienced.

Does anyone understand this principle?

Blu

My response:

Do written words cause people to become zombie like without a mind of their own and decide to kill?

If that were true, then words would be extremely dangerous.

The Bible is an inanimate object. I don't care what is written in the Bible, the Satanic Bible, the Koran, the Pali Canon, the Book of Shadows, and any other religious text you can think of.

You obviously read the Bible. If the Bible insights people to kill, then you would be killing people as we speak.

Ideas can be interpreted a billion different ways by a billion different people. But once you read something and the idea YOU CAME UP WITH enters your mind, you have time to associate what you think you learned with already existing ideas or beliefs. So the original idea becomes something else entirely in your mind. You own that idea because you created it, a book, a group didn't create that idea for you.

You have your own relative truth. You have your own experiences, perceptions about the world, and your own mental/emotional states. These are more likely to "cause" you to kill then a book of written words or a religion.

Like I wrote a lot here today, religion is separate from the mind. A person who has pre-existing (prior to reading a religious text or affilating with a religious group)ideas and perceptions about the world. What they get from "religion" is unique because their relative truth, their thought processes, their experiences are unique.

So religion is not a cause. If it was, the only factor that would determine whether an individual would end up a terrorist or murderer would be religion. If you add this factor in every life on the planet, the whole planet would be filled with only terrorists and murders.

I can say with EXTREME CONFIDENCE that not all religious people are terrorists or murderers. In fact, the percentage of religious people who are terrorist is extremely low. There are a billion or more people who follow a religion in this world, how many of those people are terrorists? What is the ratio? I would say it is one out of several million or more. So why do you use this small ratio to define the whole? Scientifically, that is just plain upsurd.

Please use SCIENTIFIC METHODS to determine the cause of something. Look at the numbers.